Great interview! I feel so seen in your experience.
Your wake-up call came at the same time as mine, and I’m glad you weren’t canceled and shielded from all of it.
It’s still so bitter in my family that my cousin gave me an ugly scowl at her wedding. My three closest friends of 20 years still refuse to speak to me. One of them even had a child 4 years ago and didn’t tell me. All because I said the protesters shouldn’t resort to violence, pointed out that a member of the Weather Underground was on the BLM board, and argued that White Fragility is racist.
Thank you Emma! I'm glad we can at least feel less crazy in our shared experience of how these bad ideas took over so many people.
All those instances you described are such heartbreaking reminders of how difficult it can be to go against the orthodoxy of the day. The points you would've been considered completely run-of-the-mill less than 20 years ago, yet now can make you a pariah.
That was always the part that really drove me crazy: the implicit denial that these were new ideas that people had adopted, not natural laws everyone has always recognized. That's perhaps one of the more pernicious aspects of groupthink: it creates the illusion that whatever the group believes is completely normal to the point of making questioners the absurd ones. It's still a hard position to be in as the questioner because there's a concerted effort to make you feel like you're the problem!
It's exactly why I started The Black Sheep. Once you see through the pattern, it makes you feel a little less crazy.
Such a great interview with you and Melody Rachel, Salome! I’d never heard of her and wasn’t familiar with her channel before this so thank you for helping shine a light on her and her show! 👏👏👏 I hope it will help boost her audience and increase her popularity! This was such a great conversation that was so enlightening and stimulating. I agreed with vast majority of what you said. I would also disagree with one statement you made which was that you don’t like the police and don’t think policing in this country works very well. I would agree that police reform in this country is needed. Police officers need to wear body cameras, officers should be trained in de-escalation tactics, the police should be demilitarized, qualified immunity should be eliminated, we should have fair police union contracts, implement community policing, adopt civilian review boards, etc. I couldn’t agree more with that. But the vast majority of police officers are good people who do a great job. True, there are enough of them that don’t that this is a serious issue and I recognize that. But most police officers are good public servants just doing their job because they want to help people and their community and make it a better place to live and keep it safe. Also, I would point out some police departments are more progressive than others and have implemented reforms. For instance, the NYPD is an example of a model police department. Now moving on to the rest of the talk. Putting aside that one tidbit I really resonated with the rest of what you said. It was really interesting to hear how you slowly evolved from a radical leftist to a free thinker. During the BLM madness of the Summer of 2020 it really seemed like the country had lost its mind. The folks who were saying looting was redistributive justice like for example ex-San Francisco 49ers QB and faux hero/social justice martyr Colin Kaepernick, were saying stealing, rioting and looting was okay and was just marginalized people expressing their frustration and anger at how the rich held them under their boot. Looting from a mom and pop store isn’t a form of justice. Even if it was a big corporation like Walmart or Target it’s still not okay. Destroying property, stealing and burning cities does nothing to advance the cause you’re fighting for. They always whip out that famous quote by Dr. King of rioting being the language of the unheard but they leave out the line above it where he says rioting is inherently self-destructive. Identity politics and woke hierarchies to be sure are ridiculous and are just basically reproducing the systems of oppression used against minority groups in the past just now in reverse. It’s amazing how woke identitarians fail to see how their ideology is just the other side of the coin to white supremacy. BLM, Antifa and Redneck Revolt would actually have a lot in common with the KKK, Neo-Nazis and the League of the South. Treating people as groups has never worked out well in history. You should never treat an individual from a group as a representative of it. You explain this well with the example of lynching in the Jim Crow South. Nor should one ever hold a group of people today responsible for the sins of their ancestors. If we’re going to play that game, than all Germans are guilty for the Holocaust, all Turks are guilty for the Armenian Genocide, all Mongolians are guilty for the mass executions, rape, pillaging, and conquest of Genghis Khan, all Africans are guilty for the sale of members of rival tribes to the Europeans and the Arabs, all Iraqis are guilty for the gassing of the Iranians by Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. I could go on and on. As to the aforementioned hierarchies how about instead replacing one with another, we eliminate them altogether? How about instead of white above black or black above white, black and white sitting on an equal playing field? Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a brilliant man and it is his blueprint we must follow to create the beloved community he always envisioned and build a more perfect union. Identity politics and race essentialism are totally incoherent, make no sense and are complete nonsense. Not to mention divisive and take us backwards as a society. You’re right people hear words like diversity, equity or inclusion and think what’s wrong with that? They stupidly don’t bother to think it through or examine what it’s practitioners mean by that precisely. A really moronic thing I’ve often heard people say is “being woke just means being a decent human being.” That tells me right away they don’t really understand what wokeness means and haven’t thought about this concept a day in their lives. Being woke means you adhere to a very rigid worldview where you see everything through the prism of identity. Someone is a skin color, gender, sexuality, etc. not a human being. You’re also right that not talking to anyone or not platforming someone is childish and immature and is not a way to covert anyone over to your side or build bridges which you need to do to change the world and get big things done. The modern social justice movement needs to dispatch with the righteous displays of indignation and do inclusive coalition building. Taking away free speech indeed has not worked out well. Just look at the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918. Just look at the 2001 PATRIOT Act or the torture program at Guantanamo Bay. Just look at the Reign of Terror during the unmitigated disaster that was the French Revolution. Just to name a few examples. Lastly, I’m glad you brought up asking people questions and just listening to understand. This is the way to go when talking to people with different viewpoints. Not to debate them or try to convert them but to interview them. I think in our two exchanges on Zionism and foreign policy respectively this is what we should of done with one another. But like you said, it can be hard to do. This discussion also helped me realize another important point, there is a difference between heated disagreement and two people genuinely being angry at each other. Lastly, to be sure identity politics and the ideas Robin DiAngelo advocated have been around a long time and have come back in different forms. That is why it’s important we know how to combat them.
Thank you Noah! Glad you enjoyed the interview. She was a great interviewer! The criticism's you shared of policing in America are largely also my criticisms. I also agree that most officers aren't bad people. People tend to fall to the standards of whatever system/community they're in, so that's often the problem when officers are corrupt or unethical.
And thanks for elaborating on these other important points!
Great interview! I feel so seen in your experience.
Your wake-up call came at the same time as mine, and I’m glad you weren’t canceled and shielded from all of it.
It’s still so bitter in my family that my cousin gave me an ugly scowl at her wedding. My three closest friends of 20 years still refuse to speak to me. One of them even had a child 4 years ago and didn’t tell me. All because I said the protesters shouldn’t resort to violence, pointed out that a member of the Weather Underground was on the BLM board, and argued that White Fragility is racist.
Some people just can’t handle the truth.
Thank you Emma! I'm glad we can at least feel less crazy in our shared experience of how these bad ideas took over so many people.
All those instances you described are such heartbreaking reminders of how difficult it can be to go against the orthodoxy of the day. The points you would've been considered completely run-of-the-mill less than 20 years ago, yet now can make you a pariah.
That was always the part that really drove me crazy: the implicit denial that these were new ideas that people had adopted, not natural laws everyone has always recognized. That's perhaps one of the more pernicious aspects of groupthink: it creates the illusion that whatever the group believes is completely normal to the point of making questioners the absurd ones. It's still a hard position to be in as the questioner because there's a concerted effort to make you feel like you're the problem!
It's exactly why I started The Black Sheep. Once you see through the pattern, it makes you feel a little less crazy.
Such a great interview with you and Melody Rachel, Salome! I’d never heard of her and wasn’t familiar with her channel before this so thank you for helping shine a light on her and her show! 👏👏👏 I hope it will help boost her audience and increase her popularity! This was such a great conversation that was so enlightening and stimulating. I agreed with vast majority of what you said. I would also disagree with one statement you made which was that you don’t like the police and don’t think policing in this country works very well. I would agree that police reform in this country is needed. Police officers need to wear body cameras, officers should be trained in de-escalation tactics, the police should be demilitarized, qualified immunity should be eliminated, we should have fair police union contracts, implement community policing, adopt civilian review boards, etc. I couldn’t agree more with that. But the vast majority of police officers are good people who do a great job. True, there are enough of them that don’t that this is a serious issue and I recognize that. But most police officers are good public servants just doing their job because they want to help people and their community and make it a better place to live and keep it safe. Also, I would point out some police departments are more progressive than others and have implemented reforms. For instance, the NYPD is an example of a model police department. Now moving on to the rest of the talk. Putting aside that one tidbit I really resonated with the rest of what you said. It was really interesting to hear how you slowly evolved from a radical leftist to a free thinker. During the BLM madness of the Summer of 2020 it really seemed like the country had lost its mind. The folks who were saying looting was redistributive justice like for example ex-San Francisco 49ers QB and faux hero/social justice martyr Colin Kaepernick, were saying stealing, rioting and looting was okay and was just marginalized people expressing their frustration and anger at how the rich held them under their boot. Looting from a mom and pop store isn’t a form of justice. Even if it was a big corporation like Walmart or Target it’s still not okay. Destroying property, stealing and burning cities does nothing to advance the cause you’re fighting for. They always whip out that famous quote by Dr. King of rioting being the language of the unheard but they leave out the line above it where he says rioting is inherently self-destructive. Identity politics and woke hierarchies to be sure are ridiculous and are just basically reproducing the systems of oppression used against minority groups in the past just now in reverse. It’s amazing how woke identitarians fail to see how their ideology is just the other side of the coin to white supremacy. BLM, Antifa and Redneck Revolt would actually have a lot in common with the KKK, Neo-Nazis and the League of the South. Treating people as groups has never worked out well in history. You should never treat an individual from a group as a representative of it. You explain this well with the example of lynching in the Jim Crow South. Nor should one ever hold a group of people today responsible for the sins of their ancestors. If we’re going to play that game, than all Germans are guilty for the Holocaust, all Turks are guilty for the Armenian Genocide, all Mongolians are guilty for the mass executions, rape, pillaging, and conquest of Genghis Khan, all Africans are guilty for the sale of members of rival tribes to the Europeans and the Arabs, all Iraqis are guilty for the gassing of the Iranians by Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. I could go on and on. As to the aforementioned hierarchies how about instead replacing one with another, we eliminate them altogether? How about instead of white above black or black above white, black and white sitting on an equal playing field? Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a brilliant man and it is his blueprint we must follow to create the beloved community he always envisioned and build a more perfect union. Identity politics and race essentialism are totally incoherent, make no sense and are complete nonsense. Not to mention divisive and take us backwards as a society. You’re right people hear words like diversity, equity or inclusion and think what’s wrong with that? They stupidly don’t bother to think it through or examine what it’s practitioners mean by that precisely. A really moronic thing I’ve often heard people say is “being woke just means being a decent human being.” That tells me right away they don’t really understand what wokeness means and haven’t thought about this concept a day in their lives. Being woke means you adhere to a very rigid worldview where you see everything through the prism of identity. Someone is a skin color, gender, sexuality, etc. not a human being. You’re also right that not talking to anyone or not platforming someone is childish and immature and is not a way to covert anyone over to your side or build bridges which you need to do to change the world and get big things done. The modern social justice movement needs to dispatch with the righteous displays of indignation and do inclusive coalition building. Taking away free speech indeed has not worked out well. Just look at the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918. Just look at the 2001 PATRIOT Act or the torture program at Guantanamo Bay. Just look at the Reign of Terror during the unmitigated disaster that was the French Revolution. Just to name a few examples. Lastly, I’m glad you brought up asking people questions and just listening to understand. This is the way to go when talking to people with different viewpoints. Not to debate them or try to convert them but to interview them. I think in our two exchanges on Zionism and foreign policy respectively this is what we should of done with one another. But like you said, it can be hard to do. This discussion also helped me realize another important point, there is a difference between heated disagreement and two people genuinely being angry at each other. Lastly, to be sure identity politics and the ideas Robin DiAngelo advocated have been around a long time and have come back in different forms. That is why it’s important we know how to combat them.
Thank you Noah! Glad you enjoyed the interview. She was a great interviewer! The criticism's you shared of policing in America are largely also my criticisms. I also agree that most officers aren't bad people. People tend to fall to the standards of whatever system/community they're in, so that's often the problem when officers are corrupt or unethical.
And thanks for elaborating on these other important points!