Speaker 1: From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Speaker 1: Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty excited about having James Lindsey on. We've had
Speaker 1: him on a number of times going way way back,
Speaker 1: but he's become a kind of a legend in the
Speaker 1: world of Twitter. And if you don't follow James Lindsay
Speaker 1: on Twitter, you're making a mistake. Author, mathematician. Well then
Speaker 1: let him introduce himself. James Lindsay, Welcome back to the
Speaker 1: Armstrong and Getty Show. Hey, great to be here. Introducing
Speaker 1: myself though, is a tall order. I'm always a bit
Speaker 1: awkward with that. But so before you became like nationally famous,
Speaker 1: you were just a math professor ten years ago. I
Speaker 1: actually left the university in two thousand ten because they
Speaker 1: were shifting to a model to retain students at all
Speaker 1: costs and I just couldn't teach. I didn't see the
Speaker 1: ideological implications of that at the time. I couldn't teach
Speaker 1: under those conditions. So I was a mask professor until
Speaker 1: two ten, and then I was actually a massage therapist
Speaker 1: in the years in between of all things, and your
Speaker 1: politics in general are very liberal. They have been. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm a bit, uh, a bit scared of that side
Speaker 1: of the aisle right now, so they're not so much
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah, I would call you, just because I
Speaker 1: follow your twitter feed pretty regularly, a classical liberal as
Speaker 1: opposed to what like a lot of modern you know,
Speaker 1: younger liberal thought is. And we'll get into more of
Speaker 1: that and just a little bit um, but now you
Speaker 1: have become famous for a whole bunch of things. Um,
Speaker 1: when you and uh and and a couple other people
Speaker 1: got together and wrote some bogus papers that you get,
Speaker 1: you submitted to various publications and they got accepted. He
Speaker 1: became famous for that. The what was the what was
Speaker 1: the name of that they got called the grievance studies
Speaker 1: affair on the back end of that, because we decided
Speaker 1: to call all of those things like whether it's critical theory,
Speaker 1: which all everybody has heard of now, or gender studies
Speaker 1: or fat studies which is a thing unbelievably, or disability
Speaker 1: studies they only end in some kind of studies control study.
Speaker 1: We just said that what these these fields are doing
Speaker 1: are stoking grievances that they're trying to you know, dredge
Speaker 1: up or pick at scabs or whatever. Dredge up hurts.
Speaker 1: Pick at scabs make people feel aggrieved against the system,
Speaker 1: against society, and they study grievance in that regard. So
Speaker 1: we called all of this stuff is a catch all
Speaker 1: term grievance studies, and so that got called the Grievance
Speaker 1: Studies Affair. And we wrote twenty fake papers over the
Speaker 1: course of a year, these things. That's like an entire
Speaker 1: academics career usually. Um, seven of them were accepted. We
Speaker 1: still had seven more under review, and the Wall Street
Speaker 1: Journal told on us so and then amazing thing was
Speaker 1: and we've talked about this a lot, and men, if
Speaker 1: you google this if you've never heard it, because you
Speaker 1: guys went so over the top. It was like, just
Speaker 1: just so incredibly over the top. Ye that's a number
Speaker 1: of them still got accepted as legitimate academic not even
Speaker 1: that they've been coming true since. Um. Yeah, we had
Speaker 1: some really crazy over the top ones. We had one
Speaker 1: about whether you can watch people react to the way
Speaker 1: that dogs misbehave in dog parks, particularly sexually with one another,
Speaker 1: and then you can divine something about rape culture from
Speaker 1: watching that. And then we just trained men the way
Speaker 1: that we trained dogs, then we could probably combat rape culture.
Speaker 1: That's a very feminist approach, and that that paper not
Speaker 1: only was accepted and published, but it was given an
Speaker 1: award for Excellence in Scholarship. UM. We we wrote a
Speaker 1: chapter of Hitler's Mind comp and that was accepted by
Speaker 1: a social work journal. UH. In terms of intersectional feminism,
Speaker 1: we had a number of other kind of hilarious papers.
Speaker 1: We had one that we argued that the sport of
Speaker 1: competitive bodybuilding professional bodybuilding is fat phobic because it sees
Speaker 1: building muscle as fundamentally different than building fats, so that
Speaker 1: we need to have a category called fat bodybuilding. That
Speaker 1: was accepted. Got it's hilarious. But we had another one
Speaker 1: and one other paper though we wrote it was that
Speaker 1: you can't use satire to make fun of social justice.
Speaker 1: And this has been born out now that literally Robin D'Angelo,
Speaker 1: who wrote White Fragility previously and now has her new
Speaker 1: book Nice Racism or whatever it's called, she literally just
Speaker 1: did an interview and she should have cited us. She
Speaker 1: made the same argument almost I mean uncannily similar argument
Speaker 1: and citing the same kind of television shows We brought
Speaker 1: up etcetera. As we made in one of our fake papers,
Speaker 1: which was also accepted. Um and hit on the Babylon
Speaker 1: b which is, you know, a satire site on the Internet.
Speaker 1: It's really funny. They got told that, you know, their
Speaker 1: their form of satire against social justice is you know,
Speaker 1: punching down or punching out, I don't know, punching something on.
Speaker 1: So they got told. I mean the papers we wrote
Speaker 1: are coming true, like the people are actually arguing the
Speaker 1: things that we wrote in in satire and and it's
Speaker 1: it's unbelievable. Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to
Speaker 1: bring up your the Grievance Studies Affairs it is now called,
Speaker 1: and that was with Peter and Helen pluck Rose Um
Speaker 1: is I came across this article the other day that
Speaker 1: I thought you would think it was funny. If you
Speaker 1: haven't seen this yet, this is for real local university.
Speaker 1: My wife went to this university U. C. Davis. Cultural
Speaker 1: Biases Impact Native Fish study calls for end to rough
Speaker 1: fish pejorative and the paradigm that created it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: fish names are racist, now that's right, Yeah, exactly. And
Speaker 1: it gets down and it says the study maintains that
Speaker 1: the term rough fish is pejorative and degrading to native fish.
Speaker 1: That this is that's not that sounds like it's from
Speaker 1: the babylog b but it's an actual, for real article. Now,
Speaker 1: that's exactly the kind of thing that we would have
Speaker 1: wrote to. We wanted to write a paper and we
Speaker 1: just ran out of time and didn't didn't prioritize it
Speaker 1: about how putting things like onions or seasoning and cornbread
Speaker 1: gentrifies cornbread and takes it away from black people and
Speaker 1: perpetuates the racial divide. We're gonna call it a gentle
Speaker 1: sification of cornbreadge a cultuation of American racial division or
Speaker 1: something like that. Uh yeah, it's absurd, you know, it's
Speaker 1: in the fish are insulted now. And these people actually
Speaker 1: kind of think this way. They really do think that
Speaker 1: the you know, these words, the way we use words
Speaker 1: structures reality. They genuinely think that in crazies power dynamics
Speaker 1: that are going to oppress people. So calling them rough
Speaker 1: fish somehow is going to cause other I don't know people.
Speaker 1: I guess you would think it's not the fish to
Speaker 1: believe something ridiculous like oh, well, you know, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: just a rough person because I'm from another culture. That's
Speaker 1: probably what the argument runs like. It's just absurd, It's
Speaker 1: totally absurd. You and Helen pluck Rose wrote the book
Speaker 1: nonfiction book Cynical Theories, which is very serious and um,
Speaker 1: you know, because we're having a lot of fun with this,
Speaker 1: but this is this is super duper serious in that
Speaker 1: the country is going crazy and in a big chunk
Speaker 1: of the country that for whatever reason gets a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot of attention, has just gone not so
Speaker 1: and and you're trying to bring it back into into
Speaker 1: the world of sanity. And you're now one of the
Speaker 1: if not the leading pushback against critical race theory. Do
Speaker 1: you have a like a shorthand version for what critical
Speaker 1: race theory is for people so they can understand it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been working on this for a long time. I
Speaker 1: finally boiled it down. Critical race theory is an almost
Speaker 1: religious belief that the fundamental uh structure of society is
Speaker 1: racism that was created by white people to benefit white people.
Speaker 1: If you believe that religiously and believe that that has
Speaker 1: to be torn down, you know, root and branch, then
Speaker 1: you're probably a critical race theres So if you believe
Speaker 1: that society was built on racism by white people for
Speaker 1: white poblical benefit, and that it's in literally everything you
Speaker 1: can imagine. You're probably a critical race theorist, and I
Speaker 1: love you throwing in the term religion um, and I
Speaker 1: know you're an atheist, but the way it has taken
Speaker 1: on this um because they're there, it's got all the
Speaker 1: home arts of religion, and that there are people that
Speaker 1: if you run a foul of it, it's blasphemy and
Speaker 1: you need to be you know, you need to lose
Speaker 1: your job, you need to have your life ruined because
Speaker 1: you said something that went against the doctrine of critical
Speaker 1: the critical race theory as they see it. And it's
Speaker 1: just it's it's so weird, like I almost can't even
Speaker 1: the particularly when I see these white people, professors or
Speaker 1: college kids or whatever, um beating up on themselves and
Speaker 1: then they talk about it. I'm just I'm such a
Speaker 1: bad person and I need to take a longer look
Speaker 1: at the way that I'm ruining the world. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just it's it's like a mental illness to me.
Speaker 1: It really is. In fact that the religion thing isn't
Speaker 1: just like oh, it's kind of like one, our parallel
Speaker 1: to it really is one, and people can't quite see
Speaker 1: it because they're like, well, what's the god of the religion.
Speaker 1: They can't like figure out how it works. But the God,
Speaker 1: it turns out his history with a capital H the
Speaker 1: exact same way that Marks looked at history. History has
Speaker 1: a trajectory, History has a purpose. The purpose for Marks
Speaker 1: for history was to get to communism, to get to
Speaker 1: the utopia where we no longer have classes, we no
Speaker 1: longer have a state that the presses anybody. Nobody is
Speaker 1: oppressed because we transcend classes and states and all of
Speaker 1: the things that cause oppression. And history is progressing along
Speaker 1: this pathway by means of revealing contradictions. So if you
Speaker 1: bring up the contradictions and do criticism on them, we
Speaker 1: move history along. And if you're doing that the right way,
Speaker 1: then you're on the right side of history. If you're
Speaker 1: doing it the wrong way, on the wrong side of history.
Speaker 1: So it's God is the trajectory of history that has
Speaker 1: a Heaven on Earth target at the end. And people
Speaker 1: who helped that along are people in the faith. They're
Speaker 1: good people. And the people who hinder that and try
Speaker 1: to so called maintain the status quo are bad people.
Speaker 1: And this is why you see their utter hatred of conservatives,
Speaker 1: utter hatred of of you know, any order, liberal order,
Speaker 1: societal order that's not there's um, their their vision, and
Speaker 1: people don't understand that their God is actually this weird
Speaker 1: belief that tracks all the way back to the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century in Germany about how history might work. The
Speaker 1: we're talking about James Lindsay. Um, I'm looking at his
Speaker 1: Twitter feed, which is a fantastic following. Underneath it says, uh,
Speaker 1: not New York Times bestselling author Math PhD, founder of
Speaker 1: New Discourses, a political against totalitarianism and supremacy of all
Speaker 1: kinds for freedom, and you're definitely one of the best thinkers,
Speaker 1: writers and speakers on this topic that I've come across
Speaker 1: anywhere in America. Thank god. Um, what do you mean
Speaker 1: by not New York Times bestselling author? Oh so cynical
Speaker 1: Theories was Actually it made it onto the Wall Street
Speaker 1: Journals best seller listen Man of the publisher Weekly best
Speaker 1: seller list, and they don't have a few different best
Speaker 1: sellers lists, but the New York Times didn't put it
Speaker 1: on theirs. And so we dug into this because we had,
Speaker 1: you know, the book scan or whatever the sales numbers,
Speaker 1: And it turns out that we actually sold enough copies
Speaker 1: of Cynical Theories in the first week to where we
Speaker 1: should have been on the list, and in fact, we
Speaker 1: sold three times as many as the last two books
Speaker 1: on the list. But for some reason, they deemed that
Speaker 1: it didn't reflect the organic buying habits of Americans and
Speaker 1: therefore did not put it on the New York Times
Speaker 1: best selling list. So bestseller everywhere but the New York Times,
Speaker 1: which snubbed us for some reason. Uh, and I guess
Speaker 1: that's their business. Did not reflect the organic buying habits
Speaker 1: of Americans. Okay, yeah, whatever the hell that I see.
Speaker 1: It didn't pass your sniff test. Whatever the hell that means.
Speaker 1: How how difficult is your life? I've wondered this a
Speaker 1: lot because I follow you regularly, Like I'm a fanboy
Speaker 1: of James Lindsay. I gotta admitted, um, how difficult is
Speaker 1: your life? Gotten? Taking all this on? I mean, how
Speaker 1: what's your what's your email? Feed? Your your hate mail?
Speaker 1: You're all that sort of stuff, Like you know, I
Speaker 1: get a little bit of hate mail. I don't get
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount Uh. The difficulty is the volume of
Speaker 1: you know, whether it's fan mail, it's mostly questions. People
Speaker 1: are asking me mail or can you help me with
Speaker 1: this mail? You know, I get so much request for that,
Speaker 1: that's very difficult. The harder part, you know, if we
Speaker 1: got into the kind of psychological side of it's like
Speaker 1: I live and you know, they think if you stare
Speaker 1: into the Abyss, the Abyss stairs back, I live in
Speaker 1: the Abyss. It's like I went into the Abyss and
Speaker 1: send letters to the world, and so it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I read the most negative, evil, poisonous stuff literally all day,
Speaker 1: try to make sense of it, try to understand it
Speaker 1: and try to communicate with other people, and that actually
Speaker 1: is pretty exhausting. Um, but everything else is great. You
Speaker 1: live in the Abyss. Everything else is great. Can you
Speaker 1: explain the current clown controversy that's going on around me? Um? Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean lots of people have been using the mean
Speaker 1: clown world to describe what's going on, right, and so
Speaker 1: this is everybody kind of gets it. It's like these
Speaker 1: people are in some regard that are pushing these crazy
Speaker 1: ideas that don't attest the reality or somehow kind of clowns.
Speaker 1: And then you know, there's Nicole Hannah Jones at the
Speaker 1: New York Times. She's got her big red hair, and
Speaker 1: people have noticed that that looks kind of like clownish.
Speaker 1: And so the other day I saw a picture of her.
Speaker 1: She was all proud of herself, was on Twitter. So
Speaker 1: I took the picture and I just put a clown
Speaker 1: emoji period send tweet with a picture, and people went
Speaker 1: berserk because I'm just I call all of these people clowns.
Speaker 1: I call you know, it doesn't matter who they are,
Speaker 1: it's not just that her hair or whatever. I call
Speaker 1: all these people clowns all the time. I refer to
Speaker 1: clown world all the time. And so she went berserk
Speaker 1: and said that I was attacking her appearance. Thousands of
Speaker 1: people went nuts and got angry at me for attacking
Speaker 1: a black woman's appearance, which well, I mean, it's coincidental
Speaker 1: in my opinion, because I called all these people clowns.
Speaker 1: So then they went berserk. And so then I came
Speaker 1: up with a parody, as I tend to do, like
Speaker 1: the fake papers, and I started talking about critical clown
Speaker 1: theory and took critical race theory, took out race, put
Speaker 1: in clown and just wrote their words with you know,
Speaker 1: slight changes and it just all fits to try to
Speaker 1: you know, point out that you know, I said that
Speaker 1: the um Nicole and of Jones had clown fragility on
Speaker 1: seat of white fragility. Her clown ary was needed doll,
Speaker 1: and she was reacted with a series of rhetorical maneuvers
Speaker 1: to try to you know, lash out or whatever. I
Speaker 1: did this the kind of the whole thing, and people
Speaker 1: loved it, um because they get the satire, they get
Speaker 1: the party, and again the clown the world thinks sticks.
Speaker 1: You'll notice on my Twitter feed that I if you
Speaker 1: follow me, that I put clown emojis on basically all
Speaker 1: of this stuff, like Anthony Fauci clown, he's not a
Speaker 1: black woman. Clown clowns all the way down, because the
Speaker 1: stuff they're saying is not attached to reality. It's like
Speaker 1: a circus. It's you know, it's all under the big top.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's just kind of a meme I'm playing
Speaker 1: with and people got really upset when I attatched it
Speaker 1: to herves. Do you have any concern that Twitter cancels
Speaker 1: at some point, because that is your biggest, biggest, you know,
Speaker 1: megaphone you've got. That's true. They've they've shot across my
Speaker 1: bow twice once for something. I I think that they
Speaker 1: were wrong, but at least I know what I did,
Speaker 1: and it can kind of see they're made up reasons
Speaker 1: and clown world for it, uh once with no explanation. However,
Speaker 1: so where I got suspended for you know, twelve or
Speaker 1: twenty four hours or whatever, so they haven't taken any
Speaker 1: serious action against me with that particular clown thing. I
Speaker 1: got a number of emails from Twitter saying we investigated
Speaker 1: you and we found no violation and so well, okay,
Speaker 1: apparently you're still allowed to call public figures clown on Twitter. Awesome.
Speaker 1: We're talking with James Lindsay and unfortunately we got we
Speaker 1: gotta let him go. I could talk to you absolutely
Speaker 1: all day long, and the main reason I wanted to
Speaker 1: have you on is to push people to follow you
Speaker 1: on Twitter to read your books, because you're you're the
Speaker 1: best voice out there I think on all this craziness,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate the effort do you put on
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, Hey, I appreciate that. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much, James Lindsay, Ladies and gentlemen, and we'll link
Speaker 1: him at our website Armstrong and getty dot com, and
Speaker 1: I'll I tweet him out all the time.