Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And in this episode, we're welcoming back our friend Yasha Monk, who has a new book coming out called The Identity Trap. And for those of you don't remember, Yasha is a professor of practice of international affairs at John Hopkins University and the founder of the Digital Magazine Persuasion, one of my favorites.

He also is a contributing editor at the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign

Relations.

Yasha, welcome back.

Thank you so much, Ravi.

Yesha, this book was incredible.

And I have to start by saying, I was a chemistry major in college. And I have to start by saying I was a chemistry major in college. And I, about two years in,

finished all my, I was pre-med, so I finished all my requirements. And then I started taking English

classes, philosophy classes, and I joined the debate team. And I just was totally dumbfounded as a kid

from Staten Island, who had a very traditional education

by the dominance of, even in classes like English, of ideas of people like Foucault and, you know,

some of these critical race theory like scholars who you write about in this book.

And the narrative and the discourse was so opaque and impenetrable that I honestly, I ascribe much of my LSAT score to the fact that I was forced to read impenetureable.

And then basically there's anything you can give me, like a, even like a dishwasher

repair manual, and I'll be riveted by it at this point after reading all that kind of stuff.

So I just want to start by saying, this is the best history of those ideas that I've ever read.

And what's important about this book for our listeners is you trace the history of a series

of seemingly disconnected ideas, which we'll get through to the modern day discourse around

things like identity politics, things like critical race theory, et cetera. So I just want to start

by saying, great job on this book. It's really amazing. Man, thank you. That means so much for coming from you. Well, I'm hoping that now college students will read this instead of having to read all those books. I promise the book is a lot more pleasant to read than some of it. Well, let's take a step back. You start this book with something that is definitely something we talk

about a lot at loss debate, which is the concept of affinity groups. We actually once did a skit

on the internet about our own workplace, pretending like we were breaking into affinity groups,

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