"This is a truly remarkable video, so telling, starting from the mere geometry of the scene:
-- Thiel is flanked on either side by two aging, name-brand professors. On the right C. West, a visual self-caricature with his tired 3-piece suit+pocketwatch and hyperbolic Afro, a look that is not aging well. The talk starts with some mumbled reference to "intimate little tableside chit chat". Hmm I see how convenient, that means honored guest PT is literally boxed in.
-- On the left, R. Unger, nervously fidgeting in his swivel-chair, impatient to get his words in, looking like a little boy uncomfortable his first suit.
-- On the right, C. West very soon moves in even closer, PT clearly taken aback by the personal space violation, shifting a little in response to C. West's intrusion. C. West spends nearly the entire talk crouched, elbows on knees, angled in and insinuating that he's ready to pounce.
The old leftists demonstrate their decrepit ideologies with two favorite tactics on full display. C. West attempts to ape the 60s Black oratory tradition with his "brothers and sisters" and exaggerated (and well-timed) African American Vernacular to his enthralled audience in the audience. R. Unger in a truly amazing display of ivory-towerism combined incoherent long-winded diatribe with multiple references to his own Marxist ideas that presumably got him tenure 50 years ago and were seemingly being taught to the students in the class as 2019-relevant (yes PT I wanted to know as well, WTF is "the new vanguardism"??) in the form of "questions" designed specifically to NOT genuinely understand what the class GUEST thought about the subject at hand.
Settled behind the immovable desk, with no means of escape and so close to his new friends that from either side he gets hit by the hot air exhaled by both old men's bloviations, PT then gets barraged with questions from an UN-MIC'd (!!) audience. We can barely comprehend their specific questions, they won't be left for the record, no matter, they took the lead from their professors so very well and with an esteemed guest in their midst somehow managed to make every question about themselves, trying to catch PT in a "gotcha" moment where he might stumble and inadvertently cause insult. Or they launched into soft-polite tirades upbraiding PT for something or another via the way only the ignorant+arrogant can.
Physically trapped in an old mildewing institution and literally between two of the old mildewing academics it enables, PT faces the firing squad and respectfully engaged these student-footsoldiers and thankfully THIS TIME nobody dies. But don't miss the geometry here, it's really key, and it's dead serious. This is a classic YT video in both content and form, visually and aurally. It encapsulates PT's thinking so well, and then the video ITSELF proves him right, irrefutably, in real time, for all of us to see."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2TrRWA
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