Blaire White Quit Politics: There Are No "Conformist Radicals".

the last time I made a video commenting
on the politics and perspectives of Blair White I know that Blair herself did stop by this channel and watch the video she reacted to it on Instagram has ever called not on YouTube but shout out to Blair who's shown that at least she is capable of taking on board criticism this video is not really intended to criticize Blair it's not intended to criticize Blair it's a response to a recent announcement for why she is at least publicly leaving politics at least for the next few years it seems and while Blair and I do not share any of the same political goals or aspirations I think simply put we're not on the same team there's a great deal in her video that I can relate to sympathetically and empathetically it's needless to say that the differences between myself and Blair are much more worthy of discussion than the similarities but there are similarities there there are experiences we have in common in terms of being a kind of public figure trying to talk about politics in a legitimate and engaging and concerned way and then seeing what the Internet han-soo in return and you know obviously I'm a fish in a much smaller pond but you know quite early in my career on YouTube I became someone who was known by all of the other fish in this pond and she obviously had that same experience that's a large part of what she's reflecting on that within her genre she got to that point where she had met and spoken to all the other players in the game she was within six degrees of separation within the other players in the game and then she starts looking around and her feelings about the whole game starts to change in my terms she starts to figure out that not everybody is playing by the same rules and definitely not all the players are equally sincere so she's obviously had a bit of a crisis of conscience and she's also had to look back and in review the cost-benefit ratio for situation she's able to say that in her life coming on the internet in time of politics has brought many wonderful and positive things into her life but it's also brought into her life certain terrible and negative things and then there's her rationale for why she's she's trying to quit or he's trying to fundamentally change which yarra she's participating in so I sympathize but I only sympathized up to a point first thing I want to say here my regular viewers have heard me say before but Blair if you're watching you will not have heard me say before when you're looking at your role as a political leader in the pursuit of positive social change you have to look back at history and ask yourself compared to any other political leader who has suffered less that's a real question I don't mean it in a caddie backhanded insulting sort of way but the types of complaints that YouTube personalities have if you were to look back at the life and career of dr. Martin Luther King jr. whose life ended in assassination he was shot to death in case you hadn't heard for his political views and he certainly suffered all kinds of harassment and censorship and repression before that his life certainly had inconveniences imposed on him long before he was publicly executed what Martin Luther King jr. went through how does that compare to to what you're going through and is it or is it not reasonable to make that comparison in terms of the level of self discipline you should have to endure in terms of simply put the inconveniences the slings and arrows of public criticism and what-have-you that you may have to endure um Gandhi Mohandas Gandhi in India his life also ended in assassination what did he go through up to that the end of his life what of repression what kind of censure what kind of you know what kind of public excoriation and by the way you may not know this many Westerners don't Gandhi's sex life really was in the newspapers and it really was scandalous it was not for no reason that Gandhi appeared in the newspapers and was excoriated for what he was doing in his private sex life so it's not all politics with a capital P that goes on in these situations these people have also suffered the slings and arrows of a lot of private criticism and I'm sure that did hurt him it certainly hurt his image of himself as a religious leader as well as a political leader but religious leaders and political leaders are subject to criticism for their personal lives their sex lives whether it's Bill Clinton or Mohandas Gandhi or any other example you want to pull out of the out of the history books so I think this leads to the next broader topic on discuss in this video which I have not talked about in this channel before and that is the difference esthetic and moral between conservatives and everyone who's not conservative so I'm not making this a contrast between the left and the right which is a useful distinction we use a great deal in Western politics I'm really talking about people who are pro-establishment and people who are anti-establishment I had a conversation with Isaac about one year ago I think now a significant length of time ago and Isaac's views really do change I mean he's still a young person growing and adopting new views and reconsidering what he thinks of all kinds of issues but I remember I had a conversation with Isaac I think over a year ago in which he said of himself that fundamentally politically he loved and appreciated Canadian society as it now exists in 2017 and whenever that conversation happened that fundamentally he wants it to stay the same he wants it to endure and persevere and maintain these same conditions and assumptions I think for the rest of his lifetime and in theory for future generations was what he was saying and I pointed out to him that he may not think of himself as conservative but what he was describing that really is fundamentally what the word conservative means that you live in a society and you want to maintain that status quo that you are pro-establishment that you fundamentally approve of and want to preserve and conserve to use a loaded verb those conditions that society that legal system that that political system so on and so forth and I I said in reply I wasn't actually criticizing him for this I was just pointing out that that is another way to describe the position that that he just described of himself and I said you know I fundamentally do not feel that way I'm very fundamentally in a different situation from you in in the context of Canadian society I am a dissident I'm a dissident and I'm anti-establishment and I'm very fundamentally profoundly unhappy with the status quo so much so that I'm willing to endorse political ideas and policies that may even include an element of recklessness an element of experimentation because I'm willing to risk damaging some of the benefits we may take for granted in the current system of current society because I really do fundamentally wanted to change I want to challenge it I want to bring about a status quo that is fundamentally better in certain ways now you may notice I've dropped in repeatedly Canadian society right if Isaac were living in Saudi Arabia he would be a dissident he would not be a conservative he doesn't want Saudi Arabian society to remain the same obviously this is true of Blair white also and she points that out in many of her own videos that if she were living in basically any of the Muslim majority societies in the world whether that's Saudi Arabia or Indonesia that she would be fundamentally in a conflict with that with that society whereas she doesn't feel that way about Los Angeles apparently she can be a conservative relative to the political spectrum and status quo in Los Angeles but this would not be her situation to some other call society now by the same token you know there are other cultures on earth and other political systems I feel much more positively about I actually do feel much more positively about the political situation in Taiwan that's a topic for another video but my point is if I were living in Taiwan or if I were living in Greece my position on the political spectrum in terms of conservatism versus being anti-establishment being Pro establishment versus being anti-establishment being a dissident versus being a conformist that may differ fundamentally not because of the difference in me but because of a difference in that political context how I fit into it or how I fail to fit into it so this brings us back to the curious case of Blair White and her decision to drop out of conservative politics I think that people like Blair do not ask themselves these questions such as well why are they suffering this persecution or these inconveniences of this danger why are they suffering even if their suffering is trivial compared to the life of someone like dr. Martin Luther King jr. or Mohandas Ghandi precisely because their political program does not have clear goals that they are trying to achieve and many people especially in politics are goal-oriented creatures so if you have a clear goal you're trying to achieve where you say look I'm not gonna rest and I'm not gonna quit until homosexuals have certain legal protections within Saudi Arabia it's a great example and you said look maybe this struggle is gonna take 30 years and maybe it's gonna take 50 years but we have to achieve this minimum standard of human rights for homosexuals in Saudi Arabia and here's how we're gonna do it and then it's relative to that goal that you're willing to suffer public criticism probably legal problems probably being dragged into court maybe being denounced in the press maybe even having threats on your life maybe your life is gonna end the same way dr. Martin Luther King Jr's life ends but you see that goal and then you evaluate your own kin in your own effort relative to that goal I think it's incredibly difficult for people whose political values their political platform is fundamentally conformist and conservative to justify even a very small amount of suffering relative to what are just status quo preserving goals goals that don't sound like goals at all um Blair White wants to build a wall so that there will be fewer immigrants into the United States I believe this is one of her positions one of the reasons why she supported Donald Trump um you know many conservatives want to balance the budget and to simultaneously have lower taxes these are not the kind of goals that inspire people to be willing to live in a cave or you know leave the city and live in the jungle to give up all the comforts of bourgeois conformist life to commit themselves to great acts of heroism or lives of very self-disciplined activism even if that activism takes the form of wearing a suit and tie and spending long hours with legal documents engaged in complex democratic processes so I just say sometimes it's useful to talk about politics in terms of left versus right and sometimes it's really quite banal it's quite useless or quite misleading a great example being Taiwan another example being Thailand in many of these political contexts the meaning of left and right it becomes very difficult to sort out who's who in those terms but in every political context as soon as we understand what is the establishment what does it mean to be Pro establishment what does it mean to be a conformist or a conservative in support of that establishment or that economic elite that benefits from the establishment we then have a very clear and very different sense of who is a dissident and who is not and we all know the biggest example in terms of size and right now we all have to struggle with on planet earth is China China a country that is communist we're in theory being pro-establishment and being a conformist means that you're left-wing but we all know in that context the concept of left and right starts become Hollow and meaningless but being Pro establishment versus anti-establishment becomes very meaningful indeed and the kind of commitment and the kind of sacrifice that you Blair White would have to make to stand up for your principles if you lived in China would be tremendous compared to what it is that you today are coming on the internet to complain is too dangerous is too dicey is too difficult to endure and has scared you out of participating in politics from the safety of Los Angeles California I do sympathise I also have suffered because of my commitment to talking about politics on YouTube and I'm probably gonna continue to suffer they're just gonna be jobs I don't get or job interview something you know what I lose out on or what have you because of this presidency Orange I really do sympathise I really do empathize but for me this raises important questions that in this video I've tried to raise for Blair herself if she's watching and for the rest of the audience