Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
God, this book's so fucking stupid. I regret choosing it. No zinger. Just you complaining. And then bam, bam, bam.
I had put in like a week of work into this before I was like, ah, shit, this was a mistake. Yeah, for the first time, we're doing a bad book on the show. Incredible. A book that could kill, one might even say. It makes me so mad that this book is called The Origins of Woke. Dude. Instead of Wokeness. It does sound vaguely like some sort of business self-help book that we would also cover on this show. The Parable of Great. All right. Okay. Michael. Peter.
What do you know about The Origins of Woke? All I know is that this is going to be the first time we're doing an episode that requires not only an internet connection, but a pair of calipers. All right. The Origins of Woke. This is a book by Richard Hananya, came out last year. Little look behind the curtain. When you go two or three months without releasing a podcast, what you want to do is come back with a book that no one's ever heard of.
And that our irritation with doing it is palpable. You don't want to be here. A big problem for our show is that conservatives keep putting out books complaining about wokeness. Yes. All of which are exactly the same. The same way they're running out of ideas, we're running out of things to say about their ideas. What makes this one interesting and I think worth covering is
It's not about like the abstract cultural origins of quote unquote wokeness. Hananya does not talk about Foucault or like any other postmodern theory. He blames civil rights laws.
For the modern cultural context. And that is the premise of this book. I'm imagining him quietly putting away a dog whistle and just pulling out a whistle. Look, we're just saying it at this point. That is, I think, the purpose. This is not aimed at a popular audience. This is aimed at powerful conservatives, especially, I think, the next Trump administration. Yeah.
Yeah. Which I think is why it's worth analyzing despite the fact that we've talked about wokeness before. Although one thing I was going to say, I was going to try to turn this into a zinger. But like, you know how Lady Gaga has like little monsters and Taylor Swift has Swifties? I was going to say that like this dude's fans should be Hananiacs. Yeah.
But then that requires him to have fans. Right. And like other than fucking center left journalists who are like, these ideas are important to take seriously. I haven't actually seen all that many conservatives say that they like this guy. I think there's something where like even conservatives can tell that someone like Anania is just a fucking worm. Appearance vampiric. He has like the overall demeanor of vampiric.
He does look like one of those creepy little ventriloquist dolls. He really does. But more reptilian, more snake-like almost. Exactly. Less likable. Yeah.
If it was between living in a home with him and the doll from Goosebumps, I'd probably just choose the doll. We don't need to go into his background too much. He's a conservative writer, think tank guy. He's appeared in many op-ed pages over the years. The Times, The Post, The Atlantic, all the biggies.
This book is about the origins of modern wokeness. Blissfully, he does try to provide a workable definition of wokeness. Okay. He says that wokeness has three central pillars. Ooh.
I'm going to send them to you. So the three pillars of wokeness. One, the belief that disparities equal discrimination. Practically any disparity that appears to favor men over women or whites over non-whites is caused by some combination of past and present discrimination. Disparities that favor women over men or non-whites over whites are either ignored or celebrated. The
This includes not only material outcomes like differences in income or representation in high-status professions, but disparities in thought or stereotypes about different groups. 2. Speech restrictions In the interest of overcoming such problematic disparities, speech needs to be restricted, particularly speech that suggests they are caused by factors other than discrimination or that stereotypes are true. 3. Human resources bureaucracy
In the interest of overcoming disparities and regulating speech, a full-time bureaucracy is needed to enforce correct thought and action. I like that we're already resorting to like things that annoy me. Oh, absolutely. It's just like HR managers, the trainings we have to do.
So I will give him some credit, I guess, for providing something of a concrete definition here. His book is mostly built around the idea that what like woke liberals believe is that any disparity between demographics must indicate discrimination. Right. This is a very common argument from conservatives, though.
I don't think I know anyone on the left, at least anyone serious, who actually believes this. It's also, it's an interesting mirror to the conservative belief, which is that disparities must be caused by the inherent nature of those groups. That's the irony here, is that he creates what I think is a straw man, where he says liberals believe that every disparity is discrimination. Now, even if you believe that that's what liberals believe,
You can say that's wrong without adopting his position, which is basically any disparity is justified and pre-exist and like you and, you know, is the will of God. It's also going to be very funny noticing the parallels between this and Yasha Monk.
who's like allegedly this kind of serious center left person, his definition of woke also had this like tripartite structure, like the three legs of the stool or whatever. Yeah. When you can't provide like a clean definition of something, you have to be like, oh, it has three pillars. You just start like talking out your ass. Like, oh, it's not one thing. It's actually...
It's actually a 10-minute sequence in a Terrence Malick movie where you're just sort of dreamily drifting through landscapes. So this book has several components. I'm going to focus on the elements that are targeting the workplace. Okay. We start off with an anecdote about the past.
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He tells the story of how originally the law only forbid discrimination based on race, color, national origin, and religion. The reason that sex was added to that list was because an opponent of the bill, Howard Smith,
Propose it as an amendment. Smith was an opponent of the bill. He was adding gender in order to undermine its likelihood of passage. Right. This is a famous like poison pill attempt. Yeah. Hananya says the story of how sex discrimination became illegal and how the definition of discrimination changed over time tells us something fundamental about how the American system works.
Ooh.
Ooh, judges be out here doing interpretations. So I guess his whole point here is that this is an example of how something can become law without really reflecting the beliefs of society or maybe even the beliefs of legislators. Right. The problem with this story is that it's kind of half myth. Like, Hananya and a lot of people make it seem like this was an accident. He says it was proposed as a joke and then just says, despite Representative Smith's intentions, the amendment passed, as did the Civil Rights Act, which, like,
Yeah.
So this story is told on the left as sort of like a tale of hubris, right? I do love the idea of like, this is so far out there, pretty soon they're going to start saying that women are unequal in society too. I'm going to call your bluff. They've been doing this forever where it's like, what's next? Yeah.
The way he's framing this is like, this is a weird fluke that this sort of tells us something about how like off kilter discrimination law is. But like, isn't this actually just a story of political will? Yeah. It's not an accident that the amendment gets passed. It's the result of people who support it mobilizing for something they believe in. I do like the idea of some laws basically being mulligans. Yeah.
You're like, oh, this one doesn't count. Nobody really wanted this one. He's trying to make this argument that like elites and bureaucrats have taken the simple law and turned it into something much more sprawling and pernicious than anyone at the time has envisioned. This is like the big theme of his book, that this is that this is all very divorced from the will of the people. These liberal bureaucratic elites have taken control of civil rights law. Right. He focuses on four outputs of the Civil Rights Act.
Affirmative action, disparate impact, harassment law, and Title IX. For our purposes, we're going to focus on the middle two again, disparate impact and harassment law. There is a section titled disparate impact. Everything is illegal. Yep. I remember this from civics, the anti-purge. So basically, Civil Rights Act.
made discrimination in employment illegal, but it didn't define what counts as discrimination, really. Everyone knew that you couldn't just say whites only in hiring anymore, right? But like,
What about job requirements that aren't explicitly discriminatory, but still disproportionately impact black people, for example, right? Enter the Supreme Court. I have a podcast to recommend about this institution. I'm going to send you something. It's a quick summary that Hananya provides.
He says,
This sounds roughly true, no? He's not providing the best faith framing, but this is more or less true. He's basically saying like, look, companies should be allowed to require that their employees take aptitude tests of various types and they should be able to hire on merit, right?
Thanks to the Supreme Court, companies that hire based on merit are just being punished if it turns out that they hired a disproportionate number of white people, even though they were just trying to hire the best people. Yeah, that's why no companies are disproportionately white and male anymore, because if you do that, they send a SWAT team. I think it's instructive here to take a look at that Supreme Court case, Griggs. Ananya sort of quickly glosses over it. He just mentions that this company had an intelligence test as part of their employee evaluation process. But he leaves out some key details.
Jesus. Jesus.
two intelligence tests. The significance of July 2nd, 1965, is that that is the day that the Civil Rights Act went into effect. OK, so Hanania wants to be like, look, they took this really well-meaning anti-discrimination law and they turned it on innocent companies who just wanted to hire good people. Right. And it's like, OK, but that's not what's happening here. Right. What's happening is that everyone in the country knows that racist companies are going to try to
Right.
If you allow companies to just start coming up with creative ways to discriminate... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. ...they will inevitably succeed. Also, lawyer question. Isn't the whole thing that, like, determining company intent is just very difficult? Yep. Whereas determining the outcome is pretty easy. There's multiple problems. One is that it's just hard to identify when someone is intentionally discriminating because people know not to say it out loud for the most part. And two...
To some degree, it doesn't really matter. The outcome is the same, right? This reminds me of like an aunt of mine or great aunt or something who talked her son out of applying to medical school because she's like a white male getting into medical school these days. Impossible.
I just want to show her statistics of like, no, white males are going to medical schools. It's the same sort of thing here where it's like you can just look at corporate America. Like, do we have C-suite types that are just wildly disproportionately like black and women and trans and all the other groups? Right, right. That person was me. And now I'm a podcaster. I'm brave.
for not going to medical school and podcasting instead. The only place where white men are still accepted. Thank God. Thank God. You can't take this away from us, woke. So...
The second part of the argument against disparate impact laws is that this is all contrary to the will of Congress. They never intended for the law to be used so broadly. This, again, very big theme throughout the book. He says, with a few exceptions, a bureaucratic and legal elite made most of the major decisions regarding what discrimination actually meant, whether the state should be in the business of regulating dating and humor in the workplace, and whether the state should be in the business of regulating
and whether and how major institutions classify people according to ancestry. There was a lot of back and forth about the meaning of the law until the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which Congress passed and officially made disparate impact part of the law, which makes this
Yeah.
But he just sort of ignores that whenever it undermines the argument that he's making. Yeah, I feel like the entire originalism argument just boils down to not like that. Exactly. We should listen to the founders unless they wanted woke shit. We should look to the past unless it was woke. So that was an Ananya spiel about disparate impact and discrimination law. And I was sort of like...
is this just going to be like a rehash of like big picture conservative arguments against discrimination laws? Yeah, I'm a little worried about how borderline reasonable he sounds, or at least like in keeping with boilerplate conservative orthodoxy. He's not deviating particularly far from like the Republican Party platform. Yeah, give me the calipers, bro.
Peter, I want the word brain pan to appear in the next five to seven minutes. What's interesting is that he doesn't veer into like express racism as much as he reveals himself as someone who doesn't have normal opinions about what human life should be like. Oh, good. Oh, good. So he starts to talk about harassment law.
Okay. This is the most bizarre portion of the book because his vision of what a good workplace looks like is so detached from the opinions of a normal person. Fuck yes. That it's like, it's hard to parse. So throughout the book,
He consistently argues basically that workplaces used to be like cool, collegial spaces where everyone could be friends and joke around. But now because of harassment laws, you can't even tell jokes anymore. You can't even try to fuck your coworker. You can't use the word sugar tits at meetings. His basic argument here is the same as it is with discrimination laws. The original idea was fine.
But then courts and bureaucrats have like steadily expanded the definition of harassment to the point where it's unworkable and ridiculous. So to give you a basic understanding of federal harassment law, we're talking about hostile work environment claims. And under the law, someone's conduct in the workplace is harassment only if it is
severe and pervasive. Right. This is why all these anecdotes of like, I said a colleague's hair looked nice. And the next thing you know, I heard from her lawyer. That's why all those stories are bullshit and they never check out. Exactly. Because there's no way any court would determine this is an environment. But it's a great opportunity for bad faith arguments from conservatives. Totally. Because when you sue for this,
you, of course, would list out every incident, right? Some of which in isolation might not look very severe, right? They might look very minor. So for many years, conservatives who don't like these laws have cherry picked out the most like inoffensive examples from these cases and held them up as proof that the whole system has gone too far.
So Hananya does some of that. And he also just gives examples that like any person would find offensive. So I'm going to send you a little bit. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh lists a large number of court cases and bureaucratic decisions at the state and federal levels that have found in constitutionally protected speech incidents.
evidence of a hostile work environment, colon. Signs with the phrase men working, draftmen and foremen as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle, an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition. All right. So let's go through some of these. Of these examples, I'd say that one of them is both true and a decent example of like government overreach.
In the early 90s, a state agency in Kentucky compelled a company to change its men working signs, even though it's unlikely that they actually violate the law. I'm happy to admit that I think that's a little bit excessive. Right. You know, these are legally required signs.
And they cost a lot to replace. And they said men working. And the state agency was like, well, that's not inclusive enough. Right. Yeah. But on the other hand, we now have all these signs that say road work ahead. And we can say, I hope it does when we drive past. God, just no. Just please cut that. Yeah.
Dude, RIP Vine videos on YouTube are like 80% of my evening entertainment. The thing about examples like that is they aren't really coherent arguments against the law itself. Like you can find instances of jaywalking laws being enforced in absurd situations. It doesn't say much about the utility of jaywalking laws or like whether they are good on the whole.
I feel like whether they're good on the whole is a really good example of the kind of thing they won't let you say in today's workplaces. He also makes it seem like a government body found that using job titles like draftsman and foreman are illegal. The case that that's about, though, involves a woman whose colleagues made consistent sexual comments, put up pictures of naked women around the workplace, cat
called her. Right. She complains about all of this. And then in addition to that, she complained that several people used gendered terms like foreman, even though they were not the official company titles. Right. And this gets boiled down as like, oh, she sees the word foreman and she melts down. Right. Right. So she complains about this and gets fired. So the case is not about like whether having the job title foreman is illegal because it's not. What's illegal is all of the surrounding sexual harassment. Yeah.
Yeah. So there's also the example of someone putting up a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini and an American flag burning in their cubicle. This feels like it was somebody targeting a specific colleague. Shocker that you immediately clock this. Yeah. Yeah.
Fuck you, Susan. And then you start doing these things and then you're like, oh, I guess you can't even put up posters anymore. This was in the mid 80s, like relatively fresh off the hostage crisis tensions with Iran. Hi. There's an Iranian person working there and someone is like intentionally putting up pictures of Khomeini and the flag burnings in Iran to harass the Iranian colleague. Yeah. Also, also.
the lady lost the lawsuit. The court said this was not enough. Right. And then there's also the case where he mentions, quote, an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition. That one just seems like straightforwardly racist to me.
This company had a Japanese competitor. They made racist ads about them and they circulated internal memos and correspondence that used slurs for Japanese people when referring to their competition. And so a Japanese employee was like,
This feels like a hostile work environment. And I guess I'm woke because I agree. Yeah, it sounds like a hostile work environment. What the fuck, dude? Can't even circulate slurs anymore with pictures of sumo wrestlers. Right. I mean, this is similar to the case where the guy was fired for saying Hurricane Katrina, more like Hurricane Tortilla. This is what's crazy about this is like, I'm sure that there are many, many examples of like
relatively frivolous cases where a plaintiff won. Because in every type of law, there are relatively frivolous cases where a plaintiff wins. That's just how it goes. But like the fact that when you're hunting for those examples, you can only come up with shit like,
where they circulate samurai swords and slurs. Also, I've noticed this, this like flock of sea lions trend among conservatives where they'll constantly do this thing. They're like, name one thing JK Rowling has said that's transphobic. They're like, oh, she says like trans women are men. Right. And they're like, why is that transphobic? And then it just leads you down this fucking tedious thing of like, what's wrong with that? Oh, yeah.
So you think anyone can identify as anything? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, no, it's just very straightforwardly racist to do this about Japanese people. Like, I don't know how to explain to you. So Hananya points out that originally sexual harassment law primarily prohibited quid pro quo harassment, basically asking for sexual favors. But over the years, it evolved to the point where we are banning, quote,
practically any behavior or speech potentially offensive to women. The evidence he gives for this is that, quote, offensive language and pornography can constitute a hostile workplace, even if not targeted at any particular employee. Oh, so I can just have like porn posters in my cubicle? I guess he wants us to think that this is all ridiculous. Like, I can't even watch untargeted porn.
at work anymore. I love the weird lawyer brain thing too of being like, well, it's not porn directed at you. Right. Like, I'm watching bondage porn and Marie isn't even into bondage. Your Honor, yeah, I was blasting Pornhub all day but it wasn't at Marie. Yeah.
He's referring to a specific case, which I looked up, and it's a workplace where several men consistently referred to female customers as a, quote, fucking bitch or fucking whore. Oh, God. There were conversations about the bodies of female colleagues, conversations about masturbation and sexual experiences, consistent sexual jokes.
Sexually explicit music being played. And yeah, porn. Yeah. Normal people don't think this is a desirable thing. The idea that he's like, this will resonate with the public. You can't even watch porn at work. I love the idea of going around my job and asking everybody what kind of porn they watch so that I can make sure that I'm watching like the generic stuff at my desk. If you don't want to watch porn, don't work at AutoZone. Yeah.
There is one more case that he mentions that I want to discuss. Okay. I'll send you this in two parts because Zoom is forcing me to. I love that you've been hobbispilled on like every single time they do these sort of stripped of context little anecdotes that are like one sentence long. You're like, I don't know, man. And also, like, I don't know. I was an employment lawyer. Like when they're like, it's illegal to have the job title form. And now I'm just like, no, it's not. I've seen that job title. Like.
Like where? We are like our brains are broken from doing podcasts about this shit. But also you think people like book editors and other pundits would also have the same capacity to just look at these anecdotes and be like, no. Yeah.
Right. It's not that hard what we're doing. You have to do inclusive job titles. Like, it can't be foreman. It has to be for person. It's for they now. For they them. You can't even be a foreman. You have to be a trans man. Right.
All right.
They sued the company for racial discrimination, but the father's claims alone making it to trial. Racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished.
Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz and also that he was a temp worker and not their employee, so the company was not responsible for protecting him from discrimination anyway. A jury disagreed and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African American employees and without hostile intent.
Questions such as whether there can be such a thing as the friendly use of racial slurs and the parameters of what kind of flirtation is acceptable were once settled by private parties. Now they are matters of federal law.
You can't even call people slurs as a joke anymore. He says that these slurs were used in a friendly matter, usually by African-American employees and without hostile intent. Right. So I think that what he's trying to do is frame this as like black employees were using the N-word toward one another in a casual, colloquial, friendly manner. Right. And then due to wokeness.
Tesla had to pay millions of dollars, right? Now, this is extremely not what happened, which I know because this was probably the most widely publicized discrimination case of the last decade. The actual allegations here are that the supervisors of these employees repeatedly use the N-word in a derogatory manner, including shit like, N-words are lazy. I wish I could get all you N-words fired. Holy shit. These supervisors were not black.
Hanania tries to be sneaky by saying that the perpetrators were mostly or all minorities themselves. Oh, my God. Which seems to imply that they were black. The primary perpetrators were Hispanic, which like, I don't know what to tell you. It's still illegal for Hispanic people to do discrimination. I don't think that's still illegal. Not to mention at least one guy's white, but whatever. They were actually bisexual. So as a member of a minority. I guess to his credit, he does.
mention the racist graffiti, which also involved the N-word, swastikas. There was like a racist caricature. On top of all this, there were almost no investigations into the conduct, despite many complaints. Those two people were like two of several plaintiffs, and some of the allegations that other plaintiffs had were worse. What the fuck, Richard? We're talking about like
outside of the bounds of a normal workplace to the point where like, I was shocked that there were workplaces like this. Same, same, same, yeah. You're like, rationally, some place like this exists. But when a large company has a problem like this, as someone who's been an employment lawyer, it's just like that, if you gave me that case, that would have been the worst case I had ever seen by a mile. And then Hinenia's like, you won't believe the overreach of anti-discrimination law.
Right. Wait, okay, sorry. I have a beef with this too. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So this is another thing that these large settlement amounts, $137 million, always get reported in the media. And then in almost every case, especially when there's a large corporation involved, they always get whittled down. So Hanania mentions that the award got whittled down to $15 million. I just Googled
Diaz racial settlement, and it was then whittled down again to $3.2 million. Right. He then settled out of court for presumably even less. No, it's never even close to the headline amounts. Yeah, exactly. So it's also supposed to be this like huge injustice.
But this guy did not get enough money for Tesla to meaningfully want to stop this behavior. Also, like he says, one of his complaints about this is that these questions were, quote, once settled by private parties. Now they are matters of federal law. That's not true at all. What Hanania really means is that before civil rights laws came around, employers had a right to do this sort of shit.
And if you complained about it, you were fired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bottom line here is very simple. He thinks that this stuff should be allowed. There's no workplace environment that he would characterize as hostile. Right. Unless it's hostile to conservatives. Yeah. Because even if you want a super-duper-duper steel man, his fucking argument, the idea that someone can repeatedly call you slurs as a joke is a terrible argument. If someone was calling me faggot at work all the time—
And they're like, oh, I'm only joking, dude. That's really fucking hostile. Michael, if you want to sue me, just sue me. We don't have to keep hashing this out on the podcast. You caught it. You caught it. That was my intention, Peter. You do know my intent. You know, I think what's interesting about the discussions of harassment are that it's no longer about like merit, right? When they're talking about discrimination generally, they can be like, oh, this is really about merit. We want to hire the best people. And if you implement this test...
And it turns out that white people are the best people, then so be it. That's what merit is. Right. But when it comes to harassment, you don't have that to fall back on. It's just sort of like, yeah, I don't know. I think you should be able to play porn on the TV and say the N-word at your colleagues. Yeah.
So next he turns to age and disability discrimination. Now, I immediately zoned in for this because as someone who worked in this field, age and disability claims are often some of the most obvious. Yeah. This is the one area where managers will sometimes just straight up say it. They'll be like, well, yeah, they're old. We need someone young and fresh. Well, yeah, they have this disability. They can't do the job quite as well.
Right. This is just an area of the law where I don't think the discrimination is worse, but it is, I think, to some degree more open. Yeah. Joe Biden is currently being discriminated against simply because of his age. All right. Now I'm going to send you something. He says Congress has also made age discrimination illegal, first in employment in 1967 and then in 1975 in programs receiving government assistance.
I mean, so I guess he's saying that because brains deteriorate with age, you should be able to just fire older people without representing them.
Yeah, but obviously they deteriorate at different rates and in different ways. And it depends on the job. Again, just a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation of how these laws work. If someone is bad at their job because their brain sucks...
It's not discrimination to fire them. Yeah. But if you fire them because they're old and so you are assuming that their brain sucks. Yes. You're advocating for firing at least some people who are totally fine and able to do their job just because they're old. What else would discrimination be? Of course, the best argument for this is Donald Trump. But I imagine he's not arguing for Trump to be disqualified. Or if someone wanted to fire people who look vampiric in the face.
and slimy at the same time. I don't think he would like that rule very much at all. The thing is, there is like a little part of me, every time people talk about him being like a haunted doll or like a worm, I'm like, hey, just because someone's demeanor is deeply unsettling and makes everybody uncomfortable doesn't mean they're a bad person. No. As a member of the unsettling community. You're on the right track with the beard. Yeah.
That's true. I'm aging out of my haunted doll phase. Ever see a goblin with a beard? I don't think so. All right. Now, then he turns his sights on disability discrimination. I'm going to send you this. What counts as a disability is constantly in dispute, particularly when it comes to psychological conditions without clear physiological markers. An entire area of law has developed, for instance, focusing on issues such as when and under what conditions employers must accommodate alcoholism.
Questions in this regard include what separates an individual who drinks too much from one who has a, quote, disease that makes him eligible for civil rights protections and at the same time more difficult to fire. Peter, I don't think this is real. I love that he puts disease in quotes. He's like, first of all, first of all, we all know that alcoholism is not a real disease. That's just liberal bullshit. Like he's living in like 1974 with his opinions about this, right? Yeah.
But more importantly, he seems to be pretty heavily trying to imply that like due to disability discrimination laws, businesses need to tolerate someone who's like frequently drunk on the job just because they're an alcoholic. Right. Right.
No, not how it works. The law has always been that businesses do not have to tolerate someone who is inebriated on the job or in possession of like drugs on the job, for example. A good example of what might protect someone who is an alcoholic under these laws would be like, like.
Let's say that you are an employer who frequently lets people leave at 4 p.m. to go to doctor's appointments, right? And then someone who's an alcoholic says, I have an AA meeting and I need to leave at 4 p.m. If you said no to that, that's the sort of thing that might qualify as discrimination. Very narrow circumstances.
You don't just have to like tolerate someone coming in late and they're like, sorry, I'm hung over. I'm an alcoholic. That's not how it works. When I worked at my human rights organization in Denmark at one point, they send out some kind of rote email saying like, it's now a non-smoking campus. So like you have to be whatever, 50 feet from a door to have a cigarette. And one of our colleagues wrote like a reply all email.
This like thousands of word long thing that was like, how ironic that this is a human rights organization. And yet you're violating my human right to smoke where I want to. Hell yeah. And he got this whole thing. That's what's up. How it was an injustice. And everyone was like, just don't smoke near the doors, man. Sure. It seems crazy in isolation, in a vacuum, but without people like that.
fighting for just a little sliver of their rights, then all of society collapses. The human rights apparatus is built on the backs of men like that. There is one section of the book that is actually sort of interesting, or at least like conceptually interesting. It would be more interesting in the hands of someone who is a little more nuanced. I'm so livid that you're actually doing the interesting parts of this.
books rather than just dunking on his like physical appearance. This is his chapter about how the government created certain racial categories. Basically, for various purposes, the government will recognize certain people as constituting a race, right? It's useful for things like the census. It's also used in discrimination laws. But this is very tenuous because race is a social construct. You can't really say where one race ends and another begins.
Which leads to very weird outcomes sometimes, right? One that Hanania points out is that for affirmative action purposes, people of Middle Eastern descent qualify as white. Hanania says that this is basically due to an ineffective activist lobby. I think that's plausible enough. People of Middle Eastern descent are a very small percentage of this country. And, you know, perhaps that has just led to them having less political power. I think if you stopped there, fine. You know, we've...
A fair enough point that there's there's imprecision here. Me personally could have benefited from. Yeah, I was just going to say being qualified. You thought that I was non-white, but no, it turns out I'm white. I mean, I kind of guessed from how much you bring up Martin Scorsese and Taylor Swift. So he has this thesis basically that the government creates these racial classifications usually at the behest of activists, right?
with the assistance of government bureaucrats. And then over time, those classifications become real. They sort of manifest in our broader culture. He focuses mostly on Mexican Americans and the example of the term Hispanic, which he says is first used as a matter of government record keeping before being utilized in the census and then eventually getting wider acceptance and usage.
He claims that this is essentially like a cynical project of social engineering. Oh. I'm going to send you something. He says, as late as the 1960s, Mexican-American activists rejected the idea that they should be labeled non-white. By the 1970s, however, when the federal government was classifying citizens and then distributing benefits and imposing costs based on those classifications, they were taking a different position.
Rather than government responding to social realities, social realities were being shaped by the federal government, which was being lobbied by organizations that were largely unrepresentative of those they claimed to speak for. Yeah, so he's basically saying this entire category is fake. Yeah, I mean, there is an element of this that is true, at least theoretically, which is that because race is a social construct—
It can be constructed by actors within our society, right? Someone telling you this is your race for long enough can result in you believing that it's your race, right? I don't want to say there's like no truth to this at all. But what he's saying is that when being deemed white was beneficial...
Right. Mexican-Americans wanted to be deemed white. But then the civil rights era comes and suddenly they're like, oh, it's beneficial to be non-white. And so they sought to create this new racial category to designate themselves as non-white and enjoy the delicious spoils of non-whiteness that all minorities enjoy in this country. Because, of course, if you're a conservative, you believe that it just rules to be a minority and
Yeah. As a gay person, I just get my check from the government and my Obama anal beads every month. And the history of the term Hispanic is interesting. I mean, it's largely true that for the first part of the 20th century, Mexican-Americans often fought to have themselves considered white because being white came with like express legal benefits. In 1930, the census included white.
Mexican as a racial category, but Mexican-American activists and the Mexican government itself lobbied to have that changed. And then it wasn't until 1970 that you see a similar racial category appear again in the census, and then Hispanic appears in 1980. Christina Mora, a sociologist at Berkeley, wrote a book about how this all came to be
called Making Hispanics, which Hanania uses as a source here, although I think he mostly ignores her actual conclusions. She says that essentially Mexican-American activists were inspired by the success of the civil rights movement, and they strategized and coordinated with Puerto Rican and Cuban activists who mostly at the time existed on the East Coast to
to build a coalition. From there, they operate as more or less a single political organization and also start to develop a shared cultural identity. So she talks about how there used to be like
Mexican-American TV stations and Puerto Rican TV stations, and they start to merge them and create this single cultural space for Spanish-speaking populations in America. Hanani is arguing that the Hispanic label is popularized because the government endorsed it. I don't think that's totally wrong, but I do think it's highly oversimplified. It makes the movement seem top-down, and he's pretty expressed that he's
He believes this is driven by the government and like elite activists who didn't really speak for their population, right? Right. I think in reality, you can argue that it just as effectively that it's a bottom-up movement. Right. And there's also this implication in the chapter that the Hispanic identity movement was actually counterproductive because Hispanic populations were in the process of happily assimilating and then activists step in and they claim they're not white and all of that assimilation grinds to a heartbreak.
halt. So I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you the opening paragraph of this chapter. He says, in the early to mid 1950s, I Love Lucy was the highest rated TV show in the United States. It centered around the life of Ricky Ricardo and his wife, Lucy. Ricky ran a nightclub and his heavy Cuban accent, especially when he became upset at his wife's hijinks,
was a source of much of the comedy on the show. Despite CBS executives' fears, Americans did not think it objectionable that the most popular show in the country featured what some might have considered an interracial marriage. It was only in Loving v. Virginia, decided in 1967, that the Supreme Court would invalidate anti-miscegenation laws in the last 16 states that still had them. Supported laws to maintain the purity of the white race regularly welcomed Lucy and Ricky into their homes without giving the issue of race much thought.
Oh, this is just like you say Americans are racist and yet they're watching black people play baseball. It doesn't mean anything. There is some truth to this in the sense that the perceived whiteness of certain Hispanic people, there's definitely something going on there that he's sort of poking at. But the implication that he's trying to make here
is that before the government established the Hispanic identity, Hispanic people were like in the process of assimilating into American culture. People didn't even think their marriages were interracial, potentially to a point where he's sort of implying that they didn't even really experience discrimination. I like that we've reached the point in the episode where we're like, Richard Hanania does not have an intersectional lens on
on the social construction of race. Because what he's really talking about is class here, right? That if it's someone who's wealthy, it's easier for that person to be kind of welcomed into white culture. I think what he is trying to say is that this otherness of like the Hispanic label, right?
was manufactured by activists who just wanted to reap the rewards of the civil rights regime. What was actually happening was that those activists were identifying discrimination against their people and
Right. And then identifying people in different spaces across the country, culturally similar to them, experiencing the same types of discrimination and saying, well, hey, we have common cause here. Why don't we unify our political forces? That is normal politics.
And it's politics that is aimed at correcting very real, very severe discrimination. Right. Here's a passage from Christina Mora's book, which, again, he's using as a source here. Along the U.S.-Mexico border.
That is about the 1960s and the era preceding that. So...
Yes, there are interesting conversations to be had about like the perceived whiteness of Desi Arnaz Yeah But the inference that he wants you to make is that like Holistically Hispanic people were on their way to being perceived as white and then the government fucked it all up right now No, this is also something I mean, I guess you could say the same thing with like the autistic community right that there's always been autistic people but because
But because like the diagnostic criteria was so bad and they're, you know, they were all totally medicalized and treated like shit and their parents were running the entire quote unquote rights movement. Right. But all of a sudden you have this community of autistic people who are fighting for more accommodations and more rights and more kind of recognition in schools, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that it's fake. Or the LGBT community, right? Part of his complaint here seems to be that like this Hispanic identity didn't exist before, which is true. It's also true.
Yeah.
gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people all have notable differences. And yet they have, they were like, well, we have enough in common. Chapel Roan. We have Chapel Roan in common. Everything else is different. Just like...
Just like, sorry, you really distracted me with chapel. I've been listening. Like, just like, for example, like there are differences in black communities across the country, right? The fact that there are also groups who recognize that there is a singular political movement underneath them is not like social engineering, right? It's just politics. It's just how politics works. And also it's fine to have a strategy. It's fine to think about this stuff.
and be deliberate about it. How can we advance the cause of this discriminated against minority is just not going to ever ring to my ears as evil. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, this is just their way of trying to undermine the political movement more broadly. Right. Yeah. Now, all of this together, Hananya sees as wokeness run amok. Yes. You can't watch porn at work and people are
He then has a chapter that lays out a course of action very specifically and using charts. He doesn't advocate expressly for repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He basically wants to see it pared back until like the only thing in it is that it's illegal to do intentional discrimination. Oh, my God. I'm not entirely sure that he even wants that. But that's sort of what he is saying if you read his chart.
I was going to say the only thing these guys accept as discrimination is like literally calling people a slur, but he's already established that he doesn't even think calling people a slur is that much of a problem. If you're joking, he thinks that's the coolest.
So you have to call them a slur in a mean way. So I want to be clear. His like solution section of this book, it seems quite obviously directed at like policymakers, judges, et cetera. To hit the high notes, he wants disparate impact to be eliminated by overturning that Supreme Court case and repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1991. He wants damages reduced for discrimination cases, wants to defund the federal agencies that target discrimination. Of course. As well as state agencies that facilitate diversity, things like that, right? Yeah.
This is also the part of the book that like makes it clear who this is for. This is not for normal people. This chart includes which executive orders should be withdrawn. Oh, God. Right. Which laws should be repealed. This isn't for some Fox News grandma. Right. This is for Republicans in positions of power and whoever takes the reins in the next Trump administration very specifically. Right. I guess that leads us to the question of where this would leave us.
His final chapters talk about this, including a section called Imagining a Non-Woke America. We had that. Yeah. Isn't that just this fake 1950s thing that they always go back to? Right. Mississippi burning, but from the other perspective. But without as much typhus. Mississippi glowing, as they call it. So-
The basic premise that he lays out here is that free markets are the best way to sort out all of this. Good shit. Yeah. What if the hand that I use to masturbate in front of my colleagues at work is in fact the invisible hand? Yeah.
of Adam Smith's free markets. He says, quote, large socioeconomic disparities that are not based in underlying differences in productivity cannot exist in a market system. Longtime libertarian argument, of course, that you don't really need discrimination laws because markets are a
So if you discriminate against quality workers just because of their race, for example, you will lose in the marketplace. That's why our country had so much equality when we had much less regulation. This is something that we basically objectively know is not true. I always go back to the resume audit studies when I'm talking about this because they're the simplest and clearest examples of how discrimination manifests.
We've talked about this in bonus episodes, but I think it's worth just going through some of the literature here. So there have been dozens of studies now that follow this model where basically you send out resumes that are functionally identical except for the names and
You measure the frequency of responses based on whether the name sounds male or female, white or black, etc. These are some of my favorite studies, in part because they're so clear and also because you need to go full send on the names so that it's clear which race they are. So it's always like Jay Kwan versus Blake. Yeah, yeah. I was just reading about this. The researchers oftentimes hire J.K. Rowling to do this.
They're like, ooh, Cho Chang? Kingsley Shacklebolt? It's a little too obvious, Joanne. So back in 2003, there's a very famous study where a couple of researchers sent out about 5,000 resumes in response to help wanted ads and found that resumes with white-sounding names got about 50% more interviews than those with black-sounding names.
There have been a bunch of similar studies, especially since then. In 2017, there was a meta-analysis of similar research that found that white applicants received 36% more callbacks than equally qualified black applicants. And also that there has been no change in that gap since 1990.
A 2021 paper was published where researchers sent out 80,000 plus resumes to large employers. They found that the gap is actually much smaller at large employers generally, about 9%.
but also that both race and gender discrimination were highly concentrated in a few employers in a handful of industries. So sales jobs, retail were more discriminatory. The auto industry was the worst offender. They also found that
that having centralized HR operations was found to reduce discrimination. Yeah, that makes sense. Standardized processes. Exactly. So keep in mind that was one of these central pillars of wokeness, according to Richard. Turns out that's one of the things that reliably reduces the most obvious discrimination. And of course, one...
flaw with these studies is that it's only the first stage of the process. That's right. It's only who gets invited for an interview. But of course, there's all kinds of other barriers once you get to the interview. And it's also important because it shows the opposite of what conservatives claim is happening. Conservatives argue that companies are hiring unqualified minorities
over qualified white candidates, right? But the reality that we can see through the data is that they aren't even hiring equally qualified minority candidates, let alone less qualified candidates, right? Now, I'm going to send you... God, he really fucking loses his mind. He says, the beauty of markets is that people are free to make such decisions for themselves.
As with many other things, some women like to be in an environment that accepts sexually charged jokes, while others find it distasteful or even frightening and disturbing. Beyond matters of the heart, some individuals like an environment in which they are surrounded by different kinds of people they can learn from, while others feel more comfortable with those like themselves. There's no justification for saying that those who have one set of instincts on each of those questions are good people, while those on the other side are bad and should have no ability to act on their preferences.
The bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges who brought civil rights law to its current state managed to start from a premise that the vast majority of Americans agreed with, that instruments of state power should not be used to repress others, and turned it into an excuse to micromanage people's lives.
Some people like racist workplaces and some people like non-racist workplaces. Some ladies love porn at work. Yeah, look, we should let them decide the freedom or choice. So note that we've sort of shifted here from like markets will fix discrimination and
And talking about how outright bigotry is bad to suddenly being like, yeah, some people want to be with people who are like them and that's okay. Look, I want to be called slurs as long as someone's joking. There's a lot of weird shit going on here. First of all, it's sort of, it's completely disconnected, like we said, from how finding a job works. Like you don't, it's not this perfectly efficient process where you're like, I'll just choose the exact workplace I want. You don't know what you're getting into. You only have limited options in your area, whatever.
These libertarian arguments are so funny because I don't think he realizes, or maybe he does, that he's essentially making an argument against the concept of rights. Once you have this, well, some people prefer to get groped at work and some people prefer not to get groped at work, you might as well just do, well, some people prefer to have safe workplaces. Some people prefer to work in places where they might die. There's also this big picture complaint here
that I just don't understand. He at one point describes the modern workplace as sexless, androgynous, and sanitized. It's like, I don't know, man. Just picturing him being like,
Like, oh, what's the problem with the modern workplace? And he's like, sexless. Yeah. He's always sort of hinting at this idea that maybe harassment laws are preventing workplace relationships. First of all, like, oh, bro. Yeah. If it weren't for the for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I'd be getting so much pussy. It's also very
funny seeing all this fucking this bullshit consternation as a gay person where I've always worked in industries where like 80% of my colleagues are women to begin with and like just statistically speaking there's not that many other gay guys around so like dating at work has never been a possibility for me
And like, I don't mind. I don't think of work as a place where I need to get laid and date and flirt and ask people out. I just like exist in a world where that's never really been an option. And I don't fucking care. The thing is, though, if there is anything that has been good for male female workplace relationships, it's the Civil Rights Act making it illegal to discriminate against women. Yeah. And now they work with you, dude. Yeah.
Survey results like very pretty wildly on this, but like a majority of people have had workplace romances and like one in five married couples met at work. So like, yeah, Richard, I know you're not getting laid at work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's because he's a moist little fascist. Maybe if you didn't have the looks and personality of the liquor from Resident Evil 2. Yeah.
The interns would like you more. So that's the gist of the book. That's just sort of like vision for the post woke world. We're going to repeal all the civil rights laws. And then you can just be racist and play porn at work and like to the rhythm of free at last, folks. Porn at work. Porn at work. Porn at work.
These guys all just very openly want to go back to a world that we've already had. So I guess we have to talk about it. Right before the book was published, the Huffington Post ran a bit of an expose on Richard where they revealed, and listeners at home, you're never going to believe this. I'm ready. He used to post on white supremacist websites. Yeah.
Between 2008 and 2012, he posted explicitly racist and sexist content under a pseudonym. We don't have to get into the details, but it did include such hits as advocating for the sterilization of low IQ people and opposing interracial marriage. I can't believe the guy who wrote a whole book about how we should be able to say slurs at work thinks that other races are like not as superior.
is his own. I mean, I was taken aback. Someone whose stated values align with white supremacist ideology at every opportunity. The expose comes out. Hanania writes a response where he basically says, like, yeah, I used to be awful and bigoted. I find my old views repulsive. I find my more polite restatement of them much more palatable. He gets a lot of support, especially from conservatives. David Frum, the old neoconservative who we are forced to do an episode on one day, said that we should embrace
quote, the road back from extremism to normality. That is true and totally irrelevant. People have to change their minds for us to do that, David. You have to change. So a lot of people on the left, Jamel Bowie, Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, basically wrote to be like, well, not only does Hanania post racist things online still, which by the way, like
Go to his Twitter feed if you want to subject yourself to it. But like, what is the difference? Right. At best, he is sort of dressed up what was once outright racism into something nominally more palatable. But to me, I guess the question is like if an open white supremacist wanted to present a more palatable version of his views in order to mainstream them.
what would be the difference between that person's output and Richard's? It feels like the people who want him to be forgiven are just asking for us to play dumb and like, no thanks. You know, by the way, one of the publications he wrote for in his more racist heyday was VDare, openly white supremacist right-wing website. He cites Steven Saylor, who's a current VDare writer in this book, in this book. I think that what this book tells me
is that the people who want power on the right right now and who are close to achieving the level of power that they need...
really do have visions of a harsher world and like whatever you thought the outer boundaries of their vision might be, I promise you it's worse. Yeah. You know, I think that most people would say like, oh yeah, you know, they, um, they don't like DEI, but it's not like they're going to repeal title seven.
of the Civil Rights Act. And it's like, well, I can tell you that they're talking about it. You know, they're talking about it in these little books that they write to each other. So I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah. The real failure here is on the part of the mainstream media who platformed him both before and after he was exposed as like this former white supremacist. Yeah, that's the thing. Right? Yeah. So like, I guess what I would want is some evidence that
that his denial is sincere. Yeah. I'm not sure that I have any. And I'm not, but you know, more importantly, I'm just not sure that it matters because the gap between Vidar and the far right of conservative punditry is very small. I feel like the redemption arcs
are getting shorter and shorter, where it's like, you guys say this young man has all these like white supremacist beliefs, but he's reformed. He just came out with a book about how we shouldn't have the Civil Rights Act anymore. Well, it's not about whether this guy should be
canceled or whatever. But it is funny that people still talk about cancel culture when all he had to do was put out one article being like, you know, yeah, no, I've, I don't believe that anymore. I believe in all that stuff. I just say it differently now. It is, I mean, the real question is like, what's it going to take? Oh, Jesus. I really regretted reading this one. I got to say.
I can't believe this is the first time this has happened. I will say between us, I was like partway through this when I was like, is this worth giving air? And then I sort of talked myself into like, no, I think it is because I think it's you're shining a light on this sort of like dark corner of the right. I definitely wouldn't have done it after a
two or three month hiatus if I had realized what I was getting into. The only thing I've actually learned from this episode is that you're just as white as I am here. Everything else went over my head. I have always said that my whiteness fluctuates very heavily depending on the level of conflict in the Middle East at any given moment, which makes me pretty low white right now. Pretty low white.
The thing is, it's the same thing with me and gayness, but because it's Pride Month and I have to deal with gay people more than usual, I'm both more gay and more homophobic than any other month of the year.
