00:04:38.560In the interest of overcoming disparities in regulating speech, a full-time bureaucracy is needed to enforce correct thought and action.
00:04:46.100I like that we're already resorting to, like, things that annoy me by pillar three.
00:04:50.040It's just like HR managers, the trainings we have to do.
00:04:54.260So I will give him some credit, I guess, for providing something of a concrete definition here.
00:04:59.800His book is mostly built around the idea that what like woke liberals believe is that any disparity between demographics must indicate discrimination, right?
00:05:11.980This is a very common argument from conservatives, though.
00:05:15.020I don't think I know anyone on the left, at least anyone serious, who actually believes this.
00:05:20.300It's also it's an interesting mirror to the conservative belief, which is that disparities must be caused by the inherent nature of those groups.
00:05:29.280That's the irony here is that he creates what I think is a straw man where he says liberals believe that every disparity is discrimination.
00:05:40.080Now, even if you believe that that's what liberals believe, you can say that's wrong without adopting his position, which is basically any disparity is justified and preexist and is the will of God.
00:05:53.560It's also going to be very funny noticing the parallels between this and Yasha Monk, who's like allegedly this kind of serious center left person.
00:06:01.560His definition of woke also had this like tripartite structure, like the three legs of the stool or whatever.
00:06:55.380He was adding gender in order to undermine its likelihood of passage.0.99
00:07:00.540Right. This is a famous like poison pill attempt.0.99
00:07:03.060Yeah. Hanania says the story of how sex discrimination became illegal and how the definition of discrimination changed over time tells us something fundamental about how the American system works.
00:07:13.200In the simplified version of constitutional law presented to schoolchildren, Congress passes bills, the executive branch enforces them, and courts interpret the law.
00:07:22.300But in the hands of bureaucrats, executive agencies, and judges, the text can take on a life of its own.
00:07:28.620Ooh, judges be out here doing interpretations.
00:07:31.620So I guess his whole point here is that this is an example of how something can become law without really reflecting the beliefs of society or maybe even the beliefs of legislators.
00:07:41.460The problem with this story is that it's kind of half myth, like Hanania and a lot of people make it seem like this was an accident.
00:07:49.100He says it was proposed as a joke and then just says, despite Representative Smith's intentions, the amendment passed, as did the Civil Rights Act, which like sort of leads to the question of why a joke amendment would pass.
00:08:00.880The answer is that when the amendment was proposed, Martha Griffiths, one of the few female representatives at the time, rallies support, convinces LBJ to support the amendment.
00:08:12.240They get all this momentum and then it becomes part of the bill.
00:08:15.280So the story is told on the left as sort of like a tale of hubris, right?
00:08:19.020I do love the idea of like this is so far out there.
00:08:21.920Pretty soon they're going to start saying that women are unequal in society too.
00:11:08.580I think it's instructive here to take a look at that Supreme Court case, Griggs.
00:11:12.520Ananya sort of quickly glosses over it.
00:11:15.280He just mentions that this company had an intelligence test as part of their employee
00:11:18.460evaluation process, but he leaves out some key details.
00:11:23.180Prior to the Civil Rights Act being passed, this company had an express policy forbidding
00:11:27.560black people from working in any positions other than manual labor.
00:11:30.880On July 2nd, 1965, they start requiring that anyone who wants to transfer out of the labor
00:11:37.920department to a more senior department take and pass two intelligence tests. The significance of
00:11:44.400July 2nd, 1965 is that that is the day that the Civil Rights Act went into effect. Okay. So
00:11:50.380Hanania wants to be like, look, they took this really well-meaning anti-discrimination law
00:11:55.540and they turned it on innocent companies who just wanted to hire good people.
00:11:59.280Right. And it's like, okay, but that's not what's happening here. Right. What's happening is that
00:12:03.900everyone in the country knows that racist companies are going to try to end run around
00:12:08.700the new laws to the best of their abilities by implementing various tests and so forth
00:12:13.340that look non-discriminatory on the surface, but are in fact designed to be discriminatory.
00:12:17.880So the Supreme Court basically says, if you implement a test like this as part of your
00:12:21.680hiring process, it can't be arbitrary.
00:12:24.380It needs to be like reasonably connected to the actual job.
00:12:27.900If you allow companies to just start coming up with creative ways to discriminate.
00:12:33.060Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They will inevitably succeed. Also, lawyer question, isn't the whole thing
00:12:38.740that like determining company intent is just very difficult? Yep. Whereas determining the outcome
00:12:45.760is pretty easy. There's multiple problems. One is that it's just hard to identify when someone is
00:12:51.060intentionally discriminating because people know not to say it out loud for the most part.
00:12:56.140And two, to some degree, it doesn't really matter. The outcome is the same, right?
00:12:59.720This reminds me of like an aunt of mine or great aunt or something who talked her son out of applying to medical school because she's like a white male getting into medical school these days.0.65
00:13:40.680You can't take this away from us, woke.
00:13:42.560So the second part of the argument against disparate impact laws is that this is all contrary to the will of Congress.
00:13:50.440They never intended for the law to be used so broadly.
00:13:54.300This, again, very big theme throughout the book.
00:13:56.720He says, with a few exceptions, a bureaucratic and legal elite made most of the major decisions regarding what discrimination actually meant, whether the state should be in the business of regulating dating and humor in the workplace and whether and how major institutions classify people according to ancestry.
00:14:13.260OK, there was a lot of back and forth about the meaning of the law until the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which Congress passed and officially made disparate impact part of the law, which like makes this whole argument fall apart because he's Ben's page after page talking about how this isn't really what Congress actually wanted.
00:14:32.800No, Congress passed a law saying this is what they wanted.
00:14:51.520We should listen to the founders unless they wanted woke shit.0.99
00:14:53.920We should look to the past unless it was woke.0.99
00:14:56.640So that was an Anya spiel about disparate impact and discrimination law.
00:15:00.740And I was sort of like, is this just going to be like a rehash of like big picture conservative arguments against discrimination laws?
00:15:08.040Yeah, I'm a little worried about how borderline reasonable he sounds, or at least like in keeping with boilerplate conservative orthodoxy.
00:15:15.520He's not deviating particularly far from like the Republican Party platform.
00:15:20.240Yeah, give me the calipers, Peter. I want the word brain pan to appear in the next five to seven minutes.
00:15:25.040What's interesting is that he doesn't veer into, like, express racism as much as he reveals himself as someone who doesn't have normal opinions about what human life should be like.
00:15:43.620This is the most bizarre portion of the book because his vision of what a good workplace looks like is so detached from the opinions of a normal person that it's like it's hard to parse.
00:15:57.020So throughout the book, he consistently argues basically that workplaces used to be like cool collegial spaces where everyone could be friends and joke around.
00:16:07.440But now because of harassment laws, you can't even tell jokes anymore.0.99
00:16:12.140You can't even try to fuck your coworker.1.00
00:16:14.520You can't use the word sugar tits at meetings.0.99
00:16:17.180His basic argument here is the same as it is with discrimination laws.
00:16:21.860But then courts and bureaucrats have like steadily expanded the definition of harassment to the point where it's unworkable and ridiculous.
00:16:29.640So to give you a basic understanding of federal harassment law, we're talking about hostile work environment claims.
00:16:36.620And under the law, someone's conduct in the workplace is harassment only if it is severe and pervasive.
00:16:43.100Right. This is why all these anecdotes of like, I said a colleague's hair looked nice.
00:16:46.920And the next thing, you know, I heard from her lawyer.0.99
00:16:49.640That's why all those stories are bullshit and they never check out.0.99
00:16:53.000Because there's no way any court would determine this is an environment.
00:16:55.840But it's a great opportunity for bad faith arguments from conservatives, because when you sue for this, you, of course, would list out every incident, right? Some of which in isolation might not look very severe, right? They might look very minor. So for many years, conservatives who don't like these laws have cherry picked out the most like inoffensive examples from these cases and held them up as proof that the whole system has gone too far.
00:22:22.120It's like, yeah, no, it's just very straightforwardly racist to do this about Japanese people.
00:22:28.100Like, I don't know how to explain to you.
00:22:30.300So Hanania points out that originally sexual harassment law primarily prohibited quid pro quo harassment, basically asking for sexual favors.
00:22:39.900But over the years, it evolved to the point where we are banning, quote, practically any behavior or speech potentially offensive to women.
00:22:48.400The evidence he gives for this is that, quote, offensive language and pornography can constitute a hostile workplace, even if not targeted at any particular employee.
00:23:00.900Oh, so I can just have like porn posters in my cubicle?0.93
00:23:03.880I guess he wants us to think that this is all ridiculous.0.71
00:23:05.900Like, I can't even I can't even watch untargeted porn at work anymore.0.98
00:23:12.420I love the weird lawyer brain thing, too, of being like, well, it's not porn directed at you.
00:23:17.580Like, I'm watching bondage porn, and Marie isn't even into bondage.
00:23:21.600Your Honor, yeah, I was blasting Pornhub all day, but it wasn't at Marie.1.00
00:23:28.280He's referring to a specific case, which I looked up, and it's a workplace where several men consistently referred to female customers as a, quote, fucking bitch or fucking whore.1.00
00:23:39.980There were conversations about the bodies of female colleagues, conversations about masturbation and sexual experiences, consistent sexual jokes, sexually explicit music being played.0.99
00:24:00.820I love the idea of going around my job and asking everybody what kind of porn they watch so that I can make sure that I'm watching like the generic stuff at my desk.
00:24:09.760If you don't want to watch porn, don't work at AutoZone.
00:24:13.260There is one more case that he mentions that I want to discuss.
00:24:17.440I'll send you this in two parts because Zoom is forcing me to.
00:24:20.980I love that you've been hobbspilled on like every single time they do these sort of stripped of context little anecdotes that are like one sentence long.
00:33:15.260What counts as a disability is constantly in dispute,
00:33:18.820particularly when it comes to psychological conditions without clear physiological markers.
00:33:22.940An entire area of law has developed, for instance, focusing on issues such as when and under what conditions employers must accommodate alcoholism.
00:33:31.180Questions in this regard include what separates an individual who drinks too much from one who has a, quote, disease that makes him eligible for civil rights protections and at the same time more difficult to fire.
00:33:52.280Like he's living in like 1974 with his opinions about this. Right. But all right. More importantly, he seems to be pretty heavily trying to imply that like due to disability discrimination laws, businesses need to tolerate someone who's like frequently drunk on the job just because they're an alcoholic. Right.1.00
00:34:10.760No, not how it works. The law has always been that businesses do not have to tolerate someone who is inebriated on the job or in possession of like drugs on the job, for example.
00:34:21.520A good example of what might protect someone who is an alcoholic under these laws would be like, let's say that you you are an employer who lets frequently lets people leave at 4 p.m. to go to doctor's appointments.
00:34:36.300Right. And then someone who's an alcoholic says, I have an AA meeting and I need to leave at 4 p.m.
00:34:41.820Right. If you said no to that. Right. That's the sort of thing that might qualify as discrimination.
00:34:46.780Very narrow circumstances. You don't just have to, like, tolerate someone coming in late and they're like, sorry, I'm hungover.
00:34:51.480I'm an alcoholic. That's not how it works.
00:34:52.860When I worked at my human rights organization in Denmark at one point, they sent out some kind of rote email saying, like, it's now a non-smoking campus.
00:35:00.520So, like, you have to be, whatever, 50 feet from a door to have a cigarette.
00:35:03.340And one of our colleagues wrote like a reply all this like thousands of word long thing that was like, how ironic that this is a human rights organization.
00:35:12.800And yet you're violating my human right to smoke where I want to.
00:37:44.780He says, as late as the 1960s, Mexican-American activists rejected the idea that they should be labeled non-white.
00:37:51.560By the 1970s, however, when the federal government was classifying citizens and then distributing benefits and imposing costs based on those classifications, they were taking a different position.
00:38:00.220Rather than government responding to social realities, social realities were being shaped by the federal government, which were being lobbied by organizations that were largely unrepresentative of those they claimed to speak for.
00:38:10.880Yeah, so he's basically saying this entire category is fake.
00:38:13.120Yeah. I mean, there is an element of this that is true, at least theoretically, which is that because race is a social construct, it can be constructed by actors within our society, right? Someone telling you this is your race for long enough can result in you believing that it's your race, right?
00:38:32.660I don't want to say there's like no truth to this at all.0.91
00:38:36.020But what he's saying is that when being deemed white was beneficial, Mexican-Americans wanted to be deemed white.0.57
00:38:43.320But then the civil rights era comes and suddenly they're like, oh, it's beneficial to be non-white.0.94
00:38:48.320And so they sought to create this new racial category to designate themselves as non-white and enjoy the delicious spoils of non-whiteness that all minorities enjoy in this country.0.82
00:38:59.580Because, of course, if you're a conservative, you believe that it just rules to be a minority in this country.0.99
00:39:04.180Yeah, as a gay person, I just get my check from the government and my Obama anal beads every month.0.98
00:39:09.560And the history of the term Hispanic is interesting.0.97
00:39:13.280I mean, it's largely true that for the first part of the 20th century, Mexican-Americans often fought to have themselves considered white because being white came with, like, express legal benefits.
00:39:24.380In 1930, the census included Mexican as a racial category, but Mexican-American activists and
00:39:31.940the Mexican government itself lobbied to have that changed. And then it wasn't until 1970 that
00:39:37.380you see a similar racial category appear again in the census, and then Hispanic appears in 1980.
00:39:44.120Christina Mora, a sociologist at Berkeley, wrote a book about how this all came to be
00:39:49.720called Making Hispanics, which Hanania uses as a source here, although I think he mostly ignores
00:39:56.460her actual conclusions. She says that essentially Mexican-American activists were inspired by the
00:40:02.420success of the civil rights movement, and they strategized and coordinated with Puerto Rican
00:40:09.160and Cuban activists, who mostly at the time existed on the East Coast, to build a coalition.
00:40:14.840From there, they operate as more or less a single political organization and also start to develop a shared cultural identity.
00:40:25.060So she talks about how there used to be like Mexican-American TV stations and Puerto Rican TV stations, and they start to merge them and create this single cultural space for Spanish-speaking populations in America.
00:40:37.860Hanani is arguing that the Hispanic label is popularized because the government endorsed it.
00:40:42.960I don't think that's totally wrong, but I do think it's highly oversimplified. It makes the movement seem top down. And he's pretty expressed that he believes this is driven by the government and like elite activists who didn't really speak for their population. Right.
00:40:57.800But I think in reality, you can argue that it just as effectively that it's a bottom-up movement.0.60
00:41:02.560And there's also this implication in the chapter that the Hispanic identity movement was actually counterproductive because Hispanic populations were in the process of happily assimilating.
00:41:13.200And then activists step in and they claim they're not white.
00:41:16.600And all of that assimilation grinds to a halt.
00:41:20.320So I'm going to give you the opening paragraph of this chapter.0.69
00:43:02.120I think what he is trying to say is that this otherness of like the Hispanic label was
00:43:08.860manufactured by activists who just wanted to reap the rewards of the civil rights regime.
00:43:15.680What was actually happening was that those activists were identifying discrimination against their people and then identifying people in different spaces across the country, culturally similar to them, experiencing the same types of discrimination and saying, well, hey, we have common cause here.
00:43:36.420Why don't we unify our political forces? That is normal politics. And it's politics that is
00:43:42.960aimed at correcting very real, very severe discrimination.
00:44:53.060But all of a sudden you have this community of autistic people who are fighting for more
00:44:57.160accommodations and more rights and more kind of recognition in schools, et cetera.
00:45:01.140But that doesn't mean that it's fake or the LGBT community. Right. His part of his complaint here seems to be that like this Hispanic identity didn't exist before, which is true. It's also true that it was the output to some degree of politicized thinking, meaning they were like we would be stronger as a political body if we united with people from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Right.
00:45:26.120That's what the Mexican-American activists were thinking.
00:45:29.220Just like it's true that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people all have notable differences, and yet they were like, well, we have enough in common.
00:45:49.440Just like, for example, there are differences in black communities across the country, right?
00:45:54.680The fact that there are also groups who recognize that there is a singular political movement underneath them is not like social engineering, right?
00:56:26.640Right before the book was published, the Huffington Post ran a bit of an expose on Richard where they revealed and listeners at home, you're never going to believe this.
00:56:37.340He used to post on white supremacist websites.
00:56:41.260Between 2008 and 2012, he posted explicitly racist and sexist content under a pseudonym.
00:56:49.120We don't have to get into the details, but it did include such hits as advocating for the sterilization of low IQ people and opposing interracial marriage.
00:56:59.740I can't believe the guy who wrote a whole book about how we should be able to say slurs at work thinks that other races are like not as superior as his own.
00:57:21.800I find my more polite restatement of them much more palatable.
00:57:25.140He gets a lot of support, especially from conservatives.
00:57:28.140David Frum, the old neoconservative who we will be forced to do an episode on one day, said that we should embrace, quote, the road back from extremism to normality.
00:57:48.540So a lot of people on the left, Jamel Bowie, Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, basically wrote to be like, well, not only does Hanania post racist things online still, which, by the way, like, go to his Twitter feed if you want to subject yourself to it.
00:58:04.880But like, what is the difference? Right. At best, he is sort of dressed up what was once outright racism into something nominally more palatable.0.64
00:58:14.060But to me, I guess the question is like, if an open white supremacist wanted to present a more palatable version of his views in order to mainstream them, what would be the difference between that person's output and Richard's?0.93
00:58:32.000It feels like the people who want him to be forgiven are just asking for us to play dumb0.56
00:59:38.080The real failure here is in the on the part of the mainstream media who platformed him both before and after his he was exposed as like this former white supremacist.
01:00:47.400I can't believe this is the first time this has happened.
01:00:49.200I will say between us, I was like partway through this when I was like, is this worth giving air?
01:00:55.040And then I sort of talked myself into like, no, I think it is because I think it's you're shining a light on this sort of like dark corner of the right.
01:01:01.660I definitely wouldn't have done it after a two or three month hiatus if I had realized what I was getting into.0.72
01:01:10.040The only thing I've actually learned from this episode is that you're just as white as I am here.0.94
01:01:14.600Everything else went over my head.0.62
01:01:15.920I have always said that my whiteness fluctuates very heavily depending on the level of conflict in the Middle East at any given moment, which makes me pretty low white right now, pretty low white.0.61
01:01:27.700The thing is, it's the same thing with me and gayness, but because it's Pride Month and I have to deal with gay people more than usual, I'm both more gay and more homophobic than any other month in the year.0.61