[Patreon Q&A] 3rd Wave Feminism, Trump, Neoliberalism, Jordan B. Peterson.
03 March 2017 [link youtube]
In case you don't know what Patreon is: https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel
Youtube Automatic Transcription
yo what up this is a video answering a
series of questions from one of my patreon supporters Jackson anyone who pays the one dollar on patreon gets to talk to me I often reply in typewritten form and sometimes I reply by making videos when I don't reply it's often because I'm lukewarm on an issue I just have nothing to say about it sometimes people ask me for dietary advice and it's like dude I am NOT the guy to get into the pros and cons of adding olive oil to your lima bean salad I'm just I'm just not the guy to do that there are other there's so many vegans on YouTube who either really are experts in nutrition or claim to be I'm not one of them so you don't I try not to be rude but there were some questions who don't answer not because they offend me it's not because I mean this is the funny thing about the people in the gossip demi-monde it's never like people asking for details about my divorce or something nobody wants to know nobody wants to talk to me about my divorce you know it's not evading those kinds of questions it's normally a question like you know somebody wants to know about whether or not lemon juice actually reduces your rate of cancer or something it's like dude you know not not in my lane it's just just not my area of expertise it's not an area where my opinion would be valuable but thanks to her I mean it's flattering thanks for asking glad you'd like to know my opinion about olive oil and lemon juice or whatever all right so Jackson has sent me a bunch of questions that are much more political and therefore much more suitable for an answer the first one is do I have any experience with professor Jordan B Peterson Jordan B Peterson is a university professor in Canada who recently emerged from obscurity into a kind of internet fame fame on the Internet is largely arbitrary if not entirely random in his case as in so many cases it's really that he made the leap from old media to new media so Jordan B Peterson was covered in Canadian newspapers and on the Canadian TV news and then he became this huge figure on the internet so nuts ah'm Sultan but but very very often fame on YouTube is an echo of some kind of Fame or success that is in traditional broadcast media nothing wrong with that Jordan B Peterson because of his fame taking on a number of issues in terms of political correctness and specifically the issue of gender neutral pronouns laws requiring people to use someone's preferred pronoun this kind of thing I did look him up I did try to watch several of his academic lectures on history and politics and I have to tell you long story short this is not because I I disagree with him politically but to me he just seems like an imbecile he seems like a fatuous self-indulgent idiot who has no idea what original research in political science really means or in you know history or politics would have you and the videos I saw from him regardless of what his actual PhD is in they were videos giving long lectures about you know history and politics they were in that category you know he had a video I saw it was a lecture basically but the history of communism I know a lot of this guy I got to tell you it was just idiocy it was not even at a level that would be impressive for a high school book report let alone for a salaried professor but you mean that's what he does he's gonna enjoy the little bit of Fame that he has earned almost at random he's having fun with it I don't have any hate Meyer for the guy but I don't want to watch another video from him ever okay if he makes a video about veganism I'll probably watch that out of interest but I I don't want to hear what the guys to say so there's another question can you expand on your commentary on third wave feminism and its influence on university campuses so he is referring back to an earlier video idea that is patreon exclusive if you're paying the $1 you can try to scroll back and find that video or I can give a link um I did an earlier video in response to the question I used to get all the time am i a feminist am i an anti-feminist where do I stand on that and basically in that video I pointed out look there's a really big difference between first wave feminism and third wave feminism and basically what I identify with positively his first wave feminism and second wave feminism is okay too but it's third wave feminism that's really been a disaster and has really discredited the good name feminist and I can compare that to number things you guys have heard me say many times I'm really concerned about the conduct of vegans discrediting the name of veganism and that's quite a reasonable concern if you've been around for a while in the veganism game there are people who discredit veganism in real life you you deal with that have misconceptions about veganism have become popularized by a you know a subset of veganism or a crazy minority of vegans iam this has asked me to expand on third wave feminism and its influence on university campuses the big change in my lifetime is that third wave feminism went from being an ideology of the students to being an ideologies of the professor's so back in 1997 I've got to tell you the world of both university politics and high school politics was vitiate 'add by third wave feminist ideas but at that time back in 1997 those were books that the the edgy hip rebellious students were reading despite their professors it was like a sense of rebelling against your professors or rebelling against your high school teachers to read these really extreme and crazy feminists you know texts like put it this way at that time the third wave feminist stuff was in the library but it wasn't required reading in your courses right so it's very different at that time in terms of the spirit it was grassroots and bottom-up now one of my girlfriend's just one just one was really kind of a woman who was brainwashed by third wave feminism back in those days so that would have been like 1994 through 1998 she was into third wave feminism and she eventually grew out of it like I remember her talking to me about how specific claims that third wave feminists made about like the history of Europe about the history of like persecution of witches and stuff like there were all these really specific historical claims that were made in setting up the platform for this kind of feminist extremism if you like and one by one she learned that those claims were not true like what they were saying about the persecution of witches as plenty to say so that was in verse so I mean at some point she just hit a tipping point where she realized look if they're lying about this stuff they'll lie about anything and I don't even think she took it much deeper than that I don't think she liked she didn't get interested in debunking third wave feminism she just realized she just realized it was all [ __ ] during the years when that girlfriend was with me because we were together for many years we did talk about feminism a lot I don't know I'm gonna be interested me be great to have her on the show be great to do a Skype conversation that girlfriend now now she's married with kids not married to me she's married to some other guy which is cool happy for her I'm happy for him hope to quote a rap lyric go [ __ ] up his [ __ ] instead of mine I'm happy I don't have to deal with her [ __ ] anymore I'm tempted to say more anyway look you know but I was interesting because when she was me I think she was really challenged by my view on gender in an interesting way because I have a moderate pragmatic down-to-earth view of gender politics I think it's very compatible with first wave feminism but it was totally incompatible with what she had been taught which she had been brainwashed into by by third wave feminism so that was a really interesting kind of contrast that I live with um but look at that time third wave feminism was the ideology of the students from the bottom up and not so much the ideology the professor's in the top down so now it's become totally intolerable because it's it's become the the ideology that students are forced to conform to and are graded on right now obviously that's gonna be different in every university department in every University campus you really have to ask yourself keeping a little real is it worse having a professor who in that way forces the students to conform to third wave feminism than it is to have a professor who forces the students to conform to Christianity because that's incredibly calm there are literally millions of people are Christians and thousands and thousands of professors do that you know make Christianity part of what defines their curriculum and what they expect to students in the classroom and my honest answer is no I mean third wave feminism is [ __ ] up but having a professor who genuinely believes in Catholicism or Protestantism I think it's easy to ignore it's easy to treat as invisible just how that totally destroys the quality of university education and I would say the same is true in most cases of a professor who really believes in Islam Buddhism sometimes better sometimes worse I've met some totally insane professors who believe in Buddhism a lot of people are [ __ ] up in Buddhism and it [ __ ] up you know what their students are getting out of the classroom experience you virtually get sure in some cases Buddhism can be even worse than Christianity but in most cases it's true most Buddhists just don't just don't take it that seriously it's hard it's hard to take some of that stuff seriously you know like the idea that a Buddhist monk can magically teleport up to the heavens and have a conversation with Indra and then teleport down to the ground the extent to which Buddhists do not take their own religion seriously is proven by the fact that so few Buddhists actually believe in indra if you don't know who indra is [ __ ] google it Indra is part of the religion of Buddhism he's a huge part of real Buddhism but nobody believes that ender anymore so alright so look I know this is not really the reply you were hoping for he is third wave feminism gonna be the death of freedom of expression but that is my reply is Christianity on campus the death of freedom of expression yes it is it [ __ ] destroyed how about Islam how about any of these repressive religions all of them are worse than third wave feminism even though third wave feminism is [ __ ] up there's no way I can see it as being as negative and nor as durable as those as those big religions and if you look at the history of any one campus including University of Toronto in general you're gonna find that you know you're gonna find that those those those religions have played that warp and the censoring role and the not-too-distant past question would you care to talk more in general terms the value of postmodern philosophy does it have any value when standing on its own or will it inevitably lead people to try to tear down the hard-won advances of modern civilization you know I do think that post-modernism is one of those categories where you have to deal with each author on a case by case term you sorry case by case basis you know like one person associated with post-modernism just doesn't have very much in common with the others politically or philosophical otherwise and you know your basic question here is does it have any value my answer is no but you know I really try not to waste people's time you may not believe it from this video eleven minutes into this video you may think you're wasting my [ __ ] time I thought well look you know um I I saw a post on Twitter recently from another vegan much younger than me I think she's 21 and she had a reading list posted of the books in political philosophy and veganism that she was apparently gonna read she was challenging herself to read in the next few months of the next year and looking at these books thinking this is such a [ __ ] waste your time I mean come really compared to just hanging out on YouTube in terms of what's going on in veganism now like I've been reading a lot of academic publications on politics and veganism as you will have noticed because I've been posting book reviews um to me that stuff is a waste of time there was a comment from sargon of akkad where he was talking about what a great use of your time it was to read like jean-jacques Rousseau and uh the treatise by John Locke and I'm saying there honestly I mean if I come out of a political science political philosophy background and I'm just listening this thinking this is a complete [ __ ] waste of people's time what he was saying about those books the specific praise he gave them they were great books for understanding this this and that x y&z problem in Paul's day I think it's not true at all yeah I've read all those books obviously I'm just sitting there thinking God you know a lot of these people take it really lightly to waste somebody's time by telling to read a book maybe especially if it's a book that has philosophy on the cover but no so this is my kv2 saying do I think postmodern philosophy is worth reading no but a lot of stuff that other people think is worth reading I consider a complete waste of your time just salience to actually solving problems keeping it real with you I mean maybe my standards are very high maybe in some ways they're very low but no I I can't think of anything in that category that I recommend anyone reading final question does Trump's election represent a pushback against post modernist influence I would say no I would say that Trump's election represents the completely incoherent final answer to neoliberalism and I mean the critique of neoliberalism is what I've been engaged in since [ __ ] in 1997 in a lot of ways right and it blows my mind that there is no and what comes after neoliberalism what's next the discourse politically has just halted at neoliberalism and disintegrated it's bizarre the total lack of imagination of any political philosophy political science of any real if just of any discourse of any debate after neoliberalism shows this tremendous paucity of I guess just intelligence in the last 20 years it's nuts so I mean Trump in his in his way he represents a next step after the collapse of neoliberalism now I can't call neoliberalism a failure it's not neoliberalism has been a tremendously successful political ideology it's one of the most successful in history of the world however it has limitations it has failings it has both advantages and disadvantages and remarkably few of my professors were ever willing to speak in those terms those kinds of pragmatics okay let's look at neoliberalism honestly let's say what is what it's good at what it's bad at what are the advantages with the disadvantages how compare neoliberalism to the government of Saudi Arabia you [ __ ] kidding yourself come on Neil is not that bad people a lot of people want to demonize it from one perspective and I don't know I don't even know if anyone's praising it anymore you know but neoliberalism had many serious obvious failings that nobody seems to have engaged in intelligent critique of and and you just answer your question Trump selection Trump was the only guy on the whole spectrum who was anti neoliberal who was just not neoliberal and he didn't even explain why I mean just totally incoherent way Trump just says free trade is bad he doesn't even say for you he says specific free trade deals are a bad deal he'd rather have protectionism than a bad deal with Mexico and there's there's nothing more say about than that he wants to have more factory jobs he complains about unemployment at a time when unemployment us around only four percent four percent unemployment in America and 21st century and you're saying there's too much unemployment you know Trump was a really sloppy incoherence critic of neoliberalism you can't he could put together a critique from the you know it's like the same thing with Trump's position on corruption what does it mean you says drain the swamp like in a sense it's a really meaningful reaction to what became normal in 20 years of neoliberalism but there's no way I can even describe this as a critique there's no way I could even tell you at the time of his election what was Trump's plan how was he gonna change the rules for how elections proceed in the US or how was he going to eliminate corruption you just know he doesn't like it you just know that Trump has been living with it I know if you guys remember but even before he became a candidate for president Trump used to have videos that were up on YouTube and on you know Twitter or whatever where Trump was just ranting about how much he hated these politicians who asked him for donations and how corrupt they all were Trump is a critic of neoliberalism because he was a part of it and he was pissed off with it he hated wasting his time and wasting his money and he hated seeing both sides the Republicans the Democrats taking bribes he hated it so and again he hates the free trade agreements and it's just an emotional reaction I understand so it's like but like there's a there's an onus on us I really do mean us including me I am a political scientist I'm a political philosopher at my incredibly low level why have we failed to elaborate any kind of meaningful discourse post neoliberal political discourse it's just a joke it's just ridiculous and now I mean Trump it's I mean you know it's like I said I mean back when we did the Canadian elections like one year ago now or whatever it's not that long ago I was saying look whatever party actually takes an anti-war position is gonna win this election and pretty much nobody did it I mean you get to a point where some of these deep assumptions about war maybe Trump became the anti-war candidate in the primaries he was completely pro war but then when he was running against Hillary Clinton directly Hillary Clinton was so pro war was so wanting to expand the bombing of you know Syrian all the [ __ ] the Trump became the anti-war candidate so he won and so he's Pro torture but anti war it's ridiculous but I mean when when you let the intellectual caliber of political discourse drop to this incredibly low level when you fail to articulate just disambiguate what the options and opportunities are in politics that is part of the role of a political philosopher of a social engage philosopher is to look at the murky mess of a situation and say look people these are our options these are our choices you know you've got a mess of information and I'm gonna clarify for you what really are the Forks in the road ahead of us we have had far too little of that going on last twenty years and in that incredibly intellectually impoverished climate Donald Trump of all people ended up being the anti the anti-war candidate and the anti neoliberal candidate and the Pro pourer candidate the Pro working man came the pro working class candidate Pro factory worker it's completely surreal it's completely ridiculous but no I mean to me I wouldn't describe that as being connected to post-modernism way or another thank you for your questions Jackson it's been nice talking to you
series of questions from one of my patreon supporters Jackson anyone who pays the one dollar on patreon gets to talk to me I often reply in typewritten form and sometimes I reply by making videos when I don't reply it's often because I'm lukewarm on an issue I just have nothing to say about it sometimes people ask me for dietary advice and it's like dude I am NOT the guy to get into the pros and cons of adding olive oil to your lima bean salad I'm just I'm just not the guy to do that there are other there's so many vegans on YouTube who either really are experts in nutrition or claim to be I'm not one of them so you don't I try not to be rude but there were some questions who don't answer not because they offend me it's not because I mean this is the funny thing about the people in the gossip demi-monde it's never like people asking for details about my divorce or something nobody wants to know nobody wants to talk to me about my divorce you know it's not evading those kinds of questions it's normally a question like you know somebody wants to know about whether or not lemon juice actually reduces your rate of cancer or something it's like dude you know not not in my lane it's just just not my area of expertise it's not an area where my opinion would be valuable but thanks to her I mean it's flattering thanks for asking glad you'd like to know my opinion about olive oil and lemon juice or whatever all right so Jackson has sent me a bunch of questions that are much more political and therefore much more suitable for an answer the first one is do I have any experience with professor Jordan B Peterson Jordan B Peterson is a university professor in Canada who recently emerged from obscurity into a kind of internet fame fame on the Internet is largely arbitrary if not entirely random in his case as in so many cases it's really that he made the leap from old media to new media so Jordan B Peterson was covered in Canadian newspapers and on the Canadian TV news and then he became this huge figure on the internet so nuts ah'm Sultan but but very very often fame on YouTube is an echo of some kind of Fame or success that is in traditional broadcast media nothing wrong with that Jordan B Peterson because of his fame taking on a number of issues in terms of political correctness and specifically the issue of gender neutral pronouns laws requiring people to use someone's preferred pronoun this kind of thing I did look him up I did try to watch several of his academic lectures on history and politics and I have to tell you long story short this is not because I I disagree with him politically but to me he just seems like an imbecile he seems like a fatuous self-indulgent idiot who has no idea what original research in political science really means or in you know history or politics would have you and the videos I saw from him regardless of what his actual PhD is in they were videos giving long lectures about you know history and politics they were in that category you know he had a video I saw it was a lecture basically but the history of communism I know a lot of this guy I got to tell you it was just idiocy it was not even at a level that would be impressive for a high school book report let alone for a salaried professor but you mean that's what he does he's gonna enjoy the little bit of Fame that he has earned almost at random he's having fun with it I don't have any hate Meyer for the guy but I don't want to watch another video from him ever okay if he makes a video about veganism I'll probably watch that out of interest but I I don't want to hear what the guys to say so there's another question can you expand on your commentary on third wave feminism and its influence on university campuses so he is referring back to an earlier video idea that is patreon exclusive if you're paying the $1 you can try to scroll back and find that video or I can give a link um I did an earlier video in response to the question I used to get all the time am i a feminist am i an anti-feminist where do I stand on that and basically in that video I pointed out look there's a really big difference between first wave feminism and third wave feminism and basically what I identify with positively his first wave feminism and second wave feminism is okay too but it's third wave feminism that's really been a disaster and has really discredited the good name feminist and I can compare that to number things you guys have heard me say many times I'm really concerned about the conduct of vegans discrediting the name of veganism and that's quite a reasonable concern if you've been around for a while in the veganism game there are people who discredit veganism in real life you you deal with that have misconceptions about veganism have become popularized by a you know a subset of veganism or a crazy minority of vegans iam this has asked me to expand on third wave feminism and its influence on university campuses the big change in my lifetime is that third wave feminism went from being an ideology of the students to being an ideologies of the professor's so back in 1997 I've got to tell you the world of both university politics and high school politics was vitiate 'add by third wave feminist ideas but at that time back in 1997 those were books that the the edgy hip rebellious students were reading despite their professors it was like a sense of rebelling against your professors or rebelling against your high school teachers to read these really extreme and crazy feminists you know texts like put it this way at that time the third wave feminist stuff was in the library but it wasn't required reading in your courses right so it's very different at that time in terms of the spirit it was grassroots and bottom-up now one of my girlfriend's just one just one was really kind of a woman who was brainwashed by third wave feminism back in those days so that would have been like 1994 through 1998 she was into third wave feminism and she eventually grew out of it like I remember her talking to me about how specific claims that third wave feminists made about like the history of Europe about the history of like persecution of witches and stuff like there were all these really specific historical claims that were made in setting up the platform for this kind of feminist extremism if you like and one by one she learned that those claims were not true like what they were saying about the persecution of witches as plenty to say so that was in verse so I mean at some point she just hit a tipping point where she realized look if they're lying about this stuff they'll lie about anything and I don't even think she took it much deeper than that I don't think she liked she didn't get interested in debunking third wave feminism she just realized she just realized it was all [ __ ] during the years when that girlfriend was with me because we were together for many years we did talk about feminism a lot I don't know I'm gonna be interested me be great to have her on the show be great to do a Skype conversation that girlfriend now now she's married with kids not married to me she's married to some other guy which is cool happy for her I'm happy for him hope to quote a rap lyric go [ __ ] up his [ __ ] instead of mine I'm happy I don't have to deal with her [ __ ] anymore I'm tempted to say more anyway look you know but I was interesting because when she was me I think she was really challenged by my view on gender in an interesting way because I have a moderate pragmatic down-to-earth view of gender politics I think it's very compatible with first wave feminism but it was totally incompatible with what she had been taught which she had been brainwashed into by by third wave feminism so that was a really interesting kind of contrast that I live with um but look at that time third wave feminism was the ideology of the students from the bottom up and not so much the ideology the professor's in the top down so now it's become totally intolerable because it's it's become the the ideology that students are forced to conform to and are graded on right now obviously that's gonna be different in every university department in every University campus you really have to ask yourself keeping a little real is it worse having a professor who in that way forces the students to conform to third wave feminism than it is to have a professor who forces the students to conform to Christianity because that's incredibly calm there are literally millions of people are Christians and thousands and thousands of professors do that you know make Christianity part of what defines their curriculum and what they expect to students in the classroom and my honest answer is no I mean third wave feminism is [ __ ] up but having a professor who genuinely believes in Catholicism or Protestantism I think it's easy to ignore it's easy to treat as invisible just how that totally destroys the quality of university education and I would say the same is true in most cases of a professor who really believes in Islam Buddhism sometimes better sometimes worse I've met some totally insane professors who believe in Buddhism a lot of people are [ __ ] up in Buddhism and it [ __ ] up you know what their students are getting out of the classroom experience you virtually get sure in some cases Buddhism can be even worse than Christianity but in most cases it's true most Buddhists just don't just don't take it that seriously it's hard it's hard to take some of that stuff seriously you know like the idea that a Buddhist monk can magically teleport up to the heavens and have a conversation with Indra and then teleport down to the ground the extent to which Buddhists do not take their own religion seriously is proven by the fact that so few Buddhists actually believe in indra if you don't know who indra is [ __ ] google it Indra is part of the religion of Buddhism he's a huge part of real Buddhism but nobody believes that ender anymore so alright so look I know this is not really the reply you were hoping for he is third wave feminism gonna be the death of freedom of expression but that is my reply is Christianity on campus the death of freedom of expression yes it is it [ __ ] destroyed how about Islam how about any of these repressive religions all of them are worse than third wave feminism even though third wave feminism is [ __ ] up there's no way I can see it as being as negative and nor as durable as those as those big religions and if you look at the history of any one campus including University of Toronto in general you're gonna find that you know you're gonna find that those those those religions have played that warp and the censoring role and the not-too-distant past question would you care to talk more in general terms the value of postmodern philosophy does it have any value when standing on its own or will it inevitably lead people to try to tear down the hard-won advances of modern civilization you know I do think that post-modernism is one of those categories where you have to deal with each author on a case by case term you sorry case by case basis you know like one person associated with post-modernism just doesn't have very much in common with the others politically or philosophical otherwise and you know your basic question here is does it have any value my answer is no but you know I really try not to waste people's time you may not believe it from this video eleven minutes into this video you may think you're wasting my [ __ ] time I thought well look you know um I I saw a post on Twitter recently from another vegan much younger than me I think she's 21 and she had a reading list posted of the books in political philosophy and veganism that she was apparently gonna read she was challenging herself to read in the next few months of the next year and looking at these books thinking this is such a [ __ ] waste your time I mean come really compared to just hanging out on YouTube in terms of what's going on in veganism now like I've been reading a lot of academic publications on politics and veganism as you will have noticed because I've been posting book reviews um to me that stuff is a waste of time there was a comment from sargon of akkad where he was talking about what a great use of your time it was to read like jean-jacques Rousseau and uh the treatise by John Locke and I'm saying there honestly I mean if I come out of a political science political philosophy background and I'm just listening this thinking this is a complete [ __ ] waste of people's time what he was saying about those books the specific praise he gave them they were great books for understanding this this and that x y&z problem in Paul's day I think it's not true at all yeah I've read all those books obviously I'm just sitting there thinking God you know a lot of these people take it really lightly to waste somebody's time by telling to read a book maybe especially if it's a book that has philosophy on the cover but no so this is my kv2 saying do I think postmodern philosophy is worth reading no but a lot of stuff that other people think is worth reading I consider a complete waste of your time just salience to actually solving problems keeping it real with you I mean maybe my standards are very high maybe in some ways they're very low but no I I can't think of anything in that category that I recommend anyone reading final question does Trump's election represent a pushback against post modernist influence I would say no I would say that Trump's election represents the completely incoherent final answer to neoliberalism and I mean the critique of neoliberalism is what I've been engaged in since [ __ ] in 1997 in a lot of ways right and it blows my mind that there is no and what comes after neoliberalism what's next the discourse politically has just halted at neoliberalism and disintegrated it's bizarre the total lack of imagination of any political philosophy political science of any real if just of any discourse of any debate after neoliberalism shows this tremendous paucity of I guess just intelligence in the last 20 years it's nuts so I mean Trump in his in his way he represents a next step after the collapse of neoliberalism now I can't call neoliberalism a failure it's not neoliberalism has been a tremendously successful political ideology it's one of the most successful in history of the world however it has limitations it has failings it has both advantages and disadvantages and remarkably few of my professors were ever willing to speak in those terms those kinds of pragmatics okay let's look at neoliberalism honestly let's say what is what it's good at what it's bad at what are the advantages with the disadvantages how compare neoliberalism to the government of Saudi Arabia you [ __ ] kidding yourself come on Neil is not that bad people a lot of people want to demonize it from one perspective and I don't know I don't even know if anyone's praising it anymore you know but neoliberalism had many serious obvious failings that nobody seems to have engaged in intelligent critique of and and you just answer your question Trump selection Trump was the only guy on the whole spectrum who was anti neoliberal who was just not neoliberal and he didn't even explain why I mean just totally incoherent way Trump just says free trade is bad he doesn't even say for you he says specific free trade deals are a bad deal he'd rather have protectionism than a bad deal with Mexico and there's there's nothing more say about than that he wants to have more factory jobs he complains about unemployment at a time when unemployment us around only four percent four percent unemployment in America and 21st century and you're saying there's too much unemployment you know Trump was a really sloppy incoherence critic of neoliberalism you can't he could put together a critique from the you know it's like the same thing with Trump's position on corruption what does it mean you says drain the swamp like in a sense it's a really meaningful reaction to what became normal in 20 years of neoliberalism but there's no way I can even describe this as a critique there's no way I could even tell you at the time of his election what was Trump's plan how was he gonna change the rules for how elections proceed in the US or how was he going to eliminate corruption you just know he doesn't like it you just know that Trump has been living with it I know if you guys remember but even before he became a candidate for president Trump used to have videos that were up on YouTube and on you know Twitter or whatever where Trump was just ranting about how much he hated these politicians who asked him for donations and how corrupt they all were Trump is a critic of neoliberalism because he was a part of it and he was pissed off with it he hated wasting his time and wasting his money and he hated seeing both sides the Republicans the Democrats taking bribes he hated it so and again he hates the free trade agreements and it's just an emotional reaction I understand so it's like but like there's a there's an onus on us I really do mean us including me I am a political scientist I'm a political philosopher at my incredibly low level why have we failed to elaborate any kind of meaningful discourse post neoliberal political discourse it's just a joke it's just ridiculous and now I mean Trump it's I mean you know it's like I said I mean back when we did the Canadian elections like one year ago now or whatever it's not that long ago I was saying look whatever party actually takes an anti-war position is gonna win this election and pretty much nobody did it I mean you get to a point where some of these deep assumptions about war maybe Trump became the anti-war candidate in the primaries he was completely pro war but then when he was running against Hillary Clinton directly Hillary Clinton was so pro war was so wanting to expand the bombing of you know Syrian all the [ __ ] the Trump became the anti-war candidate so he won and so he's Pro torture but anti war it's ridiculous but I mean when when you let the intellectual caliber of political discourse drop to this incredibly low level when you fail to articulate just disambiguate what the options and opportunities are in politics that is part of the role of a political philosopher of a social engage philosopher is to look at the murky mess of a situation and say look people these are our options these are our choices you know you've got a mess of information and I'm gonna clarify for you what really are the Forks in the road ahead of us we have had far too little of that going on last twenty years and in that incredibly intellectually impoverished climate Donald Trump of all people ended up being the anti the anti-war candidate and the anti neoliberal candidate and the Pro pourer candidate the Pro working man came the pro working class candidate Pro factory worker it's completely surreal it's completely ridiculous but no I mean to me I wouldn't describe that as being connected to post-modernism way or another thank you for your questions Jackson it's been nice talking to you