Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. This is I'm pretty excited about this. I
want to Welcome to the program. James Lindsay. He is
an author, a mathematician, and self described professional troublemaker. He's
written six books spanning the subjects including religion, the philosophy
of science, postmodern theory, expert on critical race theory. He
is the founder of New Discourses. You can read his
work there New Discourses dot com. He along with Helen
pluck Rose and Peter Bogosi and they also did the
Infamous or famous depending on your tay, the Grievance Studies papers.
And Welcome to the program. James Lindsay, how are you, sir?
Speaker 2: I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Thank you for doing this. I do appreciate it, and
I reached out to you, and this kind of came
together last minute here, over the course last hour, actually
was I'm seeing in the wake of this murder here
in Charlotte of this Ukrainian refugee by you know, mentally unstable,
deranged man on our light rail line almost three weeks ago.
Now there has been a growing chorus coming from the right,
the online right, and it's it's starting to concern me,
and I'm starting to hear parts of it kind of
filter out through into more I guess mainstream or noormy
types of people on social media, but also in some
emails and some calls and stuff here at the show.
And it has to do with the fact that the
attacker here was black, the victim was white, and this
is now being used as some sort of, I don't know,
like a call for what is essentially a racial essentialism
that we saw on the left. That I know people
like you and me and you have greatly informed a
lot of my work and views on this stuff, and
I'm concerned that we're seeing some of the same stuff
now bubbling up on the right that we were fighting
on the left. And so what are you I know,
you're seeing some of this as well, and you're trying
to push back and it's not a pleasant experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm seeing exactly the same thing. I've been seeing
this actually for our number of years building and become
very concerned about it last summer and I started to
speak up very clearly about it, and I have been
basically punished for it vigorously since. So what I'm saying
now is not a surprise to me, but it is terrifying.
It is that everything we've seen from the left, the
race of essentialism, the racial provocation, and that's just the
race to mention there are other sex, sexuality, gender, and
so on, is now being replicated in reverse. On the right.
They've decided to go full reactionary rather than to try
to restore equality under the law in our country. And
they're pushing that hard right now in the wake of
or making use of this horrific tragedy, this horrific crime
that took place there in Charlotte.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, that's it, the restoration of rule of law,
because what you know, five years, four years ago, we
on the right were saying things like you know, no,
it's equality under the law, and no people shouldn't be
given preferences and that sort of thing. And now it
seems like there are a lot of people that I
thought I was standing next to that were agreeing with me.
Now it seems like I'm standing alone. They may have
gone somewhere else, and like, that's not This is not
a healthy place for the society to be. Do you
think though, that this is like this this is intentional
or is this you said, reactionary? Is it like I
don't know, is it just this response out of like
this feeling of well, if they did it to me,
I'm going to do it to them too.
Speaker 2: Well, there's some of that, But it's happening online. And
the first rule of online is everything that happens online
is at least partially fake. So there are operators embedded
within everything happening online. It's not all organic. There are
agents provocateur who are inflaming this. Instead of trying to
turn the temperature down, they're trying to turn the temperature up.
Whether that's because they're getting clicks and getting you know,
opportunity to be seen or go viral or whatever else,
or whether that's because they're working for somebody. We know
a lot of the accounts on Twitter, for example, are
actually foreign agents that are working to stoke things up.
We see that when just as happened the other day,
a you know, internet line gets cut in the Red
Sea and then Pakistan goes offline for twelve hours and
all the big body accounts that are agitating all the
time seem to disappear until they get back on line.
So we know that this is also it's partly fake
and it's partly real, and that applies in another dimension.
The complaints that they're making are partly fake and partly real.
We're pointing at something real if we want to get
down to brass tacks. The reason that this career criminal,
the schizophrenic was on the train in the first place
is because of various policies to do with crime and
criminality and criminal justice that are championed in city after
city and state after state by Democrats, that are based
in things like restorative justice, which doesn't work, which are
based in things like you know, defund the police, which
doesn't work, abolish the prisons, which doesn't work for various reasons.
There's you know a variety of different reasons from you know,
opportunities for graft to wanting to have a virtuous appearance
with regard to the issue to downrighte adoption in some
cases of communist vision and ideology and policy that lead
this to be the case, but rather than attacking this
genuine issue and that is actually a racially divided issue,
not because of the issue itself, but because the program
has couched in diversity, equity and inclusion, racialist language analyzed
through critical racory. Black Lives Matter has come out and
poured gas all over this fire already today because of that.
This is a very clear, very straightforward policy issue and actually,
just to be blunt Democratic Party platform issue that's being
turned into a race issue so that we can't get
to the bottom of it and we can't solve it.
And it's disturbing to me to see the right, which
has been fighting against this problem so vocally and powerfully
for five to six years, suddenly decides that it wants
to get into the same mud hole and play with
the people on the left that they claimed that they
were standing against.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned a couple different factors, and there are
different people that would fit the bill that you described
for those factors, I think, and you said that they're
using this story, this issue in order to advance this
other thing. And it got me thinking of what you've
always said, which I have quoted you. I try to
always give you credit for My audience now knows this.
In fact, a caller just quoted you saying at in
the last hour, the issue is never the issue. The
issue is always the revolution. And when I heard you
say that, everything sort of falls in place from there,
all of these different issues, And so am I. So
is that what I am now seeing from the right?
Is this the same thing with these right wing influencers
that are using this.
Speaker 2: That's my opinion. Yes, with the influencers, of course, a
lot of the people who follow them are frankly just mad. Yeah,
they're horrified, they're frustrated, they despair. They've wanted these policies
to be corrected, and they don't get corrected, and then
this tragedy, this horrific crime happens. All of this was
very directly preventable, and in fact, it's not like nobody
saw it coming. People have been campaigning to get these
kinds of laws reverted to, these kinds of policies reversed
for a decade now, with no effect. There's at the
Democratic Party has been absolutely unresponsive and in fact just
doubled down consistently, and of course the Biden administration did
that with every issue they could. In the frustration that
a lot of people feel is so high, which makes
them fertile soil for the seeds that the agents provocateur
are throwing, which I think is intentional. I think it's deliberate.
And like you said, you know that famous line from
David Horowitz, the issue was never the issue. The issue
is always the revolution coming straight out of the communist playbook.
Is where he got that, or he was reporting on it,
the idea with you know, the George Floyd riots to
which they're now comparing this. You can look at what
just just look at what happened. Look at the fruit.
That wasn't designed to help racial minority communities or black
lives or any of anything like it. It was an
opportunistic moment for a radical movement to attack our society,
our government, and the idea of law and order. And
as that has broken down, now you have something that's happened,
and you have an opportunistic group of people, some of
whom are probably foreign actors, some of whom are probably
domestic actors with agendas or on payrolls or whatever else
who are now pushing the other direction. And the goal
is like a par of scissors, just to cut us
off from our society, from the rule of law, from
equality under the law, from the equal protection clause in
the laws, and trying in the fourteenth Amendment. And I
think that that's just what I said, an opportunistic move
by a group of dedicated political radicals who are attempting
to do something to a political agenda.
Speaker 1: So now, all this time I've been quoting you, and
it's actually Horowitz that I've been quoting. I've been giving
you false attribution. I could go for a job at
Harvard now no, yeah, all right, Look, it was a pleasure.
I do appreciate you joining me for the program on
such short note. It's very nice to talk with you.
I hope you'll come back again, and good luck.
Speaker 2: Keep up the good works there, fir thing you too.
Speaker 3: Take care. That's James Lindsay.
Speaker 1: You can read him at new Discourses dot com. He's
got his podcast and everything else up there. Highly recommended.
Thanks again to James. So, when I was a kid,
my grandpa died with Alzheimer's and before he died, my
mom and my dad took care of him as he
got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and
not much support for caregivers and family. But things are
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including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great
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It's on October eighteenth that truest field. Sign up at
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description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the
Gastonia Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make
a team and join that one too, or make a
donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand
dollars if you do, I really appreciate it. There are
a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You
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For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments.
This is why we walk. I gotta say, I'm very
happy that I finally got to speak with James Lindsay.
I have been. I did not tell him this, but
I've been a fan of his work for years. I've
been trying to get him on for years, and then
just it happened today.
Speaker 3: I saw him saying some stuff about the use of.
Speaker 1: The Charlotte Murder and how it's being used by people
to foment discord. And you see these people on the
quote unquote right that are now adopting this racial essentialism
that we've been arguing against.
Speaker 3: And it's like, what the hell are you doing over there?
Speaker 1: Why are you doing that? And so I reached out
to him on Twitter and I was like, Hey, could
you come on and talk about this because I'm seeing
this too, and he agreed and I'm so happy that
he did so. Anyway, if you like, I have quoted
James Lindsay many many times over many years, So go
to his website New discourses dot com. He did such
in depth guides and tutorials for years on critical race
theory and critical studies and stuff, the history of it,
the philosophy behind it. I mean, I learned so much
from him about the critical study stuff, and hey gaalienism
and all of it, the underpinning philosophies and stuff, the
history Anthony Graham, she and the known like all of
these different people in the in that movement, and I mean,
and it's still all there. Like you will find he
would he flies all over the place and does speeches
for like very very cheap for groups that need him
to like explain what they're up against. He did a
ton of stuff with Moms Moms for Liberty about the
the books in the schools and all of that and
the you know, the fights that they were having, and
so he would go and speak to their chapters all
over the country. Just just a warrior for this stuff.
So definitely give the guy a follow if you're on Twitter.
I think he's he goes by conceptually James I think
is his name conceptually James or James Lindsay. And he's well
worth the follow, and he does he does as I
have been known to do as well. He does get
in there and gets a little bit rowdy on Twitter.
So he's a good follow, and he's got a great
website with a lot of resources New discourses dot com.
All right, So I know it's been a while, but
Roy Cooper has finally weighed in on the on the
situation here on the murder of the Ukrainian refugee Arena
Zarutzka and Charlotte. I know, I know it's been eighteen days,
but still better late than never, as is Roy Cooper's
mantra when it comes to hurricane response, for example, better
late than that, right exactly. So, after eighteen days of silence,
Michael Wattley, former chairman of the RNC and the North
Carolina GOP Republican candidate for US Senate, and Wattley called
him out on Twitter and he said, eighteen days, where
you've been my good friend, Ray. He didn't say that part,
but he said Roy, like, what's up? No no word
from Roy Cooper for eighteen days? And if you heard
yesterday's program. I went over the trek, the trec This
was what Roy Cooper put together, this Task Force for
Racial Equity and Criminal Justice back in twenty twenty, during
the height of the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful rioting.
And he put in charge of that task force Josh Stein,
who was then the Attorney General who is now the governor,
and Anita Earls, a member of the North Carolina Court
Supreme Court rather and they had pages and pages, I
think fifteen pages of recommendations. I went over some of them.
And this is their philosophy. This is the judicial philosophy
as espoused by the Democrat Party, the radical left, and
it infused our court system in the ensuing five years.
So finally, after eighteen days of silence, Roy Cooper is
goaded into, well, maybe a comms person is goaded into
finally saying something about this story that has now gone national.
And he says, or the account says, because there's no
RC in the tweet. And usually when he tweets, usually
about the Hurricanes, I mean, not the ones. He doesn't
respond to the hockey team. He oh, he tweets about
the hockey team, and then he writes RC, So you
know he wrote that. So he didn't write these right
because he doesn't have RC. So here's what the account says.
The murder of Arena Zarutzka is a horrible tragedy and
we must do everything we can to keep people safe.
Only a cynical DC insider would think it's acceptable to
use her death for political points, especially one who supported
cutting funding to law enforcement in North Carolina, which never happened,
by the way. And also, do you think Roy Cooper
was using George Floyd's death when he convened the task force?
Wasn't that using somebody's death for political points? Oh?
Speaker 3: I know it's different when you do it.
Speaker 1: No, it was wrong then and it would be wrong now.
I've been attorney general and governor dedicating my career to
putting violent criminals behind bars, but not clearing out the
rape kit backlog and keeping them there. It's time Michael
Watley and the GOP get serious in Washington about funding
our law enforcement. And that's what I'll do with Senator.
This is not a law enforcement funding problem, dude. This
is not about Washington DC not giving Charlotte enough money
to pay for cops salaries. That's not what this is about.
The cops did their jobs. They arrested the dude fourteen times.
This is a judicial system problem, and this is such
a week. This is a worse response than even the
mayor gave the first time and the second time, and
it's basically in the third time too, So like all
three of her statements, this is worse than all three
of her statements.
Speaker 3: And he got dragged on Twitter and I was so
there for it.
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I did derive a good bit of saturd faction watching
Roy Cooper get ratioed into space yesterday.
Speaker 3: I may, I know it may be a little bit petty,
but so be it.
Speaker 1: After watching this guy skate on bad policies, bad politics
and destructive behavior and getting a pass from North Carolina media,
it was nice to finally see this guy nuked. It
was And for folks who don't know what a ratio is,
it's when the number of responses outnumbers.
Speaker 3: The likes on a post.
Speaker 1: So if I say, you know, mayo is the best
condom end ever, and I have you know, a billion likes,
because that's obviously the true position, I have a billion
likes and I have only you know, two comments, then
that's not a ratio. But if I were to say mustard,
for example, is the best condiment and I got a
billion comments and only two likes, that would be a
that would be like probably the worst ratio in the
history of the world. That's called getting ratioed. It means
that more people are responding to your comment than liking it,
which means generally that because if somebody's going to respond
in a positive way, they're also going to click the
like button. The fact that they're not clicking like means
that what you have said is so profoundly unpopular that
everybody is calling you an idiot and attacking your position
and you And that's what happened to him on both
of those tweets, both of his tweets, he sent out
two of them back to back. I read it all
as one statement, but those were two different tweets, and
it was like a two to one, three to one
ratio margin. It wasn't even close. And this is what
I said at the beginning, when Roy Cooper threw his
name in the hat and then threw his hat into
the ring said he was going to be running for senate.
I said, he has never gotten the kind of coverage
that he is now going to get from the national media.
And I don't I'm not sure that he's prepared for it,
Like I'm I don't mean like from a comm standpoint,
because I didn't know at that time. But now it
seems like his comms team is also not prepared for
this either, because he's been running like attorney. He was
running a senate race, state senate race. You know, he
was in the state legislature. And then he runs for
attorney general and it's just, you know, I'm going to
be tough on crime. And then he sits in the
AG's office for four terms, barely even gets any opponents,
and then he runs for governor. And what did he
do with the governor race. He made it about HB two,
barely beat Pat McCrory, barely beat him, and just got
fawning media coverage from the state political press. And it
was a walk in the park for him, even during
COVID when people are raising all of these questions and
pointing out problems citing his you know, egregious overreach of
the executive and we were getting no traction. And so
now he's running for US Senate and now this seat
is really important to the rest of the country, and
now there's a lot of outside interests that are interested
in this race. And he has failed his first test here.
He has failed it. This is the first test, how
does he behave in the wake of this kind of
an attack, and he failed it. Josh Stein did not
fare much better. The governor says I'm heartbroken for the
family of Arena Zarutzka who lost their loved one to
the senseless act of violence, and I am appalled by
the footage of her murder. We need more cops on
the beat. See this is the Democrat talking point. This
has gone out obviously, the fact that it took this
long for Cooper and Stein. I've also got a statement
here from State Senator Caleb Tedros who I had on
the program a couple of weeks back, and he's talking
about local officers need more staffing and training and tools.
They're making it about police. They're making it about we
need more cops because they see this as an opportunity
to distance themselves from the defund the police line that
they were selling five years ago, and it did not
help them. They got pummeled in the state legislative races. Pummeled,
I say, the Republican campaigns ran ad after ed after
ad about their defund the police platform and the crime,
and it did not go well for Democrats.
Speaker 3: And so this is now their chance.
Speaker 1: They're going to try to reposition themselves as backers of
the blue. We need more money for cops, and this
is not a money for cops issue, that's not what
this is about. And the fact that all of them
are now coming out saying the same thing, We need
more money for cops, we need more money for mental health. No,
the problem is the courts, which in Mecklenberg County are
controlled by Democrats. The courts are controlled by the Democrats,
and this is a core judicial philosophy. When you're letting
people go with a rap sheet of fourteen arrests and
years in prisons for violent offenses, and then they come
in expressing sex a ski it's aphrenic symptoms, and your
answer is to let them walk on cashless bail with
a promise to appear for a psyche val.
Speaker 3: That's a judicial philosophy. That's the problem.
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better returns. There is some breaking news out of Utah
at Utah Valley University. Charlie Kirk was delivering a speech.
He was doing one of his events at Utah Valley
University and there are reports that shots were fired at
the event. There's no other information available at this time
that I'm seeing. Fox News is reporting it, no further
information available. CNN says nothing on his injuries, just that
Charlie Kirk was shot at don't know if he was
struck or not, and I don't know if there's a
miscommunication going on with the way it's being framed as
that he was shot at an event or if he
was shot at the event.
Speaker 3: I'm seeing it reported different ways. And I don't know
if people in.
Speaker 1: Their race to be the first to report that something
terrible has happened that they are not that they're reporting
it sloppily. I will take this as an opportunity. Once again, Well,
I guess two things. Number One, Let's wait and see
what the information is. Yes, offer your prayers if you
are the praying type, for Charlie Kirk as well as
all of the students and all the attendees, everybody that
was there, that there are no casualties, there are no injuries,
and everybody is alive. Because we don't have any information,
and so just wait for more information to come out
before racing to fill in any gaps with what you
think may have occurred. And also, don't amplify people who
are doing that on social media. And this gets to
point number two, which is in this day and age,
everybody with a social media account is part of the
media and there is a responsibility that comes with that.
And I'm not saying this to gatekeep you or to
suppress you or not you or anybody just but there
are things that you should do and keep in mind
when you are publishing, because you are publishing, you are
a member of the media when you publish something on
your social media accounts, and so you need to be
responsible to not spread lies and not promote things that
are not true that are going to make people react
in ways that they otherwise would not have reacted. So
before you amplify something, before you share it and say,
oh my gosh, I can't believe this, which I've never
understood that people some people who do this and it's
not everybody hashtag, not everyone, but like there are some
people that it seems like they they want the attention
for themselves. There's a lot of people in legacy media
that does this too. The suspect is reportedly in custody
according to Desert News that's an Arizona newspaper. Let me
see if I can pull up the information. So they're
reporting Charlie Kirk was shot at Charlie Kirk was shot
at an event that's from Desert News. Bystanders report seeing
Kirk shot near his neck during a Q and A
with student. Again, all of This information is subject to
change because it always does.
Speaker 3: It always does.
Speaker 1: Okay. A suspect is in custody. Campus is on lockdown.
A single shot was fired on campus towards a visiting speaker.
Police are investigating. Now. Suspect is in custody, according to
an alert from UVU. But that's but that's it. That's
all we've got from Deseret dot Com. Again, that's a
newspaper in Arizona, right, Arizona? Or is that Utah? But
he was speaking at a Utah event and I'm not
seeing it, Okay, So it says breaking news, but there's
nothing else to it. So again, if you are of
the prayerful kind, say a prayer for Charlie Kirk and
his family. He's got several young children, a wife, and
he was at a university appearance doing a Q and A.
Speaker 3: All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
the show without your support and the support of the
businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like,
please support them too and tell them you heard it here.
You can also become a patron at my Patreon page
or go to dpetecleanershow dot com again, thank you so
much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.