Wilfred Reilly: confronting historical myths propagated in schools
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Wilfred Reilly about his new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula. Reilly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he worked in the private sector before his career in academia, including stints as a political canvasser, real estate investor and a corporate sales executive. He is also the author of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About] and Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War. His writing appears in a wide array of publications like Commentary, National Review and Quillette. Razib and Reilly tackle the reality that over the last few decades the American education system has reoriented itself to teach values by slanting a neutral historical narrative not specific to a particular viewpoint in the direction of what is arguably distortion and misinformation. Perhaps the most egregious case of this is the narrative about slavery, making the institution a uniquely American sin when the reality is that until the 19th century it was a widespread practice across almost all societies. In fact, as Reilly points out, it was the West, and in particular Britain, that ended the practice across much of the world. An aspect of counterfactually reorienting the historical narrative for didactic purposes is that many educators have reinvented peoples and places to serve their own idealism; Native Americans for example have become repurposed into premodern environmentalist activists, even though their arrival in the New World over 10,000 years ago was indisputably associated with megafaunal extinction. Reilly shows that this pattern of reinterpreting and shading the past applies even to events within the lifetimes of the living. The various retellings of the “Red Scare” periods of American history after World War I and World War II obfuscate the reality that the US in the 20th century did have a Communist movement that infiltrated the professions and even the diplomatic corps; Joe McCarthy’s excesses seem to have ended up justifying amnesia about a global political movement that transformed much of the world and had very real aims to take over the USA. Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me highlights that current attempts to retell history are not actually even liberal, but simply radical, and reflect the capture of education schools by Leftist activists since the 1970s. Rather than equipping children for the modern economy and expanding their understanding of the world, the regnant generation of educational practitioners seems intent on creating a cadre of 21st century radicals whose vague view of the past is rooted in ideology rather than any observable reality.
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1:07:21
Leighton Woodhouse: chaos and corruption in urban America
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, currently based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, Social Studies, as well as working with Michael Shellenberger. He also has a new podcast with Lee Fang, Le Pod. Woodhouse and Razib discuss the broader issue of the necessity of order in cities, how important cities are to American economic dynamism, and how the problems of cities impact us all. One of Woodhouse’s beats has been crime and public disorder, and living in the Bay Area he has been unwitting witness to some of the most flagrant dysfunction of the current era. He outlines the culpability of the judicial system in the rise of petty crime and details organized crime’s opportunistic manipulation of the system. Razib inquires about the political elite’s role in fostering disorder, in particular the policies and views of the mayor of Oakland and the Alameda County district attorney. They address the rise of the movement against law and order on the West coast, its connection to social libertarianism, and how that differs from East-coast big city liberalism. Woodhouse believes that the West coast’s homelessness crisis emerges in particular from its unique political configuration accelerated by a judicial system that aids and abets social libertarianism that is operationally pro-crime. Finally, they discuss the possibility that the 2024 elections will throw out of office many of the mayors and district attorneys brought in in the last few years on a plan of social justice activism.
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1:23:08
Lyman Stone: a demographer against the birth dearth
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a soon to be PhD in sociology from McGill University specializing in population dynamics. Stone runs the Pro-natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and has had appointments at AEI, and has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times. Well known for his social media presence, Stone is a published academic who has explored COVID policies, religion and divorce rates. Stone has previously been on Unsupervised Learning to discuss his work on religion, but this episode they shiftto his bread and butter: demographics and the preconditions for a pro-natalist society. First, Razib and Stone discuss the variables behind the fertility crash in the USA since 2008, and Stone debunks the notion that it is driven purely by decline in teen births. Despite the reality that teen births have dropped, disproportionately among Hispanics, Stone notes that since 2008 there has been an increase in both the age of first birth and age of marriage, resulting in reduced lifetime fertility. Stone also addresses worldwide patterns, and notes that aside from Niger almost the whole of Africa seems to have been impacted by the demographic transition that is leading to reduced fertility on other continents. He does note that the gap between the number of children women want, and the number they have, is particularly large in Africa. Razib and Stone also discuss the fiscal/monetary rationales for reduced fertility, as well as social and cultural changes. They also discuss the genetics and heritability of pro-natal dispositions, concluding that the changes we see in total fertility rate are driven by cultural change.
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator “Peachy Keenan.” A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, appearing on Fox News and penning Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War. Razib and Keenan discuss her peripatetic and unique journey from a relatively apolitical member of America’s liberal professional managerial class to a conservative Catholic housewife with a large family. Keenan talks about her ability to connect with audiences of all stripes despite her partisan leanings as the product of her cosmopolitan upbringing among coastal elites. Though in her values and practices she lives the life of the “domestic extremist,” she still retains an aesthetic appreciation of the broader culture in which she grew up. Domestic Extremist is to a great extent a roadmap from where she was, to where she is. Keenan offers a sort of primer on how to change the “factory settings” for the American professional class, proposing traditional family life as an exit out of the endless rat race. They also discuss the reality that the modern conservative culture falls short of produce any art for its own sake, at most putting out fare that ranges from overly didactic films produced by the Daily Wire to the cringe-inducing Christian film industry. Keenan emphasizes that good art must be good art, first and foremost, and whatever ideological valence should be layered in with subtlety and taste. She also discusses the problems with raising consciousness among conservative philanthropists about the problem of right-wing philistinism, and why aesthetic excellence would be a boon in any attempt to recapture the cultural high ground.
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1:13:05
Jesse Singal: after the replication crisis and into the youth gender medicine debate
On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Singal, a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack, Singal-Minded, and contributes to Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, Singal is formerly an editor at New York Magazine. His first book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, covered the replication crisis. Razib and Singal first talk about what he learned, and unlearned, during his time as a reporter at New York Magazine, especially social psychology results that were long on glamor but short on robustness. They discuss how long we’ve known that social psychology had a problem, and whether it still hasn’t reformed itself. Singal also reflects on his role in publicizing sexy findings, and how journalism has taken steps to be more careful lately. They also address some of the specific findings that came out of early 2010’s social science, from implicit bias to power posing. Next, Razib asks Singal about youth gender medicine, and the major controversies over the last few years. Singal discusses the differences between female to male transitions as opposed to male to female, and relates the whole domain back to the replication crisis and the lack of good research. They also discuss political and social aspects, and where Singal sees youth gender medicine going in the next few years.
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