Hello, I'm Adrienne Dob.

And I'm Moira Dodd again.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, today we have a very special guest.

One of these people who I'm a little shocked agreed to join us. Quinn Slobodian is here.

Quinn has a new book called Hayek's Bastards that caught my eye, particularly for his one chapter called

Neurocasts, which he is here to talk to us about, exploring the neoliberal right wings use of IQ and race science to further their economic vision.

Quinn, thank you so much for being with us.

It's my pleasure.

So there's one theory of the Trump era that, you know, Trump is accelerating but is also sort of the product of a kind of

epistemic collapse. This notion that the right wing elites and the sort of populist masses

that they are harnessing have this broad-based hostility to authorities of knowledge, right, towards professors,

towards doctors, towards public health representatives. And you see this kind of thing like

in Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Scrimetti, right, which is basically an attack on a medical

authority. You see it in more or less anything that RFK does at the Department

of Health and Human Services. And there's this notion that, you know, there is a new right-wing

populist distrust of expertise and deferral to like the impulses and preferences of the people, the common man, right? It's easy to view this

trend as a kind of reemergence of superstition and a distrust of empiricism. And Quinn, in your book,

one of the things you argued, I thought, really compellingly, was that this is kind of a misapprehension of what's going on with thinkers on the right wing regarding both their notions of like the people and also their relationship to epistemic authority.

And one of the things that you say is that we are now experiencing the culmination of this history in which conservative economists turn to nature

and to their own sort of distinct sources of science and empirical authority in the wake of the

Cold War to make the case for their worldview. Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm a big proponent of the

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