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The Joe Rogan Experience.
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You were just telling me that Washington State re-criminalized, or was it Oregon, re-criminalized drugs?
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Yeah, that s right.
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This just came out the last week, but Washington State, or rather Oregon State, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy.
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And there s now this dramatic reversal.
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Because guess what, when you let people shoot up heroin on the side of the road, snort meth in tents, downtown Portland, it actually is not good for society.
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And there s such this dramatic pushback, and I was actually shocked to see it, that Oregon lawmakers, all Democrats of course, said, you know what, we ve gone too far, let s bring it back to the center.
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And I think that s something that s very good.
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It s definitely very good.
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It is a little shocking that they figured it out.
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It just doesn t seem like when you go and drive through Oakland, for example, it doesn t seem like anybody s trying to put a cork on that.
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They re just like letting it be insanely chaotic.
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the areas where they have the shantytown set up and people have tents everywhere and these makeshift structures.
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How?
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At what point in time do you stop letting these open air drug dens exist where people are just cooking meth in front of everybody?
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That just seems so insane.
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So it s nice to see that Oregon s like, hey, let s hit the brakes.
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Is it all drugs now?
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Did they just put everything in the same category?
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Which is also quite insane.
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Yeah, I mean, no, it s not all drugs, obviously.
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It just says it right here?
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Yeah.
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It says, the measure makes the possession of a small amount of drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail.
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It enables police to confiscate the drugs and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks.
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But what about, what are the other, see, the thing is, it basically, what Oregon did is decriminalize almost everything.
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The weird thing about drugs is you throw them all into one blanket.
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You cover them all with one blanket drugs, because caffeine s a drug, alcohol s a drug.
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There s a lot of drugs that we re accustomed to using, and I m not necessarily in favor of those being illegal.
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And when you add in heroin and methamphetamine to something that we re already accustomed to, like alcohol or caffeine, it s like, why are these the same things?
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Why don t you just individually say, fentanyl is unbelievably bad for you.
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Marijuana, not so much.
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Let s figure out which ones are OK and which ones are not, instead of just saying drugs.
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A hundred percent.
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I mean, you just have to do a really simple calculation.
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You say, is this drug correlated with extreme social pathology?
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Does it obliterate the individual?
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Does it cause social problems, social chaos?
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And then you can categorize them very simply.
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Yes and no.
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Okay, you have alcohol, caffeine, marijuana.
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You can have a functioning society where those are used.
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But you can t have a functioning society
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where people are foiling fentanyl.
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And especially if you look at the cities, it s wrecked these cities.
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The big problem, though,
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is that the political left in the United States has lost the willingness and the capacity to say no.
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This is something we ve all seen.
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We re raised a generation of kids where saying no and imposing limits is something that you can t do.
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It s this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits.
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But some limits are necessary.
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Some limits are important.
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And so I think we re starting to finally see the consequences of
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obliterating limits, and then now we re starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way, we should start reimposing some guardrails.
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Well, that s one of the things you find out when you re a parent.
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That seems counterintuitive.
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But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy.
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but they re happier and they have less anxiety apparently obviously i m not a doctor because they re by having structure to life it doesn t seem like everything is like if they re in charge like oh my god i m fucking 12 and i m in charge i have no idea what s going on and i could stay out late all night the world s chaos
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which it kind of is in some ways, but by imposing structure on them, it gives them comfort.
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And I find that s the case with human beings.
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I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis that they re very dedicated to,
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Those are the happiest people.
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They re the healthiest people.
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They re the people that seem to feel like there s a purpose to life.
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The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is, pickleball, whatever it is.
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That gives people happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just
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Just able to like fly away on a whim like that doesn t promote happiness Like what are you trying to get out of this life?
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Don t you want it to be as enjoyable as possible?
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We ve all had bad times.
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They suck.
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We try to avoid those try to have the good times but
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That can be applied to a society as well.
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The way you raise children can be applied to a society.
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Like, you need structure.
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You need rules.
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You need love and compassion.
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You need examples of good behavior.
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You need all of those things.
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And when you let people fucking cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window.
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Imagine being 12, driving by a fucking drug den every day on your way to school.
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You re like, oh my God, what do I have to look forward to?
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Yeah, I mean, that was my life and my experience and observation.
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We moved out of Seattle in 2020, my wife, at that time, two kids, because of this precise phenomenon.
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The politics had gone totally sideways.
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Well, Seattle in 2020 was particularly insane.
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Particularly insane.
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What was the area, what was it called?
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The glory of the Chaz.
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Chaz, that s right.
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But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten, first grade at the time, and we would be walking to school a few blocks up, and we d have to be avoiding schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street.
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Walking.
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Just walking.
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It s so sketchy.
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And so, you know, you re trying to kind of navigate your kids around.
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There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble.
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And then you talk to the administrators at the time and say, hey, this is a problem.
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I don t accept this.
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I don t like this.
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And they say, oh, well, you know, we have to be compassionate to our houseless neighbors.
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It s like, no, we don t.
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This is a danger to kids.
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And it got so bad that they were teaching the kids what to do when they found hypodermic needles in the playground.
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Oh my God.
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This is a problem.
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I don t want this as a parent.
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I want you to prevent them having to pick up hypodermic needles and, you know, and it s like a group of people that are so
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It s like compassion also has to be limited.
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You have to have compassion within reasonable limits.
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You re dealing with people that ll just burn it all down.
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If you say arson is no longer punishable, they ll burn all the houses down.
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These are insane people.
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They don t have anything.
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Why wouldn t they just burn it all down just for funds?
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It s so hard to understand how it got this far.
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I love when they use terms like the houseless.
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You already have a word for it.
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Like, stop trying to dress it up with a new word.
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You already have a word for it.
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This one s been driving me fucking crazy lately.
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Minor attracted persons.
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Yes.
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I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting minor attracted persons.
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You re talking about pedophiles.
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That s what we re talking about.
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It must be that these people have no children.
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It must be.
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I don t know.
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If they do, they re monsters.
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This idea that you are going to minimize the harm caused by evil criminals who steal children s lives, ruin their lives forever, and you re just going to call them a minor attracted person and try to say that it s an identity?
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To what, for what reason?
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To what end?
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Like, why would you want to do that?
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I mean, the end is, it s not polite to say, but it s quite clear.
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You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour.
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You say, wait a minute, let s just break it down to the basic facts.
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These are adult men dressing up in women s clothing, dancing and performing for other people s children.
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That should be a red flag for people, but they ve couched it in this language, like you re talking about euphemisms, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.
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But you re concealing from people the fact that it s like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.
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And like, I wouldn t want to do that.
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Well, not only that.
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Do you want to talk about sex with other people s young children?
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No.
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No.
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Not in a million years.
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That s like the thing you d want to avoid like most in life.
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There s no reason to talk to them about that.
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There s no reason.
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They re not interested in it.
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They re little kids.
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They re not interested, it s the adults that are interested.
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So the question is, why?
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Why are adults so interested in this?
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What is the ideological goal, the personal goal?
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And I find it... They re influencing children because, like all groups, as much as people hate to hear this, everyone wants you to join their group.
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It is a natural human instinct.
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The idea that that would not apply to gender identity, that that would not apply to sexual orientation, is crazy.
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It applies to phones.
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It applies to, like, people who have Android phones are like, dude, switch over.
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Look, you can use the S Pen.
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Dude, you can switch over.
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Look at my AI features.
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Dude, you don t need iMessage.
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You know?
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It s with everything.
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And if you don t think that happens with sexuality or with gender, you re out of your mind.
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It s a natural human characteristic.
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Why would it be absent there when it s present in literally everything?
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People use Windows computers.
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Shit on people use Apple computers.
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You should just try Windows, man.
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There s so much more variety.
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They want you to join.
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They want you to be a part of their church.
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They want you to move into their neighborhood.
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I m guilty of it, too.
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I got a bunch of people to move to Austin.
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For sure.
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It s a thing that people do, especially if they found something that s awesome, but this idea that
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guy With fucking heavy makeup on dress like a tart like if that was a woman I d be like what s wrong with that lady Yeah, that s she s not dressing like a teacher.
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Yeah, this is crazy.
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What is she doing?
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Why is she dressed like that?
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Is that a costume?
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Is she in a play?
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Yeah, it s not a play.
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Okay, cut.
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Yeah Fucking ladies gotta be insane.
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Does she have any kids?
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Well, actually she doesn t even have a vagina, you know, she s got a penis what hold the fuck on and
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Now we re getting to a whole other level of this.
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What are we doing here?
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What s going on?
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But that opinion is completely normal, completely mainstream, held by virtually everyone.
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Yes.
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But people are silent about it.
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Right.
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Because they ve been stigmatized into believing if you offer any criticism of the ideology, of gender theory, or the practice, you are somehow a bigot, you re somehow homophobic.
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You re definitely far right.
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You re a far right extremist.
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And you re lumped in with KKK.
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You re lumped in with like storm front people.
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This is a 90% opinion.
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And so, you know, what I think is so important is to stop playing the game and to say, you know what, I m going to tell the truth and I m going to take the slings and arrows because I know that the public opinion is on my side and people fear speaking out, but they need representation.
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And that to me is the name of the game.
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Well, you are really good at explaining everything that s happening and really good at laying it out in a very easy to understand pattern, like where it first was introduced into the education system, the blind spots that people have towards how Marxism works.
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especially like during the time of the 1960s and the 70s when a lot of this stuff was gaining momentum in the United States because of the anti-war movement, they were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags.
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They re completely ignoring what happened in Cuba.
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They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship.
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Always.
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There s no evidence of it ever not leading to that.
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It s like the idea of like,
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You know, I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don t think I m going to die of rabies.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I m just going to get bit by a fucking rabies kills everybody.
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It s like one lady who didn t die of rabies because of a very novel treatment where they have to put her into a medically induced coma because rabies is such an old disease.
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And it s such an aggressive disease that your immune system can fight it off, but it can t keep up with it.
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And eventually the rabies wins and it always wins.
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So by putting her in a medically induced coma,
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I don t know what about the biological process of it, but it somehow or another shorted out her body to the point where it had the resources to effectively battle the rabies.
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Because she was just completely immobile and in a medically induced coma.
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So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies.
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Marxism will put your whole society at best in a medically induced coma and at worst you get starvation right logs Mass suppression and so it kills the society is what the point is the point is the best case scenario is that?
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You somehow through a medically induced coma fucking survive it.
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Yeah, there s no improvement No, you re probably wrecked for the rest of your life I mean, it s probably such a horrific disease that everything s compromised after that
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When I was in my 20s, I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union socialist republics, so Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and Mongolia and other countries that had been ruled by the Soviets.
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And what happened, and I think there is, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest, it generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest.
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And so when you travel through those countries,
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It is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.
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It s these Soviet block housing.
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It has enormous rates of alcoholism.
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You see people strewn on the road, freezing to death in the winters.
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There s no economic productivity.
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There s no culture.
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The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs.
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And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions.
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They ve been totally annihilated as far as their economic possibilities.
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But you still have, you know, three, four, five million people.
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And it s what happens when your society is devoured by ideology.
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And so the ideology that we re seeing in American institutions is, of course, different.
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We re blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history.
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But it s it s functionally the same.
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And to your point, in the late 80s or late 60s and early 70s, you had true Marxist Leninist radicals, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party, USA, the Weather Underground.
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And if you look at their literature, their propaganda materials from that time, and you compare it to what s happening in, let s say, Buffalo Public Schools, their BLM curriculum.
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I actually did this.
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I looked at the Black Panther Party pamphlets they were selling to foment revolution and the Buffalo Public Schools curriculum.
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You know, it s like pretty close.
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The ideas are the same.
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Of course, they re softened.
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They use the nice language about DEI or what have you.
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But, you know, we should take ideas seriously.
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And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.
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And it s a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating kids.
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And that s why you re seeing kids today that grow up with this version of the society and reality that we live in that so doesn t jive with people that are older than them, who didn t grow up in that system, who are like, what are you talking about?
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Like, it s not that bad.
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Like, the things you re saying are insane.
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You re freaking out over almost nothing and not paying attention to the important things.
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There s important things going on in this world, but it s not microaggressions.
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It s not that Google shouldn t show images of white men when you pump in the AI and ask who the founding fathers are.
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Did you see what they did with Nazis?
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Did they make multi-racial Nazis?
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Multi-racial Nazis.
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They had an Asian woman Nazi.
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It s inclusive.
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It s fucking bananas.
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It s bananas.
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It s literally like a movie.
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It s a Mike Judge movie.
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It s idiocracy.
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It s a very strange thing where logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and challenging young minds
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have completely abandoned that task and are now wholesale focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to.
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And none of these people exist that are teaching these things.
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None of these people exist in the world that we re currently existing in, which is the outside of university world.
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These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated and then they indoctrinate more and educate more and they stay in this system.
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And they re not out there in the world.
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They re just not.
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But that raises the question.
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But they don t speak for us.
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They don t agree with us.
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And yet they re ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very
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vocabulary that we use.
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It used to be that you d have a quirky, tweeted-out Marxist professor who would be smoking a pipe in an Ivy League school, and you could say, well, that s fine.
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The kids go to Princeton, and they get two years with the Marxist whack job, and then they get out in the real world.
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The problem is that that ideology that was confined to a relatively small part of society, where it was tolerated because it added some diversity of experience or ideas,
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has now extended to institutions that really do matter.
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And so the question is, if you re sending your kids to school, the majority of the parents don t like what s being taught, and it s being taught anyway, what kind of system do we live in?
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Is that democratic governance?
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Is that the representation of the people?
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If we re paying for it, we re sending our kids through it, but we don t have a stake in and the control of
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the values that are being formed in those institutions.
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I think it s a very serious question.
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It s not trivial to say we re kind of beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints that make a democratic form of government meaningful.
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When the bureaucracy rules and it s pushing ideology against the will of the majority of the people,
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We re in a kind of scary position in our country.
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And it seems like it s willing participation by the masses as well, because they feel like they re a part of change.
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They feel like they re a part of imposing these ideas on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is going to have to catch up.
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And they will be the ones that were correct, because they were on the right side all along.
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And it s very strange to watch it play out.
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because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point.
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It s very disheartening.
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You see it with DAs.
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There s an issue going on right now in Austin where they have this progressive Soros-funded DA who s just letting everybody out of jail.
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What d you do?
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Rape people?
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Let them out of jail.
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Murder someone?
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Let them out of jail.
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It s fucking bananas.
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This idea that somehow- Microaggression?
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SPEAKER_00
Straight to prison.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they re talking about the drop in crime, but it s because crime s not reported in a lot of places now.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because the crime went up so high, and they defunded the police.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, in Austin, they re 500 cops down, and the morale is down, because of the defund of police, and because cops...
2
SPEAKER_00
like there was, I think there were, I believe there was 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the Black Lives Matter protest.
2
SPEAKER_00
17 of those cases I think have been dropped.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, I m sure if that, fine, but at the, here, I ll send you an article.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can tell me if that, it s in Barry Weiss s sub stack today or her newspaper.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
But this is a real problem where you see the results playing out.
2
SPEAKER_00
You see that they re negative and I mean, kudos to Oregon for,
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, correcting course.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you see it playing out with crime and with prisons.
2
SPEAKER_00
And here s my number one beef with this.
2
SPEAKER_00
All this effort to do that, all this effort to let people out of jail, no cash bail, what about reform?
2
SPEAKER_00
What about putting all that effort into reforming people?
2
SPEAKER_00
How come that doesn t exist?
2
SPEAKER_00
What about funding reform inside the prisons?
2
SPEAKER_00
What about going to all these impoverished, drug-ridden, gang-ridden communities and doing some good?
2
SPEAKER_00
How come there s no effort there?
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re a real progressive, you want fucking progress.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual criminals, and just let them loose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone s anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s not the solution.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s very unfortunate those people are in that situation where they are habitual criminals.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that without doubt.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that s the solution is not let them out.
2
SPEAKER_00
The solution is stop that from happening in the future.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there s no effort whatsoever put on that.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s no conscious thought of like, how do we get at the beginning of this?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that s an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex, there are so many contributing factors, but I actually don t think it s totally necessary to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate, here are the ones that we don t tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so what we re seeing in El Salvador, which of course is ongoing, it s fraught with potential problems,
2
SPEAKER_01
But what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%.
2
SPEAKER_01
It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now it s per capita, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.
2
SPEAKER_01
the lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so it s not that you have to have a kind of soul-searching and endless kind of navel-gazing and philosophizing.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s simply to say,
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, people who are a direct threat to others that commit violent crimes that maybe have 20, 30, 40, 100 convictions in their criminal history, you know, cannot participate in society without limits.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s something that people have been scared to talk about, but I think that that is ending.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because when people start to feel a sense of danger in their daily lives,
2
SPEAKER_01
they re going to start to break through some of those taboos and to say, hey, wait a minute.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the letting people out of jail who are violent criminals doesn t seem to be working.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think we re there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Even in Seattle, they elected a Republican city attorney.
2
SPEAKER_01
They elected a moderate city council, a moderate mayor.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the big cities, especially the West Coast cities, are waking up to this citizen rage.
2
SPEAKER_01
These are the most prosperous cities in the history of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
But they can t keep the streets clean?
2
SPEAKER_01
They can t keep people safe?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, they can when Xi Jinping comes to town.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s right, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
How wild is that one?
2
SPEAKER_00
That dude is so wild because what he does is so blatant.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like the Panera Bread thing?
2
SPEAKER_00
The Panera Bread thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
The Panera Bread thing is amazing.
2
SPEAKER_00
You almost have to respect it.
2
SPEAKER_00
You almost have to respect it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s so brazen.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, explain it to people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Wait, hold up.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the Panera Bread.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s like, you re gonna raise the minimum wage for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour, except for Panera Bread.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because the Panera Bread guy is his friend and donor.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the way around that to make don t look that obvious is places with bakeries.
2
SPEAKER_00
What that s not what is the I mean why why a specific way of cooking there is no justification There s no rational justification for it And and so it s almost like oh what says Panera is not exempted from California s fast-food minimum-wage law after all on February 28th Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California s AB 1 2 2 8 law a law that raises minimum wage for fast-food workers from 16 to 20 dollars an hour starting anyone so why is that
2
SPEAKER_00
How is it not exempt?
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a hell of a fact check.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that.
2
SPEAKER_00
But they were saying that it was bakeries were exempt.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what is exempt?
2
SPEAKER_00
It said, okay, Governor Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times Panera would not be exempt from the law.
2
SPEAKER_00
The spokesperson also did not acclaim the Bloomberg piece, which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item, calling the report absurd.
2
SPEAKER_00
So is it a fake story?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or is it something that they might have corrected course quickly?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Roll up to the top.
2
SPEAKER_00
So where s the initial report?
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s find the initial report.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because why would Bloomberg spread bullshit?
2
SPEAKER_00
Bloomberg is a financial paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s not something I don t think it would be.
2
SPEAKER_00
You really can t do that if you re running a financial paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not like the New York Times.
2
SPEAKER_00
The New York Times can say Israel bombed the hospital and 500 people were killed and put on the front page, even if it s not true.
2
SPEAKER_00
And everybody just assumes it s true because it s the New York Times.
2
SPEAKER_00
But they can kind of get away with that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then they still exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that, if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses would do or tax laws, that seems insane.
2
SPEAKER_00
How Panera Bread ducked California s new $20 minimum wage.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is Bloomberg.
2
SPEAKER_00
Governor pushed for a carve out that s perplexed industry observers and benefited a donor.
2
SPEAKER_00
So how do we know that this is true?
2
SPEAKER_00
Do we have to subscribe?
2
SPEAKER_01
The dreaded paywall.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, no worries.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ll subscribe.
2
SPEAKER_00
We owe you Bloomberg.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there must be something to it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s so hard with that guy, because when you just look at the way he praised Biden, I would never run against him.
2
SPEAKER_00
A man of character.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, I m old school.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like he s playing someone in a movie that s a crazy person.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, that s how
2
SPEAKER_00
that s how like a
3
SPEAKER_00
really good actor would play a complete crazy person who s insincere enough that smart people recognize it, but that really dull-minded, blue-no-matter-who people are like, he s a winner.
3
SPEAKER_00
That guy, he s got my vote.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll tell you what, he can win.
3
SPEAKER_00
He can win this for us.
3
SPEAKER_02
But the problem is, is that that s not wrong.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, Gavin Newsom is a fearsome political talent and his willingness to do or say anything and do it with a straight face, with that sincere voice and that cool, you know, swoopy hair.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean... I love that he keeps getting busted too.
3
SPEAKER_02
I love that he got busted during the pandemic eating inside with no mask on he s just fucking The shamelessness on that guy is like it s like a laboratory specimen Yeah, I mean it s actually is an interesting guy and fascinating person in that way.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m not a fan I disagree with him politically, but I don t think he should be underestimated because those of us who can see through it Yeah, I think are actually a pretty small number of people
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think you re probably right, and I think there s also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s what I think.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think they barely care who the president is, and I think that s obvious with Obama.
3
SPEAKER_00
excuse me, with Biden, not with Obama at all, the opposite with Obama.
3
SPEAKER_00
Obama was like the best example of what we have to offer, but Biden is without doubt, anyone can beat him.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you were just comparing competence, someone who you would trust talking, someone who you would trust to go meet foreign dignitaries,
3
SPEAKER_00
There s zero he has he s no one he s gonna beat.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s not gonna be a single living politician But since he s a type a top of this team that people are like this team is our team No matter what like we re all in I m a fucking 49ers fan for life.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what these people are doing Yeah, and they literally don t kill they ll gaslight you into a coma Did you see that piece that someone wrote the other day how his age is his superpower?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did you see that shit?
3
SPEAKER_00
Panera exempted from California s minimum wage hike thanked a Newsom link.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, and this is Snopes.
3
SPEAKER_00
What does Snopes say?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do they do they debunk it?
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t get through all the article, but it is explaining what happened here.
3
SPEAKER_00
According to California state law set to take effect April 1st, 2024, a restaurant chain with more than 60 locations nationwide that produces for sale bread as a standalone menu item does not count as fast food.
3
SPEAKER_00
The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Bloomberg article published February 28th reporting that the fast, casual chain Panera Bread has dodged an upcoming minimum wage increase for fast food workers in California of $20 an hour.
3
SPEAKER_00
The article connected the bread exemption to billionaire Greg Flynn, a frequent donor to California Governor Gavin Newsom s political campaigns, who owns more than two dozen Panera Bread locations in the state.
3
SPEAKER_00
In a statement to Snopes, however, Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection, played a role in the law, and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Panera.
3
SPEAKER_00
The governor never met with Flynn about this bill, and the story is absurd, Stack said.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, they don t have to meet, they can talk on the phone.
3
SPEAKER_00
Our legal team has reviewed, and it appears that Panera is not exempt from the law.
3
SPEAKER_00
Whoops, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
The legal team reviewed it after they, so there is an exemption.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, right, so that s where I was gonna get to this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so how would they not be?
3
SPEAKER_00
The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills.
3
SPEAKER_00
The exemption, as we mentioned above, is real and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.
3
SPEAKER_00
However, Newsom s office said a legal analysis determined Panera, like other chain bakeries, does not fall under the exemption because it mixes its dough off-site instead of fully producing bread on the premises of its retail locations.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh my God.
3
SPEAKER_00
Interesting, but that makes sense.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that makes sense because they re just set looks like subway right subway doesn t make the dough either.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right So this so this but that why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill?
3
SPEAKER_02
Is the bakers lobby that powerful or the the opposite?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, well the the bakers are the ones who d be lobbying for more money.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s what I mean Yeah, the actual bakers.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I
3
SPEAKER_02
That, I mean, they, but even look at Snopes.
3
SPEAKER_02
Snopes has done a fact check on my work that actually got debunked.
3
SPEAKER_02
PolitiFact has done it, Washington Post.
3
SPEAKER_00
The history of Snopes is wild.
3
SPEAKER_02
Is wild.
3
SPEAKER_02
But a lot of these fact check sites, they ve actually had to retract claims against me where they say, oh,
3
SPEAKER_02
You know, Chris Rufo in his reporting said X, Y and Z. It s not true.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then I provide them the documentation, the evidence.
3
SPEAKER_02
I raise a stink about it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then they reverse course.
3
SPEAKER_02
And a lot of these like that s such a mess of facts.
3
SPEAKER_02
And who did they reach out to to verify?
3
SPEAKER_02
Governor Newsom s office.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, said it s absurd.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Of course, he s going to say it s absurd because he got in trouble for it.
3
SPEAKER_02
So.
3
SPEAKER_02
But I think the point about Biden that you were making is is is really instructive because
3
SPEAKER_02
Biden is like the weekend at Bernie s president.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s like they wheel him around.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so what you get a glimpse of is the Democratic Party machine.
3
SPEAKER_02
What are their priorities?
3
SPEAKER_02
What are they going to put on the teleprompter?
3
SPEAKER_02
What is the staff level going to decide is important?
3
SPEAKER_02
And then they kind of wheel Biden out there to kind of kind of stammer for a couple of minutes, say the talking points and get out.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so we re seeing what s important to the party as a movement.
3
SPEAKER_02
The opposite is Trump.
3
SPEAKER_02
Trump is, you know, a unique individual figure.
3
SPEAKER_02
The party is following him.
3
SPEAKER_02
Look, these are the two models that we have.
3
SPEAKER_02
And increasingly, the voters are saying we want to have a rematch.
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s it is interesting that he s so frail that he s transparent.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s so transparent to the point where the White House press secretary accidentally tweeted as him from her account.
3
SPEAKER_00
You saw that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Which is wonderful.
3
SPEAKER_00
I love when that happens because like, thank you.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was wondering.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now I know, you know, I was really confused.
3
SPEAKER_00
Kind of had a feeling it was you, you know, and is there ever been a worse White House press secretary?
3
SPEAKER_00
She s it s how how did she get that job?
3
SPEAKER_00
She s so bad at convincing people.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s there s a bunch of like hardcore ideologically driven Left-wing pundits that are on YouTube that could do a way better job and they would be fucking psycho about it It would be psycho about it and the left would be like, yeah
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like she s not the one like she s fucking terrible at it.
3
SPEAKER_00
She gets called out for stuff all the time She gets set up for stuff all the time like Peter Doocy s always setting her up.
3
SPEAKER_00
He talks to her, but he s amazing He s so good.
3
SPEAKER_00
It ll provide a little bit of this, but then what about that yeah?
3
SPEAKER_02
And, you know, she s just awful at it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And she s only really challenged by one person in the briefing room and still manages to bungle it on the daily.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, it s just there s so much madness that she has to cover up.
3
SPEAKER_02
And look, this is, again, a kind of brass tacks way of talking about it, but it s what happens when you put identity over competence.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everyone knows, like, explicitly, and then when you hire someone, it s a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities the candidate has.
3
SPEAKER_02
You know, this is our first, you know, black female, I don t know, LGBTQ, not really sure.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so the problem with that, though, is when you re not making a decision based on competence, merit, excellence,
3
SPEAKER_02
You re buying into it at the front end on that different hierarchy of decision making.
3
SPEAKER_02
But then on the back end, you can t do anything about it.
3
SPEAKER_02
You say, well, you elevated this person for identity.
3
SPEAKER_02
You can t fire that person because of incompetence.
3
SPEAKER_00
Unless they steal women s clothes from the airport.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly unless they get a little sideways, you know, that guy was my favorite but the Harvard story is this exact phenomenon and you know after the 10-7 attack Harvard kind of reveals the ideology in the institution and then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents and
3
SPEAKER_00
We were the ones who broke the plagiarist for people that aren t aware for maybe so this can be standalone What Christopher is referring to is that Harvard?
3
SPEAKER_00
The this the president of Harvard and the president of MIT and Penn mm-hmm They all had this meeting where they were grilled by who which was the?
3
SPEAKER_00
Stefanik yes who grilled them about
3
SPEAKER_00
Using anti-jewish hate and is that hate speech to say death to the Jews and their answer was essentially if it s actionable Yeah, then it s hate.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was the most bonkers bizarre mental gymnastics and also with that one woman from Penn done in the most condescending way.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like she is so accustomed to being the boss, so accustomed to people accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world, that she doesn t realize how fucking insane what she s saying is.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
The question was, if students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard s policy?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was, it depends on the context.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people on the center left, suddenly became clear.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so this caused all sorts of chaos, predictably.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have donors dropping out, you have alumni furious, and then a little birdie sent another reporter and me a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, you know, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized dozens of passages in her PhD thesis.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, in this context of this big fight, you know, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, published it, obviously causes a huge firestorm.
4
SPEAKER_00
But the question is the same.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s to say, to Harvard, okay, DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s clear.
4
SPEAKER_00
But your motto for the last three, four hundred years has been Veritas, truth.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one.
4
SPEAKER_00
You either choose DEI or you choose truth.
4
SPEAKER_00
Which one are you going to sacrifice?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think as a country, the reason that story drove so much attention is because that s where we are politically.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where we are on policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where companies find themselves.
4
SPEAKER_00
Where are we going?
4
SPEAKER_00
What are our values?
4
SPEAKER_00
And we have this competing set of values.
4
SPEAKER_00
And for me, as someone who, look, I m unabashed.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m a political person.
4
SPEAKER_00
I try to drive political change.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think framing the question clearly so that people really understand what s at stake is just the beginning part of the process of getting sanity back.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think people are waking up.
4
SPEAKER_01
Jamie, why don t you shut your mic off?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because Carl is snoring up a storm over there.
4
SPEAKER_01
While you were talking I was here.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Geez Carl.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s that boring.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Carl gets bored quick.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s only four months old.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the curious thing to me was that most people until they saw those videos weren t aware of how far it had gone.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then they re like OK now I kind of get it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there s been a very very big reaction since then of people realizing
4
SPEAKER_01
How insane everything has gotten.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that this is something that came up, like when Jordan Peterson first started doing my show, which was I think, when was Jordan s first appearance?
4
SPEAKER_01
Was it 2015?
4
2016?
4
SPEAKER_01
Somewhere around then?
4
SPEAKER_01
When I had seen his story and seen these videos of him being interviewed, explaining to people, no, you don t understand.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you impose this legislation that makes it a hate crime to not use someone s preferred gender pronouns, this is not going to stop there.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s going to keep going and going and going and going, and you can t let it happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s right, and back then, but back then, the pushback was so fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because people were like, why are you having this guy on your show to talk about this thing that s happening only in these obscure universities?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s never going to go anywhere.
4
SPEAKER_01
But now you look at it eight years later, and it s fucking everywhere.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s everywhere.
4
SPEAKER_00
Dude, so one of the things that I do, I m a trustee at a public university in Florida, New College of Florida.
4
SPEAKER_00
Governor DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to take over this university
4
SPEAKER_00
I m
4
SPEAKER_00
When we did this, what we did is we came in, we replaced the leadership, we abolished the DEI department, we terminated the gender studies program, and then we said, you know, we re not going to comply with these ridiculous pronoun rules.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I m currently under investigation by federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to call this woman by ZZIR pronouns.
4
SPEAKER_00
Z-Zer.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not, you know, okay trans, okay man-woman, okay whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
Z-Zer.
4
SPEAKER_01
Either way, federal indictment, imagine for even just refusing to call this person he or her.
4
SPEAKER_01
People have always been rude.
4
SPEAKER_01
Are we gonna like legislate against rudeness?
4
SPEAKER_01
Are we gonna say that like if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan,
4
SPEAKER_01
Can I get them arrested and locked in a cage because they re being rude to me because they re calling me a girl?
4
SPEAKER_00
If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that s where it s going.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s where they d like it to go.
4
SPEAKER_00
And look, I have to spin up lawyers.
4
SPEAKER_00
Thankfully, the university is handling it.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I mean, this is not trivial.
4
SPEAKER_00
And what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great, what he brought up illustrates this point.
4
SPEAKER_00
If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a simple sales technique.
4
SPEAKER_00
You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them to cash up, and then you work them up the chain to a bigger purchase or a bigger commitment or a bigger ideology.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s how cults work.
4
SPEAKER_00
I learned this as a kid, my father s Italian from Italy, and we went to Rome, to the Vatican, this sales guy.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like everything about sales and persuasion I learned at like 10 years old, watching this guy.
4
SPEAKER_00
He came up, he said, oh, you know, sir, it s a beautiful day.
4
SPEAKER_00
I had a new grandchild that was born.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let me give you this beautiful St.
4
SPEAKER_00
Christopher medal or St.
4
SPEAKER_00
Joseph medal to celebrate this.
4
SPEAKER_00
And as soon as you take it, you know you re hooked because he s gonna sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so this is the ante.
4
SPEAKER_00
Once you put in the ante, you re playing the hand.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so this stuff is like, it s rage bait for the right.
4
SPEAKER_00
It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives some kind of momentum.
4
SPEAKER_00
Ratings.
4
SPEAKER_00
Ratings.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what it s not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback, legal, administrative, policy, and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I m very concerned because these are just these gambits where they make, and once they stick, then you re in.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s very hard to roll back.
4
SPEAKER_00
Look at the military.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have all of these men masquerading as women that are now suddenly elevated in the military hierarchy.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not trivial.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re the most powerful military in the world.
4
SPEAKER_00
We maintain international peace.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, now the highest concern is trans?
4
SPEAKER_00
No.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think that this is how we should be making decisions.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t think that we should be submitting to the original lie.
4
SPEAKER_00
You should never submit to the original lie, because if you do, you can never successfully push back again.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s certainly odd that they re pushing that.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is where I get so confused, because if I really want to go full tinfoil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was a foreign country,
4
SPEAKER_01
I would be promoting this as much as possible in any way I could.
4
SPEAKER_01
I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.
4
SPEAKER_01
I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.
4
SPEAKER_01
I d be teaching them the kind of things that they taught
4
SPEAKER_01
people where that woman, do you remember, you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley and he was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods?
4
SPEAKER_01
And she is actually laughing while she, I just want to point out, I just want to point out what you re saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like what?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think she was a Stanford law professor.
4
SPEAKER_01
She was somewhere.
4
SPEAKER_01
Might have been Berkeley.
4
SPEAKER_01
But whatever it was, it was like, what did you just say?
4
SPEAKER_01
What did you just say?
4
SPEAKER_01
And why did you say it that way?
4
SPEAKER_01
You think you re so accustomed to being in your bubble that you don t recognize how gross it is when you giggle before you say something.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just want to point out, what you re saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like some men can have periods.
4
SPEAKER_00
But this is the dominant culture in HR departments, K through 12 schools, universities, government bureaucracies.
4
SPEAKER_00
That is the social game that has been established.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, when we took over New College of Florida, it was the most left-leaning university.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s basically the evergreen.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was the evergreen state of Florida.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was, the student population was more than 50% trans, queer, and non-binary.
4
SPEAKER_00
More than 50%?
4
SPEAKER_00
More than 50%.
4
SPEAKER_00
What is the odds of that?
4
SPEAKER_01
In terms of like the normal account when they do, if they get a random group of 100 human beings in the country.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a bit of a disparity there.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, especially because non-binary is fake.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not a thing, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It just doesn t exist.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can be non-binary.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I am.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can be.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just say it.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just say it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I knew a dude who used to say it.
4
SPEAKER_01
He used to date only girls.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was his strategy?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s like a con.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a con.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re part of the- Male feminists, basically.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re LBGT, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a little cuttlefish.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, it is like, it s a strategy.
5
SPEAKER_01
A hundred percent.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it works maybe at the initial, but there are negative consequences.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s flaws.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s flaws.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then once women figure out what you re doing, they don t respect you anymore.
5
SPEAKER_00
But what happens, so we go to the university and, you know, we re the new bosses.
5
SPEAKER_00
The governor gives us a mandate to do significant changes and reforms.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I remember I took some of my guys, we kind of landed on campus the first time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Student protests, death threats, you know, SWAT team mobilized to protect us.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I remember meeting with the old administrators, you know, and walking in and
5
SPEAKER_00
And these are people that are just wagging their fingers in my face.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re saying, oh, you can t do this.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re opening up the community to violence.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can t host a talk on campus because all the same stuff you re talking about.
5
SPEAKER_00
all of you are about to get fired.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you not understand the situation that you re in?
5
SPEAKER_00
Your finger wagging is not going to work anymore.
5
SPEAKER_00
The governor is tough as nails.
5
SPEAKER_00
He told us before we took over, if you re not driving massive negative headlines, if you re not getting flack, you re not doing your job.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ll back you up 100 percent.
5
SPEAKER_00
Go in and make the change.
5
SPEAKER_00
But what I realized in that moment is that the people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged.
5
SPEAKER_00
No one in a meeting says, actually, this is a stupid idea.
5
SPEAKER_00
We should get back to business.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so for me, it was this remarkable realization that we ve created this social and psychological pattern within our institutions.
5
SPEAKER_00
where they re like fragile, brittle, unhinged, because the most passive aggressive, the most ideological, the most kind of nagging person ends up winning.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if we re gonna have better institutions, we have to have people, men and women, that go in and just say, no, no more bullshit, no more games, no more ideology.
5
SPEAKER_00
We have a serious job to do.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re gonna get it done.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if you don t join the mission, you re out.
5
SPEAKER_00
pink slip, you know, and so that s kind of what we did.
5
SPEAKER_00
You saw the same thing at Twitter when Elon took over Twitter.
5
SPEAKER_00
These are the hard decisions that we haven t made in a long time that I think are desperately needed.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think so too, and I think that
5
SPEAKER_01
what they re doing by allowing this culture where every anxiety gets justified and amplified.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re just creating more anxious people.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re creating more fucked up kids.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re turning the whole world
5
SPEAKER_01
into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you have to amend it through DEI, and you have to amend it through equality of outcome, and you have to amend it through tax the rich.
5
SPEAKER_01
The whole thing behind it is just so unhinged.
5
SPEAKER_01
And how many of those people, if they had gone to a place where they were met with intellectual challenges by motivated professors who are not ideologically driven, who could have taught them important things about life, that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way?
5
SPEAKER_01
We re not preparing people for that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because the people that are preparing the people have never done that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s a giant part of the problem.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like someone teaching you how to do a thing that they don t do.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, unless they re teaching us what I say about drag queens, unless they re teaching you how to be a drag queen.
5
SPEAKER_01
Um,
5
SPEAKER_00
But that s what they re doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
For sure, it s a modeling thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
The drag queen comes in with a position of status, prestige, admiration.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s presented as this amazing life path.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even the drag queen theorists, if you read their academic papers, which is not everyone s cup of tea, but I ve made the sacrifice.
5
SPEAKER_00
They say very clearly and very queerly, they say, we are training kids to move into the queer ideology, the ideology of queer theory, the academic discipline, but also for kind of other ways of knowing, creating a, you know, one of the phrases they use is a site of queer pleasure.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s like,
5
SPEAKER_00
They re not hiding the ideology that s driving this, if you dig far enough.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they really say, they say, we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family, because that s oppressive.
5
SPEAKER_00
Having a mother and a father in a nuclear household environment is a form of racism, transphobia, whatever, all of the different social ills you could imagine.
5
SPEAKER_00
We have people that have no sense of responsibility.
5
SPEAKER_00
We ve inherited some good and some bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re born into the world in a tragic state of being.
5
SPEAKER_00
Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think on the whole, our history, our tradition, is on net very positive, very good.
5
SPEAKER_00
Still problems to solve.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a kind of universal human nature.
5
SPEAKER_00
But what we re training kids to believe is that everything behind them is evil.
5
SPEAKER_00
All of the structures that have provided a sense of discipline and meaning and purpose should be demolished, and they should be replaced by ideological communities.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that to me is evident in the outcomes.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids.
5
SPEAKER_00
that have been deprived of all these structures that could actually help them along.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen that across the board in my reporting, in my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life.
5
SPEAKER_00
We have to start first by, I mean, assessing your own situation.
5
SPEAKER_00
What do I do with my kids?
5
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of people are asking that question right now.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know about you, but when I grew up, if you were a upper middle class, professional class household, your parents bought a house in a nice neighborhood, enrolled you in public K kindergarten, and you kind of went up, it was set it and forget it.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s over.
5
SPEAKER_00
Parents are finally starting to say, hey, wait a minute.
5
SPEAKER_00
I actually have to look into this.
5
SPEAKER_00
I want to be careful and considerate about where I m sending my kids and what kind of life I m raising them to live.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
And there s not a lot of good options.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s what gets confusing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And for a lot of my friends whose kids are about to go to high school and about to go to college, they re making these next steps towards adulthood.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s really scary to them because they re like, look, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.
5
SPEAKER_01
They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, get caught up in momentum.
5
SPEAKER_01
and not realize that you re not contributing to any good.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re just fucking things up worse.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that none of this unhoused or home free or whatever you want to call it, that s not helping anybody.
5
SPEAKER_01
All this language, all this verbiage, it s not helping anybody.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you have to fucking work hard to get by in this world.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s important.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s an important facet of being a human being.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn what your capabilities are.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn how to push yourself.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if we protect kids every step of the way from any sort of difficult thing at all, lower math scores, because too many people aren t graduating.
5
SPEAKER_01
So this must be racist.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s lower the scores.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s just pass people.
5
SPEAKER_01
Fuck it.
5
SPEAKER_01
We don t want to be bad people.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s just pass people instead of teaching them.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s hard to learn shit.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s hard.
5
SPEAKER_01
It takes work.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s the whole reason why it s so impressive when someone is really well read.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, wow, that guy put in the work.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s really impressive when someone knows a lot of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s really impressive when someone s really good at something.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, why is it impressive?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because we know it s fucking hard to do.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s that simple.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you want to develop human beings that have potential and can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you ve got to teach them how to work hard.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s part of the process.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s unavoidable.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if you don t have that facet, if you don t have that as a core tenet of how you view the world,
5
SPEAKER_01
You re fucking up.
5
100%.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s no way you re gonna get everything out of life without hard work.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just, you ll be anxious.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ll be depressed.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ll feel lost.
5
SPEAKER_01
You won t feel like you accomplished anything.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ll feel like it s been handed to you.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ll be a trust fund baby.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ll be fucked.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not good for you.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to work hard.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so you have to overcome including emotional harm.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to go through bullshit.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to go through bad friendships and bad relationships and bad
6
SPEAKER_00
Coworkers and bad employers you have to go through that it s part of the process It s how you become a human being and you can t protect people every goddamn step of the way We re just gonna create a bunch of grown-up babies Who are screaming in the streets stop oil now blocking the highway with signs?
6
SPEAKER_00
Painted with oil wearing sneakers made with oil every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil It s insanity
6
SPEAKER_00
And this is what we ve got.
6
SPEAKER_01
Look, I m in that world of words, ideas, publication.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s a pretty easy life in some ways, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
You re doing reading, you re doing writing, you re doing media.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I have a lot of friends that live in my small town that do actual hard work.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re working in the oil business, they re working on commercial plumbing, they re working
6
SPEAKER_01
Actual real things that we depend on, but we take for granted.
6
SPEAKER_01
And those things are actually hard.
6
SPEAKER_01
Super fucking hard.
6
SPEAKER_01
Those things are super hard.
6
SPEAKER_01
It takes a ton of dedication, a ton of skill.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s the reason that those of us who are privileged enough, in the real sense of the word, can do what we do.
6
SPEAKER_01
We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these, ban oil.
6
SPEAKER_01
Ban oil?
6
SPEAKER_01
our whole society collapses instantly.
6
SPEAKER_01
Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so it s like, we ve created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, these are people that don t know what it means to be human.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re just
6
SPEAKER_01
symbols of ideology.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re like, you know, you look at those videos and you re like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions.
6
SPEAKER_01
These are kind of puppets as part of some agenda, as part of some mimetic ideology that is nihilistic at its heart.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s where I think we re going.
6
SPEAKER_01
If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color,
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, you have no sense of values.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s what we all want.
6
SPEAKER_01
We all operate on a sense of values, whether it s conscious or unconscious.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when you try to wipe away all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal,
6
SPEAKER_01
you re dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know, you know, north from south.
6
SPEAKER_01
They know up from down.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, with my own kids, that s what I m trying to do is, you know, protect them to the extent that s necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to fight.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because life is a fight, life is a struggle.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re going to confront very difficult things as they grow up.
6
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, and then at some point, you know, you hope that you ve prepared them enough.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
And when you re looking at the difference between the world of today and the world of just 20 years ago, the change is so quick.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, what year was it?
6
SPEAKER_00
Was it 2020 that we had the highest jump in murder ever?
6
SPEAKER_00
The same year we had the defund the police?
6
SPEAKER_00
That s scary.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s scary because that s the opposite of where we expect.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you look at Pinker s work on violence over time, you see that societies are trending in a very positive direction.
6
SPEAKER_00
At least we were until 2020.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that this one change
6
SPEAKER_00
Just because it was just one year, but that one year was just three years ago, kids.
6
SPEAKER_00
Another thing like that could do that again, especially when you re dealing with even more people who are released out into the world with these radical ideas, especially the people that are inclined to believe that violence is a necessary aspect of change.
6
SPEAKER_00
And these are, ironically, the same people that don t want anybody to be armed.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s all so wild.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s so wild because if you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, you would have a president who s not there, you would have a society that is
6
SPEAKER_00
run by fucking maniacs in the educational institutions, that when Antifa commits violence, somehow it s mostly peaceful, but yet when anyone else does it, especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you can throw at it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you can say.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s everything wrong with the world.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, this is a recipe for a civil war.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a recipe for chaos.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that s around us.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you just go from what happened so quickly in 2020, it s not hard to imagine if you could bring yourself back to the time in 2020.
6
SPEAKER_00
to think, this is never coming back, and it s going to be like this forever, and it s going to get way worse.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because if it can get like this, where people could just smash into stores and loot, that s what I started seeing.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the things that got me out of California.
6
SPEAKER_00
I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything.
6
SPEAKER_00
By the way, all white kids.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I saw... Or down in Santa Monica or something?
6
SPEAKER_00
It was in Woodland Hills.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I saw there was a target there that got targeted too.
6
SPEAKER_00
They lit like a dumpster on fire and pushed up against the door.
6
SPEAKER_00
There was a lot of shit that people weren t getting caught for.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it was like right after the George Floyd riots.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the cop cars burning on the highway were an image burning everyone s mind still.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh.
6
SPEAKER_00
I know how this movie plays out.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m getting the fuck out of here.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like that was my first thought.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was like, I need to figure out how to get out of here.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like this is, I can t stay because this is only going to get worse.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you don t get out now and you re going to wish you got out when something happens to someone you love, we ve got to get the fuck out of here.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is bad.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s not hard to imagine that our society, given the current situation and given the current influences,
6
SPEAKER_00
It s going in that direction.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if I was in another country, I d be fucking pumped.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was looking at, what s that lady s name?
6
SPEAKER_00
Rachel, whatever it is, the admiral, first female admiral.
6
SPEAKER_00
Madam Rachel Levine.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, madam.
6
SPEAKER_00
Wonderful, hilarious.
6
SPEAKER_00
And this other one that was some recent trans-military person who was saying we should all put our pronouns in all of our emails, even if it s obvious.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, shut the fuck up.
6
SPEAKER_00
Shut the fuck up.
6
SPEAKER_00
How come something that used to be considered a mental illness just 10 years ago is now at a precedent?
6
SPEAKER_00
Now it s a valuable asset?
6
SPEAKER_00
Now it s an important part of our community?
6
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Now it s not?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, if you found out someone was suicidal, would you want them in charge of the nukes?
6
SPEAKER_00
You wouldn t, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, just on paper, the amount of trans people that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, isn t it something insane, like 40%?
6
SPEAKER_00
It s something crazy like that.
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SPEAKER_00
What are you doing?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, are we ignoring facts and statistics?
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SPEAKER_00
If you know that someone is a bipolar schizophrenic and you got them working on a gun range, should you say, hey, Harry, we just pulled your file?
6
SPEAKER_00
And you fucking fly off the handle, and you have 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager.
6
SPEAKER_00
Give me that gun, you motherfucker.
6
SPEAKER_00
Get out of here.
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SPEAKER_00
You can t work here anymore.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like putting Kanye in charge of, like, an air wing in the Air Force or something.
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SPEAKER_01
Like, whoa, I don t know about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s just nuts.
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where we have decided that, listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria.
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I ve met many people that I truly believe they have somewhere in there, they are a woman, and they got stuck in a man s body, and I think that s real, and I think that s always happened.
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SPEAKER_00
But, but,
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When you make that more powerful than just being a normal person, more preferable than just being a normal person, subject to less scrutiny than being a normal person.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not saying you should discriminate against trans people.
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SPEAKER_00
I think you should just let everybody be whoever the fuck they are.
6
SPEAKER_00
But don t tell me that I m supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play.
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SPEAKER_00
Say if you re a biological male inmate and you decide that you re a woman and you want to transition to women s prisons, which in California 47 men have done.
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t tell me that just because you re trans, I m supposed to abandon that.
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SPEAKER_00
I m supposed to ignore that sex offenders could just walk into a women s locker room with an erection, and everyone s supposed to ignore that.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you do?
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SPEAKER_00
Now you are fucking up the acceptance of trans people, because you re saying that trans people are going to come along with all these sex offenders, which is not really
7
SPEAKER_01
true.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of the trans people that aren t sex offenders, they re just trans.
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SPEAKER_01
These other people are taking advantage of this fucking massive loophole that you ve left in here and you re victimizing female professional athletes, female college athletes, you re jeopardizing scholarships for those athletes, you re doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women and there s no consideration for that at all.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and look at this kind of sorority house.
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s probably the best example of this phenomenon where you have some, you know, 6 2 , male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women in a sorority house somewhere.
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SPEAKER_00
And look, obviously, you know, this guy s a pervert.
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SPEAKER_00
That full stop, that is a kind of patently obvious thing, right?
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SPEAKER_00
They re exploiting it, they re manipulating it.
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SPEAKER_00
You should certainly consider the possibility that he s a pervert.
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I think it s at the minimum a big bright red flag that is waving in your face.
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SPEAKER_00
But the question is an institutional question.
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the fathers of these young girls, the deans of the universities, the university presidents, it s like, hey, wait a minute, accommodate this person, try to talk to this person, figure out what the deal is, assess whether it actually is kind of a real threat or not, figure out some alternate arrangement for this person.
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But especially if the young women are telling you, we don t want this, we re uncomfortable with this, we don t like this, get this person out.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a failure on our social institutions that we haven t developed any kind of method for solving this problem.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, it also shows our oppression hierarchy, that we have always protected women from sexual predators, unless that sexual predator identifies as a group that has a social hierarchy above biological women, which is a trans woman.
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And that s where we re at.
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Yeah, and it just shows that this is cult thinking we re in a cult This is a doctrine that could have been created in the top of a mountain by a wizard.
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SPEAKER_01
It s nonsense It s fucking nonsense and somehow or another it is the norm in a lot of universities and it s fucking crazy and These women that have to deal with this shit that s it s fucking nuts that people aren t
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SPEAKER_01
Insanely outraged and that it s not stopped immediately People are scared that that s the common denominator to all of these things But the problem is the rebound of that is are equally horrific Because the rebound of that is that people have enough and then when people have enough and they find out there s this biological male that s being housed in this women s
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Sorority and this biological man, maybe he does something to one of those women that person there s gonna be vigilante justice And that s the last thing you want.
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SPEAKER_00
We want to avoid that by having sensible policies now and head off these problems before they Balloon into something that is unmanageable.
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SPEAKER_00
And so but you know if it s not already again People are scared to speak out you talk to folks that are you know, I used to have this idea that oh, you know There s the concept of fuck you money
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SPEAKER_00
Once you have a certain kind of net worth, you re untouchable, you re kind of immune to social consequences, you can do whatever you want.
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That s not even true.
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I talk to a lot of folks of considerable means, and not all of them, but many of them are also scared because there s status and prestige concerns, family concerns, business concerns.
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And so it really is up and down the line.
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People are scared to speak.
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They re scared to tell the truth.
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And because there are real social consequences for doing so.
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Real consequences across the board.
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It s not just social.
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There s economic consequences.
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There s
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You know, there s consequences in terms of your own personal safety.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a lot a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating and it s so strange for me for You know, I m 56 years old.
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SPEAKER_01
I was born in 1967.
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SPEAKER_01
I lived in a different world and you know, I grew up in a world with no internet and
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So to watch this world change the way and to be a part of the internet now and to have existed in both worlds Is a very fascinating contrast because I get to see like how old are you?
7
39.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, so you don t know shit.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t know shit about the pre-internet days
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t get a cell phone until my senior year in high school.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, you poor baby.
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SPEAKER_01
But you had a computer at home though, huh?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we had a computer for sure.
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SPEAKER_01
And it was attached to the internet.
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SPEAKER_01
It was attached to like AOL.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, that s something.
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SPEAKER_01
The kids today, like the 20-year-olds, they don t know jack shit about no internet.
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SPEAKER_01
It s crazy.
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SPEAKER_01
They have full 5G everywhere they exist.
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And they re always on.
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They re always on.
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They re always on.
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SPEAKER_01
They also know where everybody s location is because they use Snap Map.
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SPEAKER_01
They re all Snap Mapping each other.
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So they know, like, oh my god, she told me she was gonna go to Becky s house and she s over at Debbie s house.
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It s like surveillance of your friends.
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SPEAKER_00
It s fucking nuts, man.
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Could you imagine?
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It s also, it gets you very accustomed to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face.
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SPEAKER_01
And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they re not just the educators.
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They re also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic.
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And the amount of influence that you can have, if you can get people to adhere to these things, you can get them to do something really stupid, like submit to a social credit score system, which you would attach to a centralized digital currency.
7
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Now you ve got communism, and it s...
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like that.
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It s very quick.
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And just like people self-censored on Twitter and self-censored before Elon Musk and self-censored on YouTube because they don t want to get demonetized, people start doing that in regular society.
7
SPEAKER_01
They will do that because you don t want your social credit score system to drop.
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SPEAKER_01
And it could be something as simple as not using ZZer, not using ZZer and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using ZZer.
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SPEAKER_01
And now you are being tried for discrimination.
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SPEAKER_01
And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted.
7
SPEAKER_01
And now all of a sudden, you ve got a real Soviet Union style gulag situation in 2029, United States of America, with Admiral Levine as our first female president.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that could be our first female president.
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SPEAKER_00
But we re not far from there right now.
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SPEAKER_00
No.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, the absurdity of the ACLU filing a complaint, and now the Department of Education Civil Rights Division following up, for refusing to use ZSER pronouns.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s like, it is what it is.
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This is something we re already here.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so the first step is to intimidate, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s an intimidation mechanism.
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SPEAKER_00
You ve got to defend yourself, you ve got to get a lawyer, you have to spend time on it.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe you ll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents.
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SPEAKER_00
And so a formal social credit system that s tied to your digital identity would just take this to the nth power.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I spent a year living in western China when I was a documentary filmmaker.
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And this is where the Uyghurs are.
7
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The Uyghurs are the Muslim minority population of China s West, and they re ruled by the Han Chinese, who comprise the majority of the country.
7
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And so observing what they re doing, what they were doing over time, and it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.
7
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They wouldn t allow Uyghur men to wear mustaches, like trivial things that are the beginning.
7
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But then it s like very serious regulation of thought and opinion.
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And so it s propaganda that is backed up by force.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s really all that we re talking about.
7
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And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form,
7
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propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state.
7
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And we have to push at every opportunity.
7
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And look, I m a conservative, I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals, because we re cobbling together the only viable counter-movement.
7
SPEAKER_00
You can t solve this by culture alone.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to get in the arena of politics, you have to change the law, and you have to replace institutions that are broken with new institutions.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s an uphill fight.
7
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There s not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal, but what I ve been trying to do, whether it s with Harvard or Critical Race Theory or DEI, all of these stories that I ve broken and campaigns that I ve run, is at least turn people on to the idea that something is deeply wrong, put a name and a face to it, and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems.
7
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You know, if we don t, we lose the great promise.
7
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We were promised liberty and equality.
7
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Those are the two fundamentals.
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People don t even have an understanding of what that means anymore.
7
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And so we have to recover intellectually what has been erased
8
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from our discourse, and then we have to fight in the arena of actual political power.
8
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We have to take action.
8
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We have to change laws.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have to reform bureaucracies.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have to lead institutions.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so every day that I wake up, it s like, that s what I m doing.
8
SPEAKER_00
What wins are we putting up on the board?
8
SPEAKER_00
Because unless we re having substantial wins in all these little areas, that social credit system that you re talking about, it s just a matter of time.
8
SPEAKER_01
When you look at the current political landscape, particularly these trials, how disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because to me, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is,
8
SPEAKER_01
Setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another either put them in jail or make them seem like complete total criminals
8
SPEAKER_01
in a way that would for the casual for the person who s not reading deep into the headlines for the casual democrat that sees this trump real estate thing that just happened where he got fined 365 million dollars the casuals i ve seen people argue you know that you know fraud is fraud and this that and he s a fucking fraud and
8
SPEAKER_01
And then I saw Kevin O Leary explain it from Shark Tank.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was saying, this is what every real estate developer does.
8
SPEAKER_01
They say, my building s worth $400 million.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then someone comes along from the bank, and they say, no, it s worth $300 million.
8
SPEAKER_01
We ll give you a loan on $300 million, or whatever it is, whatever the number.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a negotiation.
8
SPEAKER_01
But also, real estate pricing in general is the strange thing to say that s fraud
8
SPEAKER_01
Because people overvalue their property all the time.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s a standard thing that people do.
8
SPEAKER_01
When someone has a house and it s worth $700,000, they decide to list it as $900,000.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the real estate person says, well, you know, it s really pushing it.
8
SPEAKER_01
You guys are like, that s what I want.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s worth $900,000.
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve always done weird shit like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then when you have this leftist judge that says that Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million, then you just showed all your silly hands.
8
SPEAKER_01
You showed your hand, because that s a crazy thing to say in a place that has the most expensive real estate on earth.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and the Mar-a-Lago property is not worth $18 million.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s absurd.
8
SPEAKER_00
Isn t it like 18 acres?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s huge.
8
SPEAKER_00
It covers both sides of the little key or whatever you call it, the little island.
8
SPEAKER_00
But the bigger question is the question that was first raised by the presidency of Richard Nixon that is now coming to fruition with the presidency and the kind of ex-presidency of Donald Trump.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have a democratic system that favors Trump in the sense that he won in 2016.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s winning the primary right now for Republicans in 2024.
8
SPEAKER_00
But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim.
8
SPEAKER_00
They essentially say,
8
SPEAKER_00
We want to keep him off the ballot.
8
SPEAKER_00
We want to put him in prison.
8
SPEAKER_00
We want to bankrupt him so he can t become the president, even if the people support him.
8
SPEAKER_00
We want to deprive the people of making the decision.
8
SPEAKER_00
So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the cases are bogus.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so the question that we re raising is, who actually rules in this country?
8
SPEAKER_00
Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government?
8
SPEAKER_00
Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?
8
SPEAKER_00
What they can say even to Donald, I mean, Donald Trump has been one of the most famous people in the world for decades.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s enormously wealthy.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s already been the President of the United States, powerful person.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we ve built up.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so as someone who I didn t vote for Trump in 2016, I did vote for him for 2020.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ll absolutely vote for him now in 2024.
8
SPEAKER_00
It is a contest of how we think of our democratic system.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I m of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy.
8
SPEAKER_00
And this is a contest where Democrats are saying, essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.
8
SPEAKER_00
Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages in that sentence.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have to destroy democracy as we ve traditionally known it, electing a president through a vote of the people, in order to save democracy, which is ruled by expert opinion, ruled by the bureaucracy, and essentially left-wing hegemony, left-wing domination over institutions.
8
SPEAKER_00
And as someone who tries to maximize whatever I can do to push forward on these issues politically,
8
SPEAKER_00
it s not lost on me that if they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, we re all table stakes, relatively.
8
SPEAKER_00
And they re gonna have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, that s when dissent becomes a crime.
8
SPEAKER_00
And we ve already seen that.
8
SPEAKER_00
I reported on the gender ideology in schools and work with some of the parent groups that we re trying to mobilize.
8
SPEAKER_00
And they all got put on an FBI list.
8
SPEAKER_00
We know this for sure, a FBI counter-terrorism list that was specifically for parent school board protesters.
8
SPEAKER_00
So if you participate in the democratic process, we ll turn you into a criminal.
8
SPEAKER_00
I hate that with every fiber of my being.
8
SPEAKER_00
And whatever threats come my way, whatever lawsuits, whatever investigations come my way, it s worth it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Take me to prison.
8
SPEAKER_00
you know, fine, let s do this.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because we have to actually confront these questions head on.
8
SPEAKER_00
We need to have people to have enough courage to put, to actually, you know, courage without risk is not courage.
8
SPEAKER_01
What you re saying is not hyperbole.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, these are facts.
8
SPEAKER_01
These are documented facts.
8
SPEAKER_01
And again, because it s a person like Donald Trump, you get people thinking, like, if you could stop Hitler by any means necessary, wouldn t you stop Hitler?
8
SPEAKER_01
And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go.
8
SPEAKER_01
This is our modern Hitler.
8
SPEAKER_01
Do you see what Whoopi Goldberg said?
8
SPEAKER_01
What d she say?
8
SPEAKER_01
Whoopi Goldberg said that Biden could arrest all the Republicans and put them in jail.
8
SPEAKER_01
You just need to see how unhinged this kind of thinking is.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know what Joe Biden could do?
8
SPEAKER_01
Joe Biden, you have to see it because it s it s so crazy.
8
SPEAKER_01
On television.
8
SPEAKER_02
Find that now, Jamie, because it s so... Let s look at a scenario where the Supreme Court says, yes, he has that.
8
SPEAKER_02
He has all those rights.
8
SPEAKER_02
He is immune from everything.
8
SPEAKER_02
You know what Joe Biden could do since he is presently president?
8
SPEAKER_02
What?
8
SPEAKER_02
He could throw every Republican in jail.
8
SPEAKER_02
What this means is he could do anything.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s not what it means at all.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no.
8
SPEAKER_02
But the fact that she says that so confidently.
8
SPEAKER_01
like if if you re willing to let donald trump use presidential immunity that means joe biden could just go crazy and arrest all the republicans because that s what that means no that s not what that means even a little bit yeah like you just added a whole bunch of stuff to what that means i mean in in fairness though i mean the view has to be
8
SPEAKER_00
You know if you average out the view hosts among the dumbest people on television And so it s like they say the thing that people are thinking, but they say it very directly So they expose whatever truth, but I don t think some of them are dumb.
8
SPEAKER_01
You don t think so no I think it s funny.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s deliberate.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think she s ideologically driven, and they have blinds blinders on for sure
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t think Sonny s dumb But whoopie is certainly not the brightest person and what she just said just doesn t make any sense It s just like so silly to say it s it s not a well-thought-out It s like if you had an idea for a premise and you like it was totally baked and half-baked and you went on stage with it And it s fucking it s nothing just go for it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s nothing there.
8
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes comics do that.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah The other question is then is that representative of a big constituency?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think probably yes.
8
SPEAKER_00
MSNBC viewers are probably also thinking... I don t even think they re MSNBC viewers.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think they re a little bit more sophisticated than that.
8
SPEAKER_01
This is like low information, blue no matter who, like older housewives who are mad at the world.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s the appeal that Whoopi Goldberg has.
8
SPEAKER_01
Does Whoopi have children?
8
SPEAKER_01
No idea.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting to like really politically motivated older women who don t have children.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re they re very specific.
8
SPEAKER_01
You can.
9
SPEAKER_01
kind of guess the way they think.
9
SPEAKER_01
I would like to see what the stats are on older post-menopausal women with no children and how they lean politically.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, college educated.
9
SPEAKER_01
I bet it s like my fans being male.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s like, yeah, exactly.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s like ocean blue.
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the depths of that.
9
SPEAKER_01
Bananas.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because the women that I know that are Republican, they re almost all moms.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of wild.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s a lot of young, like, hot Republican women that are social influencers now, too, which is hilarious.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s fun.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s fun to see, like, these trends.
9
SPEAKER_01
You see them in things where people realize, like, oh, this is a path to success.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m gonna be a black Trump supporter.
9
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, they just run with it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
You see a little bit of that.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I feel like with a lot of moms that I know that were like hippies, they were like, and then they had kids and they re like, fuck this.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like immediately, like a buddy of mine s mom, who was like, super fucking left wing little fuck.
9
SPEAKER_01
full-on leftist.
9
SPEAKER_01
She had kids and then the riots and COVID and all the chaos.
9
SPEAKER_01
She s like, fuck this.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like it red-pilled so many of those folks.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re just not talking about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t talk about it outwardly because they re real uncomfortable with being ostracized and being yelled at, especially with like groups of their old friends that are single that still live in Los Angeles.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, especially if you re sort of like certain ideological hubs, you know, like fucking Silver Lake, there s like these spots where you can t escape.
9
SPEAKER_01
Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh boy, that s a good one.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a hub.
9
SPEAKER_01
I went to look at a house in Topanga Canyon.
9
SPEAKER_01
And the house had a tennis court.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was this beautiful house with a tennis court.
9
SPEAKER_01
I went, wow, that s really cool.
9
SPEAKER_01
So we re going through the house, and we re checking out the kitchen and all this stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then the neighbor just drops in.
9
SPEAKER_01
And she goes, if you buy this house, you re going to let us use the tennis court, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
I go, what?
9
SPEAKER_01
She goes, the community uses the tennis court.
9
SPEAKER_01
I go, the community uses the tennis court that s in my fucking backyard?
9
SPEAKER_01
If I buy this house, I have to agree that maybe I can t play tennis because you re playing tennis?
9
SPEAKER_01
What the fuck are you talking about?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know you.
9
SPEAKER_01
You gotta sign up on the list, man.
9
SPEAKER_01
But she got in my face with beads on and shit, the whole deal.
9
SPEAKER_01
But she didn t say it like, are you going?
9
SPEAKER_01
The community is traditionally allowed.
9
SPEAKER_01
We re a really close-knit group.
9
SPEAKER_01
You re going to love living here.
9
SPEAKER_01
Really nice people.
9
SPEAKER_01
But one thing I want to tell you is we all like to get together and play tennis back there.
9
SPEAKER_01
Do you think that would be okay if you bought this house?
9
SPEAKER_01
That would be a different conversation.
9
SPEAKER_01
I d be like, maybe I like this lady.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe, look, Alice is out there playing tennis.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we re friends.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s cool.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like if I live next door to my buddy and he was over there playing tennis, I d be like, what s going on, man?
9
SPEAKER_01
What are you doing?
9
SPEAKER_01
What s happening?
9
SPEAKER_01
It d be fun.
9
SPEAKER_01
It d be like a cool thing to have your friends playing tennis in your yard.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maybe this would be fun.
9
SPEAKER_01
But you re going to let us use, the community s going to use your tennis court, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
wide open.
9
SPEAKER_00
What am I getting to use yours?
9
SPEAKER_00
Can I use your kitchen?
9
SPEAKER_00
The fuck are you talking about lady?
9
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna go fishing in the back of your yard.
9
SPEAKER_00
What are you saying?
9
SPEAKER_00
What are you saying?
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a wild place though because it s like a time capsule.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s some of the old-timey hippies that I get along with.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s like, I love those people.
9
SPEAKER_00
I grew up around those people.
9
SPEAKER_00
Unless they wanna use your tennis court.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but then it s like, oh yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Can t use my tennis court.
9
SPEAKER_00
I lived next to a guy, this guy, white dude from Georgia, went by like an Indian spiritual name.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh nice.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he was, and this dude was, he set up a business called Live Water.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he was like rappelling down mountainsides, gathering water and then selling it to all the rich housewives down in the Palisades.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was like living water.
9
SPEAKER_00
That was his deal.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m waiting for the scam.
9
SPEAKER_01
Was there a scam?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the scam is like, it s completely dangerous, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, he s like a well-meaning guy, and then, I mean, he would walk around, like he was a duplex we shared, and I mean, he would walk around just like, no pants on, just totally naked.
9
SPEAKER_00
Really?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, just like, what s up, man?
9
SPEAKER_00
Just talking to you like it s just a normal conversation.
9
SPEAKER_00
Naked?
9
SPEAKER_00
Naked, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Normal conversation.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, oh, good to see you, Mukande.
9
SPEAKER_00
Were you single at the time?
9
SPEAKER_00
I was single at the time.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it was okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he has a girlfriend there, they were making like nut butters and selling this raw water, you know, that s what they were doing.
9
SPEAKER_00
And they d be like, yeah, you want to come to a tea ceremony tonight?
9
SPEAKER_00
It s like, yeah, I ll check that out, man.
9
SPEAKER_00
We ll go to tea ceremony.
9
SPEAKER_00
And there was like a peaceful, hippied out California culture that was
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
But the second you re like, yeah, now we want drag queens in schools.
9
SPEAKER_00
You re a bad person because your ancestors came from Europe.
9
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, we want to destroy the whole society.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s when I m like, I m going to tap out and now we re going to fight about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know how you know that this is an ideological, ideologically driven thing that, you know, you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the gays against groomers movement.
9
Right.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because they attack those people mercilessly.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s like, no, we are just homosexual men, and we don t think that indoctrinating children the way you re doing is right.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s not right.
9
SPEAKER_01
What you re doing is fucked up.
9
SPEAKER_01
You re not supposed to be teaching kids about blowjobs.
9
SPEAKER_00
when they re six.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t need to know about sucking dick when they re six.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s nuts.
9
SPEAKER_01
And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornographic... And then here s the thing.
9
SPEAKER_01
This one drove me bananas when they said the don t say gay.
9
SPEAKER_01
that it s a don t-say-gay law.
9
SPEAKER_01
And everybody kept repeating it.
9
SPEAKER_01
All these liberals that I know kept repeating it.
9
SPEAKER_01
It says the don t-say-gay law.
9
SPEAKER_01
Nowhere in that law does it say don t-say-gay.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s not what it s about.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s a very specific age group.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s about introducing sexually explicit books to kids that are a certain age.
9
SPEAKER_01
And they re calling it the don t-say-gay law.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I m going to say it.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m going to say gay, gay, gay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
9
SPEAKER_00
You deserve a prize.
9
SPEAKER_01
Older women no kids.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, bro, right, but that s not what the law said and but for low information view viewers of the view or Listeners of MSNBC and the people that kept repeating that that don t say gay law over and out Wow, this you hear that they re doing in Florida You can t say gay in school imagine being a gay kid and you re in that class and you can t even say you re gay That s fucking nuts.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah
9
SPEAKER_01
Like, hey, pal, we re talking about seven-year-olds.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s like, yeah, there s, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I did a bunch of reporting and the stuff that they re doing is, is like insane.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s not just, oh, teaching kids about sex.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, fine.
9
SPEAKER_00
Obviously they have to know certain biological realities that, you know, sooner or later we all figure out.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it was like, you know, artificial penis packers.
9
SPEAKER_00
That was a story I did.
9
SPEAKER_00
They were teaching like Chicago public school kids in middle school, um, how to wear, you know, like fake penis.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then setting it up with the hormone clinics.
9
SPEAKER_01
But if they don t teach him that, who s going to teach him?
9
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
The older guy down the street who roams by in the van.
9
SPEAKER_00
Come on in, I ve got lessons.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it s like, I worked a lot on the policy in Florida.
9
SPEAKER_00
What it boils down to in Florida is a pretty simple thing.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s been such a politicization and radicalization of gender theory in schools.
9
SPEAKER_00
The governor wisely just said, you know what, let s just take that off the table.
9
SPEAKER_00
Let s focus on reading, writing and math.
9
SPEAKER_00
Let s focus on a good civics curriculum so that we have real citizens that we re graduating from our
9
SPEAKER_00
public K-12 schools, and then let s let families, churches, and private society determine for themselves what they would like to teach their kids about these controversial issues.
9
SPEAKER_00
Just take it off the table.
9
SPEAKER_00
No instruction on gender ideology, no instruction on, of course, the explicit sexual materials, beyond some reasonable considerations.
9
SPEAKER_00
This, to me, is fair.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can t teach religion in schools.
9
SPEAKER_00
They delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so unless we want to have an all-out fight all the time over these issues, why is it even necessary?
9
SPEAKER_00
I have kids.
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t feel like a need for the school to teach them all of these things.
9
SPEAKER_00
we teach them at home, we talk about them, they naturally kind of learn and develop.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that it is very wise to just say, let s take it off the table, let s delegate this back to people in their personal lives.
9
SPEAKER_00
That seems like a solution that everyone should agree with.
9
SPEAKER_01
Completely logical, unless you re dedicated
9
SPEAKER_01
to indoctrinating people into your movement.
9
SPEAKER_01
What is the Don t Say Gay law?
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s be specific about that, just in case anybody tries to call us on this.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it was initially no teaching on gender identity and sexual orientation in K-3.
9
SPEAKER_00
Which is super reasonable super reasonable and then it s a great massive uproar and the legislator said, all right You know, we re just gonna double down now.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s K through 12.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, they re saying no gender identity.
9
SPEAKER_00
No sexual orientation.
9
SPEAKER_00
No explicit, you know kind of Pornographic materials in K through 12.
9
SPEAKER_00
We re taking it totally off the table and look there is a reasonable argument
10
SPEAKER_00
to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there s more latitude.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, okay, that s a reasonable consideration.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s also eminently reasonable to just say, we re taking it all off the table.
10
SPEAKER_00
And just teach people.
10
SPEAKER_00
And just teach people what they need to know to be successful in life.
10
SPEAKER_01
Also, I m sorry, but I
10
SPEAKER_01
I had good teachers growing up.
10
SPEAKER_01
I had quite a few that I remember.
10
SPEAKER_01
I have a science teacher from 7th grade that to this day I think about fondly.
10
SPEAKER_01
He was a brilliant man and he taught me about wonder.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think about that guy.
10
SPEAKER_01
I ve also had a gang of fucking morons who taught me and I don t want that gang of morons teaching my children about biological sex or gender or
10
SPEAKER_01
homosexuality, or heterosexuality, or oral sex, or anal sex.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want nothing.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want you teaching them anything about any of those things.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want you telling them that you re a Zeezer.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want you pretending that you re Foxkin.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t want any of that shit.
10
SPEAKER_01
If you re teaching history, I want you to teach what happened in 1943.
10
SPEAKER_01
I want you to teach math.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is how you count.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is how you divide.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is algebra.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is what you re supposed to be doing.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s what you re hired for.
10
SPEAKER_01
If you re a drag queen and you re not teaching how to be a drag queen, that s it.
10
SPEAKER_01
If somebody wants to take drag queen courses, all for you.
10
SPEAKER_01
But I don t think you should be reading stories to little kids.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s one more factor that kid has to deal with.
10
SPEAKER_00
Totally.
10
SPEAKER_00
For what reason?
10
SPEAKER_00
For what reason?
10
SPEAKER_00
Inclusiveness?
10
SPEAKER_00
That s bullshit.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s bullshit.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s bullshit.
10
SPEAKER_00
Because it s not inclusive of many other perspectives, traditional perspective or religious perspective of general kind of conservative perspective.
10
SPEAKER_00
Also, how much are you screening these drag queens?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, not enough.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
What is the odds that someone who s a man who likes to dress in drag has other problems?
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I m not accusing all of them of having other problems.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women s clothes.
10
SPEAKER_01
Have at it.
10
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
10
SPEAKER_01
Have a good time.
10
SPEAKER_01
However, there s a possibility that you might be a kinky freak.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s a real possibility if you re putting fake eyelashes on and 10-inch heels and you re calling yourself Miss Wanda and you re wearing fishnets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down, or whatever they do,
10
SPEAKER_01
It s a possibility you might be out of your fucking mind.
10
SPEAKER_00
And if you re doing a drag show at a bar in the Castro and that s a kind of subculture where they re all adults, they re all opting in, have a good time, knock yourself out, totally fine.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s like bringing that into the public schools with government funding, with other people s kids, that s when I think reasonable people say no.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, reasonable people should say no and the people that don t say no think that they re going to be attacked for being bigoted if they do but there s so many people that are like on the fence and scared and don t know what to do and their kids are Coming home with these wacky ideas and like what the fuck do I do?
10
SPEAKER_01
What do I do?
10
SPEAKER_01
And if you try to go to the school board meetings get labeled a domestic terrorist?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah
10
SPEAKER_01
This is insanity.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re just enforcing indoctrination, and you re just making sure that I comply.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that is a slippery slope, kids, because you might be getting your way right now doing this, and you might think that you should be able to get your way.
10
SPEAKER_01
But what if someone else gets into office?
10
SPEAKER_01
What if there s a war?
10
SPEAKER_01
What if there s chaos?
10
SPEAKER_01
What if we have a military dictatorship?
10
SPEAKER_01
You ve already established the rules.
10
SPEAKER_01
No one s going to give you those laws back.
10
SPEAKER_01
You ve already set it so that the state and the government and the institutions can dictate personal behavior and how people are allowed to communicate.
10
SPEAKER_01
If you ve done that, you ve fucked up because now you ve given power to the people that are in control.
10
SPEAKER_01
And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize the same donors donate to both people.
10
SPEAKER_01
So what have you done?
10
SPEAKER_01
You ve empowered the deep state to control your lives and make it easier to steal your money.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and the economics of it is also perilous, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
All of these systems are functionally insolvent, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
University system, our federal budget.
10
SPEAKER_00
Federal budget, wild.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s just crazy.
10
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term.
10
SPEAKER_00
Look, as a political person, what I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s how it works.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so when there s the kind of Hamas attacks and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy or it s the capture of K-12 schools and the gender ideology is going radical, all of these problems also provide opportunities
10
SPEAKER_00
for correction, for reforms, for decentralizing some of these institutions.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think we re now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have this confrontation between Trump and Biden, but really between Trump and the entire state apparatus that s trying to jail him and prevent him from running for president.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have a military budget and a federal budget, more broadly, that is running trillion-dollar deficits, as far as the eye can see.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have a higher education system that is now, I think, $1.6, $1.7 trillion in student debt that the government has absorbed that s ready to blow up at any time.
10
SPEAKER_00
The 2020 was a wake-up call for many people.
10
SPEAKER_00
The next wake-up call is gonna be 2020 a hundred times over.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives, that are listening, should be figuring out what to do, how to best position themselves to be successful for their families, for their careers, for whatever they re working on.
10
SPEAKER_00
And those of us who wanna see deeper changes,
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, we re all preparing, we re all getting ready to say when the house of cards falls over and it s revealed that none of this is sustainable, the fundamentals of our country, institutional, financial, political, cannot hold and they can t be covered over with ideology for anymore.
10
SPEAKER_00
We have to have responsible, civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think that it may not be this election cycle, it may not be in a year, it may not be in two years, but by any vector, if you talk to people who really know, we re heading towards a big shift.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I hope that we can emerge on the other side, just freeing ourselves from a lot of this ideological capture that I think is hurting people and hurting our country.
10
SPEAKER_01
I couldn t agree more.
10
SPEAKER_01
And just leave people the fuck alone and stop using this as a vector of control because that s what they re doing.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it s also... There s a problem with that, though.
10
SPEAKER_00
The ideology, leave me alone, the kind of philosophical statement is correct.
10
SPEAKER_00
I believe in it.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s a kind of civic Republican ideal.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s been the American way is give people the maximum autonomy to their lives, delegate to civil society as much as you can.
10
SPEAKER_00
But we don t live in that world anymore.
10
SPEAKER_00
We have a massive federal bureaucracy.
10
SPEAKER_00
We have these huge institutions that control the culture.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so if you re arguing to be left alone, you re always going to be run over by people who don t want to leave you alone.
10
SPEAKER_00
The solution is not to then assume it and impose your vision, but you at least have to have people who are willing to fight the public fight.
10
SPEAKER_00
Because most people want to be left alone.
10
SPEAKER_00
They deserve that.
10
SPEAKER_00
But we need to have a leadership class, a kind of counter-elite capable of taking over these institutions that can then adopt the policies and administer the centralized institutions to protect the average person.
10
SPEAKER_00
The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what s happening and fight the good fight.
10
SPEAKER_00
But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty
10
SPEAKER_00
to provide protection for the average person.
10
SPEAKER_00
The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and offering a plausible vision for how that could be accomplished?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think very few people are thinking in those terms.
10
SPEAKER_00
And to me, that s a shame.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s also a shame that people that have these ideas are not willing to run for office.
10
SPEAKER_01
because running for office is such a shit show.
10
SPEAKER_01
And you see what happens when anyone runs for office.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s just these attacks are merciless and ruthless, and it s all in your character, in your past.
10
SPEAKER_01
We saw it with Kavanaugh, you saw it with Joe Biden, you see it with everybody.
10
SPEAKER_01
You ve been through it?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, everybody s been through it, but obviously I m not running for office, but
10
SPEAKER_01
when they re trying to attack you, and they re trying to do that, that discourages so many people that would be great leaders.
10
SPEAKER_01
But it s also now been accepted as a part of the political process.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s always been part of the political process.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you go back to the history of the founding of the country, you can read Jefferson s letters.
11
SPEAKER_01
And he s bitching about the press, slandering his character, like for decades.
11
SPEAKER_01
He s writing, he s still bitter about things that happened when he was dying in the early 1800s.
11
SPEAKER_01
He s still bitter about some slanderous journalist who was impugning his character 30 years prior.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so, look, I ve been through it, to a certain extent you ve been through it.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s the price, that s the price of admission.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so I think rather than lamenting the fact that it s this way, we need people, and I certainly adopt this attitude, and I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this.
11
SPEAKER_01
Remember COVID?
11
SPEAKER_01
They were calling him all sorts of names.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way.
11
SPEAKER_01
And as conservatives, I ve estimated
11
SPEAKER_01
that we take somewhere between a hundred to one and a thousand to one negative to positive stories in the press.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s just the ratio that we have to live with.
11
SPEAKER_01
A hundred to one, negative to positive.
11
SPEAKER_01
But what he taught me, and I think it s a valuable lesson for more people to understand, is he s saying, look, the people are smarter than the press.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so when we re fighting, when we re raising the issues, when we re getting attacked, when we re driving forward something that s the right thing to do, you ll be rewarded by the people later.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so he won a very narrow election his first time.
11
SPEAKER_01
He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with history curriculum, whatever it is.
11
SPEAKER_01
the people of Florida delivered him a huge 20 point victory, unprecedented.
11
SPEAKER_01
And to me, that s a sign that when you take ownership, when you take courage, when you take the hits, and when you do the right thing, people are smart enough to sift through the lies, the propaganda, the suppression, the censorship, and reward you.
11
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, I ve certainly seen that in my own experience, you know, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with, you know, people screaming at my kids, you know, I mean like real,
11
SPEAKER_01
intimidating things.
11
SPEAKER_01
And you have to say, you know, you have to make prudent decisions, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you can, you know, not get wiped off the board.
11
SPEAKER_01
But then once you get past that, what I found, when you get past that initial barrage, when you get through the gauntlet, you feel freedom.
11
SPEAKER_01
you feel this incredible sense of you ve survived, you ve gotten to the other side, and now people can t hurt you because they ve tried, they ve failed, and now you have the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom to do what you want, the freedom to chart your own path.
11
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But until you get through that barrage, I don t think that you re free at all.
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And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige,
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are sometimes desperately holding onto that.
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They wanna protect it as much as they can.
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But I think what happens is they become, they go through life and they get to a point where they re, oh, finally speak out if this happens, if that happens, if the cost is lower, you end up kind of wasting away your life and your opportunities.
11
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And so my goal, and for the past year especially, is to radicalize America s elites
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to show them the problems that our country is facing and to summon them to courageous action to fix it.
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Because as we get people who have something to lose, when they start talking, people listen.
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And so I live on a small farm in rural Washington state.
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There s only so much I can do personally.
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But certainly with the book that I wrote, with the articles that I m doing, with the media engagement that I m trying to drive,
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What I found is that the attitude among America s elites, finance, tech, entertainment, have changed dramatically in the last few years.
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And we just have to get them over that hump so that they re saying the things that they tell you in private and tell me in private, when you have those conversations, I would just recommend to say, hey, what about saying that publicly?
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People don t want to lose their jobs.
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But these are people who are, you know, they don t have jobs.
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They re titans of finance.
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They re people in prestigious positions.
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They re kind of university professors with tenure protections.
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People are scared.
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They really are.
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They re scared of repercussions.
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How do we get them to cross over that fear?
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We have to make it less fearful, we have to make it more common.
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And I think these conversations happen, and more of them happen, and more people listen to them, and it changes people s perspective, and they realize that this is kind of dangerous.
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And that there s real urgency involved here.
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This could really go sideways for us.
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And there s a lot of factors that are trying to force it into going sideways, and not all of them are domestic.
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There s a lot going on with social media influence that s 100% manufactured.
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There s manufactured arguments, manufactured dissent.
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There s a lot of manufactured conflict that happens online that we have documented very clearly.
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It s coming from Russian troll farms.
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It s coming from various different Eastern Bloc countries.
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It s coming from China.
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It s coming from all over the place.
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And it has an effect on us whether we like it or not and it certainly has an effect on young people It certainly has an effect on self-censorship.
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It certainly has effect on stifling dissent It has an impact they attack people and they they attack people like with thousands of trolls they know what they re doing and it s very effective and if you pay attention to your comments, you re gonna get run over by it and
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Yeah, never read the comments.
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Can t read them.
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Some of them are nonsense.
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I read comments on other people s stuff sometimes, when someone writes something controversial, and I ll just go, that seems crazy to say, let me go to that person.
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And that s A, B, Z, 2, 2, 2, 1, 5, 6.
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That s a fake person.
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It s a fake person that got a Twitter profile, and now- It s like a guy in an Eastern Bloc country with a thousand phones that he s kind of- It might not even be that anymore.
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I believe it s probably AI.
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I mean, with the ubiquitous use of chat GPT and all these different things, you could easily attack a tweet in a progressive fashion, and you could give it parameters of how to attack it and what to say, and you could distribute that en masse.
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Give me 45 different versions of this attack.
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They ll give you 45 different versions of it.
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I think that s probably true, but I think that In my opinion, I think we overestimate the the potential influence of kind of foreign operators foreign operators Don t know the language of American ideologies.
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You don t think that s easy to learn I
11
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No, I think it s actually a little difficult to learn, because even if you look at CCTV, which is the national Chinese broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they re actually trying to push, it s like,
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It s awful.
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It s not persuasive at all.
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Have you seen their movies?
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Their movies are amazing.
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Their movies are amazing, yeah.
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And those are commercial enterprises.
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I actually think it puts the real villains off the hook.
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It s not them, it s really us.
11
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It s the people who run our institutions domestically, who set policy for YouTube and other platforms.
11
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That s probably the bigger factor.
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I think it s the bigger factor.
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Because if you can have people organically talking about things, which you do on Twitter,
11
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Yes in when you see the things that are happening on Twitter.
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So a lot of it s very distasteful.
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You ll see some very racially charged Frankly racist arguments about things just openly discussed or people agreeing with them openly and it s like whoa, you know lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that and it s just like man, but
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The opportunity for other people to successfully counter those statements exists too.
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The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you re saying is so fucking stupid.
11
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Take into consideration that.
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Take into consideration this.
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You don t know about that.
11
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You don t know about this.
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What you re saying is nonsense.
11
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And that s a whole part of human discourse that s being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech.
11
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The problem with blocking hate speech is,
11
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You block the potential condemnation of hate speech.
11
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You block the potential intellectual battle between morons who believe stupid shit and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb.
11
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And this is all good for the viewer.
11
SPEAKER_00
This is all good for people, the young minds and the people that are easily influenced and the people that are on the fence and the people that hadn t.
11
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Taken into consideration this perspective or that perspective.
11
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That s what free speech is supposed to be all about The the answer to bad speech has always been better speech.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s always been the case, but when you got people that will ban your account if you Use a person s name that they used to have when they were a man, but now they re a woman So you dead named them so you made up this thing at the same time where you have the fucking Taliban on Twitter
11
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You re insane.
11
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You re an insane person.
11
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Exactly.
11
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And Elon has done a service for the entire human race by purchasing that platform.
11
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And I do not say that lightly.
11
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I do not say that flippantly.
11
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Him purchasing Twitter is one of the most important things that s ever happened to us in terms of pushback, in terms of just recognizing this is insane to tell
12
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people that they have to abide by your insanely rigid ideology that doesn t make sense.
12
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It s not logical.
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And if they don t, they can no longer participate in the discussion.
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They re removed from the town square.
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That s bonkers.
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I remember even, you know, Andrew Tate, who I think is, like, obviously very self-evidently a bad person.
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I don t think that he s a good model for young men.
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But I remember, you know, he didn t call for terrorist violence.
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He didn t, you know, say anything, you know, extremely racist.
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I don t think that I saw at least.
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And I remember just it was like one day he s nuked from every online platform simultaneously.
12
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And I say, what, you don t have to like the guy, you don t have to agree with the guy.
12
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But the fact that all of these companies can set off a little cascade where you can disappear someone from the Internet overnight.
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Milo Yiannopoulos.
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Milo Yiannopoulos was the first one.
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Yeah, they really silenced him.
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That guy was a powerful voice.
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And he was mute from the discourse.
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Also, in real life, very nice.
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In real life, hilarious, very smart, very nice.
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Every time I met him, he was cool.
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He was playing a character, and I think there s a lot of drugs involved as well, but he was certainly playing a character that had good points.
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He was playing this character that was this like right-wing gay guy who liked to talk about sex and drugs.
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And I was like, this guy s fascinating.
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But they decided that he was problematic and they fucking erased him.
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They memory hold him.
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That guy was on Bill Maher and Bill Maher compared him to Christopher Hitchens.
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Remember that?
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Wow.
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I didn t know that.
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Yeah, and then he got attacked by some other guy on the show, told him, fuck you, and there was a lot of, a lot of fuck you with that guy.
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There s a lot of drama.
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But that s what he liked.
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He liked that.
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And it was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere.
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You know, and I think they erased him particularly, the first part was his criticism of Ghostbusters.
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And then he was criticizing the new all-female cast of Ghostbusters, saying how sexist it is and every man s a moron and the women saved the day and how ridiculous it is.
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And then he got into it with Leslie Jones.
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So Leslie Jones and him got into it.
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And I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones.
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What was it exactly?
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I don t remember what it was exactly, but it was something racist or something gross or something unflattering, something.
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And people were tweeting it at her and they were blaming him.
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And then they got rid of him.
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He s gone.
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Did they just say, oh, it s mobilizing harassment or something?
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Oh, no.
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I can t believe I forgot this.
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What started is him justifying himself being sexually molested by older men when he was young.
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And he was saying on my show,
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But he was the predator.
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He was, trust me, I was the predator.
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He was the seducing, you know... First of all, anybody who doesn t think that Milo Yiannopoulos is gay is out of their fucking mind.
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Like, you think that s a choice?
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That s not a choice.
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That dude s fucking gay.
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He s, like, baked in by the universe.
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He is, yeah.
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That is, like, the prime example that I always throw in the face of people who, it s usually for religious reasons, who are unwilling to accept biological reality.
12
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Like, here s some biological reality for you.
12
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You want to know this?
12
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The first video ever captured of humpback whales mating was just recently filmed, and they re both male.
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Nice.
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So the first evidence that we have of humpback whales engaging in sexual intercourse is gay sex.
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Humpback, huh?
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Yeah, they had to go real literal.
12
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Listen, humpbacks are mammals.
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Humpbacks are intelligent.
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Humpbacks likely are gay.
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If they exist in us, why would they not exist in other intelligent mammals that are on Earth with us, like dolphins?
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I m sure there s gay dolphins.
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There s probably gay orcas.
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It s probably normal.
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It s probably, there s a percentage in every population that s gay.
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Who gives a fuck?
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The point is that, like, that guy s gay, right?
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And he claims that he was the predator and everyone s like, oh my god, he s normalizing pedophilia.
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If he had just tried that today, it would have been a minor attracted person s issue.
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He would be celebrated.
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I mean, he d be, yeah.
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But this guy was minor-attracted and I was a minor and it was fine.
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He needs to come back as a drag queen.
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But he would say, like now, like literally, in the amount of time from him being cancelled to today, that statement is not nearly as controversial.
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Yeah.
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Isn t that wild?
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Yeah, and look, you don t have to agree or disagree with the statement.
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That s irrelevant.
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It s something that is within the bounds.
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Look, if you re calling for, like the Harvard example, the genocide of all Jews around the world, you should be banned from social media platforms.
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That is a prudent limit that I think we can all agree on.
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but on more nuanced issues or more, uh, I mean, even if you take it at face value, I think he s probably going for shock value.
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100%, but also he was telling an anecdotal story about how, and it was on another podcast that I believe he said this, that it plays a very important role in young gay men to have an older gay mentor.
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I,
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I have no fucking dog in this race.
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I don t know.
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But I do know that I feel very differently about a sexual predator that s a man that targets girls.
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Like if I found out that a football coach was targeting young 14 and 15 year old girls, I would be furious.
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If I found out a hot teacher, usually from Florida, with a push-up bra was banging all the high school football kids, I m laughing.
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It s a little different.
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I think it s funny.
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You know why?
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Because I think those kids are going to be fine.
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They re going to be legends.
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Zach Galifianakis had a fucking amazing joke.
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One of them died.
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His friends high-fived him to death.
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I think that s Zach.
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But this is because people want to pretend that there s no difference between men and women.
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Right.
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That s all it is.
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It s, you know, it s like everyone, you know, wants to pretend that s true.
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It s obviously not true.
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And of course, the football coach who s like a pervert going against, you know, you know, the young girls, that s a totally different scenario.
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It is a different scenario.
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Also, the lady who s blowing all the high school football kids also shouldn t be a teacher.
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Get her fired immediately get rid of her.
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She d be doing porn or something.
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Yeah, but the point is it s like if He s talking about his life That and and saying that this was his choice and that he wanted this The issue is not with him the issues with the man who did that to him, right?
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right, so he s not so he s literally talking about his own personal experience and
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That memory hold them.
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He s not saying, hey, I should be able to go to high schools and pick up 14-year-olds because they want it.
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Okay, now we re talking a different thing.
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Now we re talking about a guy who s advocating pedophilia, right?
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This is different.
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He was merely talking about his own life.
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And that s how rabid everybody was to get rid of him.
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And it was, at that point, effective.
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And I think that became a problem.
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Because once it became effective, then they became emboldened.
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It s like the Alex Jones argument.
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When people say, yeah, ban Alex Jones.
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And everyone s like, hey, hey, hey, this is a fucking very slippery slope.
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Because if you want to ban everybody who s made disinformation and put it out publicly, how s Rachel Maddow still on?
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How is she still on?
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Everybody s seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine.
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That s insanity.
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The government.
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I mean, yeah.
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How are they still on?
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How many different stories were incorrect?
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Not apologizing for what he did, what Alex did.
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He doesn t apologize for it.
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I mean, he apologized for it, but he feels deep remorse that he did it.
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He s just like overwhelmed by it.
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But that, getting rid of that guy is a slippery slope.
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And no matter what you think about what he said, you can t support that.
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You gotta let people sort it out.
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The way to find out
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if, let s say, he says there s a false flag and some attack somewhere.
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The way to find out if he s telling the truth is to have people investigate it.
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If you say that Operation Northwoods was a document drawn up and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was going to attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans to start a war, and you say that on your show,
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People go, you re a fucking crazy person.
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How are you allowing these?
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No, no, no.
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You have to be able to have someone come on and say, hey, actually, this is true.
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And then you realize, like, oh, wait a minute.
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Some conspiracies are real.
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And if you silence this one guy that calls out all of them because he fucked up on one, you re also limiting his ability to call out the ones that are legitimate.
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And you re talking about a guy who s doing this all day long, every day.
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That s all he does.
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All he does is- And he s out there.
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I mean, he s an out there personality.
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He is out there.
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That s why he s fun.
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But he s out there talking about the World Economic Forum.
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I ve said this 100 times and I ll say it again.
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He told me about Jeffrey Epstein over a decade before anybody was in the news.
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He was telling me that there was this operation and they take these guys, high profile public figures and a lot of politicians and they compromise them with young girls.
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I was like, what?
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On an island?
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What is this?
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Fucking ABC after-school movie.
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That s crazy.
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That sounds nuts And then now everybody knows it s true and there s been a ton of those from him Infiltrating Bohemian Grove and catching these fucking wackos and heads of state Burning an effigy in front of an owl God like what the fuck that s real the thing the video he did with John Ronson in the 90s so it s like all of this stuff at a certain point in time and
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Needs to be out there and people need to find out what s real and what s not real What s real and the only way to find out what s real is not to silence everybody who says something that s incorrect It s to let people talk it out So when someone gets on there and says the earth s hollow and there s fucking aliens inside shooting laser beams
13
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Let s let s like talk to geologists and have them explain to you that they would be boiling in lava Like they don t live in the center of the earth.
13
SPEAKER_01
We know what the earth s made out of we know all the planets This is how we know this is why we know the earth is round because every fucking body of mass as it s spinning around it takes on that fucking form all the planets every one of them this one s not unique and
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SPEAKER_00
There s also an element of this is part of American folklore.
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Yes.
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If you believe that the world is flat, it s obviously false.
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Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous, crazy thing to believe.
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SPEAKER_00
And yet having a group of flat earthers in our broader society, provided that they re not like given power over, you know, the NASA or something.
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adds texture and richness to our culture, even if they re totally wrong.
13
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And so what we re having is we re trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds.
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SPEAKER_00
It actually ends up breaking this great proliferation of culture, some of it which is good, some of bad, some of it s crazy, some of it s insightful.
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But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.
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It s not really even about censorship.
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It s about power and the distribution of power.
13
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If you stack up all of the people who have been kind of nuked from orbit online on the right and then on the left,
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you have a graph that looks out like this.
13
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And so you have to then say, well, why is that?
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Who s making the decisions?
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How are decisions being made?
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And who are they going after?
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What views are they trying to suppress?
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SPEAKER_00
And so again, getting it out of the realm of the abstract debate and into the realm of a political analysis gets us to this uncomfortable point.
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SPEAKER_00
This was happening during Trump.
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Trump was president and this was still happening.
13
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And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it.
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And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, more quirky people.
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you know, people that are way out there, my old, you know, naked neighbor in Topanga, like, let the guy speak, you know, if he believes that, you know, that we have to have live water.
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And it s like, the average person is not going to be persuaded, and the view is not correct, but the broader culture suffers.
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when everyone is fearing that if they step outside of the box that they re going to get crushed.
13
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And conservatives, you know, we get all worked up about it because, look, every political faction has their fringe.
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We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition.
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But you have to figure out what s harmful and what s relatively harmless.
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And a lot of these folk beliefs and superstitions, if you take them not to condemn people as stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but you actually talk to people and try to get a sense of why do you believe this?
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It s usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness.
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And even the WEF kind of thinking,
13
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They want to believe that there s someone out there that is calling the shots, that is the problem, that is controlling the society, because they feel that just by identifying a single point, they have a sense of understanding, a sense of power.
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I actually don t think that that s the case.
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I think it s misleading.
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I don t think it s the right way to look at it.
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But I try to also forgive people to say, people are entitled to their superstitions.
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We all have superstitions.
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And we want a society where superstitions are eradicated.
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But you actually end up getting rid of a lot of the texture and a lot of the variety of culture when you try to have a hygienic treatment of culture.
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You treat culture like a disease, like a petri dish culture.
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And look, I think like
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Go as far out as you want.
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Go wild with it.
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Be respectful, follow the rules, maintain some core commitments.
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I m always fascinated with those characters.
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I lived in Topanga.
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I lived in Berkeley.
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You meet these people
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all over.
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You ve lived in these kind of places.
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Yeah, I have.
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99 times out of 100, they re harmless.
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And they should just be tolerated and respected.
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Well, I think it s an important part of how I grew up.
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I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11.
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And we lived in a super gay neighborhood.
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Our downstairs neighbor used to, there were these gay guys that would get stoned with my aunt.
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And they would play bongos naked.
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Because she could play bongos naked with these gay guys.
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They didn t give a fuck about her.
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They were just into playing bongos naked.
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They would just get really high.
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And it was the anti-war movement days.
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And so I lived around that.
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And then I moved to Florida, to Gainesville, which is very conservative.
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It was really interesting to watch.
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I ve talked about this before, but I had this friend who was Cuban.
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His name was Candy.
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And his dad was like super homophobic.
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And he was so mad.
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He slammed the paper down on the table.
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He s like, these fags want to get married.
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And I was like, what?
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I was like, what do you care?
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Like, that s so weird.
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They re just playing the bongos.
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It was so weird when he said it.
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I was like, what?
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I mean, I remember very clearly I was 11 at the time and I was just blown away.
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I m like, do you not know any gay people?
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This is crazy.
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Like, what do you care?
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Like, if you re not gay, why do you care if they get married?
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But I didn t say it because I was 11.
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I just wanted to be quiet.
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But it burned in my head that I had gone from San Francisco in the 1970s, which was like this very open-minded, hippie-dominated culture of music and art.
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And then all of a sudden, I was in Gainesville, Florida.
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And I was around this guy who was angry that gay people wanted to get married.
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I think the question, if you look at the cultural left of San Francisco at that time, I think it s always a question of proportion.
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you can have a successful, interesting, functioning society where you have a portion of people who are the, you know, getting stoned and banging the bongos.
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Okay, fine.
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The problem is, though, that when it becomes out of proportion, when that ideology, that kind of elimination of prohibition or limits or constraints becomes the dominant,
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policymaking regime.
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That works when it s a counterculture.
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And look, I come from the left.
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I was a radical leftist.
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I was a Gramscian Marxist.
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So I know that world intimately.
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What made you take a turn?
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I wanted to get into politics.
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My political formation was from my father s side.
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Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists.
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And so that was like my political upbringing.
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I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and and seeing like the books on their shelf and It s like oh, I have this beautiful collection of bound books and I talked to my aunt and I say what is this?
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Yeah, what is this book?
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It s like oh, this is the collected works of Lenin, you know, not ironically not as a historical thing but as
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this is the father of our revolution.
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And so that was my political formation.
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I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.
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The first thing that really kind of disillusioned me
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was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man.
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It s not to uplift the downtrodden.
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It s about maintaining their own status and prestige with the institutions.
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It s like a McKinsey consultant kind of worldview with the trappings of the left.
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It s the Harvard student who s wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh who then goes on to become an investment banker.
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And it s like, to me, it was so phony.
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I mean, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.
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The second thing that really changed me, I spent five years, well, first I traveled around the world making documentaries.
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I saw how Marxist and communist governments actually work out in practice.
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Not great.
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And then I made a film for PBS of all places, looking at three of America s
14
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as poorest cities.
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And my then kind of center-left views, which was, oh, you know, the Great Society, you know, public welfare programs, trying to help people.
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When you actually see how those programs manifest in the South Side of Memphis, South Side of Youngstown, South Side of Stockton, California, the poorest places in the country,
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you realize that many of those ideals that are presented to you as care, compassion, concern, equality, reparations for our racial past, are at best cynical, and at worst, deeply destructive to the people that they re supposed to help.
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And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about people s lives and then how politics affects them.
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And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster.
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even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good.
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And then the final change was in the run-up and then after 2020.
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I mean, 2020 radicalized me, because you realize how profound this cultural capture is.
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and you realize that the consequences are no longer abstract, they re no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let s say, that are totally run by the state.
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But actually, it s now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes.
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This is something that wants total domination.
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And so I got canceled out of my documentary career once I became known as a conservative.
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I lost funding.
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I lost relationships.
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I lost broadcast distribution.
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And then it s like I m out kind of launched into the wilderness.
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All right.
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Well, that career is done.
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What do I do next?
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And then say, all right, well, let s let s get into politics.
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Let s use some of the skills that I ve developed as a filmmaker I m not a traditional conservative.
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Like I m not a college Republican.
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I don t own a bowtie But I have a bowtie.
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I think you have to have a bow tie.
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But if you re a gay guy you can have a bowtie and be super left That s true.
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There s like there s nuance to it But what I realize is that the the conservative principles are sometimes expressed awkwardly or sometimes articulated poorly But there s some deep truths
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that need to be resurrected and recovered for us to be successful again.
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And so I threw in my lot with people that I would never have imagined being friends and allies and colleagues with growing up.
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It s like this huge shift politically.
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And I think it s been helpful because if you know how your political opponents think,
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You have a huge advantage.
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And the left, kind of elite, kind of academic leftists in the United States have no idea what conservatives think.
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They have zero curiosity about it.
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And so that affords us a kind of advantage because they don t know how we think, how we operate, what our principles are.
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They just assume the worst.
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And so I kind of wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and saying,
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In an odd way, you re fighting for people that are actually voiceless.
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The left is the dominant voice of the country, of all of our institutions, of all of our tech companies.
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The voice that really is voiceless are the people who are supposedly the oppressors.
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You have this book that just came out, White Rural Rage.
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Bullshit.
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Rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly.
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I just try to think in those terms always, and I ve taken over some of the tactics of the left, some of the maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful.
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But I just have this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige.
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They give all this rhetoric about helping the oppressed, the underprivileged, the whatever is the kind of term of the day, but they re actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status.
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I find that a betrayal of true left principles, and I don t think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal.
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up close and personal.
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I want to destroy that.
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I want to take all of those people who are
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selling a bill of goods to the people who are struggling in this country under these principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it s just about having a tenured position, having a feather bedded job, being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone but themselves.
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I think that that is, it s such a betrayal of the principles of the left, but really the principles of the country.
14
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And I think the way you re explaining it, particularly in the desire to have a richness of culture and not have rigid rules and to have the openness to have basically anybody just be who you are.
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But recognize that being captured by this ideology that supposedly supports you, it s doing it for its own means.
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It s doing it for a very specific purpose, and it s not doing it to support you.
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It s using these ideas and principles
14
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as camouflage to sneak in through your defenses, and it s dangerous, and it s creepy, and it s weird how effective it is.
14
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And that s why I m really happy that you re out there, and I m really happy that you can lay it down so articulately and express, especially coming from your background of being a guy who grew up that way, grew up leftist, to be able to express it.
14
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I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I m happy that you re out there.
14
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Appreciate that.
14
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Yeah, and likewise, I mean, what I think is so special about what you do is that you re talking about culture and politics, society, business, for people who aren t in that bubble.
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Like, I operate in a political bubble every day.
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Right.
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But what you ve built, and I think it s a testament to the possibilities of the internet, you don t have to be an ABC, NBC, CBS talking head.
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You don t have to have the
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Massive studio lights and the eight layers of makeup you re doing something that s real and people have really responded to that and I think that It s a reflection of something that we need more of we have an artificial culture that is trying to take over Yeah, but propped up by corporations exactly and the people that are talking about these things aren t even necessarily interested in these things and That also resonates with the people that listen and watch like I don t have people on that I don t want to talk to I just have people on that I m only interested in talking to and
14
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And if you can do that, and you re actually interested, that s contagious.
14
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And these principles that we re talking about, and this thing, the way you re laying it out, it s important for people even that consider themselves leftist to just consider what you re saying.
14
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It s for you too.
14
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It s for everybody that we can t let this happen.
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It s for all ideas.
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It s for gay people, straight people, trans people, white people, black people, Asians.
14
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It s for everybody.
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The reason the founding fathers of this country set all these checks and balances in place is because they didn t want anyone to get total, complete control over the people.
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And that s what s happening right now.
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And if you don t wake up to it and you think it s OK because your side is winning, you re actually anti-American.
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That s right.
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And it creates this winner-take-all danger.
14
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Yeah.
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And I don t want to see either side have that complete control, because that s either side.
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That s not what we want.
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That s not good for the country.
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We need to have a healthy left and a healthy right.
14
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Yeah.
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And healthy is the right perspective.
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There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right.
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And there s people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the left.
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And because they have this idea in their head that they re on the good side and these people are on the bad side, you don t consider that these are just human beings that think about things differently than you.
14
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And that is the only way we re all going to get along, is if we realize they re just human beings that think about things differently, and we should be able to engage with those people peacefully.
14
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It used to be you could sit down with a conservative person, or you could sit down with a liberal person, and you might not agree with them, but you could have a friendly discussion, and it doesn t have to be a hate-filled attack on your very humanity, because, you know, because you don t think, you know, X or Y. It s just like that s not good for anybody.
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I don t even want to debate.
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I don t know if you ve come across it, but 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this culture of debate.
14
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Left and right got together, they hashed it out.
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I ve challenged people to debates.
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You know, people try to set up debates and it s like we don t even talk even in a confrontational way conflict of visions.
15
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It s like everyone in their corner.
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Everyone s trying to make the play and I think that s too bad.
15
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I think we need more
15
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Actually, more friction is good.
15
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The more public friction, engagement, debate, we ll get to that point where it s like, all right, we re up on stage debating, but then we go to the green room and we can talk about kids, music, sports, whatever it is.
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Everything.
15
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And just be a nice person.
15
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It s not that hard to do.
15
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It s not that hard to do.
15
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It s rewarding.
15
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It s good for everybody.
15
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Christopher, I appreciate you, man.
15
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Thank you very much for being here and being so articulate about this.
15
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It s very enjoyable to listen to you.
15
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You re on top of it, and I think you make some great points.
15
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Thanks for having me.
15
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I appreciate you.
15
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All right, tell everybody your social and all that jazz where they can... Sure.
15
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Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at RealChrisRufo.
15
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I have a sub stack.
15
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It s ChristopherRufo.com.
15
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And I have a New York Times bestselling book, America s Cultural Revolution, that tells the history of the radical left s long march to the institutions, available everywhere.
15
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All right.
15
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Beautiful.
15
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Thank you.
15
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Bye, everybody.