967: What Is DEI and Why Do People Hate It?

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Music. Instead

Brian Nichols  0:10  
of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on our fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show, guest I am, as always, your humble host, joining from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in eastern Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered by cardio miracle, the best heart health supplement in the world. If you want to learn more about how to lower that resting heart rate, lower your blood pressure while improving your pump at the gym, stick around. We're gonna talk about that more later in today's episode. But first, we're digging into all things free speech, censorship from the government and a microcosm, looking at the colleges and universities who are fighting back. That's the question. And joining me today to discuss all that and more is Aaron Pomerantz. Aaron, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show, how you doing? Doing good. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely great to have you. I'm looking forward to digging into this conversation, because elephant in the room I'm hearing from folks all over the political spectrum. Who are, you know, just I would say, have that TDs right, the Trump derangement syndrome. They're freaking out. They're saying, oh my gosh, the government's trying to censor all of these, these different colleges and universities. They're trying to stop our taxpayer dollars from going to them, even though they're private institutions. There's a lot to dig in here, Aaron, but before we do that, do us a favor. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience, and I guess specifically, where your focus of research lies. Yeah. So

Speaker 1  1:43  
I'm a social psychologist and researcher. I work at Rice University, which is, you know, one of, actually, I believe one of the colleges that's being mentioned right now in terms of, are we a problem or not? My work is specifically in leader development. I work to figure out how we can use psychological principles and other interdisciplinary focuses to develop college students into better leaders. And instead of just the focus of education thus far has very much been on imparting knowledge. But traditionally, there was actually a lot more about it than that. We were about making people into better people who can go out and make a difference in the world, as trite as that sometimes sounds. So my research focuses both on that and then when leadership goes wrong, how do we stop it? And how do we understand how leadership goes wrong? So I have, like, one sphere of research for my happy days when I want to feel sad, and then one sphere of research for my sad days when I want to feel happy.

Brian Nichols  2:39  
Well, I want to just really quick before we dig into today's topic of conversations. I do think they actually go hand in hand. Is that leadership side of things, right? You know, you look at any political entity, you look at any government, you look at any business, right? It really the success of that business does stem from the top. I know there's this very, you know, this very, I'm not going to call it a left wing perspective, but you definitely hear this echoed more in that camp of, you know, it's so sad that the workers only get paid X percent of the leadership. And then the response usually is, oh, you know, I love to see that McDonald's minimum wage employee be the CEO the company, right? There's a lot of responsibility, but also a lot of, I guess, a lot, a lot that doesn't get seen behind the scene, or rather from behind the scenes in that public facing area. And a lot of it is not so much the written down, spoken stuff. It's the leadership. I've seen this as I've gone through it. I've coached and consulted with different entities in the B to B space for sales, for example. And if you have a company that's not from a leadership perspective focused on actual, you know, growth, sales, like that kind of mentality, then there's going to be a a lagging from the people you hire, from the sales folks you hire. We call them the difference between hunters and I call them zoo bears, right? You have a bear, it's in the wild, goes out, it kills the food it wants to eat, right? Zoo bears, they sit there. They're fat, they're happy. They get fed. They get to fed the food. They don't. They'll go out and hunt it. And if you see that an organization who they live by getting new sales for that new pipeline and that new new revenue, if they have a sales team that's been it's been enabled and built up by a leadership that incentivizes zuberism, right? The entity is going to die. You need to have that Hunter mentality. And I see this, you know, it really does stem down from leadership. So let's just really quickly talk about leadership, because I think that overarching theme is going to play very much into not just, you know, the the conversation we're gonna have today, but I think it's gonna get the wheels turning for folks in terms of, you know, what organizations are we supporting, not if we just like the grassroots, you know, base level employees, but really, let's, let's move upstream to see what their leadership's doing. So talk to us about that, Aaron, talk to us more about that, that leadership mentality.

Speaker 1  4:48  
Well, again, like, kind of like what you said, a leadership leadership is not just about, you know, inhabiting a space. So it's not like you could just move somebody from the the rank. Process, as it were, into the C suite, or, you know, whatever model you're using, whether it's the White House, the C suite, the what, I don't know, what they call the president's office in academia, I've been here for 10 years, but the academic C suite, you can't just move people into those roles. It's not about role inhabitants. It's not about being in a space. It is really about casting a vision as hippie as that sounds, in some ways, like being a leader. An effective leader is about vision. It's not just about having power. Like, I ask this of people in my work, sometimes I'm like, Okay, does this? Does just having power make you a leader? Would you describe that? You know, just just having that power, making somebody a leader? Well, no, it's how you use it. You know, you can. You can be in a situation where you actually don't have much institutional power. You don't have much formal in the situation that that's, you know, letting you hire and fire people, and you can still be a leader. And Alternately, you can have all the institutional power in the world, but if you can't organize people to accomplish common goals, you can't move the organization forward. You're not leading. Doesn't matter how much power you have. I think both sides of the aisle, frankly, really could stand to be reminded of that. You know, when people ask, you know, who's your favorite political leader, I'm like, do you mean currently? Because we're gonna be here a while. Like, I, you know, I'll just be very blunt, you know, like you said about, about this, this current, this current issue. I'm like, there are very few good leaders, at least on the political side of this, that I can look to and recommend people follow their their style here. I'm not gonna recommend Harry reads, you know, oh, just keep your head down and you know, the anti semitism will be fine. I'm also not going to advocate for Donald Trump's Art of the Deal, which, in addition to being a book he probably didn't write, is just hundreds of pages saying, If you bully people enough, that's leadership. I think we've seen in the last four months alone how well that works. You know, leadership is about actually being effective, and I think that's a question nobody's really asking here is like, what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? What's the best way to do that? And if you're a leader, sometimes that means taking yourself and your ego out of the equation. It doesn't mean you have to be the hero. That's the great man theory of leadership. I know a lot of people on the right are really in love with that. I've been, let's just say, accosted a little bit when I say I don't believe in it, and they're like, Well, you don't believe you have anything to learn from studying George Washington. I'm like, I didn't say that, but if you're saying that, I'm going to try to emulate him, like, take a hammer to my teeth and, you know, grow another foot because I'm short, and move to Virginia, like, what's that going to do for me? There's that I'm not going to ever inhabit the space he inhabited. What it is is about effectiveness. So maybe, you know, think, think a little bit less about trying to emulate a specific person and more about what you want to accomplish in this very specific situation you find yourself in as a leader. I'm

Brian Nichols  8:02  
really glad, by the way, Aaron, you keep on using the word effectiveness, because that's exactly the stuff I care about when I'm doing sales coaching or I'm going into an organization and helping them restructure their go to market strategies from a sales perspective, right? Because I hear what you're doing, and then there is what you need to do, right? And I know that what you need to do based on what I've seen work at other organizations from an effectiveness standpoint. And I just, I think back to one of my first sales jobs. It was a technology company, and my job was an account executive, where you're not just focused on trying to close one new business for new revenue. But you're also responsible. In this case, because it was a smaller like an SMB, you're responsible for building new pipeline, which means you have to go out and curate new opportunities. How do you do that? Right? Well, you can go knock on doors, you can shake hands, go to networking events, or you do the hard part, which is actually smile and dial you sit down, you get a list of folks that are IC, PS, your ideal customer personas within a specific vertical, right? So you now, you're laser focusing there. You've outlined your buyer persona. I know I'm selling to this person in this type of a vertical, and I know that this is usually a good fit. And then you establish your your talk track, you're asking great questions. You're doing. I call warm calling, and I went to this organization, and I started, I was an account executive, and there was about four or five other account executives, and they were much like I mentioned earlier, those zoo bears right the dial button. We'll see if we get some folks. And I came in, I was just different. And then that just folks have been watching now for 970 episodes of the show. They know I'm a little different. And in that mentality, I just sat down and I had my list, and I just went to town and I had three appointments set that first day just by doing the hard work. And they're like, Dude, why are you doing this? Like, What? What? You're making us look bad. And I'm like, well, because it doesn't matter. I'm not here just for a job. I'm not just here for a paycheck. I'm here to be a. Effective, right? And I'm going to do the things that, you know, the A plus B needs to equal c. So if I'm looking at my outputs and I'm not getting C, I might need to adjust a, right? And in this case it was, you have to do the things that actually leads a new pipeline. Here's how I'm going to tie this to what our conversation is today. Aaron like when I look at a lot of folks in the political world, there is the ideal versus the reality. What actually works, right? And this is where I get so frustrated with both folks on the left and the right, because you have these these thought leaders, you have these talking heads who will go on to all everybody's favorite MSM organization, right? And they'll spout their narrative. But when your average person actually digests that they sit back and they say is, is this narrative effective? Not just from a persuasion and messaging standpoint, but from actually making my life better tangibly? No, we're seeing that right now. A lot of folks are saying, No, you can talk a good game. But at the end of the day, what really matters is the results, what I as the voter, or in this case, the buyer, am getting from the folks that I'm putting into positions of leadership. And this is where I think today's conversation can really, you know, it can really grow, because we see this across the board with our friends on the left and the right. If you just, if you, you know, talk louder, right? You're the squeakiest wheel. You're going to get the cameras on you. You can promote your narrative, but your average person starting to say, and that's not enough. And by the way, I would dare say, Aaron, I want to hear your thoughts on this. That's partly why I think Trump got his second chance with I know some folks argue about the word mandate, but I would say, from a political standpoint, relative to what we experienced over the four years prior, it was somewhat of a mandate from a especially a cultural shift, right. But I would say that a lot of that came back to the Biden administration, the Democratic Party. They were promoting this very, very strong narrative of dei of ESG, so diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental, so social government, or, yeah, yes, yeah, environmental, social and government, you have this kind of mentality, this social justice warrior progressive mentality that really started in the mid 2010s and festered here 2020, to 2024, and there was a, I think, a resoundingly loud and vocal Now, majority of folks who said, Listen, I hear your argument. I hear your messaging. It's not working. I'm not seeing the impact. It's not what's that word effective? So I say all that, Aaron, am I on the right track? Is that what we've seen happen here over the past like five years, specifically from that post COVID world,

Speaker 1  12:40  
I think somewhat so. DAVID BROOKS actually wrote an op ed for the New York Times earlier this week or late last week, and he talked about how what we need is an uprising. But when he talks about as an uprising, he's not talking about, you know, Civil War stuff. He's talking about how we need to, you know, we're in a situation that nobody really seems to like, and we need to think about how we got here, and then you know, how we can get out. And one of the things he says in the op ed that I really resonated with is people on the left need to figure out, you know, or rather, need to realize that there's a reason people don't like them very much at the moment, you know, I work in higher ed, just like David Brooks does I love higher ed? I'm also not going to pretend I'm not one of these, you know, right wing sympathetic. Oh, I'm so sorry for being in higher ed, and I'm going to crap on where I work. And, you know, actually, I, you know, like I'm not one of those. I absolutely refuse to do that. I'm not going to pretend like I'm not going to, for example, I'm not going to pretend I think Matt Walsh has point, has, has valid points on mental health. It's like, No, I have a PhD in psychology. He doesn't end of discussion. So, like, I want to get that out of the way, because now that I've said that, David Brooks in the Op Ed points out that higher ed, despite all this love we have for it, has really dropped the ball in its role as a leader. It has become very elitist. It tells people who do represent about 50% of the country that they're backwards and wrong and evil. Dei is a complicated topic, but I will say, even as somebody who believes in dei the way dei has been enacted, you look at a lot of dei practitioners versus dei theorists, I've had conversations with people, and I'll bring up the DEI theory. You know, my boss's boss is a dei expert, and I explain it to them, even some very conservative people, and they're like, that doesn't sound like dei to me. And I'm like, Well, yes, but when the practitioner is somebody who actually doesn't really know what they're talking about and just sees it as an ideological club to beat somebody over the head. It's really rich of me to say, if you only read the theory, you'd know that dei is good when it's like, well, the practitioners are doing a really bad idea, and they're alienating people who come into higher ed. I think you see that same situation more broadly with the left you know, AOC and Bernie. Sanders are having their rallies all around the country right now, Bernie is passing on his never going to be an effective politician. Crown to AOC, and now she can begin the the long journey of failing to get anything done for the rest of her career, just like he's done. There's talk you know, David Hogg is vice chair of the Democratic National Convention, and he's advocating for Zoomers to primary other Democrats. Sure is like the the sheer lack of coherent vision here and connection to reality is a real failure of leadership, and I do think that's what we saw in the last election. I think it was a rejection of higher ed being elitist, and that's why you see a lot of people not really caring what Trump's doing right now with higher ed. I think it was a rejection of a Democratic Party that isn't looking at the center of the country and unironically has people on social media and mainstream media saying, you know, yes, we do think that the two coasts should determine the direction of the country, but at the same time, you use the word mandate, and I don't necessarily know if that's quite what this is, I don't think that this. I think this was a rejection of that version of leadership, but I don't think it was an acceptance of Trump, necessarily, and I think we see that with how Trump's numbers have gone as he's doing a lot of, a lot of the stuff he's been doing over the last four months. You know, it's not very effective, as we talked about, and so his poll numbers are plummeting. So I think rather than a whole scale rejection of the left and an embracing of the right, I think what you're actually seeing is just a desperation among a lot of people to to have politicians who can be effective, and they're going, okay, WA Well, Biden hasn't worked for four years, and they told us he was mentally competent, and that seems to have not been true, so we've been lied to by him. Let's try the other guy again. You know, there was no positive vision put forth by the left in terms of what they actually stood for. So it's just choosing who you hate less. And I think that thirst for an actual coherent vision and an actual way forward and a vision for society, I think that's something still people want. And I think it will be very interesting to see what politicians kind of get that signal and try to move towards that. And I think the anti semitism and higher ed issue is itself kind of an example of that, and that there's some there's problems on both sides, but everyone has a hot take, and nobody seems to want to actually sit down and do a lot of the difficult thinking about this issue. And what does this actually mean, and how should we actually think about that. And, you know, in the Op Ed, I wrote that kind of like, brought us here today. I wrote this, like, a month ago. At this point, I warned about that, and I was like, higher ed cannot it? Cannot just say, oh, when Trump cracks down, that's the right wing, and we have to fight the right wing and and it can't ignore the fact that we got here because of higher ed's leadership. In some ways, I think they're actually a lot of good leaders in higher ed, but places like Columbia had a leadership problem, and rather than doing that work and looking inward and playing our role in moving forward with a vision of society where we can, you know, come together and have an actual vision of where we want to go that we talk about and share and debate and refine Together, we're just going, Nope, Trump Ed, which isn't, from my perspective, wrong necessarily, but is so incredibly limited, I'm not sure how useful or effective it's going to be in the long run.

Brian Nichols  18:33  
So let me I want to, like, dig into more of this leadership, specifically from the left wing perspective, because I think this is one thing. I'm not saying you missed it, but I think this is where one of the arguments does get missed. Is going back to the example I used before, of an organization who embraces zuberism, right? So when you look at, for example, Columbia, I think you're right that the leadership is absolutely a problem, but it is that leadership who is enabling right, the mentality to then work its way down towards the actual the grunt employee, right in this case, the student activist, and is this mentality that we've seen carry forward over the past, like four or five years that has, I think, really turned off a lot of Americans, because it's not just that you have the leadership failings and then the enablement of a lot of folks who would embrace these, these policies in their extreme right. To your point, it's not what you're identifying as Dei, but what has become the character caricature of dei right now, this isn't necessarily a conversation or debate about Dei, but rather, let's talk about the impacts, the effectiveness, because from your average person, what they've seen Aaron, and I think this is where the rejection, and why I said the word mandate right was because they look at what has actually been accomplished from dei objectively over and. Specifically from when it really became pushed over the past 10 years, from, we'll say like 2014 to 2024 right? That decade of the metoo movement, the DEI movement, the ESG movement, all of these different perspectives were were brought to the forefront as the truth right, the Black Lives Matter protest. I mean, just go through the trans rights, the pride activist movements, all of these entities that you would usually fall under the umbrella of some type of dei mentality, right? So you see all that, and then we see the impacts, right? Folks looked at the country, and I think objectively speaking, said, I feel, and I guess it's hard to say objective feelings, right? But they were saying, I as a voter or as a citizen of America, I'm looking at where we are objectively saying I feel that we have gotten worse than we were back when we were embracing the ideas of a true meritocracy, right? When that idea of a meritocracy was not only embraced, but it was promoted, and it was taught from leadership. It was it was it was embraced by those who were having positions of power. It was embraced by universities and to see that that mentality has really gotten rejected over the years, I think, is where a lot of people started to get nervous about embracing this idea, just with no questions. And then fast forward to 2024 this was really the first moment not just to say I'm against this, but I want to vote for a different vision. And there's that one really, really effective ad that Trump had back during the campaign, which was the Kamala Harris she's for they them. Donald Trump is for you, right? And That ad was so impactful because it did touch on, there is a a group of folks in America who would very much embrace supporting the like the extreme micro use cases to create this brand new kind of status quo, like ground floor, right? Because once you change the status quo, now you can build something further on top of that new status quo. So why I said it was a mandate was not so much to say, hey, we're we're rejecting the ideas of being a diverse or an equitable, equitable society or inclusive, whatever the terminologies of dei try to promote. But rather, what we're rejecting is the the effectiveness of this policy, because we've seen things get worse, and also as the different the different ideas been implemented into policy, we haven't seen an objective increase in in success, or an increase in opportunity or an increase of diversity. As a matter of fact, we've seen, in many cases, the opposite. I had Phil Magnus here in the show, and he was talking about, you know, different colleges who not only were talking about like being just like pure dei schools, but actively rejecting people of the right political persuasion, if they were conservative or Republican, they were proudly saying, we're not going to accept you or we're not going to hire you, right? So where's the diversity of thought? Why do we have colleges like Harvard with 97% of their staff being one political party? So when we I think it's the hypocrisy, too, Aaron, that where a lot of folks were like, listen, you're saying you want diversity, equity and inclusion. Okay, where's the diversity of thought? Where's the inclusion of folks that you disagree with? Where's the equitable results from folks that maybe don't walk the the same path that you do? And they're like, I'm not seeing it. So I think that is more so where that that mandate mentality, came from, be it, you know, accurate or not, I think that's why a lot of folks felt that that 2024, election wasn't just a vote for Trump or against Harris, but it was actually a vote against the status quo, or the restructuring of our society to a new status quo. What say you

Speaker 1  23:57  
I don't think you're, I think, I think you've, you've hit on a lot of important points there. I think I don't think you're missing it in a lot of ways. And I think you actually, you know, one of the things you bring up is this kind of hijacking of Dei. And I think that's actually something really worth bringing up in terms of this anti semitism at Columbia and in Briar broader higher ed. You know, I, first of all, I would admit that dei in higher education, that's a very different story than dei in business, because the signals are different. It's not the business world. But that being said, you know some of some of the examples you mentioned, like Black Lives Matter? Well, there's black lives matter the movement, and there's black lives matter the organization. The organization has had people indicted for federal crimes because this use of money. But the movement was never really about that, necessarily. In fact, I would say it wasn't. I mean, I went to BLM rallies back when I was in grad school in Oklahoma. It was a hilariously conservative crowd in a lot of ways. You so now let's take a look at this issue of anti semitism. And you have. Remember that we're dealing with, in a lot of ways, an active and intentional misrepresentation of dei language by, and I hate to use this word, because it's, it's been hijacked by conspiracy theorists, but it's, it's a Psy op. You know, Qatar has how much money in our higher education system, Iran is influencing our higher education system. You have people actively cheering for Hamas and Hezbollah designated terrorist organizations. Well, we know that they know how to misuse this language. They did it back in 1979 during the hostage crisis, when the Ayatollah had the black and women and female hostages released because he knew that would appeal to the American left. We're in a war of ideologies that isn't being fought with bullets as being fought with ideas. So there is absolutely a misuse here of dei that is intentional by Islamists. And I want to make it very clear I don't mean Muslims. I mean Islamists, same way. I don't mean, you know, when I say Christian, I don't mean Klansmen. It's the same basic thing. But is, Islamic fundamentalism has absolutely been, been preying on this, and it's kind of an open secret at this point. And I do think you're right. There's a, there's a there's a real dislike of the hypocrisy scene in higher ed right now. And that's what I really called out, is it's like, you know, we can talk about the good that's done in a higher ed all we want. And one of the reasons that, for example, the funding freeze in of the Ivy Leagues is so damaging is that, yeah, a lot of good work is done by the Ivy Leagues that that funding freeze is going to harm like Harvard's health research is incredible that's using okay, but let's not pretend we're entirely innocent as a broader higher ed collective here, and that when we're you know, when we're letting people like Mohsen madawi, a 31 year old, quote, unquote, undergrad who transfers from Lehigh to Colombia for the activism and gets caught on camera, you know, saying things like Intifada, and then trying to say, well, Intifada doesn't. Intifada doesn't mean killing the Jews, even though the Intifada was a series of worldwide assassinations. It just means struggle, kind of like the word comp. You know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't take that from it, from any anyone else, but we're somehow taking it because we are so terrified that, you know, we're going to get called out for it. It's like, well, of course we're going to get called out for it. They know that we're scared of being called racist. And it's not like this is the West versus Islam, either, because there are other nations in the Middle East, like Bahrain, like the United Arab Emirates, saying things like, please stop listening to the Muslim Brotherhood funded voices that you are giving a platform to. It's really bad. We would prefer if you did not do that. But we're not. We're not doing that. So we're seeing dei terms misused and manipulated in higher ed and then, yeah, I think you're right from the broader perspective across society, what stories are being elevated, who's being given a voice? The perspective is, and I'm not sure it's entirely an accurate one, but it is the perspective, and we have to address it. Perspective is that higher ed is itself inherently, unfixably corrupt. It's and then when you add that together with this view of it being elitist, which is not undeserved, and this view of it being anti, you know, anti the common man, ideologically homogenous, which, again, not undeserved, as you sort of point out. And people have been sounding the alarm bells for a long time. Well now Donald Trump represents this chance to get a sort of collective revenge on it. And whether we can say that's anti intellectual, which I think it is, we can say it's unfair. I'd agree. But what do we care about? Are we going to complain about it and say, Oh, this is so unfair, this is awful, or are we going to try to be effective? And right now, I would say there's kind of like, like in the Op Ed I was talking about from David Brooks, yeah, and that's in the short term, there are going to need to be, to be they're going to need to be short term goals like stopping Trump's unconstitutional attacks on Harvard. I don't have any sympathy for Harvard in some ways, but the way he's doing it isn't following the process of law, at least. That is the argument. The courts will bear that out. But in the long term, it's like we need to address the fact that most Americans, or at least certainly a lot of Americans, don't think of us as providing value. And so we need to try to do that. It's one of the things I really love about where I work and what I get to do, and what my institution, Rice University, gets to do, is we were plugged into Houston. People like rice in Houston. It's not for the sports we are not a sports school. We have U of H for that, but it's rice is liked because rice invests back in its city. We work with the community. We try to provide and show that value. Not in a look at me, look at me, look at me kind of way, but in a no, like, a genuine we want to help kind of way. And I'm not saying this because I'm trying to kiss up to my job. That's why I like my job, and why I've stayed here, and why I want to stay here, and why I like what I do is because that that's what I think higher ed should be, and there are plenty of schools that do that. And that's why I said, you know, I don't think it's an accurate picture. I think if you look at a lot of schools, especially smaller communities, but also even big cities. I mean, Houston's just beat Chicago enough, but they're in America, we give back to the community. We're trying to fight that, that narrative that we don't care. But the Ivy Leagues, I'm not sure, have really done that, and they could do it. They really could. I mean, look at the cancer research that comes out of Harvard. That could be so impactful, that is impactful. But what we're allowing, and by way, I mean, broader higher ed again, is instead, we're allowing this vision of what we do to be broadcast by a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds setting stuff on fire and then not getting punished for it. And you know, when you, when you hit somebody's justice or unfairness button, psychologically speaking, not to those of there's no psychological term called the fairness button. But you know, let's just, let's just go with it. That's a really powerful motivator. People don't like like what they see as unfair. People don't like what they perceive as injustice. And the idea that a bunch of white kefia clad, you know, conspiracy driven kids on unintentional alliteration that they get to, like, set Columbia on fire and then get called activists. That's going to strike a lot of people as unfair. It strikes me as unfair, but I'm Jewish, so, you know, I don't, I don't like my safety being threatened by a bunch of people chanting Intifada, and I don't like the idea that, you know, left, that left wing Q anon is getting a lot of sympathy, but it's also going to tick off people who aren't, who aren't even in this at all, and they're going, How much money are these kids being having spent on them, and this is what they're doing with it. And yeah, is that a minority of students? Probably, is that describing the everyday experience? Probably, probably not. Most students are probably just trying to do their jobs and work and get a degree. But you know, the leadership just allowed that to become the optics. They allowed that to be what was displayed because they didn't shut it down. And here we are. I think the other piece Aaron can either, oh, sorry,

Brian Nichols  32:41  
sorry, I was gonna say, Guys, I say, I think the other piece is that not only did did leadership not shut it down, but that there was a fear from other voices, from the grassroots who would want to speak out against this mentality, but they were, they were ostracized. You're called a bad person if you didn't toe the line, your social circle. Circles were destroyed. I experienced this during COVID Because I didn't toe the line with the trust the experts mentality and I had, you know, some very, very close friends, gentlemen who were in my wedding, who I haven't really talked to in four or five years, because they still view me as a threat to society because I didn't take the public health expert expert recommendations seriously, and the fact that that I know from my microcosm right like that was very like it was tough for me to get through, and yet I know that I am just an example of what many other folks have experienced over the past 10 years, where it's not just I disagree with you, but it's I disagree with you and you're a bad person. And this mentality then being embraced, not just by the collective in these, these institutions of higher education, but being enabled, to your point, from the leadership. And I'm going to say, I think the reason that it was enabled, Aaron, and I want to you know, as we go towards the tail end of the conversation here, I want this, you know, to maybe be woven into your final thoughts is we keep on using the word effective to outline, you know, what we should consider to be good policy or good practices going forward, I would say that the leadership, they thought they were being effective, right? They thought that we were able to mobilize a very loud, vocal group of activists to not just promote a narrative that it more aligns with our worldview, but also that this narrative that was being embraced was so emotionally charged that it gave the folks who were echoing it the the power in their mind to shame others, to tell you to shut down and sit up or sit down. Shut up. There we go, shut down and sit up. Yeah, sit down and shut up. But also, like, if you do speak out against me, I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to make sure you understand that you're a bad person. I'm going to tell other people that you're a bad person, you're dangerous. Your views are a threat to society. You're against public health, you're against public justice. All these different narratives that were promoted, and it really did fracture, not just like the trust in leadership, but It fractured the trust in each other, and that's where I think you know for my final thoughts today is that effectiveness 1,000% matters, but the effectiveness has to be judged in an objective manner, right? And I think what we've seen happen over the past, especially 10 years, is that effectiveness has been instead of being objective, it's been labeled in the eye of the beholder. So a lot of folks in the left they have been effective in their perspective, right? BLM was very effective. Dei was very effective. ESG was very effective. Why? Because we were able to move people in positions of societal or economic power or something they're in, to do things and promote policies the way we wanted them to be done. And we did that for 10 years, pretty much with very little opposition. And if we did have opposition, guess what we did? We censored them. We screened them down if you were on social media, echoing that was anything anti whatever the narrative was, COVID, especially you, not just only got shouted down, maybe you got your platforms banned, right? Stuff like that. That started to happen. And I think what happened was, over that 10 year period, folks just started to say, That's it. I'm done. I'm out, right? And to your point, not necessarily going back to something of of substance to build upon, but now being that swing back, that the punch the counter, punch back. That's where we are right. Now, I want to see a society that is built on not just effectiveness, but objective effectiveness, right? I want to see our communities get better. I want to see our roads and our infrastructure get repaired. I want to see our kids not struggling to have basic reading skills at the fourth grade, and see that 97% of kids in a school district like in Illinois can't read at that level. I want to see parents who have been saving up for decades at this point to be able to retire and not feel they have to work until literally, the day they die. I want to see kids be able to go and get an education without feeling they're going to go to school as, you know, just a normal, you know, person and come out an indoctrinated little zombie, right? Like these are all things that I think we can we can absolutely look at as objective good, but we just need to plant our flag and say, Listen, goofballs on the left and goofballs on the right. Y'all been, y'all been screaming at each other for years at this point, here's where the common sense, like the the objective reality of society, actually exists. And now we need that objective reality society to speak up, because if we don't, then it's just going to continue to be the loudest voices who are going to get the attention. It's going to be those squeakiest wheels who get the grease. So that's my final thoughts for today, Aaron, bring us home. What are your final thoughts? And I guess before we wrap up today, please do us a favor, make sure you tell folks where they can go ahead and follow you if they wanna continue the conversation today.

Speaker 1  37:52  
Sure. So I think you're right in that we have there has been a series of angry decisions and angry ways of thinking on both sides of the aisle. You know, you caught it the swing back, but the right became the left. Arguably, in a lot of ways, it was, it was about shutting people down. Well, now that's what the rights doing I get. I think I've lost more friends from my from the right wing than the left wing in the last couple of years, because I don't agree. I don't I don't hold to the orthodoxy on some or other point. I think what has to happen. You're right. We have to come together, and we have to have an objective idea of effectiveness. But before we do that, we have to have a shared vision for what we want, and it has to be a realistic one. It has to be an achievable one, and it has to be an objective and concrete one. So this, like, I mean this, this phrase has been poisoned for the rest of time, but the idea of, like, make America great again. It's like, what does great mean? What does great mean? You know, a lot of people now feeling, who feel they're in the middle, are feeling disenfranchised. That's the biggest winner of the 2024 election was nobody, because a lot of and that that disengagement is being driven farther and farther. So when you want to have discussions about this stuff and you want to set the Social Agenda, I think there's a real feeling of powerlessness, because we don't have a what name your social media form, and a lot of people don't have 1000s upon 1000s upon millions of viewers. So I think the the way this starts, whether on the issue of, you know, anti semitism, or on the issue of anything else, the way this starts is in your own backyard and your own local bar, and, you know, wherever you meet people and you talk to them, and it starts with you. You, you, you have to be a leader. It doesn't matter what institutional power you have. It matters what particular skills you have. And you do. You want to use influence, and not power, but influence, to not only change other people's minds, but learn and grow yourself. And I think that's going to be something that's far that's not something that can happen top down, that's going to be about having. Conversations across the aisle and not listening when people get mad at you for doing it, whether it's people getting mad at Pete Buttigieg for going on to, you know, right wing comedians podcasts or, I don't know what the what the left wing version would be, but I know they exist, you know, like

Brian Nichols  40:16  
keeping news. Erin, sorry,

Speaker 1  40:20  
but whatever you know, how dare you talk to people across the aisle? Well, I want a vision of America, and we have to talk to each other before we can even set what that vision looks like and decide how we're going to get there and set those standards. Right? We need to have a clear set of objectives. And I think that's itself going to be a process that takes a lot of time. So I think this is a conversation that's going to continue for a lot of people. I think it's a process. Is a process that's going to be long and involved and then sometimes painful, but it has to happen, because right now we're way too fractured, and when you see these opinion polls like the majority of Americans support Israel, the majority of Americans hate anti semitism. Why does that? Does that not appear to appear to be our reality, because we're listening to these loud, quiet, these loud, little voices on social media, and not the people talking to the people around us. And that's feels so trite to say that, you know, oh, just go talk to people. But it is especially since COVID, we've become so isolated. So the way to recapture the middle, the way to have a sane step and path forward. It's not a political rally, it's not an award winning Tiktok, it's fine. Third space, finding the people there and when that you all disagree with each other, trying to find common ground in a way forward at your local level, and then hopefully that can spread broader. So that feels very trite and not particularly, you know, that's not that, that's not my brave heart speech in a lot of ways. But I think that, you know, real leadership is an everyday thing. It's not a grandiose, you know, big, big moment. Sometimes it's just those little things. So that's, that's my final thought. So, oh,

Brian Nichols  42:07  
man, no. And by the way, you know, to bring us home, I think last thing I'll say for today's episode is there was a one of those Tiktok reels, or whatever, and it was showing a progression of where people would meet new friends over, like, a 60 year period, and it went from people meeting friends at work or at, you know, at the park or at a social club, like a Moose Lodge or Knights of Columbus, something like that. You know, any of these areas where you'd meet new people and then congregate, right? And you see the, you know, the percentages are all pretty even within like the 15 to 20% for each one. And then all sudden, 1987 I think it was this little thing comes out called the Internet, and then all of a sudden, you just see the internet go all the way up to like, 40% of where people find their community. I'm just gonna tell you folks you want. Here's an action item for today. Get off the internet and go outside. Like, go talk to real people. I just I before our show today, I was downtown, walking through and talking to folks at the farmers market, right? Like, go get involved. Go be present in real life. Build those relationships and, oh, by the way, it gives you more of a chance to, I don't know, lead in your community where you can have the most impact. So, yeah, there's a call to action for today, if we can take some, you know, very big positives away. It is that don't feel helpless. Don't feel that you're just like watching this, you know, one one side versus the other side. Have a screaming match. No, understand that you can actually have a very real impact and making things better. And it starts right in your backyard, your local communities. With that being said, Aaron, where can folks go ahead, find you if they want to continue this conversation, email, social media for yours.

Speaker 1  43:50  
So actually, it's funny that you mentioned, you know, the getting off the internet. I don't actually do much social media for that, for that, all right, but you can certainly see what I write on the young voices. What are we calling it now? X musk, Twitter, whatever you want to if you follow young voices on social media, you can absolutely whenever I publish stuff as a young voices writer, they they republish it. And yeah, that would be a that would be a great way to stay in touch with with what I do. And there we

Brian Nichols  44:20  
go. Good stuff. I'll include those links there, Aaron in the show notes, folks, I hope you've gotten some value from today's conversation. Who am I kidding? I know you got some value from today's conversation. So I'm going to ask you do me a favor. Please go ahead and give it a share when you do, please tag yours truly at B Nichols liberty on Facebook, on X or on Instagram. Also, The Brian Nichols Show is, yes, a video and podcast show. So if you like your video content, head over to YouTube, Rumble, Facebook, and x is where we go ahead and air the video version of the show. Also we air the show live on Mondays and Fridays at 9pm Eastern. So go ahead check those out when they go live. And if you haven't hit that subscribe button, please do so over on x. Facebook and rumble, where the show will go live YouTube and podcast version usually air around 10pm or so after the live version goes there for the first hour. And then, as for yes, the podcast version, if you like to take your shows on the road, like I do, head over to Apple podcast, Spotify YouTube music, wherever it is you consume your podcast content. I like podcast attic hit. Subscribe to The Brian Nichols Show. And if you really want to, you know, get your feet wet in terms of what are we talking about today. Brian's mentioned a lot of the sales and marketing stuff. Yeah, we talk about that quite a bit in detail in some of those past episodes, specifically how to message, articulate your ideas, but also to, most importantly, meet people where they're at on the issue they care about. Hit, download all unplayed episodes. We have over 960 plus episodes in the archives, which, by the way, is the only place you can find all 960 plus episodes of the show, because elephant in the room, yeah, some of those youtubers and stuff, they didn't like our content when it was during COVID, so they hit us with some strikes. So we had to remove some stuff. So don't worry, though, we still have all those episodes available over at the podcast or at Brian Nichols show.com Email me Brian, at Brian Nichols show.com and also please support our phenomenal sponsors, like blood of tyrants, evils, CBD, liquid, freedom, energy T and, of course, our phenomenal studio sponsor, cardio miracle, the best heart health supplement in the world. We're gonna go ahead and wrap things up there. Thank you for joining us. And with that being said, Brian Nichols, signing off, you're on The Brian Nichols Show. Brian Nichols show for Aaron Pomerantz, we'll see you next time. Bye.

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