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It's pernicious, it's dangerous, and it's spreading everywhere. No, not the flu. We're talking about the other virus - the Mind Virus of Radical Leftist Ideology. From university campuses, it has spread through media to infect whole education systems, corporate sectors, politics and beyond, creeping into every facet of culture from the US West Coast all the way around the world to the Australian Gold Coast.

Many people are beginning to notice some of the ugliest manifestations of this very dangerous ideology, but the pernicious and subtle ways that it takes hold of and twists people's minds are many and varied. So there is still time before this 'mind virus' really takes hold and the pure, destructive force it carries is unleashed on society. Ideally, sanity will prevail before we reach the point of no return.

Join us this Sunday 11 February from 12-1:30pm EST / 5-6:30pm UTC / 6-7:30pm CET on The Truth Perspective for the antidote!

Running Time: 01:55:21

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Joe: Hi and welcome to The Truth Perspective on the SOTT Radio Network. I'm Joe Quinn and my co-hosts as usual this week are Niall Bradley.

Niall: Hi everyone.

Joe: Harrison Koehli.

Harrison: Hello.

Joe: And Elan Martin.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Joe: This week we are talking about something that everyone should be aware of. You probably are aware of it in one form or another or by one name or another, but not necessarily in the way that we're going to talk about it today and its implications. Of course we're talking about what I suppose could be termed or what many people are terming a radical leftist ideology that has been spreading for quite a long time but has dramatically come on the scene in the past few years, particularly in western nations, but evidence of it is seen all around the world.

We're just going to be exploring this issue, what it means and what it portends, if anything. Is it just a storm in a teacup? A bunch of activist type people rabble rousing and shouting in the streets, a very small minority perhaps? Or is it much more pernicious and widespread than that? And like I said, what are the implications for the future of western society, but possibly the entire world because everybody knows that if western society goes down, so does the rest of the world, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

I suppose we could start off with a few of the main examples of how this is manifesting in society, how it's manifesting in people's lives and then take it from there. So what's the one that stands out? What's the first one?

Niall: Well I think what made it appear on the scene, so to speak, and up front and centre for a large number of people is the fact that there were visible demonstrations of people expressing it nice and clearly for them, in particular in the aftermath of Trump's election in the US. So in your scenario where you have the question of whether it is just a small minority of people or is it something broader and more pernicious, on the face of it it's the first. So really although it's a serious topic, it's not going to be that serious in the end because you'll always be comforted by the fact that "Well yeah, look at those people. They really are obviously crazy but they're a minority and they're over there. I'll just be fine over here Jack and life will just be grand."

Except that it isn't. It's so serious that the thing that's driving these mostly visible kids you seen on the screen, smashing up campuses and anything on the streets in their rage against Trump, is the same basic ideology and if you have something behind that, something energetic or the same drive of very powerful people who do not make a scene out of themselves on the streets. They're very good at actually hiding their identification with this very same ideology, overlapping versions of it let's say.

Joe: The way I think of it is that these activists are really like the tip of the iceberg that has broken the surface in the past couple of years and they're a manifestation or a symptom of something that has been brewing away and bubbling away below the surface for quite a long time. We could put it back to feminism as one thing that is part of this. It's a central part of it and feminism, as most people know, has been around at least in its most modern phase or phases since the 1960s and there have been various waves that they call of feminism that have happened since then.

In the 1960s you also had the hippy movement that had a lot to do with the ideas of social injustice, anti-war and feminism and minority rights, in particular black rights in the US. So these kind of movement have been around for quite a long time and have been progressing and developing over the past 40 or 50 years and no one really saw them as the problem. They were seen as part and parcel of a constructive and positive dialogue in a healthy democracy.

Niall: A vibrant civil society as George Soros would call it.

Joe: Exactly. But it was when Trump came along that it just seemed to trigger an awful lot of people who we assume were quite happy or quite complacent, although under Obama you did have a lot of Black Lives Matter protests over the past few years before Trump, so obviously there was something going on there. But then black activism has been around for a long time in the US and was nothing necessarily to be alarmed about in that respect although with Ferguson in 2016...

Niall: And Occupy before that.

Joe: Right. Occupy Wall Street. That's quite a long time ago. If you look back you can see the kind of anti-Vietnam War movements in the past and civil liberties, all that kind of stuff, have been going on for quite a long time so people can be excused for putting it down as more of the same effectively, just the same kind of thing that has happened, as you just said, part of a vibrant civil discourse. But it seems that the last straw for these people was Trump. Trump galvanized these people to really leverage the progress that had been made over the past 30 or 40 years incrementally and Trump was this horrific supposedly set-back.

Niall: Antithesis of everything they stood for.

Joe: Yeah. He threatened to undermine all that work and as a result of that we get to see what these people actually believe and what they want and what they're willing to do.

Niall: It's ironic because Trump is actually one of them. He's very much a product of the relative equilibrium that formed after the '60s and'70. Trump is twice a divorcee. Okay, he's definitely on the right in capitalist terms, big business, property, yada, yada, but he's flirted with leftist ideas himself but he was once a member of the democratic party and then went independently briefly, left that, and here he is back in on the republican side.

So he's very much a different track than the Vice President Pence who's just on the straight and narrow all the way all through his career. Trump is the catalyst for them, just as he is for the response against the leftists, so to speak.

Joe: Right.

Niall: It isn't because he is ardently anti-lefty. It's because he sees what's going on. Maybe he can't express it too well but he put a bet on the population in general, having come close to being stretched to the limits of how much of this they can take and it was a superb bet, which he won.

Joe: Because there's a large number of people in the US who were truly disenfranchised in more real ways and those are the people that he leveraged, the poorer class if you want to call it that, in America, particularly white people because 75-80% of the American public are white. So that was the large number of people who voted for him because he promised to bring back jobs, all that kind of stuff, to people who genuinely were feeling a certain level of social injustice in the sense that things could be put right; things were going wrong in the sense that a lot of people in traditional industries had lost their jobs were closing down and Trump promised to bring them back. That's a positive thing for any government to do and it's a legitimate thing to campaign on.

Niall: It wasn't just an economic, material-based backlash. It was a moral backlash. Plenty of people are doing fairly alright, who sided with Trump. When you think back to the '90s, there was Newt Gingrich and his moral majority movement. They got lampooned in the Clinton years by allies in the media and so on, of the Clintons. But they probably tapped into the same thing but they didn't break through. Maybe they didn't have quite the majority they thought or assumed they had. The limits of most people's ability to take certain things had not yet been reached but in the 20 years since it has.

Joe: Yeah, it has moral dimension and also a political dimension and what is happening and what we're seeing today is the idea, which has been around for a long time, particularly among the more progressive-type people among whom we would have numbered ourselves until they moved the goalposts, the idea that republican and democrat, the two left/right political party ideologies were no different. They have these terms "republicrats" and "demicans", to make the point that there's no difference between these two parties. In one sense that was true if you have a ruling elite who really don't hold to any political ideology have dispensed with it and their common ideology is power and maintaining their positions of power, that's accurate. But it's not accurate. It doesn't seem to be accurate in terms of the broad demographic of the population in any country who would say 'I'm a republican' or 'I'm a democrat', 'I am left' or 'I am right'.

Those people when they said that, we have more evidence that those people were actually speaking to the difference that they saw in values between right and left and that that does actually exist within people and maybe at a very fundamental level. Maybe at a deep psychological level there are left-leaning people and right-leaning people, i.e., conservatives and lefties; conservatives and people who are more open, people who are the opposite of conservative, i.e., they embrace diversity, for example, which obviously feeds into the whole diversity movement - diversity in the population, diversity in the workplace first of all between men and women, so more women if there's not enough women, but also more minorities, more different coloured people, more different cultures. Bring all those in. That's in the leftist ideological camp which is they're open to new ideas, which isn't a bad thing necessarily in itself. What is conservative? It means holding more to - and this isn't a bad word either - holding more to a racial identity whereas one person may feel a natural almost intuitive affinity with diversity and therefore other people, people of other cultures, of other skin colours, other languages, they want to embrace that whereas conservatives would tend to be more 'Well those foreigners are weird aren't they? They're a bit strange. They're not like us!'

So people who have that natural response to difference or the 'other', seems to be in people at a deep psychological level and neither of them are necessarily bad.

Harrison: Just to go on with that point, it doesn't really make sense on the surface because even from that conservative viewpoint, I think you'd find that many conservatives, the way you're describing them, don't actually think or feel as much about race as the leftists do. It's more of an in-group thing that happens to have race as a component a lot of the time, just because of demography, just because 80% or whatever of Americans are white. But you'll find that people of diverse backgrounds are openly accepted and readily accepted in the conservative community if they identify as a conservative. If they have the same kind of mentality then there's no problem in conservatives to accept someone like Dinesh D'Souza or a homosexual, a Greek, Jewish catholic like Milo Yiannopoulos.

People like that will be accepted. There's no real hard boundaries. But there are boundaries and that's the important thing about conservatives. There are borders for conservatives. "There's my group, a conservative group based on these values with these kind of beliefs and anyone can be a part of that group but you have to have that mindset". So I think race is really secondary for the most part. Of course you're always going to have actual racism in cultures. It's just unavoidable. Whenever you have a nation with mixed ethnic populations, you're going to have racism that comes out of that. But I think it's a minority thing, at least in today's world and today's America. What gets perceived as racism is actually conservatives rejecting something that they see as different in that population with a different skin colour that is different on some other level.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: So they might look at black culture in America and say "That doesn't align with our values the way I see it and the way I see them" and it's not that they're black. It's that they don't see them as part of the same in-group. But if someone were to come out of the ghetto and become a conservative like them they'd be totally welcomed. So there are grey areas. When you look at it from one perspective it might look one way.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. I think racism is the antagonism towards another of last resort in a certain sense; when you have no other way to establish an affinity or a kinship with a person then you can use the race card. That would be a gloss on top of it, but I don't think race is or ever really has been, the only reason or even the primary reason why someone would not like another group or attack another group.

The example you've given Harrison, in southern states US where supposedly there's a bunch of racists who don't like black people or whatever, if some black guy walks in there carrying an "I love Trump" sign and "Make America Great", a MAGA hat and starts espousing all sorts of conservative values, the guy will be immediately accepted by and large unless you're talking about people who are idiots, who have swallowed the whole "racial purity" thing, of which there are very few in any population. So yeah.

Niall: There's another example that's front and centre right now, that disproves the allegedly race-based nature of the so-called "racism" which we must put in quotes and put it into an ideological bracket because it is not actually based in biology, skin differences and so on. And that is the current Russophobia.

Joe: Right.

Niall: To the extent that businessmen who went to Davos recently were afraid - it's not that they were instructed (some of them might have been) - but I doubt they were instructed to avoid the Russians who were gathering also in the town for all the meetings and hijinks or whatever they do. They instinctively knew to avoid them and they would have been primarily drawn from the liberal cities of the US. They would have been close to the liberal heart of power so to speak, that controls the US largely so they were naturally getting it from the allegedly open side 'open to all things, diversity and 'racisms always evil under all conditions'', except when there's an artificial injunction to do so.

And that's the artificial injunction to be explicitly be racist essentially, towards Russians, comes from the side that's screaming "Trump is a racist!!"

Joe: Right. So it speaks to people not really knowing their own motivations, doing things for ulterior motives than they claim they are. The example of the Russians is with demonization, where for a long enough period of time, if you can demonize another ethnic group, whatever kind of "other" group they are or however they are defined, if you can demonize them for long enough and prevent your people from ever talking to them, because the last thing you want to do is for people who are supposedly in opposite camps to actually talk to each other in a sane, rational way because you then start to realize that you have things in common and there's no reason for this animosity. So you want to isolate people from each other effectively and push them into those camps where they never talk and never discuss things.

But that's in the best case scenario. There's still the problem that has been exploited and again, isn't necessarily something that would lead to a clash of groups within a particular society, which is this fundamental difference - and maybe we should talk a little bit about that - what seems to be a fundamental difference in terms of value systems that seems to be innate; either you're born with it or from a very early age it's trained into you but not in a way that's a social construct or a cultural construct or your in-group construct I think. It's more that it really is a part of you. It's not something you can just say "Oh yeah, now I realize that I got these ideas from my upbringing. I'm just going to change them". It's more fundamental than that.

There's a book we've been discussing and reading recently by Jonathan Haidt. What's the title?

Niall: The Righteous Mind.

Joe: The Righteous Mind.

Niall: The full title is Why Religions and Politics Divide Good People.

Joe: Right. Have you read that book Harrison?

Harrison: Yes.

Joe: So it give us a rundown of the thesis in one paragraph or less.

Harrison: In one paragraph. Okay! By the end of the book what Haidt shows is that morality among humans is based on six foundations for morality. These are basic templates for how to think about things in a society and interactions between people and between groups that eventually make a society work and create what we end up calling a moral foundation, a moral structure. The way he got there was originally by being exposed to different moralities starting out with his research into the psychology of morality basically and then being exposed to radically different moralities in different cultures.

Of course there's this element that has been a debate in philosophy ever since there's been philosophy; how to reconcile the competing and different moralities of cultures with the idea that there's right and wrong. So if something's right in one culture and wrong in the other, which one is actually right. The conclusion he comes to is that there are foundations that are evolutionarily adaptive for humans that are templates. So one for example is fairness and harm. That's the first one he looks at. His hypothesis and explanation for how it comes about is for the first humans and throughout the history of evolution, the parents, especially the mother, will be emotionally affected by the sight of their child being harmed.

Human children especially are the most useless and ineffective at protecting themselves. They're totally at the mercy of their parents. They have to be guarded all of the time because they can't walk. Most animals can walk when they're born. Human children need that extra level of protection so human babies wouldn't survive if mothers and fathers weren't instilled with some kind of compassion or response to the harm that comes to their children. So humans are hardwired to have a negative reaction to the sight of harm, especially in their children and that extends to their family. That forms a moral foundation for the rules and structures that societies end up creating where it would be a concern for harm and to prevent harm.

There are six of these. Maybe we can get into some of them but they're like templates, like a language template in the human mind because every human is born with this language template and if presented with information at a certain point in development, namely the exposure to people speaking, that child will learn to talk. Of course the language will be different, the words and sounds will be different depending on what country you're in and what language you grew up with but everyone has language.

So the same thing with morality. The specific ways in which these moral foundations are filled out will be different but they serve the same function for all groups. So every group will have certain social rules or morals or values that are related to care and harm. They might not look exactly the same but at the foundation that's what they come down to. There are also others like loyalty and authority, reaction to oppression-freedom, liberty. What are the other one or two? Can't remember.

Niall: I don't have it off the top of my head.

Joe: So what's the point then Harrison?

Harrison: Haidt says the reason that all of these moral foundations exist is to solidify a group, to bind people together because he who aren't bound together, people who don't have a group, people who aren't part of something bigger than themselves are actually less likely to survive. That's the evolutionary perspective. So these moralities are what bind groups together and help groups survive throughout time so they're not wiped out.

Joe: And what does he say about the differences then, because the title of the book is Why Religions and Politics Divide People?

Niall: The thing I took from it is that everyone is righteous about where they stand because they're seeing it through what Haidt calls their own moral matrix. But there's different matrices, right?

Harrison: Exactly.

Niall: But the most important difference between them is that one is far smaller. It uses only three of these parameters. The other is more complex. It's richer and it uses all six. He found overwhelming correspondence that people who identify as liberals/left use only three. People who identify as conservatives/right use all six.

Joe: What are those six?

Harrison: Well the three that liberals do is care/harm is the first, liberty/oppression is the second and the third is fairness a bit less. In the beginning of the book he gives a bit more weight to fairness but then he actually found that what he was looking at as fairness was actually liberty/oppression because fairness is actually proportional. So just to use an example we've been talking about several times in the past several weeks about the wage gap, actual fairness is people who work more should make more money and probably the vast majority of people believe that intuitively. They think that if someone works less shouldn't make as much. If you give them the same amount of money that's unfair. It's unfair to the person who worked more and you're letting a free rider take advantage of the system. So that's actually less important to liberals. More important to liberals is liberty and oppression so if they see either themselves or some other group being oppressed then that's wrong and that has to be corrected. That trumps fairness because they want equality for all the oppressed. So it's not actually fairness.

But conservatives are concerned about all those three and they're equally as concerned with authority, loyalty and sacredness.

Niall: Or sanctity.

Harrison: Sanctity, yeah. But liberals aren't concerned very much with those latter three, with loyalty, authority or sanctity.

Joe: So loyalty wouldn't necessarily go with their focus on concern for the oppressed.

Harrison: Right.

Joe: Because the oppressed can be anybody anywhere, outside of your group, everywhere and this is the kind of humanitarianism I suppose where empathizing of other cultures and other races who are being oppressed, particularly if they're being oppressed as is the case in the US with the history of US foreign policy, it's very easy to say that America has been oppressing/bombing - that's a euphemism for bombing other countries around the world so that would give rise to a lot of antiwar sentiment and anti-war has been historically the domain of the left as well. Whereas conservatives would tend to be not so much antiwar because of loyalty and also their respect for authority, the authority being the government and what the government does and the military hierarchy, etc.

The thing about the information that Haidt talks about is that it does seem to map to reality. It maps to the human population, possibly all around the world. He only focuses on people in America, right?

Harrison: No, he has done research and said that these categories basically apply in all cultures.

Niall: Yeah, he's found it to be the case in India and Brazil and there are others who have taken moral foundations theory and built the same kinds of questionnaires and found the same results in their countries which are extraordinary. Even within the US the acronym he comes up with for liberals, the most liberal of the liberals, the ones who scored highest in only caring about the three of the six foundations, is WEIRD, western educated industrialized rich and democratic.

It was extraordinary because the differentiation within the US once you leave the city, not only that, once you leave certain areas of the city you come to the suburbs where middle class/lower class people live and there it's far richer to find all six concerns in a more complex matrices in operation among those people. So I found it extraordinary because I've been thinking for a couple of years now, what is going in western cities? There seems to be the problem. This thing comes through them.

But he did find the same differentiation in Brazil, or he did when he corresponded with other researchers there. They told him yeah, we've got the same stats here. Once you go into the cities you find these WEIRD people relative to a larger mass of people whose moral decisions generally gravitate or orbit around these six.

Joe: That would make sense because people in cities tend to be a large number of people and also a diversity of people and of ideas conglomerate into the city whereas in the countryside, in smaller towns, more locally you find more cohesive groups where small groups of people will be able to live in a small town together or move to a small town but in the city there's the anonymity and at the same time the ability to interact with many different types of people. So that would appeal to leftists and it's interesting that you do see a lot of these left-leaning activists and the movements that they create come out of places like New York and Los Angeles, major, major cities.

Niall: But do they actually...

Elan: On that one point we just had an article about how Jordan Peterson's new book was covered by various book review publications in the US and where USA Today and Publishers Weekly and a whole lot of other national newspapers were acknowledging Peterson's success in the book, it was both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times Review of Books that didn't put Peterson's book high up on the list and gave shoddy criteria.

Harrison: Right, the New York Times best seller list.

Elan: Yes. So this is totally consistent with that. These are two bastions of liberal culture, Los Angeles, New York, both voted democratic for Hillary Clinton in the last election. They can't quite bring themselves to acknowledge the objective information that suggests that his work is popular even in places like New York and Los Angeles.

Joe: Right. What were you going to say Niall?

Niall: It doesn't end there because when it comes to practice, how people actually live, vis-à-vis what they say, their ideological things they tend to say about how they live, it's different. So the way they actually live is usually closer to having a full six healthy morality because in practice, do they actually interact? They say they're open to diversity but how many of them are actually living with immigrants or helping them get papers and so on?

Joe: Well there's the thing that trumps those taste buds - he calls them taste buds.

Niall: Yeah, he compares the two to the palate.

Joe: A moral palate or a moral taste bud. What trumps that is ultimately personal self interest for a lot of people. So when it comes down to it, you will exercise those proclivities, those basic innate biological, psychological tendencies as part of your being really and this is why it's so important. This gets down to the fundamental nature of human beings and what it proposes is that there are fundamental differences between human beings and they can be broadly separated into these two categories of left and right, which has happened and has been the case across the world, certainly for the past few hundred years. We don't know so much about further back than that but certainly politics for the past few hundred years in western countries and in many other countries around the world have been divided into a left and right strata.

So it has fairly scary and bleakly negative implications for the future when those fundamental differences between ordinary people living in the same city or whatever are provoked or exacerbated because it's not something you can necessarily reason with or get someone else to see your point of view because this goes to the very base of these people's nature. How are you going to get someone to change their own innate biological and psychological drives? That is more or less who they are, who they see themselves as and who they actually are.

Niall: Does everyone know where left/right originates? It comes from the eve of the French Revolution in 1789 when the Étienne Regime, the aristocratic monarchist regime in France had actually been liberalizing because of the growing pressure to be more open, democratic and fair and so on. And so they had the Assemblée Nationale, the parliament, those on the left would be those who wanted change.

Joe: On the left side of the house, yeah.

Niall: On the left side of the house, and those deputies seated on the right were those who wanted to more or less serve the status quo. And that's a bad omen because what happens next is the revolution. Heads are chopped, despite the liberalization, the tendency towards what in theory the left said it wanted. Then a revolution starts and the people of the left leading the revolution themselves get overtaken by even more extreme people who then cut their heads off, who are taken over by even more extreme people and the wave that comes behind it is now completely out of the control of the original promoters of the revolution. And for 20 years there's The Terror; slaughter upon slaughter and it becomes more and more doctrinaire as something else comes up behind it. That's where we're at right now.

Joe: We're on the cusp of that.

Niall: And it's quite global. It's very pronounced in the US but the US is the American Empire. We're all living in America so to speak, so it concerns all of us.

Elan: That's a great point because during the Cathy Newman interview that Jordan Peterson had a few weeks ago, which we've discussed previously, she brings up the question about why he's preparing this new leftists ideological movement. First she gets it wrong and says Pinochet but then she also mentions Mao. And he likens it to a kind of violent revolution, a la Mao and other leftist leaders who would ultimately kill large parts of their population in order to secure their ideology. Very few people have made that connection and I guess that's what we're looking at today and how far this can all go. And it can go very far. We hear activists on the left make these outrageous statements about killing old white men or not having any white men for Christmas or things about white genocide and these are statements that you would, in a different context, easily attribute to a Nazi mentality and yet it's coming out of the mouths of these leftist cultural ideologues.

Niall: For now I suspect a lot of them say it in jest just to wind people up. I say for Newman interviewing Peterson was a curiosity, "Well he sounds so extreme" and then when she's talking to him, saying "You don't really mean that!" She doesn't see what he's seeing a few steps ahead.

Joe: Right.

Niall: That the analyses she's done on previous episodes, in other countries and in the west, and how bad things can get. That's why he's such a serious guy sitting there. He's very serious about it. He has said "I choose my words so carefully".

Joe: But that's the reason his position is unenviable is because he is sounding the alarm bells in advance. Now if you look back at revolutions and the collapse of societies or disastrous disruption or chaos in societies around the world, but let's say in Europe over the 20th century that Peterson talks about, no one with enough influence said or did anything - maybe not did anything but certainly didn't say anything or didn't have a wide enough audience - to stop it from happening. We don't hear about them. All we know is that these things happened in the Bolshevik revolution, for example in Russia, that led to the purges and Stalin and the deaths of 10s of millions of people in Stalin's Soviet Union and also just before that in Nazi Germany. There was no one with the voice or the reach to influence enough people to just tell them to stop. "Don't go in this direction!"

We today and people like Petersen can use those examples to make the case, to say "Let's not do this again. We have very clear examples from less than 100 years ago, 70 or 80 years ago that this kind of radical leftist ideology that's based on oppression, on the idea that there are oppressed people and therefore there are oppressors and therefore the oppressors must be overthrown and the oppressed must be put in the formerly high positions of the oppressors. That was the ideology that informed the rise of the Nazis and it was the central aspect of the Bolshevik revolution.

So it was oppression and the idea that you should destroy the structures of society in the name of oppression, i.e., in the name of inequality, i.e., there are people who don't have what other people have and therefore we must have a revolution and obviously a revolution in any society is extremely destructive and generally involves the deaths of millions and millions of people.

And it's an appealing thing. It's a very appealing thing because if you just take it on a superficial level, who doesn't feel bad that some people are having a hard time. It goes to the core of human cooperation and human relationships effectively. It tugs at people's emotional heart strings. To feel sorry for someone all you have to do is show them a picture "Look at this poor child" or "Look at this poor person" and immediately it's like "Something should be done about that!"

Niall: It pings the first moral foundation, to care.

Joe: Right, which everybody had.

Niall: Which everybody has.

Joe: But that's the whole point. Both sides have care for the other, and I suppose if you leverage it enough you can almost make some people who feel as if a person in another country that they've never met, you can get the same response as you would to them seeing one of their family members almost or something close to that, if you push the rhetoric enough.

Niall: And the problem is the people doing the pushing come up with shoddy solutions that harm everyone in the end. For example, opening the borders of Europe and letting in three million people. Sorry Harrison. Go on.

Harrison: We've seen it repeatedly over the last 20 or 30 years. The most recent example was the young Syrian boy that was caught in an airstrike. You have conservative and liberal news commentators and just people crying on air seeing this picture because that pings that first moral foundation of care. So it's a weird way of saying it but it's so pernicious. The reason it's so pernicious is because it applies to the moral foundations of everyone. But what Niall just said is a good point; the solutions offered make things worse.

The reason it's so crazy and the reason it's so hard to combat or to get around is because anyone that's pointing out the problems with this ideology, it's almost counterintuitive to anyone listening to the criticism because their first reaction will be "Well what? You don't care about this young Syrian boy?" Or "What? You don't care about this?" It's very hard to respond to that because you're put in a position where you might appear to be for things like sexual harassment. There's that recent Vice interview with Jordan Peterson where the Vice interviewer was like "How is this not just like 'don't touch the ass of your co-worker'?" Well of course it's hard not to agree with that. People should just go up to someone and grope them. But that's not the issue!

The issues get conflated from a leftist perspective which then even infects the right as well, the conservatives. It's like here's a problem and everyone can agree that it's a problem and therefore we should do something about it and we need to do something now and we need to get new laws and we need to create these new crimes in order to stop this from happening, and in the process they tear down what actually prevents totalitarianism from coming about.

Joe you started out the program by talking about gender politics and feminism. Feminism really has torn out the foundation of society to the point where totalitarianism is totally possible and it's even there already in certain areas. It's just not public and it hasn't infected everything yet. One of the first things that needs to happen is that you need to get rid of the rule of law. Specifically what that means is that when someone is accused of a crime, there has to be a trial. They have to be proven guilty and there has to have been a crime in the first place in order for this whole process to be legitimate. Well of course if the accused is found innocent well then justice has been served. If he's found guilty justice has been served either way.

But the way the leftist ideology has been going for decades actually, and it's only gotten a bit worse in recent years but it's been like that for a long time, is that no longer is the accused given the benefit of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. So it's based entirely on accusation and that's actually written into the new laws for these new crimes where the accused doesn't have the right to defend himself, doesn't have the right to confront his accuser, to present evidence. As long as the accuser feels they've been offended and feels that a new crime has been committed against him, then the person - and it's usually she at this point - has accused, is guilty. That is so dangerous!

Joe: In that sense, by definition of being a man, you are guilty until proven innocent in the case of a sexual abuse allegation against you. That's where it's going. It's already gone there in many instances. That leads it to totalitarian ideology because in Nazi Germany it was the Jews. By definition of being a Jew you were automatically guilty and if someone came up and said "I saw that Jew putting up an anti-Nazi poster", you don't need any evidence because the incriminating factor is that you're a Jew. That's the strongest evidence against you, by who you are, race, religion, whatever it is and we're seeing that with men. We're seeing all these examples of stuff that happened in these other totalitarian regimes where millions of people were killed.

We're seeing them happening in western society today and they're becoming part of the rule of law, of the legislation. It's happening in a relatively subtle way compared to in the past but then you'd expect that to happen because the past stands as an example, it stands as something of an impediment towards doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way as Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or the Bolshevik revolution again because everybody knows how that happened, at least on the surface. You can't do it in overtly the same way but we see the same thing is happening in a more convoluted, circuitous route effectively. Like we're talking about here, it is much more pernicious because it's happening as a result of an appeal to people's sympathy, their sense of care.

Both types of human beings have this care taste bud where they instinctively feel that they need to care for and that's what's being leveraged. But the people on the "left" don't have the other taste buds of the right which is loyalty and that loyalty to your own group or tribe or whatever you want to call it would trump this appeal to care for the other. So the answer to what you said about that's difficult for people to respond to when you're accused of not caring about the Syrian boy or the picture of the poor girl elsewhere in the world, the answer to that, even though you'll still be accused of being a bit heartless or something, is "I have more problems closer to home to deal with. I'm sorry that other people are suffering, but in my group I have people that are suffering". I think that's the best argument you could give to that.

But of course the lefties don't have that in-group loyalty and that's also why you find more of them in bigger cities and you find more right wing conservatives in communities where they do develop a sense of loyalty and community spirit to their little in-group whereas in cities you only have a loyalty to the ideology of diversity which is all around you. You don't feel a loyalty to your neighbour in a big city. You might not even know them. The only loyalty that you have there is when you get out in the streets when you march for your cause which is diversity and everybody together, all the different races together. Whereas in the small town, it's like "I know my neighbour. I know his problems. He knows mine and we have problems so I'm sorry but Syrian boy is going to have to wait".

But again it seems to be something very, very fundamental that cannot be changed in human beings. It's not to say that there's anything in normal times that these left/right moral structures or moral values or value system that they have can't be compatible or can't work together in a country. But the problem is when there's a swing to the extreme of one or the other. Everybody knows that a polarization of one side is bad in a society.

So polarization toward the conservative right, loyalty in-group focused side would mean a closed society that would eventually stop functioning properly because you need an influx of new ideas and you need to progress. You need new concepts.

Niall: Even just basic things like trade.

Joe: Right, exactly.

Niall: With the other groups.

Joe: Right. So you need that to vivify and help your society to progress. But the problem with the left is when it goes too far to the extreme there is no loyalty to your own. It's everybody, bringing in all others and you effectively eat your own. There's no loyalty to your own. There's no focus on your own group, your own value system and society and you neglect it. You neglect your child basically and it dies.

Niall: It's an incredibly imbalanced moral foundation to have. In the case of the rape culture hysteria on campuses and so on, whenever individual cases would actually have been thrown out, there was no remorse from those who were pushing it and whenever challenged they would say "Well in the end it's going to do the boy good anyway because now he'll be scared shitless to ever even think about doing that in the future". And one woman went on to explain - I don't remember the name - she said "In the long term this is good because it inculcates virtuousness in that person. We've scared the shit out of him and that'll actually be good for his development and the development of guys in society in general." And that speaks to a fundamental lack of insight in understanding that that's how it actually works. You don't do it that way.

That's why Jordan Peterson's going around and is such a hit with people because he is doing it the right way by telling people you gain or remember or grow new virtue so to speak, through yourself, not by correcting the world out there. It's a fundamentally different way of doing it. There's only one basically right way in this scenario and doing it by legislating and punishing, the lack of insight is staggering. And of course he gave the extreme example, "Oh don't worry it's just about them. Sexual harassment it will end there." Of course it won't.

Their insight blocks them from even realizing the obvious, that once you set a precedent in this area, this field, it's going to go over here. It's going to go everywhere. Everyone is guilty until what? Complete obeisance? The extreme in Canada that got Peterson off and running was the changing of language. "You must speak a certain way."

Joe: Forced speech, yeah.

Elan: Well on that subject Niall, I just rewatched a couple of minutes of Peterson addressing a crowd of some transgender and LGBT individuals where he said that in the long run their attitude towards having their preferred pronoun legislated was not good for them. And their response was basically "If you're not with us on this you're against us". I'm paraphrasing. But it harkens back to George Bush Jr., W's "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude regarding terrorism. There is no middle ground. There is no dialogue. There is no logos. There is no room for anything that isn't an agreement with their emotional appeal to their side. You see the same thing - to use another example here that's kind of been around for quite a while but has seen its apogee in recent years - the BDS legislation. You can't even advocate for boycott/divest sanctions against Israel without being accused of hate crime in certain places.

So this is liberalism weaponized on a geopolitical level. There are just dozens of examples of it that we're seeing all the time. It's pervasive and it is pernicious because who wants to be accused of hating Jews, of being an anti-Semite?! But to come up with any kind of policy to address the issues of Israel's maltreatment of Palestinians you must be an anti-Semite. It's very similar in colour or tone to feminism where if you don't agree with the feminists' take on certain things then you must be anti-woman or misogynistic or patriarchal.

There was that little video about Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada recently where he's on the floor of the parliament and brushed against a lady MP at some point. I'm sure it wasn't deliberate but he sort of elbowed her and she felt offended to such a degree that she made a big stink about it and after that he had to give some big speech about how wrong he was and until he made that speech he was demonized as a terrible man, a terrible person. And now we have him virtue signalling and saying all of these things, that he's learned his lesson and he's taken it to its furthest logical end in all of his PC liberal rhetoric.

Harrison: Well I think the take home message from that is that Trudeau's always been a spineless leftist feminist but no one is safe from the wrath of the feminists, even their greatest supporters. The first victims of the revolution are the people that started the revolution.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: Let's take a call. We've got someone on the line. Who do we have on the line with us?

Brent: Hey, it's Brent from New York.

Harrison: Hey Brent, how's it going?

Joe: Hey Brent.

Brent: Good, how are you guys doing?

Joe: Good.

Brent: I just had a little anecdote I wanted to share that happened over the last 24 hours on Facebook. I have friends in a wide variety of communities and this one guy is in the activist community. He identifies as anti-Civ community in Philadelphia.

Joe: Anti-what?

Brent: Anti-civilization. These are generally folks who think that we should all be back in the woods hunting and gathering and that would solve all of our problems. So he posted this picture which is a copy of a tweet, a bunch of white people that line up at a sporting event and then right next to them is a bunch of crackers laid out next to each other. Just being who I am, I just commented one word and put it in parentheses because I was whispering it, "racism" to try to drop that and it spawned a 60 reply conversation on how you can't be racist against white people. The mental gymnastics that these folks were going through were just so fascinating. A lot of it was just hate speech. I was getting a lot of hate directed at me but a few of them actually tried to engage and give reasons.

I saw the famous thing that Jordan Peterson pointed out about how even things like rational thought and reason are under fire these days. I mentioned that we were having a conversation based on rational thought and reason and this person used an epithet. He said reason was quite suspect and he didn't elaborate further without really describing what he was saying.

Another one came in and started to tell me that white people as the dominant group can't suffer racism because racism is this unique combination of power and prejudice which seems to be what's coming out of academia and why Jordan Peterson is so warring against the more social justice aspects of the humanities. It was really kind of disturbing that a lot of it seems like hate directed at white people, a very generalized sort of hate and even a lot of white people were participating in the hating all white people thing which I found fascinating as well.

Joe: That's an example of what we were talking about earlier on; the care taste bud trumping loyalty. Certainly it's quite easy for those people to dismiss or overlook any sense of loyalty to white people. These are the real anti-racists who are colour blind. They're allowed to be colour blind as long as you're a self-hating white person you don't identify in this situation that you're describing where white people are being attacked for being white. It's racism but you have white people saying "No, that's not racism. Attack me all you want." They're a version of the claim of the self-hating Jew where you're not allowed to have any sense of personal morality that diverges from the ideology of equality and anti-oppression and anti-racism. All of that's gone. Your only ideology is to support the designated oppressed people. And if you are the one who's identified as the one who's part of the oppression, then you have to effectively hate yourself. Of course they won't expect you to go around punching yourself in the face but...

Niall: They do expect you to shut up.

Joe: Well they do expect you to either shut up or shout very loudly about how evil you are, you and all of your kind.

Brent: Yeah. This one guy gave me a rather academic layout of five major points which it was fun to go through and it does give insight into how these folks are thinking about things. It's definitely like looking into Bizarro World and one of the funny things was that one of the people from the other side of the conversation who identifies with all this was reading my commentary and said the same thing about my comments, like it was looking at a Bizarro World.

So we're on opposite sides of some weird mirror and it's very difficult for either side to grasp the fundamental logic of the other side. It doesn't seem like they're using a whole lot of logic but it seems like there's a lot of emotion and we've got generations of trauma on the side of people of colour in this country which I understand. It sucks. It's terrible. I was trying to explain that you don't fix it by starting to scapegoat another population. That's just more of what we've seen in the history of the human race.

Joe: Even that argument about generations of trauma on the part of - what did you call them? People of colour? Is that what I have to call them now? I can't call them African-American.

Brent: African-American I think is still fine but people of colour is maybe a more inclusive term.

Joe: Can I say African-Canadian in there as well?

Brent: I suppose you could. I'm not sure.

Joe: Do we have to go that far? African-Irish people, African-English people, African-French people? I don't know. It's a bit silly. But I suppose we have to come up with something since we're not allowed to just call each other human beings. We have to come up with some racial designation which is interesting coming from anti-racists that you have to actually have a racial designation.

Brent: And the weird thing too was he was arguing that race doesn't exist. It was another one of the arguments plied in the concept of a white race. The white race doesn't exist because it's an invention by white supremacists.

Harrison: But racism...

Niall: What about hating others then?

Joe: But then the black race doesn't exist either except as a construct of the white racism, right?

Brent: Well yeah. It's a very weird circular set of rules that only apply for one side.

Joe: It's also called bullshit. {laughter} When you follow these people's logic through it's a circular argument. It's the definition of just nonsense or it has no logical follow through. It doesn't actually make any sense. There's no logic to it whatsoever when you follow it through. But that idea of generations of trauma suffered by black people in America or people of colour or whatever, POCs - can't call them POCs (people of colour), that's a bad word. Myself, I thought POC/pox. That's how you pronounce it. But pox is a sickness. Anyway, it's very hard to navigate.

The idea of generations of trauma amongst a people is an appropriation. They talk about cultural appropriation. Well there's oppression appropriation that is going on all over the place here. As we've been talking about, people are appropriating the suffering of people, from anybody in the country that you identify as having suffered, you can give a talk about how they suffered in the past. Or you can take people from around the world and appropriate their suffering and make a cause of it and get your ass out in the street and protest about it and get some attention for yourself. But that's the whole point, right?

But that argument of black people have suffered a lot in American history, focusing on that is only going to cause problems and it's not even true in a sense. People suffer alone. I call the bullshit on that because people suffer on their own. Individuals suffer and that's where suffering is real. You can't claim someone else's or even other people of your own racial or religious designation and claim that because they suffered that you also share in their suffering because you have the same skin colour because that's racism for a start. If there's no such thing as racism, again it's a stupid argument.

But that's used by people, like we were talking earlier on the show, to try and leverage or provoke this emotional response from people, get you to feel sorry for the and get you to shut up and give your energy and attention or your support to their cause. In the same way that suffering is an individual experience, these people are after the individual experience of their own aggrandizement. They're seeking power for themselves by way of joining a group that then seeks power because there's more force, more power, they get more of an effect lobbying as a group but each of them is individually seeking power for themselves. Peterson talks about it. "Just shut the hell up. Go and clean your room and sort your own life out."

If you're a black person in America, go and make yourself better. There are plenty of avenues for black people or any minority, including white minorities in America, to improve themselves in one way or another, improve their situation. If there's something about it you don't like, improve it. You live today. You don't live 60 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago back when slavery was a thing. Just as I don't live 200 years ago when the dirty English were oppressing Irish people, right? I don't live then. I don't carry that with me and I'm not trying to get something off the backs of the suffering of my forebears. The onus is completely cynical.

Brent: The other thing that sort of invalidates the suffering, like you said, it's all on an individual level. White people didn't have it so great 200 years ago in this country, on the whole. Granted a lot of them did but many of them did not. You're checking this hierarchy of who's suffered the most and trying to use that as leverage to get people to side with you and say "Okay, we need to give these people more power". And what it does come down to is that it seems like a lot of them are in this mindset that we need some sort of revolution or socialist overthrow and radical redistribution.

I would have no problem with a lot of the super rich people losing a little bit of their money and having it going down to help some people at the very bottom, but we don't need a huge revolution to accomplish that. We have methods and systems in place where we can do it. But it's scary. One of the groups that was referenced is called the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. If you look at their website you can see that they have a lot of the same "You're with us or against us", white power is the problem in this country and we need a radical socialist revival. They already have little co-ops out somewhere in the Midwest in the Detroit area.

So it's interesting to see. It's interesting to watch but it's scary on the other hand. It's a complete lack of logic.

Joe: Yeah and especially when you realize that the lessons of the past and how it happened almost from one day to the next things changed radically. So you can be thinking right up to the day before disaster strikes and society within a short period of time completely collapses, you can be thinking that "It's interesting, this social dynamic that's going on" and then the next day that's day one of a few week period when everything goes to hell.

That's why people like Peterson who are sounding the alarm bell really are needed because you don't know. There's no clear road map or template that you can see "Okay, if it reaches this point then it's going to tip over into complete chaos." It's not really known when that happens and nobody can know when that happens. So in that case you just don't go there. You don't even start down the road. But unfortunately we're pretty far down the road.

Brent: And there's a lot of powerful people who have sopped up a lot of what I think of as indoctrination because it's a complete lack of historical perspective and really a huge lack of knowledge.

Joe: Right.

Brent: And is really what the problem is.

Joe: Absolutely.

Brent: But anyway, that was my little anecdote I wanted to share with y'all.

Joe: Well thanks. It was appreciated.

Niall: Thanks Brent.

Harrison: Take care.

Brent: Keep it up!

Joe: See you later.

Brent: Bye-bye.

Joe: There's a short excerpt by P.D. Ouspensky, his observation. He was in Russia prior to the Soviet Union at the time of the Bolshevik revolution and what they did and he describes it all. But the summary is that they just wrecked the place, to some extent physically, killing lots of people. But they completely stopped all industry and it snowballed very quickly. They had people in different areas ready to rise up and they were able to stop the economy completely. All the factories, everything stopped and people started starving to death and they didn't give a shit. Because no food was being delivered people were starving, there was chaos.

Their justification for doing that was based on this ideology of oppression which was, they looked at a factory. They saw the managers in the factory and they saw the low level workers and they said "That's unfair. Why should those lower level workers have to work 12 hours a day when the manager gets to sit in an office for eight hours a day? That's fundamentally unfair" and they went and decided they were physically going to change it and they went in with guns and they stopped all industry and they killed or ran the upper level management out of town and they put the workers into the manager's' office. "Sit your ass down in that seat. You're running this business now," by a guy who was used maybe digging holes. He's like "I don't know. What do you mean?" "Shut up and do it. You've been liberated."

For me it's not a stretch that some version of that could happen in western countries.

Niall: Yeah.

Elan: That's the inherent contradiction. We just exported freedom and democracy in Ukraine, put a bunch of right wing neo-Nazis in power and you don't hear a single liberal-minded individual in the US say word one about it.

Harrison: Yeah, where's antifa?

Joe: Yeah.

Elan: Where are these leftist individuals who care so much about racism and equality...

Harrison: And who hate fascists.

Elan: And who hate fascists. Where are they about the US, this great bastion of liberalism, what are they saying about what we're doing around the world? You do this enough times around the world, if we're generating this idea, if this contradiction exists here, it's going to come back here in a much bigger way. So it's quite dangerous and I do think we're seeing the makings of blood on the streets in a certain sense. But not in the way that they think it's going to happen.

Joe: It never is unfortunately. What a bunch of idiots. Ideologically grown idiots in charge. We have a call.

Harrison: Okay, yes. We've got Steven on the line. Steven, hello.

Steven: Hey, how y'all doing?

Harrison: Good. How about you?

Steven: I'm doing great. I've just switched to transgender.

Joe: Good job!

Steven: The best move I've ever made in my life. I can say I'm the only transgender lake cleaning guy in the entire world.

Joe: That's pretty unique!

Harrison: Therefore you're the most depressed.

Steven: Yes, so when I buy a wet suit I have to buy a women's wetsuit and then when I buy shorts I buy women's shorts. But the weird thing is, nobody notices. {laughter} Nobody notices.

Joe: That's not fair.

Steven: But I concur with a lot of your discussion so far, especially the last points you made with respect to the Ukrainian fascists and so forth. It's amazing how the political consciousness of what used to comprise the lefty anti-war has been almost totally shut down. Totally shut down. And we focus on these outrageous silly notions that I would venture to say 95% of the population, whether you voted for Hillary or Trump, look at this and they're like "Oh my god! More bullshit!"

But I think that there is a pragmatic function to all of this. When you're talking about the latest outrages, about what Trump said about women or blacks or whatever, you're not talking about "Wow! There's people dying because they don't have health care. Wages aren't rising commensurate with prices." These are the issues that are shut down right now as far as discussion and any kind of coherent political movement that we could actually change things through our solidarity, our mobilization on key issues that people of the working class would generally agree upon. And that would definitely mean going against the republicans and Trump on that; wags for example.

But the democrats are total no-shows because the reality is the democrats don't want to see these issue forwarded either. This is the dirty little secret. The democrats don't want to see these issues forwarded because the people that fund them are Wall Street and the bankers and the huge corporations. It's ridiculous, but we are making no movement at all. People's political consciences as far as war, with imperialism, are at an all time low from what I can see.

There's a segment of the left, of people that call themselves the left, that do focus on things like Syria and Russia, but they're the people that reject Russiagate. They don't even get into these gender wars, bull crap transgender. They don't even focus on that and that's maybe 5%. I have no gauge, but when I just look at the range of progressive and liberal publications out there and thought leaders, there's maybe 5% that are anti war, anti-imperialism, and pro-working class.

When you really think about life and human society, one of the core rules is - it seems to me anyway - is that might makes right and it sounds harsh. You might not like the way it sounds but it's really true that might makes right. So all of these groups that have been, as a group, focused on injustice, like the Japanese being interned in the United States during WWII, all kinds of groups have been oppressed. They plea for the people with power to just be a little bit nicer and that's the only thing that people...

Joe: And they get on with their lives.

Steven: Exactly. I'm of the more traditional mind view of the left, that we should look at ourselves as a working class and our interests bridge all of these individual sexual preferences, ethnic backgrounds and so forth and gender, and we can focus on making movement and improving people's lives materially and getting something done. But that is nowhere on the horizon. So I suspect that a lot of this transgender stuff, I'm just like everybody else when I see a story of the latest outrage like this teacher in Miami from a catholic school that got married to her girlfriend of a long time and she was fired. I can understand that.

And there's another teacher that was fired from the university because the teacher insisted to the student that Australia was a continent not a nation. She was fired because she was an idiot. But there's all these salacious stories that we focus on but I think that when you step back at the larger reality, military budgets go up, costs of living goes up, the quality of life for the lower 50% of the US population is going down. People live in hellish conditions just precisely because wages haven't kept pace with inflation over these years.

I've seen this trend happen over and over where the democrats will champion the minimum wage. It'll take a couple of years and whatever they champion and settle upon and hash out with the republicans will be a 50 cent raise, a dollar raise implemented over two years when in fact five years goes by and when you finally get the minimum wage increase the prices in the last five years have outpaced the minimum wage increase. This happens over and over and over. It's a coordinated strategy between the democrats and the republicans.

Joe: Right. Well what's your take on white privilege? Do you have any privilege?

Steven: Oh my god! So I guess I would like to examine that term first. Privilege would mean an unearned advantage, right? Is that what it comes down to?

Joe: Mm-hm.

Steven: And well you could always argue that somebody who's born into a rich family is privileged. I don't think most people would disagree with that. But the way these social justice warriors are using it, it's to browbeat people like me and other white people and just imply that you have some kind of unearned advantage over other people. So then what's supposed to result from that realization? You're supposed to quit your job and let somebody, an African-American or a Latino or whatever take your job from you, right?

Joe: Right. Because you've got racial guilt as part of the white race which you obviously identify with because of your skin colour? There's this historical injustices that you are responsible for as a descendent of the people who committed those injustices against the descendants of the people who are oppressed and to make up for that in the past and any remnants of it today, you should do something like that. It's just about justice, about the fairness! It's about being fair.

Steven: And you know what happens here is this whole discourse totally divides and creates animosity among the working class and that is the nail on the head right there. That is what it's intended to do. Whoever these leaders like Linda Sarsour, if they're making $150 grand a year, come on! Somebody's paying that and they're paying it for a reason. They're not going to be paying somebody to go organize workers to force WalMart or big corporations like McDonald's to have to pay more. You notice that that's not even on their agenda. Their agenda is just to divide, get people hating each other and that way the lower 50% are divided as ever. I think that that is the function of the social justice warrior.

And now the college students, the antifas, they're young they're kind of dumb. They don't know that but the higher ups know the function of these movements and they know that the game plan is always keep the working class divided. Always. Never allow a union to develop. When they brainwash people to believe that you can't better your life through work or solidarity and being able to put pressure on huge corporations to pay more money, when they convince you that you can't do that, they have won. And that's been going on for decades. It's palpable, it's disgusting. For myself, I really don't think things are going to change in this country until there is a substantial economic collapse.

Like I said before, I don't see most people believing in the social justice warrior. They're curious about it, the latest outrages from it. It's fun to read, the latest silly stuff coming from them, but there's only 5% that buy into it and are the real activists of it. You'll notice as well among the social justice warriors, the leaders of these groups of young people, whatever, they're from upper middle class or middle class backgrounds in general that are in universities.

Just on a side note, I go through periods where it looks like work is going to be short and then I hear that I might not get this job because a group of Mexicans will do it for cheaper and I had this woman online tell me "Steve, don't be upset about this. We're all in this together." She's paying $4,000 a month for a nice house in the northeast. Her husband's a professional and she's telling me that we're all in this together. You follow me?

Niall: Yeah.

Steven: It is so ludicrous. I'm not a hater. Immigration's a very complicated issue, but I have to hustle and I have to go out and do work that even Guatemalans and Mexicans and Hondurans would rather not do just so I can have work. To my benefit, I found a niche that is hard to do and if you get some good wealthy clients, they treat you well and you can make it by. But these liberals and the social justice left and the democratic party left progressives, I'm just totally down on them right now. Big time.

Anyway, I'm going to Cuba this week.

Joe: Okay.

Steven: I'll be traveling to Cuba for a week and then I'll be staying in Havana meeting my fiancé and so forth, so I'll fill you in when I come back, okay?

Harrison: Yeah, let us know Steven.

Steven: Well thank y'all. I appreciate y'all. Take care.

Niall: See you.

Joe: The thing about privilege is a load of nonsense, it all comes down to your perspective on life and what's meaningful in life. Some rich kid born into a rich family has a privilege, yeah, for material goods but they can live a crappy, unfulfilled, meaningless life, not necessarily happy.

Harrison: And they can still be total failures at life.

Joe: Quite a lot of them actually are, even if they're in fancy positions, they're actually ignorant, stupid people, there's no actual fulfillment in life. So this idea that because I'm poorer than someone else means that I'm underprivileged is not the case. It's about the meaning that your life has in the sense of achievement or satisfaction. That's why Peterson says forget about comparing yourself to other people. Compare yourself to how you were yesterday. That's your only valid reference point for where you are today and whether you should be happy or content or not is have you sorted out problems that you had yesterday today.

But the other thing about it is that it fits with the idea that appeal to meaning, to focus on a will to meaning in life as opposed to a will to power or a will to wealth is interesting because it's dismissed. Peterson's message is that; improve yourself and find meaning in life through, as he says, bearing responsibility and showing that you're a person who can actually handle life and that's where you'll find the most satisfaction.

That idea is dismissed by these leftists and you find that a disproportionate number of them, certainly more than those on the right or conservatives, are non-religious or atheists. That's kind of interesting because it goes back to the stuff we were talking about earlier on with Haidt's book about these moral taste buds where the leftists don't have the authority, the idea of authority in their lives that would govern their view on life and obviously it applies to religion. Religious people have some kind of religious belief that imposes a higher authority in their lives.

Niall: Authority and also sanctity.

Joe: And sanctity, yes. They go together. But leftists tend to be more atheistic and therefore fundamentally, if you're an atheist your life has no meaning. Atheists don't realize that but there actually is no meaning to their lives because the atheist cosmology, if you want to call it that, they like to talk about it and shove it in people's faces. They put up a little quote, scientists saying that in X number of million years or whatever it is, the earth will be burned up to a crisp by the sun and there will be absolutely no trace whatsoever of humanity of which they're a part.

That by definition means that your life has no meaning. There's no meaning to human life if there would be no trace left. And more importantly, that's where you can see that we're going. You look forward and you say life is meaningless because we're just going to be burnt up and there'll be no meaning, no trace and it'll be gone. It will not form a part of existence anywhere. That's the definition of no meaning in your life.

So you can't appeal to people like that or encourage them in the idea of a higher power or some meaning in their life in that way and therefore they have no good reason not to burn it all down right now because the sun's going to do it in a few million years, or X number of million years. We're all going to die anyway so what's the point? That can be very easily leveraged in these people who don't have that idea or awareness or appreciation for the transcendent, or something transcendent, that there's something higher, a higher power in their lives.

In fact, on earth they're trying to pull down the power structures, the hierarchy on the planet, in the world. So they're very dangerous people.

Harrison: I just wanted to say something about atheists. I agree with pretty much everything you've said but I wouldn't be too hard on all atheists because I think that there are even a lot of atheists who have some moral foundations and that try to live lives of meaning. But I think the problem that they run into is that they have no good justification for doing so. They'll come up with reasons...

Joe: That's why I say they're dangerous. It can be taken away at any moment.

Harrison: Right, that's it. So that when an atheist comes up with some kind of justification for why they should be good, they may be good to some degree but I think the subconscious and the body are smarter than our conscious mind and when you contradict yourself or when you don't have a good reason for something, or when you get something wrong, there's some essential part of yourself that knows that and knows that something's not going right. I think Peterson describes this in such a way that it's basically that you lose touch with reality.

You can tell you're doing something fundamentally wrong when what you're doing doesn't give you the results that you're looking for. This gets into the whole function of reason even; that there are reasons for things and that when you have a bad justification, when you have a bad idea, when you believe a lie essentially, that has an effect, subconsciously and that will infect and affect the way you live your life.

So even if you have atheists who are generally decent people, when their world view doesn't really provide a good justification for that, that when - like you said Joe - when you get the situation with a bad foundation, that can just crumble in an instant. That's what you see with a lot of the atheist crowd. When it takes the form of a radical ideology they don't have the foundation for a good justification for actually being good and that just produces free license to the point where anything goes.

Haidt even talks about that being a feature of liberals, that because they have a very low taste bud for sanctity which he relates that being the opposite of that would be the conservatives who have a high sensitivity to disgust. Those two things seem to be tied together. Sanctity and disgust seem to be tied together where people who have that sanctity moral foundation are disgusted by certain things. It has its roots in for example being disgusted by putrefied, rotten meat or something or food. It grosses you out. You can think of any number of things that gross people out. Well people with a solid sanctity moral foundation are grossed out by things that are immoral or wrong and when you don't have that sanctity it's like anything goes.

So the doors get opened and this is when you get the slippery slope phenomenon where because liberals are open to new idea and they're inclusive and they want to see other people's points of view, you can definitely get a lot of positive things from that. But it goes in a strange direction. We can see that with the gender politics where it has been women's liberation and then homosexual rights and now the transgender thing. But it gets to the point where if you read official documents, like policy documents from NGOs all the way up to the UN where the definitions are so vaguely worded, it does get to the point where anything goes, where you can be theoretically charged with a hate crime for saying something bad about beastiality or pedophilia or necrophilia because those are sexual identities, right?

Niall: Right.

Harrison: And you can't discriminate against anything based on sex or sexuality and the whole idea is diversity and equality and inclusivity but there's no boundaries. So liberals don't have these boundaries and when you don't have boundaries like that, that's when you get the real sickos, the psychopaths that come in and wreck the place.

Joe: Yeah. It opens the door.

Harrison: It opens the door. That's why you need conservatives in order to at least put up some bit of a barrier, some bit of a wall, some red line essentially where you say okay you guys, we can't cross this line because if we do, we're done. That's what liberals don't get.

Joe: Exactly. Whitecoast here in the chat room suggested there are naturalistic forms of transcendent or immanent morality, are there not?

Niall: No, there aren't.

Joe: I'd like to see some examples but I don't think there are any. Peterson talks about this as well in the sense that this idea of altruism or whatever, he says "Give me or anybody a good rational reason, why it's not a good idea, i.e., it's not moral for me to try and get whatever I want from you at any point in any time by whatever means, for myself". Where do you get that idea from? The idea that you shouldn't do that, that you should cooperate with other people, you shouldn't try and exploit other people, you should be nice to other people? Where do you get that idea from, from the natural world? It's not in the natural world.

Niall: The natural world allows it.

Joe: The natural world almost mandates it. The natural world is survival of the fittest and this gets to the point of the extent to which the unknown for most people, extent to which animal biology or let's just call it biology, influences and governs and dictates human behaviour is completely overlooked by all of these people, particularly on the left.

They have no idea about the forces and the biological drives that influence their behaviour on what they want and what they don't want. This is in that recent interview on Vice News with Jordan Peterson where the guy asked him about sexism or sexual harassment in the workplace and is it really a thing. The guy wasn't believing that that was something you should get too worked up over; it's just about stopping men being letches and that's a good thing.

And Peterson said "Can men and women work together?" And the guy said "Of course they can! I've got loads of female co-workers." And he said "How do you know they can work together?" Then he gave the example about NBC, which employs thousands of people around the world, is regulating the hugging in the workplace. They've gone to the extent of having rules about hugging, i.e., probably men and women are not allowed to hug to stop "sexual harassment" in the workplace because it's such an epidemic. You've got to stop it.

And that's pretty far down the line where you actually have effectively company laws in the workplace where you're not allowed to hug. Well what else are you going to add on? Not allowed to look? What about a glance? What about looking at boobs or something? Or whatever women look at. Is that the next step. And if this is to stop sexual harassment and it doesn't work, if you still have signs of harassment, if you still have women, let's say, saying "I feel harassed by that man because of the way he looked at me" well then we'll have to regulate looking.

It gets to the obvious extreme where you are going to have to segregate men and women. It's not too far down the line. You have to segregate them. Women and men will not be allowed to work in any company, in any workplace together.

Niall: And ironically you bring back the 19th century and learning all over again...

Joe: Right.

Niall: ...why things were set up a certain way.

Joe: But that answers his question, that he posed, which is can men and women work together. He says "If you're going to solve this problem, if you think this is a problem that has to be solved, you need to ask the right questions, go back to the very fundamental questions. In fact the questions that are implied by the actions that you're taking can men and women work together." And he brings up the other thing about women wearing makeup. If you want to really sanitize the workplace shouldn't women stop wearing makeup? He said "Don't be silly. Why would women wear makeup? They're just doing it for themselves."

Why do women wear lipstick? Because red lips is a display or simulates sexual arousal or sexual attractiveness as does blush on your cheeks. And heels, women wearing high heels. What the hell are women doing? Let's go the full Monty here people! If men are going to be persecuted for being letches and the only source of sexual harassment in the workplace then women please stop provoking them!" They're all getting freakin' cloth sacks and no makeup. We'll put y'all in a freakin' burka, right? Burkas in the workplace. If you want to sort this out, burkas in the workplace.

The point is you'd like men to stop being letches and stuff but you know what? They're just so atavistic and Neanderthal, you can't really force them to do it. It's in them. It's just part of their nature. Men are just like that, so if you really want them to be able to work together, women are going to have to step up and take some responsibility for it as well. I know it's a bit of a pain, but stop flashing your boobs in the workplace! Please, it seems reasonable, right? No, let's go more than that. Ultimately let's go to the burka. Let's do the burka in the workplace. And men can wear burkas as well in case women check out their asses! Because it's bad, right?! It's all wrong!

Niall: But that's the logical outcome of all this.

Joe: That's where it's going. Let's explore it all. If you want to go there don't be such an idiot where you propose ideas that logically lead to a conclusion but then you decide you don't want to do because it's stupid. Don't be a freakin' idiot! Go to where your train of thought leads you, the end destination. Follow it and then decide, do you want to go there? Well maybe you haven't thought about it enough then.

Niall: They haven't, which is why things are legislated ad hoc and why it's difficult to pinpoint a conspiracy, an actually intended organization behind this. It's the problem with great utopian ideals. You unleash a sexual revolution and decades later you're having to mandate, penalize. Another example is in France where catcalling is to be made illegal. They're currently working on a law to fine men on the spot for catcalling, shouting at women in the street, even just going up and asking for their phone number.

Joe: Right.

Niall: By the way, this may be a final word on the other thing in our title, the 'totalitarianism'. You might ask "How do these petty things that affect only those crazies over there, the SJWs but which we see are gradually seeping into other areas of life, how does that add up to a rerun of Nazi Germany?" You can't see it on the face of it but the thing is, it's happening in a - loathe to say - 'natural way' but it's unfolding in an ad hoc way where the solutions to fix the problems that arose from the original ideals are creating more of the same problems. We can sit here and logically work out and foresee what the end game of this is Saudi Arabia becomes universal. We all live in the United States of Saudi Arabia.

Joe: Yeah. That's what the Saudis want. Build mosques. There are many parallels with Nazi Germany but with the added complexity you'd expect from four times the global population and it not being limited to one country; probably more than four times because in Germany you had somewhere around 40 million people and it was one country and one ideology in that country that spread outwards. This is something that's happened, maybe centered on the US because it's 350 million people, but spread to a lot of western Europe and around the world as well and across different cultures but it's taking hold. It's more evolved, it's a more complex, smarter version of what they did in Nazi Germany basically.

And what we've seen with the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin was about oppression. Nazi Germany was about oppression. The Bolsheviks were about oppression. In America today it's about oppression. Anybody giving you a good reason why it's not going to go in the same direction? So of all 70 years, we're so much better than that now? No! Listen to the discourse. It's actually worse. It's as bad as Nazi Germany in its nonsensicalness, in its inanity. It's exactly the same.

So there's no reason to think that it's not going to go in the same direction.

Elan: And the cleverness of it is that it's so well disguised.

Joe: Right.

Elan: And that gets back to the show description, how pernicious and subtle it is because it brands itself as humanitarian. It brands itself as caring and as liberal and as heart-based when it's exactly the opposite. I would say it's one of the great things to see about our world today, the great things to understand about where things are going. For that reason, this is probably one of the most important topics we've been covering here for a while and will continue to cover. Do we have any more points that we want to make on this today or talk about Syria?

Joe: Nah, it's an evolving issue. I think we'll leave it there and probably come back to it, as you say.

Harrison: I think we'll end it there then. Just add on the doomsday note that after reading Stephen Baskerville's book on The New Politics of Sex, it's really terrifying because pretty much all of the infrastructure and all the bureaucracies are in place. All it would take is the flick of a switch and we'd be living in the Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia, the modern equivalent.

Joe: Where people who don't say and think the right things are going to prison or to some kind of a lock up. People don't think it'll go there. Well you know, good luck with that one. Just nonchalantly carry on there as if it's all going to remain the same despite the evidence flying in your face and you'll be much worse off for ignoring it. The book was Stephen Baskerville's The New Politics of Sex. Alright, like we say we'll end it there. Thanks for listening everybody. We hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks to our chatters. Thanks to our callers. We'll be back next week with another one.

Byes.