James Lindsay on how Charlotte's murder is being used to foment discord (09-10-2025--Hour3)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. This is I'm pretty excited about this. I want to Welcome to the program. James Lindsay. He is an author, a mathematician, and self described professional troublemaker. He's written six books spanning the subjects including religion, the philosophy of science, postmodern theory, expert on critical race theory. He is the founder of New Discourses. You can read his work there New Discourses dot com. He along with Helen pluck Rose and Peter Bogosi and they also did the Infamous or famous depending on your tay, the Grievance Studies papers. And Welcome to the program. James Lindsay, how are you, sir? I'm good. Thank you for having me. Thank you for doing this. I do appreciate it, and I reached out to you, and this kind of came together last minute here, over the course last hour, actually was I'm seeing in the wake of this murder here in Charlotte of this Ukrainian refugee by you know, mentally unstable, deranged man on our light rail line almost three weeks ago. Now there has been a growing chorus coming from the right, the online right, and it's it's starting to concern me, and I'm starting to hear parts of it kind of filter out through into more I guess mainstream or noormy types of people on social media, but also in some emails and some calls and stuff here at the show. And it has to do with the fact that the attacker here was black, the victim was white, and this is now being used as some sort of, I don't know, like a call for what is essentially a racial essentialism that we saw on the left. That I know people like you and me and you have greatly informed a lot of my work and views on this stuff, and I'm concerned that we're seeing some of the same stuff now bubbling up on the right that we were fighting on the left. And so what are you I know, you're seeing some of this as well, and you're trying to push back and it's not a pleasant experience. Yeah, I'm seeing exactly the same thing. I've been seeing this actually for our number of years building and become very concerned about it last summer and I started to speak up very clearly about it, and I have been basically punished for it vigorously since. So what I'm saying now is not a surprise to me, but it is terrifying. It is that everything we've seen from the left, the race of essentialism, the racial provocation, and that's just the race to mention there are other sex, sexuality, gender, and so on, is now being replicated in reverse. On the right. They've decided to go full reactionary rather than to try to restore equality under the law in our country. And they're pushing that hard right now in the wake of or making use of this horrific tragedy, this horrific crime that took place there in Charlotte. Well, yeah, that's it, the restoration of rule of law, because what you know, five years, four years ago, we on the right were saying things like you know, no, it's equality under the law, and no people shouldn't be given preferences and that sort of thing. And now it seems like there are a lot of people that I thought I was standing next to that were agreeing with me. Now it seems like I'm standing alone. They may have gone somewhere else, and like, that's not This is not a healthy place for the society to be. Do you think though, that this is like this this is intentional or is this you said, reactionary? Is it like I don't know, is it just this response out of like this feeling of well, if they did it to me, I'm going to do it to them too. Well, there's some of that, But it's happening online. And the first rule of online is everything that happens online is at least partially fake. So there are operators embedded within everything happening online. It's not all organic. There are agents provocateur who are inflaming this. Instead of trying to turn the temperature down, they're trying to turn the temperature up. Whether that's because they're getting clicks and getting you know, opportunity to be seen or go viral or whatever else, or whether that's because they're working for somebody. We know a lot of the accounts on Twitter, for example, are actually foreign agents that are working to stoke things up. We see that when just as happened the other day, a you know, internet line gets cut in the Red Sea and then Pakistan goes offline for twelve hours and all the big body accounts that are agitating all the time seem to disappear until they get back on line. So we know that this is also it's partly fake and it's partly real, and that applies in another dimension. The complaints that they're making are partly fake and partly real. We're pointing at something real if we want to get down to brass tacks. The reason that this career criminal, the schizophrenic was on the train in the first place is because of various policies to do with crime and criminality and criminal justice that are championed in city after city and state after state by Democrats, that are based in things like restorative justice, which doesn't work, which are based in things like you know, defund the police, which doesn't work, abolish the prisons, which doesn't work for various reasons. There's you know a variety of different reasons from you know, opportunities for graft to wanting to have a virtuous appearance with regard to the issue to downrighte adoption in some cases of communist vision and ideology and policy that lead this to be the case, but rather than attacking this genuine issue and that is actually a racially divided issue, not because of the issue itself, but because the program has couched in diversity, equity and inclusion, racialist language analyzed through critical racory. Black Lives Matter has come out and poured gas all over this fire already today because of that. This is a very clear, very straightforward policy issue and actually, just to be blunt Democratic Party platform issue that's being turned into a race issue so that we can't get to the bottom of it and we can't solve it. And it's disturbing to me to see the right, which has been fighting against this problem so vocally and powerfully for five to six years, suddenly decides that it wants to get into the same mud hole and play with the people on the left that they claimed that they were standing against. So you mentioned a couple different factors, and there are different people that would fit the bill that you described for those factors, I think, and you said that they're using this story, this issue in order to advance this other thing. And it got me thinking of what you've always said, which I have quoted you. I try to always give you credit for My audience now knows this. In fact, a caller just quoted you saying at in the last hour, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. And when I heard you say that, everything sort of falls in place from there, all of these different issues, And so am I. So is that what I am now seeing from the right? Is this the same thing with these right wing influencers that are using this. That's my opinion. Yes, with the influencers, of course, a lot of the people who follow them are frankly just mad. Yeah, they're horrified, they're frustrated, they despair. They've wanted these policies to be corrected, and they don't get corrected, and then this tragedy, this horrific crime happens. All of this was very directly preventable, and in fact, it's not like nobody saw it coming. People have been campaigning to get these kinds of laws reverted to, these kinds of policies reversed for a decade now, with no effect. There's at the Democratic Party has been absolutely unresponsive and in fact just doubled down consistently, and of course the Biden administration did that with every issue they could. In the frustration that a lot of people feel is so high, which makes them fertile soil for the seeds that the agents provocateur are throwing, which I think is intentional. I think it's deliberate. And like you said, you know that famous line from David Horowitz, the issue was never the issue. The issue is always the revolution coming straight out of the communist playbook. Is where he got that, or he was reporting on it, the idea with you know, the George Floyd riots to which they're now comparing this. You can look at what just just look at what happened. Look at the fruit. That wasn't designed to help racial minority communities or black lives or any of anything like it. It was an opportunistic moment for a radical movement to attack our society, our government, and the idea of law and order. And as that has broken down, now you have something that's happened, and you have an opportunistic group of people, some of whom are probably foreign actors, some of whom are probably domestic actors with agendas or on payrolls or whatever else who are now pushing the other direction. And the goal is like a par of scissors, just to cut us off from our society, from the rule of law, from equality under the law, from the equal protection clause in the laws, and trying in the fourteenth Amendment. And I think that that's just what I said, an opportunistic move by a group of dedicated political radicals who are attempting to do something to a political agenda. So now, all this time I've been quoting you, and it's actually Horowitz that I've been quoting. I've been giving you false attribution. I could go for a job at Harvard now no, yeah, all right, Look, it was a pleasure. I do appreciate you joining me for the program on such short note. It's very nice to talk with you. I hope you'll come back again, and good luck. Keep up the good works there, fir thing you too. Take care. That's James Lindsay. You can read him at new Discourses dot com. He's got his podcast and everything else up there. Highly recommended. Thanks again to James. So, when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to End Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year, and it's called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash walk and then you could search for my team name Pete's Pack. There's also a link at the Pete Pot There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars if you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. I gotta say, I'm very happy that I finally got to speak with James Lindsay. I have been. I did not tell him this, but I've been a fan of his work for years. I've been trying to get him on for years, and then just it happened today. I saw him saying some stuff about the use of. The Charlotte Murder and how it's being used by people to foment discord. And you see these people on the quote unquote right that are now adopting this racial essentialism that we've been arguing against. And it's like, what the hell are you doing over there? Why are you doing that? And so I reached out to him on Twitter and I was like, Hey, could you come on and talk about this because I'm seeing this too, and he agreed and I'm so happy that he did so. Anyway, if you like, I have quoted James Lindsay many many times over many years, So go to his website New discourses dot com. He did such in depth guides and tutorials for years on critical race theory and critical studies and stuff, the history of it, the philosophy behind it. I mean, I learned so much from him about the critical study stuff, and hey gaalienism and all of it, the underpinning philosophies and stuff, the history Anthony Graham, she and the known like all of these different people in the in that movement, and I mean, and it's still all there. Like you will find he would he flies all over the place and does speeches for like very very cheap for groups that need him to like explain what they're up against. He did a ton of stuff with Moms Moms for Liberty about the the books in the schools and all of that and the you know, the fights that they were having, and so he would go and speak to their chapters all over the country. Just just a warrior for this stuff. So definitely give the guy a follow if you're on Twitter. I think he's he goes by conceptually James I think is his name conceptually James or James Lindsay. And he's well worth the follow, and he does he does as I have been known to do as well. He does get in there and gets a little bit rowdy on Twitter. So he's a good follow, and he's got a great website with a lot of resources New discourses dot com. All right, So I know it's been a while, but Roy Cooper has finally weighed in on the on the situation here on the murder of the Ukrainian refugee Arena Zarutzka and Charlotte. I know, I know it's been eighteen days, but still better late than never, as is Roy Cooper's mantra when it comes to hurricane response, for example, better late than that, right exactly. So, after eighteen days of silence, Michael Wattley, former chairman of the RNC and the North Carolina GOP Republican candidate for US Senate, and Wattley called him out on Twitter and he said, eighteen days, where you've been my good friend, Ray. He didn't say that part, but he said Roy, like, what's up? No no word from Roy Cooper for eighteen days? And if you heard yesterday's program. I went over the trek, the trec This was what Roy Cooper put together, this Task Force for Racial Equity and Criminal Justice back in twenty twenty, during the height of the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful rioting. And he put in charge of that task force Josh Stein, who was then the Attorney General who is now the governor, and Anita Earls, a member of the North Carolina Court Supreme Court rather and they had pages and pages, I think fifteen pages of recommendations. I went over some of them. And this is their philosophy. This is the judicial philosophy as espoused by the Democrat Party, the radical left, and it infused our court system in the ensuing five years. So finally, after eighteen days of silence, Roy Cooper is goaded into, well, maybe a comms person is goaded into finally saying something about this story that has now gone national. And he says, or the account says, because there's no RC in the tweet. And usually when he tweets, usually about the Hurricanes, I mean, not the ones. He doesn't respond to the hockey team. He oh, he tweets about the hockey team, and then he writes RC, So you know he wrote that. So he didn't write these right because he doesn't have RC. So here's what the account says. The murder of Arena Zarutzka is a horrible tragedy and we must do everything we can to keep people safe. Only a cynical DC insider would think it's acceptable to use her death for political points, especially one who supported cutting funding to law enforcement in North Carolina, which never happened, by the way. And also, do you think Roy Cooper was using George Floyd's death when he convened the task force? Wasn't that using somebody's death for political points? Oh? I know it's different when you do it. No, it was wrong then and it would be wrong now. I've been attorney general and governor dedicating my career to putting violent criminals behind bars, but not clearing out the rape kit backlog and keeping them there. It's time Michael Watley and the GOP get serious in Washington about funding our law enforcement. And that's what I'll do with Senator. This is not a law enforcement funding problem, dude. This is not about Washington DC not giving Charlotte enough money to pay for cops salaries. That's not what this is about. The cops did their jobs. They arrested the dude fourteen times. This is a judicial system problem, and this is such a week. This is a worse response than even the mayor gave the first time and the second time, and it's basically in the third time too, So like all three of her statements, this is worse than all three of her statements. And he got dragged on Twitter and I was so there for it. Game on Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout. 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After watching this guy skate on bad policies, bad politics and destructive behavior and getting a pass from North Carolina media, it was nice to finally see this guy nuked. It was And for folks who don't know what a ratio is, it's when the number of responses outnumbers. The likes on a post. So if I say, you know, mayo is the best condom end ever, and I have you know, a billion likes, because that's obviously the true position, I have a billion likes and I have only you know, two comments, then that's not a ratio. But if I were to say mustard, for example, is the best condiment and I got a billion comments and only two likes, that would be a that would be like probably the worst ratio in the history of the world. That's called getting ratioed. It means that more people are responding to your comment than liking it, which means generally that because if somebody's going to respond in a positive way, they're also going to click the like button. The fact that they're not clicking like means that what you have said is so profoundly unpopular that everybody is calling you an idiot and attacking your position and you And that's what happened to him on both of those tweets, both of his tweets, he sent out two of them back to back. I read it all as one statement, but those were two different tweets, and it was like a two to one, three to one ratio margin. It wasn't even close. And this is what I said at the beginning, when Roy Cooper threw his name in the hat and then threw his hat into the ring said he was going to be running for senate. I said, he has never gotten the kind of coverage that he is now going to get from the national media. And I don't I'm not sure that he's prepared for it, Like I'm I don't mean like from a comm standpoint, because I didn't know at that time. But now it seems like his comms team is also not prepared for this either, because he's been running like attorney. He was running a senate race, state senate race. You know, he was in the state legislature. And then he runs for attorney general and it's just, you know, I'm going to be tough on crime. And then he sits in the AG's office for four terms, barely even gets any opponents, and then he runs for governor. And what did he do with the governor race. He made it about HB two, barely beat Pat McCrory, barely beat him, and just got fawning media coverage from the state political press. And it was a walk in the park for him, even during COVID when people are raising all of these questions and pointing out problems citing his you know, egregious overreach of the executive and we were getting no traction. And so now he's running for US Senate and now this seat is really important to the rest of the country, and now there's a lot of outside interests that are interested in this race. And he has failed his first test here. He has failed it. This is the first test, how does he behave in the wake of this kind of an attack, and he failed it. Josh Stein did not fare much better. The governor says I'm heartbroken for the family of Arena Zarutzka who lost their loved one to the senseless act of violence, and I am appalled by the footage of her murder. We need more cops on the beat. See this is the Democrat talking point. This has gone out obviously, the fact that it took this long for Cooper and Stein. I've also got a statement here from State Senator Caleb Tedros who I had on the program a couple of weeks back, and he's talking about local officers need more staffing and training and tools. They're making it about police. They're making it about we need more cops because they see this as an opportunity to distance themselves from the defund the police line that they were selling five years ago, and it did not help them. They got pummeled in the state legislative races. Pummeled, I say, the Republican campaigns ran ad after ed after ad about their defund the police platform and the crime, and it did not go well for Democrats. And so this is now their chance. They're going to try to reposition themselves as backers of the blue. We need more money for cops, and this is not a money for cops issue, that's not what this is about. And the fact that all of them are now coming out saying the same thing, We need more money for cops, we need more money for mental health. No, the problem is the courts, which in Mecklenberg County are controlled by Democrats. The courts are controlled by the Democrats, and this is a core judicial philosophy. When you're letting people go with a rap sheet of fourteen arrests and years in prisons for violent offenses, and then they come in expressing sex a ski it's aphrenic symptoms, and your answer is to let them walk on cashless bail with a promise to appear for a psyche val. That's a judicial philosophy. That's the problem. 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Right, You got to check out Incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. There is some breaking news out of Utah at Utah Valley University. Charlie Kirk was delivering a speech. He was doing one of his events at Utah Valley University and there are reports that shots were fired at the event. There's no other information available at this time that I'm seeing. Fox News is reporting it, no further information available. CNN says nothing on his injuries, just that Charlie Kirk was shot at don't know if he was struck or not, and I don't know if there's a miscommunication going on with the way it's being framed as that he was shot at an event or if he was shot at the event. I'm seeing it reported different ways. And I don't know if people in. Their race to be the first to report that something terrible has happened that they are not that they're reporting it sloppily. I will take this as an opportunity. Once again, Well, I guess two things. Number One, Let's wait and see what the information is. Yes, offer your prayers if you are the praying type, for Charlie Kirk as well as all of the students and all the attendees, everybody that was there, that there are no casualties, there are no injuries, and everybody is alive. Because we don't have any information, and so just wait for more information to come out before racing to fill in any gaps with what you think may have occurred. And also, don't amplify people who are doing that on social media. And this gets to point number two, which is in this day and age, everybody with a social media account is part of the media and there is a responsibility that comes with that. And I'm not saying this to gatekeep you or to suppress you or not you or anybody just but there are things that you should do and keep in mind when you are publishing, because you are publishing, you are a member of the media when you publish something on your social media accounts, and so you need to be responsible to not spread lies and not promote things that are not true that are going to make people react in ways that they otherwise would not have reacted. So before you amplify something, before you share it and say, oh my gosh, I can't believe this, which I've never understood that people some people who do this and it's not everybody hashtag, not everyone, but like there are some people that it seems like they they want the attention for themselves. There's a lot of people in legacy media that does this too. The suspect is reportedly in custody according to Desert News that's an Arizona newspaper. Let me see if I can pull up the information. So they're reporting Charlie Kirk was shot at Charlie Kirk was shot at an event that's from Desert News. Bystanders report seeing Kirk shot near his neck during a Q and A with student. Again, all of This information is subject to change because it always does. It always does. Okay. A suspect is in custody. Campus is on lockdown. A single shot was fired on campus towards a visiting speaker. Police are investigating. Now. Suspect is in custody, according to an alert from UVU. But that's but that's it. That's all we've got from Deseret dot Com. Again, that's a newspaper in Arizona, right, Arizona? Or is that Utah? But he was speaking at a Utah event and I'm not seeing it, Okay, So it says breaking news, but there's nothing else to it. So again, if you are of the prayerful kind, say a prayer for Charlie Kirk and his family. He's got several young children, a wife, and he was at a university appearance doing a Q and A. All right, that'll do it for this episode. 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