Glenn Greenwald released a sex video of himself with a woman on the internet, and there's a lot of speculation that it's the work of someone else. Is it blackmail? Is it something that conservatives should be defending? Or is it something they should be condemning? And what does it mean for the future of the relationship between journalism and sex?
00:24:12.860And it will also very likely harm the young people who have been under his care.
00:24:18.560And this adds a far more thorny topic that a lot of conservatives really don't want to get into, which is, you know, the adoption or the surrogacy of children by gay men.
00:24:30.860And a lot of conservatives kind of accepted, again, gay men as like these, oh, they're just like straight couples.
00:24:40.360Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm pronouncing nuclear like George Bush here.
00:24:45.140But, you know, they're just like the normal family.
00:24:49.420And so they'll just have children and they'll be just like you.
00:24:52.740Like they'll just some kind of acquire children and they'll be just exactly like you are.
00:24:57.340And that's very evidently not the case.
00:25:00.720Most gay men who are in a gay marriage, they're not monogamous.
00:25:06.900It's an open marriage pretty much by definition.
00:25:09.980They also continue to engage in really risky lifestyles.
00:25:14.260And so the idea that, like, you just get gay married and, you know, take on a few children and all of a sudden you're a conservative, that's not how it works.
00:25:26.760And a lot of conservatives lied to themselves about the realities of the gay lifestyle and, you know, surrogacy and all this stuff.
00:25:35.820And that has led to some pretty disastrous places.
00:25:39.660Now, the good news is I think a number of conservatives have now turned the corner on surrogacy.
00:25:45.800I mean, even on over the blaze here, there are several strong voices saying that surrogacy, you know, honestly, for gay or straight couples is an abomination and should not be involved.
00:25:56.500Now, I don't know if Glenn Greenwald and his partner had a surrogate or if they I think they just adopted the children because they're older.
00:26:05.020But either way, you know, this opens up the much thornier issue, something that a lot of conservatives, even though they all like really vehemently opposed this just a decade ago, you know, they don't want to talk about this issue.
00:26:19.200But obviously, this draws a lot of questions as to whether or not, you know, there is an inherent problem with gay couples acquiring children, whether it be through adoption or surrogacy.
00:26:32.580I think surrogacy is worse because it's, you know, at least the adoption argument, you can you can make the argument.
00:26:38.820Oh, well, this kid wasn't going to get adopted otherwise.
00:26:47.020I don't buy that argument, but at least it's something.
00:26:49.760But the surrogacy is just gay men renting out women's wombs.
00:26:54.540And like no one has a problem with that.
00:26:56.860It's wild, like the people who talk about the handmaid's tale and how men are going to force women to reproduce because of the Christian theocracy that will be imposed.
00:27:06.400No, we're like we literally have that now.
00:27:09.900Well, they like two gay men rent a woman so that they can use her body to steal and steal her child.
00:27:18.420I mean, I guess technically they bought her child, but I don't think that's it should be legal.
00:27:22.080Like, I don't I don't care how much money you give someone you have not buying their child is not OK like that.
00:27:28.620Like that doesn't somehow the voluntary nature of the transaction is not all right.
00:27:32.780Just in the way that like, oh, well, two consenting men doing what they want in their bedroom makes it OK.
00:27:38.080Like, no, actually, that turns out it doesn't.
00:27:40.560Now, that doesn't mean that I want like, oh, yeah, the Stasi to go break in every gay man's door and find out whether or not he's sodomizing somebody.
00:27:48.000But ultimately, you know, that's not something we should accept as a society as being normal just because I don't want to send, you know, some puritanical police force to go check and make sure everyone's having the appropriate type of sex in their home.
00:28:04.840Doesn't mean that like as a society, we should go out of our way to give people a married status, allow them these like legal advantages, allow them to have children to adopt or to purchase children like that's not OK.
00:28:21.860Like and for some reason, this is a hard line for people to grasp because, well, let's be honest, the logic is it kind of has a certain gradient to to it.
00:28:32.400It has a certain direction. So people who are told, well, you know, we're not supposed to care about what happens in someone's bedroom ultimately say, oh, well, then they should just be given the same treatment as everyone else.
00:28:46.160We should just elevate that behavior to the same as everybody else is like, no, you can say, OK, we're not going to go out of our way to like knock down doors to check and see what type of sex people are having without being like at and at the same time, we're going to elevate everything they do to being normal.
00:29:02.160Like like a normal what a normal heterosexual couple does. And that barrier is hard, even for conservatives to ultimately like erect for some reason between like, OK, yeah, I don't want the state hunting down everyone's bedroom behavior.
00:29:15.940And actually, the public square is a place where we only elevate the type of behavior we want to see.
00:29:21.160And so intact heterosexual Christian families are the things we're actually going to honor, the things we're actually going to enshrine in law, the things we're actually going to elevate and protect.
00:29:32.120You know, it's not that hard. It really shouldn't be that hard to to understand the differentiation here.
00:29:38.380But apparently it's extremely hard. And guys like Charlie Kirk are out there making, you know, they have a really hard time grasping this.
00:29:45.020I'm also seeing people throw around, you know, Bible versus Matt Taibbi was attacking Jason Whitlock today saying, how could you condemn Glenn Greenwald's behavior?
00:29:56.540How could you call it sinful? Here's a passage about Jesus saying, you know, don't judge lest you be judged yourself.
00:30:04.380The problem is at the end of that passage that Matt Taibbi was quoting, Jesus says, go and sin no more.
00:30:10.520Go and sin no more. And sorry, you don't get to quote scripture.
00:30:15.800You don't get to pull scripture out to try to say, oh, don't judge Glenn for this behavior and then ignore the last part of the passage, the like linchpin of the passage, the whole point of the story with Jesus in that moment where he turns to the woman and says, go and sin no more.
00:30:33.220No, I'm not going to stone you. I'm not going to condemn you.
00:30:38.680I am going to call these Pharisees who are acting as if they have never sinned, but I'm still going to turn to you and say, stop doing what you're doing.
00:31:09.080People acted maliciously, and it's fine to acknowledge that.
00:31:12.780It's fine to note that truth without them turning around and endorsing what he did.
00:31:18.800However, again, very difficult for conservatives to grasp this difference, and we need to address this head on, because if you continue to normalize this behavior, if you continue to say, as conservatives, we believe that this is fine and you can engage in this and you can have children in your household.
00:31:37.840And even though the way that this stuff came to light is gross itself and the people who did it should be charged, there are laws against this, and they should apply to them, ultimately, the behavior in the video is unacceptable.
00:31:52.720And while I still appreciate the work that Glenn has done and the way he has conducted himself professionally, personally, this is not okay, and you're not going to get me to pretend that it's okay.
00:32:03.220And no conservatives should be pretending it's okay, and this should raise a lot of alarm bells about elevating people who live this type of lifestyle in conservative circles.
00:32:15.140That said, I want to transition to something else, which is very related, which is something that happened on Twitter yesterday.
00:32:25.100Again, I don't always love living on Twitter for the show here, but this one is directly related to the discussion we're having.
00:32:32.980So I think it's worth talking about this post really quick.
00:32:37.560So Dave Rubin, obviously, is somebody who has himself been elevated in conservative circles.
00:32:46.060Dave is a guy I watched early on when I was discovering kind of internet politics, when I was discovering all these IDW guys, Jordan Peterson and all these other guys, the people that Joe Rogan was bringing on.
00:33:02.980Guys like Sam Harris, guys like Sam Harris and all that.
00:33:06.160And there was this strange moment where it seemed, and at the time I was very normie, conservative, and for a moment it seemed like, oh man, we are winning stuff because guys like Dave Rubin are coming over to our side, right?
00:33:20.960Dave Rubin is this guy who was part of the Young Turks.
00:33:25.820If you didn't know, he was part of this left-wing thing.
00:33:27.960He was like this stand-up comedian who was a new atheist, and he was gay, and he was on the left.
00:33:33.540He was this radical progressive, and he was on board with all the Young Turks stuff, attacking the right, attacking Christianity, that kind of stuff.
00:33:42.960However, he had this moment, you know, he had one of these cancellation moments.
00:33:47.500He saw what, you know, Sam Harris, I think, get attacked on Bill Maher for criticizing Islam, and a lot of leftists jumping on the board with that.
00:33:54.980And he said, oh, whoa, hey, you know, what are you doing?
00:35:02.500And this matters because Dave is one of these people who has been elevated as a guy who has a lot of lifestyle problems that Glenn Greenwald also has.
00:35:11.320He's been elevated to, like, a position of leadership on the right.
00:35:26.140I appreciate the intellectual journey he made in a lot of ways.
00:35:30.640I think ultimately he even renounced his atheism, like his new atheism stuff.
00:35:35.020I don't think he ever became a complete Christian, however.
00:35:38.140And I think for pretty obvious reasons, you know, Dave is one of these guys who I think, like, went down the road of being a conservative and thought being a conservative meant getting gay married and having a house and, like, buying some kids.
00:35:52.640And he didn't understand when there was a backlash against this behavior because he thought, like, that's what being conservative means.
00:37:00.440And if, you know, the actual right comes into power, if like Christians have their beliefs in the public square, if we're actually living in a Christian country, then many of the things that Dave Rubin is involved in would not be publicly acceptable.
00:37:16.180And so he's, I imagine, pretty worried about the fact that, you know, like an actual right wing, like people with real Christian values want to assert them like they want that to be the norm.
00:37:30.120I know he said that he wants that in the past.
00:37:31.760But it seems like once it's actually happening, it's not so great because like a lot of, again, a lot of the Glenn Greenwald issues might apply to Dave Rubin.
00:37:54.040Again, I don't want to speculate about that because I don't know his personal life.
00:37:57.700But you can understand why he would be worried about people, you know, you know, questioning what's going on here.
00:38:05.400So we'll just click on James Lindsay's post here so we can see what he's agreeing with.
00:38:10.460Just to read his thing here, he says, James has been more ahead of this than anyone else and sooner more and the sooner more people see the patterns, the better.
00:38:20.220So what is James Lindsay talking about here?
00:38:22.700He says, Robin DiAngelo woke left in 2012 and an approach based in critical theory calls into question the idea of that objectivity is desirable or even possible.
00:38:35.160Orin McIntyre, completely woke right, completely objective analysis is unattainable and ultimately undesirable goal.
00:38:44.220OK, so what what are we trying to do here?
00:38:46.280Let's look at the quote he brought up from Robin DiAngelo.
00:38:51.020One of the key, let's see, the highlighted space here.
00:38:54.580An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible.
00:39:43.100He knows it's a lie because I have directly attacked an understanding of reality like the one that he is pointing to here.
00:39:52.800So this is this is a bald face lie that James is telling and he knows he's a liar and he knows what he's doing.
00:39:59.860And so the question is, does Dave Rubin understand what James is doing here?
00:40:06.920I guess I'll break it down a little more.
00:40:08.480So when I say in this post that it is very difficult for people to have truly objective analysis, what I'm pointing to is the simple fact that any and all of us, when we're engaged in political action, there's a tendency.
00:40:26.160And of course, I'm someone who spends a lot of time on political theory.
00:40:28.760I spend a lot of time analyzing things.
00:40:31.200There's a temptation constantly for us to want to be in an objective analysis mode all the time, right?
00:40:41.400I'm standing 5,000 feet above the whole thing.
00:40:44.500I'm the one who has the bird's eye view and I am objectively analyzing everything that's going on.
00:40:50.880I'm not one of those petty people who gets involved in politics or or takes any action or makes any decisions or takes any stands or joins any teams.
00:41:04.080I have the hold on reality that no one else does.
00:41:06.880And that's why everything I say is right, even though I'm never going to take any actions in real life.
00:41:11.040And my whole point of this post was actually the funny thing about this post is in some ways I was attacking the idea of some people on my side who say that like, oh, well, ultimately, we just need to have this objective fact or fact based value free value neutral analysis of what's going on.
00:41:32.400Now, ultimately, I do believe that some level of Machiavellian analysis is valuable, right?
00:41:39.120Obviously, I engage on it in it on a regular basis.
00:41:41.700It's part of what my channel is about.
00:41:43.300So this is not a scenario where I'm like, oh, well, how could you ever be involved in trying to have some kind of objective analysis?
00:41:50.620Again, I try to do it on a regular basis.
00:41:53.040However, ultimately, I'm never going to have a completely objective analysis because I am on a side.
00:42:00.020I want something to win and there's nothing wrong with that.
00:42:02.540In fact, that's great because people who get entirely locked in to just trying to be objective never take action.
00:42:09.120And what you need in a lot of political situations is action sitting there and philosophizing.
00:42:17.380It's it's something I enjoy doing, but it's not the only thing you do.
00:42:21.040If it's the only thing your movement does, then ultimately this is just going to be completely neutral or it's not going to work like it's going to be completely ineffectual because you're obsessed with the analysis and you have no interest in like actually doing what you're supposed to do, actually taking action.
00:42:41.520And if you get stuck in this mode of objective analysis entirely, it's not desirable because you will sometimes completely talk yourself out of doing anything useful.
00:42:52.580Sometimes, no matter what the odds are, you just have to take action to defend your family, to defend your faith, to defend your community, to defend your values.
00:43:01.540Like sometimes it doesn't matter what the odds are, you just have to take action.
00:43:06.580Men of action are ultimately more valuable in pretty much everything from politics to warfare than men who are completely theoretical.
00:43:15.620And I say this as someone who's very theoretical, right?
00:43:18.240So I'm not attacking the idea of, you know, some kind of intellectual analysis or attempt to have a certain level of objective analysis.
00:43:26.900But ultimately, action is what's going to matter.
00:43:31.820And so all I'm claiming here is that we need to focus not just on objective analysis, but action and that getting stuck in analysis is undesirable and that, you know, ultimately we can never have perfect information.
00:43:49.920Everything we're doing is a model that's trying to simulate reality, right?
00:43:54.960When we're doing this analysis, when we're trying to do this objective analysis, what we're doing is we're gathering the most information we can and then trying to build a model that allows us to make decisions as best as we can.
00:44:07.720But the idiot is always the person who thinks their model is complete and perfect and totally objective.
00:44:13.900And anyone who makes models for a living, like, will tell you, anyone who does this professionally will tell you that the dumbest thing in the world is to believe that the map is the terrain, right?
00:44:25.880That the representation is the reality, that these are one and the same, and that you should treat them the same.
00:44:50.400The action you are taking in real life is the real thing, not the map.
00:44:55.980And this is what guys like James don't get or what they need you not to get because their entire life is selling incomplete models to people, right?
00:45:04.560Like, that's the whole thing that they do is sell incomplete models to paralyze people against taking action.
00:45:10.480So, James doesn't understand the difference, or he doesn't want you to understand the difference, between the fact that there is objective truth, which I absolutely believe, and the fact that there is an epistemological impossibility to have complete and total information.
00:45:28.120You can never have complete and total objective information on everything.
00:45:35.580That doesn't mean there isn't objective truth.
00:45:37.820And it doesn't mean that trying to build as objective a model as possible is not something you should be engaged in.
00:45:44.820But the idea that you should always and only be engaged in trying to build a perfect novel model of objective analysis and that you should only act once you have a completely objective and total model for you to act under is stupid.
00:46:14.780I don't know if Dave Rubin just didn't bother to pay attention to what I said.
00:46:20.060And he's just, like, parroting whatever his friend says, which, in that case, like, I get it.
00:46:25.240Like, we've all shot out tweets that say, hey, this thing, you know, because I trust this guy and, you know, maybe that ultimately they got something wrong.
00:46:34.960And if that's the case, then Dave should just say so and move on.
00:46:38.060Or if he, like, went in like James with the specific purpose of, like, maliciously twisting what I said.
00:46:48.800If that's the case, then that's pretty despicable behavior on the same level that James is involved in here.
00:46:56.020Ultimately, or it just could be that Dave Rubin doesn't understand that, like, you can't, like, it's epistemologically impossible to have perfect knowledge.
00:47:06.480Like, that's, you can't have complete, total, certain, objective knowledge.
00:47:18.020It's not denying reality or the, you know, whether or not we would want to understand reality or whether we want to build a model as close to reality as possible.
00:47:26.600But what I don't believe is what woke leftists actually believe, which is that there is no objective reality, that you can construct reality however you see fit.
00:47:36.800The whole point of critical theory is the idea that, like, you can go ahead and break down these structures and reassemble them how you like.
00:47:43.740I obviously do not believe that at all.
00:47:45.960I believe in God's truth and God's order.
00:47:48.120I don't think that we, as humans, have the ability to understand all of it, though he has made a lot of it intelligible to us.
00:47:56.600And to the degree that it's intelligible to us, we should seek to understand it and utilize that understanding in our decision-making process.
00:48:04.760But that doesn't mean that we can turn around and just say, oh, well, I can know everything God knows.
00:48:22.660And unfortunately, James Lindsay keeps ruining the reputations of other people who associate with him.
00:48:27.860Because he's a liar and people who are willing to involve themselves in the same smears and lies that he paddles are going to end up looking bad.
00:48:36.040So ultimately, I hope that Dave Rubin reconsiders his support for James and for the type of lying that James involves himself with, especially types like this, which are so blatant.
00:48:48.460I mean, we're talking about a guy who believes I summon angels who are also demons from the Middle East and attacked Arby's as being woke for having a tweet about a dad not coming back or something.
00:49:07.100Like, this is obviously not a guy who's like doing really well or does a lot of like thoughtful reasoning.
00:49:13.100But for some reason, guys like Dave Rubin keep lining up behind him.
00:49:18.260So, again, I just hope he is more thoughtful about how he engages in that from now on.
00:49:24.440Because he's only humiliating himself by following a guy who's an obvious liar who's going out of his way to lie about me and is going to make you look foolish by comparison.
00:49:41.020Greenwald would scream his safe word before he leaked it himself.
00:49:45.160Yeah, again, I understand people's point that like the point of this type of sexual behavior is to be humiliated.
00:49:51.640Part of that humiliation is sharing it out and making it public for some people.
00:49:56.800I understand the motivation that people are trying to impute to James or sorry to Glenn Greenwald there.
00:50:04.660But ultimately, I really doubt that that's what happened.
00:50:08.040Again, I think Glenn is, whenever his disordered personal life, professionally, he's pretty well ordered.
00:50:15.880And I don't see him putting out something like this intentionally with the understanding that and knowing that it would hurt his ability to like build the bridges he's been trying to build.
00:50:25.520You could just say that his desires have gotten so wild that he's lost control of that impulse.
00:50:46.340Again, there's plenty of sexual immorality to go around.
00:50:53.560You know, homosexuality is not the only practice that is accepted and glamorized in our society that is inappropriate.
00:51:01.260And so, yeah, that you're exactly right to point that out.
00:51:04.280That said, I do think that there is an additional level of problem.
00:51:08.200Again, as I pointed out, some people will phrase this as sinning in the right direction.
00:51:16.120I don't know if I'm comfortable with that phrase.
00:51:18.580I will say, though, that there is there is a difference in the in the level of disordering, which doesn't excuse what's going on with other types of sexual depravity.
00:51:27.680But, you know, it does make this one somewhat worse.
00:51:31.100As to whether I would have Glenn on again.
00:52:24.380Again, surrogacy is something that I think kind of snuck under the radar for a lot of conservatives initially because they didn't understand much about the process.
00:52:33.600So they hadn't thought through the moral ramifications.
00:52:35.540And this is always kind of how technology works.
00:52:39.400And then like we backfill our moral justification of it because it's already part of our society.
00:52:46.580But I think once people really started thinking about what surrogacy is and, you know, seeing some of the horror stories of like gay men forcing women to abort children because like the child wasn't exactly what they ordered.
00:53:01.300You know, like the child is something to buy out of a magazine.
00:53:04.360Like once stories of stuff like that started coming out, you know, gay men just abandoning the children that they had purchased from women, that kind of stuff.
00:53:13.580I think people started, you know, really rethinking that.
00:53:16.500And again, it's not just gay couples, to be fair.
00:53:18.820There are straight couples who are, you know, having children through surrogacy.
00:53:22.400And to be clear, they are not having children.
00:53:58.800Alex says, I was about 12 years old when a gay couple walked past me and one of them poked me on my side when I was out of sight from my parents.
00:54:07.100Kids for straight couples only is a hill to die on.
00:54:11.140Yeah, again, I think that it is a perfectly reasonable thing to say that children deserve to grow up in a household with a mother and father whenever that is possible.
00:54:21.500And so that should be the norm and that should be the priority.
00:54:25.160Again, people will make the argument about adoption.
00:54:29.460I'm not going to go deep into that today, but I don't really buy that one ultimately.
00:54:33.380And again, due to the lifestyle that a lot of homosexual couples are involved in, introducing child children into that environment is, I think, just ultimately a really bad idea.
00:54:45.640And conservatives need to rethink any support they might hold for it.
00:54:48.840Gears of War says, what are your thoughts on Trump removing all opposition to homosexual marriage from the party platform?
00:54:54.740More damage done by him than Ruben Greenwald?
00:55:11.520And and even on the gay issue, he's more progressive than, say, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were when they ran for president the first time where they said that marriage is between a man and a woman.
00:55:20.820And so while I like a lot of what Donald Trump has done and he has my support to the degree that he must for those things, I can't say anything against what you're pointing out here.
00:55:33.660Trump has ultimately been bad on this issue and has done more damage to the conservative acceptance of this issue than any guy like Ruben or Greenwald.
00:56:15.600So no one, I don't think, pointing out what is was happening and pointing out that what Glenn was doing, this video was wrong.
00:56:24.780I hope that they weren't trying to do that just to be like, well, because I'm blameless or whatever.
00:56:29.780I think most people are probably being like, well, no, that behavior is not OK.
00:56:33.240And it's fine for me to be disgusted with it.
00:56:36.000And it's fine for me to point out that this is something that's certainly not OK if there are children in that home.
00:56:41.280And that ultimately, this is something that Glenn needs to turn away from for his own good, for his own spiritual, physical well-being, for his own eternal soul.
00:56:51.980Like, like on every level, you know, the reason to tell Glenn that this behavior is wrong is not to, like, elevate yourself.
00:56:59.300It's to let Glenn know that, like, if you care about people, you tell them when they're involved in something that is going to harm them.
00:57:40.680And if not, again, yeah, there are many different, you know, types of sexual degeneracy and pointing out Glenn's does not make yours okay or acceptable.
00:57:51.080But, again, I would say there is a order, there is still a different in the orders of magnitude there, right?
00:57:59.580Again, all bad, all sin, all will send you to hell without repentance and grace from God, salvation from God.
00:58:05.460However, there is a difference in the type of sin involved, and you can't completely pretend that's not the case either.
00:58:15.480Alex says, would watch James Lindsay versus 20 Gen Z conservatives?
00:58:20.040Yes, that would actually be quite funny.
00:58:21.780I would actually very much enjoy watching that video.
00:58:24.800All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.