July 30, 2021 • 15 mins
Author, social critic and part of the trio that put academia on its head during the Grievance Studies Affair, James Lindsay, talks to Jack Armstrong about those efforts, his boiled-down description of CRT and his fun with clown memes on Twitter.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show. Oh,
I'm pretty excited about having James Lindsey on. We've had
him on a number of times going way way back,
(00:20):
but he's become a kind of a legend in the
world of Twitter. And if you don't follow James Lindsay
on Twitter, you're making a mistake. Author, mathematician. Well then
let him introduce himself. James Lindsay, Welcome back to the
Armstrong and Getty Show. Hey, great to be here. Introducing
myself though, is a tall order. I'm always a bit
awkward with that. But so before you became like nationally famous,
(00:44):
you were just a math professor ten years ago. I
actually left the university in two thousand ten because they
were shifting to a model to retain students at all
costs and I just couldn't teach. I didn't see the
ideological implications of that at the time. I couldn't teach
under those conditions. So I was a mask professor until
two ten, and then I was actually a massage therapist
(01:07):
in the years in between of all things, and your
politics in general are very liberal. They have been. Um,
I'm a bit, uh, a bit scared of that side
of the aisle right now, so they're not so much
right now. Yeah, I would call you, just because I
follow your twitter feed pretty regularly, a classical liberal as
opposed to what like a lot of modern you know,
(01:29):
younger liberal thought is. And we'll get into more of
that and just a little bit um, but now you
have become famous for a whole bunch of things. Um,
when you and uh and and a couple other people
got together and wrote some bogus papers that you get,
you submitted to various publications and they got accepted. He
became famous for that. The what was the what was
(01:50):
the name of that they got called the grievance studies
affair on the back end of that, because we decided
to call all of those things like whether it's critical theory,
which all everybody has heard of now, or gender studies
or fat studies which is a thing unbelievably, or disability
studies they only end in some kind of studies control study.
We just said that what these these fields are doing
(02:12):
are stoking grievances that they're trying to you know, dredge
up or pick at scabs or whatever. Dredge up hurts.
Pick at scabs make people feel aggrieved against the system,
against society, and they study grievance in that regard. So
we called all of this stuff is a catch all
term grievance studies, and so that got called the Grievance
Studies Affair. And we wrote twenty fake papers over the
(02:33):
course of a year, these things. That's like an entire
academics career usually. Um, seven of them were accepted. We
still had seven more under review, and the Wall Street
Journal told on us so and then amazing thing was
and we've talked about this a lot, and men, if
you google this if you've never heard it, because you
guys went so over the top. It was like, just
(02:54):
just so incredibly over the top. Ye that's a number
of them still got accepted as legitimate academic not even
that they've been coming true since. Um. Yeah, we had
some really crazy over the top ones. We had one
about whether you can watch people react to the way
that dogs misbehave in dog parks, particularly sexually with one another,
(03:15):
and then you can divine something about rape culture from
watching that. And then we just trained men the way
that we trained dogs, then we could probably combat rape culture.
That's a very feminist approach, and that that paper not
only was accepted and published, but it was given an
award for Excellence in Scholarship. UM. We we wrote a
chapter of Hitler's Mind comp and that was accepted by
(03:36):
a social work journal. UH. In terms of intersectional feminism,
we had a number of other kind of hilarious papers.
We had one that we argued that the sport of
competitive bodybuilding professional bodybuilding is fat phobic because it sees
building muscle as fundamentally different than building fats, so that
we need to have a category called fat bodybuilding. That
(03:57):
was accepted. Got it's hilarious. But we had another one
and one other paper though we wrote it was that
you can't use satire to make fun of social justice.
And this has been born out now that literally Robin D'Angelo,
who wrote White Fragility previously and now has her new
book Nice Racism or whatever it's called, she literally just
(04:20):
did an interview and she should have cited us. She
made the same argument almost I mean uncannily similar argument
and citing the same kind of television shows We brought
up etcetera. As we made in one of our fake papers,
which was also accepted. Um and hit on the Babylon
b which is, you know, a satire site on the Internet.
It's really funny. They got told that, you know, their
(04:42):
their form of satire against social justice is you know,
punching down or punching out, I don't know, punching something on.
So they got told. I mean the papers we wrote
are coming true, like the people are actually arguing the
things that we wrote in in satire and and it's
it's unbelievable. Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to
(05:02):
bring up your the Grievance Studies Affairs it is now called,
and that was with Peter and Helen pluck Rose Um
is I came across this article the other day that
I thought you would think it was funny. If you
haven't seen this yet, this is for real local university.
My wife went to this university U. C. Davis. Cultural
Biases Impact Native Fish study calls for end to rough
(05:23):
fish pejorative and the paradigm that created it. Oh yeah,
fish names are racist, now that's right, Yeah, exactly. And
it gets down and it says the study maintains that
the term rough fish is pejorative and degrading to native fish.
That this is that's not that sounds like it's from
the babylog b but it's an actual, for real article. Now,
(05:43):
that's exactly the kind of thing that we would have
wrote to. We wanted to write a paper and we
just ran out of time and didn't didn't prioritize it
about how putting things like onions or seasoning and cornbread
gentrifies cornbread and takes it away from black people and
perpetuates the racial divide. We're gonna call it a gentle
sification of cornbreadge a cultuation of American racial division or
(06:03):
something like that. Uh yeah, it's absurd, you know, it's
in the fish are insulted now. And these people actually
kind of think this way. They really do think that
the you know, these words, the way we use words
structures reality. They genuinely think that in crazies power dynamics
that are going to oppress people. So calling them rough
fish somehow is going to cause other I don't know people.
(06:25):
I guess you would think it's not the fish to
believe something ridiculous like oh, well, you know, maybe I'm
just a rough person because I'm from another culture. That's
probably what the argument runs like. It's just absurd, It's
totally absurd. You and Helen pluck Rose wrote the book
nonfiction book Cynical Theories, which is very serious and um,
(06:46):
you know, because we're having a lot of fun with this,
but this is this is super duper serious in that
the country is going crazy and in a big chunk
of the country that for whatever reason gets a hell
of a lot of attention, has just gone not so
and and you're trying to bring it back into into
the world of sanity. And you're now one of the
if not the leading pushback against critical race theory. Do
(07:10):
you have a like a shorthand version for what critical
race theory is for people so they can understand it. Yeah,
I've been working on this for a long time. I
finally boiled it down. Critical race theory is an almost
religious belief that the fundamental uh structure of society is
racism that was created by white people to benefit white people.
(07:30):
If you believe that religiously and believe that that has
to be torn down, you know, root and branch, then
you're probably a critical race theres So if you believe
that society was built on racism by white people for
white poblical benefit, and that it's in literally everything you
can imagine. You're probably a critical race theorist, and I
love you throwing in the term religion um, and I
(07:52):
know you're an atheist, but the way it has taken
on this um because they're there, it's got all the
home arts of religion, and that there are people that
if you run a foul of it, it's blasphemy and
you need to be you know, you need to lose
your job, you need to have your life ruined because
you said something that went against the doctrine of critical
the critical race theory as they see it. And it's
(08:13):
just it's it's so weird, like I almost can't even
the particularly when I see these white people, professors or
college kids or whatever, um beating up on themselves and
then they talk about it. I'm just I'm such a
bad person and I need to take a longer look
at the way that I'm ruining the world. You know,
it's just it's it's like a mental illness to me.
It really is. In fact that the religion thing isn't
(08:36):
just like oh, it's kind of like one, our parallel
to it really is one, and people can't quite see
it because they're like, well, what's the god of the religion.
They can't like figure out how it works. But the God,
it turns out his history with a capital H the
exact same way that Marks looked at history. History has
a trajectory, History has a purpose. The purpose for Marks
for history was to get to communism, to get to
(08:57):
the utopia where we no longer have classes, we no
longer have a state that the presses anybody. Nobody is
oppressed because we transcend classes and states and all of
the things that cause oppression. And history is progressing along
this pathway by means of revealing contradictions. So if you
bring up the contradictions and do criticism on them, we
move history along. And if you're doing that the right way,
(09:18):
then you're on the right side of history. If you're
doing it the wrong way, on the wrong side of history.
So it's God is the trajectory of history that has
a Heaven on Earth target at the end. And people
who helped that along are people in the faith. They're
good people. And the people who hinder that and try
to so called maintain the status quo are bad people.
And this is why you see their utter hatred of conservatives,
(09:40):
utter hatred of of you know, any order, liberal order,
societal order that's not there's um, their their vision, and
people don't understand that their God is actually this weird
belief that tracks all the way back to the early
nineteenth century in Germany about how history might work. The
we're talking about James Lindsay. Um, I'm looking at his
(10:03):
Twitter feed, which is a fantastic following. Underneath it says, uh,
not New York Times bestselling author Math PhD, founder of
New Discourses, a political against totalitarianism and supremacy of all
kinds for freedom, and you're definitely one of the best thinkers,
writers and speakers on this topic that I've come across
(10:24):
anywhere in America. Thank god. Um, what do you mean
by not New York Times bestselling author? Oh so cynical
Theories was Actually it made it onto the Wall Street
Journals best seller listen Man of the publisher Weekly best
seller list, and they don't have a few different best
sellers lists, but the New York Times didn't put it
on theirs. And so we dug into this because we had,
you know, the book scan or whatever the sales numbers,
(10:46):
And it turns out that we actually sold enough copies
of Cynical Theories in the first week to where we
should have been on the list, and in fact, we
sold three times as many as the last two books
on the list. But for some reason, they deemed that
it didn't reflect the organic buying habits of Americans and
therefore did not put it on the New York Times
best selling list. So bestseller everywhere but the New York Times,
(11:08):
which snubbed us for some reason. Uh, and I guess
that's their business. Did not reflect the organic buying habits
of Americans. Okay, yeah, whatever the hell that I see.
It didn't pass your sniff test. Whatever the hell that means.
How how difficult is your life? I've wondered this a
lot because I follow you regularly, Like I'm a fanboy
(11:29):
of James Lindsay. I gotta admitted, um, how difficult is
your life? Gotten? Taking all this on? I mean, how
what's your what's your email? Feed? Your your hate mail?
You're all that sort of stuff, Like you know, I
get a little bit of hate mail. I don't get
a tremendous amount Uh. The difficulty is the volume of
you know, whether it's fan mail, it's mostly questions. People
(11:50):
are asking me mail or can you help me with
this mail? You know, I get so much request for that,
that's very difficult. The harder part, you know, if we
got into the kind of psychological side of it's like
I live and you know, they think if you stare
into the Abyss, the Abyss stairs back, I live in
the Abyss. It's like I went into the Abyss and
send letters to the world, and so it's like, you know,
(12:11):
I read the most negative, evil, poisonous stuff literally all day,
try to make sense of it, try to understand it
and try to communicate with other people, and that actually
is pretty exhausting. Um, but everything else is great. You
live in the Abyss. Everything else is great. Can you
(12:32):
explain the current clown controversy that's going on around me? Um? Yeah, so,
I mean lots of people have been using the mean
clown world to describe what's going on, right, and so
this is everybody kind of gets it. It's like these
people are in some regard that are pushing these crazy
ideas that don't attest the reality or somehow kind of clowns.
And then you know, there's Nicole Hannah Jones at the
(12:54):
New York Times. She's got her big red hair, and
people have noticed that that looks kind of like clownish.
And so the other day I saw a picture of her.
She was all proud of herself, was on Twitter. So
I took the picture and I just put a clown
emoji period send tweet with a picture, and people went
berserk because I'm just I call all of these people clowns.
(13:14):
I call you know, it doesn't matter who they are,
it's not just that her hair or whatever. I call
all these people clowns all the time. I refer to
clown world all the time. And so she went berserk
and said that I was attacking her appearance. Thousands of
people went nuts and got angry at me for attacking
a black woman's appearance, which well, I mean, it's coincidental
in my opinion, because I called all these people clowns.
So then they went berserk. And so then I came
(13:35):
up with a parody, as I tend to do, like
the fake papers, and I started talking about critical clown
theory and took critical race theory, took out race, put
in clown and just wrote their words with you know,
slight changes and it just all fits to try to
you know, point out that you know, I said that
the um Nicole and of Jones had clown fragility on
(13:57):
seat of white fragility. Her clown ary was needed doll,
and she was reacted with a series of rhetorical maneuvers
to try to you know, lash out or whatever. I
did this the kind of the whole thing, and people
loved it, um because they get the satire, they get
the party, and again the clown the world thinks sticks.
You'll notice on my Twitter feed that I if you
(14:17):
follow me, that I put clown emojis on basically all
of this stuff, like Anthony Fauci clown, he's not a
black woman. Clown clowns all the way down, because the
stuff they're saying is not attached to reality. It's like
a circus. It's you know, it's all under the big top.
And uh, it's just kind of a meme I'm playing
with and people got really upset when I attatched it
(14:39):
to herves. Do you have any concern that Twitter cancels
at some point, because that is your biggest, biggest, you know,
megaphone you've got. That's true. They've they've shot across my
bow twice once for something. I I think that they
were wrong, but at least I know what I did,
and it can kind of see they're made up reasons
and clown world for it, uh once with no explanation. However,
(15:00):
so where I got suspended for you know, twelve or
twenty four hours or whatever, so they haven't taken any
serious action against me with that particular clown thing. I
got a number of emails from Twitter saying we investigated
you and we found no violation and so well, okay,
apparently you're still allowed to call public figures clown on Twitter. Awesome.
(15:20):
We're talking with James Lindsay and unfortunately we got we
gotta let him go. I could talk to you absolutely
all day long, and the main reason I wanted to
have you on is to push people to follow you
on Twitter to read your books, because you're you're the
best voice out there I think on all this craziness,
and I really appreciate the effort do you put on
on a regular basis, Hey, I appreciate that. Thank you
(15:41):
so much, James Lindsay, Ladies and gentlemen, and we'll link
him at our website Armstrong and getty dot com, and
I'll I tweet him out all the time.
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show. Oh,
I'm pretty excited about having James Lindsey on. We've had
him on a number of times going way way back,
(00:20):
but he's become a kind of a legend in the
world of Twitter. And if you don't follow James Lindsay
on Twitter, you're making a mistake. Author, mathematician. Well then
let him introduce himself. James Lindsay, Welcome back to the
Armstrong and Getty Show. Hey, great to be here. Introducing
myself though, is a tall order. I'm always a bit
awkward with that. But so before you became like nationally famous,
(00:44):
you were just a math professor ten years ago. I
actually left the university in two thousand ten because they
were shifting to a model to retain students at all
costs and I just couldn't teach. I didn't see the
ideological implications of that at the time. I couldn't teach
under those conditions. So I was a mask professor until
two ten, and then I was actually a massage therapist
(01:07):
in the years in between of all things, and your
politics in general are very liberal. They have been. Um,
I'm a bit, uh, a bit scared of that side
of the aisle right now, so they're not so much
right now. Yeah, I would call you, just because I
follow your twitter feed pretty regularly, a classical liberal as
opposed to what like a lot of modern you know,
(01:29):
younger liberal thought is. And we'll get into more of
that and just a little bit um, but now you
have become famous for a whole bunch of things. Um,
when you and uh and and a couple other people
got together and wrote some bogus papers that you get,
you submitted to various publications and they got accepted. He
became famous for that. The what was the what was
(01:50):
the name of that they got called the grievance studies
affair on the back end of that, because we decided
to call all of those things like whether it's critical theory,
which all everybody has heard of now, or gender studies
or fat studies which is a thing unbelievably, or disability
studies they only end in some kind of studies control study.
We just said that what these these fields are doing
(02:12):
are stoking grievances that they're trying to you know, dredge
up or pick at scabs or whatever. Dredge up hurts.
Pick at scabs make people feel aggrieved against the system,
against society, and they study grievance in that regard. So
we called all of this stuff is a catch all
term grievance studies, and so that got called the Grievance
Studies Affair. And we wrote twenty fake papers over the
(02:33):
course of a year, these things. That's like an entire
academics career usually. Um, seven of them were accepted. We
still had seven more under review, and the Wall Street
Journal told on us so and then amazing thing was
and we've talked about this a lot, and men, if
you google this if you've never heard it, because you
guys went so over the top. It was like, just
(02:54):
just so incredibly over the top. Ye that's a number
of them still got accepted as legitimate academic not even
that they've been coming true since. Um. Yeah, we had
some really crazy over the top ones. We had one
about whether you can watch people react to the way
that dogs misbehave in dog parks, particularly sexually with one another,
(03:15):
and then you can divine something about rape culture from
watching that. And then we just trained men the way
that we trained dogs, then we could probably combat rape culture.
That's a very feminist approach, and that that paper not
only was accepted and published, but it was given an
award for Excellence in Scholarship. UM. We we wrote a
chapter of Hitler's Mind comp and that was accepted by
(03:36):
a social work journal. UH. In terms of intersectional feminism,
we had a number of other kind of hilarious papers.
We had one that we argued that the sport of
competitive bodybuilding professional bodybuilding is fat phobic because it sees
building muscle as fundamentally different than building fats, so that
we need to have a category called fat bodybuilding. That
(03:57):
was accepted. Got it's hilarious. But we had another one
and one other paper though we wrote it was that
you can't use satire to make fun of social justice.
And this has been born out now that literally Robin D'Angelo,
who wrote White Fragility previously and now has her new
book Nice Racism or whatever it's called, she literally just
(04:20):
did an interview and she should have cited us. She
made the same argument almost I mean uncannily similar argument
and citing the same kind of television shows We brought
up etcetera. As we made in one of our fake papers,
which was also accepted. Um and hit on the Babylon
b which is, you know, a satire site on the Internet.
It's really funny. They got told that, you know, their
(04:42):
their form of satire against social justice is you know,
punching down or punching out, I don't know, punching something on.
So they got told. I mean the papers we wrote
are coming true, like the people are actually arguing the
things that we wrote in in satire and and it's
it's unbelievable. Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to
(05:02):
bring up your the Grievance Studies Affairs it is now called,
and that was with Peter and Helen pluck Rose Um
is I came across this article the other day that
I thought you would think it was funny. If you
haven't seen this yet, this is for real local university.
My wife went to this university U. C. Davis. Cultural
Biases Impact Native Fish study calls for end to rough
(05:23):
fish pejorative and the paradigm that created it. Oh yeah,
fish names are racist, now that's right, Yeah, exactly. And
it gets down and it says the study maintains that
the term rough fish is pejorative and degrading to native fish.
That this is that's not that sounds like it's from
the babylog b but it's an actual, for real article. Now,
(05:43):
that's exactly the kind of thing that we would have
wrote to. We wanted to write a paper and we
just ran out of time and didn't didn't prioritize it
about how putting things like onions or seasoning and cornbread
gentrifies cornbread and takes it away from black people and
perpetuates the racial divide. We're gonna call it a gentle
sification of cornbreadge a cultuation of American racial division or
(06:03):
something like that. Uh yeah, it's absurd, you know, it's
in the fish are insulted now. And these people actually
kind of think this way. They really do think that
the you know, these words, the way we use words
structures reality. They genuinely think that in crazies power dynamics
that are going to oppress people. So calling them rough
fish somehow is going to cause other I don't know people.
(06:25):
I guess you would think it's not the fish to
believe something ridiculous like oh, well, you know, maybe I'm
just a rough person because I'm from another culture. That's
probably what the argument runs like. It's just absurd, It's
totally absurd. You and Helen pluck Rose wrote the book
nonfiction book Cynical Theories, which is very serious and um,
(06:46):
you know, because we're having a lot of fun with this,
but this is this is super duper serious in that
the country is going crazy and in a big chunk
of the country that for whatever reason gets a hell
of a lot of attention, has just gone not so
and and you're trying to bring it back into into
the world of sanity. And you're now one of the
if not the leading pushback against critical race theory. Do
(07:10):
you have a like a shorthand version for what critical
race theory is for people so they can understand it. Yeah,
I've been working on this for a long time. I
finally boiled it down. Critical race theory is an almost
religious belief that the fundamental uh structure of society is
racism that was created by white people to benefit white people.
(07:30):
If you believe that religiously and believe that that has
to be torn down, you know, root and branch, then
you're probably a critical race theres So if you believe
that society was built on racism by white people for
white poblical benefit, and that it's in literally everything you
can imagine. You're probably a critical race theorist, and I
love you throwing in the term religion um, and I
(07:52):
know you're an atheist, but the way it has taken
on this um because they're there, it's got all the
home arts of religion, and that there are people that
if you run a foul of it, it's blasphemy and
you need to be you know, you need to lose
your job, you need to have your life ruined because
you said something that went against the doctrine of critical
the critical race theory as they see it. And it's
(08:13):
just it's it's so weird, like I almost can't even
the particularly when I see these white people, professors or
college kids or whatever, um beating up on themselves and
then they talk about it. I'm just I'm such a
bad person and I need to take a longer look
at the way that I'm ruining the world. You know,
it's just it's it's like a mental illness to me.
It really is. In fact that the religion thing isn't
(08:36):
just like oh, it's kind of like one, our parallel
to it really is one, and people can't quite see
it because they're like, well, what's the god of the religion.
They can't like figure out how it works. But the God,
it turns out his history with a capital H the
exact same way that Marks looked at history. History has
a trajectory, History has a purpose. The purpose for Marks
for history was to get to communism, to get to
(08:57):
the utopia where we no longer have classes, we no
longer have a state that the presses anybody. Nobody is
oppressed because we transcend classes and states and all of
the things that cause oppression. And history is progressing along
this pathway by means of revealing contradictions. So if you
bring up the contradictions and do criticism on them, we
move history along. And if you're doing that the right way,
(09:18):
then you're on the right side of history. If you're
doing it the wrong way, on the wrong side of history.
So it's God is the trajectory of history that has
a Heaven on Earth target at the end. And people
who helped that along are people in the faith. They're
good people. And the people who hinder that and try
to so called maintain the status quo are bad people.
And this is why you see their utter hatred of conservatives,
(09:40):
utter hatred of of you know, any order, liberal order,
societal order that's not there's um, their their vision, and
people don't understand that their God is actually this weird
belief that tracks all the way back to the early
nineteenth century in Germany about how history might work. The
we're talking about James Lindsay. Um, I'm looking at his
(10:03):
Twitter feed, which is a fantastic following. Underneath it says, uh,
not New York Times bestselling author Math PhD, founder of
New Discourses, a political against totalitarianism and supremacy of all
kinds for freedom, and you're definitely one of the best thinkers,
writers and speakers on this topic that I've come across
(10:24):
anywhere in America. Thank god. Um, what do you mean
by not New York Times bestselling author? Oh so cynical
Theories was Actually it made it onto the Wall Street
Journals best seller listen Man of the publisher Weekly best
seller list, and they don't have a few different best
sellers lists, but the New York Times didn't put it
on theirs. And so we dug into this because we had,
you know, the book scan or whatever the sales numbers,
(10:46):
And it turns out that we actually sold enough copies
of Cynical Theories in the first week to where we
should have been on the list, and in fact, we
sold three times as many as the last two books
on the list. But for some reason, they deemed that
it didn't reflect the organic buying habits of Americans and
therefore did not put it on the New York Times
best selling list. So bestseller everywhere but the New York Times,
(11:08):
which snubbed us for some reason. Uh, and I guess
that's their business. Did not reflect the organic buying habits
of Americans. Okay, yeah, whatever the hell that I see.
It didn't pass your sniff test. Whatever the hell that means.
How how difficult is your life? I've wondered this a
lot because I follow you regularly, Like I'm a fanboy
(11:29):
of James Lindsay. I gotta admitted, um, how difficult is
your life? Gotten? Taking all this on? I mean, how
what's your what's your email? Feed? Your your hate mail?
You're all that sort of stuff, Like you know, I
get a little bit of hate mail. I don't get
a tremendous amount Uh. The difficulty is the volume of
you know, whether it's fan mail, it's mostly questions. People
(11:50):
are asking me mail or can you help me with
this mail? You know, I get so much request for that,
that's very difficult. The harder part, you know, if we
got into the kind of psychological side of it's like
I live and you know, they think if you stare
into the Abyss, the Abyss stairs back, I live in
the Abyss. It's like I went into the Abyss and
send letters to the world, and so it's like, you know,
(12:11):
I read the most negative, evil, poisonous stuff literally all day,
try to make sense of it, try to understand it
and try to communicate with other people, and that actually
is pretty exhausting. Um, but everything else is great. You
live in the Abyss. Everything else is great. Can you
(12:32):
explain the current clown controversy that's going on around me? Um? Yeah, so,
I mean lots of people have been using the mean
clown world to describe what's going on, right, and so
this is everybody kind of gets it. It's like these
people are in some regard that are pushing these crazy
ideas that don't attest the reality or somehow kind of clowns.
And then you know, there's Nicole Hannah Jones at the
(12:54):
New York Times. She's got her big red hair, and
people have noticed that that looks kind of like clownish.
And so the other day I saw a picture of her.
She was all proud of herself, was on Twitter. So
I took the picture and I just put a clown
emoji period send tweet with a picture, and people went
berserk because I'm just I call all of these people clowns.
(13:14):
I call you know, it doesn't matter who they are,
it's not just that her hair or whatever. I call
all these people clowns all the time. I refer to
clown world all the time. And so she went berserk
and said that I was attacking her appearance. Thousands of
people went nuts and got angry at me for attacking
a black woman's appearance, which well, I mean, it's coincidental
in my opinion, because I called all these people clowns.
So then they went berserk. And so then I came
(13:35):
up with a parody, as I tend to do, like
the fake papers, and I started talking about critical clown
theory and took critical race theory, took out race, put
in clown and just wrote their words with you know,
slight changes and it just all fits to try to
you know, point out that you know, I said that
the um Nicole and of Jones had clown fragility on
(13:57):
seat of white fragility. Her clown ary was needed doll,
and she was reacted with a series of rhetorical maneuvers
to try to you know, lash out or whatever. I
did this the kind of the whole thing, and people
loved it, um because they get the satire, they get
the party, and again the clown the world thinks sticks.
You'll notice on my Twitter feed that I if you
(14:17):
follow me, that I put clown emojis on basically all
of this stuff, like Anthony Fauci clown, he's not a
black woman. Clown clowns all the way down, because the
stuff they're saying is not attached to reality. It's like
a circus. It's you know, it's all under the big top.
And uh, it's just kind of a meme I'm playing
with and people got really upset when I attatched it
(14:39):
to herves. Do you have any concern that Twitter cancels
at some point, because that is your biggest, biggest, you know,
megaphone you've got. That's true. They've they've shot across my
bow twice once for something. I I think that they
were wrong, but at least I know what I did,
and it can kind of see they're made up reasons
and clown world for it, uh once with no explanation. However,
(15:00):
so where I got suspended for you know, twelve or
twenty four hours or whatever, so they haven't taken any
serious action against me with that particular clown thing. I
got a number of emails from Twitter saying we investigated
you and we found no violation and so well, okay,
apparently you're still allowed to call public figures clown on Twitter. Awesome.
(15:20):
We're talking with James Lindsay and unfortunately we got we
gotta let him go. I could talk to you absolutely
all day long, and the main reason I wanted to
have you on is to push people to follow you
on Twitter to read your books, because you're you're the
best voice out there I think on all this craziness,
and I really appreciate the effort do you put on
on a regular basis, Hey, I appreciate that. Thank you
(15:41):
so much, James Lindsay, Ladies and gentlemen, and we'll link
him at our website Armstrong and getty dot com, and
I'll I tweet him out all the time.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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