How Big of a Problem Is Identity Politics on the Left?

Now, do you think that that bad version of identity politics that I mentioned is a big problem on the left or not a big problem? I'm curious. I think it's certainly a problem, but I think it's a vocal minority problem. That's what I think. I think if you just regular people that are on the left that are working jobs and having families and doing their hobbies and they just have left-wing ideas, I don't think the vast majority of them hold those positions. I think those positions are things that people use as revenue. I mean, not as revenue, but it's like they get points from it. They get points from certain types of behavior that they support, certain types of thinking that they support, and it lets you ... You got woke social justice points. Well, then we agree. I asked because I genuinely didn't know. I mean, I've heard you talk about identity politics. Think of the small number. It's a dangerous number, though, in terms of college campuses when you look at like what happened in Evergreen State, Brett Weinstein. It's very disruptive. Yes and no. I mean, I do think that it's disproportionately ... I think it's a small problem, like you're saying. I think a lot of the problem exists in the college campus setting. But I mean, even at Boston College, I had sort of maybe been incorrectly indoctrinated into the idea that this was really a problem everywhere on college campuses, and I had an incident, the details of which wouldn't be appropriate to talk about, but with a student when I taught at Boston College, that because of the circumstances and the identities involved, I was ready for it to go into, this is going to be resolved the wrong way on the basis of the toxic identity politics I'm hearing is existing on college campuses, and it was not. It was the exact opposite. So I think the same way that when you look at Yelp reviews, people who had a bad experience are way more likely to go and write about it. These individual stories get way more attention than the percentage of the problem that they represent. I believe you're probably correct about that, but when you see videos like Nick Christakis getting just shouted down at Yale by a group of students and that they supported the students and that kind of shit, you say, well, it is real and it does exist. It's real. It exists. I think that sensible people on the left like me call it out, but I want to be careful imagine that you had someone from Cato on the show, which is sort of like a traditional conservative or American enterprise Institute. Maybe it's like a better example. And a lot of the conversation was about getting them to talk about or denounce the alt right, for example. Yeah, I'm sure they would do it, but how much should AEI denounce the alt right when that's like a different thing that is a very good example. Yeah, it's a very good analogy. Yeah. I think we oftentimes are responding to this very vocal minority. And those are the people that are most invested in getting these ideas pushed through. And it's also people that, for lack of a better term, they're probably mentally ill. And I only mean mentally ill in terms of like have like legitimate diseases, but in terms of their thought patterns, they're probably obsessive. I mean, I've had friends that were especially friends that were heavily involved in this kind of stuff before. And it was very damaging to their mental health. This type of stuff being politics? Being woke left wing shout out at people, attack people politics. Okay, but I mean- And they realized somewhere on the line. And then one of them, my friend Jamie Kilstein, they turned on him and then devastated his life and he realized along the way like, oh Jesus Christ, what was I doing? Like I was checking my Twitter every five seconds and insulting people left and right and attacking people just to get everybody to say, yeah, go get them. And showing everybody how woke I am and how progressive I am. And it becomes a weird sort of a point system. Like you're trying to score points. You're trying to gain favor with your party. There's a lot of that. I think it's really important though. So there's people on the left and right who get pulled into political wokeness, whether it's I'm now Tea Party in 2010, people that got sucked into Tea Party on the right and Tifa, whatever. These are all groups with different sort of followings. They're not all the same, whatever. I do think that there is a difference between getting extremely passionate about the idea that everybody should have access to just basic healthcare than getting extremely passionate about the idea that we need to go out of our way to shut down every abortion clinic in the country. I think that there's just, there's a difference. And so I don't want to participate in a false equivalency between, well, you got very far left and very far right people and they're the same and you've got center left and center right and they're the same. It's just two sides of the same coin. Like obviously I have a perspective that is based on my politics. I'm glad to debate any of these issues with anybody who wants to on the merits, but I don't want to make the false equivalency. I mean, listen, when you look at anti-defamation league numbers, for example, the vast majority of hate incidents in the United States are coming from the right. We could talk about other ways that the left is active. We could talk about what it means or how things should be categorized, but that's the reality. And so I want to make sure I don't play a false equivalency game. My audience would crush me if I did that, number one, but I think it's just wrong. I think it's wrong to do that. I don't think the facts bear it out. I think you're right there. And I also think that these false equivalency kind of conversations are, they're ridiculous because each individual conversation about each individual issue deserves its own discussion. And to say, what about this or what about that, those what about isms, those are the death of any real rational discussion because they go on forever. They go on forever. There's no, I mean, it's like scroll, this is why scrolling Twitter endlessly is a problem because there's really no end. You could always scroll a little more. To the end. Right. Yeah. I mean, the new tweets are coming fast. What if everyone's ever done that and just scrolled until their phone died? Just charge it, wake up in the morning and just scroll down all day. How long does it take? I think you wouldn't because the new content appears faster. Right, because the algorithm. Yeah. But you would still never run out. No. You would just keep going. No.