Dr. James Lindsay is one of the smartest guys I know. In fact, sometimes I struggle to keep up with what he s saying. I m going to put a bunch of questions to him about the state of conservatism, including what he calls "the woke right." How can that be? I thought woke, by definition, was left.
00:02:49.780They're less sort of stenography and more searching for truth.
00:02:53.460And that's what we're going to do today.
00:02:54.740One of the guests I love talking to, and they always turn into hour-long interviews, is Dr. James Lindsay from New Discourses.
00:03:04.080And it's because he deals with raw ideas, sometimes abstract, but very applicable to the world we live in.
00:03:12.380He really helped me understand communism, not just as an insult or a put-down, but as a way of thinking, as a kind of cult-like religion.
00:03:20.980Through him and through others like Xi Van Fleet, who fled from Maoist communism, I've really come to understand how that is one of the largest evils in the world.
00:03:32.160And I know sometimes to call someone a communist sounds cartoonish.
00:03:36.400Anyhow, Dr. James Lindsay has been very useful for me to understand the phenomenon of woke, that really only started using that name, I don't know, probably less than a decade ago.
00:04:22.400How can you be woken right at the same time?
00:04:26.220I'm confused by this, but I want to understand it because there is a bit of a battle amongst a lot of the people I admire and follow online for their views.
00:04:34.740And joining us now to help talk about the world we live in and answer some of these questions, and we'll see where the conversation goes, is Dr. James Lindsay, who joins us now from Tennessee.
00:05:21.380No, I think you did actually a good job.
00:05:23.380If you want to clarify that, of course, Marx had this idea called class consciousness that was kind of the basis of being Marxist.
00:05:30.760So that Marxist analysis means coming from a position of having awakened to a class identity that supersedes your individual identity and using that to try to overthrow the society that evolved in the late 20th century or middle of the 20th century to something called critical consciousness, borrowing from critical theory.
00:05:50.120So I often say, and I know it's very technical, and I don't mean to be abstract because you gave a great definition.
00:05:55.160I would just say what you said is fine, but the technical terminology is being woke means having adopted a critical consciousness.
00:06:01.980We use woke to distinguish from previous iterations of Marxism, though I think there's still – I think Marxism, when Karl Marx wrote it, was woke.
00:06:11.520I think when the fascists reacted to the communists in the middle of the 1920s and 1930s, what they were doing was what we would call woke right.
00:06:19.360It was a woke reaction to woke left, but in the 20th century modernist context.
00:06:24.820And then what we're having now is that the woke on the left took up – or what we've been calling woke – took up postmodernism.
00:06:32.500They took up identity politics, relocated the Marxist analysis through identity categories rather than through economic analysis.
00:06:40.420And what we're having for woke right very simply is just a reaction to that, takes on the same ideas, and points them back in the other direction.
00:06:48.960Let's get into that in a moment, but I just want to give an example.
00:06:51.300I think the conflict between Gaza and Israel, a lot of it is projected through that lens of critical theory or woke, as in all Israelis are oppressors, and all Hamas or Gaza supporters are oppressed.
00:07:08.800So in that framework, you can do anything to liberate yourself from oppressors.
00:07:14.740Every oppressor is, by definition, a bad guy, even if they're a visible minority, even if they're poor, even if they actually have thousands of years of roots in the Holy Land, they're oppressors, full stop.
00:07:28.160So anything is justified to get them out.
00:07:31.260And it destroys individualism, and it permits atrocities, I think, like what happened on October 7th.
00:07:37.220So I think a lot of the Western support, I think the Muslim or Arab support for Hamas is tribal, and there's some emotional reasons and religious reasons there.
00:07:50.740But I think the educated white Westerners who I see in these, you know, I went to the Columbia for the encampment, they're not motivated by Islam.
00:08:00.820They're not motivated by historic grievances.
00:08:38.220So, you know, these white Hamas nicks at Columbia or whatever else are seeing, like you said, the resistance, as they call it, against the oppressor, which is part of the.
00:08:50.740The global revolution in communism, they call it revolution.
00:09:13.520And the answer that's often given quite seriously by a kind of wide array, a surprisingly wide array of people, but certainly by communists.
00:09:22.480I mean, people who have hammers and sickles in their bios on X, for example, is they invented resistance.
00:09:28.320And so resistance in this case is the idea that you were just describing, that because they are oppressed, anything is justified, whether it's kind of post-colonial violence, which is kind of the setting in which it usually takes place, whether it's, you know, terrorism going back to Marx's endorsement of revolutionary terrorism in his the civil war in France, which analyzed why the Paris commune was successful.
00:09:52.160He said, oh, the missing ingredient that allowed them to take power was terrorism.
00:09:56.300That's what we've been missing so far.
00:09:57.960And then Lenin writing in what is to be done in 1902 explains, well, why did the Paris commune fail?
00:10:33.600The idea is to take up whatever cause and use it.
00:10:36.340This is in the Communist Manifesto, by the way, at the very end, right before workers of the world unite, like two sentences or three sentences above that.
00:10:45.220Karl Marx says that it is the position of the communists to always take the side of any revolutionary party in any country.
00:10:52.600So the Hamas represents a revolutionary party against the concept of Israel.
00:10:58.380So the communists take that side by default.
00:11:02.060We'll come back to Woke right a little later because you've raised so many interesting things here.
00:11:06.080I want to talk just for one minute about what I saw in Colombia.
00:11:08.940I went down there and I actually wandered around.
00:11:12.060I was not allowed into the inner sanctum of the encampment.
00:11:16.900They sort of blocked people who they could fairly quickly identify were critics.
00:11:22.560There were some foreign students there, but it was mainly Americans.
00:11:27.100There were a lot of trans students there, which I found very noteworthy.
00:11:34.020I got to say, I was surprised by how many Asian women were there.
00:11:37.460I didn't see a single Asian man, but Asian women, college students.
00:11:42.400I saw them not just at Colombia, but at another university in New York that had an encampment.
00:11:48.040And I was thinking, okay, Colombia is a very expensive school to go to.
00:11:51.680I looked it up and at the time, I'm just going off the top of my head, in Canadian money.
00:13:17.620I mean, besides what I just said, that the issue is never the issue.
00:13:20.120The issue is always a revolution once you become radicalized on the left.
00:13:24.580It's a matter of, I think, a lot of what you said, but I want to kind of add a little color to this.
00:13:30.060But I think, I mean, I'm going to blow it by telling you that I'm telling you a joke, but I'm going to start with a joke, actually, that I thought of while you were talking.
00:13:36.340You said quite a few words there, and you said that the school and Canadian money is about $100,000 a year.
00:13:42.160And by the time, I was going to say, by the time you finish talking, actually, it's about $105,000 a year because of the inflation that you have.
00:14:23.040And so what you have is, I think you've described part of the fertile soil.
00:14:27.580You have these, and I think there are evidence, there are data showing this now.
00:14:30.940So there's solid evidence showing that downwardly mobile elites, so often the next generation of wealthy people who are unable to replicate the success of their parents, are drawn to this kind of mentality because it gives them the ability to look virtuous, as you said.
00:14:47.800And I think there might be other reasons that have to do with the status loss of downward mobility.
00:14:53.040But you have this fertile soil there in, A, the fact that you have these, like you said, very wealthy people frequently.
00:15:00.880Communism tends to be a rich man's game who are trying to virtue signal that they're on the side of the poor, that they're kind of atoning for their guilt through the socialist liturgy in a sense.
00:15:13.540But on the other hand, you also have this fact that for a lot of people, this lands because there is a lot of economic challenge.
00:15:26.320I know my friend Constantin Kissin says this pretty frequently on Trigonometry, which is that people will not support a society that's not working for people like them, right?
00:15:36.440And so that's, in my opinion, the soil.
00:15:38.860But on the same time, people are propagating this.
00:15:41.620Like you said, you know, a lot of them are East Asian women.
00:15:43.620And I hate to be this prosaic, but I have to ask at this point, it's a legitimate question.
00:15:48.140How many of them are Chinese nationals doing it on purpose?
00:15:50.400And the reason I ask is not because I have a suspicion of Chinese Asian, Asian, you know, young women at colleges.
00:15:56.500It's because we've arrested a bunch of them.
00:15:58.340So we know that this is a thing that's happening, that we have actually CCP agents that are getting caught in these protests, stoking these protests.
00:16:06.360So they're the propagators looking as though they're just part of the movement.
00:16:09.920And so I think that what you have is this mixed bag that's raising the popularity of this for a wider demographic.
00:16:18.060Primarily, the explanation you gave is good.
00:16:20.480But then there are legitimately challenging and worsening conditions in many regards that are making these kinds of revolutionary and radical thoughts attractive.
00:16:29.100And then you have a dedicated, well-funded, international even, and malicious in some cases, propaganda program to draw more and more people into this.
00:16:40.100In fact, I think this is actually at the global scale remarkably coordinated with, you know, the so-called red-green axis or red-green alliance between the Islam and the radical Islam and the communists.
00:16:52.780To the point where I think that it's not – everybody says it's a perfect storm as though it's a perfect storm of conditions that happen to arise.
00:17:00.840But it's more like a perfect opportunity that is being seized by bad actors to take advantage of fertile soil of a unbelievably large body of downwardly mobile, you know, upper middle class to upper class second generation or third generation people that's being fed a steady drumbeat narrative that's literally pushing them into this.
00:17:24.180Once they get across the line and become a radical, though, the issue is never the issue.
00:17:30.460So anything, whether it's trans, whether it's Hamas, whether it's trans and Hamas at the same time, even after Hamas said when we take over we're going to kill all of them, which I believe they said the other day, there will be none of this in, you know, our Palestine or whatever they wanted to call it.
00:17:47.100Once you cross the radical line far enough, it's just we're protesting the evil oppressive power structure that's everywhere, always, all at once.
00:17:56.260And whichever tool, whether it's, again, trans, race, Hamas, whatever, whatever it is, we're going to use that tool.
00:18:50.600Maybe, you know, because I don't see South Asian – and I've only been a few of these encampments.
00:18:55.900But it may be that, you know, some of these Chinese apps, these news apps, or, you know, there's a lot of social media platforms run by China that expats in Canada and the United States use.
00:19:11.840Maybe they're encouraging people to go to these.
00:19:13.760I'll put that aside because I don't know for sure.
00:19:15.860But let me talk about Zoran Mandani just for a second.
00:19:19.100Because I've been trying to think, how can he be stopped?
00:19:22.220Because I think he really is a communist.
00:19:24.120I actually don't think he's particularly an Islamist.
00:19:27.960I think he just sees that as a way to appeal to Muslims and other minorities in New York by sort of saying, I am an other.
00:21:27.880Maybe he has to win liberal white women to win the mayorship.
00:21:32.000But I think he's totally leaning into being a communist because he knows that's a winner these days.
00:21:37.700I mean especially in places like New York City.
00:21:40.420I think that they learned a lesson from your country, from Mark Carney very likely.
00:21:45.480Mark Carney was able to pull off this unbelievable reversal of the lead Pierre Pilyev had, which is one of the largest political leads at that scale of an election that I think has ever been overturned.
00:22:00.240And he did it by leaning into Trump as the problem or the anti-Trump, right?
00:22:05.560And so by doing everything in the world that would irk Trump, he can appeal to these New Yorkers, a lot of – especially the Democrat New Yorkers who are not the ones who gave in and voted for Trump in the last election.
00:22:20.140And then meanwhile on the other side, of course, you have two or three candidates, I guess, three candidates opposing him that are all over the map.
00:22:27.800How this character is to be defeated when he's playing the game basically perfectly, I have absolutely no idea for short of some kind of a genuine scandal that is not the kind of scandal that appeals to conservatives but that would shock the conscience of these New York Democrats.
00:22:49.080I think you're actually right, especially pointing out the Muslim thing.
00:22:52.580They're able to lean on the – Trump is xenophobic.
00:22:56.040He did the Muslim ban way back in 2017, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:59.980And so I think it's – I think you're onto something that he's leaning into these controversies and when people try to raise them as the controversies that might hurt him, that it actually helps him.
00:23:12.340The only caveat to that is when he leans into explicitly communist stuff.
00:23:17.720I don't find – there is a very large contingent of outright socialists and the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a communist front organization, is behind him if I'm not mistaken.
00:23:31.340I don't know if Mandami is actually affiliated with that or just strongly supported by them.
00:23:36.080But it is not common to find – I even find that Democrats, if I wear one of my shirts that says anti-communist on it, even what I refer to as visible Democrats, often support the message on my shirt.
00:23:48.660So I think that him leaning into the identity categories, leaning into the controversies, leaning into everything that upsets conservatives helps him accept the communist thing.
00:23:59.260Him saying seize the means of production really scared a lot of people and I think it scared a lot of people in New York.
00:24:04.540When you get into too many of the specific policies, people don't understand that that's communism and it doesn't work as well.
00:24:09.520But his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and his outright seize the means of production communism I don't think is helping him.
00:24:16.440And I think that that's the more profitable angle to go after than his, you know, putative race, religion, et cetera.
00:24:25.580Mark Andreessen, who's a tech startup guy in San Francisco and he's a bit of an amateur philosopher, I think he's interesting.
00:24:34.320He's sort of a freedom-oriented guy who's come around to Trump.
00:24:37.740I mean a lot of San Francisco is hard left and he's part of this wave of sort of tech billionaires that has had a bit of an awakening.
00:24:43.960He, I think, gave a very good explanation for why so many young people are hard left.
00:24:51.720And you say communism and some of those ideas scare people and I think you may be right.
00:24:56.420But I see, and again, it could be just a Potemkin village.
00:37:17.740Wouldn't you rather live in Montreal than in Port-au-Prince, Haiti?
00:37:20.800There have been hundreds of thousands of forced deportations.
00:37:25.880They've started with the baddest dudes that they've sent to El Salvador.
00:37:29.400And I think you will soon see, if this keeps up, if you take another million people out of the country, if you actually stop all incoming illegals of the border, which I believe they've done, and if you get a few million people a year, that is enough to change the rental market.
00:37:49.800That is enough to change the wage market.
00:37:51.880I see, especially in certain industries where it's all foreign workers, meatpacking for some reason, mainly foreign workers.
00:38:03.060They're in all the fast food drive-thrus.
00:38:06.340If you were to send home a couple million foreigners from America every year, a million from Canada every year, you would have cheaper housing.
00:38:18.100You would have higher wages for Canadians, and you would have a marked decrease in crime, especially in the States, where Trump is now taking over big city crime control.
00:38:28.280And you would have this better future under a capitalist American economy.
00:38:35.740And maybe you could convince young people that there is a path for them to get married, have a family, and make a goal of it, maybe even on one income.
00:38:46.280I think that Trump has actually, in the last, he's only been in office for a little over six months.
00:38:52.980I think he has made real changes that would allow people to feel better about life, that would stop their enchantment with the communist left.
00:39:02.060If Trump keeps doing what he's doing, crime, housing, inflation, I think he's going to make America, actually, I don't want to, like, it's his slogan, but I think he will make America great again.
00:39:13.120I mean, that's the idea, and it's actually working.
00:39:17.320You know, people who have, you know, a kind of broader view of how these immigration trends work understand that if you, you don't have to, you know, get ice out to grab everybody in the country to deport them.
00:39:30.680And all you have to do, actually, to get most people to leave is to make it not a free ride.
00:39:40.280They are here under false pretenses, sometimes for a better life and sometimes not.
00:39:45.220But if it's uncomfortable, if they know that they are subject to if they get caught, ice will actually arrest them and take them out of the country or deport them, then put them possibly in some horrifying prison like Alligator Alcatraz in the meantime.
00:39:57.540Then a lot of them will just not take the risk, and they'll leave.
00:40:01.240If you make it, you know, harder for them to be able to say, I don't know, commercial driving licenses, and it's difficult for them to get jobs, then they will leave.
00:40:10.700And the whole point is to get most of the people to leave under their own power who have come in.
00:40:17.960And like you said, all of the downstream effects that you're talking about, we should be chasing very vigorously all of the ones who are actively perpetrating crimes.
00:40:26.920I think that both Canada and the UK need to learn from this.
00:40:30.320And, of course, your governments aren't interested in doing that.
00:40:33.060In fact, they're interested in the opposite.
00:40:34.820The people who are committing crimes need to be taken away.
00:40:37.180They need to be actually deported, and in the cases where, you know, they maybe have some kind of naturalization, possibly considered denaturalization.
00:40:45.800And this problem can start to solve itself once you start – once your country starts looking very seriously that we're not going to tolerate this illegal immigration problem, once you start looking at it very seriously, a lot of them will leave under their own power.
00:40:58.800So you don't have to go find out how to round up 20 or 30 or 40 million as it turns out to be in the United States.
00:41:04.700Nobody quite knows how many because millions of them – you know, you round up tens of thousands and millions of them leave on their own because the conditions and the fear just isn't worth it.
00:41:15.560The idea is to do that as much as possible.
00:41:17.700And like you said, the downstream effects are that capitalism actually gets to reemerge in a healthier way.
00:41:24.620We actually have a market that is within the confines of our national law as opposed to something that's gone completely lawless, and it actually starts working for citizens again, and then they start to have that hope.
00:41:37.940The American dream, whether you're American or not, the concept that you are upwardly mobile if you work hard is what repels revolutions into status tyrannies or stakeholder models or whatever else.
00:41:51.340The stakeholder model that we've already adopted is the problem.
00:42:33.620If you've got a good life and you're making enough money that you can have, you know, like I say, a boat, a cabin, et cetera, you're not going to feel particularly revolutionary.
00:42:44.700I bet there's not a lot of factory workers for Zoran.
00:42:50.200And that's the prime critique of the critical theorists, by the way.
00:42:53.180Marcuse wrote through the 1960s repeated complaints about this.
00:42:57.380Max Horkheimer gave interviews through the 1960s giving repeated complaints about this where the problem was that capitalism had stabilized the worker and allows him to build a good life.
00:43:07.860Now, you know, Marcuse is like – and it is a good life, but it's not an ideal life, right?
00:43:11.920And so the critical theory was developed specifically to fix that so-called problem that people were able to build better lives.
00:43:18.700So they found ways to complain and say, well, capitalism doesn't work for everybody.
00:43:24.740It doesn't work for women, blah, blah, blah, and encourage all those identity factors who were, you know, in their opinion, marginal to the successful system that we actually were operating here in our free countries.
00:43:35.600You know, I want to tell you one more Davos anecdote.
00:43:40.100We're staying in the Swiss Alps, and it's pretty much 100% Swiss up there in Davos, not so much in Zurich and Geneva.
00:43:48.800So it's the kind of place where they have sort of trust – I don't know what they – like you open the fridge door, you can take the groceries, and you just leave money.
00:43:58.740Like on someone's house, they have a little business, and they're not there.
00:45:43.420His main nonprofit is called the Open Society Foundation.
00:45:48.280And he has this really crackpot vision of the Open Society that when you actually read what it is, you know, people try to trace it back to Karl Popper, who obviously wrote the Open Society and its Enemies, and who was George Soros' mentor.
00:46:00.620So there is a connection between Popper and Soros.
00:46:03.460But when you read Soros, it's very, very obvious.
00:46:23.480But he loves everything else, the dialectic, the vision, the whole idea.
00:46:27.280So, yeah, he wants national borders to be meaningless.
00:46:30.780And so one of the ways to erase national borders is to make them so porous that they are meaningless.
00:46:37.260And so this has been for 20, 30 years, one of his biggest projects.
00:46:41.780He also says in The Alchemy of Finance that he takes, and I quote, a certain malicious pleasure in short-selling an institutional favorite.
00:46:49.620Well, the Western democracies were geopolitical institutional favorites.
00:46:53.220So if you can undermine them, you can short-sell them.
00:46:57.200And he takes a certain – in fact, he says that it's actually like a god complex that he has.
00:47:02.460He actually admits that in the book, that he sees himself as a kind of god, and the only thing that keeps him attached to not believing he is a god is his failures in the market because it's so unpredictable.
00:47:12.460But if you can short-sell institutional favorites like the United States, Canada, the UK, et cetera, then he's going to take a certain malicious pleasure in that.
00:47:21.480It aligns with his crackpot Marxist internationalist theory of a so-called open society, though the conclusion doesn't have to be communist in his view.
00:47:29.300It can dialectically go wherever the winds blow it.
00:47:32.400But the key to that is to utterly dissolve the idea of national borders and thus national sovereignty.
00:47:38.920You know, I'll have to tell you another time about the day where George Soros sued me personally.
00:47:45.340But we'll save that story for another day.
00:48:35.360So instead I'm railing against Mark Carney, mass immigration.
00:48:39.140You know, every problem in Canada under Trudeau is the same or worse.
00:48:43.380If I was a Brit, I would be in panic by the thousand illegal migrants at a time coming over from France in dinghies and the rape gangs that are in the U.
00:48:55.800So there's so much to talk about and to fight about in Canada, including the fact that the conservatives didn't win an election.
00:49:01.760In the U.K., there's so much to talk about and fight about.
00:49:05.700But in America, you know, if you're a right winger, if you're a critic of Soros, if you're a critic of the World Economic Forum, holy smokes, your dreams are coming true.
00:49:16.380And you're being entertained by Donald Trump, who is an inherent entertainer.
00:49:21.520So Will Chamberlain made a tweet the other day, and I had him on to talk about it.
00:49:25.740He said, one of the reasons you see sort of a craziness amongst some pundits on the right is that Trump has taken away their fodder.
00:49:36.340And he was referring to Candace Owens and I think a little bit to Tucker Carlson.
00:49:40.300And I know there was a certain part of the right-wing commentary at who it felt like they were lusting for Trump's attack on Iran to go awry.
00:49:49.740They were actually sort of hoping it felt like for Iran to launch a major war against America instead of just staying completely silent while Trump used the B-2 bombers on them.
00:50:01.500And I had Will on to talk about it, and I saw that you made a comment that maybe Will himself – in fact, Will said that you've called him woke, right?
00:50:15.820The first is, is there something going on with pundits, including my former hero, Tucker Carlson, who I looked up to for so many years as a role model?
00:51:21.760And they went underground, but they didn't go away.
00:51:24.940What they did was they put on happy faces and they joined the movement and became more and more prominent within a broad pro-America MAGA thing that grew.
00:51:32.880And it rapidly strengthened under the Biden years.
00:51:35.940And then I feel like last summer they started to emerge from their cocoon and to try to run a radical splinter movement.
00:51:43.200And I think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and most of these other – sometimes Trump calls them panicans – are all part of this.
00:52:00.420They turned on Trump quite vocally, and then when it worked, they turned around and claimed that they were the ones who made it work, that in fact Trump is great, but it's also that he's great that he listened to them and their wise counsel as influencers and pundits.
00:52:16.840I have an extraordinarily cynical interpretation of this.
00:52:19.880I think it is a deliberate strategy to undermine MAGA from within because they could not – and I don't mean these same people – whether it's World Economic Forum, George Soros, Democrats, if there's a deep state, if it's foreign adversaries like Russia, China, Qatar, Iran, et cetera.
00:52:36.000They could not undermine MAGA from without for the last 2016 to 2024.
00:52:42.280They could not take it down from the outside.
00:52:44.480They had to end up taking it down from the inside.
00:52:46.840And what better issue to do than Israel and Jews to split people, to scare off Jews and people who care about them, people who are recent nose-holding voters for Republicans for the first time who could have been converted into lifelong conservatives away from this communist lurch the Democrats have taken.
00:53:06.000And now they're terrified that – what's going on here?
00:53:16.260Why are they saying Churchill was the bad guy of World War II and that maybe Hitler was the good guy, as Tucker Carlson's guest said the other day?
00:53:27.160And my interpretation of it is there is a splinter cell that is operating as though it's the other hand of the other side that's aiming to take down MAGA from within.
00:53:37.380And I don't know why and cannot start to guess why certain influencers and pundits like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and so on are participating in this.
00:53:50.060But I think with at least a certain list of them, it is beyond question.
00:53:54.560I mean there's a short list of reasons why people do this.
00:53:57.140They have some kind of resentment that they're trying to enact.
00:53:59.680We know that Tucker Carlson is a paleo-conservative who is not particularly happy, that MAGA took the thrust of radical energy in the mid-2010s.
00:54:08.260So maybe he has a political motive that he wanted a more radical, older, conservative model to resurge and it didn't.
00:54:44.960It is traceable to Russian cells that are trying to amplify the likes, amplify the retweets, fill the comments with negativity when it goes the wrong way, to slowly lead these poor influencers who are obsessed in many cases with their statistics.
00:55:10.560You can screw that person's head up so easily without giving them a dime inorganically.
00:55:17.140Like they make money off of their ex getting more engagement.
00:55:20.080They make money off their YouTube getting more engagement.
00:55:21.960But you don't have to show up with a checkbook and, you know, snarling, you know, face and say, you know, say this stuff and we'll give you $10 million like in the tenant media scandal.
00:55:34.280You can actually fry these people's brains just by playing in the dopamine circuit of their social media experience if they're not aware that that's happening.
00:55:43.760And we know that that kind of thing is happening.
00:55:45.860It's very clear the bot activity if you hit certain keywords or whatever.
00:55:50.000So why these influencers and pundits and so on are participating I think is multifaceted.
00:55:56.460I think there are many reasons that apply in different amounts of different people.
00:55:59.660It's also their own business that has not been broken in many stories.
00:56:05.300It's actually it's actually ambiguous to us.
00:56:08.280And so the best we can do is speculate and guess which we always have to do, you know, with, you know, circumspection and caution.
00:56:16.160We can't be accusing people of, you know, oh, Tucker's doing this because he's blackmailed that we don't have proof of that.
00:56:21.700If we did, it would be a different story, you know, so we don't know why they're doing it.
00:56:26.540But I'm utterly convinced by the level of coordination, the strategic rollout, the kind of timing, the ability.
00:56:33.040I have an ability to predict some of the things that they do, like their new push.
00:56:37.280They said, you know, they started saying, what is an American is going to be the most important question.
00:56:41.160What is an American? What is an American?
00:56:42.800Then, boom, the next week they roll out Heritage American as the answer to this question that they've ginned up out of the immigration argument.
00:56:52.900I don't think that this was an, you know, unplanned organic evolution.
00:56:57.900And so I think that this is a radical splinter movement that is significantly coordinated, that stretches back not a year, but 10 years, and that we're well behind the playbook of what they're running, that it's extremely well funded, that there is a lot of money and there's a lot of foreign support.
00:57:14.920But my interpretation of what's happening there is extremely cynical, unfortunately.
00:57:39.480But at least four of our alumni have gone crazy in that direction.
00:57:46.640And I think it's worth noting that all four of them were single women.
00:57:51.560And I remember talking with them as I could feel things vibrating.
00:57:57.420And when you say dopamine, there's something about social media and how it interacts with, I think, the female mind slightly different than the male mind.
00:58:06.720I mean, women, I think, are more social than men.
00:58:09.680They, you know, the validation, you know, young women on Twitter, the more radical they get, the more loving notes they get from men, including, I know this sounds ridiculous.