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Welcome to the back porch again.

It's a beautiful evening here.

You know,

I tried doing this video last night and it was like 50 degrees and it was just too cold.

And not to mention the fact that the guy up the hill for me,

his dogs were out running around barking their asses off and

You know, it's just one of those things.

I mean, it's funny, you get used to quiet.

You know, in the old place, I could put up with all kinds of exterior noise.

In this place,

after roughly a year living here,

other than the sounds of nature,

and I don't consider domestic dogs a part of my natural environment now,

I don't want to hear anything.

I've become completely intolerant.

I think if someone started bouncing a basketball in my driveway, I might go for my gun.

Well,

anyway,

what I want to do the video on this week is this weird chart that James Lindsay

cooked up,

and it was floating around on Twitter,

and it's called,

What's Woke About the Woke Right?

And what he has is sort of three columns.

He calls them, I guess, yeah, three columns.

And then he has these dimensions of each thing.

One column is woke left.

The other was woke right.

And the third is the founders.

Now,

it's a pretty good rule that when people use the word founders,

they're typically going to lie to you.

The framers is a much better term because, you know, the original, you know,

generation of americans well they they put the constitutional framework together

that makes sense call them framers but you call them the founders it kind of puts

them in the same category say abraham with the jews you know or muhammad with the

muslims it's not really accurate because you know the framers anticipated that our

country would evolve and our government would have to evolve with it that's why

they wrote the constitution the way they did but that aside

He's got these different things,

like these different dimensions,

foundational narratives,

identity politics,

moral absolutism,

approach to tradition and institutions.

There's a bunch of them here.

And so I'm going to look at a few of these.

Let's take the first one, foundational narrative.

That is,

let's see,

woke left,

views history through lenses of oppression and victimhood,

interprets culture as denominated by hegemonic groups requiring a revolutionary reordering.

Okay, maybe.

I mean,

look,

the people who we call the woke people,

well,

they actually spend a lot of time defining themselves,

so we've got a lot to work with here,

and that's pretty close to what they used to say about themselves,

although they now,

I think,

eschew the word woke,

but,

you know,

whatever.

It's kind of like

You know, the craziest version of the alt-right.

You know, once it became so ridiculous, then people stopped using it.

Let's see.

Woke Right recasts history as a struggle where a once-dominant cultural or

religious majority is now oppressed,

seeking a radical restoration by tearing down liberal frameworks.

I have no idea who he's talking about.

This is not anybody I would recognize.

I mean, maybe there's some people out there who talk this way.

I mean, maybe there's people... What was that guy's name...

mold bug, you know, who wanted to bring in a monarchy or something?

I guess maybe, but I don't know.

There's no movement I know of.

It's like this.

And let's see,

the founders assumes the world is imperfect,

but improvable institutions acknowledges historical failings,

yet aims at gradual reform rooted in reason,

liberty,

and the dignity of individuals.

Well,

I mean,

the fact that the framers were revolutionaries kind of blows this whole theory so

far to pieces,

but okay,

I'm not going to pick on that one.

Let's see, identity politics.

Woke left defines social and moral legitimacy by group identity,

race,

gender,

sexual orientation,

elevating certain groups as oppressed and morally superior.

Well, I don't know about the morally superior part.

I mean, I think it's implied.

I guess you could say that.

The woke right adopts a similar structure as the woke left,

but focuses on nationalist,

religious,

or ethnic in-groups,

depicting them as besieged by conspiratorial elites.

What he's trying to describe is populism.

Populism, I mean, there's no need for a new word for this.

Populists look and say,

hey,

our elites are not doing their job,

they're failing us and they're failing society.

And of course,

looking for things like nationalism or religious or ethnic,

I mean,

it's just how people organize themselves.

And so he's basically describing most people on earth here.

Let's see,

identity politics for the founders was emphasizes individual rights and moral

agency over group identity,

endorses broad principles like equality under the law over factional or tribal identities.

Well, maybe, I guess, but they didn't really have to worry about this stuff.

They were all white Christians.

It wasn't a big problem for them.

And let's not forget that,

you know,

they carved out special considerations for non-white Christians like Indians and

Jews and blacks.

You know,

in New England,

at the time of the founding,

Jews had to register with the state or with pastor to state,

local government,

and they had to report their doings,

what they were doing,

what they owned,

that kind of stuff.

They'd take control of them.

Let's see here.

I don't know which time we got here.

Five minutes.

So moral absolutism, I'm not even really sure what that is, since all morals are absolute.

I mean,

if you have a moral code that says,

well,

look,

you're OK within this broad range,

but you shouldn't go too far one way or the other.

That's not really a moral code.

That's just kind of good advice, maybe.

Don't go too far down the hill.

It won't make it back up.

And that's, I don't know.

What he wants to do is use these words like absolutism as a motive word.

This indicates badness.

So moral badness,

the woke left,

frames issues in stark moral binaries,

oppressors versus oppressed,

leaving little room for neutral or moderate positions.

Again, what's a neutral position on morality?

I mean, that's just absurdity.

The woke right employs a similar good versus evil framework with pure patriots or

religious faithful opposed to globalist traitors or subversives.

I don't know.

I don't really.

I mean,

I guess you could say some of the mega people talk like that about subversives or

traitors or globalists.

I mean, the word globalist is kind of a silly term.

I don't use it.

I mean,

occasionally I'll use it because it means nothing better sometimes than,

you know,

there's no other.

I mean, it's a good general word, I suppose, but, you know, it doesn't really tell you much.

The founders encouraged moral discernment guided by reason,

debate and prudence,

rejected rigid binaries in favor of deliberation,

compromise and tolerance.

That's complete nonsense.

I mean, these people had a very clear moral code.

They used to talk about it.

We held most of the states had a official religion.

I mean,

the ones that didn't didn't think they needed one because,

well,

everybody was an Episcopalian or Presbyterian.

So what was there?

What was there to talk about?

What else has he got here?

Tactics of coercion and exclusion.

The woke left deploys cancel culture,

moral shaming,

and institutional pressure to silence dissenting voices and enforce doctrinal purity.

The woke right engages in loyalty tests,

demands ideological conformity,

and employs smears or demonization to marginalized moderates and skeptics within

the conservative sphere.

This is literally what Bill Buckley did for 30 years.

I did a show on Sobrin about a month ago, and that goes back in the 1980s.

I mean,

you could go back further to the Birchers,

but really starting in the 80s,

this is the primary reason for conservatives to exist,

is to marginalize anyone that was a skeptic of conservatism.

The people he's trying to smear now,

and he's deliberately trying to do this,

is the same tactic that Buckley and all the other conservatives use.

I mean, really, the guy's lack of self-awareness is almost amusing.

It's amusing in his case because I think he's a harmless crank.

Sadly,

the Internet allows harmless cranks like him to get a lot of attention,

and that kind of reinforces their crankishness.

And that's what's happened here.

I mean, you know, James Lindsay is a smart guy.

I think he got a master's degree in mathematics.

He couldn't get hired to do math, and I think it had to do with his personality.

He's obviously a very weird individual, even for the world of math.

I've been around a lot of math guys in my life.

Some of them are very strange.

I remember one guy with a PhD.

We were doing work on a satellite.

And this guy had an encyclopedic knowledge of original Star Trek.

It was kind of a lot of fun to talk to him because he just knew every episode.

He knew the title of it.

He knew all the details of the plot, the name of the characters, special guest stars.

It really was kind of an odd hobby.

But anyway...

You know, but Lindsey has got a very bizarre personality.

There's something wrong with the guy.

And I think, you know, I used to listen to him when he first got started on YouTube.

He used to do these short videos on some radical political philosophy.

It was okay.

I mean, it was fine.

It was actually kind of good because he would cover a lot of stuff I'd forgotten

about or,

you know,

it would remind me of things.

And, you know, maybe it was something I didn't read and he would find it and I'd go look it up.

But then they got longer and longer and longer.

They started to get really sort of crazy.

They started to become uncomfortable.

And I remember the one that I looked at.

It was about three hours long.

I'm like, man, this is... I think it was on like Marcuse or something.

I'm like, Jesus, what is he going to do?

Is he going to read and explain this guy's dissertation or something?

Or read all his books?

What's this about?

And I started reading it or listening to it.

I started skipping forward because it was clearly this guy was just...

He was a conspiracy theorist, really.

I mean, he gets so deep in the weeds.

He was like that meme of the guy from The Office with all the cards on the bulletin

board and all the strings attached to it.

That's what it was like.

And it's a shame for a guy like Lindsey because he doesn't need this kind of encouragement.

He needs to be discouraged from this kind of behavior.

But he's getting rewarded for it to some degree, especially with attention.

And as a result, he just gets crazier and crazier.

I'll have this thing posted up.

You'll see how nutty it is.

Alright, that's enough.

I hope you enjoyed the video.