The Michael Shermer Show

The Collapse of Open Inquiry: Sacred Victims and Forbidden Questions

December 28, 2025

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  • The core concept of "woke" discussed in this episode of The Michael Shermer Show is defined as the "making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups," which Eric Kaufmann argues undermines open inquiry. 
  • The shift from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes is traced back to the late 1960s, specifically citing President Johnson's affirmative action executive order and the concept of disparate impact, rather than being a recent development. 
  • The current cultural conflicts, or the "Third Awokening," are characterized by the convergence of academic ideology with mainstream media, fueled by an emotional substrate among liberals involving "white guilt" and an "exaggerated fear of racism and fascism," which allows for the suppression of free speech and reason. 
  • The inflation of terms like 'racism' and 'sexism' to encompass minor offenses (e.g., mispronouncing a name or concerns about crime/immigration) shuts down necessary conversations and leads to negative real-world policy outcomes. 
  • Political prejudice, particularly among highly educated liberals, has become extreme, manifesting as social exclusion (e.g., unwillingness to date or hire political opponents) and moralizing political disagreement into a matter of good versus evil. 
  • Government intervention, while carrying risks, may be necessary to enforce viewpoint diversity in institutions like universities, as private institutional censorship driven by ideological fervor (like DEI mandates) can be a greater threat to open inquiry than government regulation. 

Segments

Defining Woke and Political Discrimination
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(00:01:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Woke is defined as the making sacred of historically marginalized identity groups, leading to political discrimination and extreme filter bubbles among highly educated liberals.
  • Summary: Woke is specifically defined as the process of making race, gender, and sexual identity groups sacred. This process is argued to cause political discrimination, with highly educated liberals often inhabiting the most politically homogenous environments. The segment also references extreme examples of speech policing, such as a woman jailed in Britain for a deleted tweet.
Guest Introduction and Book Overview
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(00:02:22)
  • Key Takeaway: Eric Kaufmann’s new book, The Third Awokening, analyzes the long roots of cultural conflicts stemming from the dominance of a cultural form of the left.
  • Summary: Eric Kaufmann is introduced as a professor of politics and author of several books, including his new work, The Third Awokening. His research focuses on the cultural left, demographic shifts, and nationalism. He describes his political alignment as conservative on culture and immigration but open to some state redistribution.
Political Philosophy and Conservatism
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(00:06:16)
  • Key Takeaway: Kaufmann aligns with ‘rational populism,’ valuing scientific reason and evidence while acknowledging the need to shake up self-justifying established institutions without abandoning classical liberalism.
  • Summary: Kaufmann distinguishes his conservatism from revolutionary impulses, favoring reform over total demolition, referencing the Burkean distinction between the American and French Revolutions. He emphasizes the importance of scientific reason and falsifiability in debate. He seeks a fine line between necessary institutional shaking-up and preserving core liberal institutions.
Assessing Woke Arguments Empirically
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(00:09:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Arguments must be falsifiable and concrete; abstract concepts like ‘structural racism’ are unconvincing without measurable evidence, unlike resume studies showing callback disparities.
  • Summary: Kaufmann insists on giving all arguments a fair shot, provided they offer concrete, falsifiable measures. While acknowledging evidence of resume bias against some groups, he rejects claims based on invisible structures like ‘whiteness’ unless they can be empirically tested. The discussion notes that some historical resume bias findings regarding gender have since been refuted or changed.
Opportunity vs. Outcomes Shift
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(00:13:16)
  • Key Takeaway: The shift from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes is rooted in government programs dating back to the late 1960s, such as Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech.
  • Summary: The argument that disparities equal discrimination is identified as circular reasoning. The move toward equal outcomes began with Lyndon Johnson’s administration, which sought equal results, not just equal starting lines, setting an architecture of goals and timetables via affirmative action. This mindset, coupled with the disparate impact standard established around 1971, has accelerated over time.
Utopianism of Woke Equality
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(00:19:02)
  • Key Takeaway: Woke cultural socialism demands perfect equality between identity groups, an unrealistic utopian goal that ignores trade-offs and the natural variation in outcomes across different dimensions like IQ or gender.
  • Summary: The pursuit of perfect equality for sacred identity groups is compared to economic socialism in its utopian nature. This ideology fails to account for the fact that achieving equality in one area (e.g., incarceration rates) might require temporary inequality in another (e.g., educational exclusion for disruptive pupils). The system selectively focuses on race, gender, and sexual orientation while ignoring other factors like IQ or looks.
Historical Waves of Wokeness
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(00:27:56)
  • Key Takeaway: The current ‘Third Awokening’ is preceded by two earlier waves in the late 1960s (emotional anti-intellectualism) and the late 1980s/early 1990s (political correctness), all sharing the sacredness of race, sex, and sexual minorities.
  • Summary: The first wave involved student demonstrations and emotional hostage-taking, exemplified by the shelving of the Moynihan report due to racial sensitivities. The second wave centered on political correctness, dead white males, and the rise of gender studies. The third wave is distinct because it successfully converged with the mainstream media, moving these campus ideas into public consciousness.
Case Study: Philippe Rushton Controversy
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(00:35:51)
  • Key Takeaway: The controversy surrounding Philippe Rushton’s work demonstrates the defense of free speech, where the argument was about allowing the discussion of data, not endorsing the conclusions.
  • Summary: The defense of E.O. Wilson against accusations of racism involved defending Rushton’s right to speak on race differences in IQ and reproductive strategies (R/K selection). The core liberal defense was that the data should be published and debated, regardless of how politically incorrect the findings were perceived to be.
Free Speech Under Threat
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(00:38:07)
  • Key Takeaway: The emotional harm protection prong of woke cultural socialism directly attacks free speech and the pursuit of truth by limiting inquiry if science might offend a sensitive minority member.
  • Summary: The current climate is magnified by social media’s clickbait model, which prioritizes emotional virality. The segment contrasts the US First Amendment standard with the UK’s reality, where individuals face jail time or ’non-crime hate incidents’ for tweets. This chilling effect is seen as a negative trend across Europe where constitutional protections are weaker.
Canadian Residential School Hoax
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(00:52:41)
  • Key Takeaway: The Canadian narrative surrounding mass graves at Indigenous residential schools is described as a ‘Pizzagate-level hoax’ endorsed by major political parties and media, illustrating the danger of prioritizing sacred minority testimony over empirical evidence.
  • Summary: The death rates in residential schools were lower than on-reserve schools, yet claims of mass graves were widely accepted without physical evidence. This situation highlights how the sacred status of a minority group prevents elites from contradicting claims, even when evidence is lacking or refuted. Furthermore, there were political moves in Canada to criminalize denial of this specific hoax.
Critique of Intellectual Explanations
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(00:57:15)
  • Key Takeaway: The cultural malaise is driven more by the emotional substrate of ‘suicidal empathy’ (white guilt and exaggerated fear of fascism) among liberals than by a deliberate Marxist march through institutions.
  • Summary: Kaufmann argues that while intellectual theories like Critical Race Theory exist, the underlying cause is the emotional receptivity of well-meaning liberals who feel guilt and fear fascism. This emotional makeup makes them receptive to arguments that majority status is inherently bad and minority status is inherently good, leading to demands for equal outcomes.
Stretching of Anti-Racism Terms
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(01:04:11)
  • Key Takeaway: The definitions of anti-racism and anti-sexism have been inflated to the point where minor actions are labeled as cardinal sins, stifling open discussion.
  • Summary: Tensions and trade-offs must serve the flourishing of society, not just narrow definitions of anti-racism and anti-sexism. Mispronouncing a name or being worried about crime can be labeled racist under current inflated definitions. This stretching of terms forces the shutdown of important conversations regarding policy areas like immigration and crime.
Political Prejudice and Filter Bubbles
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(01:06:37)
  • Key Takeaway: Partisan affiliation now infects non-political decisions, and opinion bubbles insulate political prejudice from reality, with liberals underestimating Republican concerns about racism and Republicans underestimating Democratic patriotism.
  • Summary: Studies show political affiliation, not race, heavily influences non-political decisions like whom to marry or where to work. Liberals and conservatives exhibit significant partisan prejudice, underestimating the other side’s views on key issues like racism and national pride. Highly educated liberals often reside in the most politically homogenous environments, exacerbating this polarization.
Moralizing Political Disagreement
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(01:10:16)
  • Key Takeaway: Prejudice against the political right is significantly stronger on the left, rooted in the belief that right-wing individuals are morally fallen (evil) due to perceived racism, sexism, or homophobia.
  • Summary: Surveys indicate that young people who believe white Republicans are racist are more likely to agree that political opponents are immoral. This moralizing turns political questions into issues of good versus evil, making reasoned debate impossible. This phenomenon is linked to the making sacred of values around anti-racism and anti-sexism, where disagreement equals moral transgression.
Irrationality and Authoritarianism
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(01:13:07)
  • Key Takeaway: Both the left and right exhibit irrationality around their respective sacred values, but the left’s irrationality concerning race, gender, and sexuality appears to interfere more severely with straight thinking.
  • Summary: The right’s irrationality may center on issues like election integrity or vaccines, while the left’s centers on race, gender, and sexuality, where proximity to these topics seems to lower cognitive function. Research suggests left-wing authoritarianism is as prevalent as right-wing authoritarianism, contradicting previous academic assumptions.
Woke Right Misnomer
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(01:14:57)
  • Key Takeaway: The term ‘woke right’ is a conceptual stretch because the core moralistic nature of the woke left (believing opponents are inherently evil) differs fundamentally from the tribal policing seen on the right.
  • Summary: While groups on the right may exhibit family resemblances to woke behavior (like tone policing or ostracization over climate change views), the left’s approach is moralistic, asserting opponents’ core character is rotten. The ‘woke right’ is accused of merely policing tribal adherence (‘you’re a bad Republican’), not declaring opponents fundamentally evil.
Academic Monoculture and Solutions
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(01:17:17)
  • Key Takeaway: Academic institutions exhibit extreme political monoculture, evidenced by near-unanimous political donations and social sorting, which fosters extremism unless checked by viewpoint diversity or external pressure.
  • Summary: Harvard faculty donations overwhelmingly favored Democrats, and academics on the left report almost all their friends share their political leaning. Monocultural judicial panels render more extreme decisions because dissenters—who check extremism—are absent. Solutions discussed include ’equivalent action’ (applying diversity metrics to political belief) and content-based government funding restrictions.
Political Power and Institutional Reform
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(01:26:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Culture is downstream of politics, and political action, even through controversial figures, is necessary to break the ideological grip of institutions that operate against the majority’s wishes.
  • Summary: Woke ideology is not over, though elite actors show positive shifts, while public opinion on issues like affirmative action remains stagnant. Political issues must be decided in the political process, forcing institutions to resemble the rest of society. Political challenges, like those from Trump or DeSantis against DEI, can force open minds in the center by creating necessary competing power centers.