Maybe Bret put too many participants on the panel. Also, it would have worked much better if they were sat in the same room rather than on zoom. I'm not familiar with any of the 7 on the panel, so I've been finding a little more about them. Incidentally, they are all on YouTube and I realise that they've met one another in different contexts and combinations.
John Wood Jr. for example is a member of Braver Angels, an organisation working towards political depolarisation and rebuilding a civil society. Coleman Hughes is a young writer who comes across as a centrist and seems to have balanced views.

Totally agree. They needed more time to pass all the awkwardness and relax.

Two hours certainly wasn't long enough for eight people to discuss in a relaxed manner. Plus, they're very precise with wording, etc.

Hello there. I'm not white, nor am I black, plus I don't live in America. Lol So, I watched the entire thing objectively and with interest. If you live in American society as a white or black person, it may be difficult to stay objective because your emotion, personal experience, etc. can get in the way. Facts like black kids are doing better than how media try to frame and 70% of the black youths who responded in a survey thought they were doing better than their parents are interesting - no victimhood there. I didn't get the impression that the black intellectuals were posing self-imprisoned, either.

I agree with you completely. The problem with this group of Men who grew up black, is they are dependent on their University position to give their Blackness a professional tint. The awkwardness is intentional. The Exalted positions these men hold in this tiny world of Academics, has to be observed. (I watch Trump voting street and Middle class Black men and women, and they are never uncomfortable making. They are not trading on anything but their talents. Most come out of intact families, who were in the Military. Or law officers. Or like economists Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell, (who are in their 80's) are brilliant and made it on their own. Watch pods from Stanford's, Hoover Lectures to see T. Sowell.

@Naomi I'm not black either, I am white I guess, but I live in a country where everyone is white so concept of racism is non existed. Discrimination exists like everywhere else. I completely agree with on the observation that for people in America these days race is such a hot topic, that even white toilet seat is said to be racist. So its amusing at times and insufferable at other times looking at it as an outsider.

I don't put much stock in the statistic and especially surveys because they are so often wrong. Statistics are often used to support preexisting narratives or confirmation bias and when people are asked to disclose something about themselves, so often they are either embarrassed, honestly mistaken or have a hidden agenda that its very difficult to get accurate data. Therefore I tend to stay away from statistics. I figure if the argument is good, statistics are not needed.

Reminds me of a quote.

"Beware of people who use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination." — Andrew Lang, British author (1844-1912)

@dd54 I've discovered Coleman Hughes only recently. He seems to have balanced views on BLM and racism.

@Machiavelliwar Did you actually watch the video...?

@Naomi Thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately I think they are discussing wrong topics. "Racism" is a name under Marxist inspired ideology hides, and before "racism" it was Climate Change, hiding in environmental movement. Before that it was hiding behind a skirt as it were. Feminism. Before that it was hiding under various other names. If anyone wants to understand present situation one has to go back to French Revolution where these kinds of ideas were first implemented on national level. And than you work your way trough history to see how the basic concept remains the same but names change. To talk about "racism" is something that holds these discussions back, especially in America because there its such a touch topic, even if ideas of "people states" began before United States even existed.

I feel that most of these discussions are looking at only as far as they can remember as participants, rather than looking at history books to understand that only thing new is the history you don't know.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Just as popular influence over the state’s ability to project power abroad foments among the people the international avarice and belligerence of nationalism, popular influence over the state’s ability to exercise power domestically stirs among the people the interclass avarice and belligerence of socialism.

And class warfare breeds collectivism and mindless conformity for the same basic reason that international warfare does: overwhelming and plundering enemy classes (whether in the streets or in the voting booths) requires group unity and strength in numbers. So, just as nationalists demand rigid “national allegiance” and rail against “national traitors,” socialists demand rigid “class solidarity” and inveigh against “class traitors.”
As Ludwig von Mises insightfully wrote:

“Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”

Mises referred to such doctrines as types of “warfare sociology.” He brilliantly identified the intellectual fallacies of warfare sociology as the philosophical basis for the 20th century quasi-religion of “etatism”: faith in and devotion to the omnipotent state. What Mises didn’t fully realize was that it was the institutional incentives of the people’s state (which he too thought was a necessary bulwark for liberty) that made warfare sociology—nationalism and socialism—so alluring.

Revolutionary France was the birthplace of the thoroughgoing modern people’s state. Because of that, it was also the cradle of modern nationalism and socialism.

The Spread

Throughout the 19th century, all four earth-shaking ideas—liberalism, the people’s state, its counterpart conservatism and also nationalism, and socialism—spread like wildfire through the minds of Europe. And the flames chiefly emanated from Revolutionary France.

For anyone interesting in reading how ideas evolved and spread at least until Marx who simplifed it and made it even more dangarous. here is a good article.

How Nationalism and Socialism Arose from the French Revolution by Dan Sanchez, April 12, 2017

[fee.org]

@KrunoS
"... even white toilet seat is said to be racist." That's the mindset of the WOKE. I believe that Critical Race Theory frames one's mind that way.

@Naomi Well if you are referring to Frankfurt School ideas, that has played some part yes, but minor part. There are many more ideologies mixed into what we might call "woke" today.

Marxist ideologies from Europe, postmodernist ideologies from France, Frankfurt School and its critical theory was founded just before WWII and being Jews they had to run when Nazis came to power so they moved to eventually universities in America, where the ideologies evolved over time into other ideas. It than also picked up anti-colonial ideas from India and Africa along with new religious ideas from also mainly India in form of New Age movements during 1960's.

Than we had second wave feminist, Marxist in a skirt, which instead of classss fighting each other, it became men vs women, but ideas are the same. From that came intersectional theory and than it was free for all.

The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in a speech at the American conservative think tank Manhattan Institute, criticized the theory of Intersectionality by saying:

[In intersectionality] the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

Trans, LGBTW or however many letters they added this week. The various other minorities joined in etc.

But as we are getting closer to violence its all very similar to French Revolution. Going back to its roots.

During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in his famous speech I have a Dream, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., said: “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” I agree with that statement fully. And yet looking at what I see today, I can't stop thinking that poor Martin is spinning in his grave.

“...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.” ― Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

“Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin).

The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping - racial identity by any other name - and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society." ― Kim R. Holmes, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: The New Illiberalism's Assault on Freedom

@Naomi The postmodern left gets its particular brand of egalitarianism from the New Left of the 1960s. It was then that neo-Marxism and other radical movements transformed the radical politics of America into something entirely new. The focus shifted from economics to culture. Old Marxist categories of class conflict were picked up and transformed into struggles over racial and gender identity and sexual politics.

For good or bad; America still has incredibly powerful influence on other countries. And so as most things that originate in America, such as this ideology, has been packaged and quite successfully exported to other European nations.

The origins of the postmodernist left of today can be traced to the so called NEW LEFT back in the time of counter culture and anti war social movements of the 1960's. Inspired by Marxism (with its sole focus on class) the primacy of class oppression in politics was challenged during the 1970s and 1980s (United States). In particular, by the rise of the 'new social movements' (including feminism, gay and lesbian liberationism, the anti-nuclear movement, and environmentalism).

The proliferation of these movements, and the increasing acceptance of ideology that lack of success could not be explained exclusively in terms of one ability to succeed in capitalist sociality based on merit or skill, brought forth fictional accounts of oppression, such as "Institutional racism" "Patriarchy" "Sexism" and any other kind of ism and oppression the new movements could come up with.

This became known as intersectionality (race, gender, or sexual orientation). Critics have argued that intersectionality relies entirely on non-objective concepts such as "systems of power" which themselves lack a material reality, and therefore empirical basis for study, making it an ideological set of ideas, and not a proper sociological concept. Illustrated by the following....

In order to take on their enemy, allies were needed. So various movements bound together and even new minorities were artificially created. LGBTQ ideology and its many derivatives like LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual) has also resulted, although such initialisms are sometimes criticized for being confusing and leaving some people out, as well as issues of placement of the letters within the new title. E.g. LGBTTIQQ2SA.

“It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. People with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the single handed defiance of the world. Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

@KrunoS . Your point of our having discussions only as far as our lived memory, and not including the reading of History, is so true. The problem with Historical context is, we cannot just complain! When you put the present ideas/ideologies into the frame of their origins, do you think they make a case for actions to be taken, or is it only a mental organizing principle? As I am quite certain, Eric wants to become politically active, and is in this context having a constituents meeting, here!

@KrunoS . ..... "Intersectionality is like Nato for social-justice activist. " Very apt! Eric Hoffer is a genius! I almost forgot about him. The Screaming banshees certainly have. Guess he is too much like reading History.

@Machiavelliwar Yeah good point. I don't know. Someone said: “The influence of the recent past is always overestimated. When we are asked to name the greatest human inventions we tend to think of the telephone, the electric light bulb and the silicon chip rather than the wheel, the plough and the taming of fire.” ― Frans De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. ― Gore Vidal

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
― Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–1890) was a French critic, journalist and novelist.

meaning: It changes superficially; but, underneath, its essence is always the same.

So I don't think we will learn much from history, its just my hopeful thinking probably. But from my point of view, its hard to just go around in circle of present day discussions that lead to no progress. I think we need to break the deadlock in some way. If its looking at history great. But that tends to be more intellectual approach that only works with some people. Majority needs something emotional to drive them.

So for the time being its probably going to be your typical "my god is better than your god" discussion. As you so vividly put it The Screaming banshees. Hahaha love that.

Do you mean Eric or Bret wants to become politically active? If you mean Bret Weinstein, than yes I agree. He definitely has the incurable case of liberal intellectuals..... In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015), Roger Scruton reminds us that “intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society in the belief they will be in charge of it” (p. 12), and this is one reason why they most often start with the area over which they have the most control: language.

Another reason is because reality has a stubborn habit of not cooperating with their utopian visions: thoughts are easier to control than economies or the revealed preferences of individuals.

These liberal elites tend to see themselves better than society, thinking they know better and they are somehow blessed with high level of insight and superior intellect. Just like Karl Marx though or members of the Frankfurt School or postmodernists of Frence.

But even with best intentions, well as they say road to hell is paved with good intentions.