How Woke Language Radicalizes Far Left Activists w/James Lindsay | Joe Rogan

There's this weird language thing happening there with all these like, like he called it desensitizing or sterilizing language. And that's what's happening. So it takes all that meaning away. Right? So nobody knows what it means except for the guy preaching it. So the guy doing the diversity training, I watched the diversity training. Somebody sent me from their job the other day. And this woman's like just droning on. It felt like you're just getting, you know, imagine you're at the job. You're like, you have to do this for work. You don't want to do it. And you're just watching this webinar and this lady's just ramrod-ing like 12 syllable words at you. She's like, okay, so we have to talk about microaggressions. And there are different kinds of microaggressions. There are microasaults. And it's just like, what the hell is this? Microasaults. Microinsaults and then micro. What's a microasalt? A microasalt is when you do it on purpose. Like, but what is a microasalt? So a microasalt would be, you know, making a small but, you know, racially salient comment in the presence of a person of that race. Oh, so it's not even an assault assault? Not necessarily racist. No, it's not an assault. No, these people, violence is all words and discursive. So a microasalt can just be an insult? And they're all insults. Micro, everything has to just be like words or standing in the wrong place. Oh boy. Jamie just pulled it up here. A microasalt is an explicit racial derogations, characters. What is that? Look at that expression. A microasalt is an explicit racial derogations. So you've put somebody down on purpose. I know, but that's a weird way of describing it. N explicit racial derogations, plural. Oh yeah. Who wrote that? N, which is singular. Yeah, that's not right. Yeah. N, which is singular. Derigations, plural. Characterized primarily by verbal or nonverbal attack, meant to hurt the intended victim through name calling, there's your hyphen, avoidant behavior or purposeful discriminatory. .actions. Yeah, the grammar on that's broken all the pieces. It's a mess. And that's kzoo.edu. Reason.kzoo.edu. Nice. I mean, it's like a- They didn't even bother like editing that motherfucker. Look at that. There's so many of these things that are like for education that are like this. And it's like they say stuff like themself. And it's just like, this is supposed to be for education. It's barely literate. What is going on? Well, that's a problem when you're using they and them as well, right? Yeah. You start using they and them pronouns, which are really supposed to, I mean, for the most part, indicate multiple people. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, singular they. You could say, they, you know, so this guy, you could say they thought, or they thought they would get away with it. I mean, you could say it. You could say- Right. But it's hard to use it that way all the time. Right. It's hard to use it intentionally, actually. Yes. It comes up naturally sometimes, and then it's fine, but it's hard to use intentionally. Yeah. If a person wanted to go to the store, they could go. Right. And so there's something like kind of totalitarian about making people do things like that that are difficult, like jumping through these little hoops and then holding them to massive account. Yes. And it's like, I mean, even like the Black Lives Matter thing, like Black Lives Matter as a sentence is obvious, forcing somebody to say an obvious thing. That's a great name because you can't argue with it. You also can't argue with it. Yeah. Yeah, because what are you going to say? Yeah, because of course they matter. And of course it's, I mean, it's so complicated because it's like if somebody asked me, they said, okay, do you support Black Lives Matter? James, do you support Black Lives Matter? And of course they're going to try to catch me on this. And it's like, which one? There's at least five. I support one of them, and I think the other four are nuts. Right? So there's Black Lives Matter. All lowercase letters is a sentence. You can't disagree with it because it's obvious that Black Lives Matter. And you shouldn't be forced to say obvious things, but what is that? That's a call, right? They're saying, hey, look, white people, people of other races, we have a different experience with this society, and it's bad. Yeah. And we need you to hear us. And we want you to care, and we want there to be action taken that we can work on together to figure out. And who couldn't support that movement? I think everybody in the world supports that movement. But then you have the official one, and their website's full of literally neo-Marxist stuff, and they're weird, queer, feminist, something or another. Seriously, it's all on their about page on the Black Lives Matter website. And it's like, that's a lot of baggage, man. I don't know if I'm for that. And then you have the training video comes out with the one saying, yeah, we're trained Marxists. And they are. They're trained activists. You don't actually have to go along with all of that to agree with the sentence. Right. Then you have this thing with white people. There's like a Black Lives Matter movement that's white people that are like washing black people's feet and like calling them and apologizing and like freaking them out. And I mean, this is actually horrible, too. Oh, it's amazing. Could you imagine what it's like being like somebody calls you like all your all your white friends start calling you and they're like, by the way, I've always kind of been racist. Like you had a relationship with that person. And now it's so awkward. My favorite one was the white actors that all got together in that black and white film. No kidding. That was so, oh my gosh. Stupid. And it was ones in there that I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed their work. The problem is these motherfuckers haven't worked in months and they want attention. That's right. They wanted attention and they weren't getting it. So they're like, I know, I know how to really juice this up in my favorite. It's so dumb. It's so dumb. Aaron Paul, he broke my heart. I saw him in there. Yeah. The breaking bad guy. Yeah. He's a mate. I love that dude. And then I was like, bro, I wish I would have talked to you before that. I know. I can tell you how this goes. I can tell you what happens next. This ain't good, man. Because guys like me are going to watch it. That's right. We tell you, we're going to make fun of it a lot. A lot. That's right. It was so funny. So then there's two more. We'll just drop them. Whatever these. So like what happened, I wanted to get back to this. You don't mind when that piece came out and you got the award. Oh, right. And then they found out. Yeah. Like what was it? You said that she was pissed off. I mean, it was just like I got this email from her that was like short, but it was like, I'm really hurt that you were deceptive to me. You know, it was kind of like that. I felt bad actually. Oh. Like I don't, I'm not. Shit. I didn't do it to like be mean to people. Right. You did it to prove a point. Like I actually, you know, the saying, you know, you play the ball, don't play the man. Right. Yes. So I guess I said it backwards. If it's a saying, it's don't play the man, play the ball. This was about ideas for me. Like that project was about the ideas. It was about the scholarship. It wasn't about the people. And I felt like it was really unfortunate that there were people implicated in it. I actually did feel bad for them in almost every case. There were a couple of them that actually right pissed me off with some of the stuff they wrote to me. But so I didn't feel bad about them so much. But that's a human failing. You know, I'm not a perfect person. When they pissed you off because they would they write? Oh, this one woman. We wrote a paper about masculinity and at Hooters. And we said that the only reason guys go there is I mean, besides the obvious one into ogle chicks. But the main reason was that they could order like double meaning in the word order, right? Order their food. They could order pretty young women around that have to do what they say. And you know, they can patriarchally order. It could taking their order is what is a pun. And this one woman wrote like this long review of it. And she was like, this paper, it was remember, it was submitted to a journal called men and masculinities. It was a paper that was supposed to study the masculinity. And she wrote back this paper talks about men instead of women and it victim blames and blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, oh, you can go to hell, you know, basically. I mean, come on. I mean, it was aggravated also because my paper didn't get in because of that. It's like, it's like, why would a paper about men and masculinity have to be about the women? Oh, because feminism. That's why. Of course. And it's like, it's so annoying that it's so that that aggravated me. Most of them, the rest of them were actually like really nice people. So I think your feeling is that there there's really nice people that get bamboozled into really bad ideas. And then when you snuck in these hoax papers that you're essentially speaking their lingo and they don't even know that they have a lingo. That's right. And so I actually think that what we're looking at with this woke movement and, you know, we've kind of compared it to cult. We've kind of compared it to real. I actually think it's evil. And the reason is because exactly what you just said. It plays on people's best nature. It takes good people and twists them to its purpose. And that's horrible. Like the whole game is to try to make you a nicer, more caring person. So it takes your care and turns it into something literally totalitarian. You're not allowed to disagree with it. Anything you say you get branded with these horrible, you know, stigmas. They try to cancel people. And it's like it's literally trying to use people's best, fairest, most just and caring instincts to make them program into this way of thinking. There's also this thing that's going on, particularly with people in their cars when they have marches that they just decide to start smashing people's cars and doing things to people's cars, whether it's because the people don't agree with what they're saying or they choose someone or they don't like the look of that person. But they feel justified in violently attacking them and their car because they are there to do a good thing. That's right. Whenever somebody is going to punish people and think it's the moral thing to do, that's where you've got some danger going on. And the reason they do that, by the way, is because they think everything happening is violence. Like why does Antifa, by the way, that's the fourth Black Lives Matter movement, is these Antifa agitators starting the riots. Why do they feel justified in throwing a brick through a Starbucks? Why do they feel justified in starting or yelling about targets? Why does this keep happening? And the reason this is going to sound absolutely insane, but it's actually true, is that they believe that something like Starbucks is a big corporation. And when it comes into a neighborhood, it starts taking resources, capitalist resources, money from that neighborhood and then dumping it into a corporation. And they see that as a form of violence against the neighborhood. So they're justified in using violence to disrupt that by throwing a brick through the window, even though it's probably some franchise owner who's just trying to make a buck, trying to have a job that runs it. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it is. That's actually what the theoretical justification is with regard to that aspect of the theory. But do these people who are actually doing this know this, that that's why they're doing it? Or, I mean, is this written anywhere? Oh, yeah. The Antifa books are crazy. They talk about the collection of capital, any kind of racist or sexist or whatever language as they want to determine it, being a form of violence. They call these things like epistemic violence in some of the literature. They call it discursive violence in some of the literature. Sometimes they just call it violence. And queer theory, you know, calling somebody saying you're a man or a woman is called a violence of categorization. So there's all these different types of violence. They're sort of marinating in this idea that these things that are happening, the way people talk, micro assault, is of violence. And, I mean, I even saw a thing somebody sent me today from some university, Indiana maybe, where the person saying that, you know, we're tearing down these physical monuments, but maybe we need to think about discursive, so verbal monuments. And then in the middle of this, which is otherwise cracked, but, you know, not violent, he actually says something to the effect of that we really need to be prepared to do violence against this violence. And so they're marinating in these kinds of thoughts. So you get these like, like with Antifa, what are these dudes? These dudes are like hopped up, mostly young men trying to put out, I mean, there's some women in there too, of course. But there's a lot of young men who are like doing their young male rage and they're pissed off at society. And they've read all these books saying how America sucks and how it hurts, you know, all these poor people, it hurts minorities and so on. A lot of people are feeling the sting, frankly, because whatever the Republican policies since Reagan have really kind of like put some squeeze on people. Well, it's really amplified now because of COVID, because of the lockdown. Oh, yeah, exactly. People are out of their minds. They're living on Twitter. They're living on Twitter and also they're broke. Exactly. So they feel justified to loot. They feel justified to smash and rob. And they don't even have to really intellectualize it or really, when they're rationalizing this, they don't have to really make cogent points. They just have to have like some iconic enemy in their head. Right. We really should have saw Target getting set on fire when Target got deemed essential and people started making a big deal about Target's essential. Why is Target essential? Because you need to buy toilet paper, you fuck. Jesus Christ. What's weird is, I mean, it's just weird how quickly it happened. And it clearly exacerbated by the lockdowns. That's right. It's one of the most amazing, like, combination of events that happens in a perfect storm order. Right. And so it's OK. I'm not. Let me start right. And this is already bad, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't actually buy into conspiracies, but we are in a situation because of a lot of political currents for the last 50 years where there's a lot of billionaire philanthropists. Billionaire philanthropist groups, right, that generate a lot of money. They run a lot of think tanks. They run a lot of like policy forums and organizations and 501c3s and so on and so forth to study things and do these things. The rapidity with which the materials like the like Instagram ready tracks that you could read and the little videos, the speed and the educational curricula and the guides for here's a bunch of resources for for how to remake your business. This stuff came out fast. So what I think is actually going on is political operative types wait for I mean, saying is never let a good crisis go to waste, right? So they wait for a precipitating event and then they've been making easy digest materials for a long time and paying people like, you know, hey, come work for our forum. What we really need to do is look at how we can get books for like anti-racist toddler books, you know, anti-racist kids. And so they get people writing these books and they think they're doing it. It's not like some, you know, boardroom nasty stuff. And then these materials are just ready to go out fast. And so this we had, as you said, a perfect storm. Covid is pissing it like Covid is pissing everybody off. The media has everybody pissed off. Trump has everybody pissed off. It's like impossible to watch any of this and not be just pissed off. I have to be careful because I actually start to get frustrated and emotional about it. The amount of being lied to that's just so obvious, you know, through a lot of the news right now at these protests, especially in riots, is just galling. Well, the article that I showed you that shows that the Covid kick up, the uptick in cases had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, but probably had to do with people staying inside. Yeah, it's like it's just gaslighting, man. But that's the craziest gaslighting ever. So why are you making everybody stay inside then? Because that means that the disease is going to get even worse. Right. Like if we're being forced to lock in and shut down and shut and stay home, that's going to make the disease worse, according to your article. They're like, which way does it go? And nobody knows. And then you live in this like, I don't know what's true about Covid at all now. It's like you were allowed to go out in like groups less than 10, but not if you were protesting, then they could be up to a thousand or something. It could be multiple thousands. It's like what in the world is going on? Once you're protesting and as long as it's a good cause, everybody could die. Yeah, exactly. It's because racism is the real virus, is what they actually said. Well, that's a real virus, too. But that covid shit's real. Trust me. It's it's I know. I know multiple people that have it right now.