let's get right into audience questions for the week.
The first one, Hey, David, is the era of the social justice warrior or SJ w over, you're
just not hearing much about
them anymore.
This is funny because you could interpret this in two ways.
Are you saying, are there no more social justice warriors or you could be saying is the right
no longer obsessed with talking about social justice warriors and here's the reality.
This was always a charade.
The right seems to have moved on from focusing on so-called toxic SJWs.
I don't believe that anything has really changed on the left, which is most people on the left
understand the importance of justice in its different forms.
This could be social justice, this could be judiciary justice.
This is economic justice.
This is environmental justice.
I don't think anything has changed.
Most of the left understands that and prioritizes it.
The right made a lot of headway and got a lot of attention and built entire campus speaking
tours around the idea of wanting to go around and trigger so-called SJWs who want to shut
down, debate and prevent people from speaking and talk about, you know, um, uh, a small
number of issues and a particularly toxic and divisive way.
Do those people exist on the left?
Sure.
Anything exists.
We've got a country, a country of 340 million people.
You have a everything from neo-Nazis to authoritarian leftists to, I mean, like it wasn't, everything
exists.
The question always was to what degree does this slice of the left known pejoratively
as the SJWs by some on the right, um, really affect policy and represent large swaths of
the left.
And the reality is it never actually did.
And we always would hear about, you know, individual instances at schools or someone
who was triggered by this or that.
And it was always putting the microscope on something that the right decided was going
to be advantageous for them to focus on, to make the left seem on hinge and whatever.
Here's the reality.
There are people on, uh, in, in politics, on all sides of political, of the political
spectrum who will sometimes myopically and to the detriment of their broader movement,
focusing on some particular element that misses the forest for the trees or go too far.
That's not new.
That happens on the left and it happens on the right.
The reality is that on the left, most people want reasonable conversations.
Most people want diversity of ideas.
Most of the left is for free speech.
A huge swath of the left is really quite centrist and they don't even, I mean, listen, I wish
they were more to the left, but the entire Biden, Hillary contingent on the left, uh,
are, are by and large, not even tangentially involved in what the right likes to call the
crazy SJWs.
So nothing has really changed.
The right seems to have moved on, and now they're talking about other things.
They're talking about Trump derangement syndrome.
They're talking about, uh, you know, the, maybe they want to talk about violent leftists
even though of course the vast majority of political violence actually comes from the
right.
So my message to you is it's not that the era of the SJW is over.
Uh, it's that there never really was an era other than the fact that most of the left
finds it really important to support justice in all of its forms where we see it, it's
actually very much tied in with identity politics.
Right?
The right.
You hear much less about that as well.
Uh, the right liked for around the same time that they were talking about theS crazy SJWs
they were talking about the identity politics left.
Are there people on the left who use identity as a cudgel or mallet with which to beat people
and to shut down debate and to exclude voices from conversations?
Absolutely.
Have I experienced it myself?
I have a, I have been told that my Jewish identity is irrelevant because it is actually
the fact that I learned English young enough and my Jewish identity and my immigrant from
Argentina identity are irrelevant because I speak English without an accent and therefore
I basically pass as just a white guy, which is a relevant analysis in many ways when we're
talking about privilege, but therefore my views on X or Y are not valid or shouldn't
be listened to.
I've experienced that, but I recognize that it is a very small fraction of the left that
believes that stuff.
Most of the left understands that identity matters.
People's identity can give them a unique lens through which to look at a problem, a policy
problem, a societal problem, whatever the case may be, but it needs to be used to add
to the conversation, not to suppress conversation and you're also hearing a lot less about toxic
identity politics from the right about the left to the extent that it existed before
it still exists.
It's relatively small and hopefully we are moving past that.
Although the right, we'll just become obsessed with something else.