00:00:45.960What do you know about the identity trap?
00:00:48.540Is the trap that when you're a white guy who turns 40, you have to start complaining about identity politics?
00:00:58.060so today's episode is about the identity trap by yasha monk it's a little bit different from
00:01:14.040the other books that we've done in that it's not like the best sellingest book imaginable
00:01:19.180but it does make a series of arguments that are increasingly prevalent about like the problems
00:01:25.400with identity politics, etc. And so I think it's a good encapsulation of this argument and something
00:01:32.820that we should confront. It's emblematic. Exactly. It's also very deliberately attempting to be like
00:01:39.900the non-psycho version of this argument. So the author, Yasha Monk, he's acutely aware that he's
00:01:46.800making an argument pretty similar to people like Chris Ruffo and Richard Hanania, basically people
00:01:52.980who explicitly want to get Trump elected. And so what he is doing is saying, OK, we know that this
00:01:59.600has kind of been hijacked by some of these further right people. What I'm trying to do is make like
00:02:06.120the good faith, smart version of the argument that identity politics has taken over the left
00:02:12.500and is becoming an electoral liability. I'm intrigued to see where Yasha goes here.
00:02:18.180We're both going in with an open mind. Absolutely.
00:02:20.080This is a no dunks listen, listen and learn podcast.
00:02:23.400I know that he's a political scientist and it feels to me as someone who has a degree in political science.
00:02:28.700There are two types of political scientists, quote unquote.
00:02:32.320There are the types that just like deal with really noisy data and will like post on Twitter with their conclusions and then a bunch of caveats.
00:02:43.420And then there are the types that write books about identity politics, if that makes sense.
00:02:48.380to start with our protagonist yasha monk is born in 1982 same as me he grows up in a small town
00:02:58.560and then moves to munich when he's 12 he gets his ba from cambridge he then goes to harvard for his
00:03:05.340phd he writes a memoir about growing up jewish in cold war germany and starting in 2016 he kind of
00:03:12.800makes his name as a like failure of democracy scholar he starts publishing this research about
00:03:18.280how people in liberal democracies are like less enthusiastic about liberal democracy than they
00:03:23.740used to be and kind of the rise of these authoritarian attitudes. He then starts
00:03:28.940racking up these like CV bullets of just like establishment institutions. So this is from his
00:03:33.800website. Yasha is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council on
00:03:39.560Foreign Relations, and serves as a publisher at Dietzeit. Oh, hell yeah. Aspen and bio.
00:03:44.920He is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and he was the executive director of the Renewing the Center team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
00:12:16.380The second graders are split up into six different classes.
00:12:19.200There's like around 16 kids per class.
00:12:22.100If you distributed all of the black kids equally, you'd have two black kids per class.
00:12:27.780So this black principal, she grew up attending almost exclusively white institutions, and she felt really isolated as a kid, and she felt like she had no community.
00:12:37.120So she decides she's going to group together the black kids.
00:12:41.180So she decides to put six black kids in one class, six black kids in another class, and the other classes have zero black kids in them.0.66
00:12:47.880So at the most basic factual level, there's no all black classes anywhere in this anecdote.0.70
00:12:54.140There is this accusation that the mom tried to move her kid and the school was like, no, no, no, you can't because like that's not the black class.
00:13:01.920I'm actually changing the name of the mom because I loathe the way these anecdotes get litigated in national media.
00:13:09.220I'm going to find the real name and I'm going to tweet it out.
00:17:12.320By the time the NAACP even gets there, there's two black kids per class.0.98
00:17:16.060This is the problem with like all of our discourse being filtered through anecdotes1.00
00:17:21.380that are one sentence long yeah yeah if i just like walked you through the dumbest shit that0.99
00:17:26.660my elementary school teachers told me dude it would be jarring dude i had a spanish teacher0.99
00:17:32.800in high school who made us watch shall we dance a movie that is in japanese because she was really
00:17:39.160into ballroom dancing and then we learned ballroom dancing for like a whole week god being a bad
00:17:45.220teacher must rock you know what i mean she was so excited to teach us to dance like she just
00:17:52.760didn't want to teach us spanish at all but the fact that you can sort of pull up a couple anecdotes
00:17:58.000like this really says nothing to me especially when like if i were to start compiling anecdotes
00:18:04.840about like the imbalanced treatment of black versus white defendants in louisiana criminal
00:18:13.720courts right right right the anecdotes i could pull out would be endless it would drown the0.87
00:18:19.780bullshit in this book i think that's also emblematic of like where this anecdote sits0.92
00:18:24.200because school segregation in the united states is still a huge problem that's the thing is that0.96
00:18:30.080it seems like the story that monk and a lot of the folks on the right want to tell about this
00:18:36.500is like we reached a place of perfect balance and equality and then the left kept going yeah
00:18:43.220But what actually happened after like Brown v. Board was that Southern schools put as many roadblocks between them and desegregation as possible.
00:18:56.500I mean, I spent quite a bit of time like reading about the dynamics of current school segregation in the United States and like roughly half of minority kids attend schools that are 75 percent minority.
00:22:20.860So he's very open about the fact that like, you know, there's all this stuff about wokeness and identity politics in the 1990s.
00:22:28.780And people on the left have been like kind of clowning on conservatives for like being totally unable to define this term that they spend all their time whining about.
00:22:37.720Right. And he's like, I'm trying to set myself apart from that.
00:22:41.160But also like this is basically the same thing.
00:23:00.340The identity synthesis claims to lay the conceptual groundwork for remaking the world by overcoming the reverence for longstanding principles that supposedly constrains our ability to achieve true equality.
00:23:41.400many advocates of the identity how many times am i gonna have to say identity synthesis throughout
00:23:48.860this episode luckily not anymore because he he needs identity politics and it's going to just
00:23:53.820going to be easier for everybody if we just say identity politics from now on many advocates of
00:23:58.160the identity synthesis feel righteous anger at genuine injustices but their central precepts
00:24:04.520amount to a radical attack on the long-standing principles that animate democracies around the
00:24:10.220world. Basically what he's saying here, I mean, tell me if you disagree with this, but the identity
00:24:14.520synthesis is people taking the desire to rectify injustice too far to the point where they end up
00:24:23.540giving up democratic norms. And before you know it, you're, you know, segregating kids and you're
00:24:28.460shutting down free speech, et cetera. Well, yeah, I think that's right. This is the sort of common
00:24:32.880refrain that social justice movements are illiberal and these centrists are in fact the
00:24:40.800true inheritors of western liberalism right i do find it interesting that when you're taught when
00:24:48.380he talks about the norms and traditions of democracies we all know that he's talking about
00:24:55.220very abstract things like speech and not voting rights, for example.
00:25:01.660So the rest of the book, he spends laying out like the main sort of themes and content.
00:25:07.980This is what he does when people ask him, like, can you define the identity synthesis?
00:25:12.720He's like, well, it consists of like seven precepts.
00:25:16.560The book is like structured really weird.
00:25:18.600He has like the main themes and then he's like the flaws of the identity synthesis.
00:25:23.260But then they're like kind of the same as the theme.
00:25:25.220but like a little bit different. And then he's like, how to fix the identity synthesis. And then
00:25:28.560he like lays out the same thing again. So like, I've kind of pulled this apart and put it back
00:25:32.880together of like what I think are like the main things that he like keeps returning to.
00:25:38.060I hate it when they're like, well, it's not really an identifiable thing. It's like 10 concepts
00:25:44.240in any arrangement. It's like fibromyalgia. So he's now going to walk us through the main
00:25:50.840themes of the identity synthesis. The first is skepticism about objective truth. God damn it.
00:25:57.220You know what he's going to say. Michael, don't tell me that we're doing Foucault.1.00
00:26:02.860This was my reaction. God damn it. I was like, oh, don't make me do fucking Foucault.0.99
00:26:07.540I have a new motto for our podcast. Foucault, fuck no. Not engaging.1.00
00:26:13.940so the first third of the book is like this philosophical historical account of these
00:26:23.320thinkers post-world war ii who are basically starting to question these quote-unquote grand
00:26:27.720narratives of history right these things like everything will always get better like we're
00:26:31.860protecting the rights of man or whatever and there was a school of thought kind of personified by
00:26:36.420foucault that questioned the extent to which we can really say that like we can gather you know
00:26:41.540objective truth. Right. Because these concepts of kind of progress and advancement and scientific
00:26:48.680accuracy are oftentimes used by the powerful against the powerless. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for
00:26:54.020this, I talked to Sam Hunkie, who's a historian at George either Mason or Washington University,
00:27:02.600the weird libertarian one. Irrelevant. He's also a friend of mine because like we're both
00:27:07.740homosexual males who lived in Berlin I the reason I like exploded laughing at that Peter was like I
00:27:12.880literally texted him like I I know that he's wrong about Foucault but don't make me read Foucault0.87
00:27:18.380for this like I don't I don't want to read Foucault to like debunk this I was like Sam0.97
00:27:22.200what what's the deal basically Sam who like knows way more about this shit than I do
00:27:26.920was like he's not wrong about any of the Foucault shit yeah he's essentially just summarizing0.97
00:27:32.840like Foucault. And then eventually he moves into like Derrick Bell and like Kimberly Crenshaw and0.67
00:27:37.900this kind of critical theory stuff. He's roughly correct about it. But it's like, that's not really
00:27:43.960the thing that he has to prove. It's like, yes, these ideas were being published in like obscure
00:27:48.760law and philosophy journals. What they're trying to do is imagine that like by going back 40 years
00:27:55.940and saying, here's what leftists were writing in like the 70s, for example, that you can sort of
00:28:02.100infer this is what leftists actually believe right yeah i know it's sort of like a an atheist
00:28:09.240trying to do a gotcha on a christian by reading the bible and like aha it says this and the
00:28:13.920christian is just like i don't actually believe this whole section is like where we get into one
00:28:20.680of his tendencies throughout the book which is just kind of like this use of gotcha in place of
00:28:26.000actual argumentation so throughout the book he comes back numerous times to this thing where
00:28:31.120he's like these critical race theory scholars said that race is a social construct and yet
00:28:36.300black people are the most qualified to talk about their experiences that's just a misunderstanding
00:28:42.120of like what a social construct is he also has this bizarre section at the end about like gender
00:28:47.760stuff where he points out that glad once tweeted like congratulations to rachel levine for being
00:28:55.060the first openly trans federal official. And he's like, ah, so they do believe it's worth
00:29:01.900distinguishing between trans and cis women. That's not what people mean when they say trans
00:29:07.160women are women, that there's no distinctions. When people say Toyotas are cars, they don't
00:29:12.620mean that there's no differences between fucking Toyotas and Hondas. He also does a thing where he0.98
00:29:18.800takes suspiciously short quotes from his source material so here's this advocates of the identity
00:29:29.700synthesis are especially prone to reject the idea of meritocracy objective truth like merit does not
00:29:36.160exist richard delgado and gene stefanchik right in their influential critical race theory an
00:29:41.800introduction so okay it's like a little phrase you're like that's like kind of suspiciously
00:29:45.800short. So I got this critical race theory book, and here's the actual original citation.
00:29:52.620Finally, CRT's adversaries are perhaps most concerned with what they perceive to be critical
00:29:56.820race theorists' nonchalance about objective truth. For the critical race theorist, objective truth,
00:30:02.380like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics.
00:30:06.740CRT's adversaries are concerned with what they perceive to be theorists' nonchalance about
00:30:12.840objective truth these people are summarizing an argument against themselves they're not making
00:30:18.620this argument right it's like me saying like according to the westboro baptist church0.95
00:30:22.620gays are degenerates and then someone else being like michael hobbs admits gays are degenerates
00:30:27.500first of all it's just an incorrect citation second of all it's like no one was saying that1.00
00:30:33.580like the hubble space telescope can't measure how far a fucking galaxy is that's not what people are0.81
00:30:38.560actually arguing. The point is that like a lot of things that appear very simple and objective0.92
00:30:43.660on their face, when you go one level deeper, it's actually a little grayer than that. And a lot of
00:30:49.200these theorists are just sort of pointing that out. That's different than saying there's no such
00:30:54.260thing as objective truth and like immediately descending into nihilism, which is what the
00:30:58.320right thinks that like Foucault represents. Another like subsection, we're doing subcategories
00:31:04.660now of his complaint that the left doesn't believe in objective truth is this thing about
00:31:10.660standpoint theory okay this is the concept of like if you're going to write an article about
00:31:14.860trans people you should like interview some trans people okay yeah he says the core claim is that a
00:31:19.900member of a privileged group will never be able to understand a member of an oppressed group
00:31:24.520however hard they may try to do so okay as janetta johnson a prominent black activist in san francisco
00:31:30.240put it in a debate about how white allies can help to fight for racial justice don't come to me
00:31:35.120because you'll never understand my perspective yeah this is a common complaint from the right
00:31:39.920that when people on the left call for like input yeah from marginalized groups that what we're
00:31:47.880actually doing is saying that objective truth doesn't matter yeah yeah no dude like getting
00:31:53.280people who are close to issues to weigh in is a way to get closer right to the truth he bases
00:32:00.200makes like three arguments against this. The first is that like empathy is possible. I'm not really
00:32:06.320going to cover that one because like it's really just obvious. It's like, yes, we can talk to each
00:32:09.640other and learn things. The second is that by constantly deferring to marginalized groups,1.00
00:32:15.080the experiences of the majority are being left out. White people can also help us understand
00:32:21.300racism. And like he says, you know, if you want to understand police brutality, you should probably0.62
00:32:26.140also speak to like cops. Yeah, they should have what they should have is like both nationwide
00:32:31.840state and local police unions that can make public statements that are constantly amplified by the
00:32:39.740media. No one ever talks about how cops deserve that. I mostly included that because I wanted you
00:32:44.520to make a little quip. And then his third argument is that all of this deferring to minority groups
00:32:50.240basically makes organizing much more difficult, right? Because you can't come up with a broad
00:32:54.560based political program if you're constantly just being like oh i'm gonna i'm gonna step back now
00:32:59.360i'm gonna defer i'm gonna let you guys take the lead you need a strong white man to take charge
00:33:04.240i'm just gonna keep going and let you quip on all of them paragraph by paragraph now
00:33:10.140but there i guess there's the tiniest shred of truth in there and that like lefty organizations
00:33:16.060can eat themselves yeah yeah and plenty of people who actually care about the success of the left
00:33:21.980have like talked and written about this, right?
00:33:24.360Well, he actually makes a very similar argument to Olafemi Taiwo, who wrote a book called Elite
00:33:30.000Capture, which I also read for this. His argument is basically that like the problem with what he
00:33:34.720calls deference politics is that like it's very difficult to figure out who is a representative
00:33:39.840member of a group. If you're a middle manager at Amazon and you're like, okay, I'm white,
00:33:44.660I'm going to step back. I'm going to let like the black people in the company take the lead.1.00
00:33:48.080like a black person who is a middle manager at Amazon is not going to necessarily be all that0.95
00:33:54.020representative of like the needs of black people generally, right? And we have all of these
00:33:58.180institutions that tend to choose for minorities with particular characteristics, right? Especially
00:34:03.300minorities who are well-versed at moving through majority institutions. And so what you might be
00:34:09.340doing is plucking out these minorities that basically will just like say the same shit0.98
00:34:13.700as people in power and you're not actually getting like the purpose of doing that right you're just0.91
00:34:18.440getting this kind of like thin veneer of it yeah i also i i actually have like a broader critique of
00:34:23.800this like like yasha a lot of my views are based on my personality flaws and political grievances0.93
00:34:31.260and i for the last two years i felt like i'm absolutely shouting into the fucking void on0.85
00:34:37.520trans rights. And when I've talked to cisgender, like sort of more establishment journalists with0.92
00:34:43.840much larger platforms than me, part of their reluctance to weigh in uncharitably, you could
00:34:49.260say it's like there's probably some anti-trans bias going on. I think people are just generally
00:34:53.600a little bit uncomfortable with the sort of gender non-binary, like the way the gender binary is
00:34:57.780shifting. The charitable interpretation, and I've heard this directly from people, is that like,
00:35:02.660I don't want to speak on this issue because I'm not trans. Like I want trans people to lead that
00:35:06.900conversation. And like, I really do think that that comes from a good place. But the problem
00:35:11.880is that trans people are only like 1% of the population. And by definition, they have been0.99
00:35:18.360locked out of all establishment institutions. There aren't that many trans people with a
00:35:23.700platform. We're basically talking about like five people. You know them, I know them, we're thinking
00:35:29.080of their names right now. It's not fair to put the entire onus of responsibility on those five
00:35:34.620people to like fix this and roll back the tide not to mention that there's value to cis people
00:35:43.220seeing cis people make these arguments right i think that yasha's argument that like oh well
00:35:48.580what about the majorities it's like i think what he's kind of saying there's like well what about
00:35:52.520straight pride but i think that he is on to something in that there is this research about
00:35:57.740how like white people are more likely to recognize racism when they are told about it from a white
00:36:02.400person right thin people are more likely to care about fat phobia when they hear about it from
00:36:06.600another thin person there is something about having members of the majority like visibly care0.97
00:36:12.840about this shit and also i've noticed from talking about trans rights that like straight dudes are0.97
00:36:18.020good at packaging messages about this issue for other straight dudes yeah right like i i can't0.99
00:36:23.520really talk about like sports and like trans people in sports i don't give a fuck about sports you're0.84
00:36:27.020not like the fox news viewers who are sincerely passionate about women's sports that's all they've0.54
00:36:32.300been talking about for years and the trans issue comes up and all of a sudden wow this really fits
00:36:35.980into our pre-existing beliefs after 25 years of attending local female high school track meets
00:36:40.780although i think what he's implying is not just that it would be useful for members of majority
00:36:48.440groups to talk about this stuff which is i think unquestionably true in a general sense but that
00:36:54.740there are people on the left who are trying to prevent that from happening thank you for giving
00:36:59.740me an excuse to circle back to this quote that he used, Peter. He ends his section by saying
00:37:04.820that this woman on a panel said that, like, don't come to me because you'll never understand my
00:37:09.740perspective, right? He's like, these activists are saying, like, don't even engage with me,
00:37:14.020right? And like, this makes organizing much harder. But he is quoting someone who was speaking
00:37:18.720on a panel called How White People Can Support the Movement for Black Lives, right? And the full
00:37:25.440context of this woman's quote was that like there are white people who have been engaging in anti
00:37:30.640racist work for decades and if you're a white person the best thing to do is go to those people
00:37:35.060because like they know the kinds of resources you have and they know the kind of messages that are
00:37:38.520going to resonate with you she literally says you need to go to your white folks and ask them
00:37:43.060because you're not going to hear it from me the way that it needs to be served to you no one is
00:37:46.760saying that white people should not care about racism or that cis people should not care about
00:37:52.560trans rights members of marginalized groups are begging for engagement from the majority what
00:37:58.940they're asking for is a little bit of humility right so that people do the work necessary to
00:38:03.420understand the issues and also the most effective solutions they're literally making an argument
00:38:09.160about like the most effective forms of political organization and yasha is like these people don't
00:38:14.540even want political organization you know i've heard horror stories of like small scale organizing
00:38:20.480sort of falling apart because the group becomes too focused on centering the right people and
00:38:27.960stuff like that in a way that ends up being counterproductive because you end up way too
00:38:31.980focused on that and less focused on accomplishing your ultimate objectives. That stuff is happening
00:38:37.240on a very small scale. On a large scale, majority groups are obviously the dominant voices in nearly
00:38:44.940every conversation yeah so like what the fuck are we talking about like when you turn on like0.99
00:38:51.300msnbc it's not like there's like a black trans person talking to you and it's been like you0.99
00:38:58.440know yasha monk's watching that being like oh leftists have done this he has later in the book
00:39:03.120he he talks about sort of like the the stakes like the ultimate destination of all of this like
00:39:07.260identity synthesizing and he lists like three institutions as like how you can tell it's gone
00:39:13.620too far. And he talks about NGOs, colleges, and like corporate America. All three of those
00:39:20.660institutions, everyone in power is overwhelmingly white and cis and male. Like there's more CEOs
00:39:27.460named John and James than there are female CEOs. Like whether or not diversity initiatives
00:39:34.760or like diversity trainings have gone too far does not mean that actual diversity has gone too far.
00:39:40.940If I were a casual American racist, I would look at all these corporate initiatives and be like, well, at least they're not really doing it.
00:41:05.560And also like the part of the argument that like I want him to establish is like how we went from law journals in the 1970s to fucking 13 year olds on social media 30 years later.
00:41:18.040Well, I mean, you're 11 when your teacher puts you in a race segregated class and makes you read Foucault and you start talking about identity groups.
00:41:29.600He's also basing this on – he says like Catherine D., a culture writer who's interviewed 100 Tumblr users, this is based on an article in the American conservative by just like a random lady with a substack.
00:41:41.600Like there's also like a weird thing in this book where like a lot of the citations are just to like articles he read online.
00:45:17.260This, like, you're a breast man, it's sexist article is, like, if you don't like being catcalled, like, why is it okay for your boyfriend to comment on your body?1.00
00:45:44.960Right. If you're going to say that this ideology has like taken over the brains of millions of people, you have to establish that people read it and liked it.
00:45:53.140You can't just be like this exists on the Internet.
00:45:54.960If you're looking at like 2012 to 2015, you have two things happening at once.
00:45:59.820One is the increasing awareness of social justice.
00:46:03.020And two is the general higher use of social media.
00:46:07.380And these things sort of come together and you have a lot of people being exposed to these ideas for the first time, processing it for the first time.
00:46:14.880and like spitting out their thoughts for the first time.0.99
00:46:17.260And a lot of those thoughts were very dumb.1.00
00:46:43.620When Vox was founded by Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias and Melissa Bell, they wanted to do kind of like these card stacks that were like explainers.
00:46:52.180Yeah, that was the whole point of Vox was like the news media ecosystem is getting too noisy.
00:46:56.960We're going to put out like quick and easy explainers of current events.
00:47:29.160And like, how can we grab a piece of that?
00:47:31.760So he talks about the institution of Vox First Person, which is exactly what it sounds like.
00:47:35.960People send in these stories of themselves.
00:47:38.240He says that, like, based on Facebook and Twitter distribution, what they started to notice was that the sort of identity stuff just became, like, more popular.
00:49:10.380I also think that the way that Yasha is describing this is like, you know, the internet got flooded with these pieces that are like, I'm black and here's why racism is bad.
00:49:55.160I'm trying to think of a article like this that wouldn't appeal to some identity group.
00:50:01.040When you look at the trend of reporters going to diners in the Midwest to interview white working people, no one would ever characterize that as pandering to an identity group.
00:50:20.860He basically says that like, you know, we go from Tumblr to Vox, which is sort of one foot straddling online and one foot straddling traditional media.
00:50:29.460And then eventually this outlook goes to traditional media.
00:50:32.460So he talks about how the word racist and terms like structural racism start appearing in The New York Times and The Washington Post like tenfold more than they did, you know, pre-2013.
00:51:21.720I think the first thing to note, I mean, we've mentioned this on the show before, but like this is true.
00:51:25.180Progressives have become more progressive on race.
00:51:28.080There's like a lot of kind of long and short term shifts.
00:51:31.660The longest term one is that like basically since the Civil Rights Act, whites have been slowly drifting out of the Democratic Party and minorities have been slowly drifting in.
00:51:42.700So as recently as 1992, Asian-Americans, only 31% of them were Democrats.0.88
00:52:16.260So like there's some percentage of the population that basically starts to see everything through the lens of race because they're confronted by like a black dude doing it.0.97
00:52:26.600I mean, if you look at the sort of racial attitude surveys, there are huge spikes between 2012 and 2014 because we basically have the first round of like Black Lives Matter protests.
00:52:42.060There's also a social media story in that a lot of these things are captured on video, right?
00:52:46.520We now have the ability to see and hear these events that basically black people have been screaming about for decades and white people are like, are you sure?
00:52:54.200The sort of theory on attitude change among social scientists for a really long time was that, you know, when Democrats and Republicans like appear to shift their views on stuff, it's not individual people changing their minds.
00:53:06.280It's mostly the coalitions changing and you can sort of track these things over time.
00:53:10.560But during the 2016 election, you then get people updating their views and actually changing their minds based on what the candidates say.
00:53:25.900But then once he wins the primary and becomes the general candidate, what you find is a lot of sort of center right, quote unquote, respectable Republicans finding excuses to support him.0.99
00:53:36.920So there's this really interesting survey where they give people a bunch of, like, statements, one of which is you're with a friend and he describes somebody else's wife as, like, a great piece of ass.0.98
00:53:47.720And it's, like, how common is it to hear stuff like this?0.99
00:53:52.280And people report, like, oh, yeah, that's, like, a pretty normal thing to say.
00:53:55.640And, like, this is how people, like, started to justify it, right?
00:54:00.260They didn't say, like, oh, I like it when people say that.
00:54:02.900But they're like, eh, I don't love it. But it's fairly typical to say that, even though a couple of years previously they had said it wasn't.
00:54:09.460When me and the homies get together, we talk about banning Muslims from the country. That's that's what it's like.0.96
00:54:15.740But then the same thing happened among Democrats, too, where Clinton's campaign was like all framed around like opposition to Trump.
00:54:21.600Like basically whatever Trump is, I'm the exact opposite of it. Right.
00:54:24.020And so you then find among liberals more liberal views on immigration that this is also kind of at the same time as Me Too and eventually the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
00:54:36.020So people do actually start changing their minds.
00:54:38.600In 2015, if you asked a liberal, how do you feel about giant suits that just drape over you preposterously, they would have said it's fine.0.95
00:54:48.740The last big shift, obviously, is fucking 2020. George Floyd, like if you look at, again, surveys of like racial attitudes, there's a huge jump based on essentially just like news events. Like people were seeing demonstrations of the fact that these inequalities persist in America.
00:55:07.800Yeah, exactly. To circle back to his overall narrative, I don't want to say that like Tumblr and other forms of social media played no role in progressives becoming more progressive. The political science literature, I think, gives too much credit to political candidates. But all of the messages from those candidates are being filtered through media and they're being filtered again through social media.
00:55:29.660Yeah, it definitely seems to be true that social media, for example, can create echo chambers and all that stuff that everyone writes about all the fucking time. But the other side of that is that all of media consumption used to be an echo chamber because we were all reading The New York Times and like listening to like fucking Dan Rather.0.98
00:55:51.460I'm fascinated by the way that these books mix like true things and false things.
00:55:57.400The fact that liberals became more liberal over the last 15 years, he's framing it as some sort of threat, right?
00:56:05.780And like, well, now we're giving up on democratic norms.
00:56:08.700But like, I mean, you could easily see this as like good news, right?
00:56:12.880Like there's a good argument to make that like policing in America is very discriminatory and people are more aware of that now.
00:56:19.400And, like, gay people do deserve all of the rights.
00:56:22.280He seems to just take it as a given that, like, oh, this should worry us.
00:56:28.500The anti-democratic forces in America are extremely concentrated on the right.
00:56:33.120Yeah, I think that what he's trying to do here is play a bit of blame game.
00:56:41.500What the conservatives are trying to claim is, like, yeah, this is your fault for moving left.
00:56:46.980And therefore, the conservative reaction is justified. It is the sort of natural outcome. And I've seen this from others on the right, the idea that it's not the right radicalizing. It is, in fact, the left, which, again, is based on like a very thin, non-comprehensive bunch of political polls that don't capture the fact that QAnon exists.
00:57:13.320One of Yasha's earliest Atlantic articles is about how like, see leftists, nobody likes political correctness. And it's the result of a survey where they asked people like, do you like political correctness? And like 80% of Americans were like, no. It's like, right, because that's like a negative term for something that no one can agree on what the fuck it is.
00:57:39.640By definition, it's something people don't like.0.98
00:57:41.180A better question to ask would be like, do you like it when someone calls you sugar tits in the workplace?
00:57:51.580So, OK, speaking of words, the the next aspect of the identity synthesis that Yasha is going to guide us through is discourse analysis for political ends.0.99
00:58:04.260So he basically I mean, I'll read this whole fucking thing.0.96
00:58:54.120That affiliates of the university should avoid using because they could inadvertently perpetuate discrimination or commit cultural appropriation.
00:59:01.560a newly popular term that describes a broad class of circumstances
00:59:05.520in which members of one culture co-opt elements of the culture of another group
01:03:58.840So we're going to walk again through the examples that he uses. So the first one is,
01:04:04.500As part of its archive repair project, Bon Appetit apologized for allowing a Gentile writer to publish a recipe for hamantashen, a traditional Jewish dessert.
01:04:16.600What actually happened was the original recipe was basically written, like, pretty insensitively.
01:04:23.380The original headline was how to make actually good hamantashen.
01:04:27.080It was basically by this person who wasn't Jewish.
01:04:29.420And they're like, I attended a bunch of, like, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs when I was, like, 13.
01:04:33.620So, like, I'm allowed to weigh in on this.
01:04:35.440It's like this kind of tongue-in-cheek thing.
01:04:37.560And then she said, like, you know, I asked around the office and, like, all anyone could remember is, like, really chalky and terrible hamantashin.1.00
01:04:45.680So, like, I'm going to get it right this time.1.00
01:04:47.540There's an implication that the people who generally make hamantashin aren't good at it.
01:09:47.740This would be like if a Catholic got attacked and then like a bunch of non-Catholics were0.72
01:09:51.180like, we're as a show of solidarity, we're going to take communion.
01:09:53.860What I find so interesting about the way that like Yasha Monk is framing this is like he
01:09:59.680starts with this like, you know, cultural appropriation describes something real.
01:10:03.300But now the concept has gone too far. And like none of his examples are really the concept going too far. Some of them are just straightforward, like reasonable examples of it. Most of them are not even cultural appropriation being invoked in any way, like with the recipe. So it's like, sorry, what's the actual problem? It sort of seems like we have this term that you just don't think people should use.
01:10:24.020Right. Because he's basically being like, OK, so you have colonialism and also Adele.
01:10:30.780Yeah. It's like, well, well, what then what are we talking about? Right. What is your complaint?
01:10:35.260What criticisms should be allowed and what shouldn't be allowed? Is your problem just that there is terminology for this?
01:10:43.200Or is your concern that Adele is being criticized? Right. It doesn't entirely make sense.
01:10:48.260And remember his original definition, an ideology that seeks to remake the world and like erodes democratic norms.0.67
01:10:54.760The democratic norm of going to Jamaica and getting your hair braided and saying Yaman a lot.0.74
01:11:03.040Why did we fight the Revolutionary War if we can't do that?
01:11:06.160Well, my my both sides take on this is that like I do think that it's true that like people on the left can like maybe spend too much time fighting about language stuff.0.94
01:11:13.340but also no one is more obsessed with language than fucking conservatives who complain about it0.96
01:11:19.040all the time. 100%. If your actual complaint here is that like people shouldn't use the term1.00
01:11:24.820cultural appropriation, it's too broad, we don't really know what it means, it's misapplied or
01:11:29.480overapplied. Totally fine. Fine. Sure. You could also say that about all of the terms that he
01:11:33.400invokes, right? Free speech. He talks about a lot in this book. Well, people misinvoke fucking free
01:11:37.460speech all the time. Constantly. Welcome to terms, Yasha. Most terms that become popular get0.99
01:11:42.260over applied. I also feel like circling back and reminding everyone who's listening that these are
01:11:47.580the worst anecdotes he could find. Like the fact that what we're really talking about is a couple
01:11:54.740of editorials and Instagram comments. It just sort of goes to show that there's no way for the left
01:12:04.040to like squash this stuff. Right. We can't like get together and be like, all right, we're going
01:12:09.200to stop using this term because the point about complaining about the use of cultural
01:12:13.200appropriation as like a vector for political infights is that you're complaining about
01:12:18.020the left and that's what Monk is doing even if he doesn't actually think he is.
01:12:22.180He also has a large section in the book where he basically makes the same argument about
01:12:25.880like microaggressions that like microaggressions are an interesting concept but like people
01:12:29.580are taking it too far but what's very frustrating to me is that it becomes clear that his beef
01:12:37.360is exclusively vocabulary because yasha monk wrote an entire book about microaggressions
01:12:46.020so his first book is about growing up jewish in germany and at the time in west germany was like
01:12:52.38040 million people population and there were 3 000 jews in the entire country right and of course0.68
01:12:57.860germans are sort of famous for like learning all of the ugly parts of their history and so when0.98
01:13:02.460people would meet yasha and find out that he was jewish they would sort of like treat him like a1.00
01:13:06.400celebrity yeah he talks about going to a party and sort of coming on to a conversation where
01:13:10.840people are talking and he's like what are you guys talking about and they were like
01:13:13.220lockers no they say they're talking about movies and they're like oh john was just saying how he
01:13:21.120hates woody allen movies and then john is like oh uh i i actually really like woody allen i i think
01:13:26.580his earlier work is really great and i what what he did was fine i think it's okay but it's like
01:13:32.900it makes yasha really aware right and the whole book parts of which are like quite good is about
01:13:38.700how he just felt this like weird sort of sense of friction what's interesting is that this is
01:13:42.760sort of like a something you can extrapolate from as sort of a criticism of like certain
01:13:47.860iterations of identity politics right where everyone else being hyper conscious of his
01:13:52.960identity ultimately made him feel uncomfortable it also reveals how identity politics is
01:13:59.780is exclusively something other people do, right? I do not think that Yasha Monk thinks that writing
01:14:06.040a memoir about his experience as a Jewish person and like coming to grips with his identity,
01:14:09.860he wouldn't consider that engaging in identity politics, right? One of his main critiques of
01:14:15.240like the left is like, they make your identity markers the most important thing about you.
01:14:19.680Is that what he was doing by writing a book about his Jewish identity? Is that the only
01:14:22.540identity or the most important identity that he has? I wouldn't accuse him of that.
01:14:25.660This is the thing with like a lot of these conservative commentators who have been very upset about identity politics the last several years.
01:14:34.380As soon as the identity in question is their own, all of a sudden they are willing to fold in all of the nuance that they deny to other groups.
01:14:44.160Also, Peter, I it would be mean to do this, but.
01:14:47.640Well, if it would be mean, just don't do it.
01:14:49.560That's not the kind of podcast we're trying to put out there.
01:14:51.880I was going to read you the final paragraph of his book because he talks about like moving
01:14:55.860to New York and how the fact that like there were so many Jewish people in New York and
01:14:59.280that became like a much less salient part of his identity was like really meaningful
01:16:05.260I actually think it's totally fine to write a whole book about microaggressions and not use the word.
01:16:09.100You can talk about cultural appropriation without saying cultural appropriation if it's an important issue to you.
01:16:14.140He ends that section saying like a lot of what we're really talking about here is just like racial insensitivity.
01:16:18.120Yeah. And like, you know what, Yasha, if you want to write a book about racial insensitivity and like draw people's attention and you don't want to use the term cultural appropriation, I don't really think anyone would notice. Honestly, I don't think anyone would care if that's not a framework that you like. Fine. But why spend all of your time complaining about people who have a term you don't like for a concept you agree with?
01:16:40.140It's just so like lacking in empathy to like an embarrassing degree.
01:17:05.340And then not realize that when other people are talking about similar experiences, but they're not Jewish, they're black or whatever, that they're talking about the same thing.
01:17:21.580So the fourth category under the definition of identity synthesis, the problem with the identity synthesis is that it seeks to pass identity sensitive public policy.
01:17:33.860This is things like, you know, anything that basically takes people's race or gender, whatever, into account.
01:17:40.440He complains about a basic income project in San Francisco that was only eligible to trans people.
01:17:47.860In the book, he has basically two big marquee anecdotes.
01:17:51.640One is the segregation in the Atlanta schools.
01:17:55.000The second is about the rollout of the COVID vaccines.
01:21:33.520black women have particularly dangerous pregnancies,1.00
01:21:37.320we should target them for funding.0.99
01:21:39.860Those get challenged as like racist and discriminatory
01:21:42.980and as the manifestation of identity politics.
01:21:45.980Well, this is also something that's so interesting is he takes it as kind of a given that it was insane to be like taking things like race and social justice into account in this process.
01:21:57.260Like one of their categories, the three categories that the CDC was using to make this determination was science, like how much is it going to affect deaths versus infections?
01:22:06.540Two, implementation, how easy is it going to be to get it to people?
01:22:10.960He seems to think that this this entire category of like thinking about ethics is totally invalid.
01:22:16.880But what the CDC meant by that was people who are at higher risk of dying from covid.
01:22:22.280They don't just mean social justice reasons like we must remediate America's racial past.
01:22:28.220It's like black people were dying at like three times the rate of white people.0.93
01:22:32.220It just it seems that he's saying like, well, but they shouldn't be like.1.00
01:22:35.340Right. The reason that elderly people are more likely to die is probably due to sort of like0.99
01:22:41.200these biological factors. Right. The reason that black people are more likely to die is
01:22:45.600almost certainly not biological. It's due to these other factors. Right. You have to consider it.0.77
01:22:50.460Yeah, exactly. And also he's also lying when he says, you know, every other country just did age,
01:22:54.900you know, 75 plus, 70 plus, 65 plus. He presents this as like this really obvious decision that
01:22:59.700all the other countries made. That's not true. Like Germany vaccinated essential workers before
01:23:04.560they did over 65s. France also took workplace into account. Canada did it province by province.
01:23:11.540But in some provinces, they said you're eligible when you're over 65 or if you're indigenous when
01:23:17.040you're over 50 because indigenous people had way higher death rates. Another province did
01:23:21.860hotspots like there were certain zip codes. I like the hotspots concept because it's a way
01:23:26.440of avoiding having dipshits like Yasha Monk write think pieces about how what you're doing is racist.0.97
01:23:33.040You know, you're just like, oh, no, it's geographical.0.97
01:23:37.040The problem with the CDC's framework and like where I think he's right to criticize them and like they super duper fucked up is that like the definition that they were working with of essential worker covered 70 percent of American workers.
01:23:51.580If you're listening here at home, you are essential.
01:23:54.520I think I was an essential worker technically because I was working in like the media and the nation needs information to be democratic or whatever.0.61
01:24:04.200But like I was making a podcast about the maligned women of the 1990s.
01:24:10.240I absolutely should not have been prioritized for the vaccine.0.65
01:24:14.440When you when you got your four million dollar PPP loan to do the Lindsay Lohan Chronicles part five for you're wrong about.
01:24:24.140It would have been insane for the CDC to prioritize essential workers over people over 65.0.99
01:26:04.960Yeah, we don't know what happened behind the scenes.
01:26:06.760I actually reached out to two different people who were on the committee, neither of whom got back to me because I'm sure that they're so sick of talking about this.
01:26:13.780Yeah, but I reached out to Nate Silver and he says it was him.
01:26:18.400So, like, is it possible that that's true?
01:26:22.580But he says it was like the backlash to this that made them change their recommendations.
01:26:27.320There's literally no evidence of this other than the fact that there was a backlash.0.70
01:26:31.000Also, even if that was true, wouldn't that just mean that there were like a couple of dipshits at the CDC who are about to do the wrong thing?
01:26:37.480And then like because our society disagrees with it so strongly, they had to change course.
01:26:43.220This is, again, the best that he can do is some temporary interim recommendations that however you think the process went, weren't implemented.
01:26:52.380When you're like, let me tell you how pervasive and dangerous identity politics actually is.
01:26:58.340Briefly, the interim recommendations of the CDC.
01:27:21.180I looked up almost all of these. This is why I spent like three fucking weeks researching this episode. I have almost 200 pages of notes. Basically, none of them hold up. Right. I'm really doing him a service here by saying like this is as close and as good as it gets. And like, it's not that good.0.95
01:27:38.160I mean, you just said that he was bothered by the fact that San Francisco had a basic income program targeting trans folks, right?0.99
01:31:07.520How did he take such an aggressive turn?
01:31:10.140If much of popular culture ignores or demeans ethnic and religious minorities, they claim,
01:31:15.540then insensitive portrayals of people of color or instances of what has come to be
01:31:20.580called cultural appropriation should be aggressively shamed.
01:31:23.580If free speech is invoked as a reason to defend a public discourse that is full of overt forms of racism and microaggressions, then this hallowed principle needs to be sacrificed to the cause of racial justice.
01:31:38.000There is something genuinely righteous in the anger that motivates these ideas.
01:31:42.560And yet they ultimately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:31:45.380Far from merely going too far or being strategically unwise, they embrace principles that would ultimately destroy the very possibility of a truly open and multi-ethnic democracy.
01:31:57.380This is something you find in his writing all the time where it's like he lays out the problem very clearly.0.92
01:32:03.100He's like, oh, yeah, the chief justice of the fucking Supreme Court has this like totally disingenuous understanding of racism.0.82
01:32:09.420And that's why people shouting about microaggressions on Twitter are a threat to democracy.0.97
01:32:14.860I don't want to get too on my Peter shit, but there's sort of an express statement here that America was founded on these righteous principles and that those principles are sort of under attack from the left.0.99
01:32:30.400When I think what's actually happening in many cases is that the left is identifying that, one, many of the principles that the republic was founded on are, in fact, not good and noble, but are bad, racist, dumb, et cetera.0.98
01:32:45.380Two, many of the principles that the republic was founded on that are, in fact, good are misapplied consistently to the detriment of racial minorities, sexual minorities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:32:58.280So when he sort of like has this aside about free speech. Right. And what you're what he's sort of invoking is like students protesting speakers on campus. He's not engaging with whether or not the like project of free speech broadly is impacted by this, how much it's impacted by this.
01:33:17.940you know we're one year away from like coup attempt number two yeah yeah and these fucking0.98
01:33:25.320losers are still talking about like college kids like they're the true threat to democracy it is0.99
01:33:32.240absurd dude yasha's book came out a month ago no a month ago bro it's not even like 30 fucking days0.97
01:33:40.680old and then i also the passage we just read i'm pulling that from his previous book because his0.94
01:33:48.680whole excuse for writing a book about fucking identity politics in 2023 is that he already0.61
01:33:55.100did it about the right exactly i already exposed the right and then you you look back like the0.97
01:33:59.640most cursory fucking glance at his previous work and it's not about the right it's weird both sides0.99
01:34:04.840bullshit. I went back to his other older book, The Great Experiment, and he has two entire sections0.98
01:34:11.100about how people should stop complaining about cultural appropriation. He talks more about the
01:34:17.140excesses of cultural appropriation complaints than he does about voter suppression. To me,
01:34:23.720this is like the perfect example. His whole career is the perfect example of like the way
01:34:28.720that reactionary centrism has like taken over American punditry. So this term was coined by
01:34:34.620Aaron Wirtus, who defines it as someone who says they're politically neutral, but who usually
01:34:39.900punches left while sympathizing with the right. Throughout this book and like all of Yasha's
01:34:45.740work, he has this weird fucking howdy duty-ism about like right wing threats. So in The Identity0.95
01:34:52.560Trap, in his current book, he has this whole section about like, to be sure, like Republicans
01:34:57.200have passed a bunch of bills, like in Florida, the Don't Say Gay bill, and all these, like,
01:35:00.340there's a dozen states that have passed, like, these blatantly authoritarian, shut down all
01:35:06.360discussion of, like, America's racial past bills. He summarizes them. And then he says,
01:35:11.320because the language in all these bills is very vague, there's a real danger of them chilling
01:35:16.200legitimate forms of expression. Thankfully, key constitutional protections put limits on the
01:35:21.260extent to which coercive authoritarians can punish private citizens for what they say.
01:35:25.080Even at the height of Donald Trump's power, most Americans did not need to fear that their government would punish them for speaking their minds.
01:35:32.920So there's all these protections against the laws that Republicans have already passed and yet you dedicate a fucking entire chapter of your book to everydayfeminism.com?0.97
01:35:44.820So like obscure websites and people overusing terms on social media are enough of a threat to democracy to dedicate a whole fucking book to it.
01:35:53.620but actual laws being passed six supreme court justices he's like oh luckily there's all these0.98
01:36:00.960safeguards in place yeah the constitution also protects gordon ramsay's right to open a fucking0.96
01:36:05.800asian restaurant it's just so frustrating like we can fully concede like yeah you're you know0.98
01:36:11.320you're right there are some fools and miscreants on the left when it comes to this stuff but if0.96
01:36:17.460your concern is like the survival of liberal democracy in america uh you need to pivot 1800.99
01:36:26.760fucking degrees the thing that i the thing that i really want to stress about like the reactionary0.91
01:36:31.720centrist and like this entire worldview which is fucking everywhere is that like it cannot propose0.99
01:36:36.880solutions the most fascinating thing about this book is that when you get into the alleged like0.92
01:36:41.740solutions section all he does is just like restate first principles we must we must return to our
01:36:49.480core understanding of liberalism or whatever exactly he says it is impossible to understand
01:36:55.160many fundamental aspects of human life without paying due attention to categories of group
01:36:59.760identity such as race gender and sexual orientation but it's impossible to understand
01:37:03.900other fundamental aspects of human life without paying attention to economic categories such as
01:37:08.800social class, ideological categories such as patriotism, and theological categories such as
01:37:14.120religion. So it's like, okay, it's okay to focus on some identity stuff, but we should think about
01:37:18.140other things too. Oh, so we should look at how they intersect? If only there was a word for that,
01:37:25.140Yasha. Wow. These books, their solution is often just like, what if everyone essentially adopted
01:37:32.000my worldview? And like, that's the solution. And then like, fade out. This is what I mean
01:37:38.140with, it can't propose solutions because the entire ideology is based around punching left,
01:37:43.600right? Don't do anything that's going to piss off conservatives. But everything the left does
01:37:48.440is going to piss off conservatives. Conservatives don't want social change. That's the entire
01:37:52.940ideology. 100%. I have a bunch of other examples of him just like restating first principles,
01:37:57.520but I also want to get to like the few places in the book where he proposes like specific things,
01:38:03.080like specific fixes for the problems. So he has a whole section about college campuses,
01:38:06.940which I skipped because we did a whole fucking episode on it. But in that chapter, he's talking0.78
01:38:11.080about like how to heal the divisions between us and like how to not do identity politics or whatever.
01:38:14.840He says, American colleges, for example, have historically assigned students from very different
01:38:19.820backgrounds to shared rooms in their first year. Now, most of them allow incoming students to
01:38:24.680request roommates of like mind and usually like background that they've met on social media or at
01:38:29.160local meetups. It's time for colleges to abandon these counterproductive changes, returning their
01:38:34.160focus to practices that are likely to integrate rather than to separate yeah that'll save american
01:38:38.840democracy yeah just have different like roommate policies good idea dude this isn't even true
01:38:43.560some colleges do actually like random assignment others like let you request it i requested like a
01:38:49.320like a live gay guy to be my roommate in college but i got a sports bro drug dealer was that
01:38:55.140supposed to be a swipe at me directly but i'm i'm always struck by in these books it's like
01:39:02.520the minute you try to actually operationalize these broad philosophical things, you basically
01:39:07.420end up violating rights even more than what you're responding to. So another recommendation that he
01:39:13.900has in this book is that schools should ban affinity groups. Because that's what divides us
01:39:19.340and we should focus on what unites us. But you're just going to say it's illegal for the black kids1.00
01:39:24.520to make an afterschool black club? We must aggressively wield the hammer of unity.
01:39:29.000He also proposes a bunch of right-wing shit in his section on free speech.0.99
01:39:34.140He's talking about like Facebook and Twitter.0.99
01:39:36.060And he's like, if they keep discriminating against conservatives, they should be treated
01:39:42.620They shouldn't have this protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that
01:39:48.180allows companies not to be sued for libelous or otherwise illegal statements.
01:39:53.620It's fascinating to me that this guy talking about all these high-minded liberal principles all of a sudden is like, my solution, nationalize Facebook and Twitter.
01:40:05.140So this is like this bizarre thing that right-wingers like Ted Cruz and shit have seized on as like, oh, if we repeal it, that will be good for conservatives.0.88
01:40:16.000If you repeal it, what will happen is the platforms will aggressively crack down on material because now they can be held liable for it.0.81
01:40:23.320There's numerous, there's, I even read a fucking analysis of this on the American Enterprise0.76
01:41:46.180Yes. The institutional power lies with people who believe shit like this. That's why Yasha can sort of extricate himself from the mundane work of being an actual academic and gets to be a quote unquote public intellectual where you are free of the burden of having to actually do the hard work. And yet you get all the attention you ever wanted.1.00
01:42:15.080I think one of the reasons why this ostensibly the most serious book on identity politics isn't particularly serious is that, like, I don't know that a serious critique is possible.
01:42:34.000I feel like there's this perpetual debate on the left about whether we should focus on, you know, social class stuff or identity stuff.
01:42:41.040And honestly, it always feels very similar to the nature versus nurture debate to me where it's just obviously both and like no one serious says that one is where 100% of our effort should go or the other.
01:42:57.760And there's a very good article, like one of the rare ones kind of defending identity politics by Jacob T. Levy, who basically says that even empirically, it's not the case that identity politics is bad electoral strategy.
01:43:13.200If you look at Donald Trump's polling numbers, most of the big jumps downward were things that dealt with identity stuff.
01:43:20.480It was like him saying the Mexican judge can't decide against me or like the gold star Muslim family that he went after or like the Access Hollywood tape.
01:43:28.500And then, you know, we've seen all year we've seen Democrats running on protecting abortion rights and winning.
01:43:32.800We've seen Republicans running on destroying trans rights and losing.
01:43:36.800That doesn't mean that every single identity thing is going to win every election.
01:43:41.200But it's just not the case that, like, every time you do this rather than, quote unquote, bread and butter, like traditional economic issues, you're going to lose.