September 17, 2025

Words Have Meanings

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1 hour 38 minutes

Correction: 1997 not 1977

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is tangents.

Well this could be a long one although I

never know.

I have like seven pages worth of notes and sometimes that means

something and sometimes it doesn't.

I've gone for like two hours from half a

page notes and I can't really predict it.

I really genuinely can't but we'll see.

Today is as I'm recording this the 16th of September 2025, 1736, not that

that matters to you.

I'm still in Tokyo for another few days.

It's Tuesday.

I'm

flying out on Saturday and I don't know.

I have to say I can't believe I can't

believe my time.

Well I guess this is just how things go.

You know things seem

like a long time and then they're over and before I came, yeah.

Seems like it was

going to be a long time.

It's spent like two months out of the country and now I'm

coming back and it's just, it's wild.

It's actually more held.

Completely

completely aside before I actually get into the actual thing.

I shaved yesterday

and I hate facial hair.

I'm not a fan of it.

But annoyingly I really think it's

like a fucking suit.

Like it looks good.

It actually, it looks good.

My friend

when she was in town commented on it and said, you know, it actually looks

good.

And it does.

It actually does, but it bothers me.

And you know, it like it

switches and it kind of irritates me.

I look at it in the mirror and I'm like, fuck, it

does.

It does look good.

I wish the suit didn't look good too.

Because I hate wearing a suit.

And yet when you're wearing a suit, you look better.

You feel better.

And I just, yeah,

I feel like a different person with the facial hair.

Not that this is anything at all to

do with what I want to talk about.

So again, since this is going to be potentially long,

I'm going to jump right in.

So today, I'm calling this one words have meaning or maybe

trigger words.

But I feel like I'm just luring my words sometimes.

But words have meanings

or trigger words.

And this one is basically a friend a couple days ago mentioned that he's

put off by Erquoats insults.

And these insults were things like people calling people

crystal fascists or white nationalists, white supremacists, racist, this kind of stuff.

And

his comment was actually also, it was a little shaded, which was basically he's put off by it,

but he understands that if I'm using these terms, I'm not the kind of person that just throws

around insults.

And so, you know, it gives him a little pause and gives him a little time to sort

of think more about it.

And consider what is actually like the underlying thing there.

And so, I want to talk a little bit about these and in practice, I think there are several

problems.

And one of these problems is that there are people who genuinely just throw around words

as insults without any thought or consideration, no real meaning behind them.

People just throw

shit out.

And it's very annoying because when people do this, it dilutes the meaning of the words,

and it's confusing to people and it basically, I think it's just moneying the waters.

I wish

people wouldn't do that.

And then similarly, and closely related, a lot of people don't know

the meaning of these terms, so they just kind of throw shit out.

Sometimes also deliberately throw

out incorrect words.

Not that they're necessarily trying to obfuscate the meaning of the words,

but between those two things, it might again, muddies the waters.

And like a common one, right versus

left.

If you look at the history of these terms, and it's very complicated, but the history of

these terms, you go back to the French Revolution.

And in the national assembly, people would sit

in the right wing.

In the left wing, based on sort of whether they were in support of the

more traditional authoritarian essentially the king of the right wing.

And in the left wing,

would be more revolutionary and collective rights, liberty, liberty, equality, fraternity, you know,

societal justice and radical reforms.

And that's where that originally came from.

It's of course

evolved since then and the language is not a static thing.

There's a lot to it beyond that.

It gets more complicated.

And again, also, this is only one dimension, and there are many, many

dimensions that can be there.

But I think most importantly, people really don't have any

political awareness.

And when I say this, I mean, most people that you talk to, especially in the

United States, have had very little education, probably haven't taken a single polycycores,

political science course, probably, you know, maybe they've taken a little bit of government,

and they understand vaguely checks and balances and how the U.S.

government is supposed to work.

But in terms of political theory, most people have no idea what socialism is, or communism,

or fascism, and so on.

And, you know, what is conservatism? It's an interesting problem.

And I'm going to get into some of those in a minute.

But like socialism is just like the social

owning of the means of production.

So like, if there's a factory, and the factory has a bunch of

machines, one way to organize that is to have the people working in the factory, own the factory,

collectively, and own the machines.

And then they get to decide what to do, and they get to put their

labor in, and then get the profit and decide what to do with the profit.

Whether that's reinvesting,

or distributing among themselves, or whatnot.

Another system of economics that you can use is capitalism,

where you have a capitalist, maybe one or more people, who own the means of production.

And they get to decide, you know, okay, I'm going to hire these people,

you're just going to do a job, and then I'm going to take the fruits of your labor and sell that

for whatever I can, and I'll give you whatever I decide is as a reasonable amount for it.

And

I get to make all the decisions.

It's mine.

Yeah, it's not my favorite system.

Let's just say.

But people don't really understand, like they throw around these terms, socialist capitalists,

and have no clue, no concept what they mean.

A lot of people, like one of the that I really get

annoyed with, is a lot of right wingers.

And when I say right wingers, I don't actually even mean

people that are necessarily, like if you, if you took a quiz and you sort of found where you stand,

I don't know that a lot of people who vote as though they're right wingers, actually are right wingers.

A lot of people, I think, just do not evaluate and do not really understand, and they have

thought about what their positions are on certain issues, or what are your values? What do you think

matters? How do you think things should operate? How do you think government should operate? What

system of economics? And the system of economics also, like if you have a very limited view of what

is possible, you're not going to be able to decide, or you're going to decide from that limited

site you're not going to decide from the full sea of possibilities.

So that's all complicated.

So in that, I really think a lot of people who consider themselves to be right wingers,

probably aren't.

They're like culturally raised that way.

A lot of people who consider themselves

to be liberals, and they have, of course, like people throw away around, this is another one of these

terms liberals.

Often, like when I throw it around, I'm talking about neoliberals,

there's a very big difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and both of these are

right wing ideologies.

It's interesting that they get people, if you explain that to people,

because there's been so, I guess it's a combination of things.

One, the overton window in the

US, the sort of range of possibilities that people think are reasonable to discuss or think about,

and the range of where political parties are that are in power.

It's shifted so far to the right

that people have no idea what the actual scale is.

And the window that people see

makes it seem like neoliberals are lefty.

And in fact, they're absolutely, absolutely right of

center by any reasonable, you know, any reasonable metric.

And again, also, like there are many

different dimensions in all of this.

The funny thing is also, of course, if you actually go to the

people that consider themselves to be liberals or get called liberals, and again, liberals being

neolibs, a lot of them really would not align that well with neoliberalism, or though,

you know, there are, like, there are some parts of it that actually don't sound so bad.

Like,

you know, free markets, and free expression of ideas, and, yeah, things like this.

Of course,

it's still a fundamentally capitalistic system.

And, yeah, maybe, like, put some regulation,

but basically free markets, and all those kind of stuff.

But when people really

identify as these things, or identify others as these things, they'll come up with terms like that,

or, again, conservatives, like, I know a bunch of people who consider themselves conservatives,

if you're a conservative, the Democrats are actually a closer conservative party to, which is one

of the reasons why I'm not a Democrat, frankly.

The Republicans are radical,

crystal fascist, that this is the modern Republican party, not just Trump, but the

the leadership, and so on.

Radical, crystal fascist, anarcho-capitalists.

I'll get into what that

means later, but that is what they are.

They are absolutely radical.

They're not interested in

conserving shit.

They're not interested, and other than the, without getting a little bit too

much into this, that's the purity of the white race.

They're racist, horrible, kind of people.

I'm just, like, the juxtaposition between that and destroying the environment and thinking, like,

anything goes, and not having any reference for what has come before, or having any interest,

really, and actually preserving things like forests, or just natural beauty.

Not having any

feel for, like, stewardship.

The party is not conservative, and it annoys me to know in that

people call them conservative, and people call themselves conservative.

So anyway, that's, it's

very irritating.

And I think the broader problem here, and the thing that is really important to

understand, is that in the United States, and unfortunately, this is true to a very large extent,

globally, not everywhere and not everywhere, but, you know, you go to Canada, you go to the UK,

you go to Australia, and really you can go down a very long list of countries, and the,

the parties, the dominant parties absolutely do not represent anyone except for wealthy oligarchs.

And, you know, this is, if you actually look at what the parties stand for, not necessarily

their party, the official platform, but the stuff that they do, the policies that they enact,

the things that they invest in, and the things that they keep money out of.

They don't align,

like if you pull the membership, what the membership will tell you, and what the party is doing,

are almost completely unrelated.

This has been very well studied, but it's between zero correlation,

and almost a negative correlation, which is something, and I don't think people understand this,

and it really, you know, ends up in this situation where, like, neither of these parties

is actually representing anyone.

And one of the things that's kind of eerie when you start

getting out of that, because I, you know, I was raised by people who were, well, my mom especially,

always voted Democrat.

Well, I guess she was like Hillary Clinton, she did the Goldwater thing,

which is not ideal, but then Democrat afterwards, I was registered in Democrat, I voted Democrat

in every election up until 2024.

2020, I almost didn't because, frankly, Biden, before he was

genocide Joe, and you Gen X Joe, he was crime bill Joe, he was Jim Crow Joe, he was the guy who said

he didn't want his children to grow up in a racialized jungle.

That's a basically direct quote,

and important to note, your context does that make his quote better there.

He's somebody who is

actually pro-forced birth, he's against abortion, and, you know, he was for the high demand,

up until 2019, does not align with me.

He said, row went too far as recently as 2024,

and, you know, this is the guy who is leading that party, and the party itself, and,

especially since Bill Clinton, the party has switched to this point where they call this the

neoliberal consensus, but basically Republicans under Reagan got into this sort of neoliberalism.

This is another thing, because, you know, people like to throw around lives and call themselves

lives and call themselves, recall of it, people lives and all this stuff.

The neoliberal consensus

is shared broadly by both parties.

So Republicans and Democrats,

by and large, subscribe to at least some form of neoliberalism.

They don't really,

they don't use the term often, but that's if you actually look at the tenants and the points

and all this, that's where they fall, which is kind of ridiculous.

That was one of the problems

with Reagan, he pushed for the hat and pushed against the idea that government should provide

services for people that don't necessarily have to make money.

You know, lots of things,

it's wild how many things there are that people have done in the past like building roads,

building libraries, public schools, I'm a pilot and the air traffic control network is an

amazing thing that you don't pay for.

It's something that is just like a service that we pay for

collectively and, you know, it's not like a torode.

It's a free thing, free public, or free

free for use.

Obviously, things cost money, but for the end user, it is free.

There are so many

things like this that if you built them today would be very difficult because Reagan first

made it this idea that everything has to be run like a business.

Everything has to make money.

Everything has to have revenue come in and, you know, the amount that's coming in has to

exceed the amount going out and, you know, it's just, it's wild because there are so many things

that we do collectively that are so much better for all of us based on free to the end user.

Using sidewalks, walking on the road, driving, things like this, free to the end user.

And, you know, it's just, it's just wild.

So the Democrats under Bill Clinton absorbed

the same thing and, you know, like Clinton did this, I hate the term welfare reform because

what it really was was basically pushing that neoliberal consensus and getting the Democrats

on board with the same stuff that the Republicans were on board with and going from this idea

that, you know, you would have a social safety net and that you would try to help people to, oh,

you know, will help people and will means test everything and if you happen to be somebody,

you know, we're going to really figure out if you're in need or if you're screwing the system.

And I've talked about this before, but the thing about means testing, the thing about having

requirements for these kinds of things, it adds a lot of overhead.

It doesn't actually save money.

If you actually look at the amount of time and money and effort put into determining like,

does somebody actually need social services versus just having them free for the taking for

anyone that asks for them or wants them, it actually costs more to put in the barriers.

It's like public transit.

It costs more very generally to run the tolls and do all of this kind of

stuff and to enforce that for, say, the New York subways system that it would cost to simply

operate it for free.

And the amount that you take in from tolls, it doesn't actually cover any

significant amount of the costs.

You know, it's significant amount of money, but the amount of

money the operating costs for the for the system are significantly more, especially if it was

well maintained.

So anyway, coming back, we have this really big, kind of awful, false division

in the country.

And again, remember the parties don't represent people.

And if you, if you take away

the labels and I hate the term no labels, party, but because somebody is ruined it.

But many, many

terms have been ruined like this.

But if you take away the labels and you look at policy positions

and just sort of figured out where you stand, which is what I think you should do.

I think I

will get to the next thing.

But I think we should all kind of think about each issue and

sort of decide where you stand and be flexible, too.

Like be open to the possibility that you think,

oh well, we should only give help to people who need it.

And then be open to the idea of,

well, actually, by giving help to anyone that asks for it, if somebody doesn't need it,

you're going to make that money up in terms of tax revenue or, you know, and doesn't need it in

your estimation.

And if somebody does need it, but for some reason, you know, like their situation

change.

And they've suddenly lost their job or had to, you know, something happened and suddenly

they need a little bit of help.

Who is the decide who needs what? That's a massive thing.

Who

is the decide, you know, like if you're getting free college, I know people whose parents made a lot

of money and they were unable to go to college or unable to go to the schools that they wanted

because they couldn't get student aid because their parents wouldn't pay for the schools that

they wanted to go to.

And, you know, this kind of thing, like it gives you a terrible situation

and it gives you this situation as well where you're intrinsically making a class of people,

we're going to be against whatever the social, you know, whether it's the social safety net,

whether it's food or shelter or whatever.

You'll have people who are against it because they're

not in the category of people that are allowed to get it.

And you'll also leave people out, you'll

also unduly delay, you know.

And I mean, if you know anyone who has a disability and they're in

the US and they collect disability, they're not getting very much money at all.

It's a pitence.

And not only is it a pitence, but thanks to the welfare reform and giant air quotes and all of this,

they're not able to have basically any assets at all.

Plenty of people who are disabled

are not able to even get married because if they get married, their partner will throw them out

of disability, you know, they'll have too much money or too much, whatever.

And, you know,

they're living on the edge.

They're not able to keep any savings.

They're not able to work.

It's a funny thing because we have means testing and we have this stuff that is like,

well, this is not the concept that I want to get to here, but there's this concept of a welfare

cliff, which is not just for welfare, but for any kind of social support, if you stop giving it

to people when they hit a threshold, like when they start making a certain amount of money,

there becomes a point where you have to make a lot more money just in order to catch up to where

you would have been before.

If you taper it off, it's a little bit better, but if you just give it

to everybody, then you don't have these kinds of things.

So in doing that, you're giving a false

incentive not to work.

You're actually like, the system is set up through these things that are

supposed to encourage people to work, and there's sold as such to make it so that people cannot

work.

They're actively punished for trying to work.

But anyway, getting back in this false division,

this is something like, I see this much more now because I'm kind of outside of both of these

groups, and it's kind of staggering just how much of a mirror image these things are, especially

and things are complicated.

I'm not saying that all air quotes conservators are watching

fox or all air quotes in the brills are watching MSNBC.

Obviously things are much broader than that,

both of these have viewership in the like single digit millions.

The plenty of people never

watch them, but just to use those as examples, you have people who are watching fox, and you have

people who are watching MSNBC, and both of these channels are completely detached from reality.

They're presenting something that is utterly, utterly incongruous, both with each other

and with the grounded reality.

They're presenting existential threats, and this existential

threat situation, and I will say like, I think Trump is genuinely extraordinarily dangerous.

I don't think that's a, well, it shouldn't be a really controversial statement.

Unfortunately,

I know some people who would think that it is, but he is an extremely dangerous person,

and many of the people in the current Republican leadership are extremely dangerous.

But nonetheless, in both cases, you have people saying you have to vote for so-and-so because

the other guy is an existential threat.

And in one case, maybe it's more true than the other,

but in both cases, it's like you have to vote for Joe Biden, despite the fact that he's a terrible

person, he's a old racist fucking dirt bag.

And I don't think that's, you know, I don't think

that's an ambiguous, or it should not be a controversial statement, but I know plenty of people

who would push back and say, oh, he's not a racist, Scott.

No, he's a fucking racist.

And I mean,

I can get quotes, especially if you can go back to the 70s, but you can get more recent stuff,

it's a fucking racist.

It's really fucking annoying to me, that people just, I don't know.

I don't even want to get into that, but it's, it's annoying.

But you have to vote for Biden,

because Trump is so bad.

And then you have the other ones going, well, you know, you don't align

with Trump on all of these things, but you have to vote for Trump because Biden is so bad.

And it's funny, too, because the ways that they suggest Biden is so bad is they're like,

oh, he's a communist.

And first off, I wish, if the Democrats were the people that the

Republicans insist they are, I'd probably be a Democrat.

If they were actually socialists

and communists, I'd probably align more with them.

But in reality, you know, a lot of the reasons

that Trump sucks and the reasons that Biden sucks are the same reasons.

A lot of them are things

like they're both corporatists.

They're both interested in funneling shit tons of money back into

companies, giving public resources to companies, giving billions to companies, doing a lot of

the same kind of stuff.

You know, I mean, you had Harris at the debate stage arguing with Trump

over who was more like, who was a bigger fracker? Who was a better, we're in a ecological disaster

right now, mass extinction and climate catastrophe that is extremely, like you're starting to see

some stuff, but it's going to get worse.

And it's extraordinarily, like it should be a planetary

emergency.

And instead, you have the two major parties in this country arguing with each other

over, and I don't mean like, she's saying you're a bigger fracker.

I mean, both of them are trying

to claim the moniker of the biggest fracker.

That's who these people are.

And because you have this

thing in the sort of, you know, for one of the better term, like, in a migdala activation that

they're doing, like, you're getting, you're getting people into this panic, anger, it's super

emotional state, flight or flight.

It makes it very difficult for people to actually rationally sit

back and go.

But actually, you know, is, is Harris this bad that you have to vote for somebody

as awful as Trump, is Trump this bad that you have to vote for somebody as awful as Biden or Harris?

I would, yeah, I would lean more toward the latter being true, but I don't think, you know, like

all of the above, I'm fucking horrible.

And the fact that, like, out of 330 million people,

these are the best people you can come up with, it is a condemnation of our system to be down.

Just to be extremely, extremely blunt there.

But anyway, I think the worst thing about it is

it makes discussion impossible.

And this is, this is again, like, one of these things about these

words.

It's one of the reasons why I almost called this trigger words.

Because if I say certain words,

certain people will immediately shut down.

If I say that Trump is a racist, a lot of people will

just immediately shut down.

Because I don't know, he's not a, he's a fucking racist, like both.

It's kind of funny, because it's also, like, he's an open-over racist.

You know, it's not,

you don't have to go back to the Central Park 5 and the just blatant shit that he did

in terms of housing that was very discriminatory in the 70s and 80s.

Just the current stuff

openly openly racist.

Biden also a racist.

And I would even go so far as to say that Harris,

you know, despite being a black presenting woman, she is an agent of white supremacy.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about what that means.

But it's something that, you know,

like, I'm not saying, like, everybody's a racist and nobody's a racist.

I'm saying more, like,

everybody kind of is, like, she and it Biden both built their careers in a large part on throwing

black men into prison and stripping them of their, of their civil rights.

And part of that is also

if you look at the 13th Amendment, air quotes abolishing slavery with a little asterisk, people

get enslaved when they go into prison, because slavery is still allowed in prison.

And so both of

them built their political careers on enslaving black men.

It's kind of a, they're, I mean,

not just, but that by and large, that was what the end effect of what they did was.

And it's

interesting.

It's kind of interesting that they're all so similar in this regard, especially when

you get people who, like, lose their minds about how different they think these people are.

It's, I always, this is not in my notes, but this is something I always think of that,

I always liken it to pro wrestling.

You know, you have this situation where, you know,

these people playing these characters and you have, sometimes they're espousing strong differences

or they're arguing with each other in public or whatever.

I'd say both hang out the same bars

and the same parties that get paid by the same old look arcs.

They do the same things.

They're all

rich fox, just, you know, they're, they're chummy.

They're putting on a show.

And within the

parties also, they do things where they'll have somebody who is like the rotating villain.

So at

one point, it was Joe Lieberman.

I know more about the Democrats than their Republicans, but,

you know, the Republicans, I'm sure do something very similar.

At one point, it was Joe Lieberman.

At one point, it was hereston cinema and then it's somebody else and, you know,

our mansion or whoever.

It'll be somebody and there's always somebody there to point to,

to say, well, we would do good things if it wasn't for this one asshole or these two assholes.

It's kind of a fucking show.

And when you start seeing it as a show, it gets really obvious that

it's a show.

So anyway, coming back to my notes and what I wanted to talk about.

So one of the

big things that shuts people down, and this is especially to my friend, is when we talk about racism

and white nationalism and white supremacy and white supremacists, it's considered

worse to be called a racist than to actually be one in the US.

And so like, you'll get people

who react immediately and kind of reflectively with I'm not a racist.

People, people, because obviously

like you don't want to be a racist, we know that that's a bad thing.

We used to know that being a

Nazi was a bad thing.

And now, now you get people on the Fox News saying that they're a Nazi,

but they never mind that now.

We're reclaiming the word or some bullshit like that.

But anyway,

people don't understand where they fit into sort of white supremacy and white supremacists

culture.

And how lots of things that we do that don't necessarily seem overtly racist are racist

and they're harmful to a lot of people.

And they're real danger.

Again, it's easy to see the overt

over the top stuff.

But it's the subtle stuff that actually ends up being really difficult.

That doesn't mean that the over the top stuff, you know, like somebody lynching somebody

obviously extremely terrible.

But those are things that you can kind of point to and it's more

obvious that they're terrible.

Whereas the things that a lot of people, I would even argue,

almost everybody does, imply Aaron and pose these little bits of force.

They're not necessarily

huge, but collectively they end up being a lot of pressure and force that pushes people into

a great deal of disparity.

Another one that is really like people get very reactive to is to be told

that they have white privilege.

And I know that the problem is with this.

And I think people sit there

and they're like, oh, but I don't have that because I haven't had a perfect life and, you know,

I haven't faced many challenges in blah, blah, blah.

And I'm sure you, I'm sure that's true.

I'm sure, you know, you've had a lot of difficulties.

I'm sure things are not going as

well as they could for you.

I'm sure, you know, you could be doing a lot better.

But the thing

about white privilege and what that is is simply that the fact that your white is not getting in the

way, it's not one of the problems that you're facing.

Whereas people who are not white,

that is a massive impediment.

And you can argue, like, oh, no, it's not.

The things that we're

in a post, yeah, bullshit.

You can look at the statistics.

It's very clear.

Look at any job and

look at the racial breakdown of who's doing that job.

And then look at the actual decomposition

of the country.

It's very clear that there's some very strong bias there.

It's not subtle.

It's not at all subtle.

And this also doesn't mean that our lives are perfect.

It doesn't mean

that, you know, like, just because you look like me, you're automatically a CEO.

But it does mean

that, you know, the reasons that I'm not in that position are not just based on the color of my

skin.

And the thing also, I mean, here's one that I see a lot of people get very reactive to.

Racism requires systematic power structure and differential.

And again, this is going to be very

triggering.

And, yeah, I'm just resurfacing it.

Don't get shut down and don't get reactive here.

But you cannot be racist in the United States against white people.

You can be prejudiced,

prejudiced, that's fine.

But to actually be racist requires that power structure.

And the power

structure and the systems that exist do not exist for that.

The history is not there for that.

You would have to have a massive revolutionary change in order for that to be something that was even

possible in the U.S.

And again, like, you know, I get the, you could be like, oh, but, but,

but, no, reverse racism, which is like racism against white people, is not a thing.

It's not a thing.

And I understand that you may think it is, but the accusations of that and the idea that that is

a thing is actually just a tool.

And part of this comes to something called Darvo.

Darvo is

deny attack and reverse victim and defender.

And this, this was created by, uh, or not created by,

but I guess, described by, um, I'm going to box her name, but Jennifer freed in, I guess, 1977.

I was, it was kind of on gaslighting, and it's this tactic that abusers will often use,

where they will sort of, um, the, if it is right up there with kind of sewing fud, fud is fear

uncertainty and doubt.

Um, and, and when you do this, you're muddying the waters and you're confusing

things and you're making things seem much more complicated than they are.

Fulls complexity is a massive

thing that people love to use.

It's one of the things that protects is real a lot because right now,

um, you know, they're committing a genocide.

I would say unambiguously, um, at least probably 600,000

Palestinians and Gaza have been killed since, uh, you know, like October, 2023.

And, uh, yeah,

go out.

I don't even want to get into that, but it's not complicated.

If you, it's one of these

things where if you actually look at it, it gets much simpler and the more you look into it, the

simpler it gets.

And when you start looking at it, it's like, oh, well, there's actually one group

and that this, I'm going to get into this a little bit because it's going to come back to,

what I'm talking about, but there's one group who actually has a lot of real, just collective,

systemic power.

And there's a group that does not.

You have one group that has like a super modern

military with nuclear weapons and fighter jets and, um, you know, the iron dome, the ability to, you know,

shoot down, um, incoming missiles and the ability to strike targets, um, in somebody else's space.

There's one group that does not.

They have improvised weapons, they have, you know, very

little technology, very little capacity to inflate harm.

Now, if you look at, like, how many,

how many people die in Israel from bombings versus how many people die in Gaza from bombings.

If you look at pictures of Gaza has been leveled, like, just absolutely decimated.

And,

yeah, it's not hard to find, um, kids and tents blown up and burned alive by bombs and bullets

and weapons that were made often in the United States, uh, versus they have that they're literally,

like, people with stones and, uh, nothing, no power.

They even, if you take out the current,

uh, stuff that's happening.

You have one group, and this is a thing that you could have seen,

but you have one group living under a apartheid, uh, where their, their movements are strictly

controlled, their ability to leave and to come back are strictly controlled.

And then you have

another group that gets to move freely.

You have one group who live under, uh, you know,

like fences and constant threat of violence and who get regularly kidnapped and shot the

mowing the lawn.

If you, if you search for that, that's a cool one.

Uh, that Israel was doing

a long time before the current stuff.

Um, and then you have another group that just is completely

protected and essentially can operate with impunity.

There's no, that the power imbalance is

extremely clear.

And when you start having that and you start using this Darvo, uh, you are

showing this idea that like, well, it's, um, it's actually, therefore, because blah, blah, blah, blah,

and, you know, it's actually the, the reason that you have, uh, disparities in terms of who is

working a certain job, you can blame the victim or you could look at the actually strong, well-established

systemic, you know, power structure and differential there.

Um, you can, uh, and I'm, I'm trying

to tiptoe a little bit here because I understand that some of the people I want to talk to here,

some of the people I would like to hear me are going to hear a lot of this stuff and they're just

going to, like, their eyes are going to roll back and they're not going to be able to take it.

And

I wish that you would, I really wish that you would just listen and just think about this for a second.

And to think maybe maybe some of this stuff that you've been told is a little bit bullshit.

Maybe maybe some of this stuff is actually just the tool of people who are doing the oppression.

And some of it is like, it's an interesting thing about this because it's not like,

I always call this kind of thing a conspiracy without conspirators, which is not to say there aren't

people who are like deliberately pushing things and making them worse.

But a lot of this kind of stuff

you end up with people who have some kind of a general alignment.

It's like an external magnetic

field almost.

And they end up doing things that seem kind of coordinated.

They seem like there's almost

a, uh, a plan working together and people, you know, pulling the strings and all that,

when in reality, it's just a bunch of people making independent choices under some kind of

a system that pushes for certain kinds of choices.

Um, so one of the big examples of Darvo is

with affirmative action.

So affirmative action is basically just to, uh, to try to level the,

that disparity that I'm talking about, um, similarly like there's a DEI diversity equity and inclusion.

You're trying to take things where there are existing biases, where there are existing

disparities and sort of make them a little bit more fair.

And I have, um, I think it's going to

be the art for this episode.

We'll be this old cartoon, um, that's basically showing, um, I guess

sort of a baseball game.

And, uh, it's, it's showing three different people standing, watching the

game.

And there's a fence.

One of the people's short, one is going to medium height and one of

them is tall.

And, uh, on the left hand side, you have equality, which is the thing that, like,

like, equality sounds good.

It doesn't matter.

It sounds like, oh, everything is fair, everything

and, but in reality, because you have that disparity and height, um, in that artificial barrier

in front of people, the one that's already tall, standing on exactly the same crate,

gets to see everything.

And the one that's kind of medium height, they're struggling on it,

but they can kind of see the game.

And then the short person is screwed out of seeing the game.

And then on the other side, you have equity.

And in this case, the tall person gets to see the game.

The medium height person standing on a crate, they can see the game.

And the short person,

also standing on two crates, gets to see the game where they couldn't before.

That is what DEI is trying to achieve.

Now, there's also, uh, people have extended this and

they've added in things like justice and things like get rid of the fucking wall.

And then we

don't have these barriers.

And then you don't need the crates, uh, which would be ideal.

And,

you know, I know, like, I know it's tempting to say, like, oh, we don't, we don't want to have DEI,

we just want to make things, that's the fucking point of having it is to make things fair.

And until you have massive, overhauls of society, um, you need to do something about this.

And if you don't do it, uh, then you end up with the person who can't see the game.

It's, it's a massive, massive problem.

And it's one of these things also, like the, in this picture,

you can kind of see the differences in height and you can see what those things are.

And reality is a lot more complicated, because systematic and, uh, oppression is not something

that, uh, that you can really see.

It's something that you can measure.

You can see statistically

certain groups have, you know, advantages that other groups don't.

And certain groups can advance

further and certain groups are left behind.

But you can't really see it.

You can't really see

what is doing it.

Um, you have to, you have to do some work.

And because of that, it makes it

really difficult for people to understand, especially if you don't face it.

Like, people who,

that, the, the short person standing on the one crate that can't see, they fucking know,

they have zero doubt, like they, that's obvious to them.

The medium height person is kind of like,

kind of conceivate, not great.

Um, they sort of know, they, they're pretty, yeah, it's there.

The tall person is like, well, what's the problem? Yeah.

You have to, you have to do work.

If

you're that tall person, you actually see, um, what is going on.

And this is, this is just so

baked in to everything.

And it's such a thing that, um, yeah, and I'm not, I'm not trying to say,

like, we're all racist.

But white supremacy is built so much into the American culture that

and using in culture.

I would rather call it that because American, the Americas or North

and South America, I'm talking specifically about, uh, the United States, so museums.

But it's

so baked in to that culture that you don't know it.

And you don't realize, and you don't understand

to also, especially if you're not the kind of person that's actually going out of your way to figure

this out.

Uh, it's very easy not to know that if you're, yeah, if you're white, you can be

mediocre.

You can be Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

And it's one of the things actually about these two,

both of these are the most, um, archetypical, I say, I would say examples of museums, of people

from the United States.

They are mediocre, racist, old white dudes who have their entire lives

fucked up continuously and never faced a consequence.

Both of them, uh, Trump has lost a billion

dollars of other people's money.

Biden has done so much harm and so many terrible things.

He lost

this Supreme Court.

He, you know, like, I mean, he got us here.

And yet, and yet they're both,

well, current and former presidents of the United States.

And then I, I will say, also,

like, I'm not a huge fan of Obama's anymore.

But one thing you can say about Obama is he was exceptional.

He was, you know, his whole life had to be exceptional, had to be so much better than either of

these two assholes.

And even then, you know, gets the chance, the chance to bullshit treatment.

Even then gets, uh, called BO by people who definitely are not racist by the way.

But anyway,

this is, this is the thing, when you're black, it's not to say that you can't get ahead, but in order

to get to the same place, in order to get to the same level, as again, a mediocre white dude,

you have to be exceptional.

You have to be either through luck or probably through practice and

probably through both.

And this gets into this, again, myth of air quotes reverse racism

and reverse discrimination.

And it did, you get a little anecdote here, but years ago,

I was talking with somebody, and this person is white dude kind of, kind of relevant here.

But he wanted to be a firefighter.

And he went in and did his interview, prepared all that kind of stuff.

And when he was there, he was explaining that the guy who interviewed him also a white dude

was explaining to him that, you know, it's, well, you don't have any chance here because they're

going to give it to, and this is his words not mine, but they're going to give it to an air quotes

unqualified black woman.

And the thing is, A that's not true, B, I'm trying that the, I feel like

I'm describing stuff that is like simultaneously so obvious, and yet the people that I'm describing

it to, or hopefully, I would like to think some of the people that are, I'm describing it to,

do not know this, and then I'm actually informing.

But, you know, D.I.

and affirmative action,

it doesn't mean you're giving things to unqualified people.

It means you're doing what you can

to sort of level the playing field, to sort of let people actually have some degree of fairness and

equity.

And it also for a job like being a firefighter, where there are way more applicants than

there are people who are getting it, most people who apply to that job are not going to get it.

And this guy, this racist guy that was doing the interviewing, is throwing this thing out about

D.I.

and he's getting to tell so many other mediocre white dudes who probably,

probably weren't necessarily the best candidates.

It's not because they weren't the best candidates,

it's not because there were so many other candidates for so few slots.

It's because somebody who's

unqualified is going to get the job based on their skin color.

And the reality is, if you look at

the statistics, something like 75% of firefighters are white.

But if you look at the population,

only like 60% of the population is white.

It's kind of interesting.

And then you kind of go through

and you figure out, well, how many are black? Well, something like 7% are black versus 12% of the

population.

And then you start digging in and you're sort of like, well, why is that? Why?

Why is that? Why do you think that is? It turns out that the people who are doing the hiring

tend to prefer white people.

They have intrinsic biases.

Some of those are not even, you know,

like there's obviously again the overt racism where they're just discriminating and it's open

and it.

But there's a lot of stuff that is very subtle, but you don't even notice that, you know,

like if you looked at exactly the same scenario with exactly the same things happening, exactly

the same dialogue and you're someone who was raised in the US.

And this actually goes a crop like,

you could be black and you could have been raised in the US and you will still see the black

person doing exactly the same things, seeming less competent than the white person doing exactly

the same things.

Or, you know, you'll have a higher standard for the black person than the white

person.

Again, it's not that you are necessarily like overly militantly racist.

It's just that we

live in this society that is so racist, that, you know, it's just embedded in you from birth

and it's very difficult to see.

And also, you think you're being fair.

You think you're being

reasonable.

And if you're one of the people who wins, you have this thing called,

called survivorship bias.

If you're one of the people who wins, you think, oh, it's me.

I'm actually good or things are fine.

And this is one way actually where black people who end up

getting to, you know, positions like Obama end up often being very strong agents of white supremacy,

which is not to say that they're overtly like using the inward kind of racist.

But they're doing

things like sitting there and assuming that other black people that are not getting as far as them

are just doing it to themselves.

And it's, it's a really fucked up thing.

We do this all the time.

It's, you know, survivorship bias.

You look at people who go through a process.

And that process

is basically random.

Maybe has some kind of uneven odds.

And the people who win

feel like they've done something better.

The people who lose, you're like, they kind of suck.

And people looking at them think that people who win are just more qualified than the people who

lose are just less.

When in reality, a lot of it is just sort of genetic lottery kind of stuff.

And when I say that, I mean, you know, how, like, what family did you end up in? What situation

did you end up in? What kind of things worked for you by chance? How many bullets did you dodge?

By chance? And what systemic biases did you either overcome or not have? And that's a thing

that I wish, I really wish people would just see more.

And there's one of those things also where

it's very, you know, again, I like in it to atmosphere because it's so omnipresent.

It's really

easy to forget that it's there.

You know, it's really easy.

And even if you think about it and

you're like, oh, yeah, if I move my hand, it can kind of feel the air.

But then a minute later,

you stop moving and you forget about it.

And it's just like, it's not there again.

You have to

actively work to see it, especially, especially if you're somebody who happens to be successful

in that system.

And especially, especially if you're white because you're, you're just, you know,

it is so transparent there.

And you don't feel all the little, all the little things pushing

against you at every step.

And so if you're not actively looking for it, you're not going to see

it.

It's, it's, it's a very big problem.

So anyway, this is, this is one of the ways where

bigots can kind of push the narrative and convince people that affirmative action is actually bad.

When in reality, they're just sort of telling people who we're not going to get the job anyway,

that they're not getting the job for a specific reason and sort of sewing that doubt and sewing

this idea that things are unfair.

And it helps also the, the culture is set up so that

it's generally unfair and fitting to a lot of people.

So, you know, a lot of people are poor

and they feel like, you know, well, I'm, I'm white and I'm poor.

And so there must not be, you know,

whatever.

And in reality, it's just that, you know, you being white is not part of why you're in

the situation you're in.

It's not part of why you face the challenges that you have.

Despite what

the, the bigot who is telling you that it's affirmative action is telling you.

So anyway,

I think it's worth thinking about like, how did we get here? And in thinking about how we get here,

the first thing you have to understand is sort of like the foundation level understanding.

And

I do want to say, there'll be dragons here.

Like, I am, this is not my domain of expertise.

There

are people who have spent like full PhDs studying this.

I'm just kind of like a amateur.

So I'm

giving you my understanding and my, you know, sort of, I'm giving you what I can, but understand

a little asterisk on this.

Some of the things that might say declaratively may have some

fuzz to them, but the broad strokes, this is pretty, I think it's pretty accurate.

So race is a made up concept.

It is, it is purely fiction.

It was made up and especially like

whiteness was made up in the, or the 17th century.

And there's no genetic basis for it.

There's not even,

if you want to look at like more from metrics.

So like phenotype and get the, the calipers out and

do all of this kind of horrible stuff, do frenology or, or all these ridiculously racist things,

it's not well defined.

It's not, it's just not a thing.

It's a purely fictional concept.

And this actually makes you wonder, like, well, Scott, you're making the whole episode about

something that you're saying doesn't exist and is fictional.

And yes, I am.

And the reason that

I am is because even though it doesn't exist as a real thing, even though it is made up,

it affects people.

It actually matters.

It's like money doesn't exist.

Money is just a fictional

concept.

It's just made up.

But whether you have a high score in your bank account or not,

has massive impacts on your life.

Just like that, whatever your race is, not a real thing,

and yet has massive impacts on your life as long as you're living in the United States.

So

whiteness was kind of invented sort of as a replacement for Christian in, in settlers and

sort of like the 1600s.

And it was done for a variety of reasons.

But one was that people who were

in the genus could convert, whereas you can't really convert to, to whiteness.

Although this is

the thing like expanding whiteness is a whole thing and giving up your actual ethnicity.

It's not that you're Spanish or Irish or German or whatever you're just white.

It's part of the

as part of, and then they kind of expand this end, and they also have proximity to it and so on.

It is a thing that people made to create this artificial hierarchy,

and essentially to divide and conquer people.

It's kind of interesting because when you look at the

way this is set up, it's very similar in a lot of ways to capitalism, which is to say,

you know, you get relatively poor people.

This is going to, this will probably be controversial

to people, but relatively poor people to be landlords, and you're like, most scat, but they're rich.

No, they're not compared to a billionaire.

Though the wealthiest person you know,

unless you happen to know people that have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars,

the wealthiest person you know, they're like a small millionaire, they're poor.

They're actually poor

compared to a billionaire.

They have, they're as close to being completely broke

at, you know, like within the margin of error, and the fact that you don't understand that,

and the fact that they don't understand that is part of how this is set up to, to do things.

You get that person who, again, is poor to suppress and Oprah's and exploit the people under

them in that system, and they get some kind of reward for it for sure, but in the process,

they're passing money and other things up to the next person, and there are several layers of this,

and it goes up to the people who actually have billions of dollars, who don't even have to do

the stuff themselves, like they don't have to do the oppression themselves.

They don't have to be

the villain.

It's really easy for people to understand that landlords are a villain.

You can look at

Chairman Mao, but it's not, in the current system, it's not so much the landlords, which to be

fair, they are directly being villainous, but it's actually the people who own the banks,

the people who own all of the stocks, the people who are benefiting from people doing horrible

things to their tenants, but without having to do the horrible things themselves, it's kind of a really

cool, clever, I say cool, and not in a good way, but it's kind of a clever system when you think about it,

it lets you commit immense amounts of villainery and exploit vast numbers of people without actually

doing it directly yourself, and race is actually even better than capitalism in this sense,

because with that, you don't even have to give somebody something.

You don't have to give somebody

little trinkets.

You don't have to give somebody like a nice house or a couple houses or whatever.

You just give them the idea of whiteness.

You give them the idea that, yeah, you're poor,

but you're still better off than this other guy who may be poor as well.

Probably is basically

in the same boat as you, and in doing that, now you've got this intrinsic conflict between people

who are really basically at the same level.

They're basically at the same level.

They're basically

culturally at the same level, but instead of focusing on the actual minority of people who are

sort of up at the top, exploiting everybody, now they're fighting each other.

This is really

where this comes.

It's like the old saying, like a poor white person is more in common with a poor

black person than with a rich person, and absolutely fucking true.

So you get people who have no

power, who have no money, who have nothing, to exploit other people who have no power, who have no

money, who have nothing, rather than having them collectively go like, hey, wait a second, and then

look upwards.

It's really dangerous, but it's also something that I think, and I hope you can open your

eyes to at some point, and maybe start to see, wait a second, maybe we shouldn't be fighting each other

so much.

Maybe it's those people that we should be looking at.

So again, it's a fake concept,

but just like money, you have to think about it.

You have to talk about it.

You have to

consider it, and until we fix it, it really matters.

It's something that really makes a big difference.

It's something that I'm not going to say.

It's like the biggest thing in any of our lives,

but it's something that really is one of the biggest things that determines your success in life

or your failures.

Again, it doesn't mean that automatically you're going to be successful

if you're a white or you're going to be unsuccessful if you're black, but it does mean that all

things being equal, the odds are really in your favor.

If you're white and really against you,

if you're black.

Anyway, this brings up white supremacy, and it's really easy again.

This is one of the things that I'm trying to make as the theme to this, but it's really easy to

look at sort of like the white supremacist, like a David Duke kind of character.

Somebody who is

almost cartoonish in it, and to say, you're not like that guy.

That's an extreme,

but that's the thing that is an extreme case.

Those people are definitely malignant,

and they do a lot to spread a lot of harm, but they're also not the typical thing.

The thing that

really enforces all of this, the thing that makes it like stick, it's not people like that,

nearly as much as everyone else, all of us, and especially when we're not examining,

especially when we're not thinking about it, especially when we're not considering what we're doing,

and we're not aware.

Like when you're unaware of stuff, you don't realize what you're doing

habitually.

You don't realize the judgments you're making, you don't realize the biases that you have,

and how those biases affect people.

They affect a lot of stuff, and your life, they determine

things like who you're going to be friends with.

They determine things like you're going to

work with, and what kinds of jobs you're going to get, and all kinds of things.

They determine

like, are you going to be a pain in the ass to somebody? Are you going to be nicer to somebody? Are you

going to be more understanding or caring about somebody? Or are you going to just kind of be

more bitter and cold to somebody? It's all a factor.

It's also something that really makes a

big difference, and it's all stuff that, you know, that the real people doing this kind of stuff

are us.

The people who are most responsible for it are us.

They're not like, again, the David

Duke kind of people.

And so this gets into this idea of like, what is an agent of white supremacy?

What is somebody who is actually actively doing this kind of stuff? Because it's very easy to

think, well, obviously, if you're, and I kind of mentioned this before, but there's this idea that

by being black, you can't possibly be.

But the thing is, there are a lot of black people who are

agents of white supremacy.

There are a lot of black people who are sitting there and propagating these

things.

And I don't just mean the people who are sort of like, you know, clownishly pick me kind of

people.

I mean, like, people who think that they're doing a good thing.

People who think that they are

sort of, you know, like, they've overcome stuff.

And they're in this position.

And, you know, it's that

it's that race.

It's that, you know, I was much better.

And so, everyone else who looks like me

is much worse.

And blah, blah, blah.

That's a massive, massive problem.

And it's a massive area

where, you know, you don't necessarily see what you're doing or what is causing the harm.

And you can also get kind of false reassurance from people because you'll get people who look

a certain way.

And they tell you certain things.

And you don't realize that partly they are just

reinforcing the same system that you are participating in and benefiting from.

Or the opposite

of the bandana under your, we are listening.

So it's very much actually also like misogyny.

And that, you know, like, there are lots of women who are actively agents of misogyny,

who are actively making things worse for other women.

You have to, you know, just because you're a

woman does not mean that you're not propagating or perpetuating or, you know, acting on misogynistic

impulses.

And it doesn't mean also that you're not sitting there saying, oh, you know,

sexism doesn't exist anymore in blah, blah, blah.

And you can't do that.

And then when you do it,

you end up actively oppressing people.

Just because they happen to be in your category does not mean

you're not actively oppressing them.

It's, it's, it's part of how this stuff works.

And it's also

part of why it's so insidious and part of why it's so important to really examine and go, go for,

like, you know, I'm, again, I'm not an expert on this stuff.

There are other people who are experts

on it who have written a lot of stuff who have spoken a lot on it, go to them and listen,

hey, don't, I don't mean, like, ask them to do work for you.

But I mean, look, look at their material,

read their stuff, listen to their stuff, and learn from it and actively sort of evaluate

what you're doing in life and where you are and all the things that you are actively doing

to make things worse for other people and to continue to perpetuate the system.

So one, and I think, you know, again, this is just an important thing to the really unpack

in yourself and to understand just like how internalized these things are and how implicit the biases are

and, you know, it's very difficult to see unless you haven't pointed out to you.

Like,

especially, again, if you're in a class that is oppressed, it's pretty easy to see.

If you're

in a class that is benefiting from privilege, it becomes much more difficult to see.

It takes a lot of effort.

This also gets to, you know, and this is something that just drives me to fucking bonkers,

but I'll see people talking about like blue lives and you'll see even like a blue air quotes blue

lives matter.

There aren't no fucking blue lives.

Black lives are an actual thing and black lives matter

is not like a statement that only they matter, no other ones do.

It's basically got to implicit

also in it.

And the reason that you have to say it is because the implicit bias and the systematic

biases basically say that they don't police face very few consequences.

People who lynch

black people face very few consequences and people who rape black women or black men face

far fewer consequences than people who rape white people.

It's just the way things are in the U.S.

and not seeing that, not accepting it is actively perpetuating it.

It's something that you have to

you really have to understand where that stuff is and how that works.

It would just

give like an example.

This is kind of abstract, but people look at me and even if I'm fucking up,

even if I make a mistake, they tend to presume competence.

They tend to assume like, oh Scott

kind of knows what he's saying, knows what he's doing.

And yeah he just he made a hiccup there,

but that's fine.

And then if you imagine in contrast you have a black woman who may have actually

got like a PhD from Harvard and is hyper qualified and is done like a million things that I haven't

done and she makes like the tiniest little mistake.

People see her do that and they focus on the

mistake and they assume incompetence.

They assume that she's not qualified.

They assume that she got

there through something that was not fair.

This is one of these things.

It's like, it even better

one is I can lose, I'm allowed to lose my temper.

I'm allowed to get heated, I'm allowed to get

angry.

I'm allowed to be upset.

But if a black woman gets just like a little bit elevated,

it's like a little bit strong.

It's even briefly uses like a change in tone.

Suddenly she becomes

the air quotes angry black woman.

And this is again like it's not, it's not allowed.

You have

these sort of handcuffs on you.

Straight jacket on you.

And I can you like you don't notice it

if you're not in that position.

The person in that position definitely knows it.

Now you can ask her,

she can she can tell you.

But if you're just watching from afar, you don't see it.

You don't know it

unless somebody points it out to you or unless you really go out of your way to try to see it.

So anyway, I think hopefully that's enough on that.

Again, other sources are better than me.

I will

talk about it again.

I'm sure, but it's something that I think I think we all need to know.

And I'm

hoping my hope is that if you're hearing it from me, maybe you'll be a little bit more open to it

and maybe you'll maybe not react as much.

Maybe you won't be quite so triggered and you'll

start looking into it a little bit more and start thinking a bit more about it.

The people you

need to hear it from to be honest are black people, are black women especially, are people that are

facing this kind of stuff.

And not just another random white dude.

But again, I think sometimes

because of those biases that you have, maybe coming from me, you'll be sort of think about it a

maybe you will react a little bit less and maybe it will open the door for you to look a little

bit further.

That's that's my hope.

That's that's why I'm why I'm like an hour talking about it.

So getting on on other words, like fascism is a system of government marked by centralized authority

under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent government controls,

violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent, massive,

nationalism, and racism, per the American heritage, dictionary.

Obviously there are many other

definitions.

You can go through another dictionary.

This is a pretty good one.

I think it's fine.

I think it's good enough as a first order approximation.

And when I say Trump is a fascist,

I mean, I mean, just that.

And it's frankly, and I understand, like, I feel like I'm talking

to be like a child.

I'm sorry.

I'm saying it this way because I'm not trying to be condescending just

it's so obvious.

And yet it's, I can feel you shutting down and pushing back and just like reacting

to it, rather than actually listening, but Trump is a fascist.

Go through the list of stuff that

I just mentioned.

It's extremely, extremely blatant and obvious.

He's very clearly seeking

and grabbing and acting like a dictator.

He's very clearly a capitalist.

He's strictly controlling

the economy.

He's imposing all kinds of economic controls.

He's taking percentages of companies.

He's doing all of these fucking things.

He's sending beliefs and the military and to violently

suppress the opposition.

He's making this idea that, you know, like, oh, crime is rampant.

And so we

have to send in the military.

Again, crime in the US, US is a more dangerous country than a lot of

countries in the world.

But crime is very low.

Like it is an extremely safe country.

Your perception

is very skewed, especially by media and by people who are sitting there for various reasons,

sometimes deliberate and sometimes just because people don't know any better.

But people are

telling you that it's dangerous, but it's really not.

It's genuinely not.

The odds, if you don't

and I'm not saying that not like shit happens, you can go someplace and just get bad luck.

But in reality, you know, by and large, you can live your entire life and you probably will

without really interacting with violence, unless you somehow invited it in or it's in your family

or it's in your friend group or your neighborhood or whatever.

It's not something that

that is just so prevalent that like you go down the street in the wrong place and then you're

going to get shot.

That's the perception people have.

But the reality is actually things are

much safer than you realize.

So he pushes that idea and then uses that as justification to send

in the police and to send in the military and to violently suppress the opposition.

He's blatantly

nationalistic.

The fact that he even have to say that is motto is literally America first.

Like that's this.

You can't get any more nationalistic than that.

Also, I mean, this is a motto

that came up, I think it originally started in like the 1800s.

It's a motto for the

nativeist movement.

Nativeists, you might do some math on that.

Does not mean indigenous people

if that's not clear.

It was a motto used by the KKK and length of 1930s.

It was very closely

linked with anti-Semitism and with fascism.

And in fact, again with fascism, like Hitler and the

Nazis and Germany were very heavily inspired by.

And this is not me like speculating on this,

like they literally wrote about it and talked about it.

Very heavily inspired by things like Jim Crow,

things like the US committing genocide on the indigenous people here.

Things like the Indian

schools and the cultural genocide and all of these kinds of things.

Eugenics was another thing

that was extremely popular in the US.

A lot of, it's easy to focus on Trump and the Republicans,

but this country is a very fascistic country.

It's a country that I always, I'm nervous about

you in saying this because a lot of people will again react to it, but try not to react to this

and try to consider it because it's actually true.

The US is kind of what would have happened

if he would have won.

Because there was a genocide on a scale of again hundreds and millions of

people killed.

Like we don't know the exact numbers because there were no censuses and

but order of magnitude 100 million people killed to the land with.

It wasn't just like land that

was sitting there that people could take.

It was a massive, now in some of it was disease,

so it was not intentional, but a lot of it was.

A lot of it was very deliberate.

A lot of it was

stuff that was like deliberately either, if not actually actively killing people, which again,

a lot of it was that, but also destroying culture, the cultural genocide, like taking kids,

forcing them to speak English, forcing them not to speak their indigenous languages.

forcing them to dress like the settlers, forcing them to adopt the settler religions,

and isolating them and trying everything they could to destroy their culture and to break

continuity with it.

It's an extremely scary thing when you start realizing that, you start thinking

about like, oh, wait a second.

If you would have been able to destroy a group of people and things

worked out for you, what would Germany be like in the future? Well, there's a lot like the US,

a lot like the US.

And again, like Hitler and people there, we're open about that.

They literally

talked about it.

It's not like me saying it.

So, the thing about this is just, it's not

ambiguous.

The Trump is a fascist.

It's not ambiguous that his party is a crystal fascist party.

His party, and the crystal fascism is just sort of like the intersection of essentially a brand

of Christianity with, and this is kind of important, but theocratic rule, which is funny

and simply because there's this whole idea that people push about the Sharia la, Sharia la.

The people who kept talking about that the most are the Christians who talk about how oppressed

they are, despite being a majority of people in the country.

You know, the US, like it's majority

Christian country, the people who are running the country are almost all Christian, almost all

white males, by the way.

And they talk about how oppressed they are.

It's such a fucking Darvo thing,

like up and down when you start looking at it.

It's really ridiculous.

And it's, again,

like I'm trying not to be condescending here, but it's so fucking obvious.

It's so fucking obvious.

I wish that you would fucking see it.

The party is also anarcho-capitalist.

So it's going to sound like, you know, what is anarch?

The thing about this is like people, and again, this goes to education and people don't understand

terms and, you know, what does that mean? You know, and it also didn't, you just say that there

were these tight controls of corporations.

We had, in some sense, the companies and the country

are kind of merged.

Those are, are things.

But also, like the anarcho-capitalism is that the

capitalists don't want to have regulation.

You know, they don't want to have to deal.

They might,

they might be embedded in the country sort of nationalistically.

And the country is like embedded

in those companies.

But at the same time, in, in, in archo-capitalism, they don't have like

little annoying things like environmental regulations.

They don't want to have to deal with that

safety regulations.

Don't want to have to deal with things like food safety.

Things that cost money and take time.

And, you know, it's annoying to actually have to control

the quality of ingredients that we put in stuff and make sure they're not poisoning people.

So

let's just not worry about that.

You know, let's just not have any consequences for people who just

want to sell the cheapest possible food for the most money.

And who cares if they poison people,

who cares if they kill people in the process.

So that is essentially what they are.

And, you know,

they're, again, like unambiguously, um, white nationalists, which means, um, it means kind of what

it says.

It says they're seeking to develop and maintain, and this is that my language, but you know,

like in airports, racial purity, um, and maintain a white majoritarian control of the country.

Like, this is stuff.

They literally openly say, um, and it also, you know, I guess, I don't

want to keep rambling on about this forever.

But, um, these are, these are not just like names.

I'm not just like throwing insults of people.

I'm not just like saying, oh, you're a fascist.

And that doesn't mean anything.

No, I'm saying Trump is a fascist.

And by the definition of a fascist,

he checks every box.

He checks every single box.

And no uncertain terms.

Like, absolutely.

It's not even, it's not ambiguous.

It's not like there's a question about it.

It's not the

baitable.

And the fact that people react so strongly is extremely frustrating for me, because,

you know, you go like, oh, you can't use that language.

No, it is language.

It is the correct

language to use here.

And, you know, the fact that I even have to argue this or to talk about

is extraordinarily frustrating.

And it is one of these things where like, you know, like, people

throw around these terms.

Um, but, you know, like, the guy that came up with Godwin's law,

Godwin, he said, you know, like, everybody gets compared to Hitler or any, any sufficiently long

conversation on the internet and somebody, like, throws around this idea.

And then he also said,

the Trump is also, you know, comparing him to Hitler is not that ridiculous.

And, I mean,

part of it, like, the dude had, um, by his bedside, a book of quotes from this guy, from Hitler.

Like, that's, that's who he is.

It's not like, I'm just like randomly pulling out the Hitler comparison

to despair.

I'm not just making shit up.

I'm not, you know, like, you can look up that definition.

You can look it up from another source.

And you make the list.

And, you know, you can go through

there a bunch of people who have, like, checklists about what fascism is.

And, um, or eugenics,

or any of these things.

And you go through that list.

And it's pretty objective.

It's pretty clear.

So I, I wish the, um, but I do wish people would not throw around these terms.

I wish people

would understand the terms.

And I wish people would consider that if you're throwing them around

what they mean.

But I also want you to understand, um, calling him a fascist is not just me

pointing fingers in name calling.

Um, calling him a white nationalist is not just me, like,

disparaging him and insulting him and making shit up.

Calling him a crystal fascist, calling him

an anarcho-capitalist.

You know, these are, these are descriptive terms.

They're not just insults.

And, and I, I'm just, I don't know, I just am hoping I am attired.

I'm really tired of having to

deal with the situation where, like, just basic terms, basic concepts are treated as though they're

not, like, clear.

You know, it's like, I feel like I'm arguing that the sky is blue with a bunch

of people.

And I was like, why the fuck? Why do I always have to spend so much time explaining that

the sky is blue? You know, and I don't mean in the sense that, you know, like, well, actually,

and you get into the details.

You know, I mean, just like, at a first order approximation,

the sky is blue.

Like, it's, it's not a question.

It's not like, well, is the sky really,

you know, the sky is blue? And can we just fucking accept that and move on? That's, that's, that's,

that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's just like, please, like, I, I, I, I'm tired.

I'm really

tired of that.

I'm tired of bad face, too.

This is, I don't mean to keep harping on Charlie Kirk

because, again, I don't think this guy is interesting.

I know he's not decent or was.

And not a good guy.

He, but the damage that he and people like him have done to, like,

discourse and the ability to talk to people, the amount of harm that has been done just through

the fake, the bait, me, bro, bullshit where people, you know, sit there and they make these bad

faith arguments, they throw around shit that they don't mean, they manipulate stuff,

in his case he would like turn down the mic of the person so that they couldn't counter his stuff.

And, and also, like, you have this situation where, um, that this will be the last thing I

talk about on this one.

But, you know, like, you have the person who's getting heated,

and you have the person who's very calm.

And if the person who's very calm is sitting there

calmly saying inflammatory shit, it's, it's quite reasonable for somebody else to get heated.

If somebody's saying a bunch of racist shit and sexist shit and nativist shit and all of this

kind of stuff, um, some people who are direct targets of those things might be a little emotional about

it might be reasonably emotional about it, um, they might be bothered by, they might raise their voice a

and then people look at that and it's, it's such a fucked up thing about our culture that

that idea, that you have to be dispassionate and somehow being dispassionate makes you rational.

Yeah, it's, it's a very twisted kind of sick, um, gross thing.

It really is.

If it, which is not the say that like being emotional is always the right thing,

but we're human beings and emotions are a big part of our brain.

They're a big part of, um,

how we evolved to be, how we evolved to work together and interact with society and experience things.

And this idea that somehow you're going to just be disconnected from them and that, in addition to that,

being disconnected from them is a marker of being, uh, more rational and a better, you know,

like, just more objective, uh, descriptor or describe a reality versus the person who is, you know,

under threat and, yeah, it's like, if you have a gun, you're pointing it to somebody's head,

and you're very calm and you sound great, and then the other person sounds a little nervous, um,

you know, the nervousness there is not something that is a ding against the person.

It is

a natural reaction.

And sometimes that gun is verbal and that gun is like saying, oh,

well, people like you are, you know, you're not valid as human beings, um, you know, just like

throwing out stuff that would be essentially evoking and encouraging violence against groups,

or, like, removing rights from groups.

People tend to get emotional about that kind of stuff,

and they should get emotional about that kind of stuff.

And when they do get emotional about that

kind of stuff, um, that doesn't make them, um, irrational, that doesn't make them unreasonable.

And, and again, like, this is, um, going back to this concept of the, again, air quotes,

angry black woman, um, there's, there's nobody who has more reason to be frustrated and angry,

like if you take a random person in society, um, that is a demographic that has

probably more annoyances continuously.

And also, like, one of the best educated and most competent,

and, you know, whatever you want to go down, uh, the people who have the least reason to be

shot upon and get the most shot upon, um, other than, I think the only people that, like, if you

want to go into groups that are oppressed, um, I think the only one you could get that's probably

more is just children.

Children are basically treated as the property of their parents,

which is, uh, again, a really disgusting thing.

Uh, but other than, other than children, broadly,

black women have, like, by far the most reason to be pissed off, by far the most reason to be annoyed,

and to be heated.

And they're the ones that are the least allowed to do it.

They're the ones that

have this against straight jacket on that, like, they're not allowed to react.

And if they react,

then they're very emotional and blah, and then meanwhile, you have a bunch of mediocre white dudes

who are allowed to cry and bitch and moan and get upset and, you know, like poop their pants and

yell and all of the stuff.

And it's just, it's, it's so twisted.

It's so fucking twisted.

So anyway, with that, um, I think hopefully that's a, that's a good place to, and, um, hopefully

that was actually worth, then, like, helpful.

And the, the balance that I'm trying to strike there

is basically, I really want, I want you to hear me.

I want you to understand what I'm talking about,

and I want you not to be, like, immediately reactive and put off and shut down by the things I'm

saying.

And, um, because these are things that we need to talk about, these are things that, frankly,

like, all of us need to understand, all of us, if we ever do hope to get to actually get past this

stuff, and I, I'm sorry to say that, like, if you were raised with that stuff, um, you're not getting

past it, it's, it's gonna be in there.

Um, it's like, it's like ableism, but you can work on it,

you can get better at it, and you should, but understand that this is going to be, like, a lifelong

project, and no matter how much time you spend on it, you're still probably going to have a little

bit of stuff to overcome.

Um, but if you work on it, if you really put time and effort into it,

um, maybe your kids, maybe your kids, kids will be in a place where that really is actually in the

rearview mirror.

And that is a place to get to.

That is a place, um, that would be nice to get to.

That's a place that we should work on.

That's a place that we should be aiming for.

Um, and again,

I also don't mean, in saying that, yeah, just because it's going to be a very long project,

doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on it.

It's something that we need to work on,

it's something we need to do everything we can to change, because, you know, like James Baldwin said,

and I don't even remember what year it was, but there's a video of him talking about how, you know,

it's going to take time, and how much time is it going to take? And, you know, my father's time,

I took my time, it's going to take.

And, and you just keep going through this stuff, and it's like,

how the fuck much time is it going to take, you know, how long do we need? There, there are still,

it is 2025, and there are still sundown towns in the United States.

But they're very recently,

I think, is recently, as today or yesterday, Black Man was lynched, which at the same time also,

there are quotes no foul play suspected.

Dude was lynched, and, you know, like, come on, come

the fucker, no foul play, be fucking serious.

And again, 2025, how the fuck long do we need to be dealing with this shit?

Kelly, please, just, and I understand, like, it's uncomfortable with stuff that you don't want to talk about,

it's stuff you don't want to think about.

You want to think, oh, I'm, again, I'm not,

I'm not a racist and all that kind of stuff.

But understand that just by virtue of being raised

in a very heavily racialized and racist society, you've got that stuff in there.

You've got

ableism, baked in, you've got eugenics, baked in, and you have to look at these things and really

examine them and understand that, oh, you know, I mean, I guess this will actually be the last thing

I talked about, but just to tap this off with the ableism.

I started working on

reading myself of this kind of language a while ago, when I say a while, and in years ago.

And the thing that I noticed is, first off, the amount of things where you just use terms like

stupid or low IQ or DOM, things that are associating like negative qualities with all that.

Even, even I've probably today, like talked about sick, talk about, you know, things that

are like that.

It's deeply, deeply embedded in our language and in our thought process.

It's not just the words that you use, but the way that you think about stuff.

And, you know,

you take this first level of stuff and you'll get rid of it, or you work on getting rid of it,

you'll still kind of, it'll leak out from time to time.

But then, as you're working on it,

you start noticing, well, what words are you coming up with to replace those things? And there's a

whole other layer of stuff.

And, you know, I mean, for me, I'm like several layers deep and you

start realizing holy shit, holy, holy fucking shit.

This is just so deeply embedded in our

language and my thought processes that it's really difficult to escape.

And it's really frustrating

as the thing that I'm working on.

And I think it's really important that we all think about that kind

of stuff.

Because in doing that, like we have this notion that, you know, like people who are unhoused

are somehow inferior.

Like there was somebody just openly calling on Fox News, like a couple of weeks ago

or a week ago, for essentially leafly injecting unhoused people.

Like, you know, like people

want to deal with a homeless problem.

Not by helping people not by giving them homes.

But by just

fucking killing them, just you know, like they want to deal with people who are disabled.

But I just

fucking killing them.

That's huge inx, by the way.

That's pure huge inx.

And, you know, like even the

letter riff, the policy that Biden pushed for for COVID, which is now essentially into perpetuity,

going to kill into the hundreds of thousands of museums every year until we do something about it,

which compared to like influenza, which was already bad, that was just killing like 20 to 60,000

people.

And this is killing on the low end, two times.

And on the high end, five or more times,

influenza.

And we just let it happen.

And it's totally totally preventable without even doing that much.

But we just didn't want to do the work.

Biden and this just did get to the, yeah,

last thing that I will actually say that Biden and Trump are both such fucking lazy students

that don't want to do their homework.

Don't want to go through the process of what it actually

takes to do something that they've wasted so much fucking time.

They've got us in this position where,

you know, like problems that could have been easily solved five years ago are just going on and on and

and essentially going to be endless.

And, you know, it's like if you would have just fucking

studied, then you could have passed the test and you'd understand the thing and we could be done.

But instead, you cheated and you don't understand it.

And now this is just internal.

Do the work.

Just do the work.

Please be better.

Be better than these people.

Do the work,

think about it.

And again, like, understand that we're all imperfect and that even when you do the work,

you're going to fuck up and the idea that you're going to be perfect, the idea that you'll

just magically fix something.

That's part of the problem.

Understand that and understand that even

when you fuck up, it doesn't mean that even though you know you're going to fuck up,

doesn't mean you're a horrible person.

But it does mean that you have to work on it.

It's

something that we need to work on.

And the more you work on it, the better you get at it and the

more things will move forward.

And if we get, if we all get out and push, we can actually change

things quite a bit.

Like the world is what we make it.

Make it better.

With that, thanks for listening

as ever.

And,

再见

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smenor/tangents

By Scott Menor, PhD

September 17, 2025

Words Have Meanings

Listen Later

1 hour 38 minutes

Correction: 1997 not 1977

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is tangents.

Well this could be a long one although I

never know.

I have like seven pages worth of notes and sometimes that means

something and sometimes it doesn't.

I've gone for like two hours from half a

page notes and I can't really predict it.

I really genuinely can't but we'll see.

Today is as I'm recording this the 16th of September 2025, 1736, not that

that matters to you.

I'm still in Tokyo for another few days.

It's Tuesday.

I'm

flying out on Saturday and I don't know.

I have to say I can't believe I can't

believe my time.

Well I guess this is just how things go.

You know things seem

like a long time and then they're over and before I came, yeah.

Seems like it was

going to be a long time.

It's spent like two months out of the country and now I'm

coming back and it's just, it's wild.

It's actually more held.

Completely

completely aside before I actually get into the actual thing.

I shaved yesterday

and I hate facial hair.

I'm not a fan of it.

But annoyingly I really think it's

like a fucking suit.

Like it looks good.

It actually, it looks good.

My friend

when she was in town commented on it and said, you know, it actually looks

good.

And it does.

It actually does, but it bothers me.

And you know, it like it

switches and it kind of irritates me.

I look at it in the mirror and I'm like, fuck, it

does.

It does look good.

I wish the suit didn't look good too.

Because I hate wearing a suit.

And yet when you're wearing a suit, you look better.

You feel better.

And I just, yeah,

I feel like a different person with the facial hair.

Not that this is anything at all to

do with what I want to talk about.

So again, since this is going to be potentially long,

I'm going to jump right in.

So today, I'm calling this one words have meaning or maybe

trigger words.

But I feel like I'm just luring my words sometimes.

But words have meanings

or trigger words.

And this one is basically a friend a couple days ago mentioned that he's

put off by Erquoats insults.

And these insults were things like people calling people

crystal fascists or white nationalists, white supremacists, racist, this kind of stuff.

And

his comment was actually also, it was a little shaded, which was basically he's put off by it,

but he understands that if I'm using these terms, I'm not the kind of person that just throws

around insults.

And so, you know, it gives him a little pause and gives him a little time to sort

of think more about it.

And consider what is actually like the underlying thing there.

And so, I want to talk a little bit about these and in practice, I think there are several

problems.

And one of these problems is that there are people who genuinely just throw around words

as insults without any thought or consideration, no real meaning behind them.

People just throw

shit out.

And it's very annoying because when people do this, it dilutes the meaning of the words,

and it's confusing to people and it basically, I think it's just moneying the waters.

I wish

people wouldn't do that.

And then similarly, and closely related, a lot of people don't know

the meaning of these terms, so they just kind of throw shit out.

Sometimes also deliberately throw

out incorrect words.

Not that they're necessarily trying to obfuscate the meaning of the words,

but between those two things, it might again, muddies the waters.

And like a common one, right versus

left.

If you look at the history of these terms, and it's very complicated, but the history of

these terms, you go back to the French Revolution.

And in the national assembly, people would sit

in the right wing.

In the left wing, based on sort of whether they were in support of the

more traditional authoritarian essentially the king of the right wing.

And in the left wing,

would be more revolutionary and collective rights, liberty, liberty, equality, fraternity, you know,

societal justice and radical reforms.

And that's where that originally came from.

It's of course

evolved since then and the language is not a static thing.

There's a lot to it beyond that.

It gets more complicated.

And again, also, this is only one dimension, and there are many, many

dimensions that can be there.

But I think most importantly, people really don't have any

political awareness.

And when I say this, I mean, most people that you talk to, especially in the

United States, have had very little education, probably haven't taken a single polycycores,

political science course, probably, you know, maybe they've taken a little bit of government,

and they understand vaguely checks and balances and how the U.S.

government is supposed to work.

But in terms of political theory, most people have no idea what socialism is, or communism,

or fascism, and so on.

And, you know, what is conservatism? It's an interesting problem.

And I'm going to get into some of those in a minute.

But like socialism is just like the social

owning of the means of production.

So like, if there's a factory, and the factory has a bunch of

machines, one way to organize that is to have the people working in the factory, own the factory,

collectively, and own the machines.

And then they get to decide what to do, and they get to put their

labor in, and then get the profit and decide what to do with the profit.

Whether that's reinvesting,

or distributing among themselves, or whatnot.

Another system of economics that you can use is capitalism,

where you have a capitalist, maybe one or more people, who own the means of production.

And they get to decide, you know, okay, I'm going to hire these people,

you're just going to do a job, and then I'm going to take the fruits of your labor and sell that

for whatever I can, and I'll give you whatever I decide is as a reasonable amount for it.

And

I get to make all the decisions.

It's mine.

Yeah, it's not my favorite system.

Let's just say.

But people don't really understand, like they throw around these terms, socialist capitalists,

and have no clue, no concept what they mean.

A lot of people, like one of the that I really get

annoyed with, is a lot of right wingers.

And when I say right wingers, I don't actually even mean

people that are necessarily, like if you, if you took a quiz and you sort of found where you stand,

I don't know that a lot of people who vote as though they're right wingers, actually are right wingers.

A lot of people, I think, just do not evaluate and do not really understand, and they have

thought about what their positions are on certain issues, or what are your values? What do you think

matters? How do you think things should operate? How do you think government should operate? What

system of economics? And the system of economics also, like if you have a very limited view of what

is possible, you're not going to be able to decide, or you're going to decide from that limited

site you're not going to decide from the full sea of possibilities.

So that's all complicated.

So in that, I really think a lot of people who consider themselves to be right wingers,

probably aren't.

They're like culturally raised that way.

A lot of people who consider themselves

to be liberals, and they have, of course, like people throw away around, this is another one of these

terms liberals.

Often, like when I throw it around, I'm talking about neoliberals,

there's a very big difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and both of these are

right wing ideologies.

It's interesting that they get people, if you explain that to people,

because there's been so, I guess it's a combination of things.

One, the overton window in the

US, the sort of range of possibilities that people think are reasonable to discuss or think about,

and the range of where political parties are that are in power.

It's shifted so far to the right

that people have no idea what the actual scale is.

And the window that people see

makes it seem like neoliberals are lefty.

And in fact, they're absolutely, absolutely right of

center by any reasonable, you know, any reasonable metric.

And again, also, like there are many

different dimensions in all of this.

The funny thing is also, of course, if you actually go to the

people that consider themselves to be liberals or get called liberals, and again, liberals being

neolibs, a lot of them really would not align that well with neoliberalism, or though,

you know, there are, like, there are some parts of it that actually don't sound so bad.

Like,

you know, free markets, and free expression of ideas, and, yeah, things like this.

Of course,

it's still a fundamentally capitalistic system.

And, yeah, maybe, like, put some regulation,

but basically free markets, and all those kind of stuff.

But when people really

identify as these things, or identify others as these things, they'll come up with terms like that,

or, again, conservatives, like, I know a bunch of people who consider themselves conservatives,

if you're a conservative, the Democrats are actually a closer conservative party to, which is one

of the reasons why I'm not a Democrat, frankly.

The Republicans are radical,

crystal fascist, that this is the modern Republican party, not just Trump, but the

the leadership, and so on.

Radical, crystal fascist, anarcho-capitalists.

I'll get into what that

means later, but that is what they are.

They are absolutely radical.

They're not interested in

conserving shit.

They're not interested, and other than the, without getting a little bit too

much into this, that's the purity of the white race.

They're racist, horrible, kind of people.

I'm just, like, the juxtaposition between that and destroying the environment and thinking, like,

anything goes, and not having any reference for what has come before, or having any interest,

really, and actually preserving things like forests, or just natural beauty.

Not having any

feel for, like, stewardship.

The party is not conservative, and it annoys me to know in that

people call them conservative, and people call themselves conservative.

So anyway, that's, it's

very irritating.

And I think the broader problem here, and the thing that is really important to

understand, is that in the United States, and unfortunately, this is true to a very large extent,

globally, not everywhere and not everywhere, but, you know, you go to Canada, you go to the UK,

you go to Australia, and really you can go down a very long list of countries, and the,

the parties, the dominant parties absolutely do not represent anyone except for wealthy oligarchs.

And, you know, this is, if you actually look at what the parties stand for, not necessarily

their party, the official platform, but the stuff that they do, the policies that they enact,

the things that they invest in, and the things that they keep money out of.

They don't align,

like if you pull the membership, what the membership will tell you, and what the party is doing,

are almost completely unrelated.

This has been very well studied, but it's between zero correlation,

and almost a negative correlation, which is something, and I don't think people understand this,

and it really, you know, ends up in this situation where, like, neither of these parties

is actually representing anyone.

And one of the things that's kind of eerie when you start

getting out of that, because I, you know, I was raised by people who were, well, my mom especially,

always voted Democrat.

Well, I guess she was like Hillary Clinton, she did the Goldwater thing,

which is not ideal, but then Democrat afterwards, I was registered in Democrat, I voted Democrat

in every election up until 2024.

2020, I almost didn't because, frankly, Biden, before he was

genocide Joe, and you Gen X Joe, he was crime bill Joe, he was Jim Crow Joe, he was the guy who said

he didn't want his children to grow up in a racialized jungle.

That's a basically direct quote,

and important to note, your context does that make his quote better there.

He's somebody who is

actually pro-forced birth, he's against abortion, and, you know, he was for the high demand,

up until 2019, does not align with me.

He said, row went too far as recently as 2024,

and, you know, this is the guy who is leading that party, and the party itself, and,

especially since Bill Clinton, the party has switched to this point where they call this the

neoliberal consensus, but basically Republicans under Reagan got into this sort of neoliberalism.

This is another thing, because, you know, people like to throw around lives and call themselves

lives and call themselves, recall of it, people lives and all this stuff.

The neoliberal consensus

is shared broadly by both parties.

So Republicans and Democrats,

by and large, subscribe to at least some form of neoliberalism.

They don't really,

they don't use the term often, but that's if you actually look at the tenants and the points

and all this, that's where they fall, which is kind of ridiculous.

That was one of the problems

with Reagan, he pushed for the hat and pushed against the idea that government should provide

services for people that don't necessarily have to make money.

You know, lots of things,

it's wild how many things there are that people have done in the past like building roads,

building libraries, public schools, I'm a pilot and the air traffic control network is an

amazing thing that you don't pay for.

It's something that is just like a service that we pay for

collectively and, you know, it's not like a torode.

It's a free thing, free public, or free

free for use.

Obviously, things cost money, but for the end user, it is free.

There are so many

things like this that if you built them today would be very difficult because Reagan first

made it this idea that everything has to be run like a business.

Everything has to make money.

Everything has to have revenue come in and, you know, the amount that's coming in has to

exceed the amount going out and, you know, it's just, it's wild because there are so many things

that we do collectively that are so much better for all of us based on free to the end user.

Using sidewalks, walking on the road, driving, things like this, free to the end user.

And, you know, it's just, it's just wild.

So the Democrats under Bill Clinton absorbed

the same thing and, you know, like Clinton did this, I hate the term welfare reform because

what it really was was basically pushing that neoliberal consensus and getting the Democrats

on board with the same stuff that the Republicans were on board with and going from this idea

that, you know, you would have a social safety net and that you would try to help people to, oh,

you know, will help people and will means test everything and if you happen to be somebody,

you know, we're going to really figure out if you're in need or if you're screwing the system.

And I've talked about this before, but the thing about means testing, the thing about having

requirements for these kinds of things, it adds a lot of overhead.

It doesn't actually save money.

If you actually look at the amount of time and money and effort put into determining like,

does somebody actually need social services versus just having them free for the taking for

anyone that asks for them or wants them, it actually costs more to put in the barriers.

It's like public transit.

It costs more very generally to run the tolls and do all of this kind of

stuff and to enforce that for, say, the New York subways system that it would cost to simply

operate it for free.

And the amount that you take in from tolls, it doesn't actually cover any

significant amount of the costs.

You know, it's significant amount of money, but the amount of

money the operating costs for the for the system are significantly more, especially if it was

well maintained.

So anyway, coming back, we have this really big, kind of awful, false division

in the country.

And again, remember the parties don't represent people.

And if you, if you take away

the labels and I hate the term no labels, party, but because somebody is ruined it.

But many, many

terms have been ruined like this.

But if you take away the labels and you look at policy positions

and just sort of figured out where you stand, which is what I think you should do.

I think I

will get to the next thing.

But I think we should all kind of think about each issue and

sort of decide where you stand and be flexible, too.

Like be open to the possibility that you think,

oh well, we should only give help to people who need it.

And then be open to the idea of,

well, actually, by giving help to anyone that asks for it, if somebody doesn't need it,

you're going to make that money up in terms of tax revenue or, you know, and doesn't need it in

your estimation.

And if somebody does need it, but for some reason, you know, like their situation

change.

And they've suddenly lost their job or had to, you know, something happened and suddenly

they need a little bit of help.

Who is the decide who needs what? That's a massive thing.

Who

is the decide, you know, like if you're getting free college, I know people whose parents made a lot

of money and they were unable to go to college or unable to go to the schools that they wanted

because they couldn't get student aid because their parents wouldn't pay for the schools that

they wanted to go to.

And, you know, this kind of thing, like it gives you a terrible situation

and it gives you this situation as well where you're intrinsically making a class of people,

we're going to be against whatever the social, you know, whether it's the social safety net,

whether it's food or shelter or whatever.

You'll have people who are against it because they're

not in the category of people that are allowed to get it.

And you'll also leave people out, you'll

also unduly delay, you know.

And I mean, if you know anyone who has a disability and they're in

the US and they collect disability, they're not getting very much money at all.

It's a pitence.

And not only is it a pitence, but thanks to the welfare reform and giant air quotes and all of this,

they're not able to have basically any assets at all.

Plenty of people who are disabled

are not able to even get married because if they get married, their partner will throw them out

of disability, you know, they'll have too much money or too much, whatever.

And, you know,

they're living on the edge.

They're not able to keep any savings.

They're not able to work.

It's a funny thing because we have means testing and we have this stuff that is like,

well, this is not the concept that I want to get to here, but there's this concept of a welfare

cliff, which is not just for welfare, but for any kind of social support, if you stop giving it

to people when they hit a threshold, like when they start making a certain amount of money,

there becomes a point where you have to make a lot more money just in order to catch up to where

you would have been before.

If you taper it off, it's a little bit better, but if you just give it

to everybody, then you don't have these kinds of things.

So in doing that, you're giving a false

incentive not to work.

You're actually like, the system is set up through these things that are

supposed to encourage people to work, and there's sold as such to make it so that people cannot

work.

They're actively punished for trying to work.

But anyway, getting back in this false division,

this is something like, I see this much more now because I'm kind of outside of both of these

groups, and it's kind of staggering just how much of a mirror image these things are, especially

and things are complicated.

I'm not saying that all air quotes conservators are watching

fox or all air quotes in the brills are watching MSNBC.

Obviously things are much broader than that,

both of these have viewership in the like single digit millions.

The plenty of people never

watch them, but just to use those as examples, you have people who are watching fox, and you have

people who are watching MSNBC, and both of these channels are completely detached from reality.

They're presenting something that is utterly, utterly incongruous, both with each other

and with the grounded reality.

They're presenting existential threats, and this existential

threat situation, and I will say like, I think Trump is genuinely extraordinarily dangerous.

I don't think that's a, well, it shouldn't be a really controversial statement.

Unfortunately,

I know some people who would think that it is, but he is an extremely dangerous person,

and many of the people in the current Republican leadership are extremely dangerous.

But nonetheless, in both cases, you have people saying you have to vote for so-and-so because

the other guy is an existential threat.

And in one case, maybe it's more true than the other,

but in both cases, it's like you have to vote for Joe Biden, despite the fact that he's a terrible

person, he's a old racist fucking dirt bag.

And I don't think that's, you know, I don't think

that's an ambiguous, or it should not be a controversial statement, but I know plenty of people

who would push back and say, oh, he's not a racist, Scott.

No, he's a fucking racist.

And I mean,

I can get quotes, especially if you can go back to the 70s, but you can get more recent stuff,

it's a fucking racist.

It's really fucking annoying to me, that people just, I don't know.

I don't even want to get into that, but it's, it's annoying.

But you have to vote for Biden,

because Trump is so bad.

And then you have the other ones going, well, you know, you don't align

with Trump on all of these things, but you have to vote for Trump because Biden is so bad.

And it's funny, too, because the ways that they suggest Biden is so bad is they're like,

oh, he's a communist.

And first off, I wish, if the Democrats were the people that the

Republicans insist they are, I'd probably be a Democrat.

If they were actually socialists

and communists, I'd probably align more with them.

But in reality, you know, a lot of the reasons

that Trump sucks and the reasons that Biden sucks are the same reasons.

A lot of them are things

like they're both corporatists.

They're both interested in funneling shit tons of money back into

companies, giving public resources to companies, giving billions to companies, doing a lot of

the same kind of stuff.

You know, I mean, you had Harris at the debate stage arguing with Trump

over who was more like, who was a bigger fracker? Who was a better, we're in a ecological disaster

right now, mass extinction and climate catastrophe that is extremely, like you're starting to see

some stuff, but it's going to get worse.

And it's extraordinarily, like it should be a planetary

emergency.

And instead, you have the two major parties in this country arguing with each other

over, and I don't mean like, she's saying you're a bigger fracker.

I mean, both of them are trying

to claim the moniker of the biggest fracker.

That's who these people are.

And because you have this

thing in the sort of, you know, for one of the better term, like, in a migdala activation that

they're doing, like, you're getting, you're getting people into this panic, anger, it's super

emotional state, flight or flight.

It makes it very difficult for people to actually rationally sit

back and go.

But actually, you know, is, is Harris this bad that you have to vote for somebody

as awful as Trump, is Trump this bad that you have to vote for somebody as awful as Biden or Harris?

I would, yeah, I would lean more toward the latter being true, but I don't think, you know, like

all of the above, I'm fucking horrible.

And the fact that, like, out of 330 million people,

these are the best people you can come up with, it is a condemnation of our system to be down.

Just to be extremely, extremely blunt there.

But anyway, I think the worst thing about it is

it makes discussion impossible.

And this is, this is again, like, one of these things about these

words.

It's one of the reasons why I almost called this trigger words.

Because if I say certain words,

certain people will immediately shut down.

If I say that Trump is a racist, a lot of people will

just immediately shut down.

Because I don't know, he's not a, he's a fucking racist, like both.

It's kind of funny, because it's also, like, he's an open-over racist.

You know, it's not,

you don't have to go back to the Central Park 5 and the just blatant shit that he did

in terms of housing that was very discriminatory in the 70s and 80s.

Just the current stuff

openly openly racist.

Biden also a racist.

And I would even go so far as to say that Harris,

you know, despite being a black presenting woman, she is an agent of white supremacy.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about what that means.

But it's something that, you know,

like, I'm not saying, like, everybody's a racist and nobody's a racist.

I'm saying more, like,

everybody kind of is, like, she and it Biden both built their careers in a large part on throwing

black men into prison and stripping them of their, of their civil rights.

And part of that is also

if you look at the 13th Amendment, air quotes abolishing slavery with a little asterisk, people

get enslaved when they go into prison, because slavery is still allowed in prison.

And so both of

them built their political careers on enslaving black men.

It's kind of a, they're, I mean,

not just, but that by and large, that was what the end effect of what they did was.

And it's

interesting.

It's kind of interesting that they're all so similar in this regard, especially when

you get people who, like, lose their minds about how different they think these people are.

It's, I always, this is not in my notes, but this is something I always think of that,

I always liken it to pro wrestling.

You know, you have this situation where, you know,

these people playing these characters and you have, sometimes they're espousing strong differences

or they're arguing with each other in public or whatever.

I'd say both hang out the same bars

and the same parties that get paid by the same old look arcs.

They do the same things.

They're all

rich fox, just, you know, they're, they're chummy.

They're putting on a show.

And within the

parties also, they do things where they'll have somebody who is like the rotating villain.

So at

one point, it was Joe Lieberman.

I know more about the Democrats than their Republicans, but,

you know, the Republicans, I'm sure do something very similar.

At one point, it was Joe Lieberman.

At one point, it was hereston cinema and then it's somebody else and, you know,

our mansion or whoever.

It'll be somebody and there's always somebody there to point to,

to say, well, we would do good things if it wasn't for this one asshole or these two assholes.

It's kind of a fucking show.

And when you start seeing it as a show, it gets really obvious that

it's a show.

So anyway, coming back to my notes and what I wanted to talk about.

So one of the

big things that shuts people down, and this is especially to my friend, is when we talk about racism

and white nationalism and white supremacy and white supremacists, it's considered

worse to be called a racist than to actually be one in the US.

And so like, you'll get people

who react immediately and kind of reflectively with I'm not a racist.

People, people, because obviously

like you don't want to be a racist, we know that that's a bad thing.

We used to know that being a

Nazi was a bad thing.

And now, now you get people on the Fox News saying that they're a Nazi,

but they never mind that now.

We're reclaiming the word or some bullshit like that.

But anyway,

people don't understand where they fit into sort of white supremacy and white supremacists

culture.

And how lots of things that we do that don't necessarily seem overtly racist are racist

and they're harmful to a lot of people.

And they're real danger.

Again, it's easy to see the overt

over the top stuff.

But it's the subtle stuff that actually ends up being really difficult.

That doesn't mean that the over the top stuff, you know, like somebody lynching somebody

obviously extremely terrible.

But those are things that you can kind of point to and it's more

obvious that they're terrible.

Whereas the things that a lot of people, I would even argue,

almost everybody does, imply Aaron and pose these little bits of force.

They're not necessarily

huge, but collectively they end up being a lot of pressure and force that pushes people into

a great deal of disparity.

Another one that is really like people get very reactive to is to be told

that they have white privilege.

And I know that the problem is with this.

And I think people sit there

and they're like, oh, but I don't have that because I haven't had a perfect life and, you know,

I haven't faced many challenges in blah, blah, blah.

And I'm sure you, I'm sure that's true.

I'm sure, you know, you've had a lot of difficulties.

I'm sure things are not going as

well as they could for you.

I'm sure, you know, you could be doing a lot better.

But the thing

about white privilege and what that is is simply that the fact that your white is not getting in the

way, it's not one of the problems that you're facing.

Whereas people who are not white,

that is a massive impediment.

And you can argue, like, oh, no, it's not.

The things that we're

in a post, yeah, bullshit.

You can look at the statistics.

It's very clear.

Look at any job and

look at the racial breakdown of who's doing that job.

And then look at the actual decomposition

of the country.

It's very clear that there's some very strong bias there.

It's not subtle.

It's not at all subtle.

And this also doesn't mean that our lives are perfect.

It doesn't mean

that, you know, like, just because you look like me, you're automatically a CEO.

But it does mean

that, you know, the reasons that I'm not in that position are not just based on the color of my

skin.

And the thing also, I mean, here's one that I see a lot of people get very reactive to.

Racism requires systematic power structure and differential.

And again, this is going to be very

triggering.

And, yeah, I'm just resurfacing it.

Don't get shut down and don't get reactive here.

But you cannot be racist in the United States against white people.

You can be prejudiced,

prejudiced, that's fine.

But to actually be racist requires that power structure.

And the power

structure and the systems that exist do not exist for that.

The history is not there for that.

You would have to have a massive revolutionary change in order for that to be something that was even

possible in the U.S.

And again, like, you know, I get the, you could be like, oh, but, but,

but, no, reverse racism, which is like racism against white people, is not a thing.

It's not a thing.

And I understand that you may think it is, but the accusations of that and the idea that that is

a thing is actually just a tool.

And part of this comes to something called Darvo.

Darvo is

deny attack and reverse victim and defender.

And this, this was created by, uh, or not created by,

but I guess, described by, um, I'm going to box her name, but Jennifer freed in, I guess, 1977.

I was, it was kind of on gaslighting, and it's this tactic that abusers will often use,

where they will sort of, um, the, if it is right up there with kind of sewing fud, fud is fear

uncertainty and doubt.

Um, and, and when you do this, you're muddying the waters and you're confusing

things and you're making things seem much more complicated than they are.

Fulls complexity is a massive

thing that people love to use.

It's one of the things that protects is real a lot because right now,

um, you know, they're committing a genocide.

I would say unambiguously, um, at least probably 600,000

Palestinians and Gaza have been killed since, uh, you know, like October, 2023.

And, uh, yeah,

go out.

I don't even want to get into that, but it's not complicated.

If you, it's one of these

things where if you actually look at it, it gets much simpler and the more you look into it, the

simpler it gets.

And when you start looking at it, it's like, oh, well, there's actually one group

and that this, I'm going to get into this a little bit because it's going to come back to,

what I'm talking about, but there's one group who actually has a lot of real, just collective,

systemic power.

And there's a group that does not.

You have one group that has like a super modern

military with nuclear weapons and fighter jets and, um, you know, the iron dome, the ability to, you know,

shoot down, um, incoming missiles and the ability to strike targets, um, in somebody else's space.

There's one group that does not.

They have improvised weapons, they have, you know, very

little technology, very little capacity to inflate harm.

Now, if you look at, like, how many,

how many people die in Israel from bombings versus how many people die in Gaza from bombings.

If you look at pictures of Gaza has been leveled, like, just absolutely decimated.

And,

yeah, it's not hard to find, um, kids and tents blown up and burned alive by bombs and bullets

and weapons that were made often in the United States, uh, versus they have that they're literally,

like, people with stones and, uh, nothing, no power.

They even, if you take out the current,

uh, stuff that's happening.

You have one group, and this is a thing that you could have seen,

but you have one group living under a apartheid, uh, where their, their movements are strictly

controlled, their ability to leave and to come back are strictly controlled.

And then you have

another group that gets to move freely.

You have one group who live under, uh, you know,

like fences and constant threat of violence and who get regularly kidnapped and shot the

mowing the lawn.

If you, if you search for that, that's a cool one.

Uh, that Israel was doing

a long time before the current stuff.

Um, and then you have another group that just is completely

protected and essentially can operate with impunity.

There's no, that the power imbalance is

extremely clear.

And when you start having that and you start using this Darvo, uh, you are

showing this idea that like, well, it's, um, it's actually, therefore, because blah, blah, blah, blah,

and, you know, it's actually the, the reason that you have, uh, disparities in terms of who is

working a certain job, you can blame the victim or you could look at the actually strong, well-established

systemic, you know, power structure and differential there.

Um, you can, uh, and I'm, I'm trying

to tiptoe a little bit here because I understand that some of the people I want to talk to here,

some of the people I would like to hear me are going to hear a lot of this stuff and they're just

going to, like, their eyes are going to roll back and they're not going to be able to take it.

And

I wish that you would, I really wish that you would just listen and just think about this for a second.

And to think maybe maybe some of this stuff that you've been told is a little bit bullshit.

Maybe maybe some of this stuff is actually just the tool of people who are doing the oppression.

And some of it is like, it's an interesting thing about this because it's not like,

I always call this kind of thing a conspiracy without conspirators, which is not to say there aren't

people who are like deliberately pushing things and making them worse.

But a lot of this kind of stuff

you end up with people who have some kind of a general alignment.

It's like an external magnetic

field almost.

And they end up doing things that seem kind of coordinated.

They seem like there's almost

a, uh, a plan working together and people, you know, pulling the strings and all that,

when in reality, it's just a bunch of people making independent choices under some kind of

a system that pushes for certain kinds of choices.

Um, so one of the big examples of Darvo is

with affirmative action.

So affirmative action is basically just to, uh, to try to level the,

that disparity that I'm talking about, um, similarly like there's a DEI diversity equity and inclusion.

You're trying to take things where there are existing biases, where there are existing

disparities and sort of make them a little bit more fair.

And I have, um, I think it's going to

be the art for this episode.

We'll be this old cartoon, um, that's basically showing, um, I guess

sort of a baseball game.

And, uh, it's, it's showing three different people standing, watching the

game.

And there's a fence.

One of the people's short, one is going to medium height and one of

them is tall.

And, uh, on the left hand side, you have equality, which is the thing that, like,

like, equality sounds good.

It doesn't matter.

It sounds like, oh, everything is fair, everything

and, but in reality, because you have that disparity and height, um, in that artificial barrier

in front of people, the one that's already tall, standing on exactly the same crate,

gets to see everything.

And the one that's kind of medium height, they're struggling on it,

but they can kind of see the game.

And then the short person is screwed out of seeing the game.

And then on the other side, you have equity.

And in this case, the tall person gets to see the game.

The medium height person standing on a crate, they can see the game.

And the short person,

also standing on two crates, gets to see the game where they couldn't before.

That is what DEI is trying to achieve.

Now, there's also, uh, people have extended this and

they've added in things like justice and things like get rid of the fucking wall.

And then we

don't have these barriers.

And then you don't need the crates, uh, which would be ideal.

And,

you know, I know, like, I know it's tempting to say, like, oh, we don't, we don't want to have DEI,

we just want to make things, that's the fucking point of having it is to make things fair.

And until you have massive, overhauls of society, um, you need to do something about this.

And if you don't do it, uh, then you end up with the person who can't see the game.

It's, it's a massive, massive problem.

And it's one of these things also, like the, in this picture,

you can kind of see the differences in height and you can see what those things are.

And reality is a lot more complicated, because systematic and, uh, oppression is not something

that, uh, that you can really see.

It's something that you can measure.

You can see statistically

certain groups have, you know, advantages that other groups don't.

And certain groups can advance

further and certain groups are left behind.

But you can't really see it.

You can't really see

what is doing it.

Um, you have to, you have to do some work.

And because of that, it makes it

really difficult for people to understand, especially if you don't face it.

Like, people who,

that, the, the short person standing on the one crate that can't see, they fucking know,

they have zero doubt, like they, that's obvious to them.

The medium height person is kind of like,

kind of conceivate, not great.

Um, they sort of know, they, they're pretty, yeah, it's there.

The tall person is like, well, what's the problem? Yeah.

You have to, you have to do work.

If

you're that tall person, you actually see, um, what is going on.

And this is, this is just so

baked in to everything.

And it's such a thing that, um, yeah, and I'm not, I'm not trying to say,

like, we're all racist.

But white supremacy is built so much into the American culture that

and using in culture.

I would rather call it that because American, the Americas or North

and South America, I'm talking specifically about, uh, the United States, so museums.

But it's

so baked in to that culture that you don't know it.

And you don't realize, and you don't understand

to also, especially if you're not the kind of person that's actually going out of your way to figure

this out.

Uh, it's very easy not to know that if you're, yeah, if you're white, you can be

mediocre.

You can be Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

And it's one of the things actually about these two,

both of these are the most, um, archetypical, I say, I would say examples of museums, of people

from the United States.

They are mediocre, racist, old white dudes who have their entire lives

fucked up continuously and never faced a consequence.

Both of them, uh, Trump has lost a billion

dollars of other people's money.

Biden has done so much harm and so many terrible things.

He lost

this Supreme Court.

He, you know, like, I mean, he got us here.

And yet, and yet they're both,

well, current and former presidents of the United States.

And then I, I will say, also,

like, I'm not a huge fan of Obama's anymore.

But one thing you can say about Obama is he was exceptional.

He was, you know, his whole life had to be exceptional, had to be so much better than either of

these two assholes.

And even then, you know, gets the chance, the chance to bullshit treatment.

Even then gets, uh, called BO by people who definitely are not racist by the way.

But anyway,

this is, this is the thing, when you're black, it's not to say that you can't get ahead, but in order

to get to the same place, in order to get to the same level, as again, a mediocre white dude,

you have to be exceptional.

You have to be either through luck or probably through practice and

probably through both.

And this gets into this, again, myth of air quotes reverse racism

and reverse discrimination.

And it did, you get a little anecdote here, but years ago,

I was talking with somebody, and this person is white dude kind of, kind of relevant here.

But he wanted to be a firefighter.

And he went in and did his interview, prepared all that kind of stuff.

And when he was there, he was explaining that the guy who interviewed him also a white dude

was explaining to him that, you know, it's, well, you don't have any chance here because they're

going to give it to, and this is his words not mine, but they're going to give it to an air quotes

unqualified black woman.

And the thing is, A that's not true, B, I'm trying that the, I feel like

I'm describing stuff that is like simultaneously so obvious, and yet the people that I'm describing

it to, or hopefully, I would like to think some of the people that are, I'm describing it to,

do not know this, and then I'm actually informing.

But, you know, D.I.

and affirmative action,

it doesn't mean you're giving things to unqualified people.

It means you're doing what you can

to sort of level the playing field, to sort of let people actually have some degree of fairness and

equity.

And it also for a job like being a firefighter, where there are way more applicants than

there are people who are getting it, most people who apply to that job are not going to get it.

And this guy, this racist guy that was doing the interviewing, is throwing this thing out about

D.I.

and he's getting to tell so many other mediocre white dudes who probably,

probably weren't necessarily the best candidates.

It's not because they weren't the best candidates,

it's not because there were so many other candidates for so few slots.

It's because somebody who's

unqualified is going to get the job based on their skin color.

And the reality is, if you look at

the statistics, something like 75% of firefighters are white.

But if you look at the population,

only like 60% of the population is white.

It's kind of interesting.

And then you kind of go through

and you figure out, well, how many are black? Well, something like 7% are black versus 12% of the

population.

And then you start digging in and you're sort of like, well, why is that? Why?

Why is that? Why do you think that is? It turns out that the people who are doing the hiring

tend to prefer white people.

They have intrinsic biases.

Some of those are not even, you know,

like there's obviously again the overt racism where they're just discriminating and it's open

and it.

But there's a lot of stuff that is very subtle, but you don't even notice that, you know,

like if you looked at exactly the same scenario with exactly the same things happening, exactly

the same dialogue and you're someone who was raised in the US.

And this actually goes a crop like,

you could be black and you could have been raised in the US and you will still see the black

person doing exactly the same things, seeming less competent than the white person doing exactly

the same things.

Or, you know, you'll have a higher standard for the black person than the white

person.

Again, it's not that you are necessarily like overly militantly racist.

It's just that we

live in this society that is so racist, that, you know, it's just embedded in you from birth

and it's very difficult to see.

And also, you think you're being fair.

You think you're being

reasonable.

And if you're one of the people who wins, you have this thing called,

called survivorship bias.

If you're one of the people who wins, you think, oh, it's me.

I'm actually good or things are fine.

And this is one way actually where black people who end up

getting to, you know, positions like Obama end up often being very strong agents of white supremacy,

which is not to say that they're overtly like using the inward kind of racist.

But they're doing

things like sitting there and assuming that other black people that are not getting as far as them

are just doing it to themselves.

And it's, it's a really fucked up thing.

We do this all the time.

It's, you know, survivorship bias.

You look at people who go through a process.

And that process

is basically random.

Maybe has some kind of uneven odds.

And the people who win

feel like they've done something better.

The people who lose, you're like, they kind of suck.

And people looking at them think that people who win are just more qualified than the people who

lose are just less.

When in reality, a lot of it is just sort of genetic lottery kind of stuff.

And when I say that, I mean, you know, how, like, what family did you end up in? What situation

did you end up in? What kind of things worked for you by chance? How many bullets did you dodge?

By chance? And what systemic biases did you either overcome or not have? And that's a thing

that I wish, I really wish people would just see more.

And there's one of those things also where

it's very, you know, again, I like in it to atmosphere because it's so omnipresent.

It's really

easy to forget that it's there.

You know, it's really easy.

And even if you think about it and

you're like, oh, yeah, if I move my hand, it can kind of feel the air.

But then a minute later,

you stop moving and you forget about it.

And it's just like, it's not there again.

You have to

actively work to see it, especially, especially if you're somebody who happens to be successful

in that system.

And especially, especially if you're white because you're, you're just, you know,

it is so transparent there.

And you don't feel all the little, all the little things pushing

against you at every step.

And so if you're not actively looking for it, you're not going to see

it.

It's, it's, it's a very big problem.

So anyway, this is, this is one of the ways where

bigots can kind of push the narrative and convince people that affirmative action is actually bad.

When in reality, they're just sort of telling people who we're not going to get the job anyway,

that they're not getting the job for a specific reason and sort of sewing that doubt and sewing

this idea that things are unfair.

And it helps also the, the culture is set up so that

it's generally unfair and fitting to a lot of people.

So, you know, a lot of people are poor

and they feel like, you know, well, I'm, I'm white and I'm poor.

And so there must not be, you know,

whatever.

And in reality, it's just that, you know, you being white is not part of why you're in

the situation you're in.

It's not part of why you face the challenges that you have.

Despite what

the, the bigot who is telling you that it's affirmative action is telling you.

So anyway,

I think it's worth thinking about like, how did we get here? And in thinking about how we get here,

the first thing you have to understand is sort of like the foundation level understanding.

And

I do want to say, there'll be dragons here.

Like, I am, this is not my domain of expertise.

There

are people who have spent like full PhDs studying this.

I'm just kind of like a amateur.

So I'm

giving you my understanding and my, you know, sort of, I'm giving you what I can, but understand

a little asterisk on this.

Some of the things that might say declaratively may have some

fuzz to them, but the broad strokes, this is pretty, I think it's pretty accurate.

So race is a made up concept.

It is, it is purely fiction.

It was made up and especially like

whiteness was made up in the, or the 17th century.

And there's no genetic basis for it.

There's not even,

if you want to look at like more from metrics.

So like phenotype and get the, the calipers out and

do all of this kind of horrible stuff, do frenology or, or all these ridiculously racist things,

it's not well defined.

It's not, it's just not a thing.

It's a purely fictional concept.

And this actually makes you wonder, like, well, Scott, you're making the whole episode about

something that you're saying doesn't exist and is fictional.

And yes, I am.

And the reason that

I am is because even though it doesn't exist as a real thing, even though it is made up,

it affects people.

It actually matters.

It's like money doesn't exist.

Money is just a fictional

concept.

It's just made up.

But whether you have a high score in your bank account or not,

has massive impacts on your life.

Just like that, whatever your race is, not a real thing,

and yet has massive impacts on your life as long as you're living in the United States.

So

whiteness was kind of invented sort of as a replacement for Christian in, in settlers and

sort of like the 1600s.

And it was done for a variety of reasons.

But one was that people who were

in the genus could convert, whereas you can't really convert to, to whiteness.

Although this is

the thing like expanding whiteness is a whole thing and giving up your actual ethnicity.

It's not that you're Spanish or Irish or German or whatever you're just white.

It's part of the

as part of, and then they kind of expand this end, and they also have proximity to it and so on.

It is a thing that people made to create this artificial hierarchy,

and essentially to divide and conquer people.

It's kind of interesting because when you look at the

way this is set up, it's very similar in a lot of ways to capitalism, which is to say,

you know, you get relatively poor people.

This is going to, this will probably be controversial

to people, but relatively poor people to be landlords, and you're like, most scat, but they're rich.

No, they're not compared to a billionaire.

Though the wealthiest person you know,

unless you happen to know people that have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars,

the wealthiest person you know, they're like a small millionaire, they're poor.

They're actually poor

compared to a billionaire.

They have, they're as close to being completely broke

at, you know, like within the margin of error, and the fact that you don't understand that,

and the fact that they don't understand that is part of how this is set up to, to do things.

You get that person who, again, is poor to suppress and Oprah's and exploit the people under

them in that system, and they get some kind of reward for it for sure, but in the process,

they're passing money and other things up to the next person, and there are several layers of this,

and it goes up to the people who actually have billions of dollars, who don't even have to do

the stuff themselves, like they don't have to do the oppression themselves.

They don't have to be

the villain.

It's really easy for people to understand that landlords are a villain.

You can look at

Chairman Mao, but it's not, in the current system, it's not so much the landlords, which to be

fair, they are directly being villainous, but it's actually the people who own the banks,

the people who own all of the stocks, the people who are benefiting from people doing horrible

things to their tenants, but without having to do the horrible things themselves, it's kind of a really

cool, clever, I say cool, and not in a good way, but it's kind of a clever system when you think about it,

it lets you commit immense amounts of villainery and exploit vast numbers of people without actually

doing it directly yourself, and race is actually even better than capitalism in this sense,

because with that, you don't even have to give somebody something.

You don't have to give somebody

little trinkets.

You don't have to give somebody like a nice house or a couple houses or whatever.

You just give them the idea of whiteness.

You give them the idea that, yeah, you're poor,

but you're still better off than this other guy who may be poor as well.

Probably is basically

in the same boat as you, and in doing that, now you've got this intrinsic conflict between people

who are really basically at the same level.

They're basically at the same level.

They're basically

culturally at the same level, but instead of focusing on the actual minority of people who are

sort of up at the top, exploiting everybody, now they're fighting each other.

This is really

where this comes.

It's like the old saying, like a poor white person is more in common with a poor

black person than with a rich person, and absolutely fucking true.

So you get people who have no

power, who have no money, who have nothing, to exploit other people who have no power, who have no

money, who have nothing, rather than having them collectively go like, hey, wait a second, and then

look upwards.

It's really dangerous, but it's also something that I think, and I hope you can open your

eyes to at some point, and maybe start to see, wait a second, maybe we shouldn't be fighting each other

so much.

Maybe it's those people that we should be looking at.

So again, it's a fake concept,

but just like money, you have to think about it.

You have to talk about it.

You have to

consider it, and until we fix it, it really matters.

It's something that really makes a big difference.

It's something that I'm not going to say.

It's like the biggest thing in any of our lives,

but it's something that really is one of the biggest things that determines your success in life

or your failures.

Again, it doesn't mean that automatically you're going to be successful

if you're a white or you're going to be unsuccessful if you're black, but it does mean that all

things being equal, the odds are really in your favor.

If you're white and really against you,

if you're black.

Anyway, this brings up white supremacy, and it's really easy again.

This is one of the things that I'm trying to make as the theme to this, but it's really easy to

look at sort of like the white supremacist, like a David Duke kind of character.

Somebody who is

almost cartoonish in it, and to say, you're not like that guy.

That's an extreme,

but that's the thing that is an extreme case.

Those people are definitely malignant,

and they do a lot to spread a lot of harm, but they're also not the typical thing.

The thing that

really enforces all of this, the thing that makes it like stick, it's not people like that,

nearly as much as everyone else, all of us, and especially when we're not examining,

especially when we're not thinking about it, especially when we're not considering what we're doing,

and we're not aware.

Like when you're unaware of stuff, you don't realize what you're doing

habitually.

You don't realize the judgments you're making, you don't realize the biases that you have,

and how those biases affect people.

They affect a lot of stuff, and your life, they determine

things like who you're going to be friends with.

They determine things like you're going to

work with, and what kinds of jobs you're going to get, and all kinds of things.

They determine

like, are you going to be a pain in the ass to somebody? Are you going to be nicer to somebody? Are you

going to be more understanding or caring about somebody? Or are you going to just kind of be

more bitter and cold to somebody? It's all a factor.

It's also something that really makes a

big difference, and it's all stuff that, you know, that the real people doing this kind of stuff

are us.

The people who are most responsible for it are us.

They're not like, again, the David

Duke kind of people.

And so this gets into this idea of like, what is an agent of white supremacy?

What is somebody who is actually actively doing this kind of stuff? Because it's very easy to

think, well, obviously, if you're, and I kind of mentioned this before, but there's this idea that

by being black, you can't possibly be.

But the thing is, there are a lot of black people who are

agents of white supremacy.

There are a lot of black people who are sitting there and propagating these

things.

And I don't just mean the people who are sort of like, you know, clownishly pick me kind of

people.

I mean, like, people who think that they're doing a good thing.

People who think that they are

sort of, you know, like, they've overcome stuff.

And they're in this position.

And, you know, it's that

it's that race.

It's that, you know, I was much better.

And so, everyone else who looks like me

is much worse.

And blah, blah, blah.

That's a massive, massive problem.

And it's a massive area

where, you know, you don't necessarily see what you're doing or what is causing the harm.

And you can also get kind of false reassurance from people because you'll get people who look

a certain way.

And they tell you certain things.

And you don't realize that partly they are just

reinforcing the same system that you are participating in and benefiting from.

Or the opposite

of the bandana under your, we are listening.

So it's very much actually also like misogyny.

And that, you know, like, there are lots of women who are actively agents of misogyny,

who are actively making things worse for other women.

You have to, you know, just because you're a

woman does not mean that you're not propagating or perpetuating or, you know, acting on misogynistic

impulses.

And it doesn't mean also that you're not sitting there saying, oh, you know,

sexism doesn't exist anymore in blah, blah, blah.

And you can't do that.

And then when you do it,

you end up actively oppressing people.

Just because they happen to be in your category does not mean

you're not actively oppressing them.

It's, it's, it's part of how this stuff works.

And it's also

part of why it's so insidious and part of why it's so important to really examine and go, go for,

like, you know, I'm, again, I'm not an expert on this stuff.

There are other people who are experts

on it who have written a lot of stuff who have spoken a lot on it, go to them and listen,

hey, don't, I don't mean, like, ask them to do work for you.

But I mean, look, look at their material,

read their stuff, listen to their stuff, and learn from it and actively sort of evaluate

what you're doing in life and where you are and all the things that you are actively doing

to make things worse for other people and to continue to perpetuate the system.

So one, and I think, you know, again, this is just an important thing to the really unpack

in yourself and to understand just like how internalized these things are and how implicit the biases are

and, you know, it's very difficult to see unless you haven't pointed out to you.

Like,

especially, again, if you're in a class that is oppressed, it's pretty easy to see.

If you're

in a class that is benefiting from privilege, it becomes much more difficult to see.

It takes a lot of effort.

This also gets to, you know, and this is something that just drives me to fucking bonkers,

but I'll see people talking about like blue lives and you'll see even like a blue air quotes blue

lives matter.

There aren't no fucking blue lives.

Black lives are an actual thing and black lives matter

is not like a statement that only they matter, no other ones do.

It's basically got to implicit

also in it.

And the reason that you have to say it is because the implicit bias and the systematic

biases basically say that they don't police face very few consequences.

People who lynch

black people face very few consequences and people who rape black women or black men face

far fewer consequences than people who rape white people.

It's just the way things are in the U.S.

and not seeing that, not accepting it is actively perpetuating it.

It's something that you have to

you really have to understand where that stuff is and how that works.

It would just

give like an example.

This is kind of abstract, but people look at me and even if I'm fucking up,

even if I make a mistake, they tend to presume competence.

They tend to assume like, oh Scott

kind of knows what he's saying, knows what he's doing.

And yeah he just he made a hiccup there,

but that's fine.

And then if you imagine in contrast you have a black woman who may have actually

got like a PhD from Harvard and is hyper qualified and is done like a million things that I haven't

done and she makes like the tiniest little mistake.

People see her do that and they focus on the

mistake and they assume incompetence.

They assume that she's not qualified.

They assume that she got

there through something that was not fair.

This is one of these things.

It's like, it even better

one is I can lose, I'm allowed to lose my temper.

I'm allowed to get heated, I'm allowed to get

angry.

I'm allowed to be upset.

But if a black woman gets just like a little bit elevated,

it's like a little bit strong.

It's even briefly uses like a change in tone.

Suddenly she becomes

the air quotes angry black woman.

And this is again like it's not, it's not allowed.

You have

these sort of handcuffs on you.

Straight jacket on you.

And I can you like you don't notice it

if you're not in that position.

The person in that position definitely knows it.

Now you can ask her,

she can she can tell you.

But if you're just watching from afar, you don't see it.

You don't know it

unless somebody points it out to you or unless you really go out of your way to try to see it.

So anyway, I think hopefully that's enough on that.

Again, other sources are better than me.

I will

talk about it again.

I'm sure, but it's something that I think I think we all need to know.

And I'm

hoping my hope is that if you're hearing it from me, maybe you'll be a little bit more open to it

and maybe you'll maybe not react as much.

Maybe you won't be quite so triggered and you'll

start looking into it a little bit more and start thinking a bit more about it.

The people you

need to hear it from to be honest are black people, are black women especially, are people that are

facing this kind of stuff.

And not just another random white dude.

But again, I think sometimes

because of those biases that you have, maybe coming from me, you'll be sort of think about it a

maybe you will react a little bit less and maybe it will open the door for you to look a little

bit further.

That's that's my hope.

That's that's why I'm why I'm like an hour talking about it.

So getting on on other words, like fascism is a system of government marked by centralized authority

under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent government controls,

violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent, massive,

nationalism, and racism, per the American heritage, dictionary.

Obviously there are many other

definitions.

You can go through another dictionary.

This is a pretty good one.

I think it's fine.

I think it's good enough as a first order approximation.

And when I say Trump is a fascist,

I mean, I mean, just that.

And it's frankly, and I understand, like, I feel like I'm talking

to be like a child.

I'm sorry.

I'm saying it this way because I'm not trying to be condescending just

it's so obvious.

And yet it's, I can feel you shutting down and pushing back and just like reacting

to it, rather than actually listening, but Trump is a fascist.

Go through the list of stuff that

I just mentioned.

It's extremely, extremely blatant and obvious.

He's very clearly seeking

and grabbing and acting like a dictator.

He's very clearly a capitalist.

He's strictly controlling

the economy.

He's imposing all kinds of economic controls.

He's taking percentages of companies.

He's doing all of these fucking things.

He's sending beliefs and the military and to violently

suppress the opposition.

He's making this idea that, you know, like, oh, crime is rampant.

And so we

have to send in the military.

Again, crime in the US, US is a more dangerous country than a lot of

countries in the world.

But crime is very low.

Like it is an extremely safe country.

Your perception

is very skewed, especially by media and by people who are sitting there for various reasons,

sometimes deliberate and sometimes just because people don't know any better.

But people are

telling you that it's dangerous, but it's really not.

It's genuinely not.

The odds, if you don't

and I'm not saying that not like shit happens, you can go someplace and just get bad luck.

But in reality, you know, by and large, you can live your entire life and you probably will

without really interacting with violence, unless you somehow invited it in or it's in your family

or it's in your friend group or your neighborhood or whatever.

It's not something that

that is just so prevalent that like you go down the street in the wrong place and then you're

going to get shot.

That's the perception people have.

But the reality is actually things are

much safer than you realize.

So he pushes that idea and then uses that as justification to send

in the police and to send in the military and to violently suppress the opposition.

He's blatantly

nationalistic.

The fact that he even have to say that is motto is literally America first.

Like that's this.

You can't get any more nationalistic than that.

Also, I mean, this is a motto

that came up, I think it originally started in like the 1800s.

It's a motto for the

nativeist movement.

Nativeists, you might do some math on that.

Does not mean indigenous people

if that's not clear.

It was a motto used by the KKK and length of 1930s.

It was very closely

linked with anti-Semitism and with fascism.

And in fact, again with fascism, like Hitler and the

Nazis and Germany were very heavily inspired by.

And this is not me like speculating on this,

like they literally wrote about it and talked about it.

Very heavily inspired by things like Jim Crow,

things like the US committing genocide on the indigenous people here.

Things like the Indian

schools and the cultural genocide and all of these kinds of things.

Eugenics was another thing

that was extremely popular in the US.

A lot of, it's easy to focus on Trump and the Republicans,

but this country is a very fascistic country.

It's a country that I always, I'm nervous about

you in saying this because a lot of people will again react to it, but try not to react to this

and try to consider it because it's actually true.

The US is kind of what would have happened

if he would have won.

Because there was a genocide on a scale of again hundreds and millions of

people killed.

Like we don't know the exact numbers because there were no censuses and

but order of magnitude 100 million people killed to the land with.

It wasn't just like land that

was sitting there that people could take.

It was a massive, now in some of it was disease,

so it was not intentional, but a lot of it was.

A lot of it was very deliberate.

A lot of it was

stuff that was like deliberately either, if not actually actively killing people, which again,

a lot of it was that, but also destroying culture, the cultural genocide, like taking kids,

forcing them to speak English, forcing them not to speak their indigenous languages.

forcing them to dress like the settlers, forcing them to adopt the settler religions,

and isolating them and trying everything they could to destroy their culture and to break

continuity with it.

It's an extremely scary thing when you start realizing that, you start thinking

about like, oh, wait a second.

If you would have been able to destroy a group of people and things

worked out for you, what would Germany be like in the future? Well, there's a lot like the US,

a lot like the US.

And again, like Hitler and people there, we're open about that.

They literally

talked about it.

It's not like me saying it.

So, the thing about this is just, it's not

ambiguous.

The Trump is a fascist.

It's not ambiguous that his party is a crystal fascist party.

His party, and the crystal fascism is just sort of like the intersection of essentially a brand

of Christianity with, and this is kind of important, but theocratic rule, which is funny

and simply because there's this whole idea that people push about the Sharia la, Sharia la.

The people who kept talking about that the most are the Christians who talk about how oppressed

they are, despite being a majority of people in the country.

You know, the US, like it's majority

Christian country, the people who are running the country are almost all Christian, almost all

white males, by the way.

And they talk about how oppressed they are.

It's such a fucking Darvo thing,

like up and down when you start looking at it.

It's really ridiculous.

And it's, again,

like I'm trying not to be condescending here, but it's so fucking obvious.

It's so fucking obvious.

I wish that you would fucking see it.

The party is also anarcho-capitalist.

So it's going to sound like, you know, what is anarch?

The thing about this is like people, and again, this goes to education and people don't understand

terms and, you know, what does that mean? You know, and it also didn't, you just say that there

were these tight controls of corporations.

We had, in some sense, the companies and the country

are kind of merged.

Those are, are things.

But also, like the anarcho-capitalism is that the

capitalists don't want to have regulation.

You know, they don't want to have to deal.

They might,

they might be embedded in the country sort of nationalistically.

And the country is like embedded

in those companies.

But at the same time, in, in, in archo-capitalism, they don't have like

little annoying things like environmental regulations.

They don't want to have to deal with that

safety regulations.

Don't want to have to deal with things like food safety.

Things that cost money and take time.

And, you know, it's annoying to actually have to control

the quality of ingredients that we put in stuff and make sure they're not poisoning people.

So

let's just not worry about that.

You know, let's just not have any consequences for people who just

want to sell the cheapest possible food for the most money.

And who cares if they poison people,

who cares if they kill people in the process.

So that is essentially what they are.

And, you know,

they're, again, like unambiguously, um, white nationalists, which means, um, it means kind of what

it says.

It says they're seeking to develop and maintain, and this is that my language, but you know,

like in airports, racial purity, um, and maintain a white majoritarian control of the country.

Like, this is stuff.

They literally openly say, um, and it also, you know, I guess, I don't

want to keep rambling on about this forever.

But, um, these are, these are not just like names.

I'm not just like throwing insults of people.

I'm not just like saying, oh, you're a fascist.

And that doesn't mean anything.

No, I'm saying Trump is a fascist.

And by the definition of a fascist,

he checks every box.

He checks every single box.

And no uncertain terms.

Like, absolutely.

It's not even, it's not ambiguous.

It's not like there's a question about it.

It's not the

baitable.

And the fact that people react so strongly is extremely frustrating for me, because,

you know, you go like, oh, you can't use that language.

No, it is language.

It is the correct

language to use here.

And, you know, the fact that I even have to argue this or to talk about

is extraordinarily frustrating.

And it is one of these things where like, you know, like, people

throw around these terms.

Um, but, you know, like, the guy that came up with Godwin's law,

Godwin, he said, you know, like, everybody gets compared to Hitler or any, any sufficiently long

conversation on the internet and somebody, like, throws around this idea.

And then he also said,

the Trump is also, you know, comparing him to Hitler is not that ridiculous.

And, I mean,

part of it, like, the dude had, um, by his bedside, a book of quotes from this guy, from Hitler.

Like, that's, that's who he is.

It's not like, I'm just like randomly pulling out the Hitler comparison

to despair.

I'm not just making shit up.

I'm not, you know, like, you can look up that definition.

You can look it up from another source.

And you make the list.

And, you know, you can go through

there a bunch of people who have, like, checklists about what fascism is.

And, um, or eugenics,

or any of these things.

And you go through that list.

And it's pretty objective.

It's pretty clear.

So I, I wish the, um, but I do wish people would not throw around these terms.

I wish people

would understand the terms.

And I wish people would consider that if you're throwing them around

what they mean.

But I also want you to understand, um, calling him a fascist is not just me

pointing fingers in name calling.

Um, calling him a white nationalist is not just me, like,

disparaging him and insulting him and making shit up.

Calling him a crystal fascist, calling him

an anarcho-capitalist.

You know, these are, these are descriptive terms.

They're not just insults.

And, and I, I'm just, I don't know, I just am hoping I am attired.

I'm really tired of having to

deal with the situation where, like, just basic terms, basic concepts are treated as though they're

not, like, clear.

You know, it's like, I feel like I'm arguing that the sky is blue with a bunch

of people.

And I was like, why the fuck? Why do I always have to spend so much time explaining that

the sky is blue? You know, and I don't mean in the sense that, you know, like, well, actually,

and you get into the details.

You know, I mean, just like, at a first order approximation,

the sky is blue.

Like, it's, it's not a question.

It's not like, well, is the sky really,

you know, the sky is blue? And can we just fucking accept that and move on? That's, that's, that's,

that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's just like, please, like, I, I, I, I'm tired.

I'm really

tired of that.

I'm tired of bad face, too.

This is, I don't mean to keep harping on Charlie Kirk

because, again, I don't think this guy is interesting.

I know he's not decent or was.

And not a good guy.

He, but the damage that he and people like him have done to, like,

discourse and the ability to talk to people, the amount of harm that has been done just through

the fake, the bait, me, bro, bullshit where people, you know, sit there and they make these bad

faith arguments, they throw around shit that they don't mean, they manipulate stuff,

in his case he would like turn down the mic of the person so that they couldn't counter his stuff.

And, and also, like, you have this situation where, um, that this will be the last thing I

talk about on this one.

But, you know, like, you have the person who's getting heated,

and you have the person who's very calm.

And if the person who's very calm is sitting there

calmly saying inflammatory shit, it's, it's quite reasonable for somebody else to get heated.

If somebody's saying a bunch of racist shit and sexist shit and nativist shit and all of this

kind of stuff, um, some people who are direct targets of those things might be a little emotional about

it might be reasonably emotional about it, um, they might be bothered by, they might raise their voice a

and then people look at that and it's, it's such a fucked up thing about our culture that

that idea, that you have to be dispassionate and somehow being dispassionate makes you rational.

Yeah, it's, it's a very twisted kind of sick, um, gross thing.

It really is.

If it, which is not the say that like being emotional is always the right thing,

but we're human beings and emotions are a big part of our brain.

They're a big part of, um,

how we evolved to be, how we evolved to work together and interact with society and experience things.

And this idea that somehow you're going to just be disconnected from them and that, in addition to that,

being disconnected from them is a marker of being, uh, more rational and a better, you know,

like, just more objective, uh, descriptor or describe a reality versus the person who is, you know,

under threat and, yeah, it's like, if you have a gun, you're pointing it to somebody's head,

and you're very calm and you sound great, and then the other person sounds a little nervous, um,

you know, the nervousness there is not something that is a ding against the person.

It is

a natural reaction.

And sometimes that gun is verbal and that gun is like saying, oh,

well, people like you are, you know, you're not valid as human beings, um, you know, just like

throwing out stuff that would be essentially evoking and encouraging violence against groups,

or, like, removing rights from groups.

People tend to get emotional about that kind of stuff,

and they should get emotional about that kind of stuff.

And when they do get emotional about that

kind of stuff, um, that doesn't make them, um, irrational, that doesn't make them unreasonable.

And, and again, like, this is, um, going back to this concept of the, again, air quotes,

angry black woman, um, there's, there's nobody who has more reason to be frustrated and angry,

like if you take a random person in society, um, that is a demographic that has

probably more annoyances continuously.

And also, like, one of the best educated and most competent,

and, you know, whatever you want to go down, uh, the people who have the least reason to be

shot upon and get the most shot upon, um, other than, I think the only people that, like, if you

want to go into groups that are oppressed, um, I think the only one you could get that's probably

more is just children.

Children are basically treated as the property of their parents,

which is, uh, again, a really disgusting thing.

Uh, but other than, other than children, broadly,

black women have, like, by far the most reason to be pissed off, by far the most reason to be annoyed,

and to be heated.

And they're the ones that are the least allowed to do it.

They're the ones that

have this against straight jacket on that, like, they're not allowed to react.

And if they react,

then they're very emotional and blah, and then meanwhile, you have a bunch of mediocre white dudes

who are allowed to cry and bitch and moan and get upset and, you know, like poop their pants and

yell and all of the stuff.

And it's just, it's, it's so twisted.

It's so fucking twisted.

So anyway, with that, um, I think hopefully that's a, that's a good place to, and, um, hopefully

that was actually worth, then, like, helpful.

And the, the balance that I'm trying to strike there

is basically, I really want, I want you to hear me.

I want you to understand what I'm talking about,

and I want you not to be, like, immediately reactive and put off and shut down by the things I'm

saying.

And, um, because these are things that we need to talk about, these are things that, frankly,

like, all of us need to understand, all of us, if we ever do hope to get to actually get past this

stuff, and I, I'm sorry to say that, like, if you were raised with that stuff, um, you're not getting

past it, it's, it's gonna be in there.

Um, it's like, it's like ableism, but you can work on it,

you can get better at it, and you should, but understand that this is going to be, like, a lifelong

project, and no matter how much time you spend on it, you're still probably going to have a little

bit of stuff to overcome.

Um, but if you work on it, if you really put time and effort into it,

um, maybe your kids, maybe your kids, kids will be in a place where that really is actually in the

rearview mirror.

And that is a place to get to.

That is a place, um, that would be nice to get to.

That's a place that we should work on.

That's a place that we should be aiming for.

Um, and again,

I also don't mean, in saying that, yeah, just because it's going to be a very long project,

doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on it.

It's something that we need to work on,

it's something we need to do everything we can to change, because, you know, like James Baldwin said,

and I don't even remember what year it was, but there's a video of him talking about how, you know,

it's going to take time, and how much time is it going to take? And, you know, my father's time,

I took my time, it's going to take.

And, and you just keep going through this stuff, and it's like,

how the fuck much time is it going to take, you know, how long do we need? There, there are still,

it is 2025, and there are still sundown towns in the United States.

But they're very recently,

I think, is recently, as today or yesterday, Black Man was lynched, which at the same time also,

there are quotes no foul play suspected.

Dude was lynched, and, you know, like, come on, come

the fucker, no foul play, be fucking serious.

And again, 2025, how the fuck long do we need to be dealing with this shit?

Kelly, please, just, and I understand, like, it's uncomfortable with stuff that you don't want to talk about,

it's stuff you don't want to think about.

You want to think, oh, I'm, again, I'm not,

I'm not a racist and all that kind of stuff.

But understand that just by virtue of being raised

in a very heavily racialized and racist society, you've got that stuff in there.

You've got

ableism, baked in, you've got eugenics, baked in, and you have to look at these things and really

examine them and understand that, oh, you know, I mean, I guess this will actually be the last thing

I talked about, but just to tap this off with the ableism.

I started working on

reading myself of this kind of language a while ago, when I say a while, and in years ago.

And the thing that I noticed is, first off, the amount of things where you just use terms like

stupid or low IQ or DOM, things that are associating like negative qualities with all that.

Even, even I've probably today, like talked about sick, talk about, you know, things that

are like that.

It's deeply, deeply embedded in our language and in our thought process.

It's not just the words that you use, but the way that you think about stuff.

And, you know,

you take this first level of stuff and you'll get rid of it, or you work on getting rid of it,

you'll still kind of, it'll leak out from time to time.

But then, as you're working on it,

you start noticing, well, what words are you coming up with to replace those things? And there's a

whole other layer of stuff.

And, you know, I mean, for me, I'm like several layers deep and you

start realizing holy shit, holy, holy fucking shit.

This is just so deeply embedded in our

language and my thought processes that it's really difficult to escape.

And it's really frustrating

as the thing that I'm working on.

And I think it's really important that we all think about that kind

of stuff.

Because in doing that, like we have this notion that, you know, like people who are unhoused

are somehow inferior.

Like there was somebody just openly calling on Fox News, like a couple of weeks ago

or a week ago, for essentially leafly injecting unhoused people.

Like, you know, like people

want to deal with a homeless problem.

Not by helping people not by giving them homes.

But by just

fucking killing them, just you know, like they want to deal with people who are disabled.

But I just

fucking killing them.

That's huge inx, by the way.

That's pure huge inx.

And, you know, like even the

letter riff, the policy that Biden pushed for for COVID, which is now essentially into perpetuity,

going to kill into the hundreds of thousands of museums every year until we do something about it,

which compared to like influenza, which was already bad, that was just killing like 20 to 60,000

people.

And this is killing on the low end, two times.

And on the high end, five or more times,

influenza.

And we just let it happen.

And it's totally totally preventable without even doing that much.

But we just didn't want to do the work.

Biden and this just did get to the, yeah,

last thing that I will actually say that Biden and Trump are both such fucking lazy students

that don't want to do their homework.

Don't want to go through the process of what it actually

takes to do something that they've wasted so much fucking time.

They've got us in this position where,

you know, like problems that could have been easily solved five years ago are just going on and on and

and essentially going to be endless.

And, you know, it's like if you would have just fucking

studied, then you could have passed the test and you'd understand the thing and we could be done.

But instead, you cheated and you don't understand it.

And now this is just internal.

Do the work.

Just do the work.

Please be better.

Be better than these people.

Do the work,

think about it.

And again, like, understand that we're all imperfect and that even when you do the work,

you're going to fuck up and the idea that you're going to be perfect, the idea that you'll

just magically fix something.

That's part of the problem.

Understand that and understand that even

when you fuck up, it doesn't mean that even though you know you're going to fuck up,

doesn't mean you're a horrible person.

But it does mean that you have to work on it.

It's

something that we need to work on.

And the more you work on it, the better you get at it and the

more things will move forward.

And if we get, if we all get out and push, we can actually change

things quite a bit.

Like the world is what we make it.

Make it better.

With that, thanks for listening

as ever.

And,

再见

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