Live in Melbourne w/Josh Szeps

Summary

Conversations With Coleman: Live in Melbourne with Josh Szepps
Hosted by The Free Press / Coleman Hughes
Release Date: September 7, 2024

---

Introduction

In the "Live in Melbourne w/Josh Szepps" episode of Conversations With Coleman, host Coleman Hughes engages in a thought-provoking dialogue with Australian broadcaster Josh Szepps. Recorded during Hughes's appearances in Sydney and Melbourne, this episode delves deep into contemporary social issues, particularly focusing on indigenous land acknowledgments, white guilt, and the portrayal of race in Hollywood. The conversation is rich with insights, challenging prevailing narratives and encouraging listeners to engage in genuine discovery rather than mere debate.

---

Indigenous Land Acknowledgments in Australia

The episode opens with an exploration of the widespread practice of indigenous land acknowledgments in Australia. Josh Szepps introduces the topic by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and reflects on the normalization of such practices in Australian society.

Josh Szepps [01:24]: "I actually should say, on behalf of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, whose ancestors, past, present and future, I acknowledge and respect, welcome on their behalf."

Hughes raises questions about the significance and authenticity of these acknowledgments, given his position as a foreigner observing Australian customs.

Coleman Hughes [02:37]: "Because I'm a foreigner mainly. And the customs of any country seem strange to foreigners until they don't, and they seem strange when they're introduced."

He contrasts these practices with traditions from other cultures, emphasizing respect for established customs while critiquing what he perceives as excessive ritualization.

---

White Guilt and the Enlightenment Project

A substantial portion of the conversation addresses the concept of white guilt, particularly among white liberals in Western societies. Hughes shares his observations from interactions with West African friends, highlighting a lack of inherited guilt over historical atrocities such as the African slave trade.

Coleman Hughes [04:21]: "It's just a neutral fact for us. What does it have to do with me?"

This leads to a broader discussion about how different cultures handle historical wrongdoings. Hughes argues that white liberals uniquely seek to inherit guilt for actions committed by their ancestors, a phenomenon not mirrored in many other cultures.

Coleman Hughes [06:54]: "The idea that I inherit the guilt for things I didn't do is so. It's so fundamental, I think."

Josh Szepps challenges this notion by suggesting that acknowledgment of historical injustices should stem from recognition and ownership rather than guilt.

Josh Szepps [07:50]: "It could be interpreted as evidence of a certain level of enlightenment."

Hughes counters by advocating for balanced remembrance—commemorating suffering appropriately without constant reiteration that fosters a pathological obsession with guilt.

Coleman Hughes [08:07]: "An enlightened ownership and understanding of the sins of the past would be having one day a year or maybe a week where you commemorate the suffering... It doesn't mean that every single flight that lands in Melbourne should begin with a re acknowledgment."

---

Hollywood's Progressive Bias: "Woman King" and "Hidden Figures"

Hughes critiques Hollywood's approach to depicting historical narratives, asserting that there is a prevalent "progressive bias" that distorts facts to fit a particular moral framework. He cites the films "Woman King" and "Hidden Figures" as examples where historical complexities are oversimplified to portray non-white characters as morally superior and white characters as inherently flawed.

Coleman Hughes [17:39]: "In my book, I call it neo racism... it's like moral goodness. Right. White people are thought to be sort of inherently morally worse than people of color broadly."

In discussing "Woman King", Hughes points out the film's portrayal of the Dahomey tribe, a historically significant African group known for slave trading, which the movie allegedly misrepresents to fit a narrative of victimized heroism.

Coleman Hughes [20:04]: "They completely bastardized the history to make it seem like the Dahomey tribe was sort of forced into slave trading or had serious moral qualms about slave trading."

Regarding "Hidden Figures", Hughes acknowledges the film's positive aspects but criticizes its inaccurate depiction of segregation at NASA, where one of the central characters reportedly did not experience segregation, yet the film portrays it as a significant barrier.

Coleman Hughes [20:56]: "Only problem is one of them came out in an interview before the movie was made and said she didn't feel any segregation when she was at NASA. But of course, they had to make it so..."

---

Neo Racism and Its Impact on Policy

Hughes introduces the concept of neo racism, describing it as a modern inversion of traditional white supremacy where whiteness is morally condemned. This ideology, he argues, is prevalent among certain progressive circles, particularly within Hollywood, corporate America, and academia.

Coleman Hughes [17:39]: "In my book, I call it neo racism... anything other than whiteness is morally superior."

This neo-racist mindset, selon Hughes, fuels policies that prioritize race over merit or need, leading to decisions that may not effectively address the issues they intend to solve. Examples include:

• Defunding the Police: Redirecting funds away from law enforcement based on racial considerations rather than effectiveness.
• Race-Based Aid Distribution: Allocating COVID-era restaurant aid based on race rather than economic necessity.
• Employment Practices: Altering teacher contracts to favor black teachers during layoffs, bypassing race-neutral criteria.

Coleman Hughes [16:17]: "I'm talking about defunding the police, for instance. I'm talking about handing out Covid era restaurant aid on the basis of race rather than need..."

Josh Szepps counters by suggesting that what Hughes describes might instead be seen as an overly enthusiastic pursuit of social justice, where the desire to acknowledge past wrongs leads to disproportionate responses in the present.

Josh Szepps [22:00]: "If you're obsessed with social justice... getting obsessed with social justice is just the necessary pendulum swing..."

Hughes, however, contends that these policies represent a fundamental misalignment with the true goals of social justice, which should focus on equality and non-discrimination rather than perpetuating new forms of victimhood.

---

Cultural and Media Impacts

The discussion extends to the broader cultural implications of neo racism, particularly how it shapes media narratives and public perception. Hughes emphasizes that the portrayal of race in media often lacks complexity, reducing characters and historical figures to simplistic moral archetypes.

Coleman Hughes [17:39]: "It's really like moral goodness. Right. White people are thought to be sort of inherently morally worse than people of color broadly."

This oversimplification not only distorts historical truths but also reinforces divisive narratives that hinder genuine progress toward a multicultural and equitable society. Hughes advocates for a more nuanced understanding of history and race relations, devoid of ingrained biases that favor one group over another.

---

Conclusion

In "Live in Melbourne w/Josh Szepps", Coleman Hughes offers a critical examination of contemporary social justice movements, particularly within Western liberal contexts. By dissecting practices like indigenous land acknowledgments and scrutinizing the portrayal of race in Hollywood, Hughes challenges listeners to reconsider the foundations of current societal norms. The conversation underscores the importance of balancing recognition of historical injustices with a commitment to fostering an equitable, non-discriminatory future.

For those interested in the continuation of this enlightening discussion, the second half of the conversation is available through Josh Szepps's Substack page, with additional content from their Sydney event accessible on YouTube via the show notes.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Josh Szepps [01:24]: "I actually should say, on behalf of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, whose ancestors, past, present and future, I acknowledge and respect, welcome on their behalf."

• Coleman Hughes [04:21]: "It's just a neutral fact for us. What does it have to do with me?"

• Coleman Hughes [17:39]: "In my book, I call it neo racism... it's like moral goodness. Right. White people are thought to be sort of inherently morally worse than people of color broadly."

• Coleman Hughes [20:56]: "Only problem is one of them came out in an interview before the movie was made and said she didn't feel any segregation when she was at NASA. But of course, they had to make it so..."

• Coleman Hughes [22:26]: "I would argue that justice gone too far isn't justice almost by definition."

---

For a deeper dive into the topics discussed, be sure to listen to the full episode and explore the additional resources provided in the show notes.

Transcript

[Josh Zepps]

SA.

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is me. Last week, I did two events in Australia hosted by Josh Zepps, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. What follows is a recording of the first half of our Melbourne show. In this conversation, we talk about the indigenous land acknowledgments that are all the rage in Australia right now. We talk about white guilt in general. We talk about the relationship between white guilt and the Enlightenment project. We talk about Hollywood's progressive bias, especially as seen in movies like the Woman King and Hidden Figures and much more. So, without further ado, myself and Josh Zepps.

[Josh Zepps]

Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Thanks for coming. What a lovely night. Welcome, Coleman. Welcome to Melbourne.

[Coleman Hughes]

It's great to be here.

[Josh Zepps]

I can't really say that I'm not a Melbournian, but I am an Australian, so I can say it. I actually should say, on behalf of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, whose ancestors, past, present and future, I acknowledge and respect, welcome on their behalf.

[Coleman Hughes]

Why are you looking into my eyes as.

[Josh Zepps]

You're black, Coleman. That's why.

[Coleman Hughes]

This is not my issue.

[Josh Zepps]

This is something that Coleman, firstly, thank you very much for being here. If you're fans of mine, thank you. If you're not fans of mine, you're just fans of Coleman's. Subscribe to Uncomfortable Conversations because we have plenty more conversations like this, and this will be an episode of the podcast as well. I mentioned the acknowledgement of country, not totally in jest, because one of the things that Coleman has mentioned to me in the, what, five days, six days you've been in Australia so far has been the prevalence of something that, I guess if you're over the age of 30, 35, you grew up in a country where it would have been perceived as weird for people to get up on an awards ceremony at the logies and start talking about the Wiradjuri people or something, right? And now that's perfectly normalized to such an extent that I don't find it weird or necessarily forced. But it strikes you why?

[Coleman Hughes]

Because I'm a foreigner mainly. And the customs.

[Josh Zepps]

Stupid question.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. I mean, the customs of any. Of any country seem strange to foreigners until they don't, and they seem strange when they're introduced. And then strange custom plus time equals tradition. And so I have two. I'm split on this welcome to country thing because on the one hand, I do respect traditions of foreign countries I go to when I'm in Japan, I bow when I'm at the Shinto shrine And this tradition is just new enough that people remember when it was introduced, but it's quickly becoming a tradition, and as such, I respect it. On the other hand, I can't help but notice an observation I've made in America, in Western Europe, in Australia, which is that people of liberals, of European descent, right, broadly, white liberals, the world round, are the only group of people that feel any notable level of guilt for the sins of their distant ancestors. I remember I was at dinner with some friends of mine from West Africa, from Ghana and Nigeria, and we were talking about the African slave trade. And of course, the dirty little secret about the African slave trade is that it was not like the documentary roots where Europeans came to Africa, kidnapped people.

[Josh Zepps]

Tell us what the documentary roots was, because this is a huge American phenomenon that I'd never heard of.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, so it was a documentary in the 1970s about a fictional story about a.

[Josh Zepps]

Wait, it's a doc? It's a fictional documentary?

[Coleman Hughes]

Sorry, it's.

[Josh Zepps]

Yeah, they just call that a show.

[Coleman Hughes]

It's historical fiction. Rather. It's historical fiction about a slave captured off the coast of Africa and brought to America. And then he tries to escape and he is whipped when he is caught. And he's a brave hero character that eventually gets subdued by white supremacy, essentially, and changes his name from his African name, Kunta Kinte, to Toby, his American name. It was the most watched thing on American television in the 1970s, and more people watched it than watched the super bowl that year. Only reason I bring it up right now is because in that show, he was kidnapped off the coast of Africa by Europeans. He was a free man. In reality, the vast majority of people that became people that were slaves in America were already slaves in Africa because slavery, the slave trade, was alive and well in Africa prior to European contact. And so I'm at dinner with my friends who are broadly the descendants of the Africans that sold them into slavery, that captured them and sold them. And I was curious, when you're in school in Ghana and Nigeria, how do you learn about this? How do they teach this history that your ancestors captured slaves, sold them to the West? And I never forget what they said. They said, it's just a neutral fact for us. What does it have to do with me? And I thought to myself, that is the default attitude most people, most members of our species have towards the bad things that their great grandparents and beyond did. And so when I hear whether it's an American or an Australian, say something like, okay, you know, what was done to slaves was absolutely horrible. What was done to the indigenous people was terrible. What does that have to do with me as an individual? Right, where. How is my shame, how should my shame or guilt be triggered? Well, I have to make that allowance because it's the allowance, you know, all of most people around the world freely take.

[Josh Zepps]

I mean, isn't the robust response to that, that we live in society that is a consequence of all of those centuries of oppression? And there are still echoes of that, that oppression that exists today and that you can see them in differences in income, differences in wealth, differences in education levels, differences in life expectancy.

[Coleman Hughes]

I mean, so that's as true for the West Africans that I was talking to as it is for white Europeans. Nevertheless, the idea that I inherit the guilt for things I didn't do is so. It's so fundamental, I think.

[Josh Zepps]

But does it have to be guilt? I mean, guilt might be spinning it a little. Or maybe the white person who doesn't like saying the welcome to country codes it as guilt. But when in fact the intent is recognition, ownership, like standing up on your own two feet, understanding what your history was and oh yeah, phone's off as well.

[Coleman Hughes]

So that you should feel guilty for.

[Josh Zepps]

Exactly. And you know, it could be interpreted as evidence of a certain level of enlightenment. I mean, maybe we're more enlightened than the people in Ghana for owning the things that our ancestors did 200 years ago that still benefit us today.

[Coleman Hughes]

An enlightened ownership and understanding of the sins of the past would be having one day a year or maybe a week where you commemorate the suffering that was brought upon native people. It means having accurate history in the textbooks. It means having museums dedicated to the memory of those who suffered. It doesn't mean that every single flight that lands in Melbourne should begin with a re acknowledgment dozens of times a day of what all of us already know that borders on what looks from the outside like a pathological obsession with self flagellation.

[Josh Zepps]

What do you think is motivating? What do you think is motivating that psychologically then? Because there's clearly something, there's clearly a strain in modern social justice progressive culture that almost seeks to outdo ourselves on this stuff. You know, it's almost like he who can make the. Or sorry, he, she, they, them who can make the longest and most elaborate acknowledgement of country in the most inappropriately timid scenario. You know, if you'll have. I'm sure many people here have had the experience of, you know, you're on a zoom call with like four colleagues who are all middle aged, middle management, you know, white females. And one of them starts saying like just before we begin, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land. And everyone goes, oh, damn it, she got it till before I did. She wins. Now I have to sit through it and pretend, well, I was going to do that, I would have done it definitely. So what's going on there, like sociologically?

[Coleman Hughes]

It's a tricky question. So I wouldn't be the first person to point out the similarity between that dynamic and original sin Christianity, the notion that we are born guilty, we're born sinners and need to go to church once a week to sort of get cleansed and address the sin that can nevertheless never be cured. There is a kind of, there's a way in which that rhymes with the white guilt phenomenon. And I think it's also no coincidence that the places in society where I think this flourishes the most are the places that have become more secular, the places that have lost Christianity. You know, it's possible that there is some, you know, people talk about the God shaped hole in the soul. I mean it's possible that there's even a more specific kind of hole in our souls to do with guilt, with wanting to be made to feel guilty. Now I can't.

[Josh Zepps]

Or maybe we all not, sorry to play on chair psychologists, but maybe we all do feel guilty about things and know that we did naughty things as children that we have never been caught for or punished for. And there's some kind of emotional catharsis in having a context or a framework for channeling that guilt and being absolved of those sins through some kind of catechism, like either a prayer or a welcome to country.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's no doubt to me that it's a solution in search of a problem. In other words, the first thing is that people want to feel guilty about something. And then, you know, depending on your context, Australia, America, Canada, Western Europe, you reach for the thing that is a plausible thing to feel guilty about, given your history. Right. And obviously in Australia it's the indigenous issue. In America it's more so slavery.

[Josh Zepps]

So what are the Ghanaians feeling guilty about?

[Coleman Hughes]

Well, they.

[Josh Zepps]

Nothing.

[Coleman Hughes]

They don't have the same culturally, they don't have the same searching. Right. They're not searching for something to feel guilty about. That's what's interesting to me about, if you want to, if I may, white liberals, essentially, it's the only group of people that are searching for that thing. If you talk to anyone from Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, Russia, South America, you could find equally terrible things in the story of their ancestors that their ancestors committed, but they're not eager to find something to feel ritualistic guilt about. Now, even as I say it, I don't fully understand it, but it seems to me the only way of looking at kind of the landscape of human history and making sense of it and.

[Josh Zepps]

You don't see it as an extension of. I mean, I hesitate to use the word enlightenment again, but I think the way that a progressive who is super social justice focused would articulate this is like, yes, of course we're the only ones looking for things to find guilty about because this is the latest stage in an arc of moral development that has span centuries or millennia. And yeah, just because other people have civilizations that haven't quite caught up, got the memo about how you're supposed to interrogate your past. We have, and we're here. And therefore at some point other civilizations will also have the kind of reckoning that we're having. But yeah, we got here first. We got to the Enlightenment first too. We got to, you know, the Industrial Revolution first as well.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I see a few problems with that. One is that there are societies just as advanced as any Western society, but with none of the guilt. Japan, for instance, second, they could do.

[Josh Zepps]

With a little more guilt.

[Coleman Hughes]

They could get rid of some here and give it to them a little bit. Secondly, I'm not sure it's actually, it's only a marker of advancement if it contributes to the Enlightenment project in some way. It could just be a pathological feature of advanced societies. It could be a bad side effect of societies that have taken the road down Enlightenment moral progress. Because the Enlightenment is premised philosophically on the idea that every person is equal to every, every other person, that human flourishing can be understood using reason and science, and that we can, we can, we can make progress incrementally by understanding the world. That philosophy, nothing in that philosophy suggests that ritualistic guilt over things that happened hundreds of years ago is productive or beneficial. There's no version of the utilitarian or consequentialist project, which at least that I could see, could justify ritualistic feeling of guilt over things that happened in the past. Especially when guilt is such a deranging, it's such a deranging emotion. It's very easy to get someone to stop thinking logically if you can just get them to start feeling guilty. And so part of the reason that the American context is the one I know more about. But part of the reason you've seen liberals cave into policies that make very little sense, even just in terms of helping black Americans, is because the mind short circuits when feeling guilt.

[Josh Zepps]

What kind of policies are you talking about?

[Coleman Hughes]

So I have a whole chapter in my book that goes into all of them, but I'm talking about defunding the police, for instance. I'm talking about handing out Covid era restaurant aid on the basis of race rather than need. I'm talking about changing teachers contracts to favor black teachers during layoffs instead of race neutral metrics. All of these things that to most liberals of yesteryear would seem like crazy. Policies can be made to work if you crank the guilt up to 11.

[Josh Zepps]

And then you get to say as a insert membership of historically disadvantaged minority group here, I get to sort of trump you in. You know, we're not allowed to have a rational conversation about something because my lived experience trumps your guilt, your sense of guilt.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's right. That's right.

[Josh Zepps]

One of the fascinating things in your book is also the examination of what's happened to sort of not just public policy, but also culture and the media and Hollywood and entertainment and the way we think about diversity in those areas. Can you give us a snapshot in Australia of what you would regard the kind of prevailing consensus in American elite institutions and media is about race?

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So in my book, I call it neo racism. It really comes down to exactly what we've been talking about, which is this sort of cartoon version of history and humanity where whiteness is evil. Anything other than whiteness is morally superior. Basically, it's really just white supremacy flipped on its head in a way. But without intelligence being the marker of hierarchy, it's really like moral goodness. Right. White people are thought to be sort of inherently morally worse than people of color broadly. And this creates. This is. It's. If it's not an explicit philosophy, it's a feeling, it's an instinct among a certain section of progressives that are overrepresented in Hollywood, overrepresented in corporate America, in certain parts of corporate America, and certainly academia. So I mean, you mentioned Hollywood. The classic case of this from a year or two ago is the movie Woman King. Woman King was about a famous African tribe called the Dahomey, which actually had a cadre of female warriors, which is just an insanely cool historical tidbit that they had serious trained female warriors hundreds of years ago. And so Hollywood makes a movie about it. Slight problem that the Dahomey were one of the most notorious slave raiding and slave trading tribes in Africa. They put up numbers, okay? So if you put that through in any rational world, you would still be able to tell that story in all its complexity, and it could be a damn good movie. But the problem is that as far as Hollywood is concerned, black people in history have to be perfect and white people have to be the bad guys. So they completely bastardized the history to make it seem like the Dahomey tribe was sort of forced into slave trading or had serious moral qualms about slave trading. And it was really the Portugal. The guys from Portugal and Spain and Britain that were pushing it on. It was completely opposite.

[Josh Zepps]

It's even more insulting to make it seem like they didn't have agency over their own crimes. Like, it's even more insulting to be like, oh, don't worry, they were just hoodwinked by nefarious moustache twirling white people.

[Coleman Hughes]

Exactly. So that's a classic example. It's just a sentiment that exists that is of a piece with the kind of guilt we were just talking about.

[Josh Zepps]

And you also mentioned that Hidden Figures wasn't right. I didn't know that movie, but I did know Hidden Figures. Do you remember Hidden Figures? This movie? Just explain what.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, Hidden Figures was a movie that centered on a few black employees of NASA that were in the 50s and early 60s. A few black women that were involved in getting us to the moon. And it's a good film.

[Josh Zepps]

It's like the unseen crack squad of black chicks who helped us get to the moon.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, great concept. Good execution in a lot of ways. Except for that one of the main black women in the story inconveniently said that actually she didn't experience any segregation at NASA. So this was obviously a centerpiece of the movie, was that part of the people working to get us to the moon were at the time experiencing segregation at NASA. Which is an ironic comment on, you know, it's like you said, they're good enough to help us get to the moon, but you're also. They're so bad that they can't, you know, they have to be separated from white people. That's the underlying irony. Only problem is one of them came out in an interview before the movie was made and said she didn't feel any segregation when she was at NASA. But of course, they had to make it so that she did. Because again, whiteness, bad, evil, you know, and so this is a kind of reflexive. It's a. Yeah, it's a reflex and an instinct that exists on the left.

[Josh Zepps]

And so you. I mean, what do you say to people who say this is just sort of justice going too far? I mean, every, you know, at every stage, there are young people who take civil rights and social justice ideas a little bit too far, and then they sort of swing back. But, you know, wokeness or cancel cultural. Whatever you want to call it, that's all. Getting obsessed with social justice is just the necessary pendulum swing, and they're just a little bit too enthusiastic about good things.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So I would. I would argue that justice gone too far isn't justice almost by definition. And, you know, the pendulum swing phenomena. Yes and no. I mean, pendulums do swing. I think, for instance, all the problems I'm talking about right now were much worse three years ago than they are now after George Floyd and the kind of hysteria that gripped people in response to that. Not just in America, but globally. But there's also such a thing as just new norms being created. It's actually not the case that people just. I just had the political scientist Eric Kaufman on my podcast a month or two ago, and we went pretty deep into the data on whether people snap back to centrist or moderate politics as they get older. It's actually not necessarily true. I mean, it's often not true. A lot of times people really retain throughout their life a lot of the political instincts and beliefs that they hold when they're being forged in their youth. So I don't expect this stuff to snap back to a moderate place necessarily, even if it's declined from its peak.

[Josh Zepps]

That's interesting. And I suppose even if it declines in intensity, it may not decline in kind in the sense that it's possible for social movements to just go off the rails and start caring about things that it shouldn't be caring about and not caring about things that should be caring about. So if what you care about is what Martin Luther King Jr. And Gandhi and Mandela and Barack Obama cared about, egalitarianism, equality, forgiveness, justice, then if you have abandoned those virtues in your pursuit of a neo racist policy that sets people of color against white people again, then merely turning the volume down on the latter does not reinstantiate the.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's right. That's right. What you're getting at is that they're actually different projects. The project, I think, is the healthy and wise one is raising our children to believe at their core that race is a meaningless feature that you don't know. You should not prejudge anyone based on their race in any direction. For any reason and to not wield their own race as if it means anything more than how much sunblock you need to apply. And that's the project that Martin Luther King was interested in. That's the project the civil rights movement was premised on. That was seen as the end goal of all the marching and all the legislation is to inch toward that society, which is, it's the only workable one for multiracial, multi ethnic societies. Right. It's like we could, the world could go Japan's route and just have one ethnic group for one, you know, one, one island. That's not how, that's not how Australia is going. It's not how America's going. That's, that's not how the UK is going to. And if we're going to do the multiracial diverse society, there has to be a compact and a philosophy wherein I don't discriminate against you and I ask you not to discriminate against me. That's the logic of what I call colorblindness. It's the logic the civil rights movement was based on. Instead, there's a new movement that whether you want to call it wokeness or social justice, wants to essentially reverse the logic of, of the old system, at least to some degree. Correct. Has this fantasy of correcting for all of the ills of the past via present day discrimination, which just in turn creates new disgruntled victims of discrimination. Today it's a totally separate project. You can read everything Martin Luther King wrote and you're not going to find modern day wokeness in there because it wasn't there. It's just a different project.

If you want to listen to the second half of this conversation, you can follow the link in the show notes to Josh's substack page. Our other event in Sydney is available in full on YouTube and the link for that is in the show notes too. See you next time.