Benjamin Boyce, host of the popular YouTube channel "The De-Transition Project" joins us to talk about the culture war, the internet as a whole, and why he thinks Bernie Sanders should win the 2020 election.
00:00:51.800But what's interesting is I can get a trickle of what you think in your perspective from the interviews.
00:00:56.740But I'd love to have an interview that's like the you interview, what you think on things.
00:01:01.900So I'm excited to at least be one of the people who's doing this.
00:01:04.880And one of the projects you've been working on recently that I think would be a really great start to this is, I guess, I call it like the de-transition project, which is lots of interviews with people who are well-known voices in the de-transition community.
00:01:18.380I'd love it if you could just get started with what got you thinking about this and where you see things changing within that community over the past year or so.
00:01:27.980Can I answer that question by asking you guys a question?
00:03:00.720But when Gamergate was happening, like I was well on the side of the Gamergate.
00:03:06.660Like I was like, okay, this whole five guys situation is ridiculous.
00:03:10.420This is clearly a breach of journalistic integrity.
00:03:12.780But I think back then there was still a believable disconnect between the, of the time, the Tumblrina army, the Tumblr internet and the cloud agendas and all of this insanity and the real mainstream Democratic Party.
00:03:29.580Like I didn't think that those people had any direct connection on the type of policy that would be implemented by a Hillary Clinton government.
00:03:38.120That changed pretty dramatically over time.
00:04:23.020Both him and Ron Paul, I think show themselves really honestly in the public sphere.
00:04:27.180And the big, it was when he was a kid, younger than us, like in his late 20s, I think, is he went to a commune and they kicked him out because all he would do is stand up in like the common room and give speeches every day.
00:04:41.680And I was like, this man has not changed over the past 50 years.
00:05:21.060What are the different ways to arrange, rearrange and derive meaning from it?
00:05:24.860And so I went to this place called the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, which has a very non-traditional structure, no grades.
00:05:33.400Courses are like completely immersive, three, four or five professors for a quarter or a year.
00:05:38.980You just go there, you sink your teeth in and a lot of independent work.
00:05:51.160They had pictures like posters everywhere, stop the war in Iraq.
00:05:54.080So they're still a little bit behind there by 10 years, which would all, by the time I left, all those posters would be replaced by the BLM poster.
00:06:02.980And then they had big posters about no one wins under patriarchy and like this really crusty kind of old, weird Gen X feminist kind of bluster and gusto.
00:06:16.980And as I went to, and as I progressed through my degree working on my stuff, the civil rights or the civil rights 2.0, anti-racism via D'Angelo and even Kendi came and became central to the entire experience of the college.
00:06:33.400Where the administration empowered very radical teachers to basically try to redesign the entire college experience around ending racism in our time.
00:06:43.260And that blew up in their face phenomenally.
00:06:46.760It just completely, what happened at my last four weeks of school is that the students who were taught to fight the system and end racism,
00:06:54.700turned that against the system that taught them that and took over this college, took people hostage, live streamed the whole thing on the internet in this super cringey manner.
00:07:18.700It's called the complete evergreen story.
00:07:20.820I'm currently doing a watch through because it's seven years, it just, it's a seven year anniversary just happened and me and my wife are now going through and watching the whole documentary.
00:07:30.120It's really extensive and it's not even complete because there's just too many stories going on.
00:07:34.180I was there watching that whole thing progress and I was working in the media department.
00:07:38.580I was on the camera recording these workshops and these lectures that were incredibly, they're trying to reinvent racism and, and everybody's falling for it.
00:07:59.960We need like black people to hang out with black people and white people to hang out with white people because, and I'm like, this is, you are reinventing racism.
00:08:06.040So that's basically what got them a lot of press because the college had a, every year they had based on a Douglas Turner ward play called a day of absence where this Southern town, all the black people don't show up for the, for a day.
00:08:20.060And it shows just how much this town relies on the black folk.
00:08:24.240And then they did that every year at evergreen.
00:08:26.680Like do this, the people of color, the POC would go off campus and they'd have a little thing.
00:08:32.400And then they come back and then they have a day of presence where everybody gets together and have a cultural sharing, multicultural positive thing.
00:08:38.340But one year, 2017, after the election of the former, possibly next president, Donald Trump, they decided to reverse that and ask white people to leave the campus.
00:08:51.240And they even required white students to not be on campus, go out in the woods and do classes like under tarps in the rain because the campus was going to center people of color because they wanted to be inclusive.
00:09:04.400And then Brett Weinstein, who's an evolutionary biologist who has a lot of, you guys probably heard of him by now.
00:09:10.320He stood up against that and then got flack back and forth.
00:09:13.620And so when all the, it's this crazy narrative, I won't spend too much time on it right now, but all these layers upon layers of stuff going on in this tiny little campus.
00:09:22.900When, you know, the students do this uprising, they live stream it, they're acting just insane.
00:09:56.280And I was already like interested in what was going on the internet, but I didn't understand that people would just run with the narrative and not actually talk about what was going on behind it.
00:10:04.760And so what I did was I just took my phone and I started to record like a view from the inside.
00:10:09.840And then I worked in the media department, so I got my hands on all of the primary footage of how the teachers taught the students to rebel and explicitly said, you need to uprise and destroy these bureaucratic institutions because they treat you just as bad as they treated your ancestors in the 60s or in the 1820s or in the Caribbean and stuff like that.
00:10:33.940So my job as a YouTube person, when I got onto YouTube was to chronicle that.
00:10:39.300And I spent a lot of time just focusing on that one story and then a similar event to get to your question.
00:10:45.560A similar event happened up in Canada at Wilfrid Laurier University, where a young TA named Lindsay Shepard was, she showed a video with Jordan Peterson and this other guy arguing about pronouns.
00:10:58.600And she was teaching in a composition class and she apolitically just shared this about composition, because if this is how language is changing, like, what are your thoughts?
00:11:09.420And her professor and the guy in charge of the department over there and then their DEI all took her aside and grilled her for 40 minutes.
00:11:28.000And again, the internet makes hay with that.
00:11:30.480And I'm like, there's something else going on deeper in there.
00:11:33.080So I started going through that college and looking at the gender issue.
00:11:36.260And I saw that these gender activists, these trans rights activists specifically, would, are just the most borderline personality, narcissistic, Machiavellian characters on the planet.
00:11:47.500They claim to represent this marginalized group, and then they proceed to act like complete tyrants.
00:11:54.140And just like the black people or POC did at Evergreen, like these, this handful of just radical idiots took over and then just smeared that community that they supposedly represented.
00:12:08.620So the social justice ideology or whatever this thing is, I don't know what you guys, how you frame it, but that has a pattern that just goes over and over again.
00:12:16.680And once I got into the gender aspect of it, I was just fascinated with this topic because I was tired of race.
00:12:22.540And I don't think that there's an endgame with race.
00:12:32.580It transcends race, and we always are struggling.
00:12:36.640And it just, it flies in the face of this kind of liberal-ish assumption that we're all created equal and that noticing difference is really problematic.
00:12:45.580But it keeps on protruding into our safe space.
00:13:25.000They have created a world where they seem to believe that America is – okay, this is the way I genuinely think the world works in their head.
00:13:36.140America is 70% white, 30% black, and the 30% black is like this oppressed class.
00:13:46.420The, for example, Hispanic population is about twice as large as the black population.
00:13:50.920They cashed in all of their Hispanic chips by over-indexing on the black population in a way that completely marginalized the Asian and Hispanic population in this country, which are both fairly significant voting blocs.
00:14:06.940And then they went even further by going this whole anti-Semitic route recently, which has the Jewish population in this country, even if they're not a big voting bloc, they do have a lot of institutional power and wealth.
00:14:22.360And so that was astronomically stupid of them.
00:14:24.860And so I think that this sort of mist – it's one of the things I often look at when I'm looking at, like, media representation.
00:14:31.580Is media representation – if you want to talk about who's not being represented, it's Hispanic people.
00:14:36.200Like, white people, we get, like, less than we probably should, but low numbers when I'm talking about, like, percentage of the population.
00:14:42.740Black people, like, they seem to believe that black people represent all minority groups and that all minority groups like and identify with black people.
00:14:54.820One of the things I point out is that in the L.A. riots, the communities that were hurt the most were the most recent immigrants because they had moved in right next to the black community.
00:15:03.500And in that instance, those most recent immigrants were South Koreans, which were then radicalized because it was their community being burned to become a far-right community.
00:15:11.580This happened within many Latin American communities during the BLM riots, is that the towns and neighborhoods that were being burned and the shops were mostly Hispanic-owned.
00:15:21.320And, of course, the media wasn't talking about this, but that, again, doesn't matter because the media doesn't understand Hispanic families.
00:15:28.980So I, as a white person, I get my media from, like, the news, right?
00:15:34.480Hispanic families get the media from their family networks.
00:15:37.640That is, like, their source of what's true in the world.
00:15:40.120Well, there's also, like, Hispanic media, but it seems to be somewhat divorced from –
00:15:44.520It's not as important as family network information.
00:15:46.620And so we have a lot of – our company is almost entirely Hispanic.
00:15:51.340We, like, our friend network is heavily Hispanic.
00:15:53.380That's why we used to split our time between the U.S. and Lima.
00:15:59.580So the media, like, the progressive tool for manipulating public opinion doesn't work as well against Hispanic communities as it does against other types of communities.
00:17:49.720Yeah, I read, like, a virus through many lesbian communities and ended up, one of the most interesting, you know, I was listening to, and I'd love to hear your anecdotes around this, a lesbian who I respect, talking about this recently.
00:18:02.460And she's like, there was this weird moment when I went to a group house where three lesbians was living.
00:18:07.660And I went back a few years later, and all three of them were transitioning.
00:18:11.600And I was like, wait, what are the odds that all of you just happen to be trans?
00:18:17.260This is supposed to be an incredibly rare thing.
00:18:20.600And so I think that's something that we've seen.
00:18:23.220As to why this disproportionately happened in lesbian communities, I think, and I know this is a very offensive thing, but I think that women are slightly more susceptible to social norms changes.
00:18:34.840Like, they're more likely, and you see this in the data as well, they're more likely to support whatever the perceived social norm is.
00:18:42.680Is that some sort of evolutionary Stockholm syndrome baked in because women would be captured in combat and just have to adapt to new society?
00:18:50.960Could be, and also if there's more dependence as someone who, like, when you're more likely to spend a significant or not insignificant portion of your life vulnerable to pregnancy or having an infant with you, it would make sense that you'd be more compliant with whatever society you have to depend on for some protection or social services or at least a little bit of assistance.
00:19:09.120Well, also, I think that part of this is probably downstream of religiosity.
00:19:12.840Women historically were more religious and more spiritual than men.
00:19:17.460And we've argued in the past that gender has taken on the role of the soul within progressive circles, where they're talking about, there's something about myself, and it's not biological, and it's not how I was raised.
00:19:28.660It's different than either of those, but it controls who I fundamentally am.
00:19:49.560Yeah, I'm wondering, yeah, so when you saw this happening, when were you like, I'm, did you think you were a progressive or identify with the progressive movement when you were younger?
00:20:22.520And then when I wanted to get political again, when post 9-11, George Bush W just goes in this holy crusade about just going after people that are millions of miles away or thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of miles away.
00:20:47.800I spent all this energy caring about this thing that doesn't care about me at all.
00:20:51.700I was also living in Portland at that time in the 2000s when it was like the Portland that people wanted to move to before people moved to and made it something else.
00:21:04.200But, and I just had the sense before Barack and during Obama's era that we're just in this, we're in this bubble where we're not really connected to reality and we have these beliefs.
00:21:15.920I just had the sense, we have these beliefs about what truth and goodness is, but we are so coddled in this bubble and someday it's going to break.
00:21:26.340And I just, I was uncomfortable with the smugness that just became more and more ramped up over the course of Obama era.
00:21:34.280And then I want, I thought Bernie was, you know, had some sort of mandate of heaven on some level and his treatment by the democratic party was just so awful that I just said, screw you.
00:21:48.240And I went, I didn't go pro Trump, but I was just really happy how upset Trump made everybody because they were so hypocritical, higher on their own farts.
00:21:58.020And that just pissed them off so much.
00:22:02.180But then when I saw what happened at Evergreen firsthand with the end game of this racial stuff where I like, they turned me racist.
00:22:08.980Where I, when I was on campus after that hostage situation happened and I saw a black person and I got literally, first time in my life, got scared and just turned on and went another way.
00:22:19.460Because I'm like, this person has all the power and can completely lambast me, accuse me of all these things and even beat me up.
00:22:25.920And I have no recourse just based on the color of my skin.
00:22:34.900That, that Jew thing, the Jewish thing really throws a wrench in the whole system.
00:22:38.980It upsets it, which just makes me really interested in how it, because a lot of like the Jewish people were complicit in a lot of the anti-white stuff.
00:22:49.600But then once it comes after them, then they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:22:53.600We, we're, we're, we are the OG oppressed class.
00:22:56.460We've been oppressed longer and harder than anybody because we've been living with these whiteys.
00:23:56.980They're basically just a malignancy, which is affecting this one generation of Jews.
00:24:01.640Malcolm, I have to inspect this idea because you put a lot of stock into fertility rates, like being drivers of the meme complexes and stuff.
00:24:54.500Like, it is true that it is spreading in neighboring communities right now.
00:24:59.140But it hasn't fixed its fundamental issue that it hasn't figured out how to replicate itself other than through taking children.
00:25:06.600And because of that, I just don't see how it survives.
00:25:11.560It can in some countries, like in Germany, where they've gone full Nazi, where they're like, okay, private school is not legal in this country anymore.
00:25:26.600A Muslim country or something like that.
00:25:28.140Because they know how to protect their kids.
00:25:29.920Eventually, whichever group fundamentally knew how to protect their children in a way that other groups didn't.
00:25:35.340They're the groups that come out on top after the disease is done.
00:25:38.680We're just in this period of fallout now where we can predict the various outcomes, but we can't predict them with 100% certainty or anything like that.
00:25:47.480It's just because the way that information travels so fast now and the way that kids are plugged into the internet from such an early age and the way that these algorithms work in a black box.
00:25:58.720I don't think that the battle is so much.
00:26:01.880We can just rely on fertility, replacing it.
00:26:06.300And that's why your work, I think, is so important because you guys are speaking into this place that's dominated by these anti-natalist forces, right?
00:26:16.900And you're providing pushback and upsetting the rad fems and poking fun at all these different groups that you guys find yourself being on the whipping end of the whip-up.
00:26:25.860It's actually a really interesting point you make that has me reflecting on something that I hadn't reflected on before, which is to say you're showing off your skills as an interviewer here.
00:26:33.920So this is why people need to go to this channel, right?
00:26:35.700People, people, the thing I was thinking about.
00:26:39.340The different communities and how they react to, like when I say community and cultural groups, and how they react to or how susceptible they are to the virus.
00:26:51.280And there's huge amounts of differential here.
00:26:53.740So conservative Jewish communities seem to be uniquely good at preserving their community values without going crazy.
00:27:00.860They seem to have almost a complete immunity to these intellectual viruses in a way that doesn't cause them to radicalize.
00:27:08.780As to why, I think it's because Jews are predominantly an urban cultural group.
00:27:13.420We did a video recently, something like 89% of Jews or 98% of Jews live in urban centers.
00:27:21.740Can you specify what you mean by that?
00:27:23.040So a weird thing that happens to some communities when they're hit by the urban monoculture is the iteration of them that is resistant to it or survives the interaction becomes like crazy radical.
00:27:35.880So I think this is what happened to Protestant communities in the late 90s, early 2000s, is that they were hit by the urban monoculture, and their reaction to it was to become the form of evangelical that fits into popular culture today.
00:27:53.620But this sort of radicalization in response to contact seems to burn itself out.
00:28:00.080That iteration, that evangelical Protestant, doesn't really exist in huge numbers anymore, or not in a way that's actively engaging in the cultural conversation.
00:28:10.080If you look at the listened to conservative commentators, they are predominantly of Catholic or Jewish heritage.
00:28:16.700You're looking at like a Ben Shapiro or whatever, or Bill O'Reilly.
00:28:51.880Which would be old school multiculturalism, like being able to coexist with a bunch of different kinds of groups.
00:28:57.960And then seamlessly integrate through commerce, basically.
00:29:02.060If you live in a city, you have to learn culturally how to prevent your kids from being deconverted in an environment where you're a minority.
00:29:09.740And the Protestant groups just never needed to pick up that skill.
00:29:14.180And so when this sort of virus like swept across the country, like the Black Plague or something, it just completely decimated their communities and turned them woke like super fast.
00:29:26.060And then they began to put up what we call the colonizer flag based on a part of our discord, which is the triangle flag.
00:29:33.740And then the other faction of that same group that you're talking about broke Trump, broke MAGA and became the blunt of the regime or the monocultures jokes and fears and a lot of the riling up.
00:29:46.820If those who didn't succeed and going, breaking towards progressivism were, are the number one outcast group.
00:29:56.900They are the ones that Biden talks about when he's, I'm going to bring, I'm going to unite us together to destroy this one group in our country.
00:30:04.160These MAGA, ultra MAGA people who are going to the NASCAR, who still believe in Jesus, but the wrong Jesus, the white Jesus or whatever.
00:30:10.600So they are a very powerful group, but they are vilified inside and out by every rung of the vertically integrated messaging apparatus.
00:30:20.680And one culture that was uniquely susceptible to this, maybe even more than the Protestants were the Mormons.
00:30:26.000The Mormons just were destroyed, deconversion rate wise, within their culture.
00:30:32.380And your theory is that because they were so isolated by within a very specific chunk of time, 50 years in American history, they took a break from, they were disconnected from the path of American culture for a certain amount of time.
00:30:55.240They lived in mostly Mormon communities for a long time.
00:30:58.080But then in addition to that, the Mormon community became hyper fixated on trying to fit in, like be normal, not be weird.
00:31:08.040And this drive to fit in with the perfect like black pill or kink in their armor that these cultural viruses could use to infiltrate the community.
00:31:42.760But there's no going from a really tightly formed meme plex or whatever you want, like belief system or ideology into this liberal wasteland.
00:31:53.920And the people, a lot of people have to reconfigure how to believe or what is the function of belief.
00:31:59.320And progressivism is a tight or a thick belief, whereas liberalism is a loose or diaphanous belief system, like where you can have, you bring your own, you create your own meaning.
00:32:11.460It's really destabilizing for the Mormon frame of mind when you're really deep into it.
00:32:16.240So I wonder if there's something there about liberalism's problematic relationship to progressivism or how this kind of liberal anything goes, you do you, we do us.
00:32:27.680We just understand what reality and truth is.
00:32:51.340Can we live in a world without extremism?
00:32:53.560And do you guys, in your consciously created ideology or, and I mean that in a, just a non-moralistic way, are you building into your children antibodies to radicalism?
00:33:07.840Or have you seen, have you played around with your ideas enough to say, okay, how could they be radicalized and what would the end of that radicalization point be?
00:33:15.240Like, yeah, the radicalization of our ideas and the dangerous radicalization of our ideas would be extremist transhumanism, i.e. AI over humanity.
00:33:49.960You cannot be a true religious devotee.
00:33:52.140You cannot truly live your values without being seen as a radical by mainstream society.
00:33:57.220So we have to define radicalism, but you're going to be seen as a radical if you adhere to your beliefs.
00:34:03.240And if your beliefs do not immediately track with mainstream society, which in any person's lifetime, especially now in this period of rapid cultural iteration, you're going to seem at some point like a radical.
00:34:16.540If you do not change with the vicissitudes of changing culture.
00:34:21.580For example, if you just let's say like you held the mainstream political beliefs about gender and race and everything else from 1992, you would be seen as some kind of radical today.
00:34:33.520So I think that the nice thing about being a religious radical is that you are at least radically devoted to carefully selected values and objective functions.
00:35:59.640So I'm, I have about 80 interviews with de-transitioners or around that topic.
00:36:07.980And de-transitioners fall into a variety of different categories.
00:36:12.240So you have the male to estrogize, male to male de-transitioner, and then the female to masculinize, female to female de-transitioner.
00:36:21.780And then you have the lesbian or you have the straight girl or you have the teenage girl, ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria, read a bunch of fanfic and was attracted to men, but like really disliked the power dynamics.
00:36:35.340So imagine herself as a gay man to enact like that, what we were talking about earlier about the spicy, straight, queer stuff.
00:36:41.260And then you have males with autogynephilia, you have males with personality disorders, you have males with pornography addiction, you have very hyper effeminate gay males who don't fit into society.
00:36:52.740And if they just surrender and build on that femininity, they can just be accepted as a female because they're never going to be accepted as a, like kind of Blair White, just as a very hyper effeminate male.
00:37:03.040You just don't really have a place in certain societies and stuff.
00:37:05.740One thing that surprises me to directly answer your question with regard to that community, which is not a community because there's so many different people there, is just the resilience of the human soul.
00:37:16.240And the central key in the de-transitioner story arc is where their soul speaks to them or where God speaks to them and say, you're lying to yourself, stop lying to yourself.
00:37:28.060And then they look down and they realize it's usually after a very traumatic surgery that these doctors just sped them on either an orchiectomy, penile inversion, or a mastectomy.
00:37:37.660They look down at their body and say, wait, I didn't like what I was, but this is not what I am.
00:37:41.920I'm not, this is not my pet destiny or something.
00:37:45.180And you just get this glimpse that we are, for lack of a better word, and maybe poking fun at Malcolm's interview with me, we are loved.
00:37:54.360And that when we betray that which loves us, we betray ourselves.
00:37:58.640And we can't actually function in this world without that connection, that really deep belonging that is underneath all these other hierarchy of needs.
00:38:06.860And that de-transitioner arc, probably similar to like an alcoholic's arc, like a lot of TV shows and movies over the last 30 years have overused the format because it does have this, it's got this really convenient arc where somebody recognizes the truth and then apologizes, confronts their resentment, confronts their regret, and then picks up and moves on and then say, okay, I'm damaged.
00:38:28.520And everybody can see how damaged I am.
00:38:31.200Everybody can see how fucked up I am because I participated in this lie.
00:38:36.540And then it shows the lie of the system, but it's no longer a political act.
00:38:42.460It's no longer a reformation story of the system that's just gobbling up people, this huge satanic industry that's literally sacrificing children.
00:38:51.760Like you, people cannot understand that our, our current regime is worshiping Moloch.
00:38:59.160They are sacrificing babies on the altar of this gender ideology and nobody can see that.
00:39:04.500But if you, these de-transitioner stories, they show, they just show this is a human thing.
00:39:08.920And so bringing it back to the human and then you go to the universal and that's what, it's not surprising.
00:39:24.680I'll use the word boobicide so that I'm saying here, which is to say that it is widely known, like even the who has training courses and Stanford has training courses for media professionals to not talk about boobicide because it's a very addictive concept.
00:39:42.740And so whenever you have it happen publicly, they typically come up with the story.
00:39:47.160Yeah, he's talking about the real one.
00:39:48.720I thought you were talking about this massive amount of mastectomies.
00:39:55.800What's really interesting is that they have created this idea for young impressionable people where they're like, okay, you are X now.
00:40:04.740And if you don't do Y, the only alternative is boobicide and like any previous study of this would be like, oh yeah, of course that's going to lead to a lot of kids doing it.
00:40:14.840And it reminds me of this South Park episode, which we put in the other thing, where Rob Reiner is going to kill Cartman to prove that cigarettes are bad for people and that secondhand smoke can kill.
00:40:26.140And Cartman's like, but he reads it and he's all happy to have all these adults paying attention to him.
00:40:31.660And I feel like that's unfortunately what's happening to a lot of young people is that anyone who understood psychology could have predicted the result of this ideology.
00:42:22.100Yeah, I just really saw, like, what Yarvin talks about or what other people talk about, like, the global empire, like, the global American empire.
00:42:29.720Like, we want to eat all of your culture.
00:42:31.900And the trans kid is the one thing that can just put these women, specifically, these bureaucratic women on fire to go and, you know, love everything about a culture except completely destroy that facet of the culture that replicates the culture.
00:44:35.340It's just people haven't thought through it.
00:44:37.280I just transcribed an interview with a young man who went on puberty blocker, went on, yeah, puberty blocker, spirolectin, I think it's called, and estrogenized hormones at 14.
01:00:23.480You can do the same with your emotions.
01:00:25.020And that's – ultimately, when people talk about mastering their emotions from a much more woo standpoint, it's all about you feel the emotion.
01:00:47.540As soon as you've got the signal and you are changing your behavior as you need to based on that signal, you should not be so distracted by that signal that you literally can't change your behavior appropriately.