This idea that people are so afraid to speak because they're worried about social censorship or sanction, I think speaks to one's own lack of confidence sometimes that they can defend their point of view and know that their opinions aren't racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or whatever it is they're being accused of.

I do agree that there's some slippage there.

Freddie, I want to acknowledge that,

yes, I think that sometimes people, quote unquote, wokely, like self-righteously or defensively

refuse to have a level of nuanced conversation. But that doesn't mean you can't. That doesn't

mean I can't. That doesn't mean I can't.

That doesn't mean that you can't also persuade people that perhaps their initial defensiveness,

while understandable given living in a society and racism and what it is, is not warranted

when they're having a conversation with you because you're a good faith actor.

And sometimes I do wish that people would just trust themselves a little and push through

instead of coming up with some broad social conspiracy that says you're not allowed to

talk about X, Y, and Z. Moreover, just on that one point about Asian modern minority stuff,

you said it can't be the case that every time we have a conversation about black poverty,

we say, oh yeah, but remember that most, you know, that not every black person is poor.

I don't know that that isn't actually constructive and useful.

If I were to ask everyone to guess what, like, the black poverty rate is, presuming you

don't already know it, I bet we would come up with wildly different answers and that were

widely off.

I mean, I don't know. I don't want to put anybody on the spot, but I did a quick Google when you said that, and I realized, like, I didn't really

have a clue. And I think that the way that we do talk about black poverty and black incarceration,

we'll have you thinking that, like, most black people are poor, which is not the case by a long shot. And so I do think it's actually

very constructive to have built into these conversations what the statistical realities are,

...