Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Are We Training Victimhood?" with Dr. Dina McMillan

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"Are We Training Victimhood?" with Dr. Dina McMillan · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, this is another installment of my collaboration with the University of
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  Technology Sydney, where as a visiting fellow there, I get to collaborate with them on
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  inviting amazing people from all over the world to have intelligent conversations that
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  burst through the sorts of boundaries that universities are currently too cautious,
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  one would say cowardly, let's generously say cautious to break through, not the University
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  of Technology Sydney, and not its wonderful dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social
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  Sciences who has put this program together. I'll talk about today's guest in just a moment,
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  but first I'm noodling a little, I'm noodling on the Omicron variant, not quite sure what
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  to make of the Omicron variant. If you're listening to this anytime after November
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  December of 2021, I hope that you don't even know what I'm talking about. I hope that
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  you cast your mind back and go, oh yeah, remember when they were momentarily shit-scared
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  of some new variant from Africa? Hmm, turned out to be nothing. I hope you're not listening
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  back on this going, oh, nearly, poor old zeps, poor old zepity baby, he had no idea what
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  was coming, he had no idea that that thing was resistant to vaccines and was about to
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  plunge the whole world back into March of 2020 again. I hope that's not the case because
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  I'm supposed to be traveling to Europe in the United States next week, taking a Christmas
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  holiday at just the perfect moment when the virus decides to throw up the largest, most
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  significant, most challenging variant that we've seen to date. People don't like this. I mean,
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  I don't like it, but I sort of accept it as a reality that there will be waves of new kinds
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  of this pandemic. Others seem to dislike it when I even suggest that this could be a big deal.
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  Maybe I'm being tactless, but I tweeted on the 28th, which was two days after it was announced
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  and one day after scientists started shooting themselves. That's the technical term, shooting
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  themselves. I tweeted, I feel a bit like I did in February of 2020. Everyone's still babbling about
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  nonsense while an asteroid is coming. I wish I could stop their worlds from being upended.
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  I am sleepwalking. I hope I'm wrong. Hashtag on the crime. That was in one of my gloomy
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  moments. Perhaps I should be more pepper, more upbeat. But some of the responses online, I mean,
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  some of you have just gotten deranged. Hopefully not you.
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  But like one person replied, the asteroid is already there in your nightmares,
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  tougher up, plenty of us are relaxed as we've ever been.
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  Someone else tweeted back, this one's on you. You are going to have to accept that COVID will
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  always be around, always circulating and evolving. It's not the responsibility of anyone else
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  to indulge your fantasies of a different world.
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  How quickly am I supposed to make friends with the emergence of a new variant here?
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  Can I have a day? Can you give me one day? Can I freak out for one day? Are we humane enough
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  to tolerate that? What the fuck are you talking about? The asteroid is only in my nightmares.
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  No, three and a half billion people have just been vaccinated in one of the most grueling
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  periods of anyone's living memory. And if it all happens again, it's going to totally suck dogs
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  balls. I'm allowed to say that. I'm not imagining that the pandemic was disruptive and frustrating.
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  I'm not imagining that the past two years has been very different from what it was before February
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  of 2020. Am I? It's not the responsibility of anyone else to indulge your fantasies. What fantasy?
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  I'm the one being realistic that if there is a major new variant, then 2022 is going to be
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  a lot more frustrating than if there isn't. That's all. Not calling for some huge policy change. I'm
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  not arguing for endless lockdowns. I'm not arguing for border closures. I'm not arguing for
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  anything except that these fucking douchebags who keep going on about how we all have to man up
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  would just acknowledge the reality of the fact that a world in which there's a rampaging
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  pathogen is different from one in which there isn't. And when we've all just endured so much hardship
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  in getting everybody vaccinated, in locking down in the places that we did in order to save other
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  people's lives, you fucking arseholes, who never wanted to lock down to save anyone's life.
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  Just man up dude. Just man up. Yeah, tell that to the people in the nursing homes. Tell that to
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  old people. Tell that to people who are immune compromised. Just man up. There been the idea that
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  we would go through all of this and then face yet another round of some new boogie man virus
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  that starts wiping people out. I'm not saying that will happen. I'm just saying the fact that it
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  is more likely today than it was four days ago sucks. I'm allowed to say that. The other craziness
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  on Twitter lately has been yet another round of American hand wringing about what a totalitarian
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  dictatorship Australia has become. This time, as always, stoked by the inimitable likes of
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  arse hat, quasi journalist, dude bro, formerly alt left, now alt right adjacent timpool
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  who like what is this? What is this savior complex that you all have about Australia that so many
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  Americans on the far left and the far right have about saving Australia from itself like we're fine
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  guys. We're dealing with it in our way. There are lots of mistakes that are being made. There's
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  lots of overreach. There's lots of stupid lockdown rules. I've argue heard me on this podcast argue
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  against them in enormous frustration. Time and time again. We get it. We're a democracy. We're
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  sorting it out. There are lots of mistakes that America made. They were mistakes mostly of omission.
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  Australia's mistakes were mostly of commission. Maybe that makes it easier for a libertarian-minded
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  person to be critical of Australia than America because at least America screwed up by doing
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  nothing. Whereas Australia screwed up by doing something. Maybe they think that shoulders more
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  of a responsibility. I don't really. I mean this latest round has been caused by the fact that
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  Australia was woefully inadequate at vaccinating our First Nations people, the Indigenous Australians.
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  So in the Northern Territory there were outbreaks, well there were outbreaks in remote Indigenous
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  communities or over Australia. But in the Northern Territory it was the most marked because the
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  Northern Territory, no offence to Territorians, is a vast wasteland of desert in which Indigenous
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  communities are extremely isolated from good health care or the other trappings of First World
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  Civilization. And once the virus got into these communities then I mean it would have been game
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  over. These are people who suffer from terrible comorbidities and diabetes and short life
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  experiences already. The idea that you would just abandon them and leave them to suffer the virus,
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  the vagaries of this virus without being without the protections of vaccine or vaccines in First World
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  Medical Care because your libertarian, timpool, bro instinct thinks that it would be too patronizing
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  or paternalistic or condescending for the government to go in and collect them and take them
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  into managed care, managed isolated care. Concentration camps, in other words, concentration camps,
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  you're standing in the coaching question camps. Was it against their will?
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  Many people ask online, why don't you answer the simple question? I saw Claire Lehman,
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  the founder of Quillette, being badgered, hounded by Americans about her failure to supposedly
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  clearly answer the question of whether or not every single Indigenous Australian in the Northern
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  Territory who was a close contact of someone with coronavirus or who had caught coronavirus was
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  going by choice into these managed quarantine facilities or whether they were being taken against
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  their will. And it is a tricky question because I'm sure there were some of them who were being
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  taken against their will. I'm sure some of them had swallowed online nonsense, put out by
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  the same types of people who are now critical of Australia, that vaccines are dangerous.
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  I'm sure some of them, look, let's even grant the most extreme version of our opponent's arguments,
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  let's steal man our opponents and say, all right, there were some very well-informed,
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  maybe even vaccinated Indigenous Australians who didn't want to go into managed care but who
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  had to who were forced to against their will. So that's an infringement of personal freedom
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  for two weeks in fairly luxurious facilities with three good meals a day.
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  What's the alternative and does the alternative to isolation expand human freedom more
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  or constrict it? Because the alternative to putting Indigenous communities into managed isolation
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  where they can recover, get proper medical care and not spread the disease is for their communities
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  to be wiped out. So in a sense, respecting the rights to liberty and autonomy of every single
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  individual in a remote Indigenous community with low vaccination rates and high comorbidities
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  and immune problems is tantamount to giving the most extreme and obstinate member of that
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  community a terrorist veto. A veto that says, because I demand that I not be, why not participate
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  in this state run fascist totalitarian operation, I am therefore exercising my right to kill and
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  contaminate everyone else in this remote community. And then what other alternative is there?
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  I suppose you could only take the people who want to go and then the rest of the
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  community is out there to fend for themselves and what community do the community leaders who
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  chose to leave come back to. A semi ravaged wasteland in which many of their peers
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  are now mortally unwell. These are not people for whom who would just be largely shrugging off
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  coronavirus. These are not, this is not Joe Rogan living out in the bush who's just going to
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  pop some either mectin and get some fancy blood transfusions and recover.
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  There are large numbers of elderly Indigenous Australians in very remote areas without adequate
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  medical care who need to be taken care of. So I just think the whole conversation around
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  freedom and liberty has become somewhat deranged. I think it's deranged in Australia because
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  we don't pay enough attention. It isn't especially in jurisdictions like Victoria and Western
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  Australia. There's no real appreciation of the trade-offs of lockdowns and lockdowns are
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  treated as kind of the first step in border closures is that the first tool in the arsenal
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  without a recognition of the fact that you're tearing families apart, families who have family
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  members abroad, businesses who need to do cross-border trade, and just the sanity of people in
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  places like Melbourne who've had to endure lockdown after lockdown after lockdown with no necessary
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  reason for it, things like curfews at night when there's no epidemiological justification for
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  it. I completely understand all that. There is two little focus on individual autonomy and
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  liberty in Australia. But meet me halfway, guys. Let's accept that in America, individual autonomy
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  and liberty has become the sole yardstick for a lot of people. It's like, like I say, if it's the
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  only thing you focus on, then you give the most reactionary individualist a terrorist veto over
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  everybody else. Because when you have a pathogen in your system, you're exhaling that contaminant
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  onto everybody else. What about their freedom? What about their freedom to breathe air that isn't
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  going to kill them? I mean, it's not a dissimilar rationale to me for the argument against
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  smoking inside. I have a right when I'm in a bar to just breathe air, just normal air. Maybe someone
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  walks past with some perfume, so I get a little bit sniffly. Maybe there's an odor that I don't
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  quite like. That's fine. But for you to sit at the table next to me and persistently chain smoke
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  cigars would be an infringement of my rights. Like I do have a basic right to breathe air that is
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  not going to kill me. So if you want to smoke a cigarette, go outside. And if you want to be an
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  unvaccinated douchebag who parades around with coronavirus, just don't do it in a remote Indigenous
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  community where people are really vulnerable. That's not freedom. That might fulfill a strictly
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  libertarian conception of freedom in which means that the state is not involved. Okay, whoop
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  do you do? What kind of a world does that conception lead to? It's a world in which wild pathogens
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  run completely free. I mean, it's a world of the most extreme forms of like Florida at the peak of
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  the coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals completely overwhelmed. People needlessly dying. That's not a
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  great model either. Surely we have to find a middle ground between these two extremes.
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  Anyway, I hope that in subsequent waves of the pandemic, and let's hope that Omicron is not one,
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  we do strike that ground. And I think it's quite likely that jurisdictions like New South Wales
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  and Australia, the most popular state home to Sydney where I live, is doing a reasonably good
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  job. Let's hope they will. I don't think we're going to go back to, I mean, there is no, you know,
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  Sydney has been open now for some time, completely open. The borders are open. I'm traveling
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  internationally. People are coming back in. There's no more hotel quarantine for people coming in from
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  abroad unless they come from nine countries in southern Africa. That was just introduced within
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  the, you know, post Omicron. And now there's a 72-day home isolation requirement when you're
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  coming in from abroad, which strikes me as reasonable. I won't like it if I have to spend say a
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  week at home when I come back from being abroad, but that also strikes me as a reasonable
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  imposition on my freedom. But the idea that anything that the government requires me to do makes
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  it fascistic, grow up. Like, are we in first year political science at university where we're
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  taking the most extreme possible rigid, doctrinaire ideas about political philosophy without any
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  understanding of context and trade-offs? There has to be a better way. And let's hope that we can
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  navigate Omicron with sanity and generosity and no knee jerk, totalitarian instincts like those
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  of the Victorian, well, some, some people in Victoria, shall I say. I won't throw anyone under the bus
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  by name. There has to be a better way. And let's hope that we can navigate Omicron without the
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  knee jerk, totalitarian instincts that some Australians have exhibited and without the tough,
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  bro dumb guy, schtick of the American alt-right, libertarian, girly men.
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  So today's episode, a fascinating conversation with Dr. Dina McMillan. She is a social psychologist.
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  She's a relationship expert. She got her doctorate degree from Stanford University in California.
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  She's best known for a book called, but he says he loves me, how to avoid being trapped in a
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  manipulative relationship. She wrote this about it a decade ago. And it is an exposition of her
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  expertise about the early warning signs of manipulation and abuse. But this conversation is not
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  about that. This conversation is about race and workness and the culture wars. Because what
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  Dr. McMillan noticed was that the tactics that she came to understand in abusive relationships
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  were being perpetrated by the far left in the modern culture wars. The tactics that abuses
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  use. I want to read you something from her Twitter, which is quite fascinating.
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  She talks about nine characteristics of gaslighting, basically, that she notices from
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  abusive relationships, from women who are trapped in abusive relationships.
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  And her mind, much of culture is currently trapped in the same way that a woman might be trapped
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  in an abusive, spousal relationship, but we are trapped by our abusers and our abusers are the
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  cancel culture, brigade. Here are some of the characteristics of such a relationship.
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  One, they deny they said or did something even when you have proof. Two, they accuse you of
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  doing things that you know they themselves have done. Three, they turn others against you to take
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  away your support system. Remember, this applies both to the current culture wars when you're talking
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  to someone who's super woke and also to a woman in an abusive relationship of her partner.
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  Four, they tell you you're crazy. Five, you're never right. You constantly feel like you have to
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  defend reality. Six, you're trusting yourself intuition erodes. Seven, you always feel confused
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  about whether you're on good terms. Eight, you're not allowed to have feelings. Nine, you find yourself
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  collecting proof things happen so you can reassure yourself. It's a weird leap to make. It's a kind
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  of fascinating leap to make and she's a fascinating person to talk to about all this because she
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  understands the way that human beings interact and manipulate each other better than most people do.
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  As I say, this is a collaboration with UTS. Please go and look up the permission to think
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  series for more information on these interviews and the people I'm speaking with.
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  Deena currently lives in Melbourne in Australia, which made this conversation super easy.
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  Before Christmas, I am going to hold an AMA and ask me anything episode where you can ask me any
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  questions that you might be interested in my opinions on. I would love to hear from you. We've
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  got some questions rolling in from the last time I put a shout out out. But please go ahead and
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  email uncomfyconvose at gmail.com. That's uncomfy with a Y-U-N-C-O-M-F-Y-convose,
• 20:05
  C-O-N-V-O-S at gmail.com. Send us your question or tweet at me on Twitter,
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  George Sapser on Twitter, and we'll curate all those. I'll do a special ask me anything
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  episode for the holiday season. I can't wait to see you then in the meantime. Enjoy Deena McNeill.
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  Well, a social psychologist is different from a clinical psychologist in that we don't study
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  neuroses and psychoses and people with personal problems. We stand back a little and look at the ways
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  people are influenced, everything from how you learn to how you're persuaded, how you're
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  manipulated, how you're coerced, even how your brain washed. And we do a lot of their experimentation
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  on how that can happen, how you can actually manipulate and maneuver things and get people to change
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  their beliefs and their behaviors, especially when it can be done without alerting them that you're
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  actually actively manipulating them. Well, good. You're interested in social psychology.
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  I was studying psychology as a general topic as an undergraduate and took a social psychology class
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  and just fell in love with it. I thought it was fantastic. So I kept going all the way through and
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  got my doctorate. And tell us where you grew up and what that was like? I'm a military kid. I'm
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  known as a brat. So my mother was in the army when I was growing up. So I lived quite a few places
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  including going to high school in Germany. And then I went back to New York and stayed there for a while,
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  got married, had a baby decided to go back to university and nine years later, I graduated.
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  Did you like living in Europe? I loved it. In fact, living in Germany, we lived there for three years
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  and then my dad got transferred back to the States to New York. He's not from there, none of us are,
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  but that's where they sent him. And I really wanted to get back to Europe. So when I left for college,
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  rather than looking for a college in the States, I went to the American College in Paris.
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  So I went and lived in Paris for a while. To top life. That must have been, that must have been
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  a good, good, good place to spend for you, dude. So it's not quite the same as
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  there was enough money to go to all the fabulous restaurants and things, but I wouldn't trade it
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  for the world. It was absolutely phenomenal. I think Paris and New York are both cities where they
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  great with a lot of money and they great with no money as well. You can scrounge you way along the
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  backs of the sand or along the east river and still have a blast. So where did you end up studying?
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  We went to Stanford for social psychology. Yes, for for my masters and my and my doctorate. I went
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  to City University, Hunter College in New York for my undergrad. I started at the American College,
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  but I didn't finish and then I went back to the States and then I went to Hunter College and I did
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  finish then and I decided I was going to go for graduate school to whatever university was rated
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  number one that year. US News and World Report rates the universities in the United States.
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  There are about 28,000 of them. They rate them every year. So I said whichever one is number one,
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  that's where I'm going. Tell us what university life was like. Did you find it?
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  Well, coming. There's a whole conversation going on at the moment about campuses going crazy and
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  being super woke and you know, all the old establishment professors in having run-ins with
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  students who are coming in who want to run things their way. What was it like while you were there?
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  Well, it was interesting because the wokeism was there, but it was it was more underground.
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  In fact, I ended up having to replace one of the professors that was on my committee
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  for my doctorate because she didn't like the topic that I chose for my doctorate.
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  I had worked on a landmark study of homeless and formerly homeless and at-risk families
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  and I suspected that being on welfare, you know, being dependent on the government would have an
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  impact on how people live their lives, how they thought their relationships, and so I decided to
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  study that for my doctoral thesis and one of my professors was very woke and said I wasn't
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  supposed to look at welfare. You know, I was supposed to just leave that alone. I told her I was
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  a social scientist. There was nothing that was off limits and I ended up having to replace it.
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  Wait, what's the thinking about not studying homelessness? I don't even understand.
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  No, no, not homelessness, welfare. Sorry, welfare? She didn't want me to look at welfare because
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  there's a disproportionate number of black people on welfare.
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  She was white and I'm black. She didn't want me to look at it.
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  Right, she's telling you how to be a good black person.
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  Yes, again, we had some of that there. I personally thought you can't fix anything if you
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  don't really know what you're looking at, so I went ahead and studied and I see why she was worried.
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  There was not just a statistically significant impact of being on welfare.
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  It was a dramatic impact. It had a very dramatic, detrimental impact on people's lives.
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  Well-faded? Yes. Is that because of how it was delivered and how the system was managed?
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  Absolutely. I mean, all the rules from the well-meaning pre-woke
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  back in the 1960s who decided to make it easy for poor women to get welfare and you had generation
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  after generation of poor urban people brought up with no fathers in the house because one of
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  the rules was you could not have a man in the house if you were going to receive welfare.
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  So you have all of these children with no fathers in the detriment of having no father.
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  Also, getting money without having to work for it gives you no sense of purpose.
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  It makes you highly dependent. I found the people that were on welfare compared to an equally
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  impoverished population who actually had jobs but they just had low pay and jobs.
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  They had stronger relationships with their families. They had stronger friendships.
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  They had more hope for the future. It was not a good thing.
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  And part of your expertise there became abusive relationships and manipulative relationships.
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  What did you come to learn about the structure of those relationships?
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  Well, that came about because my daughter's best friend. Her mom came to me and most people
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  don't know what a social psychologist is. They think we're a clinical psychologist. She just
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  heard psychologists and thought and she came to me and said she had a close friend who was in
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  an abusive relationship. Could I help? So I spoke with the woman. I did what I could but I realized
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  I didn't know enough about that specific topic. So I went and got additional trainings
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  specifically about abusive relationships and seeing what a pervasive problem it is.
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  I've been working in that field not only in that field but in that field ever since.
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  What do we know about how those relationships work?
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  I know. Yes, it's a difference. Unfortunately, I run up against a bit of a wall for a lot of people
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  because I look at most of the domestic violence services that we have now. They're pretty much
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  the same as when I started in this business 20 years ago because they wait until after someone gets
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  into a very imbalanced toxic relationship and then if it gets really serious and physical,
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  they'll offer them some short-term temporary topical minimal help. I looked at it on the other
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  way after working in the field for about nine years. I realized my social psychology was actually
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  very valuable because I recognized the tactics, the manipulation tactics being used by abusers
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  from the very start of these relationships and what I saw was that there were only a set number
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  of manipulative tactics being used no matter who the person was. It was a small discrete set.
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  I could teach the information to anyone so I put my unasking the abuser program together
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  and started teaching it to anyone aged 13 and above. What are some of those tactics?
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  Well, the first thing I would say is too much too soon. One of the things that with abusers,
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  abusers have a lot of psychological problems and when I do workshops, depending on the demographics
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  of the participants, I talk about the psychology of abusers because it's quite distinct and one thing
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  is they are very uncomfortable in a relationship where they don't have total and complete control.
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  So the relationship goes really fast. So you go from the guy's not in your life to
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  his all over your life on one fell suit. Right. That sounds a lot like falling in love.
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  Is it hard to tell the difference? No, it's not hard to tell the difference at all and it really
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  isn't. In fact, one of the things I try to do is teach the difference between falling in love with
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  someone and being lured into a manipulative and toxic relationship because it is quite distinct
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  and it is really important to know the difference. So what is that? Because if I'm going head over
• 30:32
  heels, I'm crazy about somebody that I can't imagine living without them because all of the dopamine
• 30:37
  is juicing my brain and I have visions of us together forever. How is that noticeably distinct
• 30:43
  from what you were talking about the kind of warning signs of a manipulative or abusive relationship?
• 30:49
  Well, first of all, one has to ask how quickly did it happen?
• 30:53
  With the abusers, the relationship, first of all, their attacks happening. You don't just fall in
• 30:59
  love. This person is purposely putting lures out there to pull you closer. So using things like
• 31:08
  what I call the fairy tale lure. The moment you go out, they're talking about a future together,
• 31:14
  they're talking about happily ever after, they're talking about naming your children, you know,
• 31:20
  this kind of thing. I also teach people if you fall in love and collapse yourself into relationships,
• 31:29
  you're going to spend a lot of time in therapy. That's just not a good way to run your life. You're
• 31:36
  going to find yourself in love with people who don't love you back. You're going to find yourself
• 31:42
  in unhealthy relationships. Put the brakes on it first. Be careful because if you choose wrong,
• 31:51
  it can be extremely destructive to your life. Anything real will be there if you are just a little
• 31:57
  bit more cautious. Anything real bears up under scrutiny. How do you teach resilience once people
• 32:05
  are in such a relationship? Well, it's really challenging. If you have to start where you are,
• 32:12
  one of the things I'm putting the course together and I was writing today about the fact that often
• 32:18
  people fail at acquiring new skills because they try to do it all at once. And you always have to
• 32:25
  start where you are. And the Chinese have a very wise saying that, you know, journey of a thousand
• 32:31
  miles starts with a single step. If you're going to start being resilient, if you're going to get
• 32:37
  out of an abusive relationship, you have to start where you are. So emotionally is pulling back
• 32:45
  just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit. And then once you get used to being
• 32:50
  there, you pull back a little further, you pull back a little further, you pull back a little
• 32:54
  further. This dynamic between someone who is potentially an abusive or manipulative partner
• 33:01
  in a relationship and the target of their affection, if you can call it that, that can be reflected
• 33:09
  in group dynamics or the social level as well. And that's one of your sort of great insights,
• 33:14
  I suppose. Can you tell us the connection there? Well, it's interesting that if you, one of the
• 33:19
  things with my podcast series, for instance, I took my entire project and I put it on the podcast
• 33:26
  series called Unmasking the Abuser. And I walk you through all the tactics. And as I said,
• 33:31
  the list isn't long. But what is amazing is that you see the same tactics being used, whether
• 33:37
  the person using them is male or female, whether it's a romantic relationship or friendship or
• 33:44
  a work relationship, you also see it in social movements. You see the same sort of lures being used
• 33:52
  like a love bombing. You know, if you look up the word love bombing, you see a lot of that in
• 33:59
  quotes. And what that is is someone just showering you with, with praise and superficial acceptance
• 34:07
  and talking about how wonderful you are and how great you are. But it comes with conditions.
• 34:16
  If you do anything, if you ask questions, if you stand back a little, if you're not willing to
• 34:21
  immediately collapse yourself into that relationship, then that tap of wonderful praise and good
• 34:30
  feelings is turned off immediately. And you see social movements doing it all the time.
• 34:37
  What are the kinds of social movements that do that? I mean, I'm sort of, I can imagine some
• 34:41
  self-helpy sort of personal development type or even, you know, Silicon Valley tech,
• 34:47
  protocols, you know, nudging at the edges of that. But what do you see?
• 34:53
  Well, I have to say that whenever I've had an opportunity to go to one of those change your life
• 34:58
  in a weekend seminars, the ones where they have the intro that's free, where they get people to
• 35:04
  bring all their friends, I always go along and look to see which tactics they used. But I see right
• 35:11
  now the progressive left, otherwise known as the woke, are using all of the tactics from my abuse
• 35:18
  series. And it really frightens me where it presents everything has all the solutions.
• 35:27
  But you're not allowed to ask questions. You have to absolutely stick to the narrative
• 35:32
  with no exceptions. If you stick to the narrative, if you say you're one of them,
• 35:39
  then you can do all sorts of things wrong and it's accepted. It is really, it's really quite
• 35:45
  frightening. I look at it and it's, I find it quite frightening because it's an absolutist
• 35:54
  totalitarian religion. It is not, I can't even call it a social movement. It's more like an
• 36:00
  extremist religion or one of those weekends where they claim that you can change your life.
• 36:07
  Can you explain, Deena, to people who aren't very online, what the sort of nature of this
• 36:12
  movement is? Because I feel like we've had a hard time giving it a name, really defining exactly
• 36:17
  what it is. John McWater has his terms for it. Other people have their terms for it. We can call
• 36:25
  it work. We can call it a certain elitist, you know, regressive leftism or something. But can
• 36:31
  you kind of help people who don't spend all their lives on Twitter, understand what it is that you
• 36:35
  are talking about? Well, I don't think I spend all of my life on it. I'm talking about me.
• 36:42
  I was going to say though, I have been on there more since, you know, recent events have
• 36:47
  kind of impacted on my social life. But what I'm looking at is if you have a movement that says
• 36:56
  it's about justice and fairness. But if you ask questions, you see inconsistencies. For instance,
• 37:07
  it's supposed to be a movement that supports women's rights. But so many of the groups that are
• 37:15
  also supported by this movement don't believe in women's rights. And what women's rights are
• 37:23
  you talking about? If you are a conservative woman, your rights aren't included. You can
• 37:31
  you can be bullied enormously, terribly, and that's okay. It's just there's so many contradictions
• 37:40
  in it, but you are not allowed to notice. You're not allowed to step away. You're not allowed to say,
• 37:47
  I believe in this part, but I don't believe in that part because if you're not all in,
• 37:54
  you can absolutely be bullied. And that's what I mean about an extremist religion because it
• 38:02
  with a social movement, it's like if you look at the environment, I come from California.
• 38:08
  So I care about using recyclable things and the place I lived in California, we got rid of
• 38:16
  single use plastic 20 years ago. So I like seeing things about regenerating things,
• 38:25
  taking care of the earth. But some of the movements, some of the things they advocate,
• 38:31
  I don't buy into and I don't have people protesting outside of my house because of it.
• 38:38
  With the woke movement, if you are a public figure at all and don't buy into every single thing
• 38:46
  that they say, you can be bullied to the point where you lose your job, where you know they will
• 38:55
  post, they'll dox you, they'll post your personal information online. You don't have all sorts of
• 38:59
  people calling your names. If you're female, you often get great threats and death threats.
• 39:06
  Just for questioning what they believe is right and true, that's I find very scary.
• 39:14
  So I suppose the acolytes of this way of thinking the social justice warriors, if you will,
• 39:19
  would say to that that this is what women and people of color have been enduring from the white
• 39:26
  patriarchy for centuries, feeling like they're being sidelined, diminished, spoken over,
• 39:32
  and abused, and that what they're trying to do is excise from public discourse, people who are
• 39:38
  racists and sexists and proto-fascists. They see themselves and they have to say as being on
• 39:44
  the right side of history and fighting for progressive causes. And yet they would look at someone
• 39:49
  like me and give me a hard time because I don't buy into everything because I ask questions
• 39:54
  because I have been trained to assess research. So when they give me crap research
• 40:00
  and say it proves their point and I can see through it, they come down on me like a ton of bricks.
• 40:06
  So as a black woman who has faced racism, I mean if anybody follows me on social media or
• 40:14
  in any of my interviews and in fact my YouTube videos, I talk about the racism that I have
• 40:21
  faced is a black woman. I talk about sexism and I talk about the fact that the social justice
• 40:27
  warriors are making everything worse. That is not how you cure the problem.
• 40:35
  Was Stanford racist? Very. It was the worst racism I'd faced in my life.
• 40:44
  Are you kidding? They didn't know I was black until I showed up because even though they had
• 40:50
  affirmative action programs even then, I didn't want anyone later on to say that I'd only been
• 40:57
  accepted at the university because I was black. Now my name is Dino so you cannot, that's a woman's
• 41:04
  name. They knew I was female but they did not know I was black until I got there. And then the war
• 41:12
  started. So I was treated so badly, it is like I could make a Netflix drama off of how I was
• 41:21
  treated because I was black. How did that show up Dino? I'm sorry? How did that show up? What sort of
• 41:28
  things? Oh it was very simple. When I was in class and in my year they had over 700 applications
• 41:36
  for the PhD program and they only accepted nine. So it's a small class. When I asked a question,
• 41:46
  I was ignored. What I asked was not ever considered when the professor would arrange to have
• 41:53
  appointments with each of us, they wouldn't show up to mine. They kept voting research in the
• 41:59
  courses about how inferior black people were. I didn't find out until my second year after I'd
• 42:07
  learned to analyze the research that they were using, they knew they were using absolutely
• 42:14
  irresponsible research that was not rigorous at all. I think it was kind of an experiment to see
• 42:23
  what I would do. I was in fact, when I graduated, they finally had a chair for my department,
• 42:31
  who was the first time having a female chair in my department. And she asked me point blank,
• 42:36
  how do you handle being treated so differently from everyone else? I told her eyes on the prize
• 42:45
  that I had known and grown up seeing people set on by dogs, beaten, hanged from trees so that I
• 42:54
  would have an opportunity to compete. So unless they killed me, and I mean dead,
• 43:00
  because even if I were on crutches, I would have still gone to class. I told them point blank,
• 43:05
  you're not getting rid of me. Were you afraid of physical violence? No. That's one thing,
• 43:13
  they were no, they were way too cowardly to ever do anything like that. That's too easy to
• 43:17
  prosecute. That's too easy, that's too easy to have evidence. They had a lot of leeway in how
• 43:24
  they behaved, because they were tenured professors, the top professors had all of the tenured
• 43:31
  professors at Harvard who had been lured to Stanford. And they got away with a lot, but they knew
• 43:37
  they couldn't get away with that. So no, I was never physically threatened, but they did everything
• 43:43
  they could to get me to quit. And when you were living in Germany and subsequently having lived in
• 43:50
  Australia, do you notice any differences between the way that racism plays out in those places versus
• 43:56
  the United States? I've lived in England and France too, but yes, even being from California,
• 44:07
  and California is definitely not a state with strong racial divisions. People keep giving
• 44:14
  Australia a hard time, but I have faced much less racism in Australia than I did in the States,
• 44:21
  even in California. In Germany too, we moved from the Midwest to Germany, and I was treated better.
• 44:30
  I was like, this is amazing. These people were the former Nazis, and they treated us better than
• 44:36
  we retreated at home. I thought it was really sad. In what ways did that show up in your daily life?
• 44:43
  Can you give us an example? Yeah, an easy example. How easily and readily people will just
• 44:50
  start a conversation with you. How little old ladies act when you walk next to them on the
• 44:57
  sidewalk? Do they seem a nerd or scared? Do people, if people chat with you and like you,
• 45:07
  do they invite you to your house, to their homes? Australia has been amazing.
• 45:13
  But I don't say something, and I have to put this out there because I have to be fair.
• 45:19
  What I didn't realize until I lived in Australia for a few years is how much of how I was
• 45:26
  being treated, not all of it, of course, but how much of it was actually coming from me.
• 45:32
  My father, when he retired from the military, retired in Tucson, Arizona, and when I lived in
• 45:40
  California, of course, you go to visit family, you go to see your parents go for Christmas.
• 45:45
  I was very underwhelmed by Tucson. I thought it was kind of an unfriendly place.
• 45:50
  I moved to Australia in the first two years. My daughter came out to visit me. I couldn't afford
• 45:55
  to go back. I was short on time, short on money. Said two years after living in Australia,
• 46:02
  I went back to Tucson. Now, politically, nothing had really changed. It was no big difference.
• 46:10
  But all of a sudden, everywhere I went in Tucson, the cash year would start a conversation.
• 46:16
  People sitting next to us in the restaurant would start a conversation.
• 46:22
  People would smile at me longer, longer eye contact.
• 46:25
  All of a sudden, I was treated completely differently.
• 46:30
  You would not hear me speak or look at me and say, oh, she must live in Australia.
• 46:35
  So it's not that my living in Australia started the conversation.
• 46:38
  It had no way of knowing that. But my non-verbal behavior had changed from living in a country
• 46:46
  where I was basically accepted. It's funny that you say that people in California
• 46:51
  assume that Australians are racists or more racists because it really depends on what your
• 46:57
  definition of racism is. There are certainly codes that I have to speak in with my American
• 47:03
  counterparts, mostly white university educated American counterparts, that I have to adhere to,
• 47:08
  that I don't have to adhere to in Australia. I certainly don't have to adhere to if I'm speaking
• 47:12
  with friends of mine who are black. But there is such an uptightness at the moment among
• 47:17
  and terror, really a terror amongst white Americans about making sure that they do the correct
• 47:21
  thing racially. It means that all of that closeness and that casualness and that
• 47:28
  laid-backness that you normally use to stoke closeness with another individual have fallen
• 47:33
  by the wayside. At least I find the relations between races in the states at the moment
• 47:39
  to be boxed into quite a cold and rigid archetype because people don't feel free to treat
• 47:46
  each other as human beings. They're treating each other as racial categories that they have to
• 47:50
  make sure they speak to perfectly, correctly otherwise they'll be hounded. So I wonder if that's
• 47:55
  part of the difference between Australia and the states right now. Well, one thing you know that
• 48:01
  in Australia, if you can't take a job, don't come here. So anybody listening to this,
• 48:05
  if you're super sensitive and everybody has to use the latest term for who you are,
• 48:10
  don't come to Australia. Nothing is sacrosanct here. I remember when I was working on a show
• 48:16
  and at one point I was trying to explain to the cameraman and the crew why I was having such a hard
• 48:24
  time at my day job where everyone kept giving me a hard time about being American.
• 48:31
  And they were like, we don't understand why you're so sensitive. And I said, okay, try to understand
• 48:37
  this. By putting down my country, it's like saying your mother is a whore. And they stopped and
• 48:43
  looked at me. And then one of the guys said, yeah, but she's a good earner. And the next
• 48:49
  week she taught me everything. I mean, they just split around like this. We got no work done
• 48:55
  because we were on the floor cracking up laughing like you would not believe. Welcome to Australia.
• 49:04
  It's funny. Maybe there's a difference here between between terminology in terms of what we
• 49:10
  mean by racism. In other words, the difference between racial bias, racism, language codes,
• 49:17
  what do you, what is racism do you? Racism to me is racial hatred.
• 49:25
  And I learned this from my mother. My mother, when we were young, I was like seven. And we had
• 49:33
  lived in some military bases and then we moved near my mother's family in the Midwest. And we,
• 49:39
  at first for about a year, lived in an all black area. And then we lived in a, we integrated
• 49:44
  in all white area. And my, our mother taught us, there's a difference between ignorance and hatred.
• 49:53
  So she said, pay attention when someone says something that you find offensive. Because it may
• 49:59
  be just that they don't know any better. And that person who says that, if it's out of ignorance,
• 50:05
  if you handle it well, they could turn out to be your, your new best friend.
• 50:11
  Hatred comes out differently. And when you correct them and say that really hurts my feelings,
• 50:16
  when you say that, and here's why they keep doing it. So unless it's directed hatred,
• 50:25
  I try not to take offense. You know, if I live in an area, I live in Victoria, in Outness,
• 50:32
  suburbs. There are no black Americans out here but me. So if somebody said something that was
• 50:42
  offensive, according to the latest Black Lives Matter protesters, and I got offended, all that
• 50:50
  would do is make them uncomfortable with me, if it not inform them in any way. And if they didn't
• 50:57
  mean it to be offensive, why should I get offended? I guess I've been in Australia too long.
• 51:02
  You've been in Australia way too long. You don't sound like Americans sound. Not to generalize,
• 51:09
  but I just saw a poll from the states of Hispanic Americans. And 4% of Hispanic Americans
• 51:17
  preferred the term Latinx to Latina or Latinx. 4%. And yet Latinx is now the term for Latino
• 51:27
  and Latino Americans at National Public Radio in the official government documents in the Biden
• 51:33
  campaign. This has been taken on. It's just as an example. It's supposed to be a gender neutral,
• 51:38
  you know, more politically correct term for Latino people. But this is something that has become
• 51:44
  entrenched as a result of largely white university educated elites insisting on the use of a term
• 51:50
  that the people who they're talking about themselves, 96% of them don't even want to be caught.
• 51:55
  Well, look how they treat black Americans who don't buy into the I'm the victim mindset.
• 52:02
  We get called white supremacists. And please understand, I am not part of that group that says
• 52:09
  that there is no racism. I am above everything a social psychologist. So I'm looking at patterns
• 52:18
  of behavior, nonverbal cues, eye contact, smiles, conversation, tone of voice. I've been trained
• 52:26
  to see how the differences and how people interact with each other. So I can tell the difference.
• 52:31
  I know there is still some racism. I'm not going to pretend, but I also know getting rid of it by
• 52:38
  having violent protests and looting and making white people so so conscious around you.
• 52:44
  They're afraid to say anything. That is going to set up such an extreme backlash.
• 52:52
  It's going to take us back to like the 1890s. I just and notice again, they did not ask the Latinos
• 53:00
  what they wanted to be called. They decided for them. I found that scratch a lefty finder races.
• 53:07
  They are so elitist. They are so white man's burden with regard to ethnic minorities.
• 53:15
  They don't want us to make up our own minds. Nothing offends them more from them.
• 53:19
  A black person saying, I'm not a victim.
• 53:23
  What do you do then, Deena, about what they call structural racism?
• 53:27
  I mean, you're talking about a kind of racism, which is an antipathy or hostility
• 53:33
  from a person of one race and maybe a belief in racial supremacy.
• 53:37
  What about the institutional ways, the subtle ways in which the people of minority races
• 53:42
  are disadvantaged in the 21st century? Absolutely. I even did a video on this.
• 53:49
  Why? How systemic racism was set up? Why was set up that way? It was set up as a way of keeping
• 53:57
  people in their places, making it seem right and true. All of the systems had to interact
• 54:03
  together. The banking system, finance system, culture, a marriage system, everything had to work
• 54:10
  together. Otherwise, you would have constant discord and constant revolution by the people who
• 54:16
  were being oppressed. Both sides, the people who were advantaged by the system and the people
• 54:23
  who were disadvantaged had to be taught. It was fixed. It was inevitable and on some level
• 54:28
  that it was right and true. So it, it provided all the laws. So as time went by and the laws,
• 54:37
  you know, protests started, the civil rights movement came. The laws started to change.
• 54:44
  Some of it, while the systems themselves would alter, sometimes the people who had been hurt
• 54:52
  by the system all this time weren't really aware of it. It's one of the reasons if you want to
• 54:57
  look at racism in America, compare the outcomes for black Americans versus Caribbean people who
• 55:05
  move to the United States and Africans who move to the United States. They move to the United States
• 55:10
  based on the laws and the cultural norms of when they move. Not a historic system that kept blacks
• 55:20
  marginalized and depressed. So they have different expectations and so they're treated differently.
• 55:27
  They'll try for different things. And they have different outcomes as I understand it as well.
• 55:32
  Absolutely. They have different outcomes. First or second generation, Nigeria and Americans,
• 55:36
  I think, have a median wealth above the average white person or a median in terms of the average
• 55:41
  white person in contrast to people who are descendants of slaves. Yes, but also to people who
• 55:47
  have to take into account culture. You also find that blacks who live around whites do better than
• 55:54
  blacks who live around blacks. And the reason is that cultural norm often, I mean, even if I were
• 56:01
  talking about my parents, when my parents were small, my dad was born in the South during Jim Crow
• 56:10
  when he could have been killed and nothing would have been done about it.
• 56:14
  You know, so they grew up when racism was the law of the land. So there were a lot of things
• 56:22
  that they didn't strive for and a lot of limitations they thought might still be there.
• 56:28
  Because that's how it was in place and so firm and so dangerous to step outside the line
• 56:35
  when they were growing up. Although to give her credit though, my mother was unusual.
• 56:41
  She came from a very well-educated home. My great-grandfather was a professor at the University of Colorado.
• 56:48
  I have a great uncle who was a Tuskegee Airman. And if your audience members want to see
• 56:54
  something really interesting, they should look that up. There was actually a film with Lawrence
• 56:58
  Fishburn from the Matrix called the Tuskegee Airman. My great uncle was one of those guys.
• 57:04
  The first flyers, combat flyers for the United States during World War II with absolutely the
• 57:10
  best record of protecting the bombers that they escorted of anyone. They were all lawyers,
• 57:17
  they were doctors. So even though we grew up without money, my mother had an idea that with education,
• 57:25
  you can do whatever you want. If you have a certain mindset, you can do whatever you want.
• 57:30
  And it has, it made a huge difference. I didn't grow up with that. The white man won't let us do
• 57:35
  one set. Like many black people grow up. And yet, then when you got to Stanford, you experienced
• 57:41
  all of the racism that you found that Stanford from the white professors there, which would seem
• 57:46
  to play into the current narrative that all white people are racist. Even the left-wing liberal
• 57:53
  ones are racist. This is all part of a kind of racist patriarchy, essentially, and without dismantling
• 57:59
  the structures of power, we're not going to be able to achieve justice and equity. Like explain
• 58:05
  to us the difference between the forms of racism that you found at Stanford and conventional
• 58:10
  southern Jim Crow conservative racism. Well, you know, the senior professors that I was having
• 58:17
  so much difficulty with at Stanford were absolute fallacies. And I'll go on record calling them that.
• 58:26
  But they were also female professors and male professors in other departments and people working
• 58:32
  in the financial aid department who were white who really went out of their way to make sure I had
• 58:36
  enough funding to keep going. So I never saw it as they're white, so they're all out to get me.
• 58:43
  I saw it as these guys have some serious issues and someone who needs to give them a swift
• 58:48
  kick in the backside. But I never generalized it. That's probably how I was able to get through.
• 58:55
  I never generalized it to everyone else. I did not hold other people responsible for their
• 59:00
  silliness. That's interesting because generalizing to everybody else, or at least everybody else within
• 59:07
  a certain racial or gender group is basically the philosophy now of what you're expected to believe
• 59:14
  if you are a progressive and if you are to be considered an anti racist and anti sexist. So much so
• 59:22
  that I mean, I remember I'm sure you will have seen some of the images out of the protests after
• 59:28
  the death of George Floyd last summer in the United States. And one of them that sticks with me is
• 59:33
  an African-American police officer being shouted at by a young white girl who's accusing him
• 59:38
  of being racist. And one of his colleagues says he can't be racist. He's black and she starts
• 59:43
  screaming. She's phoning at the mouth talking about how of course you can be racist. If you're black,
• 59:46
  you can be structurally racist because you're part of a system of racial oppression just because
• 59:51
  you don't have personal animals towards someone else doesn't mean that you're not a cog in a racist
• 59:55
  machine and so on. Talk to us about education. Where is this coming from? Where is it going?
• 1:00:00
  It's this indoctrination. I blame all of us because I sent my daughter to school.
• 1:00:07
  My daughter's so much more left wing than I am. She'll wake up one day. She's
• 1:00:12
  as she goes along but I'm looking at the education system and Malcolm X who I don't agree with on
• 1:00:19
  some things. He had a different philosophy of life but darn if he didn't say some really true
• 1:00:25
  things, he said only a fool would let it his enemy teach his children. And the problem is we've
• 1:00:32
  been so worried about being nice and getting along that we have not been paying attention to what
• 1:00:39
  our children are being taught about right and wrong, about family structure, about who we are,
• 1:00:45
  about what we should attain, about our history. We have allowed these extremists with this very
• 1:00:53
  totalitarian religion to come in and take over our schools and teach our children self-hatred,
• 1:01:00
  other hatred, disrespect for their parents. Teach them that young people know more. I noticed this
• 1:01:07
  even my daughter was one that all of the shows targeting young people always had the young people
• 1:01:14
  presented as smarter than their parents. That's so dangerous because you really aren't.
• 1:01:20
  Hasn't that always been a strain of American culture? The aspirational, we are a young country,
• 1:01:28
  a visionary country looking forward to the future, slapping off a British royalty, having a
• 1:01:33
  revolution, paving the way forward with Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It feels like
• 1:01:40
  there's a certain vigor in at least the assumption, even if it's not true, that the future belongs to
• 1:01:47
  the young and the old funny stuff you should just get out of the way. Well, innovation is one thing,
• 1:01:54
  believing that you're smarter than your parents is dangerous because the brain is not really fully
• 1:02:01
  formed through the mid-20s and even then if it's full of indoctrination, it's going to take you
• 1:02:07
  somewhere grim and scary. We are an innovative country but if you look at the television shows and
• 1:02:16
  things from like the 1950s, even 1960s, you did not see it presented to young people
• 1:02:23
  that they were always smarter than their parents and television isn't just television media,
• 1:02:31
  isn't just media when you study the brain, so if a psychology studies the brain and how we
• 1:02:37
  actually interpret information, how we get an idea about the world that we live in and if you
• 1:02:42
  look at the imagery that is presented to young people and has them for the last 20 years,
• 1:02:48
  there is no way the culture that we are promoting will allow us to continue to succeed. We are so
• 1:02:56
  vulnerable to being conquered by enemies who despise us, we're so vulnerable to just falling apart.
• 1:03:06
  Part of the reluctance perhaps amongst establishment people to metaphorically slap down on younger
• 1:03:14
  people who think that they know everything about the way that the world works is that they'll be
• 1:03:20
  regarded as being bigger, it's probably regarded as not being kind. I mean, sometimes accusations of
• 1:03:27
  hate speech are leveled against people for having a different opinion about immigration or a different
• 1:03:32
  opinion about something that a generation ago would have been regarded as being well within the
• 1:03:37
  bounds of a liberal democratic discourse. Since you're a social psychologist, how does one
• 1:03:45
  sort of rebalance that power dynamic? Well, because we're in Australia, I would say grow up here.
• 1:03:52
  Right now I would say I have faced enormous animosity because I'm plain spoken about these things.
• 1:04:03
  And we have to be willing to have people dislike us because if we keep giving in,
• 1:04:11
  our society is going to be completely destroyed. So someone calls you a bigot, oh well, you know
• 1:04:18
  them a lot. And of course, please do not try to explain to them why you're not. Don't tell them
• 1:04:26
  what an ally you are. Don't be an ally to anybody. Take every cause as it comes. If it's a genuine
• 1:04:32
  cause, it will not mind you looking closely and seeing what's going on. It will not mind you
• 1:04:39
  looking out for your own interests as well. It will not mind you thinking, okay, let me have a
• 1:04:45
  think about this. It's only when someone is trying to indoctrinate you that they expect you to
• 1:04:52
  give in to submit to whatever they say or they'll call you names. Now, how is that not abusive?
• 1:04:59
  You must submit to everything I say to you that everything I want from you, even if it hurts you
• 1:05:07
  or else I'm going to punish you. For me, that's the very definition of abuse.
• 1:05:15
  You used an interesting word there in an ally. You know, don't try to explain why you're an
• 1:05:20
  ally. This has become, you know, five years ago people didn't talk about the importance of ally
• 1:05:26
  shift. What do you make of ally shift? To me, ally shift is tolerance. It's saying I'm going to
• 1:05:34
  ignore all the details and any questions that I have so that you won't dislike me or look at me
• 1:05:40
  as someone who's narrow-minded. I explain very frankly to people, I'm no one's ally. I'm a
• 1:05:46
  social scientist. If you want me to support your cause, show me the facts, stand back and let me look.
• 1:05:55
  It's so interesting because one of the big tactics that I talk about is misattribution and
• 1:06:01
  I see the woke using this so much. Misattribution is putting a positive spin, a positive label
• 1:06:10
  on a negative behavior, saying you want to be someone's ally. That sounds like a nice thing,
• 1:06:16
  doesn't it? It sounds like, oh yeah, you're understanding. In actuality, what it means is
• 1:06:24
  you ignore everything that shows that your values clash, that your values are inconsistent,
• 1:06:31
  that what you're supporting may actually be harming you. It reminds me of the British being
• 1:06:36
  allied to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. We had absolutely nothing in common with
• 1:06:42
  Stalin. He was such a force for wrong and yet we ignored it because we were fighting together
• 1:06:51
  against the Nazis. There's also a certain condescension in it, it isn't there. I mean there's
• 1:06:58
  something I find uncomfortable about the notion of being an ally to a member of a minority group
• 1:07:04
  because there's something almost paternalistic about the notion, rather than respecting you as
• 1:07:11
  an individual with whom I can speak freely, as someone who is capable of hearing what I have to
• 1:07:16
  say, judging it on its merits and then giving as good as you get. I am supposed to treat you as
• 1:07:21
  someone who is solely in a position of schooling me about how I should be the best ally for fear that
• 1:07:28
  I should hurt you in some way and I have to tread on eggshells in order to do so. That for me is
• 1:07:33
  part of the concern about ally ship that it becomes essentially a subservient position to the
• 1:07:39
  person who's insisting on it. Well, it's two things. It's the person who's demanding someone be
• 1:07:46
  a good ally. It means you're supposed to accept what I say with no assessment of whether it's true
• 1:07:53
  or not, whether it harms you or not, whether it is going to take us into a bad place. You're just
• 1:08:01
  supposed to be quiet and clap whenever I say I want to do something, but at the same time
• 1:08:08
  and any group you're allied to, you kind of look at them as your pet, you know, they're almost like
• 1:08:16
  you packed them on the head because in order to be an ally to somebody, you almost have to think
• 1:08:23
  they're not important enough to really alter your quality of life and it's just not true. We just
• 1:08:30
  need to lose the whole concept. If you want to support people who do things think a certain way
• 1:08:36
  or whatever do so, but by calling yourself an ally, it means there's no discernment and there's
• 1:08:43
  a submission and a lack of honesty on your part about how that person's values, lifestyle,
• 1:08:54
  what they're demanding is impacting you. Don't worry, Dana, we're not going to be clapping along,
• 1:08:59
  we're just going to do jazz hands because claps can be triggering. You said something interesting
• 1:09:06
  there. You said you have to accept what they say, whether it's true or not, but truth itself is
• 1:09:13
  now something that is questioned because their truth might be a lived experience and that might
• 1:09:22
  give them standing to talk about something that you're not allowed to talk about. So this is another
• 1:09:28
  thing that is coming up increasingly in, I suppose, what you might call the cultural wars, which is
• 1:09:34
  we can't really, a white person can't have a conversation with a person of color about police
• 1:09:38
  brutality against people of color because the white person hasn't experienced the lived indignity
• 1:09:44
  of being oppressed by racist police. Someone who doesn't have a grandmother who was in the holocaust
• 1:09:51
  can't talk to someone who did about the nature of Judaism or whatever it might be or anti-Semitism,
• 1:09:58
  because they don't have the lived experience. How do you balance the value if any of lived
• 1:10:05
  experience? Well, lived experience is also subjective perspective. It also doesn't look at
• 1:10:13
  causation. It doesn't look at interaction between those people. It's a way, it's a mild, again,
• 1:10:24
  misattribution. Lived experience is a nice way of saying, let me bully you. You submit to what I say
• 1:10:33
  and you don't complain about it or else I'm going to pick on you. So I'm not saying lived experience
• 1:10:40
  doesn't have value. I've been talking about the fact that I experienced significant racism when
• 1:10:47
  I was in graduate school, for instance, and that was, it mattered. But by saying no one else has a
• 1:10:54
  right to talk about it unless they've had the exact same experience that I did, we're losing out
• 1:11:01
  on shared experience. For instance, when you have black people saying, oh, no white person can
• 1:11:10
  understand what I'm going through. If you get a group of women together, there are so many things
• 1:11:19
  that women often experience. We have more in common than we don't. And you lose that. If you
• 1:11:28
  automatically look at anyone who doesn't look exactly like you, sound exactly like you as you
• 1:11:35
  are. We're also being trained. I suppose it depends what you're talking about, doesn't it?
• 1:11:41
  Because obviously, if you're talking about what it feels like to be oppressed in a certain way,
• 1:11:47
  if you've never been oppressed in a certain way, then you can't, you don't have the standing to
• 1:11:50
  have a conversation about what that feels like. But if on the other hand, you're having a conversation
• 1:11:55
  about public policy, about is dependent on, for example, data about indigenous deaths in custody
• 1:12:02
  or something like that, then you surely can have a conversation about that data, even if you're not
• 1:12:07
  an indigenous person. But we seem to currently be confusing those two categories of conversations,
• 1:12:12
  such that you need the lived experience in order to have standing, even to have a conversation
• 1:12:17
  about facts on the ground. Is that, is there a way out of that Chinese finger puzzle?
• 1:12:23
  Yes. And with my healing the roof program, because what I did is in 2020, when I saw the Black
• 1:12:30
  Lives Matter protests really taking off and I knew, because as a social psychologist, I've
• 1:12:37
  studied flow on effects and I knew that this was taking us in a place where racial disunity was
• 1:12:44
  going to become significantly worse. So I developed a program called Healing the Rift and let's talk
• 1:12:50
  about the lived experience. Let's say that I'm dealing with someone and, you know, their
• 1:12:57
  grandmother was in the Holocaust. If that person and I get together and they do everything and we
• 1:13:06
  have a safe space together where I'm not considered a bad person because I didn't, my grandmother didn't
• 1:13:12
  go through the Holocaust and she's not looking at me at the enemy and I know that. Then you can actually
• 1:13:19
  have something where you find common threads, you find storytelling where you can walk that person
• 1:13:25
  through what you're talking about, allowing them to see the world a bit from the eyes of the person
• 1:13:31
  who has experienced whatever it is you're talking about and give them some level of understanding.
• 1:13:38
  But it only happens if they're not under attack, if they're not, if you're not making them defensive,
• 1:13:46
  if you're not criticizing them and calling them privilege, this whole world word privilege,
• 1:13:51
  is just, it makes my, I tell you, my dentist said, you know, you're grinding your teeth.
• 1:14:01
  I'm here about too much privilege, doc.
• 1:14:05
  Yes, what do you make of privilege as a notion? Why does it make you grind your teeth at night?
• 1:14:10
  Because it's normally, again, what the woke have done very cleverly in a very sinister way
• 1:14:17
  is alter the definitions of everything. So now racism is just being white.
• 1:14:25
  It used to mean conscious hatred of other groups because of their race.
• 1:14:32
  Now it just means walking about living your life if you don't happen to be black or brown.
• 1:14:39
  When you're talking about privilege, privilege used to mean somebody with a trust fund
• 1:14:44
  who would get bailed out of jail even when they committed a crime.
• 1:14:49
  Now it's saying, if I am a group, if I belong to a group whether I'm born into that group
• 1:14:57
  or whether it's a group that I have decided to join, then you are privileged if you're not in my group.
• 1:15:06
  And therefore you have nothing to say, you should step aside, you should let me do what I want
• 1:15:10
  because you're privileged. It's, and people get so defensive and I'm glad they get defensive
• 1:15:18
  because they should not accept this. I try to explain to people that what they're really
• 1:15:24
  describing isn't privilege. It's saying that the group people long to does not normally face
• 1:15:32
  negative discrimination because of that characteristic. So if you're talking about a privileged
• 1:15:37
  load in it. In a way it is, it's like when you walk through life, let's talk about an example
• 1:15:47
  growing up. When I grew up, if we went on a road trip, we would have to think about where we
• 1:15:55
  were driving through and how they treated black people because it may be possible we wouldn't be
• 1:16:03
  able to find a place to get food. We might not be able to find a place to sleep that would accept
• 1:16:09
  black people. If we broke out on the side of the road, we might not get any help.
• 1:16:15
  So in that way I can understand that not being exceptional, not being facing negative
• 1:16:22
  discrimination because of a characteristic does give you a bit of an edge. It's not a privilege,
• 1:16:30
  it's just a little bit of an edge, but it doesn't take into account anything else that is going
• 1:16:35
  in your life. I know white people that have not had much harder lives than I've had. Much harder.
• 1:16:44
  Isn't the point of articulating white privilege not to say that all white people have it better off
• 1:16:53
  than all black people, but that a white person doesn't have to worry about being discriminated against
• 1:16:59
  on the basis of their whiteness. And that is a certain privilege. I walk into a shop, I don't
• 1:17:04
  have to worry about whether or not the person behind the counter is racist. Maybe I do if they're
• 1:17:08
  from some particular ethnicity that has a chip on its shoulder about white people, but generally
• 1:17:13
  generally not. If you are the same, if you belong to the same group as the people in power,
• 1:17:20
  then as a general rule, you're not discriminated against because of that. It's like the way that men
• 1:17:30
  can walk through life in a way women can. I know that Jackson Katz, who wrote the macho paradox,
• 1:17:39
  does a seminar where he has its mixed sex seminar and he starts off by asking the men,
• 1:17:47
  all right guys, I'm going to write this down. What did you do today when you got up to keep
• 1:17:51
  yourself from being sexually assaulted? The guys laugh. A few of them say I didn't go to jail,
• 1:17:58
  but for the most part, they make a joke of it. Then he asks the women and they start the list.
• 1:18:05
  I wore this. I didn't wear that. I looked where I parked my car. I had my keys here. I told
• 1:18:09
  somewhere out one where I was going. Again, you're talking about the fact that when you don't belong
• 1:18:17
  to the group that has the most power, it does impact what you have to think about as you go through
• 1:18:26
  your day, as you decide what you're going to do for your living if you're going to planning your
• 1:18:32
  holiday, for instance. It does matter, but the approach that we have right now is so alienating
• 1:18:41
  and so divisive. It really isn't point to make things better. The backlash, and to send us back
• 1:18:50
  to the 1850s if we're not careful. Since you're speaking about gender and the benefits of being
• 1:18:56
  a man, certainly when it comes to sexual assault, do you think there is a gender split on this
• 1:19:04
  ideology? Is there a difference between the susceptibility of men and women to workness?
• 1:19:10
  Yes, I think women are far more likely to get caught up in it. Because from the time we're small,
• 1:19:18
  culturally women are rewarded for being likeable, for being accommodating,
• 1:19:25
  for putting other people's needs before our own. Males are not usually brought up that way.
• 1:19:32
  So you do have a lot of work men, but not nearly as many as you have work women.
• 1:19:39
  I've heard you before make the analogy of the Pusson Boots character in Shrek, which I think
• 1:19:45
  is charming. Do you want to tell us about that? What was I talking about?
• 1:19:51
  You were talking about how the Pusson Boots character in Shrek, when he wants to manipulate
• 1:19:56
  anybody, the lip starts quivering, the tears start flowing, and then out comes the sword and he
• 1:20:02
  starts you in the chest. And the analogy that you were drawing was that there's a certain sort of
• 1:20:08
  performative victimhood that takes place in some of these conversations in terms of the group dynamics
• 1:20:13
  that you're a specialist in with regards to social psychology, where hemming up the one zone
• 1:20:21
  offendedness becomes one of the tools in the armory of your group succeeding.
• 1:20:28
  Yes, it really is about right now. There's a competition to see you can be the most victimized.
• 1:20:35
  But walking through life as a perennial victim is, first of all, anybody that knows you,
• 1:20:40
  it's draining, but often like Pusson Boots, there's often a sword. A lot of the groups that are
• 1:20:49
  getting so much time and attention right now and getting so much accommodation because they know
• 1:20:55
  how to do the big eyes in the quivering lip and so many people have been conditioned to accommodate
• 1:21:02
  whoever is standing in front of you and crying. But should you look a little closer of what
• 1:21:10
  they're asking and how it's going to impact you and how it's going to impact your family and
• 1:21:15
  you look at what they're claiming to be the truth and seeing some real holes in the data
• 1:21:20
  and the sword comes out and you can get really damaged because the vindictiveness of the perennial
• 1:21:28
  victim is exceptionally hot. They are extremely vindictive.
• 1:21:34
  Are we training victimhood? Are we in power? Absolutely.
• 1:21:38
  Victimhood? Anything you give attention to, that's why I have one more video. I have my
• 1:21:45
  videos. I promised people I would do a video. My first video was called Why You're Not a racist
• 1:21:51
  because I didn't want white people to think it's fair for somebody to switch the definitions
• 1:21:57
  on you and then all of a sudden just for being white you're racist. The second one is called
• 1:22:02
  bias isn't bigotry. All of us have bias. It does not, a bigotry is a deep-rooted and heavily
• 1:22:10
  clung to hatred. So I want people to understand that too and I'm going to do something called
• 1:22:15
  being black, the shadow of racism. I want to show white people how the systemic racism that was
• 1:22:23
  there for so long how its shadow is still cast into the lives of the average black person
• 1:22:30
  and it can't just be dismissed by saying we're not like that anymore. We need to have a concerted
• 1:22:36
  effort to do something about it but after that I'm going into influence. I'm going to show people
• 1:22:42
  the tactics being used to condition us in the worst possible way to give in to whoever claims
• 1:22:50
  to be a victim to preach self-hatred. It's like a race to the bottom. I can hate myself more than
• 1:23:00
  anyone else. Anyone who's demanding that you pay a price for historic crimes is trying to
• 1:23:08
  manipulate you and one thing I really want to do I want to make good people manipulation proof.
• 1:23:15
  Why shouldn't you pay a price for historic crimes? Germany pays Jews for the Holocaust.
• 1:23:25
  The structures of white people are still benefiting from the unpaid labor of the ancestors of people
• 1:23:31
  who are alive today. Because it will never end. There has to be a point where you're like,
• 1:23:40
  okay you can actually establish a system that tries to correct for past mistakes without
• 1:23:51
  making the people now feel guilty for that for what happened. If you didn't do it you shouldn't pay
• 1:23:57
  for it. Otherwise it's like the whole philosophy about an eye for an eye and then everybody ends up
• 1:24:06
  lying. It all it does is build resentment. It does not correct the past ills and it teaches victimhood
• 1:24:15
  it sent teaches entitlement it teaches manipulation it's too expensive to correct it that way.
• 1:24:25
  We sometimes hear a term intergenerational trauma being used as a justification for paying
• 1:24:32
  what do you call it the movement to pay for reparations? You sometimes hear intergenerational trauma
• 1:24:41
  as a term that's being used for reparations and so on. Does it make sense to you that trauma can
• 1:24:47
  be inherited intergenerational? Absolutely and it's funny because I do work in a lot of different
• 1:24:53
  communities. I do work in the Jewish community and I've met two women who are doing research on
• 1:24:59
  findings that the anxiety levels, stress levels, depression levels of Jewish people who had
• 1:25:07
  grandparents who survived the Holocaust are significantly higher than among Jewish people whose
• 1:25:13
  grandparents didn't go through that experience. So they're also finding that extreme trauma can
• 1:25:22
  actually mark your DNA. So there is something to it but here I'm going to people I hope you don't
• 1:25:31
  have any black Americans watching this because they're going to get through that. When you look at
• 1:25:36
  the reparations the demand for monetary reparations I think is a wrong approach. If you want to do
• 1:25:44
  reparations for the black community then we should do things like communities build community centers
• 1:25:51
  and teach financial literacy. Have sociologists go through and look at the cultural factors that are
• 1:25:59
  holding black people back and look at the history of those and talk about correcting them. That's the
• 1:26:07
  kind of reparations that will actually have an impact. Show young black kids how to save and invest
• 1:26:13
  their money. Just handing people who've never had money money. All it's going to do is attract a lot of
• 1:26:22
  predatory business people who will get them get that money off of them as quickly as one, two, three.
• 1:26:28
  And it was somehow get the feeling that those proposals are going to go down like a led balloon.
• 1:26:35
  They should do. But I'm looking at what would really help. I'm looking at all the talk about
• 1:26:42
  the black lives matter protests talking about we have to get rid of the police. You know they really
• 1:26:47
  have a grudge against the police. The police is the least of our problems in the black community.
• 1:26:54
  Kids with no followers is a huge problem. Black as self-esteem is a huge problem. Not understanding
• 1:27:01
  our history is a huge problem. One mother taught us black history before we went to kindergarten.
• 1:27:07
  She taught us you correct ignorance with knowledge. So when the little white kids in our new
• 1:27:14
  night white neighborhood said black people had never done anything. We were like the first man to
• 1:27:20
  die in the revolutionary war was Chris said and he was a black man. So that's his kids.
• 1:27:27
  Not in the presentation of yourself at the age of eight. You can see me there. I was like in the
• 1:27:31
  front. We were in the front of the class. We were the little black smarter. You know Charles,
• 1:27:35
  doing the first landing to perform open heart surgery. We were like she's fighting ignorance
• 1:27:40
  with knowledge and she gave us that knowledge. So we walked into the sense of pride and it made
• 1:27:46
  all the difference. I come from a poor black family. Five kids. My dad was enlisted military no money.
• 1:27:55
  Four out of the five have university degrees. Three out of the five have graduate degrees.
• 1:28:00
  That is well above the average. And it's because of the mindset my mother taught us.
• 1:28:11
  There's a narrative going around about white fragility. There's a book called white fragility
• 1:28:16
  which is mandatory reading now in the United States especially for the work. And the thesis
• 1:28:23
  broadly is that when you try to talk to white people about racism they become defensive and
• 1:28:29
  they're very fragile in acknowledging their own complicity in racist structures.
• 1:28:35
  This makes it very difficult to ever dispute the claims of anyone who accuses you of being racist
• 1:28:42
  because you're just you're disputing of the claim is itself more evidence of their thesis which
• 1:28:47
  is that you're fragile. So it's a kind of ingenious non falsifiable theory. I wonder if you
• 1:28:53
  thought about about how that is functioning between groups. Yes. And that would be white tears.
• 1:28:59
  You're talking about white tears. Yep. And I've actually heard somebody a black young black woman
• 1:29:04
  talk about someone in a totally different context because she's woke. And this this incident had
• 1:29:11
  nothing to do with race whatsoever. But when the woman got upset, oh it was white tears and I'm like,
• 1:29:16
  oh my god. You know if they say it's a bad craftsman who blames his tools. If you're teaching
• 1:29:24
  whites about racism and they're getting angry and defensive then you're teaching it wrong.
• 1:29:30
  It's not because whites are fragile. It's because the people teaching this are hostile
• 1:29:37
  and they're teaching self-hatred and the only reason to teach someone self-hatred is so you can
• 1:29:43
  take advantage of them. So maybe the whites are so eager and in their own self certainty about
• 1:29:49
  their own goodness that they can't bear to hear the truths about the system that they're part of.
• 1:29:54
  Well it's our it's our role as educators to break through that. I haven't had that problem.
• 1:30:01
  And as you've noticed I'm not the kind of conciliatory, oh everything you do is okay kind of
• 1:30:09
  woman. I mean I'm quite blunt. But I also advocate for whites please stand up for yourself.
• 1:30:17
  These people are trying to absolutely destroy everything that is good about our society.
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  And I just whenever I see those abusive tactics being used it makes the hairs on the back of my
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  neck stand up and I'm like nothing good can come from this. So again if if the people in your
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  audience are getting defensive that means for me as an educator I need to find a way through and
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  that's what I do with my healing in the lift. I don't find people getting anything.
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  You called it a totalitarian religion earlier in this conversation and certainly it has
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  aspects that religions do. It has its own taboos. It has you know the end I've heard John
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  reporter talk about the end word as being almost like you might find a culture that has a long
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  dead ancestor that they can't name who is now a god or something. It's like it's almost gotten to
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  that level of you know that he who shall not be named it's well it's the bottom of words
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  regardless of whether or not you're using it in a particular context even if you're saying
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  you should never ever say the end word you still can't say the actual word otherwise for some
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  reason you you summon the you know the demons and the volcanoes exploded and we'll we'll
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  go to hell. I wonder yeah I wonder if you can just tease out your thinking about the parallels
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  between workness and faith. Well because you're taking first of all when you have a faith by definition
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  not every aspect of it can be proven. So when I there are aspects of what culture that are being
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  being really supported in society I look at every study I can find and I turn immediately to
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  the methodology page and I am amazed but no longer surprised that if I had presented methodology
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  that shotty I would never have graduated. So you have the jargon you know even you were describing
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  that young woman who was really castigating a police officer and using all of the ideology all
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  the ideological terms all the jargon with regard to why he could be a racist as a black man
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  when she's never walked a mile in his shoes at all. When you have that you have the jargon
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  you have the absolute beliefs you have the trained thinking where you look away from anything in
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  your own tribe in your own belief set that's in congruent. You don't focus on it. You get really
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  angry at anyone else who questions in the aspect of what you believe. You don't look at the real
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  flow on effect of your beliefs. The people who are at the top of your religion are allowed to behave
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  in a way that is morally in conflict with what you claim to believe. If you're one of the top people
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  you can literally do anything and get away with it. Now how does that not echo what we see
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  in very powerful religions and everyone who wants to get the approval of that group has to
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  kiss the ring and whether they really believe in it or not they have to make a promise to not
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  say anything that goes against any of the accepted narrative. If you look at Joe Biden's history
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  of what he believes and who he is as a person what he's supporting and what he signed in the law
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  with those what do they call them executive orders first got into all first day in office he signed
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  a bunch of executive orders and one point said I don't even know what I'm signing said keeps on it
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  he doesn't believe a lot of what he's supporting you but that's the deal you have to make with
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  this group because if they get angry then they burn down your cities and of course punishing
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  dissenters is part of any good religion or any faith you know calling out blasphemers essentially
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  we see this of course in in social justice movements but what's been striking recently is that
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  people who ought to be in a position of authority to be able to to stamp out that kind of misbehavior
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  just aren't and I'm just talking about people in companies who might be the head of a company
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  people even in academic institutions and universities will feel too cowed to be able to
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  stand up to the students who have a certain ideology and who are who are calling out
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  blasphemers for not being part of their their clique are institutions to blame them I see
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  what we have is we have a culture that is we've gone too long without training our people in
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  what it takes to have personal courage you know we've tried so hard to be accommodating to everyone
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  that we are not clear of what our own values are and are not willing to defend them
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  when we see things that are so in conflict with each other one of the things that I thought
• 1:35:54
  was really astounding about the world is that so many of their beliefs are in complete conflict
• 1:36:00
  with each other but nobody that's part of their group is allowed to comment on it like what Tina
• 1:36:06
  like being pro supposedly pro women and supposedly pro gay rights and also pro Islam
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  and I'm looking at this and going hmm one of these things is not like the other so I'm looking at
• 1:36:27
  this and saying does anybody else notice that this doesn't make sense right Saudi Arabia and Islam
• 1:36:34
  and ISIS are well known for their feminism and gay rights and and having people that are
• 1:36:41
  leading the women's march in the United States who want to institute Sharia law in the United
• 1:36:48
  States but now they want to come down on Texas for changing their abortion laws and by the way
• 1:36:55
  the states have rights with regard to abortion laws and those abortion law changes
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  start of happening under Obama so we cannot hold any president even by who we cannot hold any
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  to blame for that that's not how it works but their values just don't mesh together
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  and no one that's part of that religion is allowed to really comment on it or else you're
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  vilified you could even be thrown out of the group the endgame seems to now be something that's
• 1:37:30
  called equity the endgame in the era of Martin Luther King junior was equality was judge people
• 1:37:36
  on the content of their character not the color of their skin that has now changed to a conception
• 1:37:41
  of justice that is much more proactive and much more about ensuring that the outcomes for everybody
• 1:37:47
  by group are the same I think this is probably a good place to end it so take it wherever you will
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  but where do you see that going well that that kind of a thinking is completely contradictory to
• 1:38:02
  Western society it is a socialist ideology that even in the socialist countries has never been
• 1:38:10
  borne out by how they how they live their lives those who are at the top of the hierarchy live
• 1:38:16
  completely differently there's no equity they live in gated communities they have multiple homes
• 1:38:22
  and access to things and we're seeing that also while they're talking about equity all of the people
• 1:38:28
  at the top of the black lives matter organization are buying multi-million dollar homes in all white
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  neighborhoods so the the issue about equity never works because all it does is hold back people
• 1:38:44
  who could bring a lot of value to their own lives into the lives of everyone else
• 1:38:50
  so I just hope I want to see courage courage speaks to courage I'm going to be brave enough I want to tell
• 1:38:58
  I would you'd be stunned how much money I've lost in contracts because I won't be quiet and just
• 1:39:05
  be a good black girl that just echoes you know the woke thought if I were woke I'd make so much more
• 1:39:11
  money right now um but we need courage we need people to stop and say this is not going to take
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  our society anywhere we want to go we don't want equity we want to quality we want
• 1:39:25
  better opportunity but we're not going to hold other people back because this person doesn't want
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  to work hard or succeed Dana thank you for your courage and thank you for your clarity and thank
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  you for speaking with us thanks for watching oh nice talking to you too thank you
• 1:39:47
  uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Posthuma follow me Josh Leps on Twitter and
• 1:39:53
  Instagram for all the latest may your day be fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous
• 1:39:59
  and your conversations perfectly sparklingly delectably uncomfortable