Earth Day started 50 years ago, and if you judge the event by society’s environmental conscientiousness, it’s been a success. Today, people are increasingly considering the environmental impact of products they buy. That’s true not just of cars and clothing, but also what we eat.
A survey last year found that 37% of consumers look for sustainability claims on food. Food marketers have taken note, increasing the number of food products with eco claims.
But buyers should beware: Not all food sustainability claims are true.
Where is the Beef?
Perhaps the single most common claim you’ll hear today about food is that meat is bad for the environment. Ads for plant-based fake meat commonly assert this. These claims are parroted by animal rights activists who–naturally–don’t like people eating meat. You can even find a few documentaries that try to paint meat as eco-unfriendly.
But is eating meat actually bad for the environment? No.
A frequently cited statistic is that 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from animal agriculture. But what you may not know is that this figure doesn’t apply to the US, where we have the most advanced modern agricultural technology in the world.
American agriculture has become economically and environmentally more efficient over time. For instance, we need 60% fewer cows yet produce twice as much milk as we did in the 1930s.
The EPA tracks greenhouse gas emissions and reports them by sector. According to the EPA, all of our agriculture only accounts for about 9% of total US greenhouse gas emissions, while animal agriculture accounts for only about 4%. That’s why researchers estimate that if the entire U.S. population went vegan tomorrow, it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by less than 3%. That also means, as an individual, giving up meat will have zero impact on curbing climate change.
Fake Meat Doesn’t Lower Emissions
It turns out that producing plant-based fake meats actually produces the same amount of emissions as producing chicken. And cell-cultured meat–that is, grown from cells in a lab setting–has five times the emissions of regular chicken.
Why? Because while making fake meat may use less land than raising chickens, it uses much more electricity to power all those factories that make fake meat.
“Organic” Feels Good
“Organic” is another term that many consumers look for, thinking organic food is better for the environment and their health. Once again, reality is different from perception.
A recent study of organic vs. modern agriculture on different factors such as land use, climate, over-fertilization, and energy use. Modern farming was superior on land use while organic farming was better on chemicals.Overall, the two compared equally on most factors.
(Most consumers also believe that organic food is more nutritious. But once again, scientific research has found there’s no real difference.)
Food Waste Is Important
The biggest environmental impact associated with food isn’t about the food we eat. It is actually about food we don’t eat.
The USDA estimates that up to one-third of food produced in the country is thrown away. Whether that’s meat or fake meat, or organic produce or non-organic produce, that food took resources to grow and fuel to transport. And all of those resources go to waste when you don’t finish your meal or throw out the leftovers.
What’s the lesson?
Eat what you want and ignore the marketing claims. In the big picture,
anyone’s diet has a small footprint. But whatever you choose to eat,
make sure you don’t let it go to waste.
As described in the instruction document released today, the six largest U.S. banks will analyze the impact of scenarios for both physical and transition risks related to climate change on specific assets in their portfolios. To support the exercise’s goals of deepening understanding of climate risk-management practices and building capacity to identify, measure, monitor, and manage climate-related financial risks, the Board will gather qualitative and quantitative information over the course of the pilot, including details on governance and risk management practices, measurement methodologies, risk metrics, data challenges, and lessons learned.
“The Fed has narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks – to ensure that banks understand and manage their material risks, including the financial risks from climate change,” Vice Chair for Supervision Michael S. Barr said. “The exercise we are launching today will advance the ability of supervisors and banks to analyze and manage emerging climate-related financial risks.”
This year the Fed is forcing big banks to produce complex reports on their climate vulnerability in a “pilot project” that is sure to expand and might lead to lending restrictions. A query of the Fed’s listing of recent publications returns hundreds of research papers, press releases and policy statements related to climate change.
With all this effort, one might hope the Fed would produce high-quality research on climate change. But I took a close look at two Fed studies on the subject and found shockingly poor analysis. These studies on the effect of temperature on U.S. and world economic growth are cited without a hint of skepticism and widely lavished with media attention.
Recently I published a critique of a study from the Federal Reserve Boardclaiming that a year of above-normal temperatures in countries around the world makes economic contraction more likely. The original study used sophisticated statistical techniques but failed to report that its primary finding was statistically insignificant. My request to the study’s author for computer code to reproduce the paper’s results went unanswered.
I managed to write the code from scratch and exactly replicate the results, allowing me to run additional tests that the author didn’t report. The author’s primary result—that temperature has a bigger effect in bad than in good economic times—turned out to be statistically insignificant. Additional analysis showed that there is no reliable effect of temperature on growth at all.
There are two main reasons why the Fed study appeared at first to show a statistically significant effect of temperatures on economic growth. First, each country in the sample had equal weight in the analysis.China had the same weight as St. Vincent though China’s population is 13,000 times as large. Equal weighting means that some small countries with unusual histories of economic growth greatly influenced the results.
The paper’s results disappeared when countries like Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea—which had economic catastrophes and bonanzas unrelated to climate change—were omitted. Omitting similar countries representing less than 1% of world gross domestic product was enough to eliminate the paper’s result.
The only thing to learn from the Fed’s research is that climate propaganda is spreading fast, and when it comes to climate, academic economists are no more deserving of trust than are other supposed scientists and experts. The Fed’s time would be better spent on more urgent matters, like improving its botched regulation of the banking system.
The author, David Barker, has taught economics and finance at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago.
Hoot of the Day
♦ The Fed cannot even model US Treasuries. Its stress-free test would have failed to identify the imploded Silicon Valley Bank as a problem
♦ Yet, for political reasons, the Fed is now attempting to stress test the weather.
♦ To get the desired results, the Fed study gave St. Vincent, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea the same weight as China and the United States.
♦ The Fed should throw this nonsense in the garbage and stress test commercial real estate, interest rates, accelerated QT, and things that it has clearly neglected.
Mish: One of my readers accurately commented, that “Modeling the impact of bad climate policy would be more useful.” Of course that presumes the Fed has any idea just how bad, and inflationary, our climate policy is.
Bruce Abramson explains in his Real Clear Wire article Pity the Child. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Tyler Durden
A Review of “Stolen Youth” by Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel
About a decade ago, toddler son in tow, I found myself in a playground for the first time in 35 years. It was not what I remembered. The colors were far more vibrant. Plastic had replaced wood and metal. Sharp edges had been rounded, chains and hinges softened. Cushioned ground had replaced the asphalt.
What struck me most, however, was that it was full of adults. It seemed that every child had a minder within arms length. I was perplexed. I knew why I was there—my son was still a bit wobbly. Many of the kids appeared to be about 6-8 years old. Why did they need minders?
I soon learned the two cardinal rules of contemporary playgrounds (or at the very least, playgrounds on Manhattan’s Upper West Side): One, your child may not get hurt. Two, your child may not hurt another child. Violate the first rule, and you’re negligent. Violate the second and you’re antisocial—borderline criminal. Also, and just for good measure, “hurt” is given the broadest possible definition to include potentially hurtful language.
The stories about fragile college snowflakes crumbling in the face
of microaggressions and provocative ideas suddenly made sense.
Children raised in a cocoon will demand similar protection
when they begin to think of themselves as adults.
That initial shock was hardly the end of my education. I soon learned the corollary to the playground rules: Today’s children never learn to engage in disintermediated play. The natural, if often rough, society of 3-to-5 years olds never gets to form. When my son hit that age, I was stunned to have other kids approach me to report that he was being annoying. When I was a child, running to a parent was the equivalent of a 911 call. We might have approached with a message like “your kid is bleeding” or “we think he broke something,” but annoying? That was like calling the Fire Department because you couldn’t find the remote.
It became clear to me that we had destroyed childhood. While the “advances” in parenting of the past fifty years undoubtedly contained some gems, the net effect was a disaster. As with so much else in life, human instincts honed over the millennia were far superior to decades of expert advice.
Then things got really bad. Though few recognized it as such at the time, the decision to shutter much of the world in March 2020 unraveled the entire socioeconomic fabric of modern life. As anyone who has ever studied or worked with any complex system can confirm, nothing ever restarts quite as it was before a shutdown.
American society was hardly the exception. The hibernation derailed every pre-existing positive trend and accelerated all the negative. The restart, unfolding in uneven fits-and-starts over the course of two years, introduced an entirely new sociology. Though its precise contours are still taking shape, a few things are clear: Woke reigns supreme and children are expendable.
While most Americans are still digesting the changes, a few brave souls flew into action. Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz moved quickly to chronicle the attacks on our children, ring the alarm, and call for action.
Stolen Youth is a disturbing read.
Every page bristles with details of the attack on our children.
The combined impact of these attacks is clear: There is a large, organized, well-funded movement, drawing together media, professional organizations, teachers unions, corporations, universities, and government officials committed to destroying and indoctrinating our children. Its methods are brutal and clear: It promotes psychological instability and fragility. It teaches children to ignore their emerging common sense, their parents, and timeless ethics in favor of expert pronouncements and trendy social constructs. It deconstructs language to detach negative words from their underlying concepts then reapplies them to entirely different concepts consistent with indoctrination.
The authors divvied up the chapters, perhaps each claiming the atrocities they dread the most. Markowicz, an émigré from the former Soviet Union, opens the book with a reminder of what it means to live in a totalitarian society. Spoiler alert: We’re heading there fast.
She then moves into the various ways that the woke weaponized Covid—both the virus and the shutdowns—to convince our children that they are little more than viral vectors safe only in isolation. Mandel picks up that baton a few chapters later in her broader consideration of woke pediatrics.
That discussion incorporates one of the book’s most chilling quotes. It comes courtesy of the Federation of State Medical Boards which, on July 29, 2021, threatened disciplinary action, “including the suspension or revocation of the medical licenses” of any physician who shared any information or opinion about Covid vaccines that was not “factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus-driven.”
Those first two qualifiers are unobjectionable. The third gives the game away. What does it mean for something to be “consensus-driven?” Consensus among who, and for how long? Those of us who’ve been paying attention know how it works. A few well-connected prestigious and/or governmental “experts” determine what they would like everyone to believe. They then condition funding, promotion, and even licensure on acceptance. Unsurprisingly, given the choice between: (a) Promoting the emerging consensus, keeping your job, and securing funding; or (b) Retaining integrity, getting fired, and becoming unemployable, most professionals choose (a).
Voila! Instant overwhelming consensus,
which must now be imposed, obeyed, and unquestioned.
The medical establishment, long known for its imperious nature, was unusually open in tipping its hand. As the authors show, however, its practice is hardly novel. Consensus-driven expertise emanating from schools, libraries, media, and entertainment teaches our colorblind children to develop a hyperfocus on race and sexualizes the pre-sexual. The woke teach our children to become racist and sexually confused, blame traditional American mores for racism and repression, and claim the mantle of expertise needed to “fix” the problem.
The entire process is designed to keep today’s kids off-balance.
Covid taught them to fear normal social interactions. Critical Race Theory teaches them to distrust their neighbors. Gender theory teaches them to question their bodies. The woke package combines to externalize our children’s problems and teaches them to see themselves as victims. It preaches looking outward to assign blame rather than looking inward to find solutions.
As Markowicz and Mandel put the pieces together, it becomes clear that the woke juggernaut cannot be contained by critiquing its views of race and gender. Those are but two of the more prominent avenues of attack in an all-out assault. The woke are operating in a total moral inversion: compassion for some hypothetical, distant member of society and contempt for those closest to us. It’s a perfect prescription for totalitarian tyranny: Absolute trust in the emanations of disembodied expert authority and disrespect for parental authority. The woke are teaching our children to despise and disrespect family, God, nation, and even their own biology.
Why target the children?First, as Markowicz notes in her chapter on “Child Soldiers,” because kids are useful. Put a disturbed child—say, Greta Thunberg—in front of your movement, and only the very callous will attack. That tactic is hardly new—there’s a reason we’ve long talked about “poster children”—though the woke do seem to have turned it into an art form. Second, because childhood is when we shape our beliefs and our tastes.
Convince a generation that it’s fragile, off-balance, angry, victimized, and oppressed,
and very few of its members will ever break out.
Stolen Youth is one of the clearest articulations yet of the woke drive to destroy American society and Western Civilization. That it’s starting with our children is hardly novel for an ideological movement. The question we must now face is whether we can alert enough adults to the danger to repel it before it is truly too late.
Stolen Youth rings the alarm bells. I only hope that they’re loud enough
to have the desired—and necessary—effect.
Below in italics with my bolds is the excerpted Introduction and at the end a link to the entire pdf. H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute.
This is not a religious book in the sense of its being meant to convey a religious message or for people of a particular religion—it is a book containing three journalistic reports about a religion, or a sort of religion, that emerged from and then subsumed the environmental movement. Today, that movement is a kind of cult and not a political movement at all, if it ever was one. Those who profess one of the Abrahamic faiths have a religious interest in idolatry because it perverts religion and leads religion to inhuman ends—Norman Podhoretz, in his very interesting book The Prophets, describes the ancient Israelite “war on idolatry” as a matter that is not exclusively otherworldly but very much rooted in a campaign against the ghastly social practices associated with idolatry: cannibalism, child sacrifice, etc.
And if idolatry makes a hash of religion, it is, if anything, even more of a menace to the practice of politics, which is my subject.
I suspect that some of you may object to the term idolatry here, or to the description of the environmental movement as a kind of cult—that some readers may regard these as rhetorical excesses. All that I have to say in my defense is that this is a factual and literal account of what I have seen and heard in reporting about the environmental movement, in the actual explicit religious ceremonies that were conducted in and around the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, in my conversations with such figures as the “voluntary human extinction” activist who calls himself Les U. Knight, in my conversations with those who object to clean and economical nuclear power on grounds that are, even when not accompanied by pseudo- religious Gaia rhetoric, fundamentally metaphysical. What is at work is a kind of sophomoric, cartoon puritanism that regards modernity—and, in particular, the extent and pattern of consumption in the modern developed world— as sinful. One need not squint too much to recognize very old Christian (or even Stoic) aversion to “luxury” in these denunciations.
Indeed, we need only take the true believers at their word. As scientists have been searching for economic, abundant, and environmentally responsible sources of energy to support human flourishing, the environmentalists have resisted and abominated these efforts: Amory Lovins of Friends of the Earth declared that “it would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy”—and please note there the inclusion of clean—while Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich famously opined that “giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Professor Ehrlich gives up the game with “at this point”—meaning, of course, in our fallen, postlapsarian state.
It was, of course, inevitable that Professor Ehrlich— who has been spectacularly wrong about practically every prediction he has made in his lucrative career as a secular, Malthusian prophet—should be back in the news at the same time scientists were announcing a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research. Professor Ehrlich, recently seen on 60 Minutes (which still exists!) and elsewhere, downplays the recent advance in fusion on the grounds that current patterns of human living are “unsustainable.” Professor Ehrlich has been giving the same interview for decade and decades—advances in energy production will not matter because “the world will have long since succumbed to overpopulation, famine,” and other ills, as he insisted in an interview published by the Los Angeles Times—in 1989— not long after insisting that the United Kingdom would be ravished by famine no later than the year 2000.
End-of- days stories have long been a staple of religions and cults of many different kinds and characters, of course, and the environmental movement is fundamentally eschatological in its orientation, by turns utopian and apocalyptic. It is at the moment more apocalyptic than utopian, but that is a reflection of a broader trend in our politics and our society. The Western world, in particular, the English-speaking Western world, has been fervently praying for its own demise for a generation. Future historians will note the prevalence of zombie-apocalypse stories in our time—The Walking Dead has recently concluded its main series but will be supplemented by numerous spinoffs, while one of the most intensely anticipated television series of 2023 is The Last of Us, an adaptation of a video game that is based on yet another variation of the zombie-apocalypse theme—but beyond zombie-apocalypse stories we have alien-invasion- apocalypse stories, and, precisely to our point here, eco-apocalypse stories by the dozen (The Day After Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, Waterworld, Interstellar, Wall-E).
What these stories have in common is not the particular source of anxiety, though environmental concerns are interlaced into many stories: The Last of Us is a zombie story, but the zombies are produced by global warming, which allows a particular fungus to colonize and control human brains. (One shared article of faith that is present not only in zombie movies but also from campy, anencephalic or macrocephalic aliens of Mars Attacks! and Independence Day—the enemy is the brain.) What they have in common, rather, is a two-sided fascination with social collapse, both the negative aspects—the inevitable suffering—and the positive—the possibility of a return to innocence and a shared born-against experience that retroactively sanctifies that suffering.
Which is to say, what we have here is the old mythological cycle of suffering, death,and rebirth told at the social level rather than at the level of individual hero or martyr.
None of this is to say that there are not real environmental challenges in front of us. These are real, and they deserve serious attention. But here in the third decade of the benighted 21st century, the environmental movement is not about that. It is an apocalyptic-fantasy cult. Of course there are people who think of themselves as adherents of that movement who are doing real work in science and policy, in much the same way that the alchemists and magicians of the medieval period laid the foundations for much of modern science, including a great deal of chemistry and astronomy. The two phenomena are by no means mutually exclusive.
But if you want to understand why there has been so frustratingly little meaningful progress in environmental policy in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union in the past 30 years or so, then understanding the cultic character of the environmental movement is essential. The real environmental-policy debate should be, not to put too fine a point on it, boring, though by no means simple—a largely technical matter of understanding tradeoffs and drawing up policies that attempt to balance competing goods (environmental, recreational, economic, social, etc.) and putting those policies to the test of democratic accountability. None of this is easy in a connected and global world—prohibit the use of coal in the United States and you might end up increasing worldwide coal-related greenhouse-gas emissions as relatively dirty power plants in China and India take up the slack in consumption—but none of it ought to present a Manichean conflict, either.
Demagoguery is an old and obvious factor in all political discourse, but there is at work here something deeper than mere political opportunism, and that is the invariable human need, sometimes subtly realized, to rewrite complex stories as simple stories, replacing real-world complexity with the anaesthetizing simplicity of heroes and villains. We have been here before, of course. Consider Robert Wiebe’s anthropology of bureaucracy in the Progressive Era in The Search for Order:
The sanguine followers of the bureaucratic way constructed their world on a comfortable set of assumptions. While they shaded many of the old moral absolutes, they still thought in terms of normal and abnormal. Rationality and peace, decent living conditions and equal opportunity, they considered “natural”; passion and violence, slums and deprivation, were “unnatural.” Knowledge, they were convinced, was power, specifically the power to guide men into the future. Consequently, these hopeful people also exposed themselves to the shock of bloody catastrophe. In contrast to the predetermined stages of the idealists, however, bureaucratic thought had made indeterminate process central to its approach. Presupposing the unexpected, its adherents were most resilient just where the idealists were most brittle.
Of course, the assumptions described by Wiebe are precisely backward: It is deprivation and violence that are natural, peace and plenty that are unnatural.
As Thomas Sowell famously observed, poverty has no causes— prosperity has causes, while poverty is the natural state of human affairs, present and effective ex nihilo. But the conflation of the natural and the desirable is always with us: Like most Americans, I treasure our national parks and have spent many enjoyable days in them, but it is difficult to think of any environment anywhere on Earth that is less natural than Yellowstone, the highly artificial environment that is the product of planning and policy, for instance in the programmatic introduction of grey wolves and other species.
To subscribe to a genuinely natural view of the world and man’s place in it, as opposed to a quasi-religious environmental dualism, is to understand man as integral part of nature, in which case you might think of Midtown Manhattan as a less artificial and more organic environment than Yellowstone, its features and patterns considerably more spontaneous than what one finds in a diligently managed nature preserve. If, on the other hand, you understand the natural world and the wild places in it principally as a paradisiac spiritual counterpoint to the fallen state of man as represented in our urban and technological civilization, then you cannot make any kind of reasonable tradeoff calculation when it comes to, say, drilling for gas in the Arctic, which must be regarded not as a poor policy choice but as a profanation, a “violation” of that which is “pristine” and “sacred”—words that one commonly hears applied to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to many less exalted swamps and swathes of tundra.
For myself, what I want is a boring environmental policy, one that is, in Wiebe’s terms, less brittle and more resilient, one that in “presupposing the unexpected” is able to account for developments that complicate our environmental policies by enmeshing them in other policies that they also complicate. For example, try putting yourself in the position of a responsible policy analyst in 1968, when Ehrlich’s Population Bomb hit the shelves. In 1968, it would have been very difficult to imagine the subsequent transformation of China into a modern economic power—and even more difficult to imagine that this development would be not entirely and unqualifiedly good for the world, given the resources it has put at the disposal of what today must be regarded as history’s most encompassing and sophisticated police state. (So far.)
But instead of a political discourse that can take such developments on their own terms and put them into a context of competing goods and tradeoffs, we end up instead with a parade of Great Satans.
For the environmental cultists, the Great Satan is Exxon; for certain self-described nationalists in the United States, the Great Satan is the Chinese Communist Party; the strangely durable Marxists and the neo-nationalists on the Right have, with utter predictability, converged on their choice of Great Satans, these being transnational “elites.” And so the religious appetite is satisfied through politics, including, in a particularly intense way, through environmental politics. To take one example that seems very obvious to me, the United States and much of the rest of the world, including the developing world, would be much better off on practically every applicable metric if there were wider and more sophisticated deployment of nuclear power, which is not a panacea by any means, but is a reliable, economical, and effectively zero-emissions way to produce electricity at utility scale. The case against nuclear power might be described, in generous terms, as “moral” or “pseudo-religious” but might be described more accurately as “superstitious.” But maybe that kind of metaphysical primitivism is to be expected from a political movement whose economic agenda includes a great deal of physical primitivism as well: In the neo-Neolithic future of their dreams, there won’t be much to do in the evenings except bark at the moon, so one may as well try to imbue it with some transcendent meaning.
The environment matters. So do property rights, trade, development, agriculture, medicine, energy, the rule of law, democracy, and the uncountable other constituent elements of human flourishing. A reasonable environmental policy can work with that, but a spiritualized and cultic environmental policy cannot. I hope these reports will help to make it clear just how real the choice between these two kinds of environmentalism is.
All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessonsoffered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.
1. Elites’ Hypocrisy
The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.
Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.
2. Data Challenged Models
A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”
Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:
♦ In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action. ♦ In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting. ♦ In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” ♦ Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.
3. No Dissent Allowed
Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.
Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.
4. We Want You to Panic
Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.
Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.”
5. Only Trust Science Authorities
A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.
6. Government Empowers Itself
A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.
Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful.
Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising, and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.
7. Self-Inflicted Damage
Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.
Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.
8. Elites Thrive at Others’ Expense
Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.
In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.
Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?
9. Global Bureaucrats Gut National Sovereignty
The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation.
In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful
vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.
Based on a non-fiction book of the same name by historian Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far is a 1977 epic war film depicting Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied operation using paratroopers to secure three bridges over three key rivers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II. The phrase has come to mean “a long shot”, or an overly ambitious plan.
America’s institutions currently have been invaded increasingly by Progressive Jihadists, i.e. true believers in global socialist ideology under the guise of rainbow flags and DIE protocols. So far, it has been a cultural warfare, with educational and governmental institutions surrendering with token, or no resistance. However, since the Washington D.C. takeover by the prog regime (so-called Biden administration) more often firearms are involved, as symbolized by the military perimeter around the US Capital lest anyone object to the new governance.
More than 25,000 troops from across the country were dispatched to the US capital on January 13, 2021.
Some of this move to kinetic warfare was evident in the 2020 Antifa insurrections in places like Portland and Seattle. Guns are also used by criminals in blue cities like Chicago, NYC and SF. As well the fentanyl trade at the Southern US border is empowered by guns. But a new bridge was just crossed in Nashville, Tennessee, when a transgender soldier fired 150 bullets inside a Christian school, murdering six innocents, including three children, two teachers and the principal. That terrorist event followed Tennessee laws enacted in March protecting children against drag shows and from gender transition surgery and treatments.
Another bridge was crossed with the Trumped-up indictment of the former President in NYC. It signifies that the Justice System has also been taken over and put into service of the prog ideology. Like Sharia law imposed anywhere in the world that Islam prevails, now US Federal Justice distinguishes between true believers (the Ummah) who enjoy full citizenship rights, versus the infidels (Kafir) who, if allowed to co-exist at all, are an underclass with few privileges other than working in service of their overlords. In Manhattan, as in other blue states, people who are the right skin color, gender, or sexual preference are not prosecuted for felonies like stealing, vandalism, battery, or even murder, while the Kafir-in-Chief, Donald Trump (“Rich old white guy”–DA Bragg) is arrested on imaginary charges.
How far can they go with these perversions against American heritage and ideals? One answer comes from Arkansas where Brandon Meeks writes Middle Americansat American Mind. Go Brandon! Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
What might it actually look like to represent the real interests and values of most voters?
One reason I rarely venture into the realm of American politics is because I am not in the habit of going places I do not belong, much less where I am not wanted. And I am as out of place among both Republicans and Democrats as a country ham at a synagogue.
I see no value in hitching my wagon to an elephant with neither sense of direction nor recollection of where he came from. Neither do I welcome the prospect of hooking myself to an ass that can’t plow in a straight line and tries to bite me at every turn.
I’d wager that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. In fact, if there exist out there any politicians with the pie-eyed hope of unifying the country behind a saner program than what’s currently on offer, they might do well to think about how people like me see the world.
I can’t remember the last time I trusted a politician of any stripe. Most are so crooked that when they die, the undertaker will have to screw them into the ground with a torque wrench. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them, blue and red, should be handed a pink slip and told to get further and smell better.
One party prides itself on being “conservative,” while having nothing to conserve but the madness of five minutes ago. The other gloats about being “progressive,” which seems to mean careening off the edge of a cliff like a gaggle of over-eager lemmings. Neither sounds very appealing to me.
I was born into a family of traditionalist Southern Democrats—a breed of political animal that has gone the way of the Dodo Bird in my lifetime. I live in a red state that was once a blue state. But this is because the Democratic Party sold its soul to the Devil and now worships at the blackened altar of Molech. It certainly isn’t because the folks in Toad Suck, Arkansas finally got around to reading Hayek or started subscribing to National Review.
I know this isn’t true everywhere, but in some ways my state
still feels like it is peopled by that extinct species of Democrat.
But then again, I don’t live in America: I live in Arkansas.
When I was growing up, folks in our family went to church on Sundays, to work on Mondays, and to union meetings on Thursdays. They believed in the sacred nature of the traditional family, the supremacy of the Christian religion and its outworking in society, the inviolability of the First Amendment, and the necessity of the Second Amendment to protect all of that.
We were taught that honorable folks worked hard to earn a living and that the government should only help if and when they couldn’t. Republicans were encouraging everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but we understood that it’s mighty hard to do that when the straps rotted off months ago during a long hard winter. Even so, the business of government was to give those people a leg up—never a hand out.
In much of the South, the New Deal was viewed as a late answer to the Reconstruction question. At the time, half-measures laden with problems seemed better than none. Folks too poor to make it could at least get by on surplus commodities. Those too proud to stand in line at the courthouse or the national guard armory for peanut butter and cheese could slip over and get it from a relative with a little less shame.
While this describes many in general, it describes my great-grandmother in particular. “We weren’t really all that political,” she said, “but we were hungry, and Roosevelt was sending the bread.” “That’s not ‘conservative,’” some will say. Perhaps not. But if it hadn’t been for such measures, my family wouldn’t have been “conserved” at all.
Does this make me “fiscally liberal”? Not necessarily. I seem to be for less ludicrous spending than either major party. For instance, I am not in favor of bailing out banksters, funding sexual re-education seminars with public money at either the state or local level, or footing the bill for foreign wars. In other words: I don’t belong.
So for politicians or interest groups hoping to earn the allegiance of anyone like me: don’t ask me to do anything “for my party.” Tell me to do it for my family. Am I “patriotic”? Who knows. I figure my patriotism is like bursitis: it flares up a couple times a year, usually in hot weather. I love my home and try to love my neighbor, but if you’re asking if I think we need to spread the gospel of Exxon Mobil to the four corners of the world, then no. If that’s what patriotism really is then I’m the erstwhile Queen of the Hottentots.
I haven’t watched the news (except for the local weather) since 2020. If you put a gun to my head and said, “Name six popular political pundits or I’m pulling the trigger,” there’s a good chance I’d be conversing with St. Peter in a matter of minutes. Somehow I suspect that being under-informed after that fashion is preferable to being ill-informed by partisan hacks.
But there’s one thing about which I am certain—whatever it is that Washington is doing now isn’t working. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to know beans from apple butter about how to run a country, but both seem adept at being able to run one into the ground.
What few proposals I have to offer seem both simple and impossible.
Republicans should concern themselves with protecting our republic and the laws and lives which constitute it, rather than faceless corporations, technocracies, or some divinized notion of The Market. Democrats should heed once again the voices of all the people, eschewing exotic ideological experiments in order to embrace the totality of Americans from sea to shining sea.
Though I am not altogether sanguine about the future of party politics (at least the major parties as they exist at present), I haven’t yet stocked the basement with dry beans and powdered milk against an impending Armageddon. I still have faith in ordinary Americans. I am hoping against hope that common, workaday men and women will assert their right to live in reality and insist on a politics to match. For one thing, there are so many of us. For another thing, God loves us.
There is enough discontent and hunger at the local level to make me feel that a constituency exists to support a program of patriotism and virtue against the venal manias of our elite uniparty. Any national leader who can give that constituency the drive and direction they need will have my vote. If such a leader should prove himself, we have a fighting chance.
As it stands, I belong to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. I belong to God, my family, and to the Arkansas dirt forever mingled with my own blood. But without any trace of irony, I think it is precisely that kind of sentiment that can make a person a decent American. By the grace of God, there might still be quite a lot of us out there.
More unimaginable news reported by Tabia Lee at Compact: A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. Thanks to Tabia Lee for revealing how toxic this ideology and its adherents have become.
This month, I was fired from my position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif.—a position I had held for two years. This wasn’t an unexpected development. From the beginning, my colleagues and supervisors had made clear their opposition to the approach I brought to the job. Although I was able to advance some positive initiatives, I did so in the face of constant obstruction.
What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.
My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice,
a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to
unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled.
This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.
From the beginning, efforts to obstruct my work were framed in terms that might seem bizarre to those outside certain academic spaces. For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slide titled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes.
As I attended more events and spoke with more people, I realized that the institutional redefinition of familiar terms wasn’t limited to “white supremacy.” Race, racism, equality, and equity, I discovered, meant different things to my coworkers and supervising dean than they did to me. One of my officemates displayed a graphic of apples dropping to the ground from a tree, with the explanation that “equity means everybody gets some of the apples”; my officemates and supervising dean praised him for this “accurate definition.” When I pointed out that this definition seemed to focus solely on equality of outcomes, without any attention to equality of opportunity or power, it was made clear this perspective wasn’t welcome. “Equity” and “equality,” for my colleagues, were separate and even opposed concepts, and as one of them told me, the aspiration to equality was “a thing of the past.”
Having recognized these differences, I attempted to use them as starting points for dialogue. In the workshops I led, I sought to make space for people to share their own definitions of various concepts and then to identify common points of reference that we could rally around, even as we acknowledged and accepted differences of perspective. Without editorializing, I gave participants time to notice the differences between the perspectives. We then came together and shared things that these two seemingly divergent philosophies had in common. The aim was to enable a conversation between two perspectives that I already saw at play in divisions on campus about how to approach issues of race.
When I was evaluated as part of the tenure process, some of my evaluators objected to such efforts to identify points of commonality between divergent viewpoints. They also objected to such views being presented at all. One evaluator, who described herself as a “third-wave antiracist,” aligning her with Kendi’s philosophy, made clear that the way I had presented her worldview was deeply offensive. Another evaluator objected to my presentation of “dangerous ideas” drawn from the scholarship of Sheena Mason, whose theory of “racelessness” presents race as something that can be overcome.
A dogmatic understanding of social justice shaped organizational and hiring practices.
Anything short of lockstep adherence to critical social justice was impermissible.
“Criticism” was only supposed to go in one direction. Contextualizing my colleagues’ views and comparing them to other approaches to the same issues, much less criticizing them, was “dangerous”; my supposed failure to “accept criticism” was, simply put, a refusal to accept without question the dogmas these colleagues saw as beyond criticism.
The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”
No White Crackers Wanted Here.
This sort of dynamic, where single individuals present themselves as speaking for entire groups, is part and parcel of the critical-social-justice approach. It allows individuals to present their ideological viewpoints as unassailable, since they supposedly represent the experience of the entire identity group to which they belong. Hence, any criticism can be framed as an attack on the group.
For those within the critical-social-justice-ideological complex, asking questions, encouraging other people to ask questions, and considering multiple perspectives—all of these things, which should be central to academic work, are an existential danger. The advocates of critical social justice emphasize oppression and tribalistic identity, and believe that a just society must ensure equality of outcomes; this is in contrast to a classical social-justice approach, which focuses on freedom and individuality, understands knowledge as objective and tied to agency and free will, and believes that a just society emphasizes equality of opportunity. The monoculture of critical social justice needs to suppress this alternative worldview and insulate itself from criticism so its advocates can maintain their dominant position. Protection of orthodoxy supersedes all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.
If certain ideologues have their way, compelled speech will become an even more common aspect of university life. Faculty and staff will be obligated to declare their gender pronouns and to use gender-neutral terms like “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” even as many members of the groups in question view these terms as expressions of cultural and linguistic imperialism. Soon enough, we may also be formally required to start all classes and meetings with land acknowledgments, regardless of how empty a gesture this may seem to living members of tribal nations. [Note: What is a Land Acknowledgement? These are increasingly common ritual comments at post-secondary institutions. Often spoken at the beginning of a public event, they are a formal way of recognizing the Indigenous stewards of a specific territory, their ancestors, and communities.]
As my experience shows, questioning the reigning orthodoxies does carry many risks.But the alternative is worse. Authoritarian ideologies advance through a reliance on intimidation and the compliance of the majority, which cowers in silence—instead of speaking up. Engaging in civil discourse and ensuring that multiple perspectives are presented are crucial, if we want to preserve the components of education that ideologues are seeking to destroy.
The poll was conducted by Senate Opportunity Fund, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) organization, to test public opinion regarding congressional bill H.R.1, called The Lower Energy Costs Act. A national sample of 800 likely voters were contacted by phone during March 21 to 23, 2023, with questions regarding a number of public policy issues. Responses are shown by self-identified political leanings, and by participants located in battleground states. Note that the final question showed about 80% approval by all cohorts.
Above is the podcast video discussion between Jordan Peterson and Vivek Ramaswamy. Below I provide excerpts transcribed from the closed captions, with a fewed added images.
JP: I’m very happy today to talk with Vivek Ramaswamy who has just announced his candidacy for the American presidency and is going to well hopefully change the political landscape in doing so. Vivek is an American Business leader and New York Times best-selling author of Woke Inc–Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, along with his second book Nation of Victims–Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he often recounts the sage advice from his father:” If you’re going to stand out, then you might as well be outstanding.” This set the course for his life: a nationally ranked tennis player, valedictorian of his high school, Saint Xavier. He went on to graduate Summa Laude in biology from Harvard and then received his JD from Yale law school. While working at a hedge fund, he then started a biotech company Roivant Sciences, where he oversaw the development of five drugs that went on to become FDA-approved.
In 2022, he founded Strive, an Ohio-based asset management firm that directly competes with asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and others, who use the money of everyday citizens to advance environmental and social agendas that many citizens and capital owners disagree with.
That’s a far more important issue than you might think and we’re going to discuss that a lot as we proceed through our conversation today.
Vivek Ramaswamy who I’m talking to today, is running for president, which seems to be quite the preposterous thing to do for anyone I would say. This next 2024 election is going to be some interesting contest. As far as I can tell, we’re not going to have seen anything like it. The fact that you threw your hat in the ring I think is part and parcel of the whole show, so let’s start by just exploring why it is that you decided to do this and what is it that you hope to accomplish by making this run.
VR: So you know some of the journey I’ve been on over the last few years. I think what led me to the doorstep: I’ve been addressing for the last few years this merger of state power and corporate power that together do what neither can do on its own. And and part of me long believed that the Republican Party in the United States is behind by 40 years, reciting slogans they memorized in 1980. When the real threat to Liberty today is different. So I’ve taken on the woke industrial complex in America through the books I’ve written, through traveling the country. Most recently taking on the ESG Movement by starting Strive last year.
Where my headspace was, I did not think I was going into politics. I wanted to actually avoid the limiting shackles of partisan politics because it just felt so constraining. I thought of running for the U.S Senate I decided not to do that. I said no, I want to do this independently as an independent voice, thought leader, author. I successfully built a biotech company before then putting those skills to work starting strive. That was where my exclusive Focus was going to be, and I’m proud to say I think we are already having major impact on the market through my work at strive, and even just through putting a spotlight on the problem.
But to be really honest about this, and this was the realization that dawned on me after you know years into that Journey, is that it does take Two to Tango. And what I mean by that is the top-down version of this problem: the cynical exploitation of corporate power and state power to shackle the human spirit is only half the issue. Because that only works if there’s a culture that’s really willing to buy it up; it only works if there’s a population that’s buying up what they’re selling. I think that requires every one of us to look deeply in the mirror and ask ourselves: What is it about us as a people that makes us want to bend the knee to the powers that be, that wants us to embrace these new secular religions. And that wasn’t a problem that I could address even through Market action in taking on BlackRock or the ESG forces in capital markets. That’s really what dawned on me: There was no better way to drive a cultural Revival in America than to successfully (and successfully is an important part of this) to successfully run for president.
The whole premise of my campaign pain is to define a national identity, answer the question of what it means to be an American in the year 2023. I do not believe we have a good answer to that question in this country. I’m on a mission to deliver an answer to that question. My basic premise is that our absence of that answer is the black hole at the center of our nation’s soul. That is what allows wokism and gender ideology and climatism and covidism to fill the void. These are secular religions that prey on that vacuum. If we can fill that vacuum with say a vision of national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes these other agendas to irrelevance, that is how we win. And I believe that there isn’t a candidate in this field who’s quite up to that challenge. I’m not sure I am either but I do believe that I’m going to give it the best shot that we have, which is why I’m running.
JP: Well you brought up a lot of very complex issues in that description of your motives. I’m going to walk through them one by one to unpack them for everybody. You said the Republicans are 40 years behind, I think that’s probably also true of organizations like the UN as well. And 40 years is a long time given how much has changed just in the last 10 years. It mean that the average person who’s watching and listening to this is also behind and isn’t even aware of of what acronyms like ESG mean or why they should really give a damn.
I just interviewed the CEO of the national organization for State Treasurers organization. It’s a financial officers organization, now there’s 28 States pushing hard back against the the ESG movement. Your description of your motives opened with a statement about a kind of fascist collusion and what we’re seeing is an amalgam of power that’s corporate (which of course the left Wingers complain about), that’s government (which the right Wingers complain about) and then of media (which everybody complains about and rightly so).
And there’s this idea that seems to be reigning in the upper echelons of the power structures that that we’re facing an apocalyptic emergency of such magnitude (whatever the emergency happens to be) that they should be conveniently ceded all the power. One of the fronts upon which that battle is being fought is the ESG movement, So would you walk through that for everyone just to bring them up to date?
VR: Absolutely. This has been something of my obsession over the last several years, not just as a commentator but as a doer and as an entrepreneur too. The ESG movement stands for environmental, social and governance factors. It’s designed to sound boring for a reason My general rule of thumb is: If it sounds like a three-letter acronym that bores you, that’s a good sign you should be paying more attention. This whole game is about using private power, using Capital markets to accomplish through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution.
So I’ll tell you what it is and then I’ll walk through the history of how we got here because that’s also pretty important too. Essentially what the ESG movement does to use the money of everyday citizens, Americans but Canadians too, Australians and Western Europeans. It uses the money of everyday citizens to invest in companies and to vote their shares in ways that advance one-sided progressive agendas. Environmental and social agendas that most of those people do not agree with, that most people did not know were actually being advanced with their own money. And which don’t advance the financial best interests of most people whose money is actually used.
So what does that mean? Think about yourself saving in a retirement account or a 401k account or a brokerage account. You think that the person who’s managing that money is exclusively looking after your best financial interests. It turns out they’re not; they’re also looking after advancing these other environmental and social goals. Who are these institutions? They’re Asset Management firms like BlackRock or State Street or Vanguard or Invesco or countless others that have signed a pledge to say they’re going to align all of their underlying companies with the goals of the Paris climate Accords; with Net Zero standards by 2050; with modern diversity equity and inclusion standards. And those three or four firms alone manage about 20 trillion dollars or a bit more. That’s more than the US GDP right now in the hands of three to four financial institutions.
But they’re not using their own money to do it, they’re using the money of probably most listeners to this exchange right now. There’s a good chance that people watching this have their money in their retirement accounts or their brokerage accounts being used to tell companies like Apple to adopt racial equity audits that Apple’s board initially did not want to adopt. To tell companies like Chevron to adopt scope 3 emissions caps that Chevron did not want to adopt. And that most people watching this probably didn’t want to force on Chevron either, but their money was used to do it anyway. That’s what this ESG movement is all about.
How did we get here is actually a really important question. A lot of this began with two big Milestones seeing the supercharging of this ESG movement in our economy and in capital markets. The first one I think of as the big bang that really set the whole thing into motion was the 2008 financial crisis. What happened in the 08 financial crisis? By the way I had a front row seat to this because I got my first job in New York at an elite hedge fund in the fall of 2007. The fund I worked at got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short. It was my first job out of college this is this is fun stuff for me, right. A lot of people lost a lot of money on Wall Street. I didn’t have any money so it didn’t matter to me; it was more of a learning experience, which was a pretty rich one.
So from a front row seat, what happened in the aftermath of the 08 crisis was Republicans (it’s worth remembering this) Republicans in this country bailed out the big Banks. I don’t know what your view is, Dr Peterson. I view that as a major mistake. it’s a cardinal sin the Bush Administration and Hank Paulson a CEO and alumnus of Goldman Sachs used public taxpayer funds to bail out Goldman Sachs while letting his competitors fail. This was crony capitalism all the way down and the left actually had a point. In this country Occupy Wall Street was born and what they said is: Look if you’re going to play that crony capitalist game, then we’re going to play our game. We’re just going to take money from your wealthy corporate fat cat pockets and redistribute it to poor people. To help poor people because that’s what we on the far left want to do on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
But right around that time there was there was a fissure in the left-wing movement in this country. There was the birth of this new, let’s call it the woke left. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president of the United States. There were a lot of cultural currents in the U.S that said: wait a minute, the real problem isn’t economic Injustice or poverty, it’s really racial Injustice and misogyny and bigotry, and by the way climate change. This is supposed to be Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.
This actually presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street to say: okay guys we’ll make a deal with you. We will use our corporate power, use our money (really your money) to applaud diversity and inclusion, to put token minorities on corporate boards, to Muse about this racially disparate impact of climate change. From the mountaintops of Davos, after flying there in a private jet, we’ll do all of these things. But we don’t do it for free: we expect the new Left to look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact.
And so they defanged Occupy Wall Street. Most people don’t even remember what was Occupy Wall Street. It went by the wayside, and that’s how the birth of this new woke industrial or ESG industrial complex was born. Where Wall Street said, if you can’t beat us join us and that’s exactly what happened. So that was the first thing.
JP: Do you think it was that conscious or do you think that it was the consequence of a thousand micro decisions?
VR: Okay it was the latter. I mean this was not a smoke-filled room where there was some sort of meeting in the back of Goldman Sachs boardroom on 85 Broad Street in lower Manhattan. This isn’t an ethical conspiracy theory this is an emergent reality right. Certainly that was the first Catalyst and so what began as a challenge to the system of stakeholder capitalism and ESG slowly became ossified as the system. And there’s a lot of forces behind it, the rise of passive index funds played a big role and that’s a discussion I can get into another another time or maybe later in this discussion.
Then there were two big catalysts that came out, one was in 2016 and one in 2018. In 2016 of course it was that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. This created a seismic shock wave across The Establishment class both in capital markets as well as the linkage between business and politics. When they said, okay wait a minute: this game may not be played the way it’s supposed to be going forward. If political leaders like Donald Trump are going to break the system, then we The Business Leaders need to exercise our authority to step into the void instead. And then they were vindicated or so they thought when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate Accords in 2018. Not many people realize this was a big event that threw kerosene on this ESG storm. Even the people who are complaining about the ESG movement need to better understand where it came from. This was a big deal that then caused Calpers, the California teachers and pension retirement system, and other big allocators, the people who give BlackRock and State Street your money. They started to say that if political leaders are not going to step up to the occasion to address the existential challenges we face like global climate change, then Business Leaders need to do it instead. Larry Fink the CEO of BlackRock started saying similar things, that we have to earn our social license to operate.
Really what caused this ESG thing to spread like wildfire was that event of pulling out of the Paris climate Accords.
JP: With that you’ve tied the corporate response to say Occupy Wall Street at the end of the 2008 financial crisis with the climate catastrophe. So let’s talk about the climate catastrophe for a moment and also to find stakeholder capitalism. Because The Narrative insisted upon by the woke left but also by these capitalists is that the emergency that confronts us on the environmental Frontier is so cataclysmic that any and all emergency measures are not only thoroughly Justified but morally required. Now I have a problem with that theory, psychologically as well as technically. Psychologically I’ve been trying to figure out how you separate the wheat from the chaff on the leadership front, especially in the face of an emergency, because real emergencies do occur from time to time. Here’s a rule of thumb everyone can try out for themselves: if the emergency you’re confronting terrifies you so badly that you’re paralyzed into immobility or tempted to aggregate all the power to yourself and become a tyrant, then you have defined yourself as insufficient for the job.
You should be able to maintain a calm head regardless of the impending emergency because there’s going to be emergencies and if you become a tyrant during an emergency, then you’re a tyrant and and not the solution. That’s the psychological issue: even if there is an emergency we shouldn’t be aggregating power into an elite.
Then there’s a second element too which is: What bloody emergency? I’ve talked a lot to Bjorn Lomberg for example and many other people as informed as Lomberg. And there’s no evidence even in the IPCC reports themselves that climate change is first of all entirely man-made because it’s not. And second even if it is there is no evidence whatsoever the in IPCC reports that there’s going to be some apocalyptic turning point in the next 50 years that justifies Untold trillions of panic dollars being spent, while we simultaneously destabilize our power grids and increase the cost of electricity by up to five times and make ourselves, at least in Europe much more reliant on Russia. And also throw poor people into poverty and risk the fossil fuel infrastructure that feeds half the planet. Because people actually also don’t understand that ammonia is made out of fossil fuel, and ammonia fertilizer feeds four billion people.
So anyways you said 2008 Wall Street is guilty because of the bailouts the lefties pushed them hard on the ethical front, and rightly so they decide to turn to ESG. But then that’s also Amplified by this sense of apocalyptic climate doom. So what’s your formulation of the environmental challenge that confronts us now. How do you construe that?
VR: I have more to say about the ESG story but I need to pause on what you just said. Some really good stuff in there. I’m gonna go one step further than you and draw a linkage between the psychological critique and the technical critique because they’re related. The first thing you said was a humble and Powerful point: even if there is some sort of existential apocalyptic issue you should not want to entrust the people who are going to then wield tyrannical Force to address it, not to mention the fact that the technical issue is itself a completely artificial one. It is grounded on false premises that deserve to be called out. I can call those out, Bjorn Lundberg, Alex Epstein others can call them out. We can go into all the details of that but the point is that those two critiques that you just offered are spot on as they are are deeply linked.
You were almost too charitable in that actually the psychological account explains the fact the entire climate agenda actually has nothing to do with the climate. It’s not that this was a tyrannical response to a threat–it was the creation of an artificial threat to exercise tyrannical power itself. Okay it’s a religious cult and so I’ve said numerous times, I think the climate religion has about as much to do with the climate as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with Christ, which is to say nothing at all. It was really just about power and dominion and Punishment all the way down and I can I can basically prove to you in a short amount of time.
To avoid going on for hours I’ll just pick a couple of tidbits. So one is if you really care about carbon emissions as the end-all, be-all, first of all you’d be delineating which kind of carbon emissions matter. I don’t subscribe to the tenets of this religion but I think it’s worth understanding a religion even if you’re not a practitioner. Even if you subscribe to this religion, there’s a difference between methane leakage and carbon dioxide. Well methane leakage is far worse in places like Russia and China so then it should be a mystery that you want to shift carbon production from the United States, where you tell companies like Exxon and Chevron to stop producing, to places like China.
Like Petro China on the other side of the world, and by the way this is exactly what the ESG movement is doing. So BlackRock is like an apostle of this Spanish inquisition-style Church. BlackRock forces companies like Exxon and Chevron to drop oil production to meet Net Zero standards by 2050. Yet literally some of the same companies buying up those same projects on the other side of the planet are Petro China of which BlackRock is a large shareholder, without telling Petro China to adopt any of those same emissions caps. This is nuts if you think that you care about reducing carbon emissions, if you subscribe to this crazy religion methane is 80 times worse for global warming then carbon dioxide so it’s not even net neutral it’s worse. So that’s the first breadcrumb that there’s something else going on here
The second breadcrumb is that the same movement certainly it’s Apostles in the ESG movement that are so hostile to carbon emissions is also hostile to the best known form of carbon free energy production known to mankind which is nuclear energy. That’s the second little breadcrumb that there’s something else going on here. The problem with nuclear energy in a nutshell is that nuclear energy might be too good at solving the alleged clean energy problem, such that it doesn’t solve for the actual agenda, which is delivering Equity between the West, America in particular, and the rest of the world to catch up. That’s really what this club is delivering. And delivering that power that we’ve been talking about of course.
JP: Those are the times, so really what’s going on those are two stunning points. And I want to lay them out uh philosophically for a moment just so people get the full import of what this means.
So let’s say that we do buy the propositions of the of what Vivek has been calling the climate religion (we’ll get back to that term later). If we do buy in then we make the assumption that the fundamental existential crisis facing us is one of pollution. And that that can be reduced in complexity to carbon dioxide emission and maybe methane and a couple of other greenhouse gases.
Now I don’t accept any of that and I know you don’t either, but we’ll give the devil his due. If that’s actually the driving Factor then the fundamental of actions and perceptions should be directed towards minimizing carbon dioxide output. But the first point you make is we’re making it very difficult for Western countries to use coal and to explore for fossil fuels, while we’re making it very easy for China to do so. And since we all share the same atmosphere and China and other terribly governed countries have way worse environmental regulations. All we’re doing is substituting a relatively clean fossil fuel for relatively filthy fossil fuel. And you added that additional decoration which: Isn’t it also convenient that companies like Black Rock happen to own huge shares in exactly the Chinese companies whose interests they’re promoting.
That means by the measurement standards of The Advocates of the climate religion themselves, their policies are not only a failure they’re actually counterproductive, just like they have been in Germany in the UK. That’s a subtle mystery on the fossil fuel front, but then you have the blatant mystery of the second thing you pointed to. In fact we can pretty much solve the bloody carbon dioxide problem overnight with nuclear. Yes we have small nuclear plants now and we have nuclear plants that are way safer than they were 50 years ago, and that could be built at a modular level. So why do you oppose them?
Which brings us into the religious issue. Because this is not so much a pro Planet agenda designed to bring about harmony with the natural world, as it is an attempt to simultaneously destabilize the entire industrial infrastructure. This is in accordance with the claim that all human activity is nothing but cancerous growth on the planet, combined with this underground desire to accrue all tyrannical power into centralized Elite hands.
So with that let’s talk about your insisting a number of times that the climate narrative is a religious or quasi-religious structure. I’ve got some thoughts about that which I’ll share eventually, but I would like you to lay out why you use that terminology specifically.
VR: Yes, I mean that in two senses: worst is the sense in which it is a religious institution gone awry. And the second is, it fills the psychological need for religion and God in the everyday person. On the first of those, as you were laying out the philosophical framing of it, I was actually reminded of one of my favorite stories about Christ. It actually came from not the Bible but from fyodor dostoyevsky’s book the Brothers karamazov in his chapter entitled The Grand Inquisitor. And it tells the story of Christ coming back to Earth during the 15th or 16th century or whatever in Seville, Spain. He’s walking the streets performing Miracles when the grand Inquisitor leading the Spanish Inquisition spots him on the street and has him arrested. The whole climax of the chapter is the dialogue between Christ and the grand Inquisitor. And the grand Inquisitor tells Christ: “Look we the church don’t need you here
Anymore, you are supposed to be a symbol that helps us do our work, but your presence here actually stops us from getting our work done. And he sentences Christ to execution the next morning.
Swap in Climate for Christ, which is really what’s happening in the psychological minds of people who are buying this religion. The climate’s just an excuse, and in fact once you get into a discussion about actually addressing carbon emissions, say with nuclear energy they get very worried. So they’re sentencing nuclear energy to death because that’s their Messiah and their savior right. You said you wanted to actually get rid of carbon emissions, well would you welcome the second coming of Christ the second coming of the climate solution of nuclear energy. No no they sentence it to death because as the grand Inquisitor told Christ in that story your presence here actually impedes our work. So in a certain sense it has a religious quality in terms of the church that protects its own turf even from the very God that it tells parishioners to worship.
Now the second question though is: Why are the parishioners worshiping at all? And I think this gets to the heart in a weird way of my candidacy for president of the United States. I just think we’re in the middle of this identity crisis where we are so hungry for for purpose and meaning and identity as Americans. At this moment it’s probably true also for much of the western world beyond America. But we’re so hungry for a cause at a moment in our history when the things that used to fill that void– faith is one of them, faith in God is a big one, but patriotism is also a big one, national identity is big, family is also pretty big in this category, even hard work actually.
These are sources of identity, sources of pride, sources of grounding. They’re grounded in truth and as human beings we’re like blind bats lost in some cave in an abyss and we send out these sonar signals for our echolocation of identity. We can’t see where we are but we deduce where we are by bouncing off the signals we send and get them back as sources of Truth. Okay I send a signal out and family is one source of identity I get back, God is another source of identity I get back, my nation is anothersource of identity, my hard work the things I create in the world. From these things we deduce our identity and it tells us even though we’re blind where we are lost in that Abyss. But when those things disappear, we send out that signal and then nothing comes back and then we’re lost and so then we start grasping at artificial sources of that identity: racial identity, gender identity.
From where do you think this bizarre gender ideology arose–from climate disaster, catastrophism- that’s a source of identity too. Climate instead of Christ, and so it’s no accident that we see all of these secular religions arise at the same time. Why do we see wokism at the same time as we see radical gender ideology, racial racism, as climatism as covidism. It’s a symptom of that deeper Abyss that we’re lost in.
JP: Okay so now you broke this out in two ways. I’m going to walk through your argument. You said there’s an offer on hand from above so to speak from the ESG and climate ideologues but there’s also corresponding need in the population that’s associated with the kind of emptiness. then you also talked about the brothers karamazov and the notion of of the grand inquisitors. So I want to address all three of those points
The first point is that the developmental psychologist John Piaget pointed out that the last stage of cognitive development as far as he was concerned was adolescent messianism. He meant that people between the ages of 16 to 21, when they’re they’re undergoing their last great neural pruning by the way, they sort of settle into their adult identities. And the way that human beings catalyze their adult identity is by identifying with something beyond themselves. And so in a in the archaic situation that would be with tribe for example, but also with the traditions of the tribe rather than just the people that are there presently. Now they’ll be initiated into the ancient traditions of the tribe and there’s a Messianic urge that comes along with that. Which would be expressed in modern terms as something like the desire of young people to to save the planet. So that’s a true psychological hunger.
What’s being offered by the radical left to address that Messianic need is something like it’s very very simple, and this is part of the problem, well to be Christ to be the Messiah you have to face down the apocalypse right, that’s the last judgment, the apocalypse that currently confronts us is environmental you know. And environmental apocalypses have confronted us throughout the entire history of mankind. So we have a an ecological, a psychological predisposition to be alerted to Environmental apocalypse. So the environmental apocalypse is a consequence of carbon carbon is a consequence of excess industrial output, if you adopt the radical left ideology which is anti-industrial. Then you fulfill your Messianic mission now, that’s on the positive side.
The negative side is you can also do it with absolutely no effort on your part, because all you have to do is oppose the right things. And it also lifts the moral burden from your shoulders because instead of having to undergo a psychological transformation that would that would involve confrontation of all of your own inadequacies, let’s say, to put yourself on the right path spiritually. You can just demonize whoever happens to be convenient for demonization. And for the radical left it would be anything to do with the industrial or corporate world. You can put all the sins on the scapegoat’s shoulders and you’re done with them. So that’s an expanded vision of that messionism; it’s this overwhelmingly simple solution to a very complex moral problem all right.
Now on the identity front you laid out a bunch of issues that I think are extremely relevant. People are struggling with their identities and they’re also being offered a one idea solution that fits all problems. The solution is your identity is nothing other than your group identity; it’s your sexual proclivity, which is a pretty pathetic identity; it’s your ethnicity, it’s your race, it’s some group identity which also takes the responsibility off of you by the way.
Now you might say, well what constitutes a valid identity in contrast to that? And you’ve already pointed to a number of those things. So this is where I think the psychological Community has failed to a large degree on this front. We’re the heirs of a liberal Protestant tradition socially and psychologically, and we believe that our identities are fundamentally individual and subjective. But that’s actually not true because your identity is nested. Let’s think of nestings okay because we could build a hierarchy that’s a proper hierarchy conceptually. And this is this is a good way of formulating what actually constitutes a robust identity. This is where you’d get signal for those forays that you’re putting out, those signals exactly.
So look a person has to be bound into an intimate relationship and everybody needs and wants that. That’s the first level of social integration, and then the the couple has to be integrated within a family. And then the family within a neighborhood, and the neighborhood within a community, and the community within a town, within the state, within a nation. And then the nation into something approximating a web of international agreements to minimally keep the peace. That’s a subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility. And the Old Testament book Exodus, part of what that book addresses is what forms of governance are necessary as an alternative to tyranny. So single top-down tyranny is the Pharaoh, or the desert which is you know completely scattered individuality. And the technical answer is the subsidiary hierarchy of responsibility. That means you know as an individual you have a responsibility as a couple, as a family member, as a community member and all of those. Then you can think of identity as the belonging in all of those hierarchical positions. And you can think of psychological Health not as something that occurs in in an interior space, but as the harmony between all of those subsidiary levels. So it’s an emergent property of Harmony and not something that’s carried internally.
VR: This is this is beautiful stuff actually. When you just describe the desert versus Pharaoh Dynamic out there, something clicked for me. It’s a killer set of ideas even in a much more practical sense. For even something as mundane as a political race here, it clicks for me why I’m doing this. You and I and others like us have complained about how the left has actually preyed on that vacuum by at least offering a substantive even if false, fundamentally artificial set of identities to fill that void. But I’m sick of complaining about that without critiquing the conservative movement. Where’s the conservative movement in filling its that identity with an alternative. We can do all the hand wringing we want, but over the last 10 years where’s our leadership? Where’s the leadership of for example conservative pro-american movement, pro-family movement or whatever you want to call it. These guys have been asleep at the switch while they’ve been watching the other side take advantage of this and that. And it’s worse than that if you’re participating in it in some ways. It’s the conservatives in the UK who’ve been putting forward the Net Zero agenda. So it’s especially in Western Europe, but even some wings of the Republican Party in the U.S their meek response is effectively participating in this. This is where the analogy hit me when you’re talking about the desert and Pharaoh. We as a people are lost in the desert and yet we’re criticizing that phenomenon by still critiquing Pharaoh.
A lot of the Grassroots movement that I’m leading already and hoping to lead is we’re already in the desert, we’re still lost, though we’re not going to find the Promised Land by still criticizing pharaoh. On the contrary the longer you’re lost, the more likely the people are going to say that I need to go back and bend the knee to Pharaoh. Actually I want to be ruled by Pharaoh, that’s exactly what’s happening.
You know this analogy is related to a weird place; I’m not going to claim to be a Moses figure or anything that’s beyond any of our pay grade. But when I laid out in this room the video where we launched this presidential campaign my goal is to create a new American Dream for the 21st century. Okay FDR had his new deal; I don’t agree with a lot of it, but FDR had his new deal, JFK had his new frontier. Where’s the conservative vision of where we’re going; that’s what I call the new dream. the new American Dream. It’s not just about money, it’s about Reviving our conviction in our purpose as Citizens. Does that mean unapologetic pursuit of Excellence? I can talk about what that means but but that’s my vision. Maybe another candidate can offer theirs, and if this Republican primary ended up being a competition of those ideas and Visions, then our country’s heading into a good place. But that’s what’s missing.
JP: Okay so let’s let’s talk about the conservative issue here. If you look at what temperamental factors predict political allegiance, the literature on that’s quite clear. If you’re higher in openness, if you’re higher creativity and you’re low in conscientiousness, you tend to move to the radical left. If you’re high in conscientiousness and low in openness, you tend to move towards the conservative front. And there’s a there’s a constant dialogue between those extremes because the creative people are necessary to make changes, when changes are necessary, but dangerous otherwise. And the conservative types are very good at maintaining functional tradition, but are intransigent in the face of necessary change. And so free speech is actually the mechanism by which that conundrum is mediated because people who can engage in free speech can keep arguing about which traditions need to be carefully modified.
Here’s the problem that it presents on the conservative front. By definition conservatives are not Visionaries. Visionaries tend to tilt in the more radical Direction because they have radical Visions you know. And so the conservatives are always pushed back into a reactionary standpoint. Almost always they object vociferously to the excesses of the left. But because they’re not Visionary they can’t extract from their tradition an image of the promised land for the future now.
I’ve been working with an organization in the UK that’s trying to do something that’s analogous to what you’re doing, to to lay out something approximating a compelling Vision on the conservative side. I’ll talk about one part of it because I think it strikes right to the core of what we’re discussing. So we spent a lot of time talking about families because so you have the individual then you have the individual in a couple but the next order of subsidiary organization is family. Then you might ask yourself: well what is a family now? The answer on the inclusive left is: a family is any old organization of any sort. But that’s that’s so blurry that it leaves people with no guidelines. They don’t know what to do because if you can do anything, you have no direction.
Well we could say a family fundamentally is a unit that produces children and if you’re not willing to buy that definition, then you could go develop your own definition of family. But it seems to me that there’s something core about laying the groundwork for the emergence and proper rearing of children that’s key to what constitutes a family. One of the corollaries of that is well if you’re going to have children you’re probably going to need to have a man and a woman involved otherwise it’s very difficult. That actually turns out to be relevant when you’re thinking about an ideal.
I talked to Dave Rubin about this for example. Reuben who’s conservative and gay is married to his his partner his husband Dave. And they went through the entire surrogacy route to have a couple of infants and it was very very very complicated both ethically, practically and financially. And they managed it so far, they have these two kids and I suspect they’ll do a perfectly good job of giving these kids a wonderful home. But they’re also incredibly financially well off, what would you say, privileged. Dave’s earned it, but they have the capital to make this non-standard solution a possibility, but it’s by no means replicable for the typical person. I mean the simplest way to have a child for the average person is to have man and a woman involved. And you can use technological intermediaries, but it can’t propagate easily that solution.
And so one of the extremely interesting things that’s emerged on the cognitive Neuroscience front recently was the same thing happening in the field of AI. It is the realization that at the center of all of our Concepts is an ideal that’s actually how we categorize. We categorize just like Plato initially hypothesized. We literally categorize in relationship to an implicit ideal. So to even use to even use the term family and for that to be meaningful, there has to be an ideal and the organization that I’ve started working with and helping put together has made it part of our formal propositional landscape that the ideal has to be something like stable long-term monogamous heterosexual child-centered couples.
Now the problem with the ideal this is what the postmodernists have shaken their fists about forever, especially the French like Deridda and Foucault. The problem with the ideal is that it marginalizes, because the more distant you are from the ideal the less you can fit in. So the question then arises: What do you do with the margin? That question is so old that that was even there in biblical times by the way; the problem of The Fringe or the margin. And the answer has to be something like: Look everybody falls short of the ideal like even a married stable married heterosexual couple. Lots of times during their say 30-year marriage they’re going to fight, they’re going to wish they were divorced, they’re going to wish they were with other partners. There might be Affairs lots of people end up divorced. There’s the vast majority of us will never realize the ideal, in fact none of us will in totality. But that doesn’t mean we should sacrifice the ideal; it means is we should put forth the ideal forthrightly, but allow the necessary space for deviation from the ideal so that everybody can move forward despite the fact that the ideal has to rule.
VR: It’s a great great framing I just want to jump in there for one second to draw even one further distinction if I may. First is there’s the sense in which each of us falls short of our ideals okay, both as individuals and even as a nation. I mean you could extrapolate this to the American level and you know take the critique of America as a nation is that America is hypocritical. It had a nation that set in motion, but there were slaves on day one, Ergo the ideals themselves are false. No, in fact hypocrisy is probably pretty good evidence that you have ideals. There’s no sense in which for example the Chinese Communist Party could be called hypocritical. You can’t be called hypocritical if you actually are measured against fundamentally nihilism at your core. So idealism and the existence of ideals makes hypocrisy possible. We should be grateful when we see hypocrisy because then we know we have two things: we have both ideals and we have something that is real. And something real never matches or rarely ever matches the ideals. So in a certain sense we should be Vindicated, we should feel reassured that we’re doing something right, because we have both ideals in reality.
And that’s just true at the individual level; anybody who’s in a married relationship knows this if they don’t admit it they’re lying to you or they’re lying to themselves, it’s just it’s just truth. I think that that is still distinct from a second question that you raised, also a good question which is I think what what and I’m a big fan of taking the best arguments we possibly can to understand the situation.
The marginal point is who’s at the outer end of the margin. I think some of this relates to not just a failure of an individual temporally over the course of a lifetime to depart from the ideal but some ways in which a certain person cannot themselves be part of the ideal ever. Because their genetics are real right the what brings us into this world is the gender, be it sexual orientation be it other attributes that that make one successful or not in a system that’s set up in a certain way. There is literally a reality of permanent marginalization for some even according to an ideally structured system.
And so I think it’s important to take that seriously but the problem with the modern radical left is it turns that exercise of interrogating the question of what we do at the margin and makes a whole new system out of it. What began as a challenge to the system on behalf of the marginalized becomes the new system that is the essence of the woke cancer. I actually didn’t mind it when it was an idea in in the halls of a liberal arts academy to think about, at least debate how it is we accommodate the people who are marginalized in a system that is still an ideal system. That’s an open conversation that at least under parameters of free speech which as you said is an intermediating mechanism between kind of the creative liberals and the conscientious conservatives. That’s great as long as we have Free Speech. The problem is when that challenge to the system becomes the new system, we’re then heading to a very different place than even the ideal that a pro-marginal would have argued for.
JP: What happened to Nicola sturgeon is a perfect example of that, the prime minister of Scotland who just resigned. Because here’s the problem with the Fringe. The ideal in the center is a Unity it’s a single thing, The Fringe is a multiplicity. And because it’s a multiplicity it can’t occupy the center without destroying the ideal which just brings the whole category to a to collapse. The Fringe Of The Fringe will destroy The Fringe. So we can’t do without the ideal even the Fringe defines itself in relation to the ideal in a dark sense.
Sometimes I think conservatives use this phrase right: they’ll come to eat their own. There’s a point to that but it’s low resolution. The essence of what’s going on is that once you’ve destroyed or invaded the ideal Itself, by definition being on the fringes is sort of nihilistic at its core. So at that point it’s a free-for-all.
You can see the feminist version of this too. Title IX women’s sports was because women are On The Fringe. Well, when that itself becomes the center of the story, just wait till the men become the women through the back door. That decimates the existence of women’s sports because funding the essence of it is gone if biological men are competing as women.
What’s happened right now is the obsession with The Fringe has eviscerated the ideal itself which leaves both those who espouse the ideals and even those who identified themselves as one time being a member of a fringe all worse off in the end. And that’s a failure of the conservative movement. We can blame the people on The Fringe for you know getting us there but they were just the agents and the pawns who moved it. It’s the role of the conservative movement to keep that structure intact. By not making a case for it, what happens in the evolution of time that ship has sailed, the structure itself is gone.
With this group that I’ve been working with in London we’ve also set forward a couple of other propositions. One is that if your policy requires compulsion or Force it’s at least sub-optimal. We’re trying to play an Invitational game. Imagine that on the Visionary Horizon your goal is to produce an image that’s so compelling that people of their own free Accord say: you know I’d be willing to sacrifice to that end.
VR: Because you can make a sacrifice if you know what you are sacrificing for. Actually this was a big part of my upbringing by immigrant parents from India. Hindu tradition came to this country part and parcel of parenting part and parcel of growing up as a kid in that household. The idea of sacrifice was woven into my upbringing; grandparents lived in the house because it was their duty to take care of their parents. That was just familial sacrifice needed to be made, sacrifices needed to be made to raise my brother and I to have the academic achievements that we did. The education didn’t happen in a vacuum it happened on the back of parents who actually said there’s more to life than just following your latest self-indulgence Yes these things can be done if you know what you’re sacrificing for.
It’s true too in the United States today. I’ve made the case to declare independence from China that’s a whole separate geopolitical discussion we can have why I think that’s important, why I think there’s an opportunity. It’s also very clear this will involve some measure of sacrifice. In fact if there’s some resistance I’m getting to declaring Independence from China, it’s actually coming from some Republicans who are unwilling to make that sacrifice. We’ve have become so addicted to buying cheap stuff, but again I say that we can make those sacrifices if we know what we are sacrificing for. So this idea of sacrifice is fundamental to this question of identity. Once you’re grounded in identity, you’re grounded in who you are, what sacrifice you might be willing to make is almost a litmus test for identity. if you have nothing for which you’re willing to make a sacrifice, it means your identity is vacant.
JP: You might ask well is there actually something in reality that’s worth sacrificing for and the answer is first of all you don’t have a choice generally. Because no matter what you do if you do something you’re sacrificing others things you might do. People might say I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want, sort of the ultimate in subjectivity. There’s an impulsiveness and pandering to whim associated with that. But that’s not really Freedom, but actually subjection to the rule by impulsive whims.
The reason you sacrifice the whims of childhood, that polytheistic state of motivational possession that characterizes childhood, the reason you sacrifice that to an integrated maturity is because the integrated maturity a constitutes an identity that will protect you from anxiety and provide you with hope but also unifies you across time and lays the preconditions for your social integration. Nothing about is arbitrary. So the question isn’t who is going to rule you, the question is what is it that I’m going to work towards allowing to rule me. And it’s either going to be my whims which means I’m subject to them, or it’s going to be some higher order state of integration that requires sacrifice and then that ties into this whole hierarchical identity.
VR: What’s missing in the conservative movement is this idea of the Revival of Duty and embracing Duty as a precondition for freedom. But it’s Duty that we actually autonomously opt into by way of our free choice and our Free Will. These things are not incompatible they’re not contradictory. The path to getting to this ideal, the structure of Ideal that we discussed before, ought to be a path that does not involve coercion or impinging on Free Will. You phrased it very politely sub-optimal is the word you used. I think it should be avoided is the way I would say it as a as a prospective policy maker and leader of the country.
So then you might ask yourself well what constitutes ordered Freedom. Well a game is ordered Freedom, a voluntary game is ordered freedom because you have a large landscape of choice but it’s dependent on principles. Those are the rules of the game and a game is a good analogy because people play games voluntarily. They want to play and they enjoy them. So if you set up social structure with a game like substructure, then people voluntarily hop aboard. Now the free market response to the problem of the margins is to produce a plethora of games and so that you might be marginal in one game or almost all games, but there may be some game that you’ll be Central because of your temperamental advantages.
So a free market solution to the problem of marginalization is something like the offering of a true diversity. If you’re only five foot two so you can’t play basketball you know, but you might be a damn good jockey. We have enough games so that people can trade on their idiosyncrasies. And you see this is an argument that free market types haven’t made to the diversity types. The reason you want a free market is to provide a diverse number of games so the marginalized can find a center diversity in our approach to diversity Itself by
You were talking about the level of individuals in the marginalized side and so I agree, that’s one form of approach to diversity. Here’s a different approach: diversity is diversity of institutional purpose. Let’s just take it in the realm of companies that’s the world I’ve lived in, Corporate America and capital markets. Each company ought to have a unique purpose and the problem with using a common three-letter acronym, from ESG to DEI to CSR to you know CCP; the problem with these three-letter acronyms is effectively they’re saying that, no you can’t have your own distinctive purpose. Everyone’s purpose must be common to advance environmental social and governance goals, diversity equity and inclusion goals. That’s a denial of diversity, it’s a lurking tyranny. If you’re really pro-diversity you should have that fall out of the structure that you and I discussed
What is your institutional purpose? If you run an institution you have one question: why do we exist period. Have a good answer to that question and then say what type of diversity you espouse that’s really just in service of advancing that institutional purpose. Different types of Institutions should want different kinds of diversity and and they should be transparent about what types of diversity they don’t want. I’ll give you one example that’s sort of funny. I’m a vegetarian okay I don’t eat meat because I believe it is in my tradition morally wrong to kill animals solely for culinary pleasure. There are conditions in which it would be fine to do it, but if it’s just for my culinary pleasure I’d rather not do it. I respect other people’s right to and and freedom to go in a different direction. But take the example of me working at a steakhouse. I would not make for a good employee at a steakhouse even if I would deliver the ever-prized form of diversity, seeing my diversity of appearance.
Your focus is on delivering excellent steak to a customer because the kind of diversity you want there should be in service of your purpose and so I think this this revival of the idea of purpose itself gives meaning to diversity itself and that’s whether that’s true in a company context or a national context.
There’s a version of what you described which also makes me think in a very different direction here about the response to catastrophe. Much of the social structure that we have created in absence of that purpose and vacuum; this might be a cycles of history thing less about psychology and more just about the nature of History. We create the conditions for that catastrophe whatever it might be and it might be that catastrophe itself may have to be the Catalyst for rediscovering what that sustained meaning was. In the future it may be that economic catastrophe, I think that we’re due for economic tough times in part for a lot of the difficult decisions we’ve made over the last 10 years amidst this vacuum of purpose.
JP: I’ve gone to 400 cities in the last four years lecturing about the sorts of things that we’re talking about today. There’s one point I make that always brings the audience no matter where it is to a dead silence, like absolutely pin drop dead silence. Here’s the argument: you need a sustaining meaning in your life. Sustaining means it will sustain you through catastrophe, enable you through pain and Terror. Now that can’t be happiness because happiness is absent in conditions of pain and Terror. So what is it?
I draw on my clinical it experience to answer that question. What do people have when they’re truly in the desert, when they’re abandoned and lost and in pain? Well they have the structure around them that they’d made sacrifices to produce. They have their partner, you know their their wife or their husband, they have their children and their parents and their siblings. They have their friends, they have their Community, they have this hierarchy of social structure around them that can sustain them if they made the proper sacrifices.
Then the question is: what is the nature of the sacrifice that’s necessary to make those bonds and the answer is well that’s the adoption of voluntary responsibility. This is something conservatives haven’t ever made explicit. The meaning that sustains you in tragedy is to be found through the voluntary adoption of responsibility.
And so you can respond to young people when they say: why should I grow up, I can just do whatever I want whenever I want. And that’s especially true if they happen to be wealthy and privileged. And the answer is: if you expend all that capital on Hedonism as soon as the storms come you’re Shipwrecked absolutely. There’ll be nothing left of you because there’s no Hedonism in hell. And what you will have there is whatever you’ve built responsibly, and there’s meaning in that People understand that immediately and it’s part of this alternative Vision to this fractured Hedonism that everyone is celebrating.
Matt Taibbi’s two latest “Twitter Files” drops revealed that Stanford played a direct role in this gross violation of online free speech. Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory(SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project “recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
The project succeeded in getting big tech companies to take down about 35% of the content they flagged. They reviewed content en masse from almost every major social media company: Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest were all monitored by SIO. The questionable censorship decisions by the group all seemed to go in one direction—shutting down the now-vindicated Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, while taking direct guidance from Anthony Fauci about the supposed falsehood of the lab leak theory.
In short, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project had countless people—mostly Stanford students—reporting millions of Twitter posts that didn’t comply with their standards. Even posts that were factually true faced censorship if they didn’t conform to the subjective whims of SIO officials.
The evidence points to a para-governmental fusion of universities,
social media companies,and the federal government,
all working to censor free speech.
We at the Review take Stanford’s actions to suppress speech very seriously. Stanford cannot be allowed to sweep this gross violation of fundamental freedoms under the rug. The University must answer for their actions.
It appears Stanford’s Virality Project took issues with anyone who was an enemy of the state’s, and more explicitly Fauci’s, narrative about the coronavirus and subsequent vaccines. Any posts that brought up the “lab leak” theory (now the primary COVID origin thesis), were dubbed by SIO as “keen to foment distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance and in American public health officials and institutions.” People who dared question the Fauci-manufactured ‘status quo’ narrative were censored. SIO even branded “reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway” and “natural immunity,” as troublesome violations of ‘disinformation’ policies.
If this is truly what the term ‘disinformation’ means, perhaps we should no longer define it in terms of what is and isn’t true. Instead when we hear the word we should think of it as anything that isn’t in the federal government’s formal narrative: thought crime. The Virality Project stated that because the post-vaccine death of a Virginia woman named Drene Keyes inspired “anti-vaccine” comments, it became a “disinformation” event. They warned against people “asking questions,” alleging it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” Doubting, or even just examining, the prevailing narratives on COVID got citizens repressed by a para-governmental entity.
The Stanford Internet Observatory and Project Virality wanted to cover that up—not because it wasn’t true… it was and they knew it. They covered up the truth because they wanted to preserve their narrative. The truth would “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci,” too much for SIO. When given the choice between truth and Fauci, Stanford chose Fauci.
Projects like SIO’s project Virality are deeply insidious and set
a dangerous precedent for the future of online discourse.
Stanford’s hand in them and the extent to which they censored important, relevant and true information is deeply disappointing and troubling. When an extra-governmental institution acts with impunity against the First Amendment rights of Americans and suppresses information that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, one might expect a dark and shady underground alliance of evil to be behind it. In 2023, it seems all roads lead to Palo Alto.
With free speech on campus recently under attack at the law school, the university censoring faculty that wouldn’t go along with the lockdown narrative, and now their role in censorship on social media, it is fair to question if the winds of freedom still blow at Stanford. It is up to the University to take concrete steps to reassert that freedom of speech is a bedrock principle.
Jack Hubbard reports at Real Clear Markets
Mish reports on the US Federal Reserve’s latest incompetence at his blog 
More unimaginable news reported by Tabia Lee at Compact: 
Science Matters 