Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Off The Rails?" with James Lindsay

Transcript

"Off The Rails?" with James Lindsay · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  A quick programming note because this is hot after presses for today's conversation.
• 0:07
  James Lindsay, with whom I'm about to speak, was just reinstated onto Twitter by Elon Musk.
• 0:14
  We discussed his Twitter ban back on the 8th, sorry, the 5th of August 2022, he was banned
• 0:20
  from Twitter.
• 0:21
  That was pretty the Musk takeover.
• 0:23
  He'd been talking about groomers, that whole controversy in the United States about
• 0:28
  whether or not teaching young children about drag queens and transgender people and different
• 0:35
  sexual orientations is a way of trying to groom them into that lifestyle.
• 0:40
  He had created the meme hashtag okay groomer and as a result of that, Twitter booted him
• 0:47
  off the platform.
• 0:48
  He had been silent for some months and then literally today as I record this on the 22nd
• 0:54
  of November in Australia.
• 0:57
  His first tweet back courtesy of Elon Musk five hours ago, hello darkness my old friend
• 1:04
  and he follows up with a photo of him at Karl Marx's tomb and he's pissing on Karl
• 1:10
  Marx.
• 1:11
  Enjoy.
• 1:12
  Get a humans, this is the safe space for dangerous ideas and oh James Lindsay has some
• 1:19
  dangerous ideas, maybe not just sort of metaphorically dangerous ideas, maybe actually dangerous
• 1:26
  ideas.
• 1:27
  That was a bit torn about going back to James Lindsay but here's the thing, I'll explain
• 1:33
  who he is in just a moment if you don't know him.
• 1:36
  He and I did an amazing interview all the way back in February of 2022.
• 1:42
  It was almost two hours long, we didn't know each other from a bar of soap, he certainly
• 1:46
  didn't know anything about me and was expecting me to be a wild-eyed, woke, lefty trying
• 1:52
  to bring him down a peg.
• 1:54
  He gradually realized I'm a reasonable person even though I disagree with him about much
• 2:00
  and it was a wonderful sort of experiment or insight into the way that two people like
• 2:05
  dogs sniffing each other's bums can gradually sort of come to let their guards down and find
• 2:11
  some common ground emotionally if not intellectually.
• 2:19
  And we lost that interview or rather the platform on which I record, my podcasts lost
• 2:26
  it.
• 2:27
  Thanks, Zenkaster.
• 2:30
  So I let time go by, I didn't want to try to recreate it and then recently I felt maybe
• 2:36
  it's time to come back to this well and I felt that way because James Lindsay was kicked
• 2:41
  off Twitter just before Elon Musk bought the platform.
• 2:46
  He was kicked off for apparently spreading some misinformation or hate speech about drag
• 2:52
  queens reading to children in drag queen story hour.
• 2:56
  This is something that has exercised James considerably.
• 3:00
  The question of whether or not we're grooming young people or perverting children by trying
• 3:06
  to recruit them into a trans or genderqueer or gay lifestyle, I don't think James is
• 3:13
  so concerned about gay but about the erosion of the idea of biological sex and that we're
• 3:19
  using drag queens to do so.
• 3:21
  So he was kicked off Twitter for that and most recently when Nancy Pelosi's husband, the
• 3:27
  husband of the speaker of the house, although perhaps not the speaker of the house by the
• 3:31
  time you hear this, depending on what happens in the midterm elections, I'm recording this
• 3:36
  on the day of the midterms, that the attacker of Nancy Pelosi's husband was in fact a James
• 3:46
  Lindsay fan, you'll hear me ask James about this.
• 3:49
  So who is James Lindsay?
• 3:52
  Well he's regarded as being one of the leading experts on critical race theory and what
• 3:58
  he calls race Marxism.
• 4:00
  He's a former Obama Democrat, a new atheist.
• 4:04
  And he has now sort of rebooted himself as, according to Salon, and I wouldn't give
• 4:09
  much much credence to Salon, but it gives you an impression of where the far left is
• 4:13
  looking at these things from.
• 4:15
  According to Salon, the brains behind the far right's moral panic, they say.
• 4:22
  James came to my attention because he published a hoax paper along with Peter Begotian, who
• 4:27
  I've also interviewed on this podcast back in 2017, which was an academic paper, which
• 4:33
  they pretended with serious, and it was called the conceptual penis as a social construct.
• 4:40
  And this was a mock satire of sort of post structuralist, discursive gender theory.
• 4:48
  And the paper argued that the penis should be seen not as an anatomical organ, but as
• 4:52
  a social construct, isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.
• 4:58
  And the paper, believe it or not, was accepted.
• 5:02
  By a legitimate mainstream social science journal, called Cogent Social Sciences.
• 5:11
  And thereafter, James Lindsay and Peter Begotian, along with the help of Helen Pluckrose,
• 5:16
  an English academic who was one of their partners in crime, wrote 20 hoax papers, which they submitted
• 5:22
  to peer-reviewed journals under pseudonyms, and got a lot of success, basically making
• 5:29
  the point that the whole field of social theory, critical theory at the moment, is mumbo
• 5:35
  jumbo.
• 5:36
  So they just make shit up, and even the people who are supposedly the high priests gatekeeping
• 5:40
  this fall for it.
• 5:43
  And at the time, James Lindsay was a Democrat, he became critical of woke culture.
• 5:52
  And in a trend that is not unsurprising, that we've seen replicated by other people
• 5:58
  who were part of the intellectual dark web or the heterodox line of thinking, James has
• 6:05
  become increasingly, increasingly extreme, I don't think he would mind my articulating
• 6:10
  it that way.
• 6:13
  Or perhaps rather than extreme, one could say divergent from the mainstream interpretation
• 6:18
  of things.
• 6:21
  Because he now essentially believes that there's a Marxist cultural takeover of civilisation.
• 6:30
  And his new book is called Cynical Theories.
• 6:33
  This is not that new, but it's a book out now.
• 6:35
  It's been translated into more than 15 languages, so it's been around a bit.
• 6:39
  But it's called Cynical Theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender
• 6:43
  and identity, and why this harms everybody.
• 6:47
  He has a new book coming out at the end of 2022 called The Marksification of Education.
• 6:56
  And I think it's safe to say that James is an incredibly intelligent guy.
• 7:00
  You'll get that from him, highly, highly intelligent.
• 7:05
  Whether that is an asset for him, or whether it's a downfall and creates enormous blind spots
• 7:10
  in common sense, you can figure out sometimes there are perils to being a genius.
• 7:18
  Sometimes it impedes your ability to follow the bigger plot.
• 7:23
  So this is a very weird conversation, perhaps a rambling conversation, perhaps a nameless conversation.
• 7:29
  I'm trying to pin him down.
• 7:31
  And look, I'll get pushback on this inevitably for platforming someone who is associated
• 7:38
  with far right extremism, according to his critics.
• 7:42
  But if you know me and you know this show, you'll know that I'm not just sitting here
• 7:47
  Lex Friedman style nodding and making, you know, pleasant sounds and putting out Anadine
• 7:53
  tweets about how the only way to really understand each other is to just come at everything
• 7:58
  with empathy and thereby allowing bigots to steamroll me the way that they steamroll
• 8:03
  Lex and other suck people.
• 8:05
  I am trying to push back.
• 8:06
  I am trying to articulate the most generous interpretation of his view and his opponents
• 8:11
  views.
• 8:13
  So I hope this sort of stands as a moment in time of James Lindsay's brain and the cultural
• 8:22
  right.
• 8:23
  And I hope it helps you understand the fears that they have and the worldview that they
• 8:31
  are living inside because it's kind of a terrifying place.
• 8:35
  It's terrifying if he's right and it's terrifying if he's not right that he and a large cohort
• 8:41
  of our compatriots believe what he does.
• 8:47
  I hope you find this stimulating.
• 8:48
  You want to know only James Lindsay.
• 8:52
  Are you back or are you pure blind at this, I'm pure blind, you're pure blind man.
• 9:08
  I only encountered that term yesterday when Sydney was and do you know Sydney, the Australian
• 9:13
  conservative, we've met, yeah, she was tweeting about how hard it was for it to come back
• 9:19
  to Australia and I was like, what kind of bullshit is that Australia has been completely
• 9:23
  and absolutely 100% free from like COVID restrictions for a long time now, she was like
• 9:30
  as a pure blood.
• 9:31
  I mean, there aren't even any restrictions against coming in if you're not vaccinated,
• 9:35
  but I guess maybe she, there was an airline thing or something, maybe some of the airlines
• 9:39
  still wanted to show vaccination status.
• 9:42
  Yeah, I haven't, I haven't ventured to try to go to Australia.
• 9:46
  I'm about to take my first international trip in a couple of weeks.
• 9:50
  Your first and since the pandemic?
• 9:52
  Yeah, I mean, not my first ever.
• 9:53
  I've been to Australia actually in the past and I've been all over, but yeah, London.
• 10:01
  Nice.
• 10:03
  Yeah, I was traveling quite a lot during the peak of Omicron.
• 10:07
  I was in New York and Europe in December when Omicron was going off and it was not fun.
• 10:13
  Like every country would just keep imposing these weird restrictions as I was bouncing
• 10:18
  around Europe.
• 10:19
  I'd just have to like, oh, okay, I guess I won't be going to Switzerland then because
• 10:23
  you know, if I don't pass the COVID, the mandatory COVID test that is required like 24 hours
• 10:29
  beforehand, then I have to be quarantined for a week or even if I do pass, then I have
• 10:34
  to check in and like there was just such arcade rules just coming and going and coming
• 10:38
  going.
• 10:39
  Yeah, definitely.
• 10:40
  But it was nice.
• 10:41
  And I got COVID in June and got quarantined in Iceland.
• 10:44
  Oh, shit.
• 10:45
  Yeah.
• 10:46
  So you ended up, which by the way, Iceland is very expensive.
• 10:49
  You ended up having to stay there like three weeks longer than he intended to because of
• 10:52
  that.
• 10:53
  Oh, man.
• 10:56
  So since we spoke, when did we talk, that must have been at the beginning of the year.
• 11:03
  In fact, that would be an interesting thing to establish.
• 11:05
  I actually saw it.
• 11:07
  I tried to open a file.
• 11:08
  I was looking for a file the other day and I actually saw where I had dug through and
• 11:13
  tried to find, you know, when we tried to do the, yes, you're a good man for covering
• 11:18
  it.
• 11:19
  February.
• 11:20
  Yeah.
• 11:21
  Was it in February?
• 11:22
  Yeah.
• 11:23
  Nine months ago.
• 11:24
  Okay.
• 11:25
  Yeah.
• 11:26
  I'd actually seen it.
• 11:27
  It was, you know, I was trying to find an older file that I had opened in for some reason.
• 11:29
  It's in, you know, I was in my list of all files.
• 11:32
  So I'm going to try to open it in the word process where it's like there it is.
• 11:36
  So in the nine month since, so the general consensus about James Lindsay amongst people who
• 11:41
  I know is that is very smart guy started out with reasonable critiques and has gradually
• 11:48
  creamed off the rails into La La land.
• 11:50
  I was going to hear about myself in the nine months since we spoke because anything much
• 11:55
  changed.
• 11:56
  I'm probably further into La La land.
• 11:59
  I don't know.
• 12:00
  I'm not on Twitter.
• 12:01
  Yeah.
• 12:02
  So what are people who are saying that Twitter was what was making me insane can be definitively
• 12:06
  proved wrong.
• 12:07
  But you can probably still because you're more insane than previously and you can still
• 12:11
  not be on Twitter in three months.
• 12:13
  Do you not surf at even what from a logged out status in the last week for two reasons.
• 12:22
  But otherwise, no, I don't look at it at all.
• 12:24
  I actually, I didn't remove the app from my phone, but it took it off of my, my, you
• 12:29
  know, screen or whatever, my home screen.
• 12:32
  So I don't think about the app very often.
• 12:34
  I have since this attack on Pelosi's husband, I guess who's also named Pelosi.
• 12:42
  And the reason is because I'm somehow in that story.
• 12:44
  And I was just saying that.
• 12:46
  Yeah.
• 12:47
  Yeah.
• 12:48
  Yeah.
• 12:49
  I don't know how I'm in that story.
• 12:50
  All I know, this is probably why I'm sick because I went to Boston over the weekend for
• 12:54
  an event.
• 12:55
  And I had an event in Charleston, South Carolina just before that.
• 12:58
  So I was traveling quite a bit and obviously that involves sleeping less than one wants
• 13:02
  usually.
• 13:03
  And so I was a bit behind on my sleep.
• 13:05
  And that's usually when you get sick because when you get behind on your sleep, and you're
• 13:07
  around a lot of people.
• 13:09
  And so I came back to my hotel room that night in Boston Friday night or whatever that
• 13:14
  was that that I'll broke out here Friday, I guess Saturday there.
• 13:18
  But whenever it was, I came back to my hotel room, it was like 930, we like all were just
• 13:23
  beat after the day of the conference.
• 13:26
  So we like went and got a drink or two as like a group and then went back to my room.
• 13:31
  We all called it early.
• 13:33
  So it was like 930 and I'm like walking dead and I walk into my room and I'm like finally
• 13:36
  I'm going to get some sleep tonight because I have to get up like six for the thing the
• 13:40
  next day for 630 or something early.
• 13:43
  And I was like finally getting some sleep.
• 13:45
  My freaking messages are just filled with, did you know you're in the Pelosi Attackers website,
• 13:52
  it's a set up bubble bomb.
• 13:53
  And I'm like, I don't even know about the Pelosi thing.
• 13:56
  I'm so far behind.
• 13:57
  So I'm so far behind.
• 13:58
  I ended up staying up till after 2am to 30 almost to get up like I said just after six.
• 14:03
  I think I had my alarm for 615 and I changed it to like 620 or something to try to squeeze
• 14:08
  that last little bit of juice out.
• 14:11
  And so I woke up in the morning, obviously just devastated with exhaustion.
• 14:15
  And then here we are, got a cold.
• 14:19
  It always happens, it always happens, I'll tell you what happens.
• 14:23
  I'm telling you man, I've had a million different, like I've had like six or seven colds
• 14:28
  this year because I travel so much I think.
• 14:30
  But it's, it's the, if you had, I'm not a doctor, I'm not this Huberman guy that everybody's
• 14:37
  falling in love with since he went on Joe Rogan and told everybody how to get more testosterone
• 14:41
  by dipping the balls in cold water or whatever.
• 14:43
  That's a Huberman lab.
• 14:45
  Yeah, I'm not this guy.
• 14:48
  But if I had to narrow it down to one variable other than direct contact with the, with
• 14:54
  the infirm for how you're going to get sick, it's that you're using enough sleep.
• 14:58
  Yeah.
• 14:59
  Right.
• 15:00
  I think that's right because I hadn't been getting much sleep either.
• 15:02
  And now bam, I'm hit by this non-covid ailment.
• 15:07
  Yeah.
• 15:08
  That's what happens.
• 15:10
  And also even wait.
• 15:11
  I mean, I don't want this to become the Huberman lab hour with James and Josh.
• 15:15
  But I think it affects your weight as well.
• 15:18
  Like when you're trying to, oh yeah, you can't sleep, you get, you just get chubby.
• 15:23
  Yeah.
• 15:24
  I know that from doing breakfast radio and getting four hours sleep a night.
• 15:28
  I don't, you know, when you have to get up at four in the morning to go on the air.
• 15:31
  I'll tell you what happens when you Google James Lindsay now.
• 15:37
  So I just thought, oh, you know, well, I should have a look.
• 15:39
  It don't worry.
• 15:40
  It's not as bad as you would have thought.
• 15:41
  But so the first one, this is very damning article.
• 15:45
  This is in the Oxford Mail from Oxford, England.
• 15:48
  Long, actually technically where I'm going, by the way.
• 15:52
  Not just the one.
• 15:53
  Careful, then, because this says Laurie driver in court over Oxford Parkway bike crash that
• 16:00
  killed L Lentam.
• 16:02
  A Laurie driver has appeared in court accused of running down cyclist Ellen Marlena and
• 16:07
  also known as Lentam in a fatal crash.
• 16:10
  Prosecutors say James Lindsay 46 was behind the wheel of a Mercedes HGV on Oxford Road
• 16:17
  Kiddling turn on February 8th when he struck the 44 year old near the turning to Oxford
• 16:23
  Parkway Railway Station.
• 16:25
  Now was that you?
• 16:27
  Does it look like it was me?
• 16:29
  No, the picture looks different.
• 16:31
  Yeah.
• 16:32
  Well, no.
• 16:33
  Okay.
• 16:34
  I definitely was not involved in that.
• 16:36
  Okay.
• 16:37
  I was, I was definitely not in Oxford, then.
• 16:40
  I haven't left the country since, since the COVID started.
• 16:44
  Okay.
• 16:46
  So unless it's like a time traveled, right, or that could just be the Oxford Mail making
• 16:51
  a small mistake.
• 16:52
  A mistake.
• 16:53
  It's hard to know.
• 16:54
  Nonetheless, so let's put that one aside, just be careful when you're in Oxford that
• 16:58
  there isn't a case of mistaken identity and you don't go to the jailhouse for running
• 17:03
  down the cyclist.
• 17:05
  And then the second thing that comes up is at long last, Survivor 43 has arrived.
• 17:13
  Every week, Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the cast away most recently voted off
• 17:17
  the island.
• 17:18
  Quote, I'm not scared of the game of Survivor.
• 17:22
  I'm scared of never getting the opportunity to play Lindsey Carmine said.
• 17:29
  And to make an iron clad majority, Lindsey brought over fellow Pennsylvania resident James
• 17:34
  Jones.
• 17:36
  So the Google has seen Lindsey Carmine and James Jones and gone, James Lindsey.
• 17:43
  That's what Josh must be searching for.
• 17:45
  That's also clearly me.
• 17:47
  Have you ever been on Survivor the show?
• 17:50
  No.
• 17:51
  I just am surviving.
• 17:53
  Yes.
• 17:54
  Some would say this is the model for the show, but I have never been on the show.
• 18:00
  And then after you get through those two, then you get to these things about how the individual
• 18:08
  who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband, as you say, also a Pelosi, had a blog who reads
• 18:17
  like a jumble of ideas popular on the broader right wing internet in 2022.
• 18:22
  The blog features posts, this is from the Daily Beast, claiming that teachers who discuss
• 18:26
  LGBT issues in classrooms are sexual predator groomers, depict posted links to videos made
• 18:33
  by right wing internet personality, James Lindsey, attacking drag queen events, another
• 18:38
  supposed groomers.
• 18:41
  And then SF gate says that the the bloke got into all this because of gamegate, a harassment
• 18:49
  campaign that targeted social justice and women in video games.
• 18:53
  Homephobic transphobic anti black anti Muslim anti-Semitic sentiments often accompanied
• 19:00
  by YouTube clips and a fascination with Canadian pundit Jordan Peterson, an anti woke mathematician
• 19:07
  James Lindsey, the latest post on the wicks site published a day before the attack was
• 19:13
  titled white colleges of the coming cults.
• 19:17
  So now that one is you.
• 19:20
  Okay, so this is that yes, it is referring to me, although he misspelled my name, so you
• 19:24
  can see I looked into this.
• 19:26
  Okay, so a few things about his website, first of all, to call it a jumble of ideas is
• 19:32
  I guess a apt description.
• 19:34
  A lot of people are talking about like all of the content on this site.
• 19:37
  I actually spent a, since I was introduced to this, the like immediately, in fact, before
• 19:44
  it was taken down, I was able to go to the site immediately.
• 19:48
  And see what was there regarding myself and an archive that had been made immediately
• 19:53
  as well.
• 19:54
  And so I was looking through it.
• 19:55
  I don't know if you've seen the site, it doesn't contain words, it has like titles of
• 20:01
  articles that are sometimes grammatically or syntactically okay.
• 20:07
  But there's no manifestos, there's no screams, there's no, there's no words.
• 20:12
  There's most of the posts have nothing in them.
• 20:14
  And so I go to my tab, I have a whole tab.
• 20:18
  So I go to the tab and what do I find on the attacker's website?
• 20:22
  Yeah, it's kind of shocked about this tab, I mean, it's a shock to anybody.
• 20:27
  So I go and I see just like 100, okay, it's a lot, no, there are, he's not that, whoever
• 20:36
  it is that put it there is not that obsessed with me.
• 20:39
  And there are a smattering, there are seven or eight things there.
• 20:42
  I didn't count, but it's in that, it's in that range.
• 20:46
  And they're kind of this random smattering of podcasts, like just the link to the podcast
• 20:51
  that I did.
• 20:52
  And then there's this one about the colleges that I didn't do, but somehow I got filed
• 20:57
  under me.
• 20:59
  It's not, I don't recall if it has a link to piece of my content, but I have no content
• 21:03
  by that title.
• 21:04
  So that's something he presumably derived from this smattering.
• 21:10
  Now the smattering of podcasts, several of them are kind of in the same direction.
• 21:14
  They are, for example, all of the ones where I call this the school's groomer schools.
• 21:20
  Those four are there, they're four.
• 21:23
  And then it's like this random, the first one I ever did, which was just an experiment,
• 21:26
  or I didn't know if I was going to podcast or not.
• 21:29
  So I just grabbed a microphone and read this article about interior design and bringing,
• 21:35
  I don't know, equity or something to interior, it's like 15 minutes, like nobody on earth
• 21:39
  has listened to this.
• 21:40
  I think our least listened to podcast ever.
• 21:43
  And somehow that one's on there.
• 21:45
  And that doesn't make any sense at all.
• 21:46
  So I don't know what's going on in my life, interior design.
• 21:49
  Well, maybe it's, I mean, I'm looking at the stories surrounding the guy and assuming
• 21:53
  that he does not, the interior design is probably not one of his four days, as they say.
• 22:00
  But you never know.
• 22:03
  What's this, so when you say that you, that since we last spoke nine months ago, you've
• 22:08
  gone further off the cliff.
• 22:11
  What does that look like?
• 22:12
  Oh, I mean, I'm totally not off the cliff at all, but that's what people assume.
• 22:16
  Although since, okay, so these kind of tie together, the thing that you just said, right?
• 22:21
  So you bring up the Google search and the first things that come up are clearly not anything
• 22:27
  to do with me.
• 22:28
  And I died, man, like I went on, I died, I read eulogies to myself, I kicked off a Twitter
• 22:36
  at the beginning of August and that renders me dead.
• 22:39
  So I've been much less interesting to people, but, you know, I'm just more and more convinced
• 22:44
  that the read that I have of the situation is broadly at least, if not quite specifically
• 22:50
  correct.
• 22:51
  And so I don't think that I've gone off the rails.
• 22:53
  In fact, I feel like it's become immensely clarifying and it simplifies quite a lot.
• 22:59
  But my friends will call them into tractors would certainly say that this is just proof
• 23:04
  that I've gone further off the rails, which is in my opinion hilarious, because the thing
• 23:08
  that they tell me I need to do is get off of Twitter and touch grass in order to come
• 23:12
  back to the rails.
• 23:14
  But as I tried to explain to people back then, I maybe even tried to explain to you, Twitter
• 23:19
  wasn't my problem and it never was my problem.
• 23:21
  I haven't been on Twitter.
• 23:22
  I don't use Twitter.
• 23:23
  I only have looked at Twitter because I didn't trend, but I came up in the last week.
• 23:29
  I haven't looked at it since August when I got kicked off.
• 23:33
  Twitter wasn't ever my problem.
• 23:34
  If you want to know what radicalizes me, if that's the term we're going to use, it's
• 23:38
  that I read their books.
• 23:40
  I read their academic literature and I follow their citations.
• 23:44
  So if I read, for example, if I read, uh, Paulo Ferrari, a Brazilian Marxist educator
• 23:52
  of enormous influence and colleges of education.
• 23:55
  So if I read his book, he cites people like Ivan Litch of the de-schooling movement.
• 24:00
  So I could read Ivan Litch.
• 24:01
  He cites Karl Marx on whatever about animals and that turns up to be in capital or sorry,
• 24:06
  yeah, capital and also in the economic philosophical manuscript.
• 24:11
  So I go read those.
• 24:12
  This is all that I do.
• 24:14
  I read their books, Klaus Schwab's a big player in the whole like world economic forum, creepy
• 24:21
  space suit wearing globalist thing, whatever that is.
• 24:25
  So I read Klaus Schwab's books and I say, wow, this is kind of some concerning themes that
• 24:30
  he brings up here and then I report on those and that, my friend, lands you squarely in
• 24:37
  off the rails and I understand because nobody else bothers to read their books.
• 24:42
  Well, I don't think the reading of the books lands you off the rails.
• 24:45
  I think the, uh, the interpretation that you get of the nexus between the books and
• 24:52
  the what is happening on the front line of the culture was in America today is what
• 24:58
  gets you off the rails.
• 24:59
  But before we go into that before, there will be some, the certain cohort of people who've
• 25:03
  never heard of James Lindsay at all or who are afraid of you running them over with a
• 25:07
  lorry in Oxford.
• 25:08
  Yeah.
• 25:09
  So I don't worry.
• 25:10
  I've never driven a lorry or maybe do.
• 25:12
  If I happen to get behind the wheel, well, exactly don't rent, uh, I mean, Oxford doesn't
• 25:17
  need anymore James lorry, James Lindsay's behind the wheel of a lorry.
• 25:22
  So don't think I was planning to walk to be honest.
• 25:24
  Yeah.
• 25:25
  Well, that sounds much better.
• 25:26
  It sounds much safer for the resident, for all residents of Oxford at this point.
• 25:30
  So people who don't know you, what is your, when you say you've been more vindicated in
• 25:35
  your broad worldview, what, what is your concern about what?
• 25:40
  I mean, you know, you're happening in the world.
• 25:44
  What is my, my broad concern in which domain?
• 25:49
  I mean, they're all related.
• 25:50
  So I think we could actually, maybe that's why people think I'm off the rails, but we
• 25:55
  could pick one, I guess, and use it as an entryway.
• 25:58
  I think that powerful elite people in the world, not just the respective countries, are
• 26:06
  making a desperate bid to establish mechanisms of control for a variety of reasons, some
• 26:13
  of which are defensive and some of which are offensive, and that they have clearly an
• 26:18
  agenda attached to that, and that of course lands you, you know, not quite at ground
• 26:23
  zero in the conspiracy theory camp, but, you know, not that far away.
• 26:27
  Yeah, okay, so to, to flesh that out on a ground level, I mean, I would correct me, tell
• 26:34
  me if you think this is a fair articulation of your worldview, that what appear to be
• 26:42
  the skirmishes of like woke sort of cancel culture, culture war issues are actually not
• 26:51
  motivated by a desire for justice on the left, and are not just kind of trivial, cutesy
• 26:58
  things that we can argue about on social media, but are in some sense the tip of the
• 27:04
  spear or the tip of the set, one of the tips of a set of spears of an attempt to, would
• 27:11
  destroy Western civilization be too harsh away of putting it to use.
• 27:15
  Well, that's not even close to bad enough, so yeah, that's, that's a proximal goal.
• 27:21
  What's the ultimate destroying Western civilization or supplanting it is certainly a fair
• 27:25
  characterization.
• 27:26
  Now, the only part of that characterization of my views that you just offered that I
• 27:30
  would quibble with is when you talked about the motivation of the left, which I want
• 27:36
  to insist I don't believe is monolithic.
• 27:39
  I do use the phrasing a lot because we're all lazy and we all say these things, we can
• 27:43
  say the left, this, the right, that, but these things are not monolithic entities.
• 27:48
  I think that the vast majority of people who push these kind of culture wars, social justice
• 27:53
  type issues on the ground, the vast majority of them are motivated by a desire to see something
• 27:59
  that they believe is justice, whether it's social or otherwise, that they are motivated
• 28:05
  by the things they claim to be motivated by, they care about the things they claim to
• 28:09
  be care, that they claim to care about.
• 28:11
  I think that that is overwhelmingly the majority of the people at the ground level.
• 28:17
  However, when we start getting off of the ground and we start getting further up into these
• 28:21
  bureaucratic apparatuses, I believe that we also tend to increase in how knowing and willful
• 28:29
  they are and how much of an agenda there is behind implementing these programs.
• 28:33
  And so far from saying that I'm off in like insanity land, I could see an accusation
• 28:40
  that I may be overfigging the pudding and I have repeatedly, repeatedly said and I genuinely
• 28:46
  mean that I hope I'm wrong in those regards.
• 28:50
  But there is some suggestive evidence that I'm not at least wholly wrong and I can give
• 28:54
  you a piece if you'd like that I just, yeah.
• 28:58
  So when I was in Charleston, South Carolina last week, I was sent a video from the South
• 29:06
  Carolina Freedom Caucus, which is on their YouTube channel so you can look that up at some
• 29:10
  point or anybody can.
• 29:13
  And they did a sort of project, very toss style sting where they ended up getting an education
• 29:19
  consultant who works with the state and who I don't know specifically who this person
• 29:23
  is or what her role is at this point, I'm not a, you know, ground level operative in Charleston
• 29:28
  or South Carolina, but this recording that they have, which spans seven or eight minutes
• 29:34
  or six minutes or something is, is utterly damning of what this woman's talking about.
• 29:37
  She says, for example, that, you know, these consultants to implement things like critical
• 29:42
  race theory in the school, they are careful not to use the words critical race theory because
• 29:46
  it doesn't sell well.
• 29:47
  She doesn't mention that it's actually illegal in the state of California, South Carolina
• 29:51
  to implement critical race theory in schools, but she says it doesn't sell well.
• 29:54
  It doesn't.
• 29:55
  So she suggests alternative wording and then she says in order to facilitate this, we get
• 30:00
  among the faculty and staff of the school, what she calls, this is her word co conspirators
• 30:05
  who are willing to help us implement this even if they get in trouble, which means they
• 30:08
  are, they are knowing actors and they know they are knowing actors to implement an agenda.
• 30:13
  And if that's happening, and now maybe that's just one school system, but I mean, if that's
• 30:18
  happening, it's impossible to conclude that nobody involved has an agenda that they're
• 30:26
  willing to break the law in order to, I mean, explicitly break the law in order to implement.
• 30:33
  So what do you think her perspective on what she's doing is?
• 30:36
  Well, there are at least two possibilities, and those two possibilities may mix into
• 30:43
  some unexamined or highly examined blend, but at least two, there may be more, there
• 30:48
  are two jump out to me.
• 30:50
  And the first of those is that she has an agenda, perhaps she's being paid, perhaps
• 30:56
  she's, you know, in a cabal, maybe whatever, a committee, this is one of the two.
• 31:02
  And their goal is to implement this, however they need to do as strategically as possible
• 31:08
  given the constraints.
• 31:10
  So in other words, there are people who have instructed her to do this and it's very important
• 31:15
  that she do this in following their instructions.
• 31:18
  In other words, the conspiracy that there is a conspiracy to implement this, that there
• 31:23
  is a hierarchical structure and instructing people to involve this.
• 31:28
  That's one possibility.
• 31:29
  And a second possibility is that she fundamentally believes that the thing that she's pushing
• 31:37
  is so right, so righteous, so important that it renders the law prohibiting it so unjust
• 31:45
  that she's entitled to engage in civil disobedience.
• 31:50
  In other words, to intentionally break the law in order to implement this, this thing
• 31:53
  that she believes is in line with justice, which I'm sure that on some level, you have
• 32:00
  some of that motivation mixed in with whatever else.
• 32:03
  I mean, if I were going to be involved in the conspiracy of that type, that's why I would
• 32:06
  have joined it or an activist organization or everyone to call it.
• 32:11
  I guess there is the banality of evil explanation, the ordinary man that's just doing my job,
• 32:15
  but she's in sound like she's just doing her job.
• 32:17
  She sounded like she was very motivated and strategic about what she was doing.
• 32:20
  So let me just clarify the facts on the ground here.
• 32:23
  This is a woman who works for a school who is confessing in private, she believes that
• 32:28
  she is getting co-conspirators to spread critical race theory inside the school.
• 32:35
  Those co-conspirators presumably being teachers and like parent activists or something.
• 32:41
  Yes, among other things, besides just critical race theories, you know, she mentions other
• 32:45
  of these kind of educational programs and paradigms as well.
• 32:49
  I mean, James, this is what baffles me about you.
• 32:52
  Surely the most parsimonious explanation, like the Occam's razor here, and I think this
• 32:58
  is the broad critique of you and your worldview, is that the world is super, super, super complex
• 33:05
  and lots of, like, lots of different anomalous things happen.
• 33:09
  And unless we're going to approach the world with the mindset of the conspiracy theorist,
• 33:13
  the way that they approach, say, 9-11 by saying, like, yes, but what about this anomaly?
• 33:17
  What about that anomaly?
• 33:18
  What about the people who heard bangs before the plane here?
• 33:22
  There's got to be some explanation for that.
• 33:24
  I think the rational person just rules out the outlier events and goes, okay, let's
• 33:29
  look at the trend and try to build some kind of a bell curve.
• 33:33
  There are going to be situations like this where I don't know this woman.
• 33:36
  I haven't seen this video.
• 33:38
  I can check it out.
• 33:39
  I suspect that if I asked her in her quietest moments about what she's doing, she would
• 33:48
  say something closer to the lines of, we've been living in a racist society for hundreds
• 33:54
  of years, a society that was founded on slavery, the consequences of which still haven't evaporated
• 34:00
  from American society, much as we might like to believe that they have.
• 34:04
  The disparities in wealth and educational outcomes between blacks and whites in America
• 34:10
  is still stark and needs a more fundamental addressing than the one that we're currently
• 34:15
  giving it.
• 34:16
  The kind of smaller, liberal solution of, well, let's just all treat everyone equally,
• 34:21
  has not worked adequately since the Civil Rights Movement, and therefore we need to go
• 34:24
  one step further and ensure that the next generation of children is profoundly aware of
• 34:32
  the importance of skin color, the enduring importance of skin color in the United States
• 34:36
  of America.
• 34:37
  Of course, we're going to get pushed back from near-to-wells and from right wingers and
• 34:41
  from trumpets and from proto-fascists about why we shouldn't be doing that and from white
• 34:45
  supremacists.
• 34:46
  In this white supremacist country that we live in, I'm going to have to, yeah, as you say,
• 34:52
  sort of fudge the edges and do it a little bit disobedient civilly because the system,
• 34:57
  the structures, the power structures of the system are never going to condone us getting
• 35:01
  real with each other about race in America.
• 35:04
  We're going to have to, to some extent, do it ourselves, just as we had to do it ourselves
• 35:07
  in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and activists throughout history have always
• 35:11
  tried to do that, so sometimes I do have to sort of bend the rules a little bit to ensure
• 35:16
  that the future is a more equitable future than the past was.
• 35:21
  I suspect that that's the most parsimonious explanation of what's happening.
• 35:24
  That's category two of the two that I got.
• 35:27
  Well, I mean, you were very on-genre as when you were saying like that she sort of believes
• 35:30
  that what she's pushing is has some of the way I look at her name is.
• 35:37
  Her name is Tureka Sullivan, her, she is a professional development specialist for
• 35:41
  what's called EL Education Incorporated.
• 35:45
  But so yeah, she, yeah, I think that this woman's an activist and she can be, be what
• 35:51
  you said as it may, that maybe is wholly her motivation.
• 35:55
  This woman is willfully and intentionally breaking the law and leading other people to
• 36:00
  knowingly break the law in order to teach things in schools that are against the law with
• 36:07
  other people's children because she believes she is above the law because she's on such
• 36:12
  a high and righteous position.
• 36:15
  This isn't working with the law, this isn't working to change the law, this isn't a civil
• 36:19
  right to move something I would condone and civil disobedience, you see, if, if something
• 36:24
  you take upon yourself, I decide that some injustices happening, I go have a sit-in or
• 36:29
  whatever it is, I refuse to pay my property tax or whatever I do and I should be ready
• 36:35
  willing and able to pay the legal consequence like Henry David Thoreau going to jail for
• 36:39
  this very famously in civil disobedience where he wrote down his story about it.
• 36:44
  It is not something where you decide to break the law with other people's children.
• 36:49
  Right.
• 36:50
  Right.
• 36:51
  Which is what this woman is doing.
• 36:53
  I mean, like I said, co-conspirators is a word that's difficult to like skip here.
• 37:00
  So I mean, I'm always loath to do to be the what about us and be like, well, sure she's
• 37:05
  doing bad things but there are right wingers all over America who are breaking the law in
• 37:09
  various ways that would probably escape our attention.
• 37:13
  I mean, that doesn't justify what she's doing.
• 37:16
  I just, we're talking about some vast, almost cosmic level conspiracy to destroy Western
• 37:23
  civilization and the first example that you've given me is of some woman somewhere in
• 37:27
  a video who is admitting that she's breaking the law to try to enact social justice in
• 37:33
  her school.
• 37:34
  Well, she's not just some woman.
• 37:35
  She's the professional development coordinator for a state level education program.
• 37:43
  And here's the exact quote, by the way, I mean, I could play it and see if it comes to
• 37:48
  the microphone.
• 37:49
  But it says in 2022, like you have some people who are really who are sorry, it just disappeared
• 37:54
  on me.
• 37:55
  I'm trying to get the the period or the play button off of it.
• 37:59
  Where did it go?
• 38:00
  Sorry.
• 38:02
  That was really crappy of me to do that to you because I tried to get the pause button
• 38:06
  to go off the video so I can read it.
• 38:09
  So yeah, in 2022, like you have some people who are willing to be allies and then you
• 38:17
  have some people who are willing to be co conspirators and ally is someone who says, yeah, that's
• 38:21
  right.
• 38:22
  I think that's something that this would benefit our students.
• 38:26
  That's the people you're talking about.
• 38:27
  It would benefit everyone.
• 38:29
  And we know if you need any help with that, right?
• 38:31
  That's an ally.
• 38:32
  A co conspirator is, I'm willing to do this work in my classroom, even if I get in trouble
• 38:40
  and have conversations, I don't know what she means by conversations there because it's
• 38:44
  literally against the law.
• 38:46
  And so it's more like you're going to lose your job and go to jail.
• 38:49
  What aspect of this is against the law, James?
• 38:52
  Now confused.
• 38:53
  South Carolina passed a statute prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in the
• 38:57
  state.
• 38:58
  So it is against the law in the state of California.
• 39:01
  Sorry, I don't know why my C's, it's probably because I've called it is definitely not against
• 39:06
  the law in the state of California.
• 39:07
  It is against the law in the state of South Carolina and however many other states in
• 39:10
  the United States to teach these things.
• 39:12
  They have passed an explicit statute on this issue.
• 39:16
  So she's explaining in this part of the video how to get around that statute.
• 39:22
  And I agree that she's probably motivated by the what you called parsimonious four minute
• 39:27
  explanation.
• 39:29
  But I don't think that that's adequate to living in a society where we have rule of law,
• 39:37
  which is she decides she has the right to circumvent because of a what amounts to literally
• 39:42
  a racial conspiracy theory that matches nothing that's happening in reality.
• 39:47
  This society that we live in bends over backwards and kisses its own balls from behind
• 39:52
  to incorporate minorities, racial sexual and so on into fucking everything.
• 39:57
  I mean, I'm serious, we could not bend over further backwards if we stuck around heads
• 40:02
  up our asses eight feet to accommodate and elevate and center exactly the thing she says
• 40:09
  we're doing nothing to elevate and center.
• 40:12
  So I just that explanation may be her motivation and her heart of hearts.
• 40:17
  But in practice, it doesn't wash and it's also literally an explicit violation of law.
• 40:22
  Now granted, this is just one example of something happening that suggests that it doesn't
• 40:27
  suggest it proves that there are people who are knowingly doing something that is against
• 40:32
  the law to implement change that since she works for a huge organization that pushes for
• 40:39
  this to happen all over that state is certainly at least organized to do so.
• 40:44
  It doesn't prove a global cabal and I didn't intend it to for that.
• 40:46
  We would have to read from like say Professor Kloss Schwab in his is a great narrative book
• 40:52
  or his a great reset book or his stakeholder capitalism book, you know, whichever other
• 40:57
  when I listen to if I listen to the audio book of Klaus Schwab's books, what I want there
• 41:02
  to be is the option to have James Lindsay reading it in a bad German accent.
• 41:07
  Oh my God.
• 41:08
  But that's not the best.
• 41:09
  Why don't you do that and release it as a parallel audio book with a list by Hans
• 41:13
  Gruber just putting like putting the top spin on the on the kind of sinister Germanic accent
• 41:20
  the whole way through.
• 41:21
  And it should just have an image of him in the space suit, which is what the space is.
• 41:26
  It's okay.
• 41:28
  This isn't totally fair, but I mean, holy shit, look at the thing.
• 41:32
  It's actually the graduation or like, you know, like academic regalia, they have like
• 41:37
  the robes and their funny hat from like 500 years ago.
• 41:40
  Some, I think it's in like Lithuania or something, there's some university that that's their
• 41:44
  academic regalia and alien space suit and alien space suit and they gave Professor Klaus
• 41:51
  a one of his PhDs or something like this or an honorary degree.
• 41:55
  I don't know which degree, but they gave him an honorary degree.
• 41:57
  So he has to wear the space suit when he does anything academically with them, right?
• 42:03
  Which if you're going to head an organization that looks super shadowy is one of those things
• 42:07
  that when you put the space suit on and there's pictures of you and videos of you in space
• 42:10
  suit.
• 42:11
  People are going to be like, what the hell?
• 42:12
  If people already think that you are someone who comes from another ideological planet in
• 42:16
  order to take over civilization, it's not good to have photos out there if you're wearing
• 42:20
  an alien space suit.
• 42:22
  Yeah, whoever it is, it's central casting that was like, let's get Dr. Evil and put them
• 42:26
  in a space suit.
• 42:27
  Yeah.
• 42:28
  It was really not on the ball for this choice.
• 42:32
  Let me just wrap up in a little bow the the the parsimonious explanation of that woman's
• 42:37
  events.
• 42:38
  I appreciate your comment about parsimon, but obviously I mean that the kind of Occam's
• 42:43
  razor.
• 42:44
  I'm talking about not the fact that it takes four minutes to explain to people who don't
• 42:48
  have an understanding of the social justice mindset, what the social justice mindset sounds
• 42:53
  like.
• 42:54
  But the whole over the whole landscape of culture there, you can go around the cherry
• 43:00
  picking items and forming like a, you know, the serial killer's wall that's pinning the
• 43:07
  string connecting the all of these dots to create a vast complex machine of conspiracy.
• 43:13
  Or you can chalk it up.
• 43:15
  That's what I mean by the parsimonious explanation, the kind of Occam's razor explanation of
• 43:18
  the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation that culture is complicated and
• 43:22
  some people will sometimes do slightly untoward things in order to try to achieve their vision
• 43:29
  of the good.
• 43:30
  And your criticism of her boils down, it seems to two things.
• 43:34
  One is that she's breaking the law.
• 43:36
  The second is that she's unjustified in her beliefs because America bends over so far
• 43:40
  it's kissing its own ass to pander to the kinds of things that she wants to achieve.
• 43:44
  I mean, on the on the point of doing something that's against the law, she lives in a state
• 43:49
  that has passed a law about what can be what can be taught.
• 43:54
  Now she clearly regards that that's an unjust law.
• 43:57
  I know people in Australia who like you are purebloods who broke the law in terms of
• 44:03
  lying about things during the pandemic because they regarded the vaccine restrictions as
• 44:09
  being an unjust law.
• 44:10
  They went into shopping centers they weren't allowed to go into, for example, by taking
• 44:14
  a snapshot of someone else's QR code on their phone to make it seem like they were
• 44:18
  vaccinated when they weren't at the peak of the pandemic before we were all vaxed.
• 44:23
  I think that I assume you would agree is a morally legitimate thing to do that sometimes
• 44:28
  if there are unjust laws that you're allowed to, you're allowed to bend them if you think
• 44:32
  that you're living under tyranny.
• 44:34
  I'm not saying that it's right for her to do what she did, but that's the simpler explanation
• 44:39
  than that she's getting orders from on high from somebody or that she's part of a part
• 44:43
  of a wave that is going to overrun the West.
• 44:47
  And as we're being unjustified, yeah, I mean, you can argue all day about how extremely
• 44:52
  woke American culture currently is and like how much more do they really want?
• 44:56
  But they would retort with, well, the Supreme Court is as conservative it's been in generations
• 45:02
  and you have a right wing party that they regard as being obsessed with populism and conspiracy
• 45:08
  theories about elections and so on and that the Republican Party of Reagan and the 1990s
• 45:14
  has disappeared and that that needs fighting back against.
• 45:19
  I'm not saying any of these things are right or wrong.
• 45:21
  I'm just saying that I see these kind of apocalyptic style of your worldview as being closer to your
• 45:30
  opponents on the far work who think that America is irredeemable and everything is like
• 45:34
  going to hell in a hand basket than it is to I suppose centrist like myself, but what's
• 45:39
  wrong with that?
• 45:40
  And you see the unfortunate aspect of conspiracy theories is if they're conspiracy facts,
• 45:46
  they still involve conspiracies.
• 45:48
  And therefore to relate what might be conspiracy facts by necessity appears that you're relating
• 45:56
  conspiracy theories until such time as said theories are proved as actual conspiracies
• 46:01
  in a court of law.
• 46:03
  But that court of law moment doesn't come until quite late in this story.
• 46:11
  And this woman isn't just some woman again, she's the coordinator for this organization
• 46:17
  that operates at the state level in the state of California that represents a larger educational
• 46:22
  program called EL, I forget what EL stands for, so let me just so I can get to into weeds
• 46:26
  of her James when when yeah, she's irrelevant, yeah, good.
• 46:31
  So what's happening when this probably unfolds to an extent that Josh Seps actually comes
• 46:36
  around and goes, holy fuck, James was right.
• 46:39
  What is that?
• 46:40
  Well, I hope you think I hope you understand that I'm rational enough that I'm going
• 46:43
  to judge things on the basis of the evidence as I see it as I see it.
• 46:48
  I mean, they will.
• 46:49
  I mean, the lady that just asked for COVID amnesty has unapologetically dated driven on her
• 46:53
  Twitter bio.
• 46:54
  So I'm a little hesitant there, but wait, the woman who's worked, who's asked for Twitter,
• 47:01
  what Emily Oster, who wrote the article that's for the Atlantic this week that said, can
• 47:07
  we have COVID amnesty saying all the things we said, all the terrible stuff we did, all
• 47:11
  the things that the evidence is now showing, we're probably really bad.
• 47:15
  Can we just have amnesty because we had, you know, high, high-minded intentions or whatever.
• 47:20
  And it turns out that her bio says unapologetically dated driven.
• 47:25
  And so I, I'm not real encouraged when people tell me that they follow the data anymore
• 47:30
  because I don't know where they're getting their data.
• 47:33
  Fair enough.
• 47:34
  You don't have to take me at my wood.
• 47:36
  Maybe I'm going to be an irredeemably woke until even as I've burned in the gas, in
• 47:40
  the gas chambers.
• 47:42
  What would this world look like for you to feel like, yes, now I'm finally, no, not for
• 47:50
  you to feel because you already feel like you've indicated, I feel like you have quite a
• 47:53
  lot of self certainty.
• 47:55
  For the average reasonable person to realize that James Lindsay was right, what does that
• 47:59
  look like?
• 48:00
  No, I mean, I hear this, you know, I mean, it's a, it's a hashtag.
• 48:03
  I hear this a lot that James Lindsay was right.
• 48:06
  I don't know what would convince any given person.
• 48:08
  I mean, I spend a lot of my time recording podcasts that I think I hope will reach people
• 48:14
  in that way.
• 48:15
  For example, reading, I just did a four part series, half of it has come out on my website,
• 48:20
  which is new discourses.com if anybody wants to go there, shameless plug or whatever.
• 48:25
  But it's, it's called, the series is called The Strange Death of the University.
• 48:30
  And it's a document.
• 48:31
  I'm just reading a document and of course adding color to the canvas in my unique style,
• 48:37
  which makes it well within not plagiarism or whatever.
• 48:40
  Hopefully a gem of the accent as well.
• 48:42
  Well, here and there, maybe, it depends on what I'm doing.
• 48:45
  But in this case, this document is from UNESCO.
• 48:48
  And I don't know which accent I have to adopt for UNESCO.
• 48:51
  I think UNESCO was actually largely created by an American by the name of Robert Mueller.
• 48:57
  He didn't head UNESCO.
• 48:58
  He was the assistant secretary general of the UN for a number of years.
• 49:03
  And I think he helped with the project that spun off UNESCO.
• 49:06
  UNESCO's United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, by the way.
• 49:10
  And so earlier this year, sometimes this summer, they published this 100 page, I guess,
• 49:14
  white paper has lots of colors on it.
• 49:16
  But saying that it's time for the higher education, it's about transforming the higher education
• 49:22
  institutions of the world.
• 49:23
  That's explicitly what the title is like transforming the higher education institutions.
• 49:27
  First sentence is transformation is the red thread that runs through all of the sustainable
• 49:31
  development goals that red thread things a little cute.
• 49:35
  Second thing in there talks about how it's time for us to revisit the Marxist, Herbert
• 49:39
  Marcusa in his book, One Dimensional Man, and keep that in mind as we go through the
• 49:42
  rest of the document.
• 49:43
  And then the rest of the document is that it's time to reorganize higher education institutions
• 49:48
  so that their mission statements, in fact, are rewritten to adopt and promote and achieve
• 49:54
  the sustainable development goals of United Nations agenda 2030, which is one of the things
• 49:59
  that sounds very conspiratorial, except that it's all over their website and they put out
• 50:03
  these papers about it.
• 50:04
  And they go on in this document to say that there's absolutely, you know, there's going
• 50:08
  to need to be sustainability officers put into different, you know, on all the universities.
• 50:13
  They're also going to have to issue doing any kind of research that supports unsustainable
• 50:17
  practices.
• 50:18
  They explicitly name that there should be no research done that could be used to support
• 50:21
  the fossil fuel industry.
• 50:24
  And they say that we need to rethink of knowledge.
• 50:26
  We need to abandon the old model and think in terms of what they call transdisciplinarity
• 50:31
  where now they explicitly say that that's where the arts, humanities and social scientists
• 50:36
  will work in committee with the natural scientists and the natural scientists will be required
• 50:41
  not to look down their noses at them, but to take their suggestions seriously.
• 50:45
  And then in the third chapter is explicitly about creating in room in the natural sciences
• 50:50
  for other ways of knowing, which are necessary to achieve the sustainable development goals.
• 50:55
  And we already see indications from UNESCO as well, but also other organizations that
• 51:01
  this veering of the purpose of education into the sustainable development goals of the United
• 51:07
  Nations agenda 2030, which sounds very conspiratorial, is kind of the direction they're bending
• 51:12
  these things.
• 51:13
  And so I put out pieces, I bring this up because I put out pieces of evidence like this,
• 51:17
  hoping that people such as yourself will say, holy shit, that's weird, why is that happening?
• 51:23
  And then start to do their own looking into it to try to find out, I don't actually expect
• 51:28
  people to take my interpretation, I expect them to go look into it themselves and then
• 51:32
  come back with hashtag James Lindsay was right.
• 51:35
  So UNESCO has been around since, I mean, when the UN was founded, so UNESCO has been around
• 51:41
  since 1945.
• 51:42
  Yeah, they're about, I think it's friends, I think, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure what
• 51:48
  Bob Mallow was doing in 1945 in Paris, but let's assume that he was involved somehow.
• 51:55
  Why is UNESCO important?
• 51:57
  I'm just looking at, I just googled the budget of UNESCO, they have an annual budget of about
• 52:01
  $750 million US dollars, including needed fund raising.
• 52:07
  Yeah, so that's the budget of a small, that's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of
• 52:12
  a small US department government department, $750 million to try to promote cultural and
• 52:20
  educational diversity.
• 52:21
  Well, I mean, do you think the United Nations is a sexuality education program that's
• 52:26
  being implemented in literally every Western country in the world was a UNESCO project
• 52:30
  as well.
• 52:31
  So UNESCO has an outsized influence in setting tone and policy in direction.
• 52:37
  But again, the thing that I put out this evidence is I'm trying to tell people like, hey, look,
• 52:42
  this is going on in very large organizations with the backing of the United Nations,
• 52:47
  in this case, we can read through white papers from the World Economic Forum, from the OECD,
• 52:54
  from USAID, I mean, you look at this kind of like pantheon of these, you know, large institutional
• 53:01
  organizations at the top of the pile, and you find extraordinarily consistent messaging
• 53:06
  that is extraordinarily consistent in becoming policy.
• 53:11
  So here's a moment where we could set up a stage for Josh Seps to come back and say, holy
• 53:16
  shit, James Lindsay was right.
• 53:18
  Great.
• 53:19
  If it's a major push in education, say a year from now, that we're going to really work
• 53:26
  on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations through education, then perhaps
• 53:30
  it would be a good time to say James Lindsay was right.
• 53:32
  Well, no, because I already agree with that.
• 53:34
  And I don't think.
• 53:35
  And I already write about that part.
• 53:38
  Well, no, you're not right about that there being a globalist conspiracy, which is filtering
• 53:42
  down from the United Nations into my local New South Wales, I mean, the world is full of
• 53:51
  lots of different influences, right?
• 53:52
  So I'm not claiming that the New South Wales Board of Education or the Board of Education
• 53:57
  anywhere, what we call a department here, but whatever, that they are insulated from the
• 54:01
  existence of advice that emerges from global organizations and from, you know, their peers
• 54:08
  who are experts all over the world in institutions, people who are devoting their lives to thinking
• 54:13
  about what education should look like in the 21st century in order to combat the biggest
• 54:18
  challenges that we face as they see them being things like climate change and global equality
• 54:23
  and justice and fighting poverty and things like that.
• 54:27
  From that perspective, you're going to have certain recommendations about how to tweak
• 54:33
  education so that it's not so burdened by big sort of biases that it had had in the, you
• 54:40
  know, 19th or 20th centuries, which may be biases towards who knows, a traditional patriarchal
• 54:49
  kind of capitalist white male interpretation of the world.
• 54:52
  And this pushback against that vision of the world, that old vision of the world is might
• 54:58
  be something that you James Lindsay see as a big conspiracy to try to derail civilization,
• 55:03
  but the people who are doing it might be expert educators from academic institutions and
• 55:09
  non-government organizations all over the world who sort of collaborate, I'm trying to think
• 55:12
  about what education in the future will look like and that they're sort of drinking the
• 55:17
  same cool aid to some extent.
• 55:19
  So I agree with you that the kinds of things that UNESCO is putting out about what education
• 55:24
  should look like are very likely to be running in parallel with and in some kind of a feedback
• 55:28
  loop with what bureaucrats and teachers and academics are thinking teaching should look
• 55:34
  like in the 2020s and 2030s.
• 55:37
  So I don't think that it would be chalk one up to the overall James Lindsay conspiracy
• 55:43
  theorists, the conspiracy theory.
• 55:44
  We see that's the problem with labeling something conspiracy theory is even if the conspiracy
• 55:49
  were approved as fact, you'd still say the theory's wrong.
• 55:51
  That's what they have.
• 55:52
  Yeah, I mean, it is a bad look.
• 55:54
  It's a bad term conspiracy theory because you're right there.
• 55:57
  It sort of demeans an explanation needlessly, excuse me, there's my COVID that's not COVID
• 56:04
  again.
• 56:05
  The question then becomes for you is what would it take for you to be convinced that I'm
• 56:09
  right?
• 56:10
  Well, I'm not sure what your thesis is still.
• 56:15
  The incentives that are causing these things to happen are coming from people who are
• 56:20
  setting those incentives up and that they have an intention.
• 56:23
  They have an agenda.
• 56:24
  They have a goal.
• 56:25
  They aren't doing this willy-nilly and they're not doing it merely because I don't even
• 56:28
  think they're doing it merely because this is what you've said is my thing and I nodded
• 56:32
  my head, which you can't see.
• 56:35
  They aren't doing it merely because they think it's the best thing in the kind of big picture
• 56:41
  of the good.
• 56:42
  They're doing it because they think it's the best thing for the system that they wish
• 56:45
  to put in place and be in charge of.
• 56:48
  Yeah, that's a good distinction of where your worldview and mind differ.
• 56:56
  I don't think Klaus Schwab is in it for the good of humanity, frankly, I don't think
• 57:00
  he is.
• 57:01
  Yeah, I will.
• 57:02
  I think Klaus Schwab is in it for the good of him and people like him, whom he's networked
• 57:08
  with for 50 years, who have screwed the pooch royally with the financial system of the
• 57:15
  world, defrauded 99.9% of the people and are desperate to make sure that that doesn't
• 57:19
  blow back on them.
• 57:21
  And if they can just happen to set up a new system using a digital kind of platform of
• 57:27
  society as the means and mechanism very much like has been rolled out in China over the
• 57:32
  past, say, decade and a half, then all the better.
• 57:37
  And I don't think that they're even shy about this.
• 57:39
  Players like Larry Fink say, markets love authoritarian behavior.
• 57:43
  We're not afraid of not just nudging but forcing behaviors.
• 57:47
  I don't think that this is at this point, even controversial to point out that these
• 57:52
  people very, very blatantly have an agenda that includes in literally their own words,
• 57:59
  forcing behaviors.
• 58:00
  I mean, I would love to talk to you about a left wing critique of these exact same cabals
• 58:05
  if that would make you feel more comfortable from a man in a family.
• 58:08
  Well, let me just give you one, I'm happy to get to that.
• 58:13
  I think it's, I think what you said is really useful in the articulation of their world
• 58:18
  view as being that something that even they don't see as being for the greater good,
• 58:23
  but that they see as, that they understand as being something that is for the good of
• 58:28
  them and their cohort.
• 58:29
  Which by the way, I will give them this piece of credit.
• 58:33
  They believe that is the greater good.
• 58:35
  In fact, that's what I was, that's what I was just about to say.
• 58:37
  I mean, you're really in my mind.
• 58:38
  I think we all, we all do a bang up job of articulating the interests, and this is an old
• 58:43
  Marxist principle.
• 58:44
  In fact, one of the things that Marx got right was to point out that every, each class
• 58:48
  and each group identifies its own interests as being universal.
• 58:52
  That we always try to pull us, we always can't help but pull us the kind of psychological
• 58:56
  trick on ourselves.
• 58:57
  That it's very convenient to note that the beliefs of the people who you go golfing
• 59:03
  with and who are at your country club just happen to align with what is best for everybody.
• 59:10
  And so I think that's, to some extent, a distinction without a difference and that we're
• 59:15
  all kind of playing that game.
• 59:17
  But on the question of whether or not that is likely to lead this cabal of people to impose
• 59:23
  authoritarianism on the rest of us, I'd love your thoughts about one vast counter example
• 59:29
  vast for me because I live in Australia, and this is so the authoritarian imposition
• 59:36
  that has most deranged my life over the past few years is the response to the pandemic.
• 59:43
  And you know, a little more than 12 months ago, 14 months ago, I was locked inside, well
• 59:50
  not literally locked inside, but you know, I wasn't able to go to work and I was only
• 59:56
  allowed to go to the supermarket for a certain number of hours per day and I was only supposed
• 1:00:01
  to be out walking for a certain set of reasons that the government would allow me to go outside
• 1:00:07
  for because we were scrambling to get vaccinated.
• 1:00:10
  And the first really, the first wave had finally hit in terms of, there had never been
• 1:00:15
  an out of control community spread of coronavirus at any point during the pandemic until the Delta
• 1:00:21
  wave, which was just before the vaccination campaign.
• 1:00:24
  So we spent over 100 days in this state and at the time you'll recall there was a lot
• 1:00:31
  of shrieking about how Australia has fallen and perhaps not unjustly.
• 1:00:35
  I mean, Tucker Carlson said that this is the end of Australia, Australia is no more
• 1:00:40
  as the country of Australia as we understood it doesn't exist anymore, it's not, it's
• 1:00:44
  not a democracy anymore.
• 1:00:45
  There were some groups you knew just gave of it was pretty screwed up, man.
• 1:00:49
  Yeah, I mean it was, it was pretty dystopian.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah, yeah, I mean that is from, look, I'm not going to go into that argument now because
• 1:00:58
  I've written a lot about it, I've spoken about it on Joe Rogan's podcast, I've been back
• 1:01:02
  and forth with, with people online about it, I'm actually just writing something about
• 1:01:07
  it now for an American publication looking back on it.
• 1:01:10
  And I mean, I was published in the main newspaper here in November of, of 2020 or may have
• 1:01:18
  in December saying we need to have a serious conversation about what just happened.
• 1:01:23
  This was after, after the restrictions were lifted.
• 1:01:26
  So you met in Australia overall or locally like New South Wales?
• 1:01:31
  New South Wales locally, it was a state-based thing.
• 1:01:33
  So this was, this was in New South Wales in Victoria, but so was it the Sydney Morning
• 1:01:39
  Herald because I just want to, yes, I just wanted to make the opportunity to call it
• 1:01:43
  to shake my head.
• 1:01:44
  Oh, the SMH in a long time, I'm going to use SMH and it just cracked me up.
• 1:01:50
  Yes, I was in, I was published in this link at SMH, shake my head and it was like, good job,
• 1:01:57
  Australia.
• 1:01:58
  So if you Google SMH ZEPS COVID or something, you'll get my article, which was pushing
• 1:02:04
  back on this.
• 1:02:07
  Now, the claim at the time was not just that that was fucked up, but that this was your
• 1:02:13
  kind of prophecy coming to pass that there is no way.
• 1:02:17
  I mean, Marjit Nawa's went on Joe Rogan's show a few weeks after I went on and made the
• 1:02:22
  point that these things are not temporary health restrictions.
• 1:02:25
  These are a permanent imposition of laws that will never be removed in full.
• 1:02:32
  And his experience having been imprisoned in Egypt where emergency decrees were introduced
• 1:02:38
  and then never removed has led him to believe that emergency action by governments is always
• 1:02:46
  a thin edge of the wedge.
• 1:02:48
  It's always just a way to open the door or crack to an impending totalitarianism.
• 1:02:53
  And I was worried as well, like, and I still am worried about the lack of oversight of
• 1:03:00
  what it takes to call an emergency decree and the location, the locating of that power
• 1:03:06
  in just the person of the health minister, there were all kinds of things to worry about
• 1:03:10
  about checks and balances in the Australian system that have been revealed by COVID.
• 1:03:15
  But one thing that hasn't happened is that any of those rules have outlived their purpose.
• 1:03:23
  Every single restriction, well, even just mild things.
• 1:03:27
  I mean, some people, many, many people would like there still to be discrimination against
• 1:03:32
  unvaccinated people, for example.
• 1:03:34
  Many, many people would like there still to be rules about masks on public transportation.
• 1:03:38
  We're currently entering another wave of COVID here because there are these new sub variants
• 1:03:42
  that are going around, which is my producers currently got it.
• 1:03:44
  That's why I thought I have it at the moment.
• 1:03:47
  And there is no response.
• 1:03:48
  There is no response in terms of, you know, mandating the number of people who can be, you
• 1:03:54
  know, a venue.
• 1:03:55
  I mean, there is no response in terms of requiring you to wear a mask on a bus.
• 1:03:59
  There is no response in terms of requiring anything.
• 1:04:02
  The only rule that still exists is that frontline healthcare workers who work for the government
• 1:04:07
  have to be vaccinated.
• 1:04:09
  That's the only remaining rule at all around COVID.
• 1:04:13
  Unvaccinated people can come to Australia like, if ever there was an opportunity for the
• 1:04:20
  cabal to get its little claws in and keep some of them there, it was the biggest public
• 1:04:27
  health crisis of our lives and all of the attendant in positions that they were able to impose
• 1:04:34
  on us.
• 1:04:36
  Why in your worldview have they all evaporated?
• 1:04:40
  Blood didn't work.
• 1:04:41
  COVID didn't work.
• 1:04:43
  Omicron basically wrecked that.
• 1:04:47
  It's the fact that the pushback was getting untenable for them to maintain.
• 1:04:51
  There is, I don't think there is a, you know, I know in Australia that a lot of people
• 1:04:55
  are still very much in favor of, you know, doing silly things like wearing masks that don't
• 1:04:59
  do anything to prevent COVID transmission, which by the way, we didn't get on the
• 1:05:06
  mask bandwagon until well after Americans did and we got off it.
• 1:05:10
  Yeah.
• 1:05:11
  That's become more of a mask.
• 1:05:12
  We're fake news and even our CDC here in the US said that they were fake news right
• 1:05:17
  up until the pandemic began.
• 1:05:18
  Even Fauci was on, I got kicked off of one of them Facebook or something for like a month
• 1:05:24
  for posting a video of Fauci saying that masks don't work right when the pandemic first
• 1:05:28
  broke out.
• 1:05:29
  Like it was, I didn't put any words.
• 1:05:31
  I literally just put the date.
• 1:05:32
  That was my entire set of commentary like April, whatever 13th or March 25th or whatever
• 1:05:38
  was 2020.
• 1:05:39
  All I put was the date.
• 1:05:40
  And it was Fauci saying masks don't work on the pandemic, you know, no shit, they don't
• 1:05:44
  work.
• 1:05:45
  Okay.
• 1:05:46
  So anyway, but it's said to me, well, and 95 masks do work if you're the one who's infected,
• 1:05:51
  but we don't need to get into a big, yeah, that's not your face, right?
• 1:05:54
  Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  Yeah.
• 1:05:56
  Yeah.
• 1:05:57
  Lots of ifs.
• 1:05:58
  And certainly not and see in the US, the big problem is with children.
• 1:06:00
  Yeah.
• 1:06:01
  We've never managed.
• 1:06:02
  Did you see this by the way?
• 1:06:03
  We haven't closed schools the way that they did in the States.
• 1:06:06
  I mean, let me just, we can go back and pull out this, but the part of the
• 1:06:10
  justification for having a very COVID zero approach in the first place was that we were
• 1:06:14
  actually able to live much more normal lives throughout the majority of the pandemic
• 1:06:18
  with kids at school and people still at work.
• 1:06:20
  Yeah.
• 1:06:21
  And people were in places where the pandemic was constantly, you know, wreaking havoc before
• 1:06:26
  vaccines existed.
• 1:06:27
  But sorry.
• 1:06:28
  Well, whatever we did in the US was completely fake news.
• 1:06:29
  They're masking kids, which are the cohort least likely to benefit from masks, most likely
• 1:06:34
  to be harmed by masks, etc.
• 1:06:36
  But even just gave guidance for our Halloween celebrations that children should be able
• 1:06:40
  to wear their costumes to school, but not a mask that covers the face because it hinders
• 1:06:44
  learning.
• 1:06:45
  And it's like, you've got to be kidding me.
• 1:06:46
  Like no sense of a way that's what makes me, but this isn't part of my worldview.
• 1:06:50
  Part of my, so what's the explanation on my worldview for why they did this?
• 1:06:54
  So first of all, you said you think they would put their claws in and leave some in.
• 1:06:56
  I bet you they did.
• 1:06:58
  I seriously suspect that they did.
• 1:07:01
  As a matter of fact, you probably have a lot of digital infrastructure for tracking and
• 1:07:04
  identifying people and knowing where they went and how to do that than you did before.
• 1:07:09
  So they probably did leave a lot of the crucial stuff.
• 1:07:11
  I don't know what's going on in Australia with regard to passes with regard to tracking
• 1:07:16
  individuals or the technology capacity.
• 1:07:19
  You do that with digital ID.
• 1:07:20
  Well, we create there was you're right that there was a there was a system created where
• 1:07:24
  you would have to check in using a QR code in order so that the context traces would
• 1:07:29
  be able to to get back to you if you've been a close contact of someone who was who
• 1:07:35
  was infected.
• 1:07:36
  So that although that's a voluntary system in the sense that it no longer exists and so
• 1:07:40
  as long as I'm not scanning anything, it's not doing anything and I don't there's no
• 1:07:44
  like app on my phone that's tracking me around.
• 1:07:46
  You're right that I suppose you could if you wanted to be generous to your perspective,
• 1:07:50
  you could say that that is one core that exists in the government's arsenal, but it's not
• 1:07:54
  a core that's being deployed.
• 1:07:55
  It's not a core that exists in daily life now.
• 1:07:59
  Well, it's good to hear that, but the point is really to I mean, the means to build
• 1:08:04
  out and get adoption of an architecture, it's like if you build a house, you don't keep
• 1:08:09
  whacking it with a hammer when it's there.
• 1:08:11
  This is the difference between poetic and and practical construction, police is in practice,
• 1:08:16
  the two modes of creation.
• 1:08:19
  When you're done with a poetic construction, you put when you achieve the ends, you don't
• 1:08:23
  continue with the means when you build the house, you don't continue with a carpentry
• 1:08:27
  to become a carpentry.
• 1:08:28
  However, you continue with carpentry so that you can through practice or practice become
• 1:08:33
  a carpentry over time.
• 1:08:34
  So, there are two different modes of where the means and ends do align and don't align
• 1:08:40
  with creative activity.
• 1:08:42
  So within my perspective, I don't know and I don't want to over diagnose what's going
• 1:08:47
  on Australia, but I would suggest it's likely that a lot more claws are there and that
• 1:08:51
  the COVID was a means that's not necessarily the end.
• 1:08:56
  And so those control apparatuses were built in ways that they did not exist before and
• 1:09:00
  the cover of COVID allowed it.
• 1:09:03
  But more broadly, the explanation for this so-called counter example from my perspective
• 1:09:07
  is that COVID fell apart as a impetus.
• 1:09:10
  So when we read Klaus Schwab who publishes a book in 2020, in June of 2020, very, very quickly
• 1:09:17
  into the pandemic.
• 1:09:18
  Now, I write books very quickly so I know it's possible to do these things.
• 1:09:22
  He has his own publishing company, forum, press or whatever for the world economic forum,
• 1:09:27
  so it's easy to publish quickly as well.
• 1:09:30
  It's a little suspicious timing, but he says very, very clearly and he said this on television,
• 1:09:34
  he said this in interviews, he said this a lot of places, he said this in writing, it's
• 1:09:37
  in his book, the COVID-19, the pandemic represented a narrow window of opportunity for a very
• 1:09:42
  specific thing that I just can't make sense of.
• 1:09:45
  I can see that it represents a very narrow window of opportunity for a lot of different
• 1:09:49
  things, but one of the things he specifically says is for reinventing our entire economic
• 1:09:55
  system.
• 1:09:56
  What the hell?
• 1:09:57
  Why?
• 1:09:58
  Why?
• 1:09:59
  Why would you do that?
• 1:10:01
  Why is that the thing?
• 1:10:02
  And so when the Omicron comes out and everybody in their mother gets not very sick, very,
• 1:10:09
  very quickly, it ends up having kind of this highly enhanced immunity that even infection
• 1:10:15
  with the original with alpha with delta didn't confer for some reason.
• 1:10:21
  So when Omicron comes in, whether, you know, Eru Ilevata or whatever, like nudge this
• 1:10:25
  thing into the world to change the course of human, I don't know what caused it, Omicron
• 1:10:29
  comes into existence.
• 1:10:31
  It changes the whole calculation, the arguments that they had and the mechanisms they had
• 1:10:34
  to become completely untenable then.
• 1:10:36
  There is not a country on the earth with the possible exception of either Australia
• 1:10:41
  or New Zealand that would accept those measures under the auspices of a variant where there's
• 1:10:50
  no reason whatsoever to get vaccinated with the previous vaccine, which is all they had.
• 1:11:00
  Future formulations, notwithstanding.
• 1:11:02
  There was no reason whatsoever to get vaccinated for a variant that the vaccine couldn't protect
• 1:11:08
  from, which is what the case is and was with Omicron.
• 1:11:11
  So no, it gives a bit of protection, it doesn't give the same amount of protection, it
• 1:11:14
  gives significant protection against disease and death.
• 1:11:17
  Does it a bit or is it significant, because those are very significant, that's a data-driven
• 1:11:24
  question that remains unanswered.
• 1:11:26
  No, it's not all answered when you look at the death right in places that have high
• 1:11:32
  vaccination versus low vaccination.
• 1:11:34
  But I'll take you on it.
• 1:11:35
  There are very credible challenges to those data analyses.
• 1:11:40
  But at any rate, we'll just look at country to country at the death toll.
• 1:11:44
  You can look at the fact that they were saying this about Delta, for example, and then Australians
• 1:11:49
  got vaccinated at a very high vaccination rate and end up having 90% fewer deaths, about
• 1:11:55
  10% of the death toll per capita than the United States because of the way it's-
• 1:11:59
  And you're old people back to the nursing home?
• 1:12:02
  Yeah.
• 1:12:03
  Our first big waves happened after everyone was vaccinated.
• 1:12:05
  Even though it was the Delta strain, not the original strain.
• 1:12:08
  But I take your point that if you don't want authoritarianism, then-
• 1:12:12
  So you don't want any encroachment?
• 1:12:16
  It just feels to me like-
• 1:12:17
  I don't think that the pandemic controls were ever meant to be permanent in the first
• 1:12:22
  place.
• 1:12:23
  There were all levers to achieve-
• 1:12:26
  Either what the laws of vaccination are which I don't know why he was saying that they would be.
• 1:12:31
  Well, no, no, no.
• 1:12:32
  I did not think that they would be in the direct sense.
• 1:12:37
  The central bank digital currency with a digital ID and a social credit system is the goal.
• 1:12:41
  And you need a mechanism to get- not children because you can just do that through the schools,
• 1:12:45
  but adults on the digital ID program.
• 1:12:48
  That is the end.
• 1:12:49
  And that's the end.
• 1:12:50
  I've always looked at it.
• 1:12:51
  Now, what?
• 1:12:53
  I've talked to magic once.
• 1:12:54
  I like magic, but we're not the same guy.
• 1:12:58
  The point in my estimation of the relentless campaign was in fact to create the vaccine passport
• 1:13:06
  program which became politically completely untenable once Omicron came into the world.
• 1:13:11
  Even if the medical information says it is untenable, it was not politically untenable.
• 1:13:15
  People would have burned buildings down before they're going to put up with this crap at that point.
• 1:13:19
  And so I think that they were unable to deploy the vaccine passport due to a number of reasons.
• 1:13:24
  And then the public mood around COVID, Zineo, a window of opportunity, slammed shut.
• 1:13:32
  And they couldn't recreate the systems using the social credit system.
• 1:13:35
  There requires a digital ID that requires the currency buy-in that they were going for.
• 1:13:42
  So in other words, I think that COVID-19 was a pretext in order to put authoritarian
• 1:13:48
  tools in place.
• 1:13:49
  And they got partial buy-in on that, but not sufficient buy-in.
• 1:13:53
  And then their window of opportunity to continue to use that pretext wore out.
• 1:13:58
  You said earlier, James, that the timing of Klaus Schwab's book is a bit suspicious coming
• 1:14:05
  out so early in the pandemic.
• 1:14:07
  Do you mean it's suspicious because he might have known that the pandemic is coming because
• 1:14:11
  he has to create it?
• 1:14:12
  Yeah, absolutely, especially given the scope of the recommendations that he's making,
• 1:14:21
  like literally transforming the entire world, it seems like a pretty bold claim to be making
• 1:14:28
  that quickly.
• 1:14:29
  But there's also someone's claim would be that because someone published a book very quickly
• 1:14:35
  after the pandemic started, that means that the pandemic was man-made.
• 1:14:41
  What I said is making it.
• 1:14:42
  I didn't say any of that, though.
• 1:14:44
  What I said is that this is the timing of that, and then I said, if you recall, if I may,
• 1:14:50
  I said, I write books very quickly, and if he's publishing it from his own press, which
• 1:14:53
  is called the Forum Publishing, which is in the World Economic Forum, that's the Forum
• 1:14:57
  and Forum Publishing, it is possible to do something this quickly.
• 1:15:01
  So I did actually leave room for that, so we'll see.
• 1:15:03
  Yeah, you did.
• 1:15:04
  But the reasons to be suspicious, though, aren't necessarily
• 1:15:09
  just that COVID-19 dropped into the world the way that it did, which by the way, I didn't
• 1:15:13
  say it was man-made there.
• 1:15:15
  It could have been a perfectly natural thing that took off due to intention by accident
• 1:15:20
  or that was contracted from the wild.
• 1:15:22
  And seizing the chaos as a ladder, if we might quote from the philosophical work Game
• 1:15:28
  of Thrones, seizing that chaos as a ladder to enact a pre-planned agenda is a completely
• 1:15:36
  different thing.
• 1:15:37
  The agenda pre-planned on the opportunity, it's like earthquakes, right?
• 1:15:41
  When's an earthquake going to strike San Francisco next?
• 1:15:43
  Nobody knows.
• 1:15:44
  But imagine you had this plan that you're going to say, well, next time the big one hits,
• 1:15:47
  we're going to do this.
• 1:15:48
  And then the big one, you know the big ones come in sooner or later, and you just may
• 1:15:51
  have to buy your time for, you know, six months, a year, 10 years, 14 years.
• 1:15:55
  No, I get that.
• 1:15:56
  You say, I knew that, I mean, you say this all the time, and you know, swine flu happened
• 1:16:00
  in 2009, like a big pandemic was coming again.
• 1:16:03
  Yes, but I'm just clarifying the suspicious thing.
• 1:16:06
  I said, well, yeah, you look at it suspicious timing.
• 1:16:09
  You know about the event 201, hang on, but there was another one I just want to put in
• 1:16:13
  and then I just want to put a full stop on this because I just want to clarify.
• 1:16:15
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:16
  Do you know, hang on, is it suspicious timing because he might have known that the pandemic,
• 1:16:21
  that this specific pandemic was coming because he was playing a role in it being released
• 1:16:27
  or is it just suspicious?
• 1:16:28
  I don't have enough information to say that he knew this pandemic was going to be released.
• 1:16:35
  He didn't publish it till after it was already out in the world and at least three months
• 1:16:38
  into the official recognition of it, which we now know it may have actually been floating
• 1:16:43
  around months before that, maybe as early as October or November the previous year.
• 1:16:49
  So I'm not saying he manufactured or released the virus.
• 1:16:52
  I am unequivocally saying that he took advantage of that and I think that his, it represents
• 1:16:58
  an era of opportunity to transform the world's systems is sufficient proof of that claim.
• 1:17:04
  That's such a plan to take advantage of a pandemic that is let's say a mildly deadly, highly
• 1:17:10
  contagious coronavirus was literally wargamed in October 2019 under the auspices of event
• 1:17:19
  201, which took place at Johns Hopkins University using many of the players.
• 1:17:24
  I don't know the Klaus Schwab was in the room, but certainly Bill Gates was many of the significant
• 1:17:30
  players that are kind of implicated in this so-called cabal and whatever else that they
• 1:17:34
  did.
• 1:17:35
  I don't know that they released it.
• 1:17:37
  I don't know that it was men made or intentional.
• 1:17:39
  I know that I hesitate zero to commit to the fact that they capitalized upon it, capitalized
• 1:17:46
  upon it very fully and capitalized upon it to enact very suspicious, a very suspicious
• 1:17:53
  agenda that they had wargamed out in advance.
• 1:17:58
  And I don't think any of that's, I don't even think that's controversial to say if you just know
• 1:18:02
  the facts of what they did.
• 1:18:06
  Event 201, October 2019 at Johns Hopkins, there was another one before that was a clade,
• 1:18:11
  something I don't forget, a cladex or something like that.
• 1:18:13
  They did another war game with another virus, it wasn't a coronavirus.
• 1:18:19
  I mean, I was actually pretty familiar with some of this stuff because I'm a bit of a science
• 1:18:23
  wank and when I was living in New York and working at Half-Post, I did some events with a man
• 1:18:32
  who has now become a bit of a bet noir on the right.
• 1:18:37
  I don't know if you, I can't remember his name, but the fact there's a dammit, it was during
• 1:18:43
  the Ebola outbreak and you're completely right that everyone wargames for scenarios that they
• 1:18:50
  think are going to happen. I mean, right now the Australian and US military are installing B-52
• 1:18:57
  bombers in northern Australia and wargaming a Chinese invasion in this part of the world
• 1:19:04
  over in the expectation that at some point China might do something on Taiwan and we'll be in a
• 1:19:11
  full-scale war. That sort of thing takes place all the time, that doesn't mean that the Americans
• 1:19:16
  creating a war between China and Taiwan, it means that they're preparing for what will happen
• 1:19:21
  after the tragedy happens and I was involved in sort of reporting on some of these
• 1:19:29
  contingency plans, essentially, that were being put in place in case something like a Ebola
• 1:19:33
  broke out. Now I'm not saying that some people won't do that planning in a nefarious way.
• 1:19:39
  I'm sure they do. I don't think the people who are planning to manipulate those events in order
• 1:19:45
  to destroy Western civilization are the ones who have the loudest voice in the room or are the
• 1:19:51
  ones who are ultimately going to win but you and I can disagree about that. Because I have COVID,
• 1:19:57
  I don't have as much time as I had hoped that I would because I'm not yet in my office,
• 1:20:02
  I mean I don't have COVID because I thought I had COVID. So I want you to start giving
• 1:20:06
  recommendations about what people should do. Like let's take as a given that the world is the
• 1:20:13
  way that you see it and not the way that I see it. When people are confronted by
• 1:20:19
  cancel culture, workness, I mean take it where you will, drag queen story hour, I mean any of the
• 1:20:26
  things that people think are superficial culture war things, what are they really and how should they
• 1:20:32
  respond to them? I mean those are kind of different things. I think their mass lines of action
• 1:20:39
  is the correct term for them in a broader push that my term for this is neo-communism. I don't
• 1:20:47
  want people to mistake it for, you know, Lenin or Stalin or even Mao. It's an updated communist
• 1:20:54
  model. They are mass lines of action that have strategic agendas that are meant to whether it's
• 1:21:00
  destabilize individuals, destabilize family structures, upset culture, overturned institutions or
• 1:21:07
  whatever the goals happen to be for each individual mass line of action. I think that they should
• 1:21:13
  recognize them for those things which means I think that they should study a little communist
• 1:21:17
  history and strategy. They should read people who are communist effectors like Dr. Bella Dodd
• 1:21:22
  in her extraordinary lengthy testimony to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities which is
• 1:21:29
  not what Joseph McCarthy was part of by the way. That was Joseph MacArthur was a senator. That was
• 1:21:35
  the House. Little American politics there. Thanks for the tip for F's sake. But no she testified at,
• 1:21:45
  I mean it's absurd how long it is and then Manning Johnson testified he was a black man that was
• 1:21:51
  being used by the communists. He was a communist himself but then he was being used by the
• 1:21:56
  communists as well. So Manning Johnson gave testimony. He also wrote a book a couple of books.
• 1:22:00
  Read some of these these pieces about the strategies and I strongly encourage people though to
• 1:22:07
  look at what's happening to read primary source materials and to get together with people
• 1:22:12
  and discuss to try to figure out what's going on and what they have to do in terms of
• 1:22:17
  practicality is that they have to not only organize and share information with one another
• 1:22:22
  but they also have to start getting involved locally. They have to keep their wits about them to
• 1:22:29
  the best of their ability but then do things like run for county commission run for the various
• 1:22:35
  public offices around the county or city or even state level run for school boards get involved
• 1:22:40
  ask your children what they're learning at school asked to see their homework. You know these
• 1:22:45
  very simple basic kinds of civic engagement that we had kind of abandoned as society's plural
• 1:22:51
  to the tally for a number of years probably we should start undoing that start having family
• 1:22:57
  dinners again start talk like I just listened to a guy give a talk he's an educator in California
• 1:23:02
  and he says when he talks to his students one of the biggest things that he hears he says we you
• 1:23:06
  what you know he never hears them bring up their families they never talking my mom said this my
• 1:23:10
  dad said that well my dad said this thing about the Civil War whatever they never never comes up
• 1:23:14
  he starts asking you know well what's a dinner time look like at your house and it's you know
• 1:23:18
  mom and dad we throw some stuff in the microwave I go to my room and eat my brother goes to his
• 1:23:22
  room and he we watch our computer player game and my mom and dad make their thing and they sit in
• 1:23:26
  the couch and watch TV together we don't talk you know start starting to involve with your families
• 1:23:30
  again just very basic stuff with but the kids call touching grass but in the kind of not literal go
• 1:23:36
  outside since that's good too those are the kinds of things that I think people should be doing
• 1:23:42
  if the view that I have of the world is correct um because I mean those are the things that people
• 1:23:46
  should be doing even if the old view is on Josh Seps or whoever else is not going to let's say that
• 1:23:51
  you fully agree you're like oh my god you have a conversion moment tonight and you're in my
• 1:23:55
  cult now you're not going to stop Klaus Schwab you're just a dude like you can podcast about him you
• 1:24:00
  can write about him you can get it eyeballs on you're not going to stop him you're just a dude so what
• 1:24:05
  you need to do is thinking about how you're gonna you know network in your community make your
• 1:24:08
  communities healthy make your families healthy and this isn't the kind of advice that it doesn't
• 1:24:11
  matter if I'm wrong so what you still win um but it's actually some of the most powerful antidote to
• 1:24:17
  the slow dirt poison that I perceive being loaded into our society at the moment do you feel bad
• 1:24:24
  about the bloco kid I mean about quote unquote your role in that I mean I sometimes won the
• 1:24:31
  the kid the Pelosi thing oh yeah I sometimes wonder what the relationship is between two
• 1:24:39
  he's uh you know I bet they've been wrong with that guy yeah but of course there is but I mean
• 1:24:44
  when you when you talk about the influences that people have and the people when you go back and
• 1:24:49
  you read these texts that people you know that are underpinning the sort of takeover that you're
• 1:24:55
  fearing the everyday henchmen of this conspiracy are just our colleagues and our co-workers and
• 1:25:03
  our family members who think that they're doing the right thing because they're following the social
• 1:25:09
  justice trend that they think is correct but actually they're being puppeteered by bigger ideas
• 1:25:16
  people and so I sometimes I'm conflicted about the nexus between people who create ideas and then
• 1:25:22
  crazy people who go and do their bidding is there any relationship between your ideas and
• 1:25:29
  the Pelosi attack well I don't think so because I was on his website I mean personally I understand
• 1:25:33
  what you're saying and I get it um in this case no I think the dude's nuts I'm just gonna
• 1:25:39
  go out on a limb and say that this dude that the stories that people that knew him that are coming out
• 1:25:45
  that have testified that they square up pretty good he's on some kind of he got on some kind of a drug
• 1:25:51
  bender something didn't go right he came back he thought he was Jesus for a while right but this
• 1:25:56
  content of a person's belief matters I mean Kanye's bipolar being bipolar doesn't make you an
• 1:26:01
  anti-semite the thing that you choose to cling to is the thing that sure like that's the
• 1:26:06
  but if you look at the guy's website for example jihadists and nots but you need you know you
• 1:26:10
  need jihadist writers and thinkers in order for them to be doing what they're doing right well I
• 1:26:15
  see on this guy's website in addition to this like odd smattering of podcasts that I did and one
• 1:26:22
  thing that I don't even know how why it's in my thing but in addition he has an entire uh section
• 1:26:29
  devoted to like religion and he's has like Jesus is the anti-Christ I don't think that that's a
• 1:26:34
  view that I've ever espoused um he's pretty far down the q rabbit hole I think that if I might
• 1:26:40
  use a word that tends to get people canceled I think qonon is retarded um that is my chosen word
• 1:26:47
  for it uh and I stand by that word um why why provoke like that well because it's I mean I just
• 1:26:55
  speak that way and if people hate me for it I don't care like it doesn't bother me that's like
• 1:27:00
  that's the word I'm gonna say and when the microphones aren't on that's the word almost everybody says
• 1:27:05
  and that's probably not going to get changed I mean we all get worked up about the R word nobody
• 1:27:09
  gets worked up about idiot which was literally a designation of retardation when they invented the
• 1:27:13
  word imbecile definitely was also a literal clinical category nobody worries about these things
• 1:27:19
  this is a manufactured outrage that nobody should care about well do you still say the end the
• 1:27:23
  actual landwood when you're talking about the endwood I actually said it on a stage the other day
• 1:27:27
  but it's the first time I've said it in a very very long time for any purpose because of the taboos
• 1:27:31
  been pretty heavy um so people can watch the talk actually said it it was it was use uh what is it
• 1:27:38
  called I don't remember I didn't use it I I remarked that this was the word that was used for a
• 1:27:44
  thing yeah of course um a hundred years ago but the syllables came out of my mouth and um so it goes
• 1:27:51
  and so okay that means that you're a white supremacist jabs that's what I've heard you just
• 1:27:55
  to the mid of it yeah and did you know I have a black friend that was there and he said that was
• 1:28:00
  hilarious afterwards and so this makes it even worse falling back again on the black friend excuse
• 1:28:05
  I know it makes you more of a racist totally uh yeah well it kind of is stupid you didn't have to
• 1:28:11
  it's just a friggin word I think that destigmatizing words um while remembering what they record
• 1:28:17
  represent like the taboo not destigmatizing detabooizing a word actually steals it of undeserved power
• 1:28:24
  yeah I mean I've long made the point about this saying that the the the the time at which
• 1:28:30
  america is no longer obsessed with like saying the n-word instead of actually saying the word
• 1:28:35
  is not going to be a time when america is more racist it's going to be a time when america is less
• 1:28:40
  racist correct you know when everyone just say the word because it doesn't have any sting in
• 1:28:44
  its tail that will be a less racist world especially when it's a descriptive use you know like
• 1:28:49
  discourse appears exactly like this of course if everyone's going around calling each other
• 1:28:54
  you know calling black people the n-words then that would be a more racist america I mean it would
• 1:28:58
  be a less racist america if you can just say there's this horrible word that we don't use any word
• 1:29:02
  and the anymore and the word is this yeah we're just calling anybody that where you use the a
• 1:29:07
  instead of the hard are apparently that might be less or more depending on the context but that's
• 1:29:11
  beside the point this guy I also want to bring this up just as a point this guy had a whole huge
• 1:29:16
  ass section on his website it was real weird to religion so I clicked on it to see what was in his
• 1:29:21
  website and it was all about like all these weird memes like there's no words on his website
• 1:29:25
  just weird memes and like YouTube videos and other people's not his own and so there's all these
• 1:29:31
  weird memes about like nosticism well like literally I've dedicated last half of a year maybe whole
• 1:29:37
  year of my career to studying narcissism and complaining about narcissism and being against
• 1:29:42
  narcissism is a religious thing and so whatever the degree of influences on this guy were they seem
• 1:29:49
  to be pretty eclectic and I don't actually know where I fit in because a large number of them are
• 1:29:54
  diametrically opposed that's what we got off on that tangent anyway because talking about QAnon
• 1:29:58
  diametrically opposed to things that I espoused or uphold in fact I'm a little bit glad that there's a
• 1:30:05
  voice of sanity mixed into the whole thing frankly maybe laugh at me calling myself a voice of sanity
• 1:30:10
  but this was an argument that I gave to Helen who obviously Helen Pluckrose who wrote cynical
• 1:30:14
  theories with me Helen is outright a leftist she is openly a leftist she's not a bashed leftist
• 1:30:20
  she's not ashamed of it I'm not calling her a name I'm not putting her down I'm putting no shade
• 1:30:25
  on it when I say this it's just a descriptive fact of the woman and she was very worried when we
• 1:30:33
  wrote cynical theories that right wing people would like it and I was like don't you want them to
• 1:30:39
  hear the arguments that somebody like you would make so they enter into their heads and they
• 1:30:43
  ponder them and consider them she's like no I don't want to let I don't want the right wingers
• 1:30:47
  to like it I don't want them to read it they're like no Helen you definitely don't want them to
• 1:30:52
  stay in an echo chamber and so okay but I mean this is beside the point this dude just nuts this dude's
• 1:30:59
  like broken nuts and okay well he probably would have benefited from going out and touching the
• 1:31:04
  grass I'm glad that you were advising people to go out and touch the grass which is the correct
• 1:31:09
  thing to do whether or not James Lindsay's world view is true we should all be having dinner with
• 1:31:14
  our families and going outside and climbing trees more regardless of where we are on the political
• 1:31:19
  spectrum I hope you do more of that James why don't we I'd love to we'll just touch base every nine
• 1:31:24
  months as you go creating off the cliff and I'll see yeah we'll see who's right and who's wrong
• 1:31:29
  yeah next next episode can be James Lindsay was right James Lindsay was right hashtag 2023
• 1:31:36
  thank you James yeah thanks y'all good call
• 1:31:43
  uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma follow me Josh Leppes on Twitter and
• 1:31:48
  Instagram for all the latest may your day be fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous
• 1:31:55
  and your conversations perfectly sparklingly delectably uncomfortable