The Wisdom Wall

“why do we need to study, um, the history and ideas that lasted, uh, from the Western tradition is because it's not because they're Western, it's because these, these ideas shaped our world. These ideas actually made the societies that we must learn to navigate in and that made the societies that frankly Are as, you…”

“they never actually come for the alt-right, or for actual white supremacists. They come for the person that's basically agreeing with them on every issue, but differs just slightly.”

“The idea of monolithic whiteness is relatively recent and it's, It, it smooths over so many, uh, important, uh, ethnic, uh, trajectories into kind of one thing.”

“banning is not the way, um, to achieve the, the society that we want to achieve.”

“also when you ban, you don't actually get, the true believers don't stop. Because they're not actually teaching specific CRT texts. It's a, it's a, it's a methodology. It's a way of seeing the world. It's a way of teaching.”

“liberalism. Liberalism is about, um, treating people as individuals, not as avatars of, of, uh, of identity groups.”

“It's actually, people think that being a moderate just means that like whatever people on the left or right think you just like are wishy-washy, but it's no, it's actually like very hard. You actually have to believe in compromise, believe in not getting all of what you want. You, you believe in actually, um, making…”

“You would be shocked, or maybe you wouldn't be shocked, but a lot of people would be shocked by what people believe privately compared to what their public positions actually end up being.”

“Well, I think that, you know, everything comes back to the kind of education you're exposed to early on, and the kind of cultural capital that you're able to access, and by the time you're talking about, um, high school or college, you're already very late, so I think that, you know, everybody having an access to a…”

“the idea that you can eliminate discomfort from the study of history, you can't do that in any nation on earth because history is riddled with things that to our contemporary sensibilities are uncomfortable.”

“if, if you genuinely care about things like the debates we're having around CRT, or, or, or how do we make a multi-ethnic society work, or how do we improve, uh, you know, outcomes for kids, I think investing in, uh, new institutions, um, Which probably actually is a lot less expensive than some entrepreneurs and…”