Women, Politics, Personality, and Self Esteem | Eric Kaufmann | EP 453

If you take a look and I've done surveys in the US Britain and Canada it's the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position and that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or um you know that there are many genders or whatever so it's roughly two to one against across 50 questions let's say in a democracy the Democracy gets to set the curriculum I think the Majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality and balance as they

see it and I think we have the numbers to to Institute that now and me one of my pleas is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on [Music] culture hello everybody I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr Eric Peter Kaufman he's a Canadian author and a professor from the University of Buckingham he's written a new book it's come out in two different forms the third awokening or taboo how making race sacred produced a cultural revolution Eric is also the author of a number of other books shall the religious inherit

the earth the rise and fall of Anglo America the Orange Order Etc um he's a rare bird you might say he's a relatively conservative social scientist and uh there aren't very many of those in fact I think the two of us Talking are about the only two that there are that's a bit of an exaggeration but not much we talk about a lot of things today we we talk about the sacred dimension of the victim victimizer narrative we talk about the state of modern universities and what's being done to what would you say stem the

tide of the radical leftists we talk about Dr Kaufman's what his Pres assumtion that much of what's happening on the culture War Front isn't precisely due to the invasion of marxists that you often hear about or even about postmodernism per se but more about uh Progressive literalism with its with its roots in the early 20th century and so he makes that case we talk about sex and the different political beliefs that are emerging especially between men and young women join us for the conversation you're concentrating on the culture War which continues to rage Madly especially

in well Academia and everything it touches do you want to tell I thought we'd start with two things do you want to tell people why you entitled your new book The Third awokening and then maybe fill everybody in a little bit about your the history you've had with Council culture and Academia and how that ties in with your broader your broader body of work yeah Jordan it's great to be on the show and yeah I've got a new book the Third awoke in the title in Britain is called taboo um and what this book really

is about what it really argues is that what we're seeing cancel culture for example attacks on the past on on History this is actually uh a continuation and an acceleration of a pre-existing set of ideas it is not a a deviation from this well there are people who will say everything was fine in the 2000s and suddenly we've had this post 2015 deviation my argument is Actually no uh what we're seeing is a is is really a continuation of a set of ideas which arguably go back a century uh and so these are the ideas

really of left liberalism and we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left liberalism a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century uh as liberal progressivism um people like John Dewey Jane Adams in the United States the or Orin of pluralism the Origins of the critique of ethnic majorities and national identity and and then this is sort of accelerated and every generation but really from the late 1960s we get a sort of takeoff and then we've kind of had with social media another acceleration

and so the third awokening simply means that we're not in the first one that that we've had three of these uh emotional outbursts and and ideological Awakenings just like in Protestant ISM You have the first and second great Awakenings in American protestantism these are sort of emotional upsurges so the first one was in the late 60s and people forget that you had black panthers occupying buildings armed to the teeth you had students demanding you know 50 black professors be studied every black student be admitted black studies this is how black studies got started for example

is through demands by occupi people who occupied the Offices of administ aters so the late 60s we have a number of these things then there's another awokening which is in the late ' 80s early '90s that's sort of probably when you and I we're coming of age we had political correctness afrocentrism uh Speech codes for example hey ho Western Civ has got to go get you know changing the curriculum purging it of dead white males that talk in the late 80s early 90s and then we have another wave which Comes in post 2010 so these

are in my view continuous they really touch on the same set of ideas which is really making sacred uh a couple of things which is identities are made sacred so I Define for example woke one sentence definition people always ask what is the definition of woke well the definition of woke as I mentioned in the book is the making sacred of historically marginalized race gender and sexual identity groups that's it That's the one sentence definition and that is also what I would say what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral

order and out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology which says um so these are the sacred groups um those groups cannot be offended so anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a a blasphemer you're profaning the sacred you must be Excommunicated I.E canell the other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources uh between these groups so for example you can't have a race Gap or a gender gap in terms of the

boardroom in terms of admittance to Elite universities and so on it's got to be zero so equality plus emotional safety these are the two pillars of this ideology but the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system like loan liberalism or even Marxism that is uh it is more of a bottomup empathizing rather than a top down systematizing cognitive thing it's much more emotional we're attached concretely to the black civil rights movement to the indigenous to the LGBT movements and it's our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our

meaning and that's Primary in the system it's not a set of ideas like Marxism it's actually a set of attach emotional attachments and so This is very much emotional and it's driven from the ground up okay so let me let me ask you let me ask you some questions about that okay so I guess you you you you pulled out two strings there you you did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism let's say starting in the early 20th century but then you are also stressing the more emotional side of it uh let's call

it the compassionate side so I I Want to ask you and and you talked about it as bottomup and emotion driven so it seems to me that there's the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number of potentially fundamental causal elements you pointed to Liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion let's say other people have pointed to the role of like a kind of a metap Marxism so it's the marxists of course divided the world into victim And victimizer essentially on economic grounds the difference now is that that that same narrative seems

to play out there are victims and there are victimizers but there is a number of Dimensions along which that axis of inequality can reveal itself and you talked about uh race gender and sexuality there there's other axes as well but those are likely the primary ones and then with regards to the emotional side this is something I can't Help wondering about and no one is talking about it and I can understand why we did a series of studies in that were published in 2016 which was pretty much when I left the university so it never

got completed but we identified a group of ideas that that hung together statistically that we called politically correct authoritarianism deviated to some degree from say the liberal Progressive Ethos in that the people who adopted the set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force that being perhaps the primary distinction the predictors that we found that determined whether or not people adopted those beliefs were first of all low verbal intelligence that was a walloping predictor and the second one was being female and the third one was having a female temperament and the fourth one

was having ever taken even one Politically correct course and so one of the things I'm very curious about see I've been thinking that one of the things that we're seeing is the increased female domination of the University system especially in the humanities and the social sciences and I think there's a fundamental feminine ethos that's instinctive that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education but that has a proclivity to divide the World up into predators and infants and will be tied you if you happen to fall into the Predator Camp it's very tightly allied with

the victim victimizer narrative and you know you do point out in your book that there is a predilection for women between the ages of 18 and 34 and this has been shown everywhere they're way out of lock step without it with every other demographic group way more Progressive far more radically left way more likely to uh Identify for example to even claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims in some sense which is just an absolute Miracle of interpretation so so we've identified a number of streams there's a Marxist influence there's a postmodern influence which we

haven't talked about there's a liberal Progressive influence there's an emotional influence and and then I don't know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination especially of the humanities And the social sciences plays into that because that's a major league cultural revolution the fact that the universities are dominated for example administratively as well by females and so I know that's a hell of a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat but I think that's actually really interesting and I I think it is a contributing factor but I

just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats and the first is we only see this female Effect amongst young people so older women we don't find greater support for ccel culture it's very much seems to be among young women the second thing is if you were to go back to 1970 for example women were you know there's a survey done every year in the US H higher higher education Research Institute 100,000 freshmen 18yar olds entering American universities uh in 1970 women were somewhat more conservative than men 18-year-old women 18-year-old men and It's

really not till 204 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be more liberal than the men and that's now widened to about 15 points um and so something's happened to women in the recent period That's the first first point to note so and that's the other thing is that fire which foundation for individual rights and expression does an annual survey in the US 55,000 so there's a lot of survey data in the book I I I try and ground this as much as Possible in the data so they ask questions for example is

it okay to shout down or block somebody from speaking and on those questions actually um especially using violence to to prevent somebody from speaking women are less likely than men to support that on blocking they're about as likely where women really stand out is should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something that might be offensive so for Example uh that says BLM is a hate group that says trans is a mental disorder there you see a big gender gap uh and you see it also amongst Republican women by the way versus Republican

men so it seems like the attitude the sort of there's the authoritarian I want to do violence which is I think not gendered or it may even be somewhat more male but there's this protective oh I don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt and that I think is more female um so I think there Are some nuances here the what I would say I me the way I think about it is women will tend to back up this the the whatever is the moral order if the moral order is a woke moral order they'll back

that up if it's a religious or patriotic moral order they'll be more likely to back that up whereas men will be more likely to be the contrarians I think because it's you know people will talk about well women are more compassionate but the point is compassionate to who Like compassionate to that is the point that's for sure that's the point so compassionate to the transitioner or the D transitioner compassionate to the trans the biological male wants to enter a woman's shelter or woman's prison or the women in the prison I mean the ideology is what

tells you who to be compassionate towards so if we we go back to the liberal progressives Jane Adams was relatively pr- lynching or at least thought that wasn't a bad idea Because she was very very empathetic towards white women and so she was willing to accept that there were these black male predators and buy into that framing so what I'm just saying is I think what's happened is an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate towards and who not to care about are you or someone you know fighting the battle against

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that the the ideology specifies the victim victimizer Dimension and Identifies the victim now do you think do you think it's so when we when when we when we did our study it was agreeable I said it was being female and having a female temperament those were both predictors we never saw that in any study we ever did looking at what predicted beliefs for example if generally if we controlled for temperament sex had no effect but that wasn't the case in this specific situation which which I thought was Extremely telling and so and it's also very

interesting as you pointed out that it's young women in particular and I can't help as someone you know psychoanalytically influenced I can't help but think that a fair chunk of this is misplaced maternal Instinct I I believe that the young women who are in by and large childless in the years when they shouldn't be are unbelievably sensitive well let's talk about what happened in 2004 you know you Said that's when women started to shift their political priorities now I know from people who've been investigating this that um Tik Tok is a particularly pernicious influence especially

with regards to the campus protests that are occurring right now and The Tick Tock short videos that are fostering the the campus protests at least among women focus on compassion for the war victims to to to the ultimate degree and they seem to be extraordinarily effective but There's a real problem here that needs to be wrestled with because if it is the case that young women are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda and they often and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions in uh University institutions for example then we have a whole

new kind of social problem on our hands because we've never had it's only been in the last 30 years that we've had the opportunity to see what female dominant Large institutions would look like right that's historically unprecedented we have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have so what do you think happened in 2004 like why did the tide start to turn then so interpret there's other data s data series that we can see changing so political donations shifting towards the Democrats for example around roughly the same time now political donations come for

people who are Highly Educated Relatively well off for example I think what what happens in the US anyway is you get George W bush who's more of a populist not an elite style conservative who's just about tax and spend for example and I actually think you see you know he's also to some degree advancing the agenda the religious right to some degree I think this populist style cultural conservatism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion formers and so they start to drift away in terms of Political donations and the the if you like the

kind of background the ambiant noise the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions the schools the culture just starts to turn against uh Republicans and conservatism for example so I actually think women are a kind of rof kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society or at least the prestige ethos in a society so if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism I think women would be in the Forefront of that uh I don't think there's anything biological so I I am so more of a sociologist and a political scientist

so I tend to approach these things from a kind of Sociology of emotions perspective which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express and now of course that's refracted through like gender so in this case I think women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values dominant Ideology of the Elites in a society um so I'm not as convinced why the elites why do you think it's okay why would women specifically back up the dominant ideology of the elites is do you think that's a consequence of

something like hypergamy or what's your what's your theory about that because it's weird if they're also standing up from the for The Underdogs is it that they accept the elite differentiation of who's an underdog and who's a power monger and Then and and and and then why is that associated with with youth let's say with with women I'm trying to disentangle all that well I think there are a couple of things I mean one is the education system uh which I think shifts in this direction in a big way I mean it was there in

a few radical centers like Berkeley and the Toronto District School Board greater London Council so you you had these crazy places but what's happened is a scaling up so what my book Talks a lot about is these ideas actually go back quite a long way but it's the scaling up now it's in every school so I did a couple of studies with the man Manhattan Institute you know 90% of 18 to 20 year old Americans that I interviewed you know sent the survey to said that they had encountered at least one critical race Theory concept

from an adult in school in in Britain it was about you know it was a majority as well not as high but a majority so it's sat It's hitting saturation level so that's what women getting in class and then they see it in the institutions that maybe in the workplace uh in the government so they they're seeing this thing Dei everywhere and so they think yeah this is the way you have to be a good moral person and they simply reinforce those values so I think that is the biggest driver and I don't think it's

just self-interest so if we take a question like you know should one of the Questions that I ask is should JK Rowling be dropped by her publisher uh amongst young people it's 5050 uh dropper not dropper amongst anyone over 45 it's in low single digits so we've got a big issue with young people um and but but what's really interesting is that uh if we take this sort of should JK Rowling be um be dropped by her publisher question you know women are considerably more likely to say that than men now you might say Well

shouldn't women be sticking up for women and women's spaces and female authors and we no actually so women are actually going against their own interest as a tribe by supporting uh the gender you know the trans activist case on women's Sports women's shelters women's prisons you name it doesn't make any sense from a purely feminist perspective so I just think they're reflecting these are the values that good people are supposed to have and We're going to reinforce do do you think do you think okay well it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that something like the default

young female ethos is self-sacrifice in relationship to the marginalized right I mean infants are marginalized they're danger all the time they have to be attended to everything they demand has to be granted to them so perhaps it's not surprising that women would sacrifice their own interests in relationship to the marginalized because That's actually and so certainly self-sacrifice is part of what you might regard as a core in relationship to any moral ethos the the problem seems to be that it can be gamed and it it's gamed so effectively now and then we you also talked

about the fact that the the young people have been exposed to these courses so we could flesh that out a little bit we did find in the study that I described which was a very good study by the way it it was only published as a Master's thesis because my research career came to a rather crashing halt but the fact that even one course had a significant effect over IQ and temperament and sex was telling right so now I don't know if you know this but you might know it you know that um in virtually

every state and province in North America a teacher has to be certified and that's basically the faculties of Education have a hammerlock on that which is appalling as far as I'm Concerned because I don't think there's a more corrupt branch of Academia than the faculties of Education terrible research counterproductive research whole word learning self-esteem social emotional name a stupid fad and the probability that it came out of an educational psychologist in a faculty of education is extremely high do you know that the the K through2 education system eats up 50% of the state budgets in

the United States so that means that 50% more sometimes more so that means that since the 1960s we have handed 50% of the state budgets to the most woke graduates of the worst possible faculties we've done that for four generations and now well and as you said now in your surveys you're finding that the vast majority of students have been exposed to well what what's essentially I don't I don't know how to characterize it postmodern metam Marxist propaganda it's something like that although you know you're stressing more the emotional side of it and so well

I guess that all we'll discuss that a little bit too when we get to your I'm so interested in discussing your Solutions because you know I think the solutions to the universities is to let them perish by their own hand because they're certainly struggling mightily to do so so but you're more optimistic and so I I Okay so so that's this that's the facts on the ground with regards to State budgets 50% of their budgets has been handed over to these propagandistic institutions well I think the schools are critical so one of the things we're

finding for example is that students largely are formed by the time they come on campus and a lot of the studies of University show people's views don't actually change a great deal between when they come on step on to campus and Leave the university however so we really have to focus on the school so one of the things we found in the the study that Zack Goldberg and I did was we looked at how much exposure to critical race and gender Theory Concepts students had had uh in high school and you know we take take

for example somebody who didn't get any exposure to any of these critical race Concepts like white privilege systemic racism unconscious or the gender Concepts many Genders patriarchy for example someone who got no exposure to that uh is sort of 50 to 100% less likely to express for example white guilt think that um you know whites are racist and mean uh to favor a racial quotas an affirmative action all of these things jump 50 to 100% less yes wow and and mindling that's between somebody having no Concepts and the maximum of six Concepts similarly by the

way for partisanship you know someone with a republican Mother uh who is exposed to no Concepts there's a essentially 60% of them identify as Republican exposed to six Concepts it drops to below 30% so one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K12 education public education is absolutely massive and must become a top priority for certainly conservative politicians this if you want to have a hope in the future in terms of turning this around we've got to get at K12 education okay so so let Me ask you about that

I just saw a study the other day just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups when people believe that the culture their culture peaked in terms of Quality Music Entertainment food peace Etc and the the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between the are about say 15 and 19 and you know there's a tremendous amount of neural reorganization that goes on at that point so there's a big die off of Neurons between two and four right so you're born with more neural connections than you ever

have again in your life and a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning there's a major pruning in late infancy and then there's a major pruning in teenage in the teenage years you kind of die into your adult personality that's a reasonable way of thinking about it now people have known for a long time that if you want to get men Into the military in the proper way you have to do that when they're young adults the earlier the better by the time they're 23 or so like forget it you can't tribalize

them right so that we and we don't know exactly the critical period for the establishment of tribal identity but you're suggesting that you're research is indicating that it's actually prior to University you know I bet it's the same time that people develop their musical preferences right Right right right well yeah I think I mean that's such a good a key point that you make about the neurons and and brain development kind of ending in a certain way in the early 20s that tends to manifest itself I mean a political SCI like scientist like myself would

tend to look at these as cohort effects so you kind of your beliefs crystallize to some extent in your early 20s and you carry those through life cuz right now I think there's a complacency amongst a lot of People who say well you know young people are woke but they'll grow out of it you know they'll come back they'll have kids they'll they'll own a house and they'll suddenly become conservative and I think that's quite naive in many ways I think that U I think that may be true in terms of self-interest paying taxes but

in terms of these core values I don't think that's likely and you can see that by the way with religion so secularism non-religion started with Young people and they those beliefs were sticky and they maintained non-religion through life and now we're seeing record levels of non- rigos in the US and Britain for example one of my contentions is yes there's no question that we you know woke has kind of peaked um we've seen a roll back of Dei in corporations to some extent we've seen to some extent uh reduced tar so we'll see about that

they're pretty slippery man just because they don't have the Same name doesn't mean they're not up to the same tricks exactly but but but be that as may be that as it may in the New York Times in the Washington Post editorializing in favor of free speech and against you know mandatory diversity statements what I say is that's true and I think those senior liberals have rode back but I think we've got to look at this in terms of cohort change generational turnover when the median voter and the median employee in an Organization is a

millennial or a Zoomer they're going to carry the beliefs they have with them into midlife and that is going to change our culture so for example if if I say here's a question that we ask yugov asked to hundreds of thousands of British uh respondents on its panels uh do you favor political correctness because it protects people from discrimination or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles Free speech no in the British public it's sort of 47 to 37 against political correctness um amongst academics it's maybe 7520 in favor among social science Humanities academics

young people take after that they're about two to one in favor of political correctness and what I would sort of predict is if we run the clock forward 20 years the median in society is going to shift from essentially being opposed to political Correctness to being supportive of political correctness so something like speech codes for example in universities will have majority support and so I think we really have to turn this ship around while we still have a sensible population because we can't guarantee that that's always going to be the case and so that's why

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a special discount on beam's dream powder get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shop beam.com / Peterson and use God Peterson at checkout that's shop beam.com Peterson and use God Peterson for up to 40% off yeah so okay so so you I want to bring a couple of other issues here Before perhaps we turn to your Solutions now when we began our conversation you said that part of this movement was the establishment of sacred identities and I just brought that up because you brought up the religious issue as well

and I know you've done some writing about that additionally know so there's a variety of I like the idea of sacred see I think what I think religion religious ideas are axiomatic starting points like the ukian axioms for ukian geometry there's Very very many different forms of geometry right you just have to switch the axioms the axioms of a cognitive system I think the word sacred is exactly right is that you have to accept a certain number of things on faith and then you can build a logical edifice on top of that maybe even a

functionally logical edifice but there's going to be aums at the base and so I think that any assumption for example on the part of people like Dawkins that we can replace The religious Enterprise with something that's purely secular is nonsense I think what we'll get is a different set of sacred axioms and you pointed to race gender and sexuality and so why do you first of all I want to know what you think about that and why you use the term sacred but I'm also curious about your thoughts with regard to why it was that

when we shed our previous set of sacred presumptions let's say that it was race gender and sexuality that Rushed in to fill the void right so why them why those why those axioms right well I mean there's a there is a sort of earlier history which I don't go into as much in the book for reasons of space so to some degree uh you know this was directed against immigrant immigrant groups were sort of slightly protected by the liberal progressives not as Extreme as as race post 1960s but I think to understand this we have

to go and one of the Reasons I make the argument that this is about left liberalism is that the Civil Rights Movement starting in the mid-50s but really it's in the mid 60s this you this occurs uh with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act all things which are are things that I support but uh as Shelby Steel in his book white guilt which I recommend to everybody he's an African-American he grew up in the South experienes what he called a dramatic shift almost overnight where The cultural power goes away from whites where

black people had to kind of genuflect to to whites to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they are one of the good whites to black people so the cultural power flows to black people that doesn't mean economic power initially but cultural power that's what he said and in fact American institutions in order to they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the Sin of racial Discrimination once you admit he says you give up cultural power now you have to admit because these were real things but that loss of

cultural power means that you now have to uh fight for your moral legitimacy how do you do that through virtue signaling so you're kind of virtue signaling that you're one of the good whites that your institution still has moral legitimacy so you're going to have an affirmative action program for example you're going to have Some kind of racial sensitivity training which is the precursor to diversity training so a lot of these things really begin in the 60s and 70s which is one of the reason and these are not Marxist things this isn't Herbert Marza saying

we failed on class we got to move to identity because they might do the radical revolution I'm those people were there don't get me wrong you had rufo is correct and Lindsay that at least in terms of the Ideas those ideas were there but really what drove this you know President Johnson was an anti-communist you know he was bombing Vietnam this is not some kind of a a neo-marxist what this was really about was kind of virtue signaling and saying I'm not one of the bad people and we're one of the good people so white

guilt guilt compassion for these groups and a certain exaggerated catastrophizing in fear of the right of conservatives they're going To drag us back to Jim Crow back to 1933 Germany that constant jinning up of that alarmism these are the three elements of the left liberal stool that are developed um and so that's kind of the emphasis so I put the Civil Rights Movement as kind of the the big bang of our moral order and it is sort of the the sort of center of our moral Universe now once you've got this sacredness around race that

you have to very tiptoe around black American because you know You've done wrong and and you feel a bit guilty and then you sort of can take that sacredness it's a bit like Kryptonite and you can wield it and you can if you're a feminist movement you can grab a bit of that power and use it if you are an indigenous movement you can use it and so and then you can stretch it so it's now mispronouncing somebody's name or the moan report 1965 about the black family that becomes a bit offensive and you have

to shove it Right so the stretching it's a bit like putty you can then stretch it across to different groups outwards to microaggressions and this is where all the power comes from and I think you know there's another there's well there's another interesting Dimension there too that's that's worth thinking about that's more psychological than sociological so the there's a group of personality disorders that are extraordinarily Resistant to treatment and should have probably never been medicalized is in my estimation because they're not illnesses so antisocial personality disorder is one of them criminality is not an illness

even though it's diagnosable the associated pathologies are borderline personality disorder which is perhaps the female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder although I would argue it's even more toxic um histrionic personality disorder Narcissistic personality disorder that kind of fleshes it out now the the in so those the people in that cluster let's say they the personality traits they show are they're ma of ellan so they use their language to manipulate so if if someone like that is talking to you the only thing they're using their words for is to obtain power over you for their immediate

needs that's it there's there's no there's no dialogue there's pure manipulation They tend to be Psychopathic and so psychopaths are predators and parasites they are um histrionic so prone to high levels of emotional display especially negative emotion they're narcissistic which means they want unearned social status and just to top it off because that's not bad enough they have a proclivity to be sadistic which means they take pleasure in the undeserved deserving suffering of others now the Reason I'm bringing this up is because that group of people uses claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain

power so there's a there's an additional twist here that that I think is stunningly dangerous and you see it's tied in with your notion that the progressive liberals have enabled the radical see because here's the problem if you're empathic and Progressive you don't believe that Cluster be people exist but because everyone's a victim but the problem is they do exist and and it's in times when that small minority of people maybe that's 4% something like that when they get the upper hand and they do they got the upper hand after the French Revolution they got

the upper hand after the Russian Revolution it is no fun for anyone because they're chaos they they're chaos worshippers their best means of obtaining power and even Reproductive opportunity is in the ashes and so I've spent I spent five years working with Democrats in the US and it got frustrating and so I stopped doing it but part of the reason it got frustrating is because I could never get any of the ones that I worked with and that was a lot to say to me when does the left go too far and I would point

out the dangers of the cluster B Psychopaths and they just handw W it's like oh no they don't really mean what They say they don't mean what they say when they're talking about equality of outcome for example camela Harris she doesn't mean equality of outcome she just means equality of opportunity and you you you have it's it is stunning the degree to which that's an aaic belief of progressive liberals that that radical left Fringe doesn't exist or they don't mean what they say that's Universal I've literally not talked to one of them who including Robert

Kennedy by the way who Was willing to say for example what you said in in your book which is that we better watch out for the demand for equality of outcome because I do think that's where the pathology really manifests itself it's like really you want equality of outcome do you along all dimensions and you're going to how are you going to obtain that exactly except by force well maybe we want Force it's like yeah yeah maybe you do yeah so so well so there's this interplay Between sociology and thought and psychopathology that that that

people aren't attending to and it's very dangerous because the other thing that's terrible is that social media seems to enable the cluster B types because in normal conversation they're subject to the restrictions that face-to-face interaction carries with it like the possibility of getting hit for example but none of that is there on social media and that enables as far as I could Tell that enables this Psychopathic manipulation to have essentially free sway yeah I mean that's really an interesting set of observations I think you're right and and I guess we we're agreeing but from different

ends of the telescope because I think that what's happening is this large group so in a university the median academic is liberal left soft left not farle 50 to 60% of the University uh and this is why for example by a 2:1 ratio social Science AC mics and Elite universities support mandatory diversity statements so this is not something they're being forced to do by a few crazies but of course as you say there's a symbiosis be between the authoritarian left and this large group of liberal left so my view is if we could work on

at least convincing some of those liberal leftists to change course then that will reduce you know it's like unplugging a guitar from the amplifier the liberal Left is the amplifier and the radical left is the guitar player how do we and and but you make another good point which I've heard before which is when does the left go too far the unwillingness and and there's really a couple of strands to this and we might call them equal outcomes diversity is another and inclusion is another the EDI triumvirate and I would say that on all of

those Dimensions left liberalism really has no boundaries so left Liberalism is it is in my view sane on the economy it believes in a mixed capitalist economy and so left liberal is M really emerges as the Victor through two world wars and the Cold War as the ideology of sort of the elite cultural ideology it's not communist actually I don't think it is communist I think it believes in a maybe a higher tax rate perhaps than the free market right but I'm not really that concerned about the economy it's on the cultural Side there are

really no guardrails at all it's it's it's just there are we're not diverse enough we're not inclusive enough we're not equal enough there's no bound to that so whenever someone comes along and says we should be more equal it's like yes what we have is this ratcheting um and that's really where I mean hania's book on affirmative action in the United States moving to this idea of well starts out as well we want equal treatment that's what affirmative action Meant pretty soon it was goals and timetables then there was disperate impact well you know if

you have a test like the SAT and certain racial groups are not represented then that's a kind of indirect discrimination so what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting now that's quite different from a neo-marxist takeover of Institutions a kind of Vanguard March through the institutions argument which I think is I'm not as persuaded but I Think there's some of that happening but I think it's really this sort of evolving ratcheting left liberalism because it has no boundaries as you say when does when is there too much diversity and we know from the

studies Robert putam for example or easterly that too much diversity actually has negative impacts on for example Economic Development on uh various kinds of examples trust in your neighbors and this this is now a this is A finding I would call a how can you have trust with how can you have trust without cohesiveness right right how the hell can you manage that yeah but there's no limits and there's no willingness to recognize we don't want to maximize these things we want to optimize them that is not the way the liberal left thinks they just

think more equality more diversity more inclusivity now of course inclusivity means we got to have Speech codes we got to clamp down on speech which might be offensive so people don't feel included might damage their self-esteem so this is getting at free speech to be to get inclusion and that and I just don't know self yeah self-esteem well I've been watching these pathologies grow in Psychology for 30 years and the social psychologists in particular they just they've irritated the hell out of me for like three Generations and so self-esteem people still use that word so

here's what self-esteem is self-esteem is trait neuroticism minus extroversion there's no such thing as self-esteem it's a complete bloody lie it has no construct validity whatsoever it's an index of your temperamental proclivity to negative emotion and women have lower levels of self-esteem because they have higher levels of neuroticism and that kicks in at puberty and so this is a Good example of how the educational psychologists and the social psychologists have actually perverted the whole culture because we actually believe in things that don't exist so deeply that people use them in their speech as if they're

actual facts maximizing self-esteem it's like it's trait neuroticism it's extremely difficult it's it's it's very much set temperamentally has a very powerful genetic what would you say Foundation Neuroticism doesn't differ between boys and girls it doesn't kick into puberty it's different between men and women all around the world and you know so we can't lower people's self-esteem it means we're aiming at a Target that doesn't even exist and we're using ideological means because we've got our measurements wrong so all right so so one of the things that was striking about your book and and I

don't know how to rectify this apparent Paradox you Make the case that we're we're we've raised a cohort of kids who've been thoroughly propagandized in High School let's say because that looks like about the place where it's occurring and your belief is that that's pretty sticky it's although there'll be some movement in a conservative Direction people get more conscientious as they get older they get more agreeable they do tilt a bit more towards conservatism but you believe That a lot of those ideas will be sticky and that means that that's going to dominate let's say

in positions of power 10 years down the road but by the same token you also believe that there's time to turn the ship around so let's talk about that you have 12 ideas and I'm really curious to see you go through them so well you lectured for us at Peterson Academy right that's right that's right yeah right right so that's one of our answers to the problem and That's launching by the way at the end of the month fantastic yeah and it was very enjoyable experience I I didn't teach anything particularly controversial but still um

what I would say is there's really two different approaches to dealing with the issue I mean one is what I might call libert Aran and that's using Mar market-based Solutions and the other is interventionist using government-led Solutions now I actually lean more Towards the second than the first which may jar against some of the Libertarians in the audience so for example uh I think it when it comes to the Battle of ideas in the media there I think it is the barriers to entry are quite low you can set up a podcast you you you

know can have the impact that you're having that that Joe Rogan is having um but when we're talking about universities for Tech firms particularly search engines there are natural monopolies and There are sort of market failures so there are first mover advantages to being Harvard it's going to be very hard for Harvard's reputation I know it's dropped a little but it's going to be hard for that rank ordering to change a lot um and so and similarly with school so the view that we should simply have uh school choice and that's going to fix the

problem um one of I I I'm sort I think school choice is great but I don't think it's going to make much difference Surveys that I've looked at for example show that kids who go through the through to private school to parochial school who are even homeschooled actually don't differ very much in their views and in addition the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed to is relatively similar if you think about universi even in home schools very very it's it's a little bit lower but in the data that I've

seen which is the at the Fire Foundation individual rights and expression and also we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey now we didn't get a ton of variation now it could be that The Homeschool kids we got a selection of those homeschool kids which wasn't representative I don't know maybe that's the case but well is it a curricul is it a curriculum issue like well how do you account for that because on the face of it that seems I believe it with the private schools because my Experience with private schools

is that they tend to be as woke as the public schools maybe not quite as much but pretty much the homeschool one that that's more complex but it's not that easy for PE parents for example to set up a curriculum and the curricula are well dominated by the ideology let's say but how do you make sense of that right well well I think there are some differences so on the gender ideology there's a bit less amongst The Homeschool um now we don't have a massive sample but there looks to be some effect but it's not

massive and my point is you know if you are a really switched on parent you could send your kid to a classical school if you have that option nearby that may make a difference for you but the number of parents who are like that is quite small most of them will just say what school is going to get my kid ahead into a top university gets the best results even if They have a choice and so most kids are just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine and that's my concern is not

the freedom of a very you know switched on parent to actually avoid these things which is important but it's most of these kids are being put through the same system system so we've got to I think get at the public school system so for example I think something like what Ronda santz is doing sort of essentially Banning Dei um sort of getting indoctrination out of the schools monitoring that okay let okay let me ask let me ask you about that you know because I I really have mixed feelings about this and I'll I'll tell you

why I like Chris rofa I've enjoyed talking to him I think him and DeSantis have done very interesting work in Florida but I have a concern and the concern is that once you establish the precedent that the universities can be directly can be directed from the top Down by the politicians particularly to set their curricula straight you set a vicious precedent and I believe that the work that rufo is doing in Florida setting up the new University for example and pushing back in against Dei is laudable partly because all the universities to speak of are

woke with the possible exception of like Hillsdale and and so even if there is a risk of overshooting on the conservative side they're at such A disadvantage that practically speaking at the moment that might be necessary but like if the universities are incapable of governing themselves and that would go along with the faculties of education and we turn that we we we move that responsibility up the political hierarchy to the elected officials we open the door for Mass intervention in the education system for ideological reasons and that's like so I just can't See that as

I see that as a solution with a lot of attended dangers so I'm wondering like I said I'm I'm I'm I understand what rufo is doing and why and DeSantis as well and I think they're both sensible people but that doesn't mean that it'll always be sensible people doing such things no so I I would draw a very Stark distinction between K12 between the school system where you've got minors who are captive they have to be there they have to Parrot Back what the teacher says in order to get a good Mark with the universities

where academics have academic freedom for example so at University level I would be opposed to critical race Theory bands I've taught critical race Theory I think you've got adults they're choosing which courses to take now I do think however that state governments or or the government has the right to defund not ban but to defund say well we're not going to fund this kind of course now That's a political decision but it's not to say it's banned you can cross subsidize that from your more profitable faculties and I think that will just it will allow

it to be taught If people really want to take it uh but so I don't think we this is practical for universities universities I think there's a different set of solutions but I think for the school system it is perfectly legitimate to say we're going to have a politically neutral space more Important than that sory I just want to say one thing which is you have to teach about the past and the warts slavery genocide Conquest but I don't think you should be allowed to teach about American slavery without teaching about say indigenous slavery or

ottoman slavery you shouldn't be able to teach about or Roman slavery or Greek slavery yeah or stolen land you know the Americans stealing Land from the indigenous without talking about the Iqua stealing Land from the hon and the kamanche committing you know atrocities against the uh Apache so what I mean is we need to have a a fully contextualized discussion that all land is stolen land in a way and that because I think part of what the problem is you know 70% of of you know 18 to 24s in the United States believe that you

know um the native peoples quote unquote the Native Americans lived in peace and Harmony prior to the arrival of the Europeans Right so I this is exactly the problems we have a very all wise stewards of Nature and everything was peaceful and harmonious yeah right Jean sh rouso 101 it's so pathetic yeah so I think that kind of really that sort of attempt to forge the curriculum and now if you look historically Canada the US Australia Britain conservative parties have tried and failed they've essentially been outdistanced by the education establishment time and time again on

This stuff that's going to have to change they're going to have to get hold of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum and political neutrality Britain has a law on the books that schools cannot politically indoctrinate but what they do is they say well critical race theory is not political they get around that yeah right so so so then okay so that begs the next well that begs the next question it's like once the institutions That we're discussing the faculties of Education let's say once they're universally corrupted who the hell has the wisdom or

the time in order to manage something like curricular analysis you know like I went to the Republican Governor's association meeting which was an interesting thing to do I did that last year and one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes me in general about the Republicans it was a rather dull meeting Um they were trying to appeal to their donors so I expected a bit more spice but it was dull in a kind of competent administrative manner so the governors would get up and they would talk about what were essentially local

micro initiatives that were sensible and practical but they weren't the sort of cultural transformation Vision that's necessary for people to sit down and say okay well the faculties of Education are propagandizing what do we want our Children to learn like who in the rufo is an exception to this maybe but he's a singular sort of person it's I don't see widely you know I spent a lot of time talking to political people all across North American it isn't obvious to me that I see anywhere the kind of expertise or even the time that's available to

manage such a thing so how do you how do you envision that happening well I think there are groups So the National associ Association of Scholars has model curriculum Civics curriculum that they're developing some of the think tanks Manhattan Institute as well um so there are now model curricula and Britain history reclaimed is is working on this so we we actually have got model curricula that say conservative governments could adopt they have to have the fight with the educational establishment which by the way they have had and lost now you look At for example DeSantis

the the African-American the AP for example I don't know if you recall where DeSantis rejected the um the AP for African-American studies was filled with critical race Theory forced the critical race Theory to come out of that that's an example of what I'm talking about is you actually have to get into the weeds of this and you have to insist and you have to do inspection you have to mainstream it into the inspection regime All this very boring technocratic bureaucratic stuff I I just think so it's a bit I use the analogy of Elon Musk

taking over Twitter had so much more of an effect than gab parlor you know those are those are important to have these alternatives are important but I just think we're going to have to get our hands dirty get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curricul and actually have that Fight if you're always trying to stay healthy while on the go if you're on the lookout for products to boost your immune strength and gut health you need to check out Arma armra is the gift that keeps on giving

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try they have a special offer for Jordan's listeners right now you'll Receive 15% off your first order go to tr arm.com Jordan or enter Jordan checkout for 15% off that's TR r y rm.com Jordan TR arm.com Jordan or enter code Jordan checkout okay okay well let's fair enough I'm going to point out a couple of problems again it's not because I don't agree with you it's just like you said or implied at least the devil's in the details I mean the person who took over Twitter that was Elon Musk and he's A complete bloody monster

and he's run many diff difficult corporations and done impossible things and so he's like there's one guy like that and he fired what 80% of the Twitter staff and nothing happened except the place got better now the Pito distribution for large corporations or large Enterprises kicks in very viciously and so the Pito distribution uh what would you say uh mathematical equations indicate that the square root of the number of people in a Given organization do have the work and so if there's 10,000 educational bureaucrats then 100 of them do half the work and that basically

means you could fire 80% of them and if the whole place is corrupt you probably have to and like I just can't see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that because it could easily be that 80% of teachers need to go now I know there are places like the act and Academy and so forth That are setting up educational institutions where teachers for example are much less necessary because the students take a lot of the work on their own and they're and I know I understand as you pointed out that there are

places that are producing model curricula but I just I've talked to Republican Governors for example whove tried to take on the teachers unions in their own States and you know failed because the well because they have 50% of the state budgets and They're insanely powerful they're much more powerful generally speaking than the governors are so right well so so you talk about Florida and Florida is a good model but that's one state you know and so so lay out some more of your ideas for how these things might change well I do think so it's

already having an effect in Florida I mean the chilling effect on the CR the CRT banss and those are being now I think there are you know many red States and I I've lost track of The number it might be approaching 25 that are rolling this out and actually there is compliance it's not perfect but I think if the Republican party in these states is serious it will invest political capital and it will demand accountability it will ask people to sort of in you know what are the inspections saying uh you know you have to

report to the legislature on progress and I actually think that process first because I also think most teachers are I Think a lot of teachers are flexible and actually teachers are not quite as leftwing believe it or not as academics so there there is actually I think more receptivity now you also need to open up new avenues into the profession so you don't have to require an education degree there's all things things that that that you need to do um so there's a whole set of things we can do as liberal democracies likewise with the

government getting uh CRT and Dei out of government Is something I think we can do I think you can so through political appointments you have to you're probably going to have to fire some people you might have to set up new agencies so on the UK we have the higher education freedom of speech act where there is a new 10 person academic freedom directorate that's a new institution now I actually think that's a good thing now it could be that labor comes in and defangs it fine I mean perhaps to some Degree this becomes a

matter of political contestation because really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible majority on the cultural side can control is the elected government that is the only institution that we have we don't we we haven't got the schools the universities we haven't got the Civil Service the quangos what we actually need to do is to use elected government to reform all Of these devolved bodies and also institutions relying on public money we're not trying to indoctrinate them our goal is political neutrality and balance that's it I think that

has to be the goal that's maybe where I disagree a bit with rufo and some others who want to put in a different ethos based on Christianity or yuram hone believe I I don't believe that I believe we can have political neutrality and actually you can chill activists within the academic Sector okay so let me ask you about let me ask you about that because the postmodern rejoiner to your claim is that well you claim that your anti- Dei stance let's say is politically neutral or that there's even such a thing as political neutrality but

really all you're trying to do is uh what would you call it sneak in an alternative ethos of power to replace the one that is highlighting the victimized and the marginalized and you know pushing things Back 50 years into the hands of like white Christian conservatives you know because for the postmodernist there's no neutrality there's only a battleground of power that's it and they believe that and they believe it technically and certainly the radical leftists not only believe that but Revel in it because it allows them to use power with no guilt and so why

on what grounds are you convinced that the claim that institutional neutrality for example Could be instituted and that it actually constitutes neutrality what's your philosophical justification for that claim well philosophically you know what I approach the whole book with is this idea of human flourishing a kind of utilitarian argument that says um we want to have a certain amount of equality a certain amount of diversity a certain amount of inclusion but only the amount that is optimal to maximize human Flourishing in the system I think we've overshot on those three and we have to sort

of move it back not back to where it was in 1950 but back a little bit further um and so the idea there is institutional neutral it is critical for people to have trust in the system now we already have for example the Civil Service in Britain is supposed to be neutral we already have this aspiration and I think a lot of people even even left liberals will actually be convinced By they're not postmodern in in being radically cynical uh the way that I mean some of them are but I think many people will be

one over if you say look what we want is neutrality you know you've talked about you know American slavery we want to talk about ottoman slavery I think that making that argument can win over some people uh and I think a neutrality argument is more winnable than to say we're going to replace your ethos of woke with our e ethos of public Religion to to to use Hon's argument right okay so you still think that there's enough of a Centrist consensus around what neutrality constitutes for that to still be a compelling argument to people even

even the left the LI more liberal Progressive types well you'd think at least they'd be self-interested enough to understand that neutrality throughout sequential elections might be a held lot better than Domination by the radical Conservative right which is certainly a possibility and that's certainly something that's emerging in Europe and could easily well who knows how things will play out but it's popping up its head in many many places in Europe right the last country to go was the Netherlands so that's what Sweden the Netherlands Italy most of Eastern Europe like this is starting to happened

very very widely and could certainly continue so neutrality you'd think across Sequential elections would be the best policy for everybody if we had enough of a consensus to Define it well I'd also say too that right now the public if you take a look and I've done surveys in the US Britain and Canada it's the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position and that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or um you know that there are many G or whatever so

it's roughly two to one Against across 50 questions let's say in a democracy the Democracy gets to set the curriculum I think the majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality and balance as they see it and I think we have the numbers to to Institute that now and one of my pleas in terms of the 12-point plan is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on culture uh because you have a two to1 yeah a two to1 majority These are clear wedge issues they divide the left

and they unite the right a question like you know should Winston Churchill statue be removed from Parliament Square you know if you take conservative voters they are you know overwhelmingly strongly opposed to that if you take labor and and green voters um and liberal Democrats they're kind of splintered some are strongly in favor but many are not uh so these are obvious issues to go after why haven't conserv Atives gone after them because they're scared of being accused of being a racist I'll give you another example which is affirmative action red states only four red

states have got bans on affirmative action 13 have bans on abortion now abortion is a relatively unpop and bans on abortion are relatively unpopular they may have a one-third support across the US population bans on affirmative action might have a 2third support and yet There's very little of it in red States what how do we explain that well we explain it first of all by the fact that this issue has not been important enough for conservative politicians hanana does a good job of talking about that and also that the abortion Lobby the gun lobby they're

very organized you know they put pressure on Republican politicians between elections the anti-affirmative action Lobby is totally disorganized and cannot hold Conservative politicians feet to the fire if they do nothing about it that has to change that organization between elections we have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians to raise the importance of this issue and to deliver on that issue now that may be changing well I've seen in I've seen in Canada well I talked to a lot of conservative politicians in Canada and a fair number in the US although I think

the proclivity for this is much more Market in Canada because it's more left leaning um 10 years ago the typical conservative was terrified in Canada saying anything that's smacked of social conservatism and there was a very specific reason for that and the reason was if any one of them came out publicly and said anything socially Conservative then the woke Psychopathic mob would take them out on social media like as an individual right they'd be targeted and destroyed and that was very effective And the conservatives who are also very guilt prone like that's the other thing

too is that the left has this radicals have this tremendous Advantage because especially the really Psychopathic ones because conservatives feel guilt but radical leftist Psychopaths feel none and they can use guilt as a weapon and conservatives are very sensitive to that so you get that combination of clear threat because it is no fun to be mobbed it's really really hard on people it Drives them to not only to distraction but often to Suicide you lose your job you lose your friends you lose your reputation no one has enough courage to stand up beside you the

radicals had the conservatives cowed completely and so and affirmative action is a real Touchstone for that because to even question it well it's changed to some degree now not that much but to even question it meant you're the probability that you could be accused of being a Racist was like super high it's going to happen inantly right but I think this is where you have what political scientists would call an Everton window of acceptable debate right and if you're outside that window you can be cancelled or but you can be attacked by the Press but

what we've actually seen in Europe and in the US is you take an issue like immigration that was a taboo in many European societies that's No longer a taboo so Sweden for example you could not the the sort of establishment conservative party try to one of the ministers tried to raise levels of immigration as an issue in Sweden in 2014 he was attacked and the media as a racist okay he's shut down but then what that means is the next year the Sweden Democrats swoop in on 12 and a half and of course they've reached

25% us Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 20156 to make The Border a signature issue he was willing to go there now once you break the taboo all of a sudden as in Sweden now all the parties are talking about immigration and the taboo is it's not gone entirely but the Everton window is open quite a bit and so in Canada likewise we're going to need that now we've seen it a bit on the gender issue Premier higs and New Brunswick we've seen Scott Mo and saskat that's the beginning of an

opening up of a convers You need a brave politician like higs to break the ice the next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass Graves that has somebody has to sort of say The Emperor's New Clothes on this thing because there is no evidence of this and it underpins an entire garment rening attack on National History on the founders of Canada Etc now who is going to take who's going to throw the first stone in that I don't Know but it has

to happen and I think I I would argue that in fact the population will follow you cuz for example in the surveys I've done by two to one Canadians do not want Sir John A McDonald statues removed they support the idea yes he was a creature of his time no this idea that that the residential schools are genocide Etc I mean this I just think somebody needs to go after that have you had a chance to talk to Pierre POV the new leader of the Conservative party in Canada I haven't um I'm a little concerned

I mean I I certainly think obviously that Trudeau was was a disaster for all the issues we're talking about so uh but I'm worried that paf has only largely talked about economics and only reluctantly about any cultural issues now I get it he's well ahead in the polls why endanger that prior priorities to get there is some of that yeah my sense is though you know my my sense is in Canada That the conservatives are a lot different lot than they 15 years ago like Daniel Smith has a spine Scott Mo has a spine higs

has a spine so does POV there POV isn't pushing the cultural issues at the moment and I think it's partly because and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree if your opponent is busy slaughtering himself you might as well just stand and watch well seriously there's not you know there's no sense causing a tremendous Amount of trouble while that's occurring um but the conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago like a lot and they'll certainly make an issue of the sorts of things that we've been discussing in

a way that wouldn't have been conceivable in say 2010 I think that's right I yeah um I I I think that it's Al but I do think it's important for the Grassroots to to some degree hold PV to account when he's in Office if for example he backtracks on defunding the CBC if he doesn't do anything say anything on immigration on culture wars I think that you know and my worry I having seen it in Britain where the conservative government came in with the support of brexit Voters and essentially did not deliver hoping that that

the voters wouldn't notice so that's my worry but I don't know is the honest answer I don't know him or his cabinet so let me let me ask you a more Personal question maybe um and then I'll see if there's some anything else you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion does it like would you characterize yourself politically where do you characterize yourself politically first of all that's the first Ian I think that you know I don't think I'm down the so I think economically I'm sort of Centrist you know I

have many Centrist views I believe in the welfare state I actually Think tackling climate change is actually a worthwhile thing to to a degree and using nuclear and using a whole bunch of other on however on the cultural side I think I'm very much a conservative and I think we we are in danger of losing free speech and Truth we're in danger of losing National cohesion uh and and so in a whole series of issues i' I'd say I'd probably lean conservative for that reason okay is that a surprise to you I mean you're a

Rare academic right I mean there there it's not like there's no people like you and there are a lot more of them than there used to be you know I'm in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that's got like 100 people on it and there's there's more people who've been well many of them kind of slipped surprisingly into the conservative Camp over years but it's rare it's still comparatively rare and And it's particularly rare in your field I would say although that's also the case in mine so like why is that

the case with you and and how did you come to these conclusions well how did you manage any degree of success while having them yeah it's a tough one as you probably know yourself you know I mean we anyone right of Center is 5% perhaps in in the soft social sciences um and that's what the surveys seem to show uh Now I haven't changed my views really U not really I can't think of any major change that I've had in my views since I was in my 20s um but yeah you keep your head down

you write you sort of write things that are not controversial that are in fields that are not political um and and that's what I did for many years until about 2018 or thereabouts I was a full Professor I was head of Department I I felt that I kind of did what I'd want wanted to do in terms of publishing I published in the major university presses and journals and and so I just thought Now's the Time to actually you know with the populist moment and the rise of brexit and Trump I sort of you know

I was talking about why I think these things happened um in a different way and I was also more openly critical of the social justice movement and that is really what got me under attack from Twitter mobs open letters internal investigations right which are prompted By people inside the university and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed and and you know put in a a complaint against you and then you have to yeah okay well I think what we'll do and I'll let everybody watching and listening know this too I I want to

talk to you for another half an hour on the daily wire side unless let's not step into what happened to you personally let's do that on the daily wire side and I guess what I would like to do um is There are there other issues that you're working on now or that are gerain to this new book that you would like to close with um let's say are are there some other things we haven't talked about that you'd really like to bring to the attention of people on the YouTube side well I I just say

a couple of things I mean first is that I think that uh woke and cancel culture are connected to many different issues that are very pressing to a lot of Voters um and one Of them is you know you look the populist right is going to do very well in Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or there about this is really a so so it's not just you know about free speech and Truth when we talk about ccell culture it is Downstream effects if you can't talk about immigration you're

not going to get control of your border you're not going to get to you're not going to be Able to deport people and then you're going to have populist rising up because the mainstream won't touch it I use the example of Soviet department store you can only sell black pants well then you're going to have somebody popping up and selling blue GS so if the mainstream parties are only selling one immigration policy then the political entrepreneur which is going to be ukip or the Sweden Democrats or Donald Trump is going to pop up so if

you care about polarization And populism you have to have free speech which means we have to deal with woke and I should just say one other thing which is I'm trying to both with this book and which with a new course that I've run this year on it's an open online course on woke trying to get people to understand what's What's led to this problem and why so many of the things that we we argue about and talk about crime Health Care education they're Downstream of this so we can't One of the things that I

fear is that the culture wars get siloed into this narrow campus bubble and people think it's a minor thing and they forget that it has many many effects on a lot of issues that a lot of voters care a lot about so I just think it's a much bigger thing in a way it's the future of our civilization it's not just a little culture War yeah right exactly well that's the thing is you got to see what the source is and it's well it certainly Seems that the sources the source of much of the trouble

is well I think it's the higher education system and then it's the more specifically the ideologies that have gripped the higher education system that people have allowed to grip it I suppose and also enabled and so yes you're absolutely right is in my opinion that it isn't about economics with the culture War being a distraction that's it's partly too you Know one of the things I've come to deeply understand that wealth is a consequence of an ethos it's not a consequence of Natural Resources in fact the natural resource curse is one of the economic facts

that seems to disprove that entirely countries that are rich in natural resources are often in fact statistically more often not likely to be rich because they become corrupt for example you need an ethos and an ethos makes you wealthy and that's what Happened in Japan for example and the default interaction between between Japanese citizens is one of trust and honesty and so Japan can be filthy rich in the absence of any natural resources at all and so there's no culture War independent of Economics that's foolish is if we get the culture war wrong we're going

to destroy the economic system and that's actually the stated goal of many of the real deep radicals and so that actually should come as no surprise to Anyone who's listening and so this and I think you're right in in in consequence about the Libertarians it's like you need a certain kind of cultural consensus so that less government is even an issue and it's not going to be less government it's going to be better distributed responsibility and that's not the same thing at all like right because the libertarian ethos only works when you have a citizenry

that's capable of picking up governance on their own to Take that responsibility then libertarianism is fine but if the culture War has destroyed that responsible ethos less government is not a solution it just lets the IDE ideologues win well exactly I mean this is sort of a point to TUV made as well is that that sort of layer of Civic trust is is vital for the functioning of Freedom if we have more polarization polarization means you Can't enact the right economic policies because each party is sort of wrapping that policy into its ideology people can't

be rational and detached right and and this is one of the things I think that the left loses sight of is that if you try and infiltrate institutions and politicize them Civil Service schools corporations you are actually going to cause half the citizenry to lose trust in those institutions and therefore if without trust I mean as putam putnam's Work a lot of people have done work on the salutary effect of Trust on entrepreneurship and innovation without that basis of trust if that's being torn apart as you say by culture Wars and polarization and and so

I just I'm trying to appeal to the sane left to say look you cannot just conduct your politics by infiltrating institutions you could if you want to win that battle in the court of public opinion that's fine but to try and do it Surreptitiously by infiltration is actually eroding the trust in society and I and and by the way you can see it on the right too the right has kind of won over more positions on the Supreme Court so what do we see the left's trust in the Supreme Court as an institution Falls and

that's what happens when you politicize and so I just think we've got to solve and and when people say it's just a little culture war no these are critical issues that we have got to to Come to a solution on if we want to overcome this polarization yeah yeah all right sir for everyone watching and listening I'm going to continue this conversation on The Daily wire side I'm I'm going to talk to Eric more about what happened to him personally with regard to his experience with cancel culture because well these things are made much more

realistic when they're nailed down to to actual experience and so if you'd be Willing to join us there please feel welcome and invited to do so thank you very much sir be nice to talk to you again at some point I'd like to delve into the uh the the the issue of fundamentals like your take is something like as far as I can tell that there's still enough Centrist consensus so that we can adopt this stance of neutrality and use that as a uh what would you say as a conceptual structure to push back Against

the woke nonsense and you know that seems plausible to me possibly there might be enough trust left for that I'd like to have a conversation with you at some point about what the sacred fundamentals perhaps actually have to be you know what are the ones that are lurking underneath that residual consensus because I think you can be UT utilitarian when when the implicit consensus exists but the question is you Know are we so fractionated that that's not the case anymore hopefully not yeah yeah you I I I think that we do have to sort of

try and just as we fought the Cold War it was economic utilitarianism and well-being against economic socialism what we have now is we've got cultural socialism and we need that sort of cultural wealth perspective it's a bit like the the economists always talk about the p the more equally you cut it up the more It shrinks or the less it grows uh so you need an optimal balance between equality redistribution and growth I think like likewise with the culture we have to have a conversation about the more we push equal outcomes by race and gender

and other things the more that cultural pie isn't going to grow so you may maybe a white man can't write about a black woman and that impoverishes literature you can't borrow that's cultural appropriate I mean the so Essentially we get a poorer culture the more we push cultural socialism and so again I think we need this sort of New Vision which is really about human flourishing and overcoming cultural socialism we'll have some concern with equality as we did with economic equality but it's not going to dominate the whole thing right now I feel we've got

cultural socialism unbounded with no guardrails and that's something that we're going to have to address all right Sir thank you everybody for watching and listening um as I mentioned a few minutes ago I'm going to continue talking to Dr Kaufman on The Daily wire side please feel free to join us there to the film crew here in Northern Alberta thank you very much for your help where are you Eric at the moment um I'm in London um actually you're in London yeah and you're well you're in Northern Al whereabouts in Northern Alberta um a little

bit I'm in a town Called Fairview which is near near Grand prair it's about 400 miles north of Edmonton yeah right I I lived in Peace River for a year I think I mentioned that oh okay so you know you know exactly where it is all right all right sir well thank you very much and uh yeah and good luck with your book and and with your continued efforts and and uh thank you to everyone watching and listening thanks Jordan [Music]