Author, social critic and part of the trio that put academia on its head during the Grievance Studies Affair, James Lindsay, talks to Jack Armstrong about those efforts, his boiled-down description of CRT and his fun with clown memes on Twitter.
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From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show. Oh, I'm pretty excited about having James Lindsey on. We've had him on a number of times going way way back, but he's become a kind of a legend in the world of Twitter. And if you don't follow James Lindsay on Twitter, you're making a mistake. Author, mathematician. Well then let him introduce himself. James Lindsay, Welcome back to the Armstrong and Getty Show. Hey, great to be here. Introducing myself though, is a tall order. I'm always a bit awkward with that. But so before you became like nationally famous, you were just a math professor ten years ago. I actually left the university in two thousand ten because they were shifting to a model to retain students at all costs and I just couldn't teach. I didn't see the ideological implications of that at the time. I couldn't teach under those conditions. So I was a mask professor until two ten, and then I was actually a massage therapist in the years in between of all things, and your politics in general are very liberal. They have been. Um, I'm a bit, uh, a bit scared of that side of the aisle right now, so they're not so much right now. Yeah, I would call you, just because I follow your twitter feed pretty regularly, a classical liberal as opposed to what like a lot of modern you know, younger liberal thought is. And we'll get into more of that and just a little bit um, but now you have become famous for a whole bunch of things. Um, when you and uh and and a couple other people got together and wrote some bogus papers that you get, you submitted to various publications and they got accepted. He became famous for that. The what was the what was the name of that they got called the grievance studies affair on the back end of that, because we decided to call all of those things like whether it's critical theory, which all everybody has heard of now, or gender studies or fat studies which is a thing unbelievably, or disability studies they only end in some kind of studies control study. We just said that what these these fields are doing are stoking grievances that they're trying to you know, dredge up or pick at scabs or whatever. Dredge up hurts. Pick at scabs make people feel aggrieved against the system, against society, and they study grievance in that regard. So we called all of this stuff is a catch all term grievance studies, and so that got called the Grievance Studies Affair. And we wrote twenty fake papers over the course of a year, these things. That's like an entire academics career usually. Um, seven of them were accepted. We still had seven more under review, and the Wall Street Journal told on us so and then amazing thing was and we've talked about this a lot, and men, if you google this if you've never heard it, because you guys went so over the top. It was like, just just so incredibly over the top. Ye that's a number of them still got accepted as legitimate academic not even that they've been coming true since. Um. Yeah, we had some really crazy over the top ones. We had one about whether you can watch people react to the way that dogs misbehave in dog parks, particularly sexually with one another, and then you can divine something about rape culture from watching that. And then we just trained men the way that we trained dogs, then we could probably combat rape culture. That's a very feminist approach, and that that paper not only was accepted and published, but it was given an award for Excellence in Scholarship. UM. We we wrote a chapter of Hitler's Mind comp and that was accepted by a social work journal. UH. In terms of intersectional feminism, we had a number of other kind of hilarious papers. We had one that we argued that the sport of competitive bodybuilding professional bodybuilding is fat phobic because it sees building muscle as fundamentally different than building fats, so that we need to have a category called fat bodybuilding. That was accepted. Got it's hilarious. But we had another one and one other paper though we wrote it was that you can't use satire to make fun of social justice. And this has been born out now that literally Robin D'Angelo, who wrote White Fragility previously and now has her new book Nice Racism or whatever it's called, she literally just did an interview and she should have cited us. She made the same argument almost I mean uncannily similar argument and citing the same kind of television shows We brought up etcetera. As we made in one of our fake papers, which was also accepted. Um and hit on the Babylon b which is, you know, a satire site on the Internet. It's really funny. They got told that, you know, their their form of satire against social justice is you know, punching down or punching out, I don't know, punching something on. So they got told. I mean the papers we wrote are coming true, like the people are actually arguing the things that we wrote in in satire and and it's it's unbelievable. Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to bring up your the Grievance Studies Affairs it is now called, and that was with Peter and Helen pluck Rose Um is I came across this article the other day that I thought you would think it was funny. If you haven't seen this yet, this is for real local university. My wife went to this university U. C. Davis. Cultural Biases Impact Native Fish study calls for end to rough fish pejorative and the paradigm that created it. Oh yeah, fish names are racist, now that's right, Yeah, exactly. And it gets down and it says the study maintains that the term rough fish is pejorative and degrading to native fish. That this is that's not that sounds like it's from the babylog b but it's an actual, for real article. Now, that's exactly the kind of thing that we would have wrote to. We wanted to write a paper and we just ran out of time and didn't didn't prioritize it about how putting things like onions or seasoning and cornbread gentrifies cornbread and takes it away from black people and perpetuates the racial divide. We're gonna call it a gentle sification of cornbreadge a cultuation of American racial division or something like that. Uh yeah, it's absurd, you know, it's in the fish are insulted now. And these people actually kind of think this way. They really do think that the you know, these words, the way we use words structures reality. They genuinely think that in crazies power dynamics that are going to oppress people. So calling them rough fish somehow is going to cause other I don't know people. I guess you would think it's not the fish to believe something ridiculous like oh, well, you know, maybe I'm just a rough person because I'm from another culture. That's probably what the argument runs like. It's just absurd, It's totally absurd. You and Helen pluck Rose wrote the book nonfiction book Cynical Theories, which is very serious and um, you know, because we're having a lot of fun with this, but this is this is super duper serious in that the country is going crazy and in a big chunk of the country that for whatever reason gets a hell of a lot of attention, has just gone not so and and you're trying to bring it back into into the world of sanity. And you're now one of the if not the leading pushback against critical race theory. Do you have a like a shorthand version for what critical race theory is for people so they can understand it. Yeah, I've been working on this for a long time. I finally boiled it down. Critical race theory is an almost religious belief that the fundamental uh structure of society is racism that was created by white people to benefit white people. If you believe that religiously and believe that that has to be torn down, you know, root and branch, then you're probably a critical race theres So if you believe that society was built on racism by white people for white poblical benefit, and that it's in literally everything you can imagine. You're probably a critical race theorist, and I love you throwing in the term religion um, and I know you're an atheist, but the way it has taken on this um because they're there, it's got all the home arts of religion, and that there are people that if you run a foul of it, it's blasphemy and you need to be you know, you need to lose your job, you need to have your life ruined because you said something that went against the doctrine of critical the critical race theory as they see it. And it's just it's it's so weird, like I almost can't even the particularly when I see these white people, professors or college kids or whatever, um beating up on themselves and then they talk about it. I'm just I'm such a bad person and I need to take a longer look at the way that I'm ruining the world. You know, it's just it's it's like a mental illness to me. It really is. In fact that the religion thing isn't just like oh, it's kind of like one, our parallel to it really is one, and people can't quite see it because they're like, well, what's the god of the religion. They can't like figure out how it works. But the God, it turns out his history with a capital H the exact same way that Marks looked at history. History has a trajectory, History has a purpose. The purpose for Marks for history was to get to communism, to get to the utopia where we no longer have classes, we no longer have a state that the presses anybody. Nobody is oppressed because we transcend classes and states and all of the things that cause oppression. And history is progressing along this pathway by means of revealing contradictions. So if you bring up the contradictions and do criticism on them, we move history along. And if you're doing that the right way, then you're on the right side of history. If you're doing it the wrong way, on the wrong side of history. So it's God is the trajectory of history that has a Heaven on Earth target at the end. And people who helped that along are people in the faith. They're good people. And the people who hinder that and try to so called maintain the status quo are bad people. And this is why you see their utter hatred of conservatives, utter hatred of of you know, any order, liberal order, societal order that's not there's um, their their vision, and people don't understand that their God is actually this weird belief that tracks all the way back to the early nineteenth century in Germany about how history might work. The we're talking about James Lindsay. Um, I'm looking at his Twitter feed, which is a fantastic following. Underneath it says, uh, not New York Times bestselling author Math PhD, founder of New Discourses, a political against totalitarianism and supremacy of all kinds for freedom, and you're definitely one of the best thinkers, writers and speakers on this topic that I've come across anywhere in America. Thank god. Um, what do you mean by not New York Times bestselling author? Oh so cynical Theories was Actually it made it onto the Wall Street Journals best seller listen Man of the publisher Weekly best seller list, and they don't have a few different best sellers lists, but the New York Times didn't put it on theirs. And so we dug into this because we had, you know, the book scan or whatever the sales numbers, And it turns out that we actually sold enough copies of Cynical Theories in the first week to where we should have been on the list, and in fact, we sold three times as many as the last two books on the list. But for some reason, they deemed that it didn't reflect the organic buying habits of Americans and therefore did not put it on the New York Times best selling list. So bestseller everywhere but the New York Times, which snubbed us for some reason. Uh, and I guess that's their business. Did not reflect the organic buying habits of Americans. Okay, yeah, whatever the hell that I see. It didn't pass your sniff test. Whatever the hell that means. How how difficult is your life? I've wondered this a lot because I follow you regularly, Like I'm a fanboy of James Lindsay. I gotta admitted, um, how difficult is your life? Gotten? Taking all this on? I mean, how what's your what's your email? Feed? Your your hate mail? You're all that sort of stuff, Like you know, I get a little bit of hate mail. I don't get a tremendous amount Uh. The difficulty is the volume of you know, whether it's fan mail, it's mostly questions. People are asking me mail or can you help me with this mail? You know, I get so much request for that, that's very difficult. The harder part, you know, if we got into the kind of psychological side of it's like I live and you know, they think if you stare into the Abyss, the Abyss stairs back, I live in the Abyss. It's like I went into the Abyss and send letters to the world, and so it's like, you know, I read the most negative, evil, poisonous stuff literally all day, try to make sense of it, try to understand it and try to communicate with other people, and that actually is pretty exhausting. Um, but everything else is great. You live in the Abyss. Everything else is great. Can you explain the current clown controversy that's going on around me? Um? Yeah, so, I mean lots of people have been using the mean clown world to describe what's going on, right, and so this is everybody kind of gets it. It's like these people are in some regard that are pushing these crazy ideas that don't attest the reality or somehow kind of clowns. And then you know, there's Nicole Hannah Jones at the New York Times. She's got her big red hair, and people have noticed that that looks kind of like clownish. And so the other day I saw a picture of her. She was all proud of herself, was on Twitter. So I took the picture and I just put a clown emoji period send tweet with a picture, and people went berserk because I'm just I call all of these people clowns. I call you know, it doesn't matter who they are, it's not just that her hair or whatever. I call all these people clowns all the time. I refer to clown world all the time. And so she went berserk and said that I was attacking her appearance. Thousands of people went nuts and got angry at me for attacking a black woman's appearance, which well, I mean, it's coincidental in my opinion, because I called all these people clowns. So then they went berserk. And so then I came up with a parody, as I tend to do, like the fake papers, and I started talking about critical clown theory and took critical race theory, took out race, put in clown and just wrote their words with you know, slight changes and it just all fits to try to you know, point out that you know, I said that the um Nicole and of Jones had clown fragility on seat of white fragility. Her clown ary was needed doll, and she was reacted with a series of rhetorical maneuvers to try to you know, lash out or whatever. I did this the kind of the whole thing, and people loved it, um because they get the satire, they get the party, and again the clown the world thinks sticks. You'll notice on my Twitter feed that I if you follow me, that I put clown emojis on basically all of this stuff, like Anthony Fauci clown, he's not a black woman. Clown clowns all the way down, because the stuff they're saying is not attached to reality. It's like a circus. It's you know, it's all under the big top. And uh, it's just kind of a meme I'm playing with and people got really upset when I attatched it to herves. Do you have any concern that Twitter cancels at some point, because that is your biggest, biggest, you know, megaphone you've got. That's true. They've they've shot across my bow twice once for something. I I think that they were wrong, but at least I know what I did, and it can kind of see they're made up reasons and clown world for it, uh once with no explanation. However, so where I got suspended for you know, twelve or twenty four hours or whatever, so they haven't taken any serious action against me with that particular clown thing. I got a number of emails from Twitter saying we investigated you and we found no violation and so well, okay, apparently you're still allowed to call public figures clown on Twitter. Awesome. We're talking with James Lindsay and unfortunately we got we gotta let him go. I could talk to you absolutely all day long, and the main reason I wanted to have you on is to push people to follow you on Twitter to read your books, because you're you're the best voice out there I think on all this craziness, and I really appreciate the effort do you put on on a regular basis, Hey, I appreciate that. Thank you so much, James Lindsay, Ladies and gentlemen, and we'll link him at our website Armstrong and getty dot com, and I'll I tweet him out all the time.