If Books Could Kill - The Identity Trap

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

"There are two kinds of political scientists: The types who deal with noisy data and post on Twitter with a bunch of caveats. And then there are the types who write books about identity politics." Where to find us: TwitterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Sam  Huneke's "Yascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man"Jacob T. Levy's "The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics"Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's "Elite Capture"Aaron Huertas's "We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists"Mary Lin Elementary under federal investigationParents refute claims of segregation at Mary Lin Elementary SchoolSchool Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970–200060 Years After BrownSchool choice and racial segregation in US schoolsStudent Population Has Significantly Diversified, But Many Schools Remain Divided Along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic LinesU.S. public school students often go to schools where at least half of their peers are the same race or ethnicityThe Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan PreferencesWhy The Democrats Have Shifted Left Over The Last 30 YearsWidespread misperceptions of long-term attitude changeTrump, the 2016 Election, and Expressions of SexismChanging Norms Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: The Trump Effect on PrejudiceChanges in Americans’ prejudices during the presidency of Donald TrumpThe CDC slide presentationModel-informed COVID-19 vaccine prioritization strategies Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Can't do any jokes about identity politics. They're all fucking. They're all why they're all battle on B. Shit. You can't do a satirical crack about it because it won't register to 90% of our listeners Who already believe that I'm a conservative? But a sexy conservative Peter due to the voice they They they know that I have woke elements, but also watch football highlights. And that is, that's reactionary coded, I admit. From a team with a problematic name. I've made the promise.

I've told people that if we don't win a Super Bowl this year, we're getting more racist. It's the only way to fight the power. I like those podcasts as we come a venue for us to repeat our best Twitter jokes. I'm like, that was a fucking banger. You're getting it again. Peter. Peter.

Michael. What do you know about the identity trap? Is the trap that when you're a white guy who turns 40, you have to start complaining about identity politics. So today's episode is about the identity trap by Yasha Monk. It's a little bit different from the other books that we've done in that it's not like the best-sellingest book imaginable, but it does make a series of arguments that are increasingly prevalent about the problems with identity politics, etc. And so I think it's a good encapsulation of this argument and something that we should confront.

It's emblematic, right? It's also very deliberately attempting to be the non-psycho version of this argument. So the author, Yoshimunk, he's acutely aware that he's making an argument pretty similar to people like Chris Rufo and Richard Hennania. Basically, people who explicitly want to get Trump elected. And so what he is doing is saying, okay, we know that this has kind of been hijacked

by some of these further right people. What I'm trying to do is make like the good faith smart version of the argument that identity politics has taken over the left and is becoming an electoral liability. I'm intrigued to see where Yasha goes here. We're both going in with an open mind. Absolutely. This is a no-dunk listen, listen and learn podcast.

I know that he's a political scientist, and it feels to me as someone who has a degree in political science, there are two types of political scientists, quote unquote. They're the types that just like deal with really noisy data and like post on Twitter with their conclusions and then a bunch of caveats. And then there are the types, they're right, books about identity politics,

if that makes sense. To start with our protagonist, Yasha Monk is born in 1982, same as me. He grows up in a small town and then moves to Munich when he's 12, he gets his BA from Cambridge, he then goes to Harvard for his PhD. He writes a memoir about growing up Jewish and Cold War Germany.

And starting in 2016, he kind of makes his name as a like failure of democracy scholar. He starts publishing this research about how people in liberal democracies are like less enthusiastic about liberal democracy than they used to be. And kind of the rise of these authoritarian attitudes. He then starts racking up these CV bullets

of just establishment institutions. So this is from his website. Yasha is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as a publisher at DeatSight. Oh, hell yeah. Aspen and Bio. He is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation

and he was the executive director of the renewing the center team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. How's that mission going, folks? Yeah, that sounds like a 30 rock joke. It's a great dance. And so this book is basically an argument about how like identity politics is leading the left astray and the way thatense. And so this book is basically an argument about how like identity politics

is leading the left astray. And the way that he defends writing this book is that he's written two previous books about like right wing radicalization. And so that sort of gives him a license to finally turn to the problem on the left. Okay, we're now ready for the episode to get good because we're going to talk about the book that he's written. This is a pop political science book, Peter, so what do we have to start with? Are we talking one book? We're gonna need an opening anecdote.

Oh, God. A whole story that encapsulates some of the little themes. Okay, let me, can I guess? I do, do I do. This is going to be something that's emblematic of the worst excesses of lefty identity politics. So I'm going to guess that this is something involving children, maybe like a middle school teacher

trying to teach something about race and losing the plot for Yasha. Is that right? I mean, it's actually shocking how wrong you were. This is actually about an elementary school where someone loses the plot about race. The edit this out, edit this out so I don't look foolish. Really embarrassed for you right now.

I am going to send you the opening paragraphs of this book. In the late summer of 2020, Jennifer Kingsley asked the principal of Mary Lynn Elementary school in the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta, whether she could request a specific teacher for her seven year old daughter. No worries, the principal responded at first, just send me the teacher's name. But when Kingsley emailed her request, the principal kept suggesting that a different

teacher would be a better fit. Eventually, Kingsley, who was black, demanded to know why her daughter couldn't have her first choice. Well, the principal admitted, that's not the black class. The story sounds depressingly familiar. It evokes the long and brutal history of segregation, conjuring up visions of white parents who are horrified at the prospect of their children having classmates who are black, but there is a perverse twist.

The principal is herself black. As Kingsley told the Atlanta Black star, she was left in disbelief that I was having this conversation in 2020 with a person that looks just like me. It's segregating classrooms. You cannot segregate classrooms. You can't do it. So, it's like a weird version of Horseshoe theory where it's like people have moved so far to the left. Now, they've ended up in this right-wing place. They're like, yes, let's separate their races. Separate the children from each other due to my wokeness. Right. separate the races, separate the children from each other, due to my wokeness, right? Oh, no.

Okay, all right. I'm ready for whatever this actually is or isn't. We got it. God. I love that you're already rushing into, like, I don't know about this, Mike. This seems a little short, this retelling of like, what might be a more complicated anecdote.

Ugh, God. He tells this story in basically every interview that he's done. You know, he's been interviewed on kind of all of the main liberal and centrist podcasts. And he always like starts with this anecdote. He talks about the principle. He says, she had bought into an identity and ideology that is attempting to reshape the norms of the West.

According to this worldview, we shouldn't be teaching school kids that they have things in common. We shouldn't be telling them to stand in solidarity with each other. We shouldn't show them how to recognize injustice. Instead, students should define themselves as strongly as possible by the particular racial group to which they belong. Sorry, immediately off the rails, with the description of the ideology, right? You know, it's not just like, oh, they're sorting kids based on race, right? And here's what that might lead to. It's like, they're telling them that they have nothing in common. They're telling them that they shouldn't speak out against injustice,

that they should be anti-solidarity. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't think you've established this. It's also cast as this betrayal of what makes us liberals, right? So when he's defining this, what he basically says is, like, the left used to fight for universal values, equality, liberty, freedom, but now they've abandoned that effort. And they're now fighting in favor of the things that divide us, things like race and gender, and all of these identity markers that are,

that are what makes us different from each other. So he says, this trend is especially striking in education. Over the last decade, many schools have introduced race-segregated affinity groups, some as early as kindergarten. In extreme cases, principles who claim to be fighting for social justice have, as Jennifer Kingsley experienced in Atlanta, even put all the black children in the same class. A similar set of trends is now changing the nature of higher education. World-renowned universities are building dorms reserved for their black or Latino students, hosting separate graduation ceremonies for students of color, and even excluding some

students from physical education classes on the basis of their race. In the place of liberal universalism, parts of the American mainstream are quickly embracing what we might call progressive separatism. And a progressive separatism. You can hear inception horns. Oh, God. So whatever. Look, I do want to I want to flag one thing about this because like I don't think it's crazy to think that there are teachers out there who are misapplying like social justice principles and saying dumb things about race. That is very,

but that is very believable. And in fact, pretty much inevitable. Yes. But in the quote you sent me, he said in a growing number of schools all across America, educators who believe themselves to be fighting for racial justice are separating children from each other on the basis of their skin color, right? That is a quantifiable claim that should be backed with like clear data and yet all of these conversations happen in a barrage of anecdotes. One thing I started to notice very early in this book is the way he relies on your mind filling in the blanks. So in this little litany of anecdotes,

he says, they're hosting separate graduation ceremonies for people of different identity groups, right? One thing in favor of this book is that he gives like very meticulous footnotes. So like every single claim in the book, he has like a link to where he got it. So like, I appreciate that. But then when you go to the description

of these like separate graduation ceremonies, they're actually in addition to the main graduation ceremony. Right. He also has this thing of like affinity groups in schools now. Like they're doing racial affinity groups. Right. But again, like we had those in my high school in the 1990s. We have like the Filipino club, like the the black students club. Yeah. He says that this harkens back to like 1950s segregation, but like these are students opting into voluntary groups. There's actually a huge difference between that

and like you must attend a black only or white only school. Something about this that always gets missed is like, you're not gonna see a lot of like black affinity groups at vast majority black schools, right? These are groups that form among kids who feel like they are looking for some sort of cultural connection. Yeah, I mean, he mentions university housing that they now have housing for like specific identity groups.

One of the examples that he gives in the footnote is Berkeley. And like, it's true that Berkeley has something called like Africa House for Black students, but it's like it houses something like 200 students and Berkeley has 43,000 students all together. And you can find actual articles about the creation of these institutions that Berkeley is only 3% Black despite California being like 8% Black. And they've always struggled to recruit black students. And one of the reasons is that like, there aren't that many black people at Berkeley. And so black students feel really isolated. And so in this context, they're like,

well, why don't we set up a place for black students to kind of like find each other and like offer each other support? Is that bad? Maybe if they stopped viewing themselves as black and started viewing themselves as human beings, Michael, we wouldn't have this problem. So are you ready to talk about our opening anecdote in the Atlanta suburbs? Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

So again, when he says this thing about like, there's the black class, your brain fills in that like, oh, it's an all black class. That is not what happened. What actually happened is this is a school in wealthy, overwhelmingly white suburbs of Atlanta. And in the second grade class, there are 98 kids altogether. There's only 12 black kids. The second graders are split up into six different classes. There's like around 16 kids per class.

If you distributed all of the black kids equally, you'd have two black kids per class. If you distributed all of the black kids equally, you'd have two black kids per class. So this black principal, she grew up attending almost exclusively white institutions, and she felt really isolated as a kid, and she felt like she had no community. So she decides she's going to group together the black kids. So she decides to put six black kids in one class, six black kids in another class, and the other classes have zero black kids in them. Okay. So at the most basic factual level, there's no all black classes anywhere in this anecdote. There is this accusation that the mom tried to move her kid and the school was like, no, no, you can't because like that's not the black class. I'm actually changing the name of the mom because I love the way these anecdotes get litigated

in national media. I'm gonna find the real name and I'm gonna tweet it out. Yeah. Thanks. Brave, brave Peter. But so it appears to what happened was this mom who's like really involved in the PTA and runs an after-school program.

Her daughter tested the low grade level on a test. She tried to move her daughter to another class, and the school basically was like, no, you can't do that in the middle of the year. One of the few articles that actually interviewed people at this fucking school, talked to an administrator who said, this is basically a mom asking for special treatment.

She wanted to move her daughter to a different class with a different teacher, and the school was like, no. And then she complains and then they cut her after school class and she says that's retaliation. And then she starts recording her conversations with the principal and then eventually she goes to the media with this all black class story. And like, I hate how much I know about this.

I hate how much fucking time I spent looking into this. The whole thing honestly smells like an interpersonal dispute to me. This has been going on for years. Okay. We can't say exactly what happened at this one fucking school, but I feel like what we can say is that the worst possible version of this story is not reminiscent of 1950's segregation. What was distinct about like early 20th century segregation in America was that students of different races

were receiving different educations. Yeah. Not that teachers were trying to pair them up in ways that they thought would help with their shared cultural understanding or whatever. Exactly. And putting aside the stuff with the mom and like whatever the interpersonal dynamics were,

the basic facts of this story are a principle at an overwhelmingly white school without the power to make the school more diverse, doing her best in a structurally unsound situation. My, you know, my instinct just hearing about it as a lawyer is like, this is not good. The thing is, you know, my instinct, just hearing about it as a lawyer, is like, this is not good. This is not good.

The thing is, I think there's actually, like, this is something that comes up throughout the book, is that like, there's a lot of these cases that like are actually quite legally dubious, but it's not clear if they're like morally or ethically dubious. Right, that also means that there is like an apparatus for shutting this down, you know what I mean?

Like, to the extent that there is like an apparatus for shutting this down. You know what I mean? Like, to the extent that someone is sorting children by race exclusively, you can point out that that is most certainly illegal and shouldn't be done and that is how you handle it, right? What Monquist to argue is that this is sort of like the manifestation of a mindset that has gone too far. Yeah. But I'm not sure that it's a particularly strong example, you know, again, this is just

someone who felt isolated when she was a child and tried to sort of piece together a system that would avoid that for the black students in her class. Now, is that like thinking race first too much or something? Maybe, but it's not. It doesn't seem like a moral disaster, right? It doesn't seem like we are a small step away from racial segregation as it was in the South. He also, he describes this as symbolic of like a much larger cancer on the American left that like, oh, progressive separatism, right? But it's also noteworthy that there have now been three different investigations of this after this mother went to the media with her complaint about the principle. So the Atlanta School District investigated, there's now a federal investigation

and the NAACP sent somebody there to investigate what was going on. So it's like, the fact that something happened at a school that you think is bad, like, doesn't really say anything, right? There's tens of thousands of schools in the United States to claim that this is like a much broader problem. You have to show that left-wing institutions are accepting of this or cheering it on, right?

Like, ooh, put even more black kids in the one class. Yeah, I love it. No, there was a huge outcry about this. And the school, it appears immediately changed this. But by the time the NAACP even gets there, there's two black kids per class. This is the problem with like all of our discourse being filtered through anecdotes that are one sentence long. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If I just like walked you through the dumbest shit that my elementary school teachers told me, dude, it would be jarring. Dude, I had a Spanish teacher in high school who made us watch Shall We Dance? A movie that is in Japanese, because she was really into ballroom dancing, and then we learned ballroom dancing

for like a whole week. God, being a bad teaser must rock. You know what I mean? She was so excited to teach us to dance. Like, she just didn't want to teach us Spanish at all. But the fact that you can sort of pull up a couple anecdotes like this really says nothing to me, especially when like, if I were to start compiling anecdotes about like the imbalance treatment of black versus white defendants in Louisiana criminal courts.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. The anecdotes I could pull out would be endless. Yeah. It would drown the bullshit in this book.

I think that's also emblematic of where this anecdote sits, because school segregation in the United States is still a huge problem. That's the thing, is that it seems like the story that monk and a lot of the folks on the right want to tell about this is like, we reached a place of perfect balance and equality, and then the left kept going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what actually happened after like Brown v. Board was that Southern schools put as many roadblocks between them and desegregation as possible.

Eventually, they were successful. I mean, I spent quite a bit of time like reading about the dynamics of current school segregation in the United States, and like roughly half of minority kids attend schools that are 75% minority, 10% of American students attend schools that are 90% one race like all white or all black. It's also darkly funny that these steaks of Yasha's Atlanta

anecdote are like, oh my god, there's like all white classes at the school. But one in five white kids attend 90% white schools. So like, there's a lot of all white classes in the United States of America. And yes, there was this period. There was after Brown v. Borer, there was this period where everyone fucking ignored it.

And then starting in the 1970s and 1980s, we had all these city programs to like do force busing or like to kind of directly address segregation and there was actually a period where segregation in schools fell But as the Supreme Court basically neutered all of those programs and white parents lost their fucking minds cities one by one totally abandoned these plans and so right since the 1990s There's actually debate among academics whether segregation has gotten worse or whether it's just stagnated. But we essentially have not made any progress on this

for 30 years. And in all the literature that I've read on this, I didn't see one mention of like, wokeness. The primary driver of school segregation is like the way that we fund public schools, right? People pay for it with their property taxes and most kids attend the nearest school. So when you have all white neighborhoods and all black neighborhoods, you have all white and all black schools. That is kind

of the original sin of school segregation. We also have rich white people protecting their privileges and like there's actually these like super bleak studies that as the percentage of black students in a school rises, the white kids start increasingly flowing out to private schools and that effect only shows up for highly educated white parents. Highly educated black parents don't do this. So like there actually is a case to be made that like white liberals are the problem here. But like Yasha isn't interested in making that case because that would require looking at the actual dynamics

of segregation. It's incredibly frustrating to have someone sort of like pontificating like, ooh, you know, liberals in schools are recreating segregation. And it's like, segregation still exists for us. But we just have the secret, we don't need to recreate anything.

It's just now de facto instead of de jour. Right. And some fucking principal shuffling around the six black kids or whatever is not going to make a difference. Dude, he thought this anecdote was so strong, he opened his fucking book with it. Right. This is like the first three minutes of every season

of the wire. All right. So that is the overture, chapter. He spends the rest of the book laying out the characteristics and flaws of what he calls the identity synthesis. They have to do so much defining in these books because I know point to their ideas,

like, sort of naturally cohere. This is usually watched the interviews with him where they're like, define the core concept of your book and then he talks for like four minutes. Okay, well. Define the core concept of the identity trap and he's like, it's Atlanta in the year 2010. Yeah.

Yeah. 1950? No. So he's very open about the fact that like, you know, there's all this stuff about wokeness and identity politics in the 1990s, and people on the left have been kind of clowning on conservatives for like being totally unable to define this term that they spend all their time whining about, right? And he's like, I'm trying to set myself apart from that, but

also like this is basically the same thing. He's quite explicit about it. He's like, look, we just need a name for this. Whatever, whatever you want to call it, I don't really give a shit. But like, we all know this is happening. This is as close to a real definition as we get in the book. So I'm going to send this to you. Good luck with that first sentence, by the way. Godspeed. The identity synthesis claims to lay the conceptual groundwork for remaking the world by overcoming the reverence for long-standing principles that supposedly constrains our ability to achieve true equality. Crystal clear. Sorry, I'm just rereading it. You're not laying conceptual groundwork.

It claims to lay. Claims to lay the conceptual groundwork for remaking the world by overcoming the reverence for long- and eprince, both as supposedly constrained our ability to achieve true equality. Genuinely doesn't mean anything, I don't think. Many words. It seeks to do so by moving beyond or outright discarding the traditional rules and norms of democracies like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. How dare they list Canada first? Many advocates of the identity...

How many times am I going to have to say identity synthesis throughout this episode? Luckily not anymore because he needs identity politics and it's just going to be easier for everybody if we just say identity politics from now on. Many advocates of the identity synthesis feel righteous anger at genuine injustices, but their central precepts amount to a radical attack on the long-standing principles that animate democracies around the world. Basically, what he's saying here, I mean, tell me if you disagree with this, but the identity synthesis is people taking the desire to rectify injustice too far to the point where they end up giving up democratic norms.

And before you know it, you're, you know, Secretary of State and kids and you're shutting down free speech, etc. Well, yeah, I think that's right. This is the sort of common refrain that social justice movements are illiberal. And these centrist are, in fact, the true inheritors of Western liberalism. Right. I do find it interesting that when he talks about the norms and traditions of democracies, we all know that he's talking about very abstract things, like speech and not voting rights, for example. Right. So the rest of the book, he spends laying out like the main sort of themes and content.

This is what he does when people ask him like, can you define the identity synthesis? He's like, well, it consists of like seven precepts. Okay. The book is like structured really weird. He has like the main themes and then he's like the flaws of the identity synthesis, but then they're like kind of the same as the themes, but like a little bit different. And then he's like, flaws of the identity synthesis, but then they're like kind of the same as the themes, but like a little bit different, and then he's like, how to fix the identity synthesis,

and then he like lays out the same thing again. So like, I've kind of pulled this apart and put it back together of like what I think are like the main things that he like keeps returning to. I hate it when they're like, well, it's not really an identifiable thing. It's like 10 concepts in any arrangement. It's like fibromyalgia. So he's now going to walk us through the main themes of the identity synthesis. The first is skepticism

about objective truth. Goddammit. You know where? You know what he's going to say. Michael, don't tell me that we're doing Foucault. This was my reaction. God damn it. I was like, oh, don't make me do fucking Foucault. I have a new motto for our podcast, Foucault. Fuck no. Not engaging. So the first third of the book is like this philosophical historical account of these thinkers, post World War II,

who are basically starting to question these quote unquote grand narratives of history, right? These things like everything will always get better. Like we're protecting the rates of man or whatever. And there was a school of thought kind of personified by Foucault that questioned the extent to which we can really say that like we can gather quote unquote objective truth, right?

Because these concepts of kind of progress and advancement and scientific accuracy are often as used by the powerful against the powerless. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for this, I talked to Sam Hunky, who's a historian at George, either Mason or Washington University, the weird libertarian one.

A relevant. He's also a friend of mine, because we're both homosexual males who lived in Berlin. The reason I exploded laughing at that Peter was I literally texted him. I know that he's wrong about Foco, but don't make me read Foco for this. I don't want to read Foco to debunk this, so Sam, what's the deal?

Basically, Sam, like, knows way more about the shit than I do, was like, he's not wrong about any of the Foco shit. Yeah. He's essentially just summarizing, like, Foco, and then eventually he moves into like Derek Bell and like Kimberly Crenshaw and this kind of critical theory stuff. Yeah. He's roughly correct about it, but it's like, that's not really the thing that he has to prove. It's like, yes, these ideas were being published

in like obscure law and philosophy journals. What they're trying to do is imagine that, like by going back 40 years and saying, here's what leftists were writing in like the 70s, for example, that you can sort of infer this is what leftists actually believed, right? Yeah. I know it's sort of like an atheist trying to do a gotcha on a Christian by reading the Bible. Yeah. It says this and the Christian is just like, I don't actually believe that.

This whole question is like where we get into one of his tendencies throughout the book, which is just kind of like this use of gotcha in place of actual argumentation. So throughout the book, he comes back numerous times this thing where he's like these critical race theory scholars said that race is a social construct and yet black people are the most qualified to talk about their experiences. That's just a misunderstanding of like what a social construct is. He also has this bizarre section at the end about gender stuff where he points out that glad once tweeted, congratulations to Rachel Levine for being the first openly trans federal official.

And he's like, ah, so they do believe it's worth distinguishing between trans and cis women. That's not what people mean when they say trans women are women, but there's no distinctions when people say Toyota's are cars. They don't mean that there's no differences between fucking Toyota's and Honda's. He also does a thing where he takes suspiciously short quotes from his source material. So here's this advocates of the identity. suspiciously short quotes from his source material. So here's this advocates of the identity synthesis

are especially prone to reject the idea of meritocracy. Objective truth like merit does not exist. Richard Delgado and Jean Staphon chick write in their influential critical race theory and introduction. So it's like a little phrase. You're like, that's like kind of suspiciously short. So I got this critical race theory, an introduction. So, it's like a little phrase, you're like, that's like kind of suspiciously short. So, I got this critical race theory book, and here's the actual original citation.

Finally, CRT's adversaries are perhaps most concerned with what they perceive to be critical race theorists nonchalance about objective truth. For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit does not exist, at least in social science and politics. CRT's adversaries are concerned with what they perceive to be theorist nonchalance about objective truth. These people are summarizing an argument against themselves. They're not making this argument. It's like me saying, like, according to the Westboro Baptist

Church, gays are degenerates. And then someone else being like Michael Hobson admits gays are degenerates. First of all, it's just an incorrect citation. Second of all, it's like no one was saying that like the Hubble Space Telescope can't measure how far a fucking galaxy is. That's not what people are actually arguing. The point is that like a lot of things

that appear very simple and objective on their face, when you go one level deeper, it's actually a little greater than that. And a lot of these theorists are just sort of pointing that out. That's different than saying, there's no such thing as objective truth. Yeah.

And like immediately descending into nihilism, which is what the sort, what the right thinks that like Foucault represents. Another like subsection, we're doing some categories now, of his complaint that the left doesn't believe in objective truth is this thing about standpoint theory. This is the concept of like,

if you're gonna write an article about trans people, you should like interview some trans people. Okay, yeah. He says, the core claim is that a member of a privileged group will never be able to understand a member of an oppressed group however hard they may try to do so. As Jeanetta Johnson, a prominent black activist in San Francisco, put it in a debate about how white allies can help to fight for racial justice don't come to me because you'll

never understand my perspective. Yeah, this is a common complaint from the right that when people on the left call for like input from marginalized groups, that what we're actually doing is saying that objective truth doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, dude. Getting people who are close to issues to weigh in is a way to get closer to the truth. He basically makes three arguments against this. The first is that like empathy is possible. I'm not really gonna cover that one

because like it's really just obvious. It's like yes, we can talk to each other and learn things. The second is that by constantly deferring to marginalized groups, the experiences of the majority are being left out. White people can also help us understand racism. And like he says, you know, if you wanna understand police brutality, you should probably also speak to like cops.

Yeah, they should have what they should have is like both nationwide, state, and local police unions that can make public statements that are constantly amplified by the media. No one ever talks about how cops deserve that. I mostly included that because I wanted you to make a little quip. And then his third argument is that all of this deferring to minority groups basically makes organizing much more difficult, right? Because you can't come up with a broad-based political program.

If you're constantly just being like, oh, I'm going to step back now. I'm going to defer. I'm going to let you guys take the lead. You need a strong white man to take charge. I'm just going to keep going and let you qu take the lead. You need a strong white man to take charge I'm just gonna keep going and let you equip on all of them But there I guess there's the tiniest thread of truth in there in that like lefty organizations Can you eat themselves? Yeah, yeah, and plenty of people who actually care about the success of a left have like talked and written about this Right, well, he actually makes a very similar argument to Olefemi Taiwo, who wrote a book called Elite Capture,

which I also read for this. His argument is basically that like the problem with what he calls Deference Politics, is that like it's very difficult to figure out who is a representative member of a group. If you're a middle manager at Amazon, and you're like, okay, I'm white, I'm gonna step back, I'm going to let the black people in the company take the lead, like a black person who is a middle manager at Amazon is not going to necessarily be all

that representative of the needs of black people generally, right? And we have all of these institutions that tend to choose for minorities with particular characteristics, right? Especially minorities who are well versed at moving through majority institutions. And so what you might be doing is plucking out these minorities that basically will just say the same shit as people in power, and you're not actually getting the purpose of doing that,

right? You're just getting this kind of thin veneer of it. I also, I actually have a broader critique of this. Like Yasha, a lot of my views are based on my personality flaws and political grievances. And I, for the last two years, I felt like I'm absolutely shouting into the fucking void on trans rights. And when I've talked to cisgender, like sort of more establishment journalists journalists with much larger platforms than me, part of their reluctance to weigh in uncharidably, you could say it's probably some anti-trans bias going on.

I think people are just generally a little bit uncomfortable with the gender non-binary, the way the gender binary is shifting, the charitable interpretation. And I've heard this directly from people, is that I don't want to speak on this issue because I'm not trans. I want trans people to lead that conversation and like I really do think that that comes from a good place But the problem is that Trans people are only like 1% of the population and by definition

They have been locked out of all Establishment institutions, but there aren't that many trans people with a platform We're basically talking about like five people. You know them, I know them. We're thinking of their names right now. It's not fair to put the entire onus of responsibility on those five people to like fix this and roll back the tide.

Not to mention that there's value to cis people seeing cis people make these arguments, right? Right. I think that Yasha's argument that like, well, what about the majorities? It's like, I think what he's kind of saying there's like, well, what about straight pride? But I think that he is on to something in that there is this research about how like white people are more likely to recognize racism when they are told about it from a white person, right? Yeah. Thin people are more likely to care about fat phobia when they hear about it from another thin person.

There is something about having members of the majority like visibly care about this shit. And also, I've noticed from talking about trans rights that like straight dudes are good at packaging messages about this issue for other straight dudes, right? Like I can't really talk about like sports and like trans people in sports, so I don't give a fuck about sports. You're not like the Fox News viewers who are sincerely passionate about women's sports.

That's all they've been talking about for years and the trans issue comes up and all of a sudden, wow, this really fits in where pre-existing believes. After 25 years of attending local female high school track meets, although I think what he's implying is not just that it would be useful for members of majority groups to talk about this stuff, which is I think unquestionably true in a general sense, but that there are people on the left who are trying to prevent

that from happening. Thank you for giving me an excuse to circle back to this quote that he used, Peter. He ends his section by saying that this woman on a panel said that like, don't come to me because you'll never understand my perspective, right? He's like, these activists are saying like, don't even engage with me, right? And like, this makes organizing much harder. But he is quoting someone who was speaking on a panel called, how white people can support the movement for black lives. Right? And the full context of this woman's quote was that like, there are white people who have been engaging in anti-racist work for decades,

and if you're a white person, the best thing to do is go to those people because like they know the kinds of resources you have and they know the kind of messages that are going to resonate with you. She literally says, you need to go to your white folks and ask them because you're not going to hear it from me the way that it needs to be served to you. No one is saying that white people should not care about racism or that cis people should not care about trans rights.

Members of marginalized groups are begging for engagement from the majority. What they're asking for is a little bit of humility so that people do the work necessary to understand the issues and also the most effective solutions. They're literally making an argument about the most effective forms of political organization. And Yasha is like, these people don't even want political organization. You know, I've heard horror stories of small scale organizing, sort of falling apart because

the group becomes too focused on centering the right people and stuff like that in a way that ends up being counterproductive because you end up way too focused on that and less focused on accomplishing your ultimate objectives, right? That stuff is happening on a very small scale on a large scale majority groups are obviously the dominant voices in nearly every conversation. So like, what the fuck are we talking about? Like when you turn on like MSNBC, it's not like there's like a black trans person talking to you and it, and like, you know, Yasha monks watching that being like, oh, leftists have done this. He has later in the book, he talks about sort of like the stakes,

like the ultimate destination of all of this, like identity synthesizing, and he lists like three institutions as like how you can tell it's gone too far. And he talks about NGOs, colleges, and like corporate America. All three of those institutions, everyone in power is overwhelmingly white and cis and male. Like, there's more CEOs named John and James

than there are female CEOs. Like, whether or not diversity initiatives or like diversity trainings have gone too far, does not mean that actual diversity has gone too far. If I were a casual American racist, I would look at all these corporate initiatives and be like, well, at least they're not really doing it. Yeah, you know what I mean?

We don't have to have this conversation. Can we talk about something else? Like, you know, fucking Amazon is not like a beacon of racial justice. So the first problem with the identity synthesis is that no one believes in objective truth. The second problem with the identity synthesis is that no one believes in objective truth. The second problem with the identity synthesis is doubling down on identity. Oh. So we started out with like, Focco and like, Critical Race Theory and like, Obscure Law Journals.

We then smash cut to this... I damn it. The culture of Tumblr encouraged users to start identifying as members of some identity group, whether that identity was chosen or descriptive, and whether it reflected a pre-existing social reality or expressed a kind of aspiration. As Catherine D., a culture writer who has interviewed more than 100 early users of Tumblr about the role it played in their lives notes, quote, Tumblr became a place for people to fantasize

and build upon ideas about real identities. Most of the people involved had little lived experience as these identities. This is my Groundhog Day Peter. Every fucking episode we have talked about Tumblr. Conservatives will be like, there are kids online who claim that their true identity is like a wolf.

Yeah. Yeah, they're like 12. And also, like, the part of the argument that like I want him to establish is like, how we went from law journals in the 1970s to fucking 13-year-olds on social media 30 years later. Well, I mean, you're 11 when your teacher puts you in a race-segregated class

and makes you read Foucault. And you start talking about identity groups. He's also basing this on, he says, like, Catherine D, a culture writer who's interviewed 100 Tumblr users, this is based on an article in the American conservative by just like a random lady with a sub-stack. Like, there's also like a weird thing in this book

where like a lot of the citations are just to like, articles he read online. He, he cites Chris Rufo, like, directly. I just want to Catherine D's Twitter and her pinned tweet is about other kin. I know, I went out yesterday. I know. I know.

I know. Then I came across every day, and I was like, I know, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. He then tells us how he became interested in this. I know. Then I came across everydayfeminism.com, a website that expressed a simplistic version

of these new ideas and idioms in a highly accessible form. The concepts I had first encountered in stuffy academic settings were now being packaged into easily understandable and readily shareable slogans. This I quickly realized was something genuinely new, a way of interpreting the world through a narrow focus on identity and lived experience that might appeal to a mass audience. The articles that adorned the homepage of everydayfeminism.com in March 2015 give a sense of the world view that was starting to congeal. Its headlines read, four thoughts for your yoga teacher

who thinks appropriation is fun. People of color can't cure your racism, but here are five things you can do instead. You call it professionalism. I call it oppression in a three-piece suit. He loves listing examples. Once I discovered the website, I couldn't stop looking at it.

I'll bet. Over the next six months, I read articles with titles like Six Ways to Respond to Sexist Microaggressions in Everyday Conversations. White privilege explained in one simple comic, and so you're a Breastman? Here are three reasons that could be sexist. So in fairness, I did go to this website and read this piece about being a breast man and why you're problematic. And it is by far one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever read in my entire life. But this is actually like a perfect encapsulation of how these reactionary thinkers become obsessed.

Right? He's literally like, I came across a website where every other article was dumb and condescending at the same time. And I became obsessed with it until it took up a massively disproportionate segment of my mind space. And then a few years later, I wrote basically wrote a book about it. Yes. What he's talking about is like self-radicalization. Yeah. This guy is a scholar of how various countries are radicalizing across the world and like the rise of rate-wing populism, et cetera. Right. It's happening to him, but he just describes it not as like I had an unhealthy obsession with this extremely obscure website, but as like look at what's happening,

look at what they're trying to do to you. This is like pop pop feminist bullshit, right? It's clickbait nonsense with like feminist overtones written by people with no academic credentials. It's not absorbed as anything other than that by the community. Yeah, that's a thing. There's a much bigger culture on the left of making fun of this shit than there's an actual culture of this. I went to this website. I spent like a day looking into this because I thought it was one of those like fake websites that set up by right wingers, like exclusively

to provide material to these reactioners, like look what the leftists are saying now. Because like the articles are fully like really fucking out there. This like Europe rest man, it's sexist article is like if you don't like being cat-called, like why is it okay for your boyfriend to comment on your body? Which like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no't like being cat-called, like, why is it okay for your boyfriend to comment on your body? Which like, not so much on the same time.

But also, I looked for this article on Twitter to see like, okay, who was sharing this? I found one or two right-wingers posting this to make fun of it. But like, I could not find a single person posting this earnestly. Being like, wow, interesting article, good perspective. Right, right. If you're gonna say that this ideology has taken over the brains of millions of people, you have to establish that people

read it and liked it. You can't just be like this exists on the internet. If you're looking at like 2012 to 2015, you have two things happening at once. One is the increasing awareness of social justice. And two is the general higher use of social media. And these things sort of come together and you have a lot of people being exposed

to these ideas for the first time, processing it for the first time and like spitting out their thoughts for the first time. And a lot of those thoughts were very dumb. Yes. The meta-conversation, even in like popular feminism, has sort of moved past this sort of bullshit. Yeah, yeah.

The only people who ever say stuff like this now are kids, again, encountering it for the first time, processing it for the first time. This actually leads to the next section of this like historical piece that I think that he's totally right about. So after he talks about like Tumblr and everydayfeminism.com, he talks about Vox.com.

When Vox was founded by Ezra Klein, Matt and Glacier and Melissa Bell, they wanted to do these card stacks that were like, explainers. Yeah, the whole point of Vox was like, the news media ecosystem is getting too noisy. We're gonna put out quick and easy explainers of current events.

Exactly, but the problem is they launched it kind of at the tail end of like the blog era, and this was at the rise of social media sites, right? So everything became about like how shareable, how viral something was gonna be, and these like explainers of like existing issues, people just don't share them in the same kind of way. So we talked about this sort of the transformation

of the site into publishing more social justice oriented things, really trying to capture like the news cycle. Like, what are people interested in today? And like, how can we grab a piece of that? So he talks about the institution of Vox First Person, which is exactly what it sounds like. People send in these stories of themselves. He says that like based on Facebook and Twitter distribution, what they started to notice was that the sort of identity stuff just became like more popular. Like that's what people wanted. There is a kernel of truth here.

There's also a kernel of falsehood. First of all, this is exclusively based on a Mac Eglaceous blog post. And then if you go to every single first person feature that Fox published in 2015, which I did, you do find some sort of SJW stuff. These are a couple of headlines. I'm a black activist. Here's what people get wrong about black lives matter. What it's like to be black at Princeton. I never noticed how racist children's books are until I started reading to my kids. So like, you know what? SJW stuff. Yeah.

But those were like actually the minority. So these are some of the other ones. Married with roommates. Why my wife and I choose to live in a group house. What breaking up with my best friend taught me about male friendship. I complained about helicopter parents for years. Then I realized I was one. How working for a suicide prevention hotline made me rethink pain and empathy.

I was a rural, homeschooled Christian kid, then I converted to Islam. I'm marriage counselor. Here's how I can tell a couple is heading for divorce. And this is maybe my favorite one. Shark Week is upon us as a shark scientist. I both love it and hate it. This is...

I read that one. Every single one pains me in a unique way. And I'm sure that some of them are totally reasonable, but something about the way those headlines are written. I know. It's like PTSD in my brain. I also think that the way that Yasha is describing this, is like, the internet got flooded with these pieces

that are like, I'm black and here's why racism is bad. Yeah, yeah. You don't really find that in these. What you mostly find is this obsession with counterintuitiveness. Like one of them is like, I'm a left wing person who likes guns and hears why. Why being run over by a bulldozer

was the best thing that ever happened to me. The way that he summarizes this is he says, a large percentage of the most successful articles spoke directly to the interests and experiences of particular identity groups. And on some level, yes. But it's like another problem with this book is that he never actually defines identity groups.

Uh-huh. I'm a homeschooled Christian kid. Well, as homeschooled as an identity. Right. I'm trying to think of a article like this that wouldn't appeal to some identity group. When you look at the trend of reporters going to diners in the Midwest to interview white

working people, no one would ever characterize that as pandering to an identity group. But I think by the definitions that Yasha is using, that's what you would call it. He basically says that we go from Tumblr to Vox, which is sort of one foot straddling online and one foot straddling traditional media. And then eventually, this outlook goes to traditional media. So he talks about how the word racist and terms like structural racism

start appearing in the New York Times and the Washington Post like 10 fold more than they did pre-2013. Okay. He sort of says that like a kind of group thing kicks in. There's now this peer pressure. No one's allowed to descend, right? Because we get yelled at. We descend on Tumblr and people yell at us.

So because everybody's so afraid to push back, you then have this kind of ideological conformity kicking in. Seems to leave out Ferguson, but all right. I mean, this is what happens when you base your entire argument on a single blog post from Matt Iglesias. As opposed to the vast literature on why beliefs about identity groups have changed in last 10 years. Who needs a vast literature when you have the incredible brain of medical issues? A man who's read dozens of abstracts.

I think the first thing to know, I mean, we've mentioned this on the show before, but like, this is true. Progressives have become more progressive on race. Yeah. There's like a lot of kind of long and short-term shifts. The longest term one is that like basically since the Civil Rights Act, whites have been slowly drifting out of the Democratic Party, and minorities have been slowly drifting in. So as recently as 1992, Asian Americans only 31% of them

were Democrats. That sounded like 75%. It's like really easy to forget. The coalitions of the parties used to be much more evenly split. And then this process, of course, massively ramps up after Obama gets elected, even during the campaign, Hillary Clinton would propose, like let's make community college free.

And be like, okay, whatever. And then Obama would say, let's make community college free. And people would be like, what is this black separatist bullshit? Is this like a black thing or what's going on here? Right. Right. So like there's some percentage of the population that basically starts to see everything through the lens of race because they're confronted by like a black dude doing it.

Right. The biggest, like shift, I mean, if you look at the sort of race because they're confronted by like a black dude doing it. Right. The biggest like shift. I mean, if you look at the sort of racial attitude surveys, there are huge spikes between 2012 and 2014 because we basically have the first round of like Black Lives Matter protests, right? We have Crave on Martin, we have Michael Brown, we have Eric Garner. There's also a social media story in that a lot of these things are captured on video. We now have the ability to see and hear these events that basically Black people have been screaming about

for decades and why people are like, are you sure? The theory on attitude change among social scientists for a really long time was that when Democrats and Republicans appear to shift their views on stuff, it's not individual people changing their minds. It's mostly the coalitions changing, and you can sort of track these things over time. But during the 2016 election, you then get people updating their views and actually changing

their minds based on what the candidates say. So on their Republican side, Trump only won 44% of Republican voters in the primary. But then once he wins the primary and becomes a general candidate, what you find is a lot of sort of center right, quote, unquote, respectable Republicans finding excuses to support him. So there's this really interesting survey where they give people a bunch of like statements, one of which is you're with a friend and he describes somebody else's wife as like a great piece of ass. And it's like, how common is it to hear stuff like this?

And people report like, oh yeah, that's like a pretty normal thing to say. And like, this is how people started to justify it, right? Was that they didn't say like, oh, I like it when people say that. But they're like, eh, I don't love it, but it's fairly typical to say that. Even though a couple of years previously, they had said it wasn't.

When me and the homies get together, we talk about banning Muslims from the country. That's what it's like. But then the same thing happened among Democrats too, where Clinton's campaign was like all framed around like opposition to Trump. Like basically whatever Trump is, I'm the exact opposite of it, right?

And so you then find among liberals, more liberal views on immigration, that this is also kind of at the same time as me too, and eventually the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. So people do actually start changing their minds. In 2015, if you asked a liberal, how do you feel about giant suits that just drape over you.

Proposterously, they would have said it's fine. The last big shift obviously is fucking 2020, George Floyd, like if you look at again, surveys of like racial attitudes, there's a huge jump based on essentially just like news events. Like people were seeing demonstrations of the fact that these inequalities persist in America. You're forced to engage with it.

Yeah, exactly. To circle back to his overall narrative, I don't want to say that like Tumblr and other forms of social media played no role in progressives becoming more progressive. The political science literature, I think, gives too much credit to political candidates. But all of the messages from those candidates are being filtered through media,

and they're being filtered again through social media. Yeah, it definitely seems to be true that social media, for example, can create echo chambers and all that stuff that everyone writes about all the fucking time. But the other side of that is that all of media consumption used to be an echo chamber. Yeah, exactly. is that all of media consumption used to be an echo chamber. Yeah, exactly. Because we were all reading the New York Times and like listening to like fucking Dan Rather.

I'm fascinated by the way that these books mix like true things and false things. The fact that liberals became more liberal over the last 15 years, he's framing it as some sort of threat, right? And like, well, now we're giving up on democratic norms. But like, I mean, you could easily see this as like, good news, right? Like, there's a good argument to make that like,

policing in America is very discriminatory. And people are more aware of that now. And like, gay people do deserve all over the rights. He seems to just take it as a given that like, oh, this should worry us. But like, why? The anti-democratic forces in America are extremely concentrated on the right.

Yeah, I think that what he's trying to do here is play a bit of blame game. What the conservatives are trying to claim is like, yeah, this is your fault for moving left. And therefore, the conservative reaction is justified. It is the sort of natural outcome. I've seen this from others on the right, the idea that it's not the right radicalizing. It is in fact the left, which again is based on like a very thin, non-comprehensive bunch of political polls that don't capture the fact that QAnon exists. One of Yasha's earliest Atlantic articles is about how like sea leftists, nobody likes political correctness,

and it's the result of a survey where they ask people like, do you like political correctness. And it's the result of a survey where they ask people like, do you like political correctness and like 80% of Americans were like, no. It's like, right, because that's like a negative term for something that no one can agree on what the fuck it is. Right. Of course, do you object to government overreach? Yes. Right. By the condition that something people don't like. A better question to ask would be like, do you like it when someone calls you sugar tits in the workplace? Thank you. So, okay, speaking of words,

the next aspect of the identity synthesis that Yasha's going to guide us through is discourse analysis for political ends. Ugh. So he basically, I mean, I'll read this whole fucking thing. He says, many scholars who are immersed in the identity synthesis are deeply interested in the way that dominant narratives and discourses structure our society. Inspired by Edward Said's work in Orientalism,

they hope to put the tools of discourse analysis to explicitly politically use. Their ambition is nothing less than to change the world by redescribing it. This has had a major influence on the way in which activists engage in politics. In virtually every developed democracy, activists now expend enormous efforts on changing the way in which ordinary people speak.

In the United States, for example, activists have successfully championed new identity labels such as People of Color and BIPOC. Prominent institutions such as Stanford have even published long lists with terms, ranging from guru to sanity check. Oh god, damn it. Yeah, check out bonus episode feed

that affiliates of the university should avoid using because they could inadvertently perpetuate discrimination or commit cultural appropriation, a newly popular term that describes a broad class of circumstances in which members of one culture co-opped elements of the culture of another group in supposedly objectionable ways. There are many things that frustrate me about these conversations, but one is like, I actually think that it's largely true that too many people argue about like the best terms to use. To say it. Oh my god.

The way that I understand that is mostly as like an expression of political powerlessness by many of those people who are sort of trying to grab on to something that they feel like they can control. Yeah. You know, I just can't bring myself to get riled up about it. I can't believe we're in. We're finally for the first time on the show in a position where like I'm about to be more of a dick than you. I think that you're right. I think that that's like some up about it. I can't believe we're in, we're finally, for the first time on the show in a position where I'm about to be more of a dick than you. I think that you're right.

I think that that's some aspect of it. I also just think that some people are really annoying. And it's really easy online to police people's speech. It serves two purposes at once. One is you get to express your knowledge about this issue. The other is you get to express like almost like a moral superiority. Like you're actually going about your allyship wrong.

And you know, as much as the right focuses too much on those people, they absolutely exist. Yes. I do tend to think that they are unpopular. And also, I mean, as we've discussed before, it's not like language has no importance. Right. My approach to these things is like some of the language stuff

I think is silly, and some of it I don't think is silly, and the silly stuff I just don't do it. I don't spell women with an X. Yeah. If you want to spell women with an X, whatever, it doesn't harm me, it's not anti-democratic, I find it a little silly, but also, like, I'm not gonna spend a lot of my time being like,

did you hear there are spelling women with an X now? I just like quietly don't do it, which I think is what like most people do with this stuff. You hear some of these language things and you're like, ah, that resonates. Like yeah, that's a fair point. And some of them, you're like, I don't know if that's necessary.

And like whatever, over time, some of these things take, right? We were spelling women with a Y for a while. That also never really took. Maybe women with an X will go the way of women with a Y. Maybe it won't, and I'll be spelling it with an X in 10 years. Who fucking cares?

I'd like, is that a future with less democracy in it that like I spell a word differently? I don't know, I just really don't fucking care that much. But then he gives a very telling example. So he spends basically like the rest of this chapter Talking about cultural appropriation. Oh, hell yeah. Do you have a definition of this Peter? How do you describe this cultural appropriation is when you take something from another culture and You do it but not in a nice way all you had to do was say just in timber lake wearing corn rows at the 2008 MPV video awards.

And I would have known what you mean, everybody. That's not cultural appropriation because that is humiliating for him personally. We all were just like, oh, Justin, no. This is how he starts. This chapter, he's going to delineate this concept and tell us why it's bad. Some cases of so-called cultural appropriation do undoubtedly amount to real injustices.

It was, for example, immoral for white musicians in the United States to steal the songs of black artists who were barred from big careers because of racial discrimination, or for collectors in the United Kingdom to loot art from the country's former colonies. Is that cultural appropriation? That's like stealing. But as it is now applied, it misdescribes what made those situations wrong and inhibits valuable forms of cultural exchange. You know how, like when you're watching an action movie and you know there's like a montage coming, Peter,

you know there's like a litany of anecdotes coming. You know we're gonna fucking list. Justin Trudeau at a party. Yeah. All right, here's where he goes with this. By now debates about cultural appropriation We're going to fucking list. Justin Trudeau at a party. All right, here's where he goes with this. By now debates about cultural appropriation have gone mainstream and cover a very wide range of supposed offenses. As part of its archive repair project, Bon Appetit, the American culinary magazine, apologized for allowing a Gentile writer to publish a recipe for a

hamentasian, a traditional Jewish dessert. In Germany, they're speagle-worryed that Gentiles who donned a kippa in a show of solidarity after a man had been assaulted for wearing the traditional Jewish head covering were guilty of cultural appropriation. And in the UK, the Guardian has weighed in on whether Jamie Oliver, a star chef, can cook Jollof rice, whether Gordon Ramsay, another star chef,

should be allowed to open a Chinese restaurant and whether it was offensive for Adele to wear a traditional Jamaican hairstyle to the Notting Hill carnival. So, the argument here is that cultural appropriation has use in these like very narrow circumstances. But it's now being so broadly applied

that it's creating a chilling effect. So people are afraid to publish recipes. They're afraid to open restaurants because no matter what you do, even if you're doing these harmless activities, people are going to come out of nowhere and accuse you of cultural appropriation. So we're going to walk again through the examples that he uses. So the first one is, as part of its archive repair project, Bon Appetit apologized for allowing a Gentile writer

to publish a recipe for Hamentation, a traditional Jewish dessert. This is not true. What actually happened was the original recipe was basically written like pretty insensitively. The original headline was how to make actually good ham and tassion. It was basically by this person who wasn't Jewish,

and they're like, I attended a bunch of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs when I was like 13. It's like, I'm allowed to weigh in on this. It's this kind of tongue-in-cheek thing. And then she said, I asked around the office, and all anyone could remember is really chalky and terrible ham and tassion. So I'm gonna get it right this time. There's an implication that the people who generally make a commentation aren't good at it.

And like let me show you how. I mean they left the recipe up like so there's still a recipe via Gentile on the website. It's not like this has been like wiped from the internet. It's really not an appropriation thing. It's really just a like insensitivity thing. And also why the fuck are we talking about a website updating its fucking recipe? But like whatever. We're gonna go to the UK.

He says, in the UK, the Guardian has weighed in on whether Jamie Oliver can cook Jollaver rice, whether Gordon Ramsay should be allowed to open a Chinese restaurant, and whether it was offensive for Adele to wear a traditional Jamaican hairstyle. So the Jamie Oliver one, at no point did anybody accuse him of cultural appropriation. He basically put a recipe on his website that had coriander parsley and lemon in it, which

aren't like part of the traditional recipe. And people were like basically clowning on him for being like, ah, this isn't traditional, like this is your own thing. And he's like, you're right. This is like my own weird spin on it. I mean, that happens every time anybody cooks Italian food of any kind. Someone will be like, this is what my grandma does. And you're like, OK, everybody kind of moves on.

The Gordon Ramsay one is not about whether he has the right to open an Asian restaurant. It was about the opening. Like, it was an opening party for one of his restaurants in London, where an Asian writer went. And she's like, it feels weird to be at the opening, like it was an opening party for one of his restaurants in London, where an Asian writer went, and she's like, it feels weird to be at the opening of an Asian restaurant, and there's 40 people here, and I'm the only Asian person.

This is also part of a trend where a lot of, like I remember that there was a piece written about the Luke Holmes cover of Tracy Chapman's fast call, which has been a sensation, and a black person writing a piece about basically processing their feelings about a black artist's work being taken by a white man and a white guy sort of profiting off of it.

And the piece just read to me, like literally a black person thinking out loud about this stuff and people lost their fucking minds. You know what I mean? And like you have to allow some space for an Asian woman to go to an event like this and be like, this feels a little weird, right? Yeah, so many of these things are like,

did you hear that a minority had thoughts? And like, again, at no point in this review, does she say that his restaurant should be shut down? Yeah. And then the Adele one is by far the closest to an actual cultural appropriation blow up, where she posted this. She wasn't at the Notting Hill carnival, but it was on the day of the Notting Hill carnival.

And I believe she happened to be in Jamaica and she posted a photo of her in a Jamaican flag. Oh, that's right. With Bantu knots in her hair. There was an internet outcry. People were like, ah, this is not cool. Now I remember this one. There was a an internet outcry. People were like, uh, this is like not cool. Now I remember this one. And there was, there was a little internet outcry.

But again, it was just a bunch of people being like, I don't know about this, right? Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, it tells us in Giveryman interviews, like five months later, she, her new albums coming out, and she was giving an interview. And they were like, hey, what was the deal with that like Instagram blow up a couple months ago?

And she's like, you know what, it was cringe. I shouldn't have posted it. I just kind of wasn't really thinking of how it would look. And like, you know, my team or whatever was saying that I should delete it. But I want to leave it up just to kind of remind people that like I'm a human being and I make mistakes.

And like, thanks a lot for letting me know that that like felt weird. Whatever, right? It's just like a little discussion about whether or not this shit is insensitive. And it seems weird to act as if this is like reflective of a global ideological shift that we should all be concerned about. But then, okay, but then the last, or this is his middle example,

but we're going to talk about it last. This example is, I think the most interesting. He says, in Germany, Der Spiegel warned that Gentiles who dawned at Kippa in a show of solidarity after a man had been assaulted for wearing the traditional Jewish head covering were guilty of cultural appropriation. So this is actually like a real and like really fucked up incident. This guy as like a video like a YouTube experiment was like I mean a walkerumber Lynn wearing a Yamaha

and like see what happens and then like someone beat the shit out of him. And it was like on video and it's like super fucked up. This was a huge deal in Germany. It's like the video went super duper viral. Yasha again, great footnotes. He links to the peace and your spiegel. It's by a Jewish guy who's basically saying, like there's a huge show of solidarity,

people are protesting, people like want to do something to show that they protect and support the Jewish community in Berlin. And people are showing up to these rallies wearing kippas. And he's like, this is a traditional Jewish head covering. It's really important in my religion. He has this little thing at the end of his piece where he's like, there's this term that they use in America, cultural appropriation.

I think that it's a useful term that we could talk about in Germany a little bit. I don't think it's appropriate to use my religious symbolism to show solidarity with me. Please find other ways of showing solidarity with me. That actually feels like just a very straightforward, reasonable application of the term, cultural appropriation. Right. It's not like you're using it to be symbolic of something, but it actually is meaningfully a religious symbol for me. Right?

This would be like if a Catholic got attacked and then like a bunch of non-Catholics were like, we're as a show of solidarity, we're gonna take communion. What I find so interesting about the way that like Yasha Munk is framing this, is like he starts with this like, you know, cultural appropriation describes something real,

you know, but now the concept has gone too far. And like none of his examples are really the concept going too far. Right. Some of them are just straightforward, like reasonable examples of it. Most of them are not even cultural appropriation being invoked in any way, like with the recipe. So it's like, sorry, what's the actual problem? It sort of seems like we have this term that you just don't think people should use. Right, because he's basically being like, okay, so you have colonialism and also Adele. Yeah, it's like, well, well, what, then what are we talking about, right? What is your complaint?

What criticisms should be allowed and what shouldn't be allowed? Is your problem just that there's terminology for this or is your concern that Adele is being criticized, right? It doesn't entirely make sense. And remember his original definition, an ideology that seeks to remake the world and like erodes democratic norms.

The democratic norm of going to Jamaica and getting your hair braided and saying, Yaman, why did we fight the revolutionary war? If we can't do that. Well, my, my both sides take on this, is that like, I do think that it's true that like, people on the left can like maybe spend too much time fighting about language stuff,

but also, no one is more obsessed with language than fucking conservatives who complain about it all the time. 100%. If, if your actual complaint here is that like, people shouldn't use the term cultural appropriation. It's too broad We don't really know what it means. It's it's misapplied or over applied. Totally fine You could also say that about all the terms that he invokes right free speech He talked about a lot in this book. Well people miss and vote fucking free speech all the time

Constantly welcome to turns yasha most The become popular get over applied. I also feel like circling back and reminding everyone who's listening that these are the worst anecdotes he could find. Yes. For sure. The fact that what we're really talking about is a couple of editorials and Instagram comments, it just sort of goes to show that there's no way for the left to squash this stuff, right?

We can't get together and be like, all right, we're gonna stop using this term, because the point about complaining about the use of cultural appropriation as a vector for political infights is that you're complaining about the left. And that's what Monk is doing, even if he doesn't actually think he is. He also has a large section in the book where he basically makes the same argument about like microaggressions, that like microaggressions are an interesting concept, but like people are taking it too far.

But what's very frustrating to me is that it becomes clear that his beef is exclusively vocabulary because Yasha Monk wrote an entire book about microaggressions. So his first book is about growing up Jewish in Germany and at the time in West Germany, it was like 40 million people population that there were 3,000 Jews in the entire country. And of course Germans are sort of famous

for like learning all of the ugly parts of their history. And so when people would meet Yasha and find out that he was Jewish, they would sort of like treat him like a celebrity. He talks about going to a party and sort of coming on to a conversation where people are talking and he's like, what are you guys talking about?

And they were like, oooh, lockers. Yeah. No, they say they're talking about movies and they're like, oh, John was just saying how he like hates Woody Allen movies. And then John is like, oh, I actually really like Woody Allen.

I think his earlier work is really great. And what he did was fine. I think it's okay. But it's like, it makes Yasha really aware. Right. And the whole book, parts of which are quite good, is about how he just felt this weird sense of friction. What's interesting is that this is sort of like a,

something you can extrapolate from as sort of a criticism of like certain iterations of identity politics, right? Where everyone else being hyperconscious of his identity ultimately made him feel uncomfortable. It also reveals how identity politics is exclusively something other people do, right? I do not think that Yasha Monk thinks that writing a memoir about his experience as a Jewish person

and like coming to grips with his identity, he wouldn't consider that engaging in identity politics, right? He, one of his main critiques of like the left, is like, they make your identity markers the most important thing about you. Yeah. Is that what he was doing by writing a book about his Jewish identity?

Is that the only identity or the most important identity that he has? I wouldn't accuse him of that. This is the thing with like a lot of these conservative commentators who have been very upset about identity politics the last several years. As soon as the identity and question is their own, all of a sudden they are willing to fold in all of the new

wants that they deny to other groups. Also, Peter, it would be mean to do this, but. Well, if it would be mean, just don't do it. That's not the kind of podcast we're trying to put out there. I was gonna read you the final paragraph of his book because he talks about like moving to New York and how the fact that like there were so many Jewish people in New York that became like a much less salient

part of his identity was like really meaningful to him. And then his like final paragraph, he's like, I realized I wasn't a Jew and I wasn't a German. I was a New Yorker. Oh, good. And the book ends. Maybe 2014 was a different time, but I get so fucking annoying. You'll like about how much they love New York. That was right when Taylor Swift was arriving in New York.

He should have had a little a little vignette about getting in a cab and that and welcome to New York. That was right when Taylor Swift was arriving in New York. He should have had a little vignette about getting into Cab and welcome to New York is playing. Every New Yorker was here during 2014, remembers that phase where you'd get into a Cab and it was just Taylor Swift singing that fucking song. The book is actually a singing. It's like one of those greeting cards. You open it and that song just starts playing

to critically get the rights. So again, to be totally clear, I think it is absolutely valid for Yasha to write a book about his Jewish identity. I think that's great. But what is fascinating to me is that he spends so much of this book complaining about people invoking microaggressions, right?

So he clearly does not object to the concept of microaggressions, he only objects to the term. Yeah. I actually think it's totally fine to write a whole book about microaggressions, he only object to the term. I actually think it's totally fine to write a whole book about microaggressions and not use the word. You can talk about cultural appropriation without saying cultural appropriation. It's an important issue to you.

He ends that section saying like, a lot of what we're really talking about here is just like racial insensitivity. And like, you know what, Yasha, if you wanna write a book about racial insensitivity and like, draw people's attention, and you don't wanna use the term cultural appropriation. I don't really think anyone would notice honestly.

I don't think anyone would care. If that's not a framework that you like, fine. But why spend all of your time complaining about people who have a term you don't like for a concept you agree with? It's just so lacking in empathy to like an embarrassing degree. Yeah, I don't know. It's like seeing someone like stub their toe and say, Ouch and being like, people say, Ouch too much when they get hurt.

Not realizing that you've done it your whole life. It's just it's something so simple, you know, that like the idea that he can think about this enough to write a book about it. Right. And then not realize that when other people are talking about similar experiences, idea that he can think about this enough to write a book about it. Right. And then not realize that when other people are talking about similar experiences, but they're not Jewish, they're black or whatever, that they're talking about the same thing. Human empathy.

It's been weighed in for you. I'm sorry. I don't know where to go after that. So the fourth category under the definition of identity synthesis, the problem with the identity synthesis is that it seeks to pass identity-sensitive public policy. This is things like anything that basically takes people's race or gender or whatever into account.

He complains about a basic income project in San Francisco that was only eligible to trans people. Okay. In the book, he has basically two big marquee anecdotes. One is the segregation in the Atlanta schools. The second is about the rollout of the COVID vaccines. We're due to looing ourselves back to December of 2020. Okay. Obviously, in the first couple of months of the vaccines,

there weren't very many doses available, so countries had to basically do triage to decide, okay, who's going to get vaccines first, right? Yeah. He says, countries from Canada to Italy came up with remarkably similar plans. To begin with, they would make the vaccine available to medical staff.

In the next phase, the elderly would become eligible. Only one country radically deviated from this plant, the United States. In its preliminary recommendations, the key committee advising the CDC proposed putting 87 million essential workers, a broad category that would include bankers and film crews, ahead of the elderly. So this is about the CDC basically saying essential workers are going to get the vaccine before over 65s, and they were doing so for explicitly

like racial justice reasons. So he's talking about this presentation that was given to this vaccine prioritization committee within the CDC. The key problem the presentation highlighted in red font is that racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among groups over 65. Because they elderly are a less diverse group

than the younger group of essential workers, it would be immoral to put them first. So this is basically like most old people are white. And even though they're way more likely to die of COVID, we should actually prioritize younger people because they are more diverse. Okay. Is that something that they really said? The thing is, this is as close as he gets in this book to like a real anecdote. Like something that actually happened and like I find kind of troubling. I mean, that does sound stupid. Yeah.

That seems to put prioritized diversity over like efficacy of the vaccine rollout, which is in fact, a problematic manifestation of identity politics. Exactly. That was what was wrong with the presidency of Donald Trump, the constant prioritizing of diversity. So to understand what's actually going on here,

you need to go back to where we were in late 2020. When you're talking about a highly infectious disease, there are two ways to protect people at risk. One way is directly, right? So you just vaccinate all the old people. Another way is indirectly by preventing infection and transmission of the virus. Basically, if you can prevent a surge, you may end up saving more old people's lives,

even if the old people themselves are not vaccinated. The conversations going on at the time were mostly about whether or not the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission. The early vaccine trials hadn't measured that. And so some virologists thought that the vaccines could prevent another surge, and others thought that it couldn't prevent another surge.

So Yasha describes this as like the CDC doing the button meme where it's like, should we kill a bunch of old people, or should we not kill a bunch of old people and like sweating over the decision? All right. But because he didn't reach out to anyone on the committee and he's relying exclusively on a bunch of gotchas from these slide presentations, he doesn't seem to realize that this was a debate about how to save the most people's lives.

Isn't all of this a good example of when identity politics is useful because like no one talks about targeting the elderly for vaccines as identity politics, right? If someone's like, hey, black women have particularly dangerous pregnancies, we should target them for funding. Those get challenged as like racist and discriminatory and as the manifestation of identity politics. Well, this is also something that's so interesting is he takes it as kind of a given that it was insane to be like taking things like race and social justice into account in this process. Like one of their categories, the three categories that the CDC was using to make

this determination was science, like how much is it gonna affect deaths versus infections? To implementation, how easy is it going to be to get it to people? And three, ethics. He seems to think that this entire category of thinking about ethics is totally invalid, but what the CDC meant by that was people who are at higher risk of dying from COVID.

They don't just mean social justice reasons. Like, we must have immediate America's racial past. It's like black people were dying like three times the rate of white people. It's just that it seems that he's saying like, well, but they shouldn't be. Like, the reason that elderly people are more like litodized is probably due to sort of like these biological factors, right?

The reason that black people are more like litodized is almost certainly not biological. It's due to these biological factors. The reason that black people are more likely to die is almost certainly not biological. It's due to these other factors. You have to consider it. Yeah, exactly. And also, he's also lying when he says every other country just did age, 75 plus, 70 plus, 65 plus. He presents this as this really obvious decision

that all the other countries made. That's not true. Like, Germany vaccinated essential workers before they did over 65s. France also took workplace into account. The Canada did it, province by province, but in some provinces, they said you're eligible when you're over 65,

or if you're indigenous when you're over 50, because indigenous people had way higher death rates. Another province did hotspots, so like they were serving zip codes. I like the hotspots concept because it's a way of avoiding having dipchits like yasha monk, right? Think pieces about how what you're doing is racist. Yeah, exactly.

You just like, oh no, it's geographical. The problem with the CDC's framework and like where I think he's right to criticize them and like they super duper fucked up is that like the definition that they were working with of Essential worker covered 70% of American workers. You're all essential folks. If you're listening here at home You are essential. I think I was an essential worker technically because I was working in like the media and the nation needs Information to be democratic or whatever, but like I was was making a podcast about the maligned women of the 1990s. I absolutely should not have been prioritized for the vaccine. When you, when you got your $4 million PPP loan to do the Lindsey Lohan Chronicles Part

five for your wrong about, it would have been insane for this PC to prioritize essential workers over people over 65. Like, he's just right about that. It would have been fucking bananas partly because the implementation would have been nuts, right? It's not meaningful prioritization to say that like now 70% of the workforce is eligible. Like that doesn't help the triage, right?

There weren't enough vaccines available for that group. So you had to have a more granular categorization. So what about like black bankers? Start up with our most important groups. But then this is what's so weird. Again, this is as close as he gets to like a real problem caused by identity politics. But it sort of tucks in and I don't think you noticed it.

What actually happened with the CDC is in their interim recommendations. At the beginning of December 2020, they said, okay, we're going to do essential workers and then we're going to do over 65s. Over the course of December, they then changed that. And the eventual recommendation was everybody over 75 and front line workers.

So people who are like seeing people in person, nobody who works from home, and that's a much smaller group. He chalks this up to, he says, intrepid journalists, like notice the slide presentation. He's like about Nate Silver tweeting about it, and Matt Iglesias writing a blog post about it. Just kill me. Their original decision for the interim recommendations

was on December 3rd. Their eventual decision where they made it final and made the right decision is on December 20th. The Nate Silver tweets were on December 19th. I don't think that 24 hours before this was about to happen, people in this committee would have looked at like, oh shit, Nate Silver's mad at us. Time to change course. Yeah, we don't know what happened behind the scenes.

I actually reached out to two different people who were on the committee, neither of whom got back to me because I'm sure that they're so sick of talking about this. Yeah, but I reached out to Nate Silver and he says it was him. So like, is it possible that that's true?

Sure, but he says it was like the backlash to this that made them change their recommendations. There's literally no evidence of this, other than the fact that there was a backlash. Also, even if that was true, wouldn't that just mean that there were like a couple dipshits at the CDC who were about to do the wrong thing

and then like, because our society disagrees with it so strongly, they had to change course. This is again, the best that he can do is some temporary interim recommendations that however you think the process went, weren't implemented. When you're like, let me tell you how pervasive and dangerous identity politics actually is, briefly the interim recommendations of the CDC

incorporated too much identity politics before they change course. Yeah. If that's where you are, then you need to move on. You need to write about something else. And like every other anecdote in this book is like one sentence. He does these little montages.

Like we had with the Adele culture appropriation stuff. It's like, bang, bang, bang, bang. I looked up almost all of these. This is why I spent like three fucking weeks researching this episode. I have almost 200 pages of notes. Basically none of them hold up, right? I'm really doing him a service here by saying like, this is as close and as good as it gets.

And like, it's not that good. I mean, you just said that he was bothered by the fact that San Francisco had a basic income program targeting trans folks, right? That's identity politics, right? Now I imagine if you asked the folks implementing it, they would say, well, this is a population lacking in wealth, right? Lacking in income, perfect, perfect targets for a basic income program. Also, he doesn't mention, like I said, I looked up all these fucking anecdotes, he doesn't mention that the program was only open to trans people earning less than $600 a month. That seems interesting.

It wasn't going to Caitlin Jenner. I'm just sort of curious about like, what in his mind is the substantive difference between that and rolling out vaccines and prioritizing elderly people in that rollout, right? In both cases, they're sort of imprecise in a way, you know, those are sort of the wages of government programs, right?

That's just how it sort of works. One of them is objectionable identity politics to him and the other is just common sense. Well, this is the exact thing that he lays out in the next section of the book and the final section of our episode. Oh. He's delineated all of the categories, all of the characteristics of the identity synthesis. And then we finally get to the end of the book where he's like, all right, how do we fix it? How do we solve the identity synthesis? To discuss this section, we have to talk about reactionary

centrism. Peter, this is something we've mentioned on the show before, but I don't think we've ever really laid out. So this is an excerpt from his previous book, The People versus Democracy. When it comes to race, the noble principles and promises of the US Constitution have been violated over and over again. For the first century of the Republic's existence, African-Americans were enslaved

or treated as at best second-class citizens. For the first century of the Republic's existence, African Americans were enslaved or treated as at best second-class citizens. For the second century, they were excluded from much of public life and suffered open discrimination. Nowadays, these realities are mostly empirical rather than legal. If African Americans face discrimination on the job market, if they are given higher prison sentences for the same crimes, the reason is not a difference in official legal status. Rather, it is that the neutral principles of the law are in practice administered in a discriminatory manner. This is why the standard conservative response to the problem of racial injustice is so unsatisfactory. People from John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court to Tommy Laren, the conservative commentator,

like to point out how noble and neutral the country's principles are, only to use this fact to deny that there are serious racial injustices to be remedied. This is disingenuous. If private actors from real estate agents to HR managers continue to discriminate on the basis of race, then a state that pretends that race doesn't exist can't effectively remedy the resulting injustices. So it's pretty good so far, right? Talamiaasha.

Yeah. It's like, all right, we got like people at the head of the Supreme Court, we have like this dumb understanding of race, they're like, oh, the laws are neutral, but like they're not being applied neutrally. It's like really fucking head in the sand bullshit. I'm not sure I agree that the US Constitution's principles are noble. Yeah. You know, whatever. All right, so here is where he goes with this. I'm not sure I agree that the US Constitution's principles are noble.

All right, so here is where he goes with this. The insistence that the noble principles of colorblindness will fix everything is either naive or insincere. Recognizing this, parts of the left have started to claim that there is only one way to face up to racial injustice, to reject outright some of the most basic principles on which the American Republic is founded. How did he take such an aggressive turn? Incredible. If much of popular culture ignores or demeans ethnic and religious minorities, they claim

then insensitive portrayals of people of color or instances of what has come to be called cultural appropriation should be aggressively shamed. If free speech is invoked as a reason to defend a public discourse that is full of overt forms of racism and microaggressions, then this hallowed principle needs to be sacrificed to the cause of racial justice. Sacrific principles. There is something genuinely righteous in the anger that motivates these ideas, and yet

they ultimately throw the baby out with the bathwater, far from merely going too far or being strategically unwise, they embrace principles that would ultimately destroy the very possibility of a truly open and multi-ethnic democracy. This is something you find in his writing all the time where it's like he lays out the problem very clearly. He's like, oh yeah, the Chief Justice

of the fucking Supreme Court has this like totally disingenuous understanding of racism. And that's why people shouting about microaggressions on Twitter are a threat to democracy. Like what? I don't wanna get too on my Peter shit, but there's sort of an express statement here that America was founded on these righteous principles and that those principles

are sort of under attack from the left. When I think what's actually happening in many cases is that the left is identifying that one, many of the principles that the Republic was founded on are in fact not good and noble, but are bad racist dumb, et cetera. Two, many of the principles that the public was founded on that are in fact good are misapplied consistently to the detriment of racial minorities, sexual minorities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So when he sort of like has this aside about free speech, what he's sort of invoking is like students protesting speakers on campus. He's not engaging with whether or not the like project of free speech broadly is impacted by this. How much it's impacted by this. You know, we're one year away from like coup attempt number two. Yeah, yeah. And these fucking losers are still talking about like college kids, like they're the true threat to democracy, it is absurd. Dude, Yasha's book came out a month ago.

No. A month ago, bro. It's not even like 30 month and days old. Oh my God. And then I also, the passage we just read, I'm pulling that from his previous book because his whole excuse for writing a book about fucking identity politics in 2023.

Is that he already did it about the right? Exactly, I already exposed the right. And then you look back like the most cursory fucking glance at his previous work and it's not about the right. It's weird both sides bullshit I went back to his other older book the great experiment and he has two entire sections about how people should stop complaining about cultural appropriation He talks more about the excesses of cultural appropriation complaints than he does about voter suppression

To me this is like the perfect example. His whole career is the perfect example of like the way that reactionary centrism has like taken over American punditry. So this term was coined by Aaron Wertes, who defines it as someone who says they're politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right. Throughout this book and like all of Yasha's work, he has this weird fucking howdy dutyism about right wing threats.

So in the identity trap in his current book, he has this whole section about to be sure, like Republicans have passed a bunch of bills like in Florida, they don't say gay bill, and all these, there's a dozen states that have passed these blatantly authoritarian shutdown all discussion of like America's racial past bills. He summarizes them. And then he says, because the language in all these bills is very vague, there's a real danger of them chilling legitimate forms of expression.

Thankfully, key constitutional protections put limits on the extent to which coercive authoritarians can punish private citizens for what they say. Even at the height of Donald Trump's power, most Americans did not need to fear that their government would punish them for speaking their minds. Wait, sorry, so there's all these protections against the laws that Republicans have already passed. And yet you dedicate a fucking entire chapter of your book to everydayfeminism.com. So like obscure websites and people overusing terms on social media are enough of a threat to democracy to dedicate a whole fucking book to it. But actual laws being passed, six Supreme Court justices,

he's like, oh, luckily there's all these safeguards in place. The Constitution also protects Gordon Ramsay's right to open a fucking Asian restaurant. It's just so frustrating. Like we can fully concede. Like yeah, you're, you know, you're right. There are some fools and miscreants on the left when it comes to this stuff.

But if your concern is like the survival of liberal democracy in America, you need to pivot 180 fucking degrees. The thing that I really wanna stress about the reactionary centrist and this entire worldview, which is fucking everywhere, is that it cannot propose solutions. The most fascinating thing about this book

is that when you get into the alleged solutions section, all he does is just like restate first principles. We must we must return to our core understanding of liberalism or whatever. Exactly. He says it is impossible to understand many fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to categories of group identity such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. But it's impossible to understand other fundamental aspects of human life without paying attention to economic categories, such as social class, ideological categories, such as patriotism, and theological categories, such as religion.

So it's like, okay, it's okay to focus on some identity stuff, but we should think about other things too. Oh, so we should look at how they intersect. Right. It's a word for that, Yasha, wow. These books, their solution is often just like, what if everyone essentially adopted my world view? Yeah.

And like that's the solution. And then like fade out. And this is what I mean with it can't propose solutions, because the entire ideology is based around punching left, right? Don't do anything that's going to piss off conservatives. Yeah. But everything the left does is going to piss off conservatives. Yeah.

Conservatives don't want social change. That's the entire ideology. 100%. I have a bunch of other examples of him just like restating first principles, but I also want to get to like the few places in the book where he proposes like specific things, like specific fixes for the problems. Yeah. So he has a whole section about college campuses, which I skipped because we did a whole fucking episode on it.

But in that chapter, he said I might like how to heal the divisions between us and like how to not do identity politics or whatever. He says, American colleges, for example, have historically assigned students from very different backgrounds to shared rooms in their first year. Now, most of them allow incoming students to request roommates of like-mind and usually like-background, but they've met on social media or at local meetups.

It's time for colleges to abandon these counterproductive changes, returning their focus to practices that are likely to integrate rather than to separate. Yeah, that'll save American democracy. Yeah, just have different, like, roommate policies. Good idea, dude. This isn't even true. Some colleges do actually, like, random assignment. Others, dude. This isn't even true. Some colleges do actually like random assignment.

Others like let you request it. I requested like a like a live gay guy to be my roommate in college, but I got a sports bro drug dealer. Well, was that supposed to be a swipe at me directly? Damn. But I'm always struck by in these books, it's like the minute you try to actually operationalize

these like broad philosophical things, you basically end up violating rights even more than what you're responding to. So another recommendation that he has in this book is that schools should ban affinity groups. Because like, oh, that's like what divides us and we should focus on like what unites us. But like, you're just gonna say it's illegal

for the black kids to make like an after school black club. We must aggressively wield the hammer of unity. He also proposes a bunch of right wing shit in his section on free speech. He's talking about like Facebook and Twitter. And he's like, if they keep discriminating against conservatives, they should be treated as publishers. They shouldn't have this protection

of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that allows companies not to be sued for libelists or otherwise illegal statements. It's fascinating to me that this guy talking about all these high-minded liberal principles, all of a sudden is like, my solution, nationalized face-looking Twitter.

Yeah. So this is like this bizarre thing that right-wingers, nationalized Facebook and Twitter. So this is like this bizarre thing that right wingers, like Ted Cruz and shit, have seized on as like, oh, if we repeal it, that will be good for conservatives. This is false. This is just straightforwardly false. If you repeal it, what will happen is the platforms

will aggressively crack down on material because now they can be held liable for it. There's numerous, there's even red-afucking analysis of this on the American Enterprise Institute website. Even like actual right-wing institutions are like, this would not help, this gives more power to Facebook and Twitter because they would have to put in place processes to legally vet every single post.

Right. He is wrong about this. And like, this solution, and this is something that like I've been kind of saving, but throughout this book, so much of this book, is just dumb. Yasha Mons work is not very smart. It's not very rigorous.

He makes basic factual errors. He misinterprets anecdotes all the fucking time and then was basic fucking ways. We could have done that for like three hours. This is a guy who has the institutional imprimitor of like Harvard and the Atlantic and the Council on Foreign Relations, like this is as establishment of a person as you get. And like to me, the existence of this book and the you know, Yasha Munch's entire career is such an example of like the actual threat on the left,

career is such an example of like the actual threat on the left, which is basically that we have all these mediocrities that are allowed to flourish because they're telling people in power what they want to hear. One of the frustrating things about these is that the continuous ascendance of these mediocrities just sort of proves that their assessment of the institutional power of the left is incorrect. Yes. The institutional power lies with people who believe shit like this. That's why Yasha can sort of extricate himself

from the mundane work of being an actual academic and gets to be a quote unquote public intellectual where you are free of the burden of having to actually do the hard work. And yes, you get all the attention you ever wanted. I think one of the reasons why this, ostensibly the most serious book on identity politics isn't particularly serious, is that I don't know that a serious critique is possible. The core problem is that on some level,

all politics are identity politics. I feel like there's this perpetual debate on the left about whether we should focus on social class stuff or identity stuff. And honestly, it always feels very similar to the nature versus nurture debate to me, where it's just obviously both. And like no one serious says that one is where 100% of our effort should go or the other. And there's a very good article, like one of the rare ones kind of defending identity politics by Jacob T. Levy, who basically

says that even empirically, it's not the case that identity politics is bad electoral strategy. If you look at Donald Trump's polling numbers, most of the big jumps downward were things that dealt with identity stuff. It was like him saying the Mexican judge can't decide against me, or like the Gold Star Muslim family that he went after or like the the Axis Hollywood tape. And then you know, we've seen all year we've seen Democrats running on protecting abortion rights and winning. We've seen Republicans running on destroying trans rights and losing. That doesn't mean that every single identity thing is going to win every election. But it's just not the case that like every time you do this, rather than quote unquote bread and butter, like traditional economic issues, you're going

to lose. It just depends. Right. If Joe Biden ran on like cultural appropriation, I think he would lose. Right. But, you know, there are salient and compelling issues that sort of map on to identity, and there are very dull and abstract and weird and non-compelling issues that map on to identity, and you can't just lump them all together and be like, identity politics, it's no good. Levy ends his article by saying, identity politics isn't a matter of being on some group side. It's about fighting for political justice by drawing upon the commitment that arises out of targeted injustice.

It lets us spot the majority group's identity politics rather than treating it as the normal background state of affairs and to recognize the oppression and injustice that it generates. Right, simple and I mean, look, the bottom line for O for me has always been like, are there iterations of identity politics and manifestations of identity politics that are literations of identity politics and manifestations of identity politics that are objectionable in various different ways sure but politics happens to people on the basis of their identity How do you respond to that without talking about their identity? Especially if their identity is as a New Yorker You're served. Fuck the pinnacle. Fuck the pinnacle. Fuck the pinnacle. Fuck the pinnacle. you you you you you you