Richard Hanania on the Legal Origins of Woke Culture

We are joined by author Richard Hanania to discuss his controversial new book "The Origins of Woke." Richard argues that modern woke ideology stems directly from changes to civil rights law in the 60s and 70s, not broader cultural shifts. He traces how pursuing equality of outcomes rather than opportunity put quotas and disparate impact front and center, leading to impacts on testing, HR, and more. We debate whether wokeness may also have religious origins. Richard details the role of government in racial classification, Title IX, and mandating practices at universities. We discuss potential government action to combat wokeness, and whether running for office with an unorthodox approach could drive change.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00]

Hi, today we are joined by a very special guest, the author on Substack and Twitter, Richard Hanania. Really awesome work. We love following him and we love talking with him even more.

So we're so excited he's coming on the podcast .

Malcolm Collins: Well, so an interesting thing is, is. with our audience, you're hitting an audience. It's going to be great for your book. The origins of woke. But it great in an interesting way because we are so interested in the same type of stuff.

We actually are going to have persistent disagreements about the types of questions that normal people have literally no vested interest in. Exactly. I am so interested. And I know our audience are interested. Here your theory on the origins of woke presented in like the short version that will get them excited for the book.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Richard Hanania: So the, the basic argument, if you're going to send up, you know, you're going to sum it up in a sentence is that wokeness is caused by government policy through via [00:01:00] civil rights law. And it's a strong claim and it's not, you know, it's a very, it's a claim that can you know, it could be misinterpreted and of course it doesn't explain literally every single thing that ever happened.

Like, it doesn't explain like Z's or pronouns or, or whatever, but the basic outline of like, all policy is racist. If it has like a disparate impact, how we classify race in this country. You know, the fact that our institutions have HR departments that and DEI offices that are obsessed with race. It's like, That is ultimately traceable to law.

There's a fascinating history there and it can potentially be undone by law too.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so I mean, you've gotten fairly in the weeds in your book into like how this first was introduced into law and why it wasn't stopped as it was happening. Can you talk a little to that?

Richard Hanania: Yeah, so this is a history book.

I mean, I want to say origins of woke. I mean, my background is in political science. I'm trying to like, meet the standards of like, a good social science argument of like, how we got here. And so that requires a lot of history. And yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement. I [00:02:00] mean, that's the basically every school children know about it.

It's, you know, the idea that, you know, there was there was a sort of this moral sort of wave in reaction to Jim Crow laws in America in the 1960s that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And what happened after that is that the people, you know, who were involved in that movement didn't just pack up and go home and embrace that she wasn't solved overnight.

There was, you know, pretty much immediately within, you know, within You know, within literally years there was a move towards equality of outcome rather than equality of results. And what happened, what happened from there was you had to start pushing, you know, quotas or quasi quotas onto private institutions.

You had to start going after standardized tests. And later the same civil rights act and other, you know, associated laws, smaller less important laws were used to go after free speech through hostile work environment and, and harassment and all these things really led to the rise of HR really led to like a institutional homogenization.

And so it's sort of the genesis of how we got here. So

Malcolm Collins: can you talk about [00:03:00] when really the moment happened when it moved from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, like in the legal system? I mean, there

Richard Hanania: are, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, steps on the way, but I think the Greggs decision in 1971 was, you know, pretty much the ratification of it by the Supreme Court.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thought it would lose that case. It actually sort of encouraged that. plaintiffs not to appeal because they thought the legislative history was so clear that you could use tests and you couldn't just say they were racist on the grounds that whites do better on them than blacks.

They said, clearly that's not what the law meant. That's not what the law says. They thought they would lose. It goes to the Supreme court and there's a unanimous decision. I mean, the Supreme court would surprise people on race in a lot of ways. And during the Warren and Berger years in the 1960s and 1970s but that really, that really codified it.

And then it was sort of off to the races.

Malcolm Collins: So can you educate our audience on the Greeks decision? What happened in it? What was at stake?

Richard Hanania: Yeah. Yeah, okay. So the greg's decision was basically a lawsuit against [00:04:00] a corporation in North Carolina company in North Carolina. I think it was a textile factory. And they had given basically a test, you know, they used to discriminate based on race you know, before the civil rights act, then they integrated, but they used to, they, they would have basically like an IQ test and they would have some educational requirements like high school degree and basically went to the Supreme Court.

Somebody argued that this was discriminatory just because blacks did not do as well on the test as whites did, right? This idea of disparate impact had been around for a while. But when they passed and signed the Civil Rights Act, you know, the belief was that that discrimination had to be intentional.

You had to actually have an intent to want to keep somebody out of a job. But then this was the theory of disparate impact. You went to the Supreme Court on that basis and the Supreme Court basically said, anything that has a disparate impact is basically presumptive, can be presumptively seen as discriminatory as violating the Civil Rights Act.

And then it becomes on the business as a, as the burden of proving that it's actually necessary. And there's, you know, all the, all kinds of steps to determine what that means. We can [00:05:00] get into the weeds, but that's basically the idea. So when you hear something is racist, because whites do better on it than blacks, it's all from a Supreme Court decision in 1971.

Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. So, question, when you look at the current, the most recent Supreme Court ruling that's, you know, on everyone's mind these days, with, with you know, tied to early colleges and admissions and everything like that I don't know what it's called off the top of my head, but is it sort of like the opposite of this?

Do you think it could lead to an untangling of some of this? Or do you think it's, it's just, I don't know. It's, it

Richard Hanania: is a it's a related area of law. It's not the, so that, that one was about employment. This one is about universities directly discriminating based on race. And it's a, you know, you can't do that.

And it is, I mean, it is important. I think you've seen stories, even though it doesn't directly apply to employment. You've seen stories of like corporations, like sort of becoming a little more skittish about diversity. It's a signal of sort of how the Supreme Court is thinking about these issues and how.

Future cases will be ruled on and you know, whether it [00:06:00] matters or you know, how much it matters in the end is really going to be determined. It's a very sort of a boring answer, but it's going to be determined by you know, who the judges are in the future. I mean, it's going to be determined by election results and who's appointing the judges and who's who's the Senate you know, confirming them because like, you Every, you know, every decision is sort of never in our legal system.

Nothing is ever a final decision. Everything is just sort of shifting. You know, the goal points 1 direction or not. If 3 conservative Supreme Court justices die and are replaced tomorrow, right? That decision will go back and we'll go. We'll go even further in the other direction. So it, I mean, it matters.

You see, sort of, it's sort of like, You know, like you fire, you know, artillery barrage at an enemy and they scramble for a while. If you don't follow up with any other fire, they're going to regroup and they're going to be right back in their original position. If you start hitting them again while they're scrambling, you can really change things.

So, you know, how much it matters will depend on future decisions and future elections. As boring as that sounds as an answer. Well,

Malcolm Collins: no, it is. It is actually an interesting answer. So what I find interesting is [00:07:00] how different our perceptions on the origins of Woke are and what Woke is, and I'd love it if you could comment, so I'll give a brief explanation of where I think our differences of perception are, and I'd love you to present an argument for, for your perception versus our perception.

Ours, so, so if I'm going to characterize yours and you can tell me I'm mischaracterizing it. Wokeism is downstream of legal decisions that were originally tied to the civil rights movement, but basically ran out of

Richard Hanania: control.

Malcolm Collins: Whereas our perception is that wokeism is a memetic virus much closer to a religion, and that it literally evolved out of a form of Quakerism, and that it, Instead of coming from these decisions that it actually sort of infects cultural movements, even iterations of religions.

Basically kills everything they ever stood for, then [00:08:00] marionettes their corpses and claims to be them. And that it is not the civil rights movement, that the civil rights movement had entirely different goals than modern wokeism. And that the civil rights movement now is just the corpse of something that used to matter, being marionetted by the thing that killed it.

So how do you,

Richard Hanania: I mean, I, I hear these arguments and I talk about them a little bit in the book. How does one go proving that? I mean, what is this sort of the, the, the, the historical analysis that gives you the causal mechanism that shows you that that Quakerism is sort of the root of this.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so we sort of try to trace it through time and through the educational system that was originally controlled by the Quaker movement.

And then we look for weird things that woke culture does that we don't see in any other culture. I can almost think of it as like vestigial organs. So, like, an example of this would be two things that are like really weird that I wouldn't exp or three things. So three things that we only see in Wokeism and this form of Quaker culture.

One thing that [00:09:00] was really common in Quaker culture was that young children would chastise adults for moral failings. No other culture in society does this yet was in the Woke movement. We have things like Greta Thornburg. Another thing that they would do is they would have a form of religious meeting where you wouldn't have a leader.

But people would just stand up and talk when moved by God, which is very similar to the way meetings were structured if you look at something like Occupy Wall Street. The final one is, is that Quaker culture was famously really, really prudish about sexuality, yet like claimed to be like sexually open ish which is a weird thing you see in woke culture, which is like the idea of woke culture is sexual openness, and yet they are Extremely prudish, especially about male sexuality, which seems to go against their raison d'etre.

The reason I don't think it's the civil rights movement, which I think is pretty interesting as a direct, is the civil rights movement was about creating equality. Where I think [00:10:00] woke culture's goal is to remove in the moment emotional pain, which is a very different goal than creating equality.

Richard Hanania: So, yeah, as far as that vestigial organ, you know, analysis, you know, I think that, you know, I'm just trying to think, is there any historical examples where I could say, well, you know, there's this here.

I mean, it sounds to me a bit like Maoism. I don't think civil rights awokeness comes from Maoism, but if I wanted to, I could say, you know, young generation denouncing the old prudish about sexuality. What was the, what was the second one? Crazy meetings that are, you know, it seems they did have that under, under Mao.

Yeah. Right. Well, I

Malcolm Collins: mean, could you argue that woke culture? I mean, we do know if you look at something like Antifa. So I'm just gonna make a different argument now. Woke culture is Maoism. We do know with stuff like Antifa that we had actual like communist training cells, like training these organizations, which then could have disseminated to other parts of woke culture.

Richard Hanania: Yeah, so, so I think that like the, you know, the, the stronger argument for it being you know, [00:11:00] descending from the civil rights. I have the strongest argument is that it was a lot of cases, the same people. I mean, it was the same people who were preaching equality of opportunity. A lot of it was a strategic.

I mean, there was a lot of communist involvement in the civil rights movement. They you know, they of course sold it as, you know, colorblindness and most of the members of Congress and the senators who voted for it were not communists or anything close to that. But then on a drop of a hat, sort of when they were, when the public attention was off of them, you know, they went and they pushed for equality of results.

So whatever was motivating the civil rights movement, I think it's a combination of like. You know, going back to Lincoln, the sort of noble idea of just like race, not mattering and, you know, free markets and free labor and people living as individuals, there was, there was that it was a coalition of that and just communists, which is what it, you know, quality of results, no matter what.

And sort of the, that, that latter part of the movement just sort of, took over and you can just say, I mean, it's, it's the same organizations, the NAACP, right. Color blindness in 1960, all about quotas in 1970, 1975.

Simone Collins: [00:12:00] Well, it sounds like that the, the Richard explanation is like the statutory legal governing origins of it.

And the Malcolm story is the like mimetic religious, like sort of intuitive origins of it. And they both totally play into each other. They just come from really different, like perspectives of. Like how, how actually they both sort of reflect on you, like both of your, your ways of modeling the world and your education, like, you know, you're coming from a very different sort of academic background.

Like Malcolm is looking at this from the perspective of someone who studied psychology and neuroscience, and you're looking at it from the perspective of like politics and history and like, you know, what, what concrete things are happening. I think it's really interesting to see. Like how that plays

Malcolm Collins: out.

By the way, I found your arguments very compelling and they made me challenge some of my own beliefs. Like going through your book and going through you talking on other podcasts and hearing just how specifically you were able to chart things.

Richard Hanania: Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think people, [00:13:00] yeah, I think people can I think I'm glad you said that because that is really sort of a strength of the book when I'm talking on social media or when I'm talking on podcasts, it's, it's hard to just because it is, it's not, it's not a long book.

It's like 210 pages, but it's dense. Like, you know, I don't do the academic thing. Book author thing of repeating the same things over. I'd be a hypocrite if I did because I wrote an article about why you shouldn't read books because books are often just a bunch of fluff of people saying the same thing over and over.

I only gave you 210 pages, but they're all each one is necessary. Right. And, you know, I do trace, you know, I do trace that history very, very closely. And it depends on what you're talking about. There are some things that I think I can show like, Absolutely conclusively that it was governed, like how we classify race.

I mean, that chapter, the word AAPI, the phrase, didn't exist in the English language before the 1970s. It was a government classification, and then it became part of the English language. What are the odds that it, you know, was anything, it was anything else, right? I'm

Malcolm Collins: not familiar with this. Can you

Richard Hanania: go into this part of the book?

Oh, so it's called Asian American Pacific Islander. So we have this category in America called Amer, Asian [00:14:00] American Pacific Islander. I have a chapter on how the government created new races, right? And when I have Google, I have a, a couple graphs of Google Ngrams for one for Hispanics and one for Asians.

And I showed that. It does not, AAPI, Asian American Pacific Islander, does not appear in any English language book until the late 1970s. It a government category, and why it became a government category is just sort of funny. It was just because Hawaii was a state, and like, It was like a third, like native Hawaiian and like a third Asian or something.

They're like, okay, miscellaneous everything. Everyone from Hawaii is just an Asian American Pacific Islander. And it became an identity. And now in 2020, you see hashtag stop AAPI hate. You see on Hulu, they say AAPI heritage month. I mean, it's amazing. This mimetic thing, which was literally just invented by the government.

And now it's like, it's like race. Like the thing that you think would be like sort of primordial, right? Something that would just be very natural was just clearly so clearly created by the government. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that's also fascinating [00:15:00] because there are groups that have so little in common. Yeah,

Richard Hanania: it's sort of a, it's sort of a, a test case of like how ridiculous, like you could, you could, you could just construct these things.

Simone Collins: Right. I mean, it's the same with Latino though. Like, I don't know, like we, we grew up, I think insensitively, like just sort of running with it, at least like I did in California and super progressive Silicon valley society. And then Malcolm and I acquired a business with headquarters in Peru and then like a us team that had people from all over Latin America.

And we discovered that like, people that would be considered Latino or Latinx, though no one wants that like, totally don't see themselves as part of a group. Of course not, because they're not. They're super culturally different. They would

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. I can see how plausibly you could say these groups were colonized by many of the same people and stuff like that and so they had the same pressures on them, but like comparing a Pacific Islander to like a [00:16:00] Chinese person is insane.

Yeah, it is, it is. Okay, okay. What are some of the other quirks you ran into?

Richard Hanania: Yeah. Yeah, so there is, I mean, the Hispanic one is not as absurd as the API one, but you do see the word Hispanic Latino sort of takes off. So it's not like it didn't exist in the English language. It existed and actually Mexican American and Puerto Rican go down around the same time period.

So we start think we start sort of lumping. These, you know, these groups together you know, like the, the, some things are so direct, like the title line stuff. This is more recent history. So people even might be familiar with this. But like the government and the Obama administration is basically going to universities and telling them.

Hire a Title IX coordinator. This is how you judge sexual assault cases. You know, you have preponderance of the evidence. You don't have you know, beyond a reasonable doubt standard. And they're just like, and they're giving them like the feminist literature of like, you know, how to understand gender relations and telling them like who they have to hire.

Right. They're saying you're going to have to have you know, the title line coordinator. And so there's very [00:17:00] direct here. Another thing. I mean, I think people will really appreciate is universities, right? So you think of universities, they're the origins of the other, the origins of wokeness, right?

There are places where you know, the craziest people go and they have the craziest ideas and they're obsessed with identity. In 1971 it was the federal government that goes to Columbia University and they go, give us your data on your, you know, race and sex of your hires. And we want to see if you're discriminating and the president of Columbia University is scandalized by this.

He writes an open letter. Saying, what do you talk? We're an institution of higher learning. We don't even collect that data. We are, we are so decentralized. I don't want to ask, start asking departments like which race are they hiring or if they're hiring enough women. And at the end of the note, the end of the letter, he goes you know, we have to do it to maintain our funding.

And so we'll have to become a new kind of institution. I mean, you have the history of Columbia literally holding the line for merit and and you know, colorblindness and, you know, academic standards and then just being bullied into becoming something else through the federal government. And I wish there was [00:18:00] more.

You know, I wish there was more research on like the history of this, because you look at, and there's not like tons of like, you know, there's not like historians haven't like really paid much attention. Yeah, you can go back and you can see the New York Times articles from 1971 talking about this. You can find the open letter.

It's sort of an obscure document from the Columbia president, but, you know, there's like, you know, there's, there must be a rich history there of what was going on in these years that I don't think anyone has taken up to my knowledge, but it's just, it's just sort of, you know, it's sort of crazy how, how.

Like direct, you could see the influence of government on these institutions.

Simone Collins: So if it started with government, are you of the opinion that would have to end with government, that like, if people wanted to shift culture in a different direction, they would be best advised to try to do so through policy and

Richard Hanania: government?

I think it's the most direct way to do so. Yes. And it's not, you know, they should, they should fight the mimetic war, of course, and they should make culture and art and. Media and go on Twitter and make their arguments. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all that is, all that is great. The law though, I mean, it shapes incentives and it [00:19:00] shapes institutions and what it does is not always visible, right?

If you like, if you have a law that says you have to make sure you don't have a disparate. In fact, you hire some HR person you know, five years later they do some program. Nobody traces it to the original civil rights law. Right. And so it's like going in the reverse direction. Yeah. is going to be like the same thing.

You're going to be basically making these HR people, you're going to be making them less necessary. You're going to be making corporations less skittish about racial discrimination, or maybe more skittish in the case of anti white or anti male discrimination. And there's going to be downstream effects, you know, months, years even decades down the line.

And so, yeah, I have a you know, my second to last chapter, it spells out the political program. There are specific things, you know, government can do. Well, so

Malcolm Collins: what, what are you going to run for office? Yeah.

Richard Hanania: You think I would do well running for NBC by Twitter?

Simone Collins: I mean, name awareness is like the number one factor that you need.

Richard Hanania: Maybe, maybe when I get to Trump's level of name awareness, [00:20:00] maybe, maybe all the stuff I say won't matter, but yeah, no, I don't think I have enough to overcome all that.

Malcolm Collins: Simone went to a council thing to like teach you how to run for office because she's thinking about running in the next election cycle.

And they're like, well, the first thing you have to do is delete all your social media. So no one knows anything crazy. You said, and we were like, wow, if we had a political assaulted, they would literally have a heart attack. Yeah.

Richard Hanania: So what are you running for Simone?

Simone Collins: We're, we're looking at potentially running for just state house in Pennsylvania

Richard Hanania: for our district.

No, don't say just state house. That would, I would be impressed if you became a state rep. I would be

Simone Collins: impressed too. It's, it's a, it's a, what the hell? It's, it's a, our district is very much on the edge and running as a Republican, like the, the female Republican challenger to our Democratic incumbent has lost two times in a row.

So like, not, not a good sign, but I mean, we agree with you that government is. Is crucial in changing these. We also somewhat disagree with the, the philosophy that those who are elected to office are elected because they are like. Good guys with clean records. [00:21:00] I mean, Trump, we say broke the ultimate glass ceiling and prove that people like

Malcolm Collins: us, exactly.

Richard Hanania: Yeah. I think there is. I mean, I don't know, like other candidates don't, there's not a lot of Trump like candidates, right? There aren't, but there's not

Simone Collins: a lot of people who have the balls to do it. Here's the thing is you, you decide you want to run for office and you're serious about it, right? So like you do all the right stuff, which is you hire the political consultant, you hire the campaign manager, you hire the pollster.

They all tell you to do exactly the same thing. They are not incentivized to look at efficacy. They're not incentivized to look at ROI. They're incentivized to get hired again. So they're not going to do anything risky. They're not going to do anything weird. Of course, they're going to do all the stuff that is like extremely conventionally safe.

Because if they, if they do something weird and for any reason you don't get elected and there are many reasons why you could be a really promising candidate and not get elected and your district is just, you know, zoned in a weird way like they're out, so they're not going to do anything. So I think the problem is that most responsible people who care about it don't have the balls.

To run for office using any [00:22:00] unconventional tactic We also think and i'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this because you recently got a lot of press For something that most people would be terrified to get pressed about right? You you got sort of like a lot of controversy but we found personally that the most controversial coverage we get and the most hate we get also leads to the most actual reach For people who are genuinely like engaged with our message.

So whenever we get positive Press were like really disappointed because it literally does nothing like nothing moves a needle. No new subscribers, no new engagement, no new followers. And then like we get hate and we just like tons more, tons more engagement and meaningful engagement, positive engagement.

So I'm curious, like, and so like part of, part of our thing with like running for office is we're like, you know what, you know, leave the bad social media up. Let your, let your opponents smear you because as long as your vices are not deal breakers for the thing you're running for. And like for Trump, right?

Like in the fact that he was like, that he lied about his finances and you know, let him answer. Yeah. I'm curious.

Richard Hanania: [00:23:00] Yeah, so the adage, you know, no publicity is bad publicity. I think there's, there is some truth to that. The worst thing in the universe for a politician or an intellectual, you know, depending on the, on the field, but a lot of field is to be ignored.

So bad press at least puts you in the arena, right? If anyone is, you know, most people are not thinking about most other people, most of the time, and most people will not leave a mark and most. Things that they try. So if they can write 10 hit pieces on you, a house candidate in Pennsylvania, that's, that's, you're at the 99.

9th percentile of attention for someone running for, for that position. You know, and I did 1 thing you're getting at someone that I think is, you know, there might be something to it. Is that like the whole. Industry, you know, there's fake expertise. I've heard about fake expertise that the whole sort of political conventional wisdom is sort of fake that there was, you know, something to be said for that there was you know, the trial, the whole Trump phenomenon.

I mean, if you watch the Trump, you know, the Trump phenomenon, they were always like, he can't get when the primaries, okay, he can't win the election. Okay. Now he's finished. He's not going to be the nominee in 2024. They're always, they're [00:24:00] always wrong. Right on Trump. And the market, even the markets are following sort of the conventionalism.

The markets have always underestimated Trump. And I think, you know, another case, I think, I don't know how much, how close to your fall in the current Republican primary, but my, my friend, Vivek Ramaswamy is sort of doing the unconventional thing. He's not as unconventional as you guys are, but he is

Simone Collins: trying to be the new Trump, like the reasonable Trump.

Richard Hanania: Yeah, and I, he's got a very good sort of ear for where the base is. So it's, it is, I don't know if he's actually doing something that unusual or different, or he's just like, he's just like better than the consultants are sort of knowing where the base is and where to go. Yeah. But the idea

Simone Collins: that like, Conservatives are, but I will say he's way too, like, good.

He doesn't have enough. I don't know what's wrong with him. If I cannot clearly name someone's vices, they're not doing it. Right. It per our philosophy.

Richard Hanania: Yeah, I mean, people do say he's too slicker. They're this and that. I mean, you know, but he's done amazingly for someone who came from nowhere, right? The fact that he's, you know, almost in second place and some polls you know, ones that I've seen.

But in fact, he's even like in the top five, [00:25:00] given he was nobody, you know, six months ago. It's just amazing. And so, yeah, I mean, I think you guys. Yeah, I mean, I, I, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a theory worth testing. I mean, you guys are not going to be like, what, what, what are your options? You're not going to become a conventional, you know, political couple, right?

We can't, no. So like, you know, we'll learn something from it if nothing else. So yeah. Are you, are you is it, is it a sure thing you are

Simone Collins: running? We're not totally sure yet. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: whenever I hear something like, I'm like, okay, how do we fix this? And you're like, here's how you could fix this. And I'm like, okay, then how do we do that?

You know, get more sane people into office. I think is a really good goal and I, I like, well, I mean, you seem to be working on it with Ramaswamy so that's cool. Yeah, I'd love to see you run some day though.

Richard Hanania: The world would have to be a lot, a lot crazier. I've sort of, you know, I just, I value my freedom a lot.

I've sort of, you know, I wasn't thinking about academia for a while and then I was sort of doing a few think tank things and then finally it was just like, [00:26:00] I am, you know, I just, I just don't want to be, yeah. I don't want to be chained to anything,

Simone Collins: you know, just politics is like academia. You just don't have to be competent.

Richard Hanania: Well, yeah, but you have to be at a certain place at a certain time, right. You have to sort of, you know, go where they tell you. Right. I'm fine with being competent. I just, I just don't wanna, I just don't wanna have to be anywhere. I just don't , I just love my own schedule and my own, my own freedom. So, but no, you guys doing it.

That, that's awesome. I mean, I, I, I, I didn't know about this. I'm, I'm really glad to hear it.

Malcolm Collins: What are you going to do with all our guests trying to convince them to run for office?

Simone Collins: You know, okay, well, we can do the test run, right? We'll throw ourselves under the bus, then we'll get like... It would expand

Richard Hanania: my sort of, my understanding of what's possible.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Like if we were like, Oh, if you do this and here's our secret way of making it work, then you might actually get all of our

Malcolm Collins: spicy internet friends to run.

Simone Collins: And many people, I think Tyler Cowen like put out a blog post about this recently, but he, he genuinely believes that, that one of the most meaningful [00:27:00] EA causes.

Is to reform the Republican party because right now it's kind of, it's kind of lost. It doesn't have like, like a sort of intellectual leadership or new tone. It could really use it. And we'd love to do for the Republican party, what justice Democrats kind of did with the, the, the Democratic party where they moved the Overton window and they installed some, some

Malcolm Collins: specific Democrat story or like.

What's that? Justice Democrats. Are you familiar with what happened? Oh, no. I'm familiar with Justice Democrats. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, they were incredibly successful. So for the audience who's not familiar, there was this group that was like, can we change the Everton window of the democratic party by basically holding like America's Got Talent style like auditions for who would be good candidates?

And then funding them to run by basically telling them what to do. And you know, this sounds like an insane idea, but this is where like AOC came from. This is where Omar came from. This is where like the squad came from. They really did move the Overton window of the entire democratic party while [00:28:00] capturing democratic Gen Z.

Yeah,

Richard Hanania: no, you, yeah, you're right. You know, the, the, the specifics of the Republican party though, is it's interesting because it's you know, like the, the justice Democrats were sort of, they were coming from a place where they sort of, you know, the base, you know, like the base of both parties is sort of more economically leftist.

Then the parties themselves are, so they were just saying, be even more economically leftist and then also like, well, I mean, they were also more economically liberal and so that they were sort of, you know, in that place where, and it was considered like, you know, being socially liberal was sort of consistent with all the you know, I think that the, with the Republican party, it's sort of different in that, like, first it's like, it has less of an intellect intellectual elite culture and has more of sort of a podcast and sort of, and not podcasts like radio and TV mostly.

Yeah. And you guys are good on radio and TV, but you know, your, your audience is, you're competing with like, you know, Sean Hannity or something. Right. Just like the mouthpiece. Right. As far as like, as far as reach and then you have like this very sort of, you know, these [00:29:00] sort of like religious sort of rural concerns, you know, you're going to have to sort of navigate that, you know, your soci, your socioeconomic class is sort of different from where the Republican voter is.

So it's an interesting, it's an interesting idea. Yeah. Have you thought about like running as a Democrat? I mean, was it always going to be Republicans for you guys?

Malcolm Collins: I, I do not, one, I don't think it matters to run as a Democrat anymore. The democratic party's agenda is set. There's nothing you can do to change it.

The Republicans post Trump, they can be anything they want. It's really exciting. But in addition to that, I do not think we keep having people trying to start pronatalist foundations that are tied to Democrats or like that are politically neutral and they keep getting crucified.

Richard Hanania: Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

The Republicans can't be whatever. I think you have to, you have to, you have to check a few boxes. I think abortion, guns, taxes, I think you have to check this and you have to be like, I love Trump. You have to just love Trump personally. Right. But you're right. Other than that. Yeah. Democrats are sort of, there's more of sort of a comprehensive agenda of all Republicans.

You have, you have a lot of space.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we'll, we'll see. I [00:30:00] mean, we'll see. All right. I have loved chatting with you. This was fantastic. We'll definitely do another episode with you and thank you so much for your time. I would really encourage our audience to check out his sub stack. Like somehow if you don't know who Richard Henenia is, yet you know who we are.

He is very ideologically similar to us, but much more famous and has a broader so I am surprised. Like if you know who we are, but don't know who he is, You should

Simone Collins: and definitely also check out his book, the origins of woke really interesting

Richard Hanania: book and yeah, the self stack Twitter. I'm, I'm, you know, every thought I have is basically put on one of those places.

So I thought you could follow that. All right.

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