SIO250: James Lindsay's "New Discourses" Funded By Far Right Christian Nationalist

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 250, wow, quite a milestone, and, uh, since that's happening, I'm happy to be joined by Aaron Rabinowitz, how you doing, Aaron?

0:00:40 Aaron: I'm great, Thomas. It's been a long time. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever. It is nice to hang out again. What are we talking about this time? Are we talking moral realism again? Is that what we're doing?

0:00:43 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I feel like it's, well, on this show, it's kind of weird, it sort of like a, a married couple that has a kink of, like, we'll pretend we're strangers at a bar, you know, or something, and it's like that, it feels like that because we don't, we haven't,

0:01:03 Aaron: All of our shipping fans just got really excited.

0:01:07 Thomas: That's true, of course. Aaron is over on Embrace the Void and our podcast Philosophers in Space, which, you know, people if they hear the latest episode, maybe they'll be surprised that we're so still deeply entangled, because it got heated. We were arguing, but it's okay. It's part of it's also part of our kink, so it's fine. Pretending we don't know each other in bars, then hitting on each other with, like, rigorous philosophical debates. That's us. And then, like, someone tries to hit on you and we get to start a fight. It's a whole thing, it's, you know what, let's not explain it here, it's too much, um, but, uh, yeah, this is, uh, where do we even begin, Aaron, I don't know where to begin. We wanted to talk about James Lindsay and this whole, you know, new discourses, um, what do you even call it, uh, and there's so much history there because people if they've been listening to this for a, a long time will remember that I had James on as a not shit person, like having

0:01:22 Aaron: It was, it was pretty wild, yeah. Talk, that's right, talk meta-ethics to me.

0:02:06 Aaron: Mm-hmm,

0:02:06 Thomas: Him on as just, like, as a person, like, hi, how, who are you, let's get, you know, back years ago, um, probably oh, probably, like, I don't know, five, six years ago, it could at the, could be sooner, but anyway, or a more recent, and, you know, we had the book Everybody's Wrong About about God. He's, of course, a mathematician.

0:02:13 Aaron: Mm-hmm.

0:02:26 Thomas: We'll get to this, too. There seems to be a common trend in this sort of writing, and I don't know what you would call it, punditry, of kind of posing as a philosopher a lot of times. Peter Boghossian does that. James Lindsay does does that?

0:02:38 Aaron: Mm. James Lindsay would be so angry if he, you heard you say that, he hates philosophers, he really dislikes philosophers, he

0:02:47 Thomas: Yeah. But he likes to be called Dr. James Lindsay and then, you know, kind of assuming it's he's either a sociologist or a philosopher or something. And then it's like, well, no, he's a mathematician, but whatever. It is what it is. And furthermore, I think it's relevant because his entire thing that we've talked about regarding the conceptual penis hoax and all that, that. There's the Eli Bosnick episodes, which you check out. Um, that all comes from this angle of like, they know everything about, uh, the Academy and here's why it's going wrong. But, um, he doesn't have a academic position. I don't know that he ever has. Um. He didn't

0:02:53 Aaron: Does, I don't

0:03:28 Thomas: Back when I talked to him.

0:03:29 Aaron: Believe so, yeah.

0:03:30 Thomas: Yeah. So there's a lot to unpack and I know I can't, I don't even know where to start. I don't know where to end, but also, uh. You kind of came across a certain revelation.

0:03:40 Thomas: I give credit where it's due, but, uh, why don't you talk about what you recently discovered, yeah.

0:03:47 Aaron: And I mean, I first came across James Lindsey myself on your show, uh, on the episode about death, which I really liked, and I thought that he did a good job on it, enough that I actually, my, um, my, uh, mom does death doula stuff, and so I sent her a copy of his book, uh, as a present one time, and then he came back on for the penis hoax, and that did not go well, and I tried to engage with him on Twitter after that, tried to offer to have him on, because ETV just started around that time, have him want to talk about ethics or something like that, and his response was, I think something along the lines of, ethics and meta-ethics are pointless and I would rather die than discuss them, though I believe he now calls himself an expert on social justice, his ethics, so maybe he's

0:03:54 Thomas: Me too Uh-huh.

0:04:30 Thomas: Side

0:04:30 Aaron: Changed his mind on the importance of that subject.

0:04:32 Thomas: Note on, on this, just to give you credit, you are very gracious on Twitter in a way that people, if they're not familiar with you for some reason and are familiar with me on Twitter, they'll note that, like, oh yeah, Thomas was probably like, hey, fuck face, come talk about whatever, whatever. Whereas you're not that. So this wasn't like when you, when you offer to engage with these folks, you do so in a impressively level-headed way that I, for one, definitely respect and used to try to do, but long since gave up patience for doing.

0:05:03 Aaron: I appreciate that, though it is slipping some. I'm, I'm losing my patience on this one.

0:05:05 Thomas: No, but I, I do, you're slipping a little. Well, I, you know, I'd encourage you to try not to lose it. Cause I do. It's something that I I admire, you know, um, from a distance, cause I can't, I'm past it. I can't do it. Um, I've already, the cat's out of bag with me. People just look at my Twitter and realize that I just have lost, after it was, after the Sargon stuff, I just lost any ability to not be like, all right, fuck you, I'm tired of this bullshit, anti-feminism, whatever, whatever racket you're selling. Um, but I just want to throw that in, like, this, this wasn't you coming at him as, you know, in some challenging, insulting way. Like, you're very level-headed with stuff, stuff especially back then too, like, you just wanted to pursue this further and talk to him, and he was, uh, never going to do that apparently, hmm.

0:05:11 Aaron: Okay. Okay.

0:05:44 Aaron: No, And, and let me be clear, I don't think that James Lindsey himself deserves to be treated civilly on Twitter, explicitly because in, in our second exchange ever on Twitter, it's the only other, you know, I think he muted me after this one, was, or he unmuted me just to argue with, with me about this, but, you know, I tried to say, look, I think, James, that your approach to Twitter is not even helping your own message, as many of his friends have apparently also conveyed to him, and his response was, it's Twitter, you're supposed to be terrible to people, so in his view, being terrible to him is part of the way you're exposed to Twitter, so I'm just going to say that, I'm going to put that out there for anyone who wants to to engage with him, however they choose to.

0:06:23 Thomas: And Uh, so sorry, continue on your, uh, your story there, uh.

0:06:30 Aaron: The weird revelation, right? This started with, of all people, Michael Marshall. Marsh messaged me one day and was like, I'm in London. He was doing a talk or something, I think. And after the talk, he like popped over to this conference that he was aware that was going on, the Speaking Truth to Social Justice this conference. This was a conference being run by Sovereign Nations, which, as we will soon find out, is a far-right Christian nationalist organization with a lot of particularly weird interests and a leader who's deeply invested in COVID conspiracy theories.

0:06:48 Thomas: Yes. Uh-huh. Wow.

0:07:08 Aaron: And so this is a far-Right organization that organized this event basically just to have the grievance folks do their thing, right? It was all them and only them. That was the whole conference. As far as I can tell, O'Fallon flew several people over to London, had this big event, um, there were maybe 50 people there total, I think, so I get the sense that it probably wasn't the most profitable of events

0:07:09 Thomas: I Vaguely remember this, uh, just seeing it, that it happened. It was like, oh, oh yeah, of course, of course.

0:07:32 Aaron: Yeah yeah and and Marsh couldn't get in but he linked me to Godless Spellchecker's live tweeting of it since Godless Spellchecker was in attendance um so I I read all of that and it was You know, it was the usual, you know, boilerplate grievance folks stuff, if you're at all familiar with them. It was nothing new or interesting, though it was sort of interestingly catered specifically towards the recognition that maybe they were talking to an audience that, you know, was more, I guess, ideologically diverse is the way that Godless Spellchecker put it. And so there was a lot of, like, you know, we're really happy to talk to anybody on any side of anything as long as they're not woke, right? Right. So, yes,

0:07:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well, and usually often when these people get together and discover they're all the same white dude, it's important to stress that there's ideological diversity because there's no other kind of diversity. That's the only kind, so.

0:08:26 Aaron: According to someone else who was at the event who I asked about this, they said the event was something like, I think it was 80 percent male and 90 percent white, or something like that. So, so this event happens, you know, it's ridiculous. And then it sort of passes away for a while. I'm not thinking about it anymore. And then, like, something happened. I don't know if it was, that was New Discourses came along or something.

But this stuff popped back up on my feed, and I sort of started to get curious about it. And so I started to dig into Sovereign Nations. And boy, are they a fascinating, I don't know, what would you call it? Far-right propaganda machine, I guess. Um, this is, this is a group that appears to have been started by Michael O'Fallon, uh, who is a, uh, Christian businessman. He has a cruise line, I think they're called Sovereign Cruises or something like that, where they do like cruise events for people and such like that. So this is the business guy, um, who's also particularly interested in, in, you know, anti-globalist conspiracy theories and such like that.

Um, and so I started digging into this stuff, and not only do I find that, like, he's very, and I start reading through his Twitter and I start finding him denying, you know, him being sort of conspiracy theorist about COVID, him promoting hydroxychloroquine, him, you know, sort of playing with these ideas that, like, the shutting down of churches for COVID is a secret strategy to destroy Christianity, and such. So really, really fairly far out there stuff, stuff. And at the same time, I found on Sovereign Nations these series

0:10:01 Aaron: Of videos that James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian had done with Michael O'Fallon, that they're all very, very proud of, as far as I can tell. Michael referenced them as much as possible.

0:10:09 Thomas: No, uh, no Helen Pluckrose. She didn't get it. She,

0:10:12 Aaron: Helen Pluckrose was not there. Yeah, it's at a New York City, like, top of a Newark City building, like outside of a New York Building. So I don't know if they, like—because she's in London, they didn't fly flyer over or something.

0:10:13 Thomas: Uh. Okay. I Anyway, she's usually the third horse person of the asshole apocalypse in that group, just I was wondering if she was, she was there or not, but okay, probably travel related, so

0:10:27 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, and I will say, I will say broadly speaking, my sense is she has not been as directly involved with O'Fallon and Sovereign Nations. So she was at the conference with them, but she wasn't in any of these videos and has, as far as I can tell, not been super involved with new discourses. And the reason I bring that up is because the big reveal, this was actually passed along long to me after I had done Embrace the Void 150, which was the episode where I sort of laid out this connection between these folks. And somebody messaged me and provided me the publicly accessible, you can look this up online yourself, legal documents in Florida for the incorporation of New Discourses LLC, which it turns out is owned by Michael O'Fallon and not James Lindsay, which which was fairly surprising to me.

0:11:20 Thomas: Sorry, Wholly owned? I thought I figured he was just like a co-founder or something, really

0:11:23 Aaron: On the document, it says manager James Lindsay, manager Peter Boghossian, though I think he's no longer a manager, and owner Michael O'Fallon. That's what it says.

0:11:33 Thomas: Huh. Wow. So Because that's really interesting that he wouldn't even be a co owner, but it could also you never know could also be tax related like set up for all we know, I guess.

0:11:37 Aaron: Yeah.

0:11:47 Aaron: It's fairly weird. And I'm, you know, anxious not to read. I don't want to, like, assume things about it. Obviously, I'm not the legal expert here or anything like that, um, but it was, uh, it was interesting that, uh, it seemed weird to me that you would make O'Fallon the manager of a site that is nominally supposed to be from the left or liberal perspective, um, and that you get the impression that this wasn't supposed to come out, um, maybe they didn't understand that these things are publicly available documents.

But But, you know, it does seem to sort of drive home the accusation that a lot of folks, including myself, have made that James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian and Pluckrose to some extent are effectively laundering far right ideology and conspiracy theories. That what they're doing is taking talking points and stuff that have been, you know, old hat on the right and giving them kind of a refurbish into liberal talking, you know, liberal looking talking points so that then Breitbart and O'Fallon and stuff can retweet them and say, "Look, here are these liberals who agree with us that this is a a problem."

0:12:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:12:52 Aaron: And this is a concept, by the way, that I learned from Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay when I was painfully watching through as much of their videos as I could to make sure that I said exactly what was true. And I found them accusing lefty academics of doing this kind of ideas laundering, where they pass their ideas around from publication to publication to give of the impression of sort of a robust ecosystem of thinkers and views when there actually isn't one. And I think, you know, in like 95% of the cases where these folks are criticizing the social justice folks, it's generally telling on themselves as far as I can tell, right? When they complain about these people being driven by grievances, every one of these people has a very rich victimhood grievance story that drives their participation in this program.

0:12:53 Thomas: So

0:13:45 Aaron: And, you know, I just, so I just see in all these different kinds of ways how they're just kind of a very useful front, right, for conservatism. Now, does that mean that they themselves are conservatives? Not necessarily. I don't think, you know.

0:13:57 Thomas: I want to talk about that. Yeah that's Interesting, because I was, I was just thinking about this, you know, going into this show, and it strikes me that there's almost, possibly just putting this out there, it's almost like there's two different flavors of this that are kind of, uh, joining together, joining forces, it feels like there is, because look, we know that all of Fox News and all that bullshit is mainly, um, the very wealthy waging an ideological culture war to distract from the fact that their policies are horrible for basically everybody except the very wealthy. I mean, that, that is,

0:13:59 Aaron: Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-huh.

0:14:35 Thomas: That's my, you know, um, not that I came up with it, but that's, that's what I subscribe, the view I subscribe to, um. Read books like Dying of Whiteness, which is one of the most depressing books I've ever read, which has just about, how about, all about how these, these, honestly, mainly poor poor white people take on all these conservative views because they've been led into this culture war and it, and, and they, all they do is cost their own lives.

Like it just costs them dearly in these States that like refuse to take advantage of like, you know, the Medicare expansions or whatever it may be, you know, all these policies are just terrible. And so there's kind of that truly believe it is, you know, not like a smoke filled room, bad guy volcano layer conspiracy, but like kind of close to that where it's very well off people, constantly, named Tucker Carlson, trying to like convince you that they're the every man just fighting these like, you you know, liberal elites, you know. And waging culture war in order to basically smuggle in a horrendous conservative agenda that benefits the wealthy. I don't think James Lindsay is that. And, you know, I'm speculating. This is opinion. But, you Now, I interacted with a guy a fair amount. I think he's a true believer on the specific cultural

0:15:25 Aaron: Mm-hm. Mm-him.

0:15:59 Aaron: Mm-hum.

0:15:59 Thomas: Issues that he's commenting on. So I almost feel he's the other way. I actually think he is a liberal. I think if you looked at his policies, you know, he would be in favor of, I imagine he's in favor of like universal health care. He's in fair. I mean, I think we talked about this at some point. I think he has very liberal for the most part policy views, but he's just super, I get, you know, for lack of a better word, conservative, or conservative reactionary, or whatever it might be, however you want to describe it, on these culture war issues.

And I just think that's fascinating, that like it kind of links up in this way, and so the the these two sides, or whatever it is, these two entities kind of use each other, um, because he also, you know, is going to take advantage of the spotlight that he can get, and I, you know, I put, I put Boghossian in a slightly different category, I think, um, and again, Mia Pining, based on my interactions, what I know of him, he's, he needs a spotlight and wants a spotlight mostly, I think.

James Lindsay has a little bit of that, but he also truly believes what he's saying, um, and it's, it's just fascinating to me. So I think people make a mistake if they call these people, you know, "Oh, you're just a Republican," or "You're just pushing blah blah," I don't really think that's quite right. And, you know, it might, it might possibly do a disservice, or or maybe derail the conversation, to

0:16:39 Aaron: Mm-hun.

0:17:28 Aaron: Mm-hum.

0:17:28 Thomas: Try to call them conservatives when they're probably not, sure.

0:17:29 Aaron: Yep. Yes, I think don't call them conservatives. Don't call them racists. Don't call them any of the names they want you to call them. It doesn't work. I actually wanted to, before I, I want to agree with you, and I'll explain a little bit about my views on the three of them in a second, but there's something you said there at the beginning I just wanted to jump on and say for folks who want to make sure that you're not just conspiracy theorizing about the Republican Party, the most recent episode of Ezra Klein Podcast, which is one of my favorite podcasts, just listen to it, right? Stuart Stevens, a devastating indictment of Republican party from his book, It Was is all a lie.

0:17:44 Thomas: Oh. Yeah. Just listen to that, yeah. Yeah, just out today, as we're recording, yeah.

0:18:06 Aaron: So, yeah, I think you're not at all wrong. I think the Republican Party has adopted the Southern strategy since the 60s to try to maintain power. And they've mostly used the maintaining of that power for the sake of creating the radical wealth inequality that we're all familiar with today. So, OK, the three folks. Right. Here's, here's my take on them. Since folks often ask me about this, I don't think that, I think James Lindsay is either a liberal or libertarian, I don't know which at this point, um, I definitely, uh, don't think that he's like a far right conservative. What I would describe him as is the quintessential sort of resentful white male who becomes radicalized online. Like, he's very much, in my mind, the kind of person who, um, has, has been driven more into his very radical position by, you know, being a troll and getting trolled back and a a bunch of conflicts and such like that.

0:18:59 Aaron: Whereas I think you're very right that Boghossian, from what I can tell, is probably just a narcissist. Like, probably just really needs attention. Somebody once commented to me that, like, if the whole world was atheist, Boghossian would be arguing for God. Right? Just to be contrarian.

0:19:16 Thomas: Yeah, wait.

0:19:17 Aaron: Whereas, you know, Pluckrose, I think, is, she has a personal narrative about having felt pushed out of her graduate degree by wokeness, and I think that was what sort of set her on this path. I get the impression that she's economically fairly progressive, culturally more conservative. I think she's much more towards the sort of—she seemed to be in favor of radical redistribution of wealth, for example. So I think it is important to distinguish between them, though I also think it's frustrating because I think they deliberately take advantage of this fact by sort of some of them sometimes playing good cop versus bad cop. Sort of, I see James often as sort of being the kind of attack dog where Helen tends to hang back and act more sort of reserved and not get quite as catastrophizing in her language, for example.

0:20:10 Aaron: Example, um, whereas, you know, as far as I can tell, what Peter adds is, uh, pronouns and bios, that's pretty much what he's bringing to the conversation. Um, so something else that you mentioned there about, why would they do this, right? Why would you, if you're this woke anti-woke liberal individual, right, why would you get into bed with, you know, far-right Christian nationalists? Certainly, I feel like there's got to be people who you could collaborate better with, right, who might also still, still agree that, you know, the left goes too far or something like this. And in the past week or so, I've been posting a lot about all of this, and the closest I've gotten to a direct reaction from any of these people, another fact that I find really interesting, given how quickly James is to jump on any criticism by him on Twitter, this was from Mike Naina, who is the videographer of the grievance studies folks and is close friends with James.

0:21:05 Aaron: And he actually jumped on one of my threads to say, this is not actually what the relationship is like or something like that. I asked why there was this connection at all, and he said, that's not the relationship. This is his explanation for why this happened. Okay. Conservatives are good at business models. Jim liked the model and required infrastructure to continue his work. I was around for several early discussions, and I'd go so far as to say Jim was truculent while setting up ideological boundaries. So, I James, James Lindsay, that's, yes, Jim to his friends, apparently.

0:21:40 Thomas: Who's Jim? James? Wow. He's never, I've never heard him going by Jim, I guess we weren't that close then.

0:21:47 Aaron: No. So I think, of course, right, infrastructure there is a very nice word for funding, it seems like. Or don't know what other kind of infrastructure there would be.

0:21:47 Thomas: Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I was saying a second ago, like, it sounds like they didn't really have the necessary capital to start a bullshit enterprise, because you need a bunch of, I've been all over this New Discourses, uh, website, um, you know, today, which I, I don't know from a branding perspective, picking something that sounds like nudist, uh, in it, maybe not the best, just, but anyway, that aside, it's fine, it's fun, um, and I, it's amazing, it's a pretty sharp website, uh, and And have you checked out their consulting pitch? Because I cannot get enough of this consulting services pitch.

0:21:58 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Mm-hm. Mm-mm.

0:22:27 Aaron: Yes. Mm-mmm.

0:22:30 Thomas: It seems to be, yeah, as long as I didn't, you know, cut you off before you were going to say anything there.

0:22:30 Aaron: Yep. Do you want to read it? Oh, I just wanted to add, you know, Naina says, you know, they were very serious about setting up ideological boundaries, and I asked for a follow-up about what did those boundaries look like and what role have they played in actually impacting what is on there, because as far as I can until there is zero daylight between New Discourses and sovereign nations beyond the fact that New Discourses doesn't explicitly reference Christianity as a solution to the problem new discoursers

0:22:38 Thomas: This. Go ahead. Uh-huh. Yeah.

0:23:02 Thomas: You can't not hear nudist courses now, right? I mean, every time. Like, Yeah. Nudist course. I want to sign up for some of those nudist course courses. What if we have a bunch of like aspiring nudists that then get radicalized by this, like, they go to the wrong website because, anyway, uh it

0:23:06 Aaron: Uh Yeah, yeah, that would be really a shame if this was if this was nudist courses I would, I would be totally in favor of this, right? I would be 100% on board.

0:23:18 Thomas: Would be, we want the nudists on our side Yeah, we don't want a bunch reactionary nudists, we want liberal, you know, hippie nudists, that's what they should be so, uh, yeah, and and on that note, this, it just bothers me so much. It, it always seems to be the line that they use is like, "Well, we're happy to, you know, engage with anyone who's willing. It's diversity of viewpoints. We just want open conversation." And, you know, that often involves being either using or being used by Nazis to kind of, you know, spread their their bullshit. It's the same thing when Glenn Greenwald, who I know I talk about a lot, when he goes on Tucker Carlson over and over and over and over to shit on Democrats, to me, it's inexcusable. It just is. It absolutely is inexcusable. I don't care if he's right about every single complaint about Democrats that he's ever had.

0:23:31 Aaron: Yeah, exactly. Sure.

0:24:14 Thomas: It is inexcusable to go on a white power show, essentially, and to go like bring eyeballs to it, to to to make, unless you're going to go on there and do what that one guy did who, this is a reference that I barely have in my brain, so apologies, I think was Sean Hannity show, the guy who went on and just absolutely shat on him. And then Sean Hannity didn't use it, you know, and then like the somebody posted the phone. Someone took phone video of like the interview kind of on the side. And that's what went viral. Like, unless you're to do that, there's just no excuse for going and empowering these people. And it's kind of the same thing here. Like, I don't care if you, all your complaints about academia or something are valid. If you have to go empower something called sovereign nations to get your message across, like find another way, you know, that that's, it's inexcusable to me.

0:24:37 Aaron: Yeah.

0:25:08 Aaron: And I want to reference a tweet here that I found from James Lindsay around the conference time when folks brought up that, hey, maybe you shouldn't be having a conference being organized by this group, right? Rather than say, I'll talk to anybody any time, here's what he said. Sovereign Nations isn't anti-Semitic, in response to I think someone accusing him of anti-Semitism, for some reasons I'll talk about here in just a second.

0:25:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, you should.

0:25:32 Aaron: Sovreign Nations isn't anti-Semitic, lol. I know everyone involved personally. Does anyone really think I would get involved with people with views divergent to my own without getting to know them first? So I read that as James acknowledging that there is a red line for collaboration. You shouldn't get in bed with just anybody. And if they were antisemitic, for example, that might be a kind of red line. Okay. So I don't think he can just say, you know, we'll just talk to anybody kind of thing, or unless he's changed his tune from that particular tweet. Now, for the antisemitics side of things, I personally have not accused Sovereign Nations of antisemitism, though I do think it is correct to say that they engage in a variety of anti-globalist conspiracy theories that are eerily similar to the kinds of anti-Semitic, anti-global conspiracy theories that, yeah.

0:26:20 Thomas: Yeah. Well, that's. I mean, that'S merely just The substitute phrase now, isn't it? Like globalists.

0:26:27 Aaron: Well, yeah, so let me give you, yeah, let me go into some concrete here, right? So on Sovereign Nation's website, there is a section specifically devoted to anti-Globalism called Open Societies, which is a reference to George Soros' Open Society Organizations or something like that. This is a section that is 80% talking about George Soros, right, so just happens to be this particularly very famous liberal Jewish individual around which there are a lot of conspiracy theories.

0:26:28 Thomas: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it's it's not 88 percent talking about. Never mind, okay.

0:26:57 Aaron: Yeah, right. There's lot of China on there as well. He's a big opponent of China for a variety of reasons, some of which are legitimate, right? China has problems. But so here's an example of what we can find on the Open Society's page. This is posted by a guy named Desmond Berg, who seems to post a lot of stuff that was written by Jack Montgomery. I think Desmond Berg may be the person who runs the Sovereign Nations website. He seems to be the poster of most of the articles. So the article is entitled, Hungary, the country Hungary, sounds alarm over Soros plan for billion dollar global university network. Followed by a creepy picture of George Soros and then direct quotes from, Again, let's remember, Hungary is a country that is currently run by Orban, a far-right, some would say authoritarian, fascist maybe, right? Who has explicitly, for example, this was back in 2018, Hungary leader Orban bans gender studies in all universities

0:26:58 Thomas: Yeah, Hmm.

0:27:24 Thomas: What?

0:27:38 Thomas: Yeah, of course. Oh, Yeah,

0:28:01 Aaron: Because it's not science. This is the guy who Jordan Peterson spoke favorably of. Of. Now, this same government, here's a quote.

0:28:01 Thomas: God, it Really? Wouldn't that freak you out a little bit if you were James Lindsey or Helen Pluckrose or, you know, Peter Brigosian? Hmm, fascist, like, dictator, dictator type right wing person is doing the thing that I think we should do. Like that just, gosh, doesn't that give him pause a little bit?

0:28:22 Aaron: Well, so they'll say that they don't want these things to be defunded or banned because they're not into cancel culture.

0:28:32 Thomas: Oh, I don't know. I think I've seen Boghossian. OK, well, I'll

0:28:36 Aaron: I mean, so what they will, they like to, you know, they liked to have it both ways, right? When people were getting fired from African-American studies departments during COVID, James posted about how gleeful this was and how gleefully, was that, like, "This is like the best thing that's happened to academia," me in a long time or something like that. So I think the point is they don't ever want to be tagged with having tried to say that they wanted anybody canceled. They just want other people to take care of that for them in some way. So instead, James said stuff like, "We're taking back math," and things like that, and it's left to other people and figure out what taking back math really means. But here's a quote from the Hungarian Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Relations: "In Soros's view, it is high time for Open Society Foundation, the vehicle through which he funds myriad endeavors to advance an ideologically driven political agenda, to build on his previous efforts and develop a new and innovative educational network that the world really needs." So,

0:28:36 Thomas: Have to follow up on that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:29:37 Aaron: Like, this is the kind of stuff that they're drawing on, they're throwing on propaganda from far-right governments to attack globalists because they're nationalists, and they're, if they're fine with Hungarian nationalism, right, as long as it stays in Hungary, then that's great for their worldview, essentially. So, mm-mm-mm,

0:29:53 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, isn't isn't the that that come down a lot of the stuff we saw with, like, Charlottesville or whatever. A lot of a lot lot of it is the justification for some of this extremism, extreme racism, is like, well, look at other nations get to have, you know, have their nationalism, and, you know, so therefore there should be a white, uh, an American, you know, cough.

0:30:14 Aaron: Yep.

0:30:15 Thomas: Um, yeah, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, but, like, for anyone who doesn't remember or wasn't around, um, I think what's so frustrating about this attack on academia is, you know, we've gone through all these episodes we've done, through interviews of them, trying to do their first hoax that they didn't pull off, you remember that, I don't, everybody forgets that they actually kind of tried to wipe that one a little bit too, so they, they, the three of them tried to pull off a hoax, they declared victory, and then it was, you know, discovered very quickly.

0:30:16 Aaron: Yeah, and the white part, that's a weird part.

0:30:36 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Mm-hm.

0:30:49 Thomas: And and people wrote about it and people I think, like, Eli and others, you know, came on my show or whatever and talked about the fact that all you did was get a fake paper submitted to a pay-for-play, you know, publishy thingy, like it was nothing, anyone could have basically written anything, and so that was a big disaster, they, they kind of, they've deleted a lot of the stuff around that particular failure. And then they did the second one, which, you know, I think, to give them the slightest amount of credit, was at least a better version of what they're trying to do. And I think what frustrated me so much about this is, despite the fact that, you know, James Lindsey is a really smart person, um, he's not dumb, uh, he's the kind of person where I don't think I would personally attempt to ever debate him on anything, because he just has an incredibly sharp mind for all these different, like, buzzwords and concepts and stuff, in ways that I wouldn't, there's no way I would be able to, like, respond to it in real time, you know, it just

0:31:01 Aaron: Mm-mm.

0:31:48 Aaron: Mm-hum.

0:31:48 Thomas: He's, he's very, he's one of those kind of guys, like, he's, it's in the same way I wouldn't debate a moon landing fake, you know, hoax, or person, like, I wouldn't be able to keep up with all that, I just feel like, okay, all right, but I'm pretty sure what you're saying is bullshit anyway. Um, he's very smart, and, you know, back in one of those episodes I asked him to give me some sources for some of these, you know, these great academic hoaxy claims he was making, and everything he gave me was from this, uh, Twitter account that that was like real, real peer review, or whatever, that would, would grab peer reviewed stuff that people had done and just change the titles and make it look horrible and take it out of context. And I researched every single one he sent me, and none of it was what he said it was. And it's just, so I guess that maybe, maybe now I'm doubting my part where I thought he truly believes this stuff. I don't know. I didn't know what to believe.

0:32:15 Aaron: Mm-huh.

0:32:31 Aaron: Yep. Oh, I think he does. I think he's just willing. I mean, I think he just reads these things in the least generous, most cynical light possible. So this is also what I've been hearing about Cynical Theory, their book that just came out, that it is also fairly rife with misreadings. And misreadINGS that only really make sense if you're trying to really grind a very specific axe against a specific group of academics.

0:32:47 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I guess the point I wanted to make with all that, that with kind of, again, part of me is just sort of remembering going through all this at the time was that like, they are very smart. And, and, and I don't want to try to like, I don't think people should think or, or, you know, rest their whatever hopes on the fact that these people are like idiots who are just, they're very smart, but at the same time, they're very wrong about a lot of things.

0:33:20 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Mm-hm.

0:33:26 Thomas: And they're, they're able to take the, as you say, an incredibly uncharitable reading of of this stuff and then just blow it into astronomical proportions, and I I was going to use that as a segue to something that I can't believe we didn't start with, which is, uh, hey, you globalist, uh, cuck over there, what is two plus two equal? They've gotten to the point they've got If you if you go to Nudist courses and click on their store, guess what they're selling this is all just an elaborate scheme. I wish I had thought of it, because they are selling shirts and mugs and and Matt face masks and stickers and everything that say two plus two equals four.

0:33:46 Aaron: Oh, God. I don't know. I don't do math, I'm an ethicist. Yeah. I know and I'd be very curious to find out how much Michael O'Fallon makes off of every one of those units. To be honest, uh no

0:34:12 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know how much the other thing is. We really don't know like how successful this is. Like it on some level, obviously the grift is somewhat successful. You know, they're, they'RE going on TV.

0:34:19 Aaron: I mean they have a decent Patreon following, they've got, they've got funding, you know, so uh

0:34:24 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So maybe they are selling, I don'T know, but talk about two plus 2 equals 4.

0:34:28 Aaron: Well Two plus two equals four is a proxy battle, and it's proxy battle that's being fought about objective truth. I don't know if you're familiar with the issues around objective versus subjective truth. I believe that we've ever had a discussion about on those topics before. Um, but the the view that James at all want to push, based on a fairly ungenerous, fairly narrow reading of like the most extreme epistemic part of critical theory, is that these these critical studies are all about the rejection of any kind of objectivity and the claim that every, all knowledge and truth is subjective or something like that, um, and you know, if you want we can talk about why, where they get that impression from and how justified it is, but what the implications for the math conversation are. James believes that these folks who are interested in the project of decolonizing the curriculum, sort of making things like math more accessible to people of color and various other sort of

0:34:42 Thomas: I was

0:35:31 Aaron: Marginalized groups, trying to figure out ways to teach it that are less sort of culturally narrow and things like that, right? So these folks have sort of made various arguments, and like, I think there was one post where a guy was sort of arguing that, like, know, there's a sense in which two plus two equals five essentially, and James picked up on this and freaked out about how this is proof that the lefties are coming for even the most basic of objective truths, like the most basic mathematics and such, like that, and that the only reason they're defending this idea is because of their woke ideology. So it was another example of this kind of their attempt to show that woke people are members of a cult. Um, so then what happened was there was this guy, um, Kareem, I believe his name, uh, who is a, uh, PhD mathematics student, um, and also happens to be a person of color.

0:36:26 Aaron: And so there's a whole side debate about, like, does James really only single out people of color? And while it's not absolutely only people of colour, I think statistically it's much more frequent that those are his targets for trolling and dogpiles and such. So Kareem put out this like thread about how two plus two could equal five. He didn't mention woke, he didn't mention social justice or race or anything in it at any point, right? Right. And yet James sort of picked it up and dogpiled him, and it's been a giant mess. So some other folks, some other mathematicians, like a guy with a Fields Medal, for example, came along and like said, no, here are the situations in which two plus two does equal five. There's a variety of scenarios in which this can happen within mathematics and such. Um, but you know, for for James and his cultists, right, this is just further proof that the woke are trying to destroy western culture by breaking down objective truth. So that's what's going on there.

0:37:20 Thomas: Yeah. And I guess the reason I bring this up is I'm really stuck on this. Like if you just search two plus two equals four or any of these things, like basically any of these little, as you say, like put it like proxy battles that happen, what you'll see is entirely, entirely, um, the the usual suspect right-wing sources capitalizing on this every single time.

So it'll be Washington Examiner, uh, Federalist, Campus Reform, you know, and that'll be the, sometimes it'll Brytbard, it'll do whatever it is, and I'll just read you some of the, just doing that search, and that's a tough one, because, you know, searching two plus two equals four, I'm pretty sure is a weird Google thing to search, like I'm getting, I'm doing some like basketball scores and stuff, like some other stuff is coming up, but like if it was a more, um, know, definite, uh, phrase that wouldn't come up with other stuff, I imagine you would see just nothing but these Washington and Examiner whatever sources, um, that just say stuff like "math professor claims equation two plus two equals four reeks of white supremacist patriarchy," and then the next one, Campus Reform, oh, it's the same same headline, "math education professor two plus two two equals four trip reeks of white supremacy."

Uh, there was another one, I think that was a little different. Where was it? Oh, here we go. The Federalist, "when educate educrats can't even agree that two plus two equals for, public education is a joke." And it's like, I don't know what, what do we do here? You know, because on one hand for, I think for most people, for most intelligent people, for most People in actual academia, I.E. not James, not Peter, really, oh, I guess he's a, he does teach, uh, but, uh

0:37:27 Aaron: Yep

0:39:02 Thomas: But not Helen Pluckrose

0:39:02 Aaron: The only one of them that has a teaching job ever, as far as I know

0:39:03 Thomas: Right true I should be fair, he does have a teaching job, uh, that despite the uh ethics investigation that went against him, and should have done something, no, he still has that teaching position for now. Um, most people, I think, uh, who are part of this globalist, no, who are just, you know, people who actually are in academia, academia, doing whatever work they're doing, just don't bother with this stuff. I think, I think most of them are like, well, this is obviously fucking stupid, I don't, whatever, you know? Um, but the, on the right, the Federalist, Campus Reform, you know, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Breitbart, they all line up around these and, and you, you just see a wall of it, you Know, of, of why, oh, education joke, blah, blah. On a unified message. And I I just, it just pains me. I don't know. What do you do? I guess I don'T even have a good question. But, like, do you see this as a major problem? Like, or is, their reach is too small or not? I don't know. What do YOU think?

0:39:31 Aaron: Well You know, first of all, I want to pre-butt the objection, well, we can't hold people like James responsible if the right wing picks up on his talking points, for example, um, but I do think we can hold him responsible for, uh, happily tweeting out that Federalist article that you just referenced, um, which goes after, uh, um, Kareem Karr, amongst other individuals, um, and yeah, like Breitbart, for example, has gone after – and the problem – one of the major issues is that oftentimes who they're going after are fairly small accounts of, like, you know, math teachers of various sorts. So there's another individual who I've messaged back and forth with a little bit, right?

Her name is Lori Rebell, who has been sort of trying to – who has – been one of these people who's like, we want to – she calls it defund math, math, uh, that that structuring of that framework is not my favorite, but you know, put through the right, um, code switching, I understand what what they're getting at, the same as like defund the police kind of idea, um, but like James has gone after these people repeatedly, like recently is still sort of, um, screenshot tweeting them, um, even when

0:40:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:13 Aaron: They've locked their accounts or, uh, blocked him in various kinds of ways. As far as I can tell, he continues to find ways to, uh, harass these these accounts, which then gets picked up not just by Breitbart and Federalists, but also gets picked up by 4chan and Reddit, which results in just, you know, a deluge of hate mail against these people. And again, I know we can't hold James at all responsible for any of the consequences of any of his speech ever, at all, ever. But when he talks about taking back math, right, and he's mostly talking to non-mathematicians, it is not at all clear to me what he could possibly mean there by taking back math besides persistently harassing mathematicians into silence and I don't know, I don't what other mechanism there could be that he could be way using here besides this sort of constant drum beat against these people.

0:41:56 Thomas: Yeah. I want to clean something up. I keep, you know, going through these, because it' just a batshit thing. And I, for one, you T. this is another strength that they have, that it's so much easier to build, especially when all these right-wing sources, as I've said, get on the same page, hammer the same simple message, um, with the same quote tweeted sources. It's much easier for them to do that than for us to track down, like, what the fuck is happening, you know, like, what, what is this, who said it, who, what, whose Twitter was this first, what is it, is this it looks like the, the Kareem tweet, I pulled that up, Kareen, Car, I think he responded after the initial one.

And the reason I bring it up, the only reason I'm bothering with this, is the first tweet that I saw, and I'm trying to frantically, trying to find where I just saw it, was an a account with like 280 followers, you know, which it was just, it was somebody who was a PhD student and it, the, uh, the article that was so outraged about it highlighted her, you know, bio, her Twitter bio, which said like, uh, you know, PhD student, uh, Black Lives Matter, you now, that kind of thing. Um,

0:42:27 Aaron: Yep. Oh.

0:43:09 Aaron: I know, I think I know who you mean, actually.

0:43:11 Thomas: Yeah, I've lost it now, but anyway, the point is the only reason I bring all that up.

0:43:11 Aaron: It's Because She Went She Locked Her account.

0:43:16 Thomas: Oh, that's probably why the The point is, that's what what they do, though. They find person with 200 followers who, you know, is a Ph.D. student, you know, like that doesn't it's not really in charge of the world, you know, certainly not in the White House, for example. And they blow that out of proportion. And then Kareeb Carr, who also seems to be a mathematician who has the very simple explanation for like, oh, here's an example of why James James Lindsay quoted, quote tweeted that, oh, by the way, he did a image, a screenshot quote tweet, just, you know, just he wouldn't, but I guess somebody must have Twitter snitched because Kareem Carr then ended up replying. He said, I don't know who needs to hear this, but if someone says two plus two equals five, the correct response is what are your definitions and axioms, not a rant about the decline of Western civilization. Because I think so, that's, that was, I think his response to the initial controversy, you you know, that was probably, again, a personal account that was 280 followers, whatever might have been.

0:43:31 Aaron: True. True. But I want to make a point real clear here that you brought up about the Orwellian thing, and this is where I think it's, it's unquestionable that James is full of it, right? So James wants to say this two plus two equals five stuff is the equivalent of, in George Orwell's 1984, when the evil totalitarian government is, is trying to force people, you know, through sheer brute force to say, you know, things that they know to be wrong as a form of kind of mind, you know, reprogramming essentially, right?

0:44:41 Aaron: That's not what mathematicians are fucking doing when they're saying two plus two equals five. Like, I'm sorry. These are not, these are not people who are trying to enforce their ideology in like, you know, through nonsense in the radical sense of the word, right. You could disagree with their interpretations about colonialism and all that, but they have an argument, right, the people in Orwell's world don't have an argument, they're not saying two plus two equals five is based on anything except the will to power.

0:44:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right, yeah.

0:45:06 Thomas: Well, and if anything, it's almost the opposite of what they're saying, because the, the message that I'm taking from this, with the two plus two equal five, the initial tweet thing is, question the axioms. You know, find out what the, what the ax, axioms are. Don't just assume that whatever you know is correct and whatever someone else says is bullshit. It's almost the opposite of an Orwellian view. You know, there is no room in 1984 for someone who's like, maybe we should reconsider the axiom that we're basing. No, it's not at all. And but so I guess in the end, I still don't know for sure if James is a true believer.

I think I think he is, as I initially said, and as you backed me up. But sometimes you You see stuff like this and it's like it's so aggressively wrong. It's so like hostile and bad faith to an extreme that you're like, is this intentional or is it just he's so reactionary now that everything he sees is just he casts it in the, you know, in the culture war and just anybody who says something he doesn't agree with. But it seems to be they're a foot soldier in the Orwellian culture war. It's mind-blowing.

0:45:06 Aaron: Right. Right, Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

0:46:19 Aaron: I mean that appears to be the project, uh, mean, I just, I'll just say I find this all very depressing, as as someone who does genuinely like debate and discourse. I just, just, this looks to me like just pouring so much poison in the well. Like, there's no way to have a conversation with the people who follow James anymore. I have managed to, I think, deconvert maybe like a handful of people through these various sort of projects and lots of lengthy Twitter discussions, but generally speaking, nothing you put in front of his cult members. And I say that, I say cult members specifically because he has extensively argued that everyone who disagrees with him as a member of a cult and I

0:46:31 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I just read that article on New Discourses. Well,

0:46:56 Aaron: Yeah And if you read the criteria for cults, it's all the things that he does, all the time.

0:47:02 Thomas: Right. Right. I, to that point, the the pitch here for consulting services, just to maybe go out on this note, um, not that there's like anything de facto wrong with consulting, you know, as a as an industry maybe, but it, this theory, under this page, if you go to the New Discourses website and read the consulting services pitch. It is really, truly all about how these people, here, I'll read the top line here.

"Diversity, equity, and inclusion management from New Discourses, helping you identify and manage risks for your project, personnel, operations, and everyday business activities. Whatever your industry or whatever the nature of your organization, you surely face tremendous pressure to adopt and implement programs and training branded with terms like anti-racism, implicit bias, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. You probably recognize the apparent good intentions behind these initiatives, but also realize that something doesn't quite square with the material being presented, and you may especially feel confused by the dizzying array of specialized terminology behind these programs. You're right to feel skeptical and confused." This is a pitch to boomers, harder than anything's ever been a pitch to boomer's. Like, this is this, and it's it's pretty well done, pitch. It's like, hey boomer, are you confused when people seem to be yelling at you for stuff you say and do,

0:48:20 Aaron: Yep.

0:48:20 Thomas: You own a business and have money, well, we can help you, yeah, it and it gets, um, and he has, I'm not going to go through it because again with anything with James, it's it's too long to read, but, um, he has an article, not just this consultant services page on his website, but there's also an article about protecting your business from, you always the social justice, uh, fundamentalist, or whatever it may be, and it really does seem as though he truly believes, or at least his pitch to make money is, that like you're going to be overrun by diversity and inclusion people that are, it's, ah, it's

0:48:23 Aaron: Funny, that Yeah. Right, um. Yeah.

0:48:56 Aaron: Yeah.

0:48:57 Thomas: Just so much, yeah.

0:48:59 Aaron: And it's unfortunate that like things like White Fragility are out there giving him easy targets for this kind of abuse. And, like, you know, my feeling is, and I wrote about this in, um, an article I wrote, uh, called Culture War Fragility, um, that, you know, I really do think that there are legitimate criticisms of critical theory, I've had folks on my own show who've made legitimate criticisms of critical theory, and I genuinely think that we should be discussing those and trying to find a healthy synthesis between sort of the social justice perspective and the anti-social justice perspective. It's just impossible to find that synthesis when the other team is actively engaged in a holy war.

Like, for James, this is, this is 100 percent a jihad, right, he, you know, technically he's an atheist, but as far as I'm concerned his approach to it is very fundamentalist, kind of religious approach where, you know, there can't be any compromise, everything said by woke people has to understood in the worst possible terms, terms, um, you know, we can't find any balance or engage in in reasonable disagreement, right, he'll say, he's, you know, we're the ones who won't debate, I've been incapable of getting him to debate me in any format, including on LetterWiki, uh, so yeah, it's it's just really really frustrating because I think, you know, it's another piece of the polarizing puzzle that is making our lives all hell right now, um, and rather than de-escalating that polarization, it's making it worse, and like, like, you know, now their talking points are getting picked up by Trump. And I actually like the fact

0:49:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:50:25 Aaron: They're getting picked up by Donald because, A, Trump is so much worse at these talking points than they are. So he just does, like, really stupid shit, like say, man, that 1619 project, what's up with that? Right? And then Chris Wallace makes fun of him for slavery. But, like... I also think it's not going to work in this particular election.

This is something that makes me very happy, is that like, if Trump really goes all in on this anti-woke agenda, I just think it's going to widen Biden's lead because, you know, in the midst of a pandemic and a social crisis and such, I think people want sort of stability and and normalcy and someone who's going to get back to like business as usual, you know, and I know the lefties will hate me for saying that, but I do think that is where a lot of the country's feelings are right now, and so they don't want to have a big woke culture war, and Biden is like the opposite in every way of like social justice warriors, he's the the worst possible person to be trying to target with these kind of arguments. So I actually do think, weirdly enough, James et al.

0:50:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:51:24 Aaron: Have done us all a benefit by making this a prominent thing on the right at this moment that Trump has clearly then sort of gleaned and glommed onto and is using, despite his advisors telling him that this is not the best way to win the election. So maybe they're going to actually help us, you know, secure this election, which be great, um, you know, yeah,

0:51:43 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I don't know that there's an alternative. Honestly, I think this has been the game from the beginning with Trump because there is no content to his. What is he going to do? Talk about his policies or something? What is it going to talk about other than, those people hate you and they whatever and they want to just, their hordes of people are going to take down the statues of George White? That's all he has. He doesn't have anything else.

But, yeah, you know, I remembered one other thing I was going to say that was so tragic, back when I, you know, gave a shit, because I had talked to James and kind of, you know, didn't, wouldn't consider him a friend or anything, but was like, oh, yeah. He was in, he was in my social circle a little bit. It was so tragic because I remember one of the, like, there was an email that I sent that was asking him about a debate that happened. I remember he responded to me. It was after the episode on death, which you and I both really liked that you mentioned. And then before, a bit before, all the hoax stuff.

0:51:53 Aaron: Right, Yeah, Yeah,

0:52:37 Thomas: And I asked him about a certain thing that had blown up. And he's like, yeah, I'm kind of done with the antisocial justice stuff. I could probably find it somewhere. He was like, Yeah, I've had enough of that, you know, and I was like. Oh, good.

0:52:46 Aaron: It's Hilarious. Uh-huh. Yeah.

0:52:50 Thomas: Oh, that's nice. And then, you Know, I don't know what happened. The short on his mortgage or what caused the change. But it went from, oh, I think this guy is going to be done trying to like have these stupid arguments that he was just dabbling in at the time. You know, he's kind of here and there on Twitter. I noticed him dabbled in little things. And no, that didn't happen. It's sort of tragic in a way. I wonder what caused that. I'll always wonder. Yeah, well, I suppose we've reached our time here. The thing I did mean to ask you about, when I'm talking about the Washington Examiner and all these right-wing sources, is, do you think that that people on the left need to try to be more aware of this stuff and putting out the counter propaganda to it, you know, so that when somebody does the Google search, they don't just come up with these same sources over and over and över. Do you think that needs to happen? Should we do that? Should you and I start? No, I don't have time.

0:52:51 Aaron: Yep. I mean it's a good question right like is it so this this to me is like the fundamental Trump problem right when you have a troll that has substantial power The idea of just don't feed the troll becomes less functional institutional, right? Because they're already thoroughly fed and they're doing a lot of damage. So do you engage with their stuff and try to, you know, refute it in some kind of way, or what is the the correct method? And I'm not sure that we have an ideal sort of correct method. I do think that I have, I have made a little bit of progress on this front in terms of now, when people quote New Discourses or cite New Discourses, they're getting pushback along the lines of, hey, you know, that site is owned by a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist. And I don't want to make this either a genetic fallacy argument or a guilt by association. I'm not interested. If they were just private friends, I wouldn't care. Even if they had collaborated in one video or something, that would be different.

0:53:51 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:54:40 Aaron: But they clearly have an ongoing, substantial working relationship. And by James's own admission, he believes that there would be things such as going too far. And it's just unclear to me why someone who is openly in favor of – so let me read you actually just one little quick thing from Their About page. This was something that I found on the Sovereign Nations About page that they later removed while I was in the midst of all of this researching. So this is what they say in their quote. As can be found over the last eight years, the goal of Open Society Foundations – there that is again – is to demean and destroy the tenets of traditional conservatism.

And thus create a crisis of conscience within the mind of the conservative. In order to succeed, we must rebuild confidence in the presuppositions of conservatism in all its excised, exercised forms, including in economics, civil liberties, family, sovereignty, theology, rule of law, and foreign affairs. What was once heresy is now law, and what was once law is now heresy. The issue for progressive Open Society Foundations, that their new law has no foundational presupposition. That's as far as I think you can, as clear as you can get to saying we want to institute theocracy again. Um, so I don't understand why that's not a bridge too far. I don't understand why propping up, um, hydroxychloroquine is not a bridge too far, I

0:54:58 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:56:05 Aaron: Don't understand why all of this conspiracy denial stuff, these, these, um, you know, like, go listen to some of O'Fallon's podcast. He does his own podcast which is really, really out there, where he talks about, there's one episode called The Trans Cultural, um, Cult, I think, or something like that, where he basically lays out his whole theory about how the reason we're all being quarantined is because it's trying to reset our behavior so that we will be more malleable to being reprogrammed by the the globalist conspiracy. Essentially, so, like, this guy is really really far out there. This is not just you know, I'm just right wing and really like small government or something like that. This is stuff that to me is a red line. Of His conspiracy theories could potentially put lives at risk, and I think that that should be a solid red line, and I'm not sure why it isn't for James, uh, but as far as I can tell so far, it isn's.

0:56:41 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:57:00 Thomas: All All right, thanks again, and of course check out Embrace the Void, check out Philosophers in Space, anything I'm missing there? Check out your, yeah, that's your entire yeah, that that's what I meant.

0:57:06 Aaron: That's my life. ETVpod.com is the Twitter, if you want to go see all of the proofs of all of the things I've been claiming. Oh, did I say it? Did I really? Oh, god.

0:57:14 Thomas: Sure. Oh, that was so boomer of you. ETVpod.com is the Twitter? Like that's, yeah,

0:57:22 Aaron: I failed everyone

0:57:22 Thomas: You did. And I'm leaving it because I love it. E TV. Yeah. Your Twitter handle is at E TV, uh, what pot?

0:57:24 Aaron: Okay. That's fine, I suddenly just felt

0:57:31 Thomas: Yeah. Pot.

0:57:31 Aaron: A strong urge to hire someone to help me with my diversity issue. Weird pleasure.

0:57:36 Thomas: Awesome. Thanks so much, Aaron.

0:57:48 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com slash ThomasPodcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.