The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 3 ｜ Michael Rectenwald

00:00:00.000 Hey, welcome to the podcast episode number three. It features Michael Reckenwald, who is honestly a guy, and you'll understand right at the beginning, I wasn't sure if he was the real deal. I started reading his book and thought, boy, this is a great story. But is it real? Wow, it's even better than I thought.

00:00:22.320 And listen all the way to the end of the podcast, because it's remarkable. So he's a self-described former libertarian communist. I know, I asked him about that. He's worked in the university system his whole life. He has been part of the radical Marxist left until a few months ago.

00:00:41.080 Today on this episode, he's going to share what happened to him when he finally woke up, what woke him up, and what happened to him. He's been busy on Twitter as deplorable NYU professor. He's a guy who's published white papers on communists for communists. He is well-respected in the communist community, or was, but now he's writing tweets like this.

00:01:07.000 Hey, Paul Parrott and robotic chanting leftists, you are losing the actual war of the intellect. Your minds are so utterly flabby from disuse that it's almost unfair to ask you to express a thought.

00:01:18.740 The moon is the sun because I say it is, and if you disagree, you're a bigot. I see the right doesn't know a fraction regarding the insanity of the identitarian left. No father-daughter dances? Try people who identify as yellow-scaled wingless dragon kin.

00:01:33.640 And, quote, and, quote, an expensive ornate building. It's way crazier than you think.

00:01:39.940 Um, this is, that's real.

00:01:42.620 His new book is Springtime for Snowflakes. I think it's a must-read. You're gonna love. Michael Rechtenwald.

00:01:49.980 So, I wanted to sit down and talk to you because your story is absolutely incredible and fascinating, um, and I'm not sure I know who you are yet.

00:02:13.380 So, that's my goal.

00:02:14.540 Okay.

00:02:14.900 Okay.

00:02:15.140 That's great.

00:02:15.560 So, let's start at the beginning. Tell me who you were 10 years ago, or who you've spent your life being and studying and thinking.

00:02:23.980 Okay. Well, I mean, let me, let me give you a, a sort of a, um, anecdote that I'll tell you who I was.

00:02:29.800 Okay.

00:02:30.500 Um, I'd say about 10 years ago, I used to be a regular on Joe Scarborough's show called Scarborough Country.

00:02:37.700 Yeah.

00:02:37.920 I was brought on as the standard liberal pundit who they beat up on and then dispensed with, you know.

00:02:45.240 Right.

00:02:46.020 Uh, and so, you know, at one point, Joe Scarborough even suggested I might be a, I might be a traitor against the country that I should be tried for treason.

00:02:54.160 Joe Scarborough said that.

00:02:55.620 Wow.

00:02:55.920 Well, because I, because I took exception with George Bush's, uh, execution of the war in Iraq.

00:03:01.600 Right.

00:03:02.120 So did I.

00:03:03.000 Yeah.

00:03:03.380 And, um, you know, so they, since he's leaned forward, I've leaned the other way.

00:03:08.300 Mm-hmm.

00:03:08.900 Um, I was also a left communist at some point.

00:03:12.640 You might want to lead with that.

00:03:14.700 Not want to lead with that?

00:03:15.780 No, you might have wanted to lead with that.

00:03:17.720 Because that's where, that's where I find your, um, transformation a little profound.

00:03:25.600 How deeply into that theory and that belief are anti-capitalist, pro-communist were you?

00:03:32.820 Well, I was very well published as a, as a known, uh, communist writer.

00:03:38.120 I had essays all over the place.

00:03:40.160 People referred to my work all the time.

00:03:41.920 I had, it was, uh, I have essays that have been read by thousands of people.

00:03:45.480 Um, I, they were critiques of certain other aspects of the left a lot of the times, but

00:03:50.640 they were committed to, uh, what I called a libertarian version of communism.

00:03:56.460 That the idea was the Bolsheviks, they were right in having a revolution, but they were

00:04:02.220 wrong in killing everybody afterwards.

00:04:04.180 Right.

00:04:04.700 So, but how does coming a serious, this is a serious question.

00:04:08.220 Yeah.

00:04:08.400 How does communism work?

00:04:10.420 Like, for instance, I think the, you know, everybody just make money, put it in a big

00:04:16.040 pile and take what you need.

00:04:17.460 Right.

00:04:17.780 Um, I think that's a great plan.

00:04:20.700 I really do in utopian.

00:04:23.120 Right.

00:04:23.940 But when you're dealing with man.

00:04:26.080 Yeah.

00:04:26.640 Men go bad quickly.

00:04:28.360 Right.

00:04:28.720 So how do you do that without the barrel?

00:04:30.900 I mean, just tell you what it's really, what the people that, that espouse this belief

00:04:34.960 are about.

00:04:35.560 Okay.

00:04:36.020 Okay.

00:04:36.180 I'm going to give it to you from the inside.

00:04:37.520 This is a story you'll never have heard before.

00:04:40.560 Here's what they think.

00:04:42.240 They think because they have this ideal that, that we can establish a de facto, you know,

00:04:50.400 uh, equality in the world as it is because we have this idea, we're better than you.

00:04:56.360 If you don't.

00:04:57.260 Right.

00:04:57.680 We're morally superior to you.

00:04:59.360 Right.

00:04:59.820 And we're intellectually superior to you.

00:05:01.580 And another thing about Marxism is it gives you a lot of intellectual grist to, to grind

00:05:07.760 on.

00:05:08.060 And it gives you a lot of intellectual work to do.

00:05:10.860 And it's, it's a sort of self flattery that comes with that.

00:05:14.020 Um, it's very highly engaging intellectually in Marxism is, uh, and there's a lot of different

00:05:20.020 aspects to it that are quite compelling.

00:05:22.000 They're good things to think.

00:05:23.540 I mean, they're, it's, it's a good exercise for the mind.

00:05:26.080 Um, it, I will, but I will tell you, I've, I, uh, I am a baby in any of, uh, of, uh, Marx

00:05:35.060 philosophy, but I will tell you it does.

00:05:38.220 It pushes you to think differently because it's, it's completely different.

00:05:42.220 It's completely different.

00:05:43.200 And so I was one of those people that thought that the world could be a much, much better

00:05:50.920 place and that this was the way to go about it.

00:05:54.580 Now we'll get to what I think now, but it's quite, quite different.

00:05:59.160 Okay.

00:05:59.340 I mean, it's completely radically different from that.

00:06:01.900 And you are, uh, you're a professor of global liberal studies.

00:06:07.460 Okay.

00:06:08.060 Basically anything I want to teach is what that means.

00:06:11.980 What a gig.

00:06:13.140 Yeah.

00:06:13.320 It's a nice gig.

00:06:14.060 Yeah.

00:06:14.460 I teach my own textbook, for example.

00:06:17.320 Uh, it's called academic writing real world topics.

00:06:20.120 And I approach, uh, various worldly topics from different, I let the students read about

00:06:25.960 very controversial contemporary issues, but I make them look at all these topics from

00:06:30.960 multiple perspectives so that people aren't, I'm not indoctrinating anybody.

00:06:36.220 I'm not trying to inculcate some particular ideology.

00:06:38.880 Was that always that way?

00:06:39.800 That's always been the way I've taught.

00:06:41.260 I've never been, I don't believe the classroom should ever be a site of indoctrination.

00:06:45.840 Okay.

00:06:46.620 And I've, I've, I've differed with people, colleagues of my own, uh, and other friends

00:06:51.560 who are also professors and leftists who were, you know, they were trying to drive somebody

00:06:56.480 to Marxist feminist, you know, and that's just how they work.

00:06:59.900 Their syllabus were stacked that way.

00:07:02.220 Best professor you could have is one that you, you might think for half the class, he's

00:07:06.980 this.

00:07:07.540 That's right.

00:07:07.920 And then the other half, he's arguing the exact opposite and you have no idea where

00:07:12.120 they stand.

00:07:12.620 That's what I do.

00:07:13.160 I embody different positions, you know, rather believably.

00:07:16.600 Right.

00:07:16.760 Uh, so that's been my approach.

00:07:19.020 But, um, when it comes to, uh, my own change, it came basically from, uh, the terrible run

00:07:26.320 in I had with the left and, and the, you know, I thought the, you know, the utopian and the

00:07:31.380 egalitarian veneer, uh, of leftists really is very thin.

00:07:36.200 And when you scratch it a bit underneath of that, I found totalitarians.

00:07:40.520 Yeah.

00:07:40.780 And that's what scared the heck out of me.

00:07:42.800 And that really is what caused my political conversion.

00:07:46.480 I've had, um, I've had a, um, daughter of one of the communists that was arrested during

00:07:52.640 the, you know, communist trials from Hollywood.

00:07:55.460 Yeah.

00:07:55.840 Come to me.

00:07:56.440 She still says, you'd call me a communist Glenn.

00:07:58.680 In my family, I'm called a conservative.

00:08:00.820 Yeah.

00:08:01.200 Um, but she, she, we've had several conversations and she and her friends are more afraid right

00:08:08.900 now of what's happening on the campuses and the left than they are on the right.

00:08:15.100 And they're really concerned about the right.

00:08:17.020 I said this from the beginning, uh, when Trump, uh, got into office or before he got into

00:08:22.900 office, even, Oh, I guess it was after when they, we found that the resistance, I said,

00:08:27.280 the resistance would be far worse than Trump.

00:08:29.840 And I think that's been the case.

00:08:31.380 I mean, the resistance is really unhinged and it's, it's fueled by all kinds of, um, ideological

00:08:39.120 error, I think.

00:08:40.720 And it's fueled by a conviction, an absolute conviction of total moral certainty.

00:08:45.360 And that's what's scary.

00:08:47.040 When people believe they're absolutely morally superior and certain than, and they're absolutely

00:08:52.860 right, they become like Antifa.

00:08:55.260 Well, the, it is why totalitarianism always ends in massive death, because if, if you get

00:09:05.900 to a point, I've asked this question from the left and the right, just let's imagine

00:09:09.800 tomorrow you have your way and everybody you've elected is in an area, you still have 50% of

00:09:17.740 the country that doesn't agree with you.

00:09:19.460 That's right.

00:09:19.700 What are you going to do with them?

00:09:20.660 Well, even, you know, this is most Marxists won't admit this, but Marx himself said, you

00:09:24.920 have to kill them.

00:09:26.480 Uh, there has to be a terror.

00:09:28.520 And they got this idea of the terror from, of course, the French revolution and the aftermath.

00:09:33.580 Uh, you know, they said that there, that is the model after a revolution, you must go on

00:09:39.420 a terror spree.

00:09:40.300 You must get rid of ideological opponents and you must get rid of the bourgeoisie if they

00:09:45.020 cling to their bourgeoisie character.

00:09:47.400 Otherwise, you know, if they're willing to convert then fine.

00:09:50.440 But, uh, people are killed for having the wrong thoughts.

00:09:53.960 It's that's, that's basically what it comes down to.

00:09:57.160 So you're a guy who you weren't, I mean, you weren't against this stuff, but you didn't

00:10:06.120 think that it was, it wouldn't end to killing.

00:10:09.880 Yeah.

00:10:10.340 So you were not.

00:10:11.400 In fact, I was never, you know, I've had friends that were communists that would joke

00:10:16.720 about putting a bullet to the people's heads, you know, and they actually said, if I had

00:10:20.900 my chance, I would do it.

00:10:22.200 And I never chimed in on that.

00:10:23.960 That, that was not my cup of tea.

00:10:25.700 I thought that that violates the deepest moral system that I have, the beliefs that I have

00:10:30.700 that each person has an absolute right to live.

00:10:33.460 And nobody here on earth has a right to take that away.

00:10:36.620 So, um, one more thing, and then I want to go to, to, to the first thing that it was

00:10:41.920 kind of your, your red line.

00:10:43.660 Yeah.

00:10:44.160 Um, but, uh, no pun intended, uh, in the opposite direction.

00:10:48.840 Um, uh, you describe yourself as not a, uh, John Stuart Mill kind of guy.

00:10:55.520 Well, I am now.

00:10:56.760 You are now.

00:10:57.320 Yeah.

00:10:57.520 So, cause that's, gives us life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual.

00:11:01.680 Right.

00:11:02.000 I'm basically a classical liberal, uh, a libertarian.

00:11:05.740 So cultural and social libertarian.

00:11:07.760 That is, I believe people should be allowed to do what they want.

00:11:10.600 Right.

00:11:11.040 As long as they're not infringing on my rights, other people's rights.

00:11:13.800 Like I have no problem.

00:11:14.640 If you want to live as a communist with 10 people.

00:11:17.800 Yeah, that's fine.

00:11:18.920 And you don't have a right, but I have a right to get, I have a right to not be a part

00:11:22.500 of that and live my life.

00:11:23.980 I mean, I started a criticism of Marxism from the standpoint that, you know, the worst thing

00:11:28.720 is politically it's murderous.

00:11:30.760 It's totalitarian.

00:11:31.940 Then second, I got to the point where I understood the economics of it as well and why it's, why

00:11:36.020 it's flawed, deeply flawed.

00:11:37.420 The market has to be there.

00:11:39.060 You have to have a market.

00:11:40.300 You can't have individual rights without the market.

00:11:42.760 Um, and so, and also that you can't have, uh, what socialists want most, which is what

00:11:49.080 they would call economic democracy.

00:11:50.540 You can't have that without the market because without a market, you have to have a

00:11:53.960 no prices.

00:11:55.140 And if you have no prices, you have no way of knowing what something's worth to people.

00:11:59.620 Right.

00:11:59.840 And therefore you have to dictate it.

00:12:01.720 Right.

00:12:01.940 And therefore it's undemocratic.

00:12:03.600 It's the opposite of what you've tried to attain.

00:12:05.460 Right.

00:12:17.860 Okay.

00:12:18.320 So let's go to your, the first thing that woke you up and said, you know what?

00:12:22.680 I got it.

00:12:23.400 Yeah.

00:12:23.740 Uh, it was a Twitter.

00:12:24.840 It was, I'm sorry.

00:12:25.460 It was a Facebook post that I made.

00:12:27.340 It was a joke.

00:12:28.320 Uh, there was a student at the university of Michigan who posted when asked by the university

00:12:34.360 or given the right to, to, uh, use any pronoun he wanted and to enter it into the system under

00:12:41.360 his profile chose quote, his majesty.

00:12:44.660 I thought it was hilarious.

00:12:46.820 And, uh, so I posted, I simply posted a link to that article having, you know, thousands of,

00:12:52.740 uh, leftist friends, a lot of trans friends at that time.

00:12:55.560 And the, uh, vitriol, the outrage, the hysteria was just unbelievable.

00:13:03.260 They called me everything from a transphobe to a, uh, to committing discursive violence,

00:13:09.300 a phrase I will explain later, uh, and, uh, of treason, uh, you know, on and on and on,

00:13:17.240 just for posting a link to an article with no comment.

00:13:20.120 And I said, this is, this is unbelievable.

00:13:22.740 And then I realized that everybody was, everybody was kowtowing to this kind of ideological pressure.

00:13:29.080 Everybody I knew, uh, they were all careful not to say something that would offend this

00:13:33.860 crowd, uh, this trans crowd and this social justice crowd.

00:13:37.740 And they were so scary.

00:13:39.160 How many of your friends, cause you being a professor at NYU living in Manhattan, I've done

00:13:44.920 it.

00:13:45.140 I was alone on that Island.

00:13:46.640 I felt, wow.

00:13:47.580 I know what that feels like.

00:13:48.620 Yeah.

00:13:49.000 Yeah.

00:13:49.440 You bet.

00:13:49.940 I bet you do.

00:13:50.680 Yeah.

00:13:50.840 Um, how many would you say of your friends are quietly have a couple of glasses of wine

00:14:00.160 and go, you know, Michael, don't say this to anybody, but I'm with you.

00:14:04.300 And how many are diehard, you know, social justice, post-modernist radicals from the

00:14:12.100 earlier group of friends that I used to have or from earlier, from earlier, they were, uh,

00:14:17.560 I would say that it was about 90% socialist, social justice, the whole nine yards and about

00:14:25.240 10% that were reasonable.

00:14:27.820 Otherwise, you know, it's people that were less, uh, enthusiastic, shall we say about the

00:14:32.180 whole thing?

00:14:33.300 How many of those, if any, are waking up with you?

00:14:36.600 Oh, a several.

00:14:37.440 Well, I've actually led some people out of Egypt, if you will.

00:14:41.700 Uh, I'm not, I'm not, I don't mean to have any main grandiosity here, but I'm saying a

00:14:47.020 lot of people followed me out of that and they, they followed my.

00:14:50.540 Courage is contagious.

00:14:51.660 Yes.

00:14:52.040 It really is.

00:14:52.620 It just takes one person to say, guys, what are you doing?

00:14:56.060 Uh, you know, so that I saw that and then I set up the Twitter account.

00:14:58.980 And I said, and I had been thinking that there's a lot of things are going wrong here in the

00:15:03.140 left, this identity politics and a social justice fanaticism.

00:15:07.940 So I set up that Twitter account and started tweeting that, and I did it anonymously and

00:15:13.140 I called myself the deplorable NYU prof.

00:15:15.520 I did that not as so much as a, as a sign of a support of Trump as a sign of solidarity

00:15:21.500 with the Trump people who were treated so miserably and called, you know, those people holding

00:15:27.200 onto their guns and Bibles, those people, those fly over state people who were called

00:15:32.100 the, you know, thrown into the basket of deplorables by Hillary Clinton.

00:15:35.980 I just thought that was a despicable way to talk about people.

00:15:39.480 And I, I just felt that these people, these are the people that are most maligned in our

00:15:44.160 culture.

00:15:44.980 They're the most maligned people in our country.

00:15:47.760 And I thought I'll call myself by that name because I want to stand with them.

00:15:51.440 How did you, and, and I want you to know, Michael, I think we're repeating.

00:15:57.200 We're repeating the Obama years just at volume 10.

00:16:01.220 We've just switched places.

00:16:02.760 Yeah.

00:16:02.960 Okay.

00:16:03.300 Perhaps there are things that the people on the left see about Trump.

00:16:06.420 Right.

00:16:06.780 I have seen about Trump that concern me.

00:16:08.900 Right.

00:16:09.380 And, but he's kind of in with my side.

00:16:13.820 And so we're not going to go crazy.

00:16:16.000 You know what I mean?

00:16:16.700 Oh yeah.

00:16:16.980 Yeah.

00:16:17.180 And the same thing with Obama.

00:16:19.180 Yeah.

00:16:19.440 Right.

00:16:19.680 And so we've just switched places and people don't realize none of us should be this afraid

00:16:26.480 of a government or a president, no matter which side.

00:16:29.460 That's right.

00:16:29.880 That should not be the case.

00:16:31.320 So something's wrong in the whole process.

00:16:33.480 As I think your work is pointing out, something's seriously wrong.

00:16:37.400 Seriously wrong.

00:16:38.340 Um, okay.

00:16:39.980 So you, uh, you start your tweets and you, you, you have just awesome tweets.

00:16:46.380 Thank you.

00:16:47.180 Uh, they're very, very satisfying.

00:16:49.460 Um, but then you decide to go on the record.

00:16:53.260 That's right.

00:16:53.800 I had a NYU student newspaper reporter contact me and said, you know, these tweets are really

00:16:59.980 something else.

00:17:00.620 Are you really an NYU professor?

00:17:02.560 This was through a direct message.

00:17:03.900 And I said, yes.

00:17:04.540 And so she asked me if I would sit down for an interview and I said, yes, I wasn't sure

00:17:08.940 I would go on the record, but I, I would talk to her.

00:17:11.140 So we did that.

00:17:12.000 And after I was done talking to her, I said, there's, there's really nothing, what I've

00:17:15.760 said here needs to be said.

00:17:17.360 And I actually want to put my name on it, frankly.

00:17:20.220 Um, because I think it's, there's, there's nothing objectionable into some, you know, there's

00:17:25.020 nothing fundamentally abhorrent or deplorable about it.

00:17:29.500 It's just, it's just another viewpoint and it's a vantage point I think needs to be aired.

00:17:35.240 And that, that went in the paper.

00:17:38.220 She took a picture of me laughing and that made the heresy, you know, somewhat redoubled.

00:17:44.680 Uh, and then all hell broke loose on, uh, within my university.

00:17:48.880 Uh, you were called in the middle of a class, were you not?

00:17:51.080 I was called out in the middle of the class by the Dean and said, you know, can you come

00:17:54.940 over to see me?

00:17:56.460 And I said, sure.

00:17:57.780 And I've got to add an idea what it was about.

00:17:59.800 Yeah.

00:18:00.200 Although I was saying that this really is happening.

00:18:01.960 I'm being called, uh, in for my political views.

00:18:05.640 Think about that a minute.

00:18:06.980 I mean, I have, I mean, I have thought, I mean, because that's, if you're a conservative,

00:18:15.400 if you're a conservative, I've talked to so many people that want to be a professor.

00:18:18.920 Yeah.

00:18:19.520 And they're, they can't.

00:18:20.840 No, they can't.

00:18:21.340 So, I mean, we live this on this side.

00:18:24.100 But for you now to see this and you, now it's, now maybe some things are starting to

00:18:30.600 come to you.

00:18:31.400 I'm guessing that you're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, they came to me right away.

00:18:35.640 And so I go over and, uh, he comes up really close to me, but pulls me into the office.

00:18:41.240 I come into the office.

00:18:41.940 He pulls me real close with, by a handshake, you know, Michael, I want you to know this

00:18:47.020 has nothing to do with your Twitter account or the publicity you're getting.

00:18:50.780 I said, oh, and, uh, sure, sure.

00:18:54.220 And then he said, just after that, hang on before this, you are a well-liked professor.

00:19:00.580 Well-liked.

00:19:01.420 You're, I was well-liked.

00:19:03.000 Students love me.

00:19:04.000 My student, you know, evaluations are very high.

00:19:07.140 I mean, I have done everything you're supposed to do.

00:19:09.980 And you were liked by your peers up until most of my colleagues like me.

00:19:13.440 Okay.

00:19:13.740 There was a few that didn't.

00:19:15.000 That's fine.

00:19:15.420 It's always going to happen.

00:19:16.240 And I had done everything that an academic is supposed to do.

00:19:19.600 Published widely, committee work, all that stuff.

00:19:23.160 Yep.

00:19:23.260 Yep.

00:19:23.480 I was a good citizen.

00:19:25.240 Okay.

00:19:25.980 Until I said the wrong thing.

00:19:27.800 Right.

00:19:28.340 Right.

00:19:29.100 Uh, and then he said, no, um, have a seat.

00:19:33.520 And if you don't mind, I would like the head of human resources to join us.

00:19:37.800 Uh-oh.

00:19:38.820 Right.

00:19:39.420 Yeah.

00:19:39.580 And so he continues by saying, people are worried about you.

00:19:43.200 Well, and I said, really, why?

00:19:44.940 He said, uh, they think that this Twitter account, which this has nothing to do with,

00:19:50.580 represents a cry for help as one of the people.

00:19:54.620 But I said, who said that?

00:19:55.560 And he wouldn't tell me.

00:19:56.380 He said, this is confidential.

00:19:58.220 Somebody in the department said they thought my Twitter account was a cry for help.

00:20:03.020 And, you know, in other words, they were, he was suggesting something was wrong with me

00:20:06.480 mentally, like that I had some sort of a psychological problem.

00:20:10.080 So in other words, I'm being called crazy for my views.

00:20:13.060 It's that simple.

00:20:14.820 And, um, then the pressure came, you know, to, to accede to their view.

00:20:20.860 They wanted me to take a leave of absence, get off campus, get out of here.

00:20:24.840 And for my good, for my own good.

00:20:27.000 Uh, no, wait, wait, wait.

00:20:28.080 Well, for your own good, because it would become unsafe or because, well, because they

00:20:31.880 said I needed the rest.

00:20:33.520 Right.

00:20:33.940 Yeah.

00:20:34.540 Right.

00:20:34.980 Right.

00:20:35.140 So there, so it's clear.

00:20:37.260 And if you take that, did this occur to you?

00:20:39.940 Yes, it did.

00:20:40.620 Yeah.

00:20:40.920 If you take that, I am admitting in a way that I am exhausted and need.

00:20:46.520 Yeah.

00:20:46.540 That I need some help.

00:20:47.520 I need rest.

00:20:48.100 And I might need, you know, some sort of, uh, I might need therapy, whatever.

00:20:51.420 I might need medicine.

00:20:52.420 I don't know.

00:20:52.680 Whatever they, they thought or trying to insinuate rather.

00:20:56.560 And then.

00:20:57.720 But you took them up on that.

00:20:59.340 Well, I did because there was something else at stake.

00:21:01.540 Okay.

00:21:01.840 That is, I had been up for a promotion to full professor since the previous April.

00:21:08.040 Now we're sitting here in September at this point, or October, I guess, by this time.

00:21:13.300 And, um, this, this, this promotion was largely dependent upon, uh, the upper administration

00:21:21.480 approving me as, and I needed this, this promotion because, um, I've worked your whole.

00:21:27.540 I've worked, yeah, I, I needed, I deserved it.

00:21:30.180 There was nobody that had done more, uh, publishing and, uh, and so forth in the department.

00:21:34.760 I ran a massive, uh, uh, um, conference on secularism and brought scholars from all over

00:21:42.720 the world.

00:21:43.160 The first conference by this, uh, that it was ever put up by this department.

00:21:46.640 And I needed this, this, uh, this promotion badly and I wanted it badly.

00:21:52.880 And I thought that if I didn't, uh, you know, if I didn't go along or acquiesce with what

00:21:57.600 they wanted, that they would, um, you know, that I wouldn't get the promotion that, that,

00:22:01.900 that I would be, you know, right.

00:22:03.480 Maybe you could, maybe you could just do this thing and then it would be over and you could

00:22:08.340 come back.

00:22:09.040 Right.

00:22:09.280 And then I, you know, also the promotion would be announced and I'd get it because I gave

00:22:13.360 into the demands and all that.

00:22:15.440 But then after I left, you know, I felt very coerced into that.

00:22:19.800 And the, and the, and the leftists are saying that I lied because they said, you know, and

00:22:24.200 the university later said, you know, all leaves of absence for medical reasons are voluntary.

00:22:28.660 Yes, it was voluntary, but they were twisting my arm, you know, certainly leftists should

00:22:33.220 understand power differentials.

00:22:34.900 Isn't that their thing?

00:22:35.860 Yeah.

00:22:36.760 Yeah.

00:22:37.020 Right.

00:22:37.500 Yeah, it is.

00:22:38.380 Um, I, uh, you know, I took, I, I said, okay.

00:22:42.920 And then I went to my office.

00:22:44.140 They actually had the head of human resources shadow me on the campus for the rest of the

00:22:48.000 day.

00:22:48.280 Like we wouldn't leave my side.

00:22:50.300 Wow.

00:22:50.940 As if I was opposing some sort of a threat or somebody might pose a threat to me.

00:22:54.880 I don't know why, but they just suggested that she stay with me while I was on campus.

00:23:00.360 And so she did.

00:23:01.460 And then I got uncomfortable with her and I said, listen, I just think you can go.

00:23:05.640 I'm fine.

00:23:06.320 I'll just, I'm in my office.

00:23:07.560 I said, I'll lock the door, whatever you're worried about.

00:23:10.180 Nothing's going to happen here.

00:23:11.160 So she left and I got a call from the New York post like five minutes later saying, you

00:23:17.300 know, we, we are following this case with a great keen interest.

00:23:20.560 And we think, you know, we really support what you're saying and what you're doing.

00:23:23.500 And we think the university's treatment of you is bad, deplorable.

00:23:27.220 And I said, what treatment?

00:23:29.340 Cause how, cause how could she know?

00:23:31.900 Well, there was an open letter that had been published in the same newspaper where my

00:23:36.260 interview was published in which I was denounced really wildly by this committee calling itself

00:23:41.680 the diversity, equity, and inclusion group, which I've later dubbed the conformity, inequity,

00:23:48.600 and exclusion group.

00:23:49.660 Right.

00:23:49.900 Because they certainly wanted to exclude me.

00:23:52.260 Right.

00:23:52.520 They wanted to, you know, debunk, they wanted me out.

00:23:55.760 Right.

00:23:55.960 They, they came out against me in no uncertain terms, basically calling me guilty for the

00:24:02.460 structure of my thought.

00:24:04.400 That is for my, you know, for my thinking of wrong.

00:24:07.300 They could use me of wrong think in effect.

00:24:09.160 But, and, um, so she told me about this open letter and I said, oh wow, do you think there's

00:24:14.160 any connection between my Twitter account, the interview and this open letter and the

00:24:19.420 leave of absence?

00:24:20.220 And she said, are you kidding?

00:24:21.580 Of course there is.

00:24:23.020 So I said, I better, you know, so she convinced me to go on the record.

00:24:25.960 I had to, because I thought if I don't, they could just bury me, I'd be out of there and

00:24:30.100 that would be, it would be over.

00:24:31.220 Yeah.

00:24:31.500 So I went on the record and they, you know, they accused me of being, you know, media, uh,

00:24:35.660 you know, the university accused me of being sort of like media hungry or something.

00:24:39.980 I was looking for attention.

00:24:41.080 I don't know.

00:24:41.280 I had, I wasn't looking for anything.

00:24:42.700 They were looking for attention.

00:24:43.780 I was trying to, I didn't have opinions, but I certainly wasn't looking for this kind

00:24:47.780 of attention.

00:24:48.440 Right.

00:24:48.820 Right.

00:24:49.700 And, um, so I, I went on the record and I started to go on the record and tell them

00:24:54.240 that, uh, you know, tell them what I released that I, uh, to let them publish the story

00:24:58.540 about this.

00:24:59.680 And they did.

00:25:00.440 So I went on, you know, she asked them questions about what I thought about this and that.

00:25:03.880 And we went out with it.

00:25:05.660 And then it just went viral.

00:25:19.060 The biggest betrayal your friends must've felt was going on Fox.

00:25:25.200 Yes, they did.

00:25:26.480 Oh, they thought that was just unbelievable.

00:25:28.560 And when you went on, what were you expecting?

00:25:31.740 Uh, I was expecting supportive, uh, conversation.

00:25:34.300 I didn't expect to be attacked and they didn't, you know, nobody on Fox attacked me at all.

00:25:37.980 In fact, they were supportive.

00:25:39.320 So if you're being chased and be, uh, you know, called a devil and, uh, Satan and white

00:25:45.840 pants or shirt pants, white boy by these other people.

00:25:48.600 And, uh, and, uh, and this other group is being very friendly and nice and cordial and welcoming

00:25:53.360 and supportive.

00:25:53.980 Where are you going to go?

00:25:55.380 So it made perfect sense for me to, to talk to that, to Fox and other, uh, right leaning

00:26:01.060 media.

00:26:01.420 And, um, because they, they really having been the victims, if you will, of this very kind

00:26:08.300 of head hunting.

00:26:09.580 Yeah.

00:26:09.900 Uh, they understood.

00:26:11.400 Yeah.

00:26:11.720 And that was very nice.

00:26:13.140 Yeah.

00:26:13.520 Um, and, uh, so, uh, I couldn't help but think that I've been with the wrong people for a

00:26:20.020 long time, you know?

00:26:21.480 Yeah.

00:26:22.400 Uh, in fact, I've had no better friends than I've had since this.

00:26:25.500 I mean, really, really good people.

00:26:27.700 It's amazing the difference.

00:26:29.140 It's, um, I think there's a different, you know, there's, um, some people, not all people,

00:26:36.920 but some people, because they've really been pushed for so long on what they believe they've

00:26:41.560 been called all kinds of names.

00:26:42.580 Yeah.

00:26:43.220 You, at least for me, when I left Fox, before I went to Fox, I was on CNN.

00:26:49.520 Yeah.

00:26:49.960 I won the most admired man in the world.

00:26:53.920 I was, I was tied for fourth between Nelson Mandela and the Pope.

00:26:58.700 Wow.

00:26:59.140 Okay.

00:26:59.500 That's crazy.

00:27:00.080 That's impressive.

00:27:01.080 I tell you.

00:27:01.700 A year later, I wasn't on that list.

00:27:04.660 Wow.

00:27:05.100 I was hated by everybody.

00:27:07.360 Okay.

00:27:07.640 I did the same show, did the same show.

00:27:10.540 Um, what happened?

00:27:12.560 Uh, the platform was so huge and, um, and, uh, I just, I think I misjudged and I think

00:27:19.840 this tool went into effect.

00:27:22.900 I think it's a combination of a lot of things.

00:27:24.480 Yeah.

00:27:24.880 Um, but, you know, I stepped back.

00:27:28.620 I went back from that and I went, how does 50% of the country who didn't have a problem

00:27:33.280 with me just a few years ago, right?

00:27:35.020 How are, what is, what have I done?

00:27:37.700 Am I what they think I am?

00:27:39.620 I know I'm not, you know, the hero that the right thinks I am.

00:27:43.520 I'm not that guy.

00:27:44.460 Yeah.

00:27:44.620 But I'm not that guy either.

00:27:46.780 No, I know.

00:27:47.320 And so you self-reflect.

00:27:49.060 I don't think people on the left for a long time, um, have had to self-reflect.

00:27:56.240 Oh.

00:27:56.720 And it's, it's amazing to me that we're repeating McCarthyism in reverse.

00:28:03.620 In reverse.

00:28:04.040 And it's, and it's also involving the Russians.

00:28:06.640 I mean, everything, everything's there.

00:28:08.020 All the players just taking it.

00:28:09.660 It's the same characters, you know, with different, different script.

00:28:13.480 Right.

00:28:13.720 It's really unbelievable.

00:28:14.940 So let me, let me take you now into something that I, um, I think that people on the right

00:28:20.460 have absolutely no clue of what it really means.

00:28:24.640 One of your tweets was, uh, you know, yeah.

00:28:27.000 Father, father, no, no more father, daughter dances.

00:28:29.940 Yeah.

00:28:30.620 Yeah.

00:28:30.800 How about this?

00:28:31.440 And what was the person that was, it was somebody actually, it came out of the Google

00:28:34.960 lawsuit with James DeMora and this person who identifies as a, uh, yellow, uh, wingless

00:28:41.220 dragonfly kin and an ornate building.

00:28:46.580 That's their sexual identity.

00:28:49.120 An ornate building.

00:28:49.960 And an ornate building.

00:28:50.840 So don't, don't ask me how this, you know, sexuality works because it's an ornate building.

00:28:56.220 I don't know.

00:28:57.200 I'm sure there's some portals there, but I mean, you know, but that's, you just parked

00:29:02.460 that tractor trailer in the back.

00:29:03.980 Those are, those are some of the people that work at Google that James DeMora who got, you

00:29:08.420 know, got fired for expressing the view that there were, there was a difference between

00:29:11.920 the genders.

00:29:12.440 Yes.

00:29:13.540 Uh, those are the kinds of people, those identities are actually venerated.

00:29:18.040 They're valued and they're actually observed.

00:29:19.960 Uh, at the, at that organization.

00:29:23.420 I mean, so you have to, you have to refer to people as if they are what they say they

00:29:27.140 are.

00:29:27.680 A large ornate building.

00:29:29.480 Yes.

00:29:30.320 I guess you've been described as that lately.

00:29:31.820 I don't know if you go up and knock on their head or what.

00:29:33.780 I mean.

00:29:34.000 All right.

00:29:34.720 Okay.

00:29:35.120 So, so let me just, let me, one more before we back up into all of this stuff.

00:29:40.560 Yeah.

00:29:40.720 Um, uh, were you for the gender thing when you were?

00:29:47.860 The transgenderism and all that?

00:29:49.260 Not transgenderism.

00:29:50.500 The, the, the, the, yeah.

00:29:51.800 The, the whole, everything is fluid.

00:29:54.000 There's 183.

00:29:55.720 It, it, it was disturbing to me from the beginning to tell you the truth.

00:29:58.620 But you didn't say anything about it.

00:30:00.180 I didn't say anything about it.

00:30:00.800 I figured it was like, there were, there were some touch, you know, touchy subjects on

00:30:05.160 the left that you didn't go after.

00:30:07.000 Because you'd just be, you'd just be vilified instantly.

00:30:10.800 I mean, you know, you're just.

00:30:12.340 But you didn't buy into it.

00:30:13.760 I didn't buy into it at all.

00:30:14.880 I, but I didn't touch it.

00:30:16.480 Okay.

00:30:16.780 You know, I was, you know, you'd be just vilified for being who you are.

00:30:21.040 And you're only saying that because you are a cis, a cis hetero male, you know, cis means.

00:30:28.200 Yeah.

00:30:28.360 This is the word they made up for other than trans.

00:30:31.140 It's the non-glorious category.

00:30:33.300 Right.

00:30:34.640 So yeah, you just, I knew that you didn't touch these things unless you wanted all, all this

00:30:39.280 fury to come at you.

00:30:40.860 So I've, I've written a book called Addicted to Outrage.

00:30:44.280 I saw, I know that.

00:30:45.260 And addict, we know the addiction is happening.

00:30:48.520 I mean, these companies are designing those, you know, those apps to be addicted.

00:30:53.900 Right.

00:30:54.000 Then we're, on top of that, we're yelling at each other, calling each other names, which

00:30:59.600 shuts down all thinking.

00:31:01.960 Mm-hmm.

00:31:02.780 People are afraid on both sides.

00:31:05.380 Yes.

00:31:05.820 Which shuts down all thinking.

00:31:07.620 Yes.

00:31:07.960 We're becoming very tribal.

00:31:09.820 Right.

00:31:10.220 We have this when somebody says something, we now can say it back twice as loud.

00:31:15.880 Right.

00:31:16.100 Which is very addicting.

00:31:17.740 Right.

00:31:18.040 But, um, and when I found post-modernism about two years ago, I started going, whoa, whoa,

00:31:27.280 whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, what?

00:31:29.600 Because as a conservative.

00:31:31.800 Yeah.

00:31:32.340 You don't know all this crap.

00:31:33.520 Yeah.

00:31:33.900 And you don't know, you, you, you just hear these words and you're like, what the hell does

00:31:37.980 that mean?

00:31:38.280 Where did that come from?

00:31:39.420 Exactly.

00:31:39.920 Okay.

00:31:40.500 Right.

00:31:40.780 And it's really well thought out.

00:31:42.380 And when you understand the, the, um, original birth and point of post-modernism, um, you

00:31:54.740 realize, I mean, I cannot find a reason that that isn't just 100% destructive.

00:32:04.560 I mean, that's its point.

00:32:05.980 Yes, it is its point.

00:32:07.360 And so it is destruction.

00:32:09.060 Right.

00:32:09.520 And so if we are, if we are ramping it back up on our side, it doesn't leave a place for

00:32:17.980 anyone like you or like me that goes, I don't want to be with either of those people.

00:32:22.320 Right.

00:32:22.900 Oh, that's right.

00:32:23.460 That's true.

00:32:24.300 Let me give you a little, a very short little metaphorical way of understanding the difference

00:32:29.040 between say post-modernism and Marxism.

00:32:31.360 Okay.

00:32:31.700 Okay.

00:32:32.300 If, if Marxism is about blowing up the house and to, and you know, raising it to the, to

00:32:38.200 the ground, post-modernism is about putting a few little termites here and there in the,

00:32:44.840 in the walls and watch the house get eaten up slowly until it finally collapses out of

00:32:51.800 its, under its own weight.

00:32:53.600 So the point being that Marxism was about overthrowing everything, overthrowing the whole social

00:33:00.120 order, overthrowing capitalism, overthrowing the ruling class.

00:33:03.380 No, no.

00:33:04.560 Post-modernism said that can't be done because you can't tackle the totality of the world.

00:33:10.840 You can only do these little subversive things at one at a time here and there, and that we'll

00:33:17.520 work on it.

00:33:18.220 We'll work on the system in a different way.

00:33:20.920 Okay.

00:33:21.200 So please, um, I know, uh, I could tell you everything there is to know about progressivism

00:33:28.320 early 20th century.

00:33:29.280 Sure.

00:33:29.500 I've, I've, I've studied it.

00:33:31.060 Yeah.

00:33:31.420 Um, so correct.

00:33:32.980 Let me lay this out and you correct me where I, where I don't have it and I am wrong.

00:33:37.340 That's fine.

00:33:37.820 Yeah.

00:33:37.940 And then we'll, and then we'll, you can fill in all of the gaps.

00:33:41.020 Okay.

00:33:41.540 Um, the turn of the century, uh, the American system is not moving fast enough.

00:33:50.040 We have science, we have eugenics, we have all these things, bright horizon.

00:33:54.540 Yeah.

00:33:55.660 And because, you know, um, a Republic is plotting and ugly and, you know, it just doesn't move

00:34:05.360 fast.

00:34:05.820 Yeah.

00:34:06.460 The idea is if we just put an authoritarian in, now this is before any of that's bad.

00:34:12.000 Yeah.

00:34:12.240 We put some strong leader in.

00:34:14.120 Yeah.

00:34:14.680 He'll be able to lead us and he'll, the state will be able to say, no, we have to make this,

00:34:20.100 we have to make this, we have to do this.

00:34:21.860 And it's all going to, cause we're working together.

00:34:24.200 Right.

00:34:24.540 Correct.

00:34:24.900 Right.

00:34:25.180 There's the utopian early 1900s.

00:34:28.300 Yeah, that's right.

00:34:28.780 Okay.

00:34:30.000 Then revolution happens in Russia.

00:34:32.640 Yeah.

00:34:32.960 And the progressives have been arguing in the West, they want communism or fascism.

00:34:39.680 Right.

00:34:39.840 I think this is right before fascism really starts.

00:34:41.780 Right.

00:34:42.080 They were eugenicists too.

00:34:43.360 Right.

00:34:43.940 Right.

00:34:44.080 Yeah.

00:34:44.240 And they want to create this utopian world.

00:34:46.600 That's right.

00:34:46.820 And there's no negative on it at this point.

00:34:50.320 That's right.

00:34:50.840 Okay.

00:34:51.080 So they're, they're moving towards that, but they see the revolution and, and the West

00:34:57.240 says, we don't want a bloody revolution.

00:34:59.820 Right.

00:35:00.360 Right.

00:35:00.640 We don't want to do that.

00:35:01.800 Right.

00:35:02.080 But we want this.

00:35:03.020 So we want the object though.

00:35:04.140 Right.

00:35:04.420 So we want to, we will just take progressive steps.

00:35:07.920 At what point does the postmodern theory of let's add some termite, let's speed this

00:35:16.680 up.

00:35:17.060 Yeah.

00:35:17.340 At what point does that come?

00:35:18.300 That happens in 1968 in France.

00:35:20.660 Yeah.

00:35:21.080 It's a result.

00:35:22.480 Well, the way to understand the birth of postmodernism is this, it is a philosophical

00:35:28.320 and social cultural response to the failure of the 1968 student rebellion in France.

00:35:35.500 The student rebellion, it also involved, you know, union workers from, from public, uh, from

00:35:42.540 publicly held, uh, organizations or companies, you know, like the, the railroads, uh, the

00:35:48.020 subways and all that it, you know, the students and these workers, they were on the verge, they

00:35:53.420 thought of overthrowing capitalism in France and therefore throughout Europe.

00:35:57.680 And therefore, perhaps after that in the United States and it failed, it, it did not end in a revolution.

00:36:03.740 It ended in, in anarchy.

00:36:05.180 Nothing took place.

00:36:06.180 They didn't overthrow the state.

00:36:07.480 Nothing.

00:36:07.740 Can you stop there for a second and back up?

00:36:10.420 Tell me the significance of the Frankfurt school meeting in 1959.

00:36:13.880 Well, the Frankfurt school is another, I would call them neo-Marxist.

00:36:18.400 Okay.

00:36:18.660 Uh, they're a different, uh, breed.

00:36:21.100 They're coming out of Germany.

00:36:22.120 They left, uh, Nazi Germany just in the beginning in like 33, uh, after Hitler comes to power and

00:36:28.880 they realize they're in bad shape.

00:36:30.480 If they stay, they're intellectuals, they're Jewish.

00:36:32.980 Right.

00:36:33.480 And, uh, they're, they're, they'd be on the, the hunt list right away.

00:36:37.300 Right.

00:36:37.880 Uh, so they escaped to the United States and, uh, they set up at Columbia actually first.

00:36:43.400 Right.

00:36:43.800 And then out in Berkeley.

00:36:45.060 Um, they mostly are, they're just theorists.

00:36:48.900 They're not, they're theorists, but they're not theorists who are going to be, uh, they're

00:36:54.860 not the kind of theory that you read and say, let's put this into practice.

00:36:58.640 Uh, they're rather theorists who say, basically, let's just keep it theoretical, frankly.

00:37:05.280 Uh, but that's not the case with what happens after the 1968, uh, failure of the 1968 rebellion.

00:37:11.780 Okay.

00:37:11.820 As a matter of fact, Hork, um, Adorno, Theodore Adorno, who's one of the major players in the,

00:37:17.440 um, in that, uh, that movement, the, the, uh, Frankfurt school, he, he was appalled by the

00:37:24.740 1968, uh, student rebellion, which spread to Germany as well.

00:37:28.420 He was totally appalled by it.

00:37:30.300 He thought it was horrific.

00:37:31.820 He, it reminded him of fascism.

00:37:33.700 How do you like that?

00:37:35.280 Okay.

00:37:35.460 So hang on, let's stop at 1968.

00:37:37.880 Cause every, I think everybody knows 1968 in America, horrible.

00:37:42.000 Yeah.

00:37:42.760 RFK, Martin Luther King, I think Malcolm X in the same year.

00:37:46.160 Um, we have the same year we're doing the moonshot.

00:37:49.880 Yeah.

00:37:50.400 That same summer is Woodstock.

00:37:52.620 And I think Altamont.

00:37:54.200 Yeah.

00:37:54.600 Perhaps.

00:37:55.200 I'm not sure about that.

00:37:56.000 Um, I, I, one of them was in 68.

00:37:58.840 I think it might've been Altamont.

00:38:00.580 Um, and it, I'd love to hear your theory of why it falls apart here.

00:38:06.360 You know, this is when the Beatles come out with revolution and their answer saying, I'm

00:38:11.560 not doing that.

00:38:12.340 Yes.

00:38:12.660 We're not joining.

00:38:13.580 Right.

00:38:13.820 Um, and so the whole thing kind of falls apart here.

00:38:17.740 How much of that is connected America 1968 to Paris 1968?

00:38:23.080 Very much so.

00:38:23.920 Yeah.

00:38:24.320 The same kind of people or actual connections?

00:38:27.400 Uh, it's the same kind of people in the same spirit.

00:38:30.020 You know, the movement, it's not necessarily like, there's no tactical connections that

00:38:34.140 much.

00:38:34.540 Right.

00:38:34.680 But it's the, they're in the same spirit of a kind of cultural revolution, uh, that

00:38:40.460 we had here, of course, but a cultural revolution that they also wanted to become political and

00:38:45.360 it didn't happen.

00:38:46.880 And so postmodernism was born as a response to that.

00:38:50.840 And how was it born?

00:38:52.100 Who started it?

00:38:53.020 What?

00:38:53.320 Uh, it started this way.

00:38:54.820 Um, and so they're, even though they were moving away from Marxism as such, they all,

00:39:00.880 they did incorporate some techniques from Maoism.

00:39:04.000 Uh, people were, feminists were sitting around reading miles, red book and in France and they

00:39:10.640 didn't know about the horrors that were happening there.

00:39:12.800 Okay.

00:39:12.960 They just thought this is the way to go.

00:39:14.760 The cultural revolution, you know, we, we can, you know, have a full communism, a total

00:39:20.940 communistic revolution, culturally, socially, politically, and every other way.

00:39:25.020 I'm so, I'm so riddled with ADD.

00:39:27.320 I'm sorry to pull you off again, but how do people still Marxists and communists, how do

00:39:33.940 they still not see every time it's tried and then just draw the conclusion that you're going

00:39:39.660 to have a great number of people that don't want to do it?

00:39:41.920 We joke about this friends of mine now.

00:39:43.780 It's, it's always next time, next time it's going to be right.

00:39:46.140 Next time it'll be right.

00:39:47.020 Next time we won't do that.

00:39:48.260 You know?

00:39:48.380 So they say that, you know, there was mistakes made or that wasn't really socialism.

00:39:53.220 That's the other way they usually go.

00:39:54.760 That was actually state capitalism, blah, blah, blah.

00:39:57.580 So they have every type of excuse instead of seeing that when you run an experiment X amount

00:40:03.360 of times and the result is the same, no matter where it's run.

00:40:06.080 So it can't be blamed on the people and their regional differences or peculiarities.

00:40:11.040 It's got to be on the system that's being implemented.

00:40:13.480 And it, it ends the same way every time.

00:40:16.320 Pol Pot, uh, you know, Mao, Stalin, it happens.

00:40:20.940 I'm sorry, but I put, I put, I put Hitler in, I know there's a difference, but to me, it

00:40:26.740 is a difference of how much the state actually owns and, uh, and, uh, and, and, and, uh, and

00:40:34.760 if it's international or national, but I mean, those are, those are both the same idea.

00:40:38.720 It's socialism.

00:40:39.600 There's, it is national.

00:40:40.480 There is one other difference though.

00:40:42.000 And that is the type of people that are deemed villains or vilified and the reason they're

00:40:47.100 vilified in, in the case of, uh, Nazism, the difference is that the Nazis and Hitler is

00:40:54.000 of course the main agent here, they see the, the enemy to the state in terms of race, whereas

00:41:03.600 in the Soviet union and, uh, communist China and, uh, Vietnam, North Vietnam, et cetera,

00:41:10.160 et cetera, they see the enemy of the state in terms of ideology.

00:41:14.600 So because putatively people can change their ideology, you're not trapped.

00:41:19.800 Right.

00:41:20.460 Okay.

00:41:20.700 Like you are in the cases of race where you can't get out of your racial identity.

00:41:24.580 Communism though does, I mean, Marxism.

00:41:25.800 Although George Soros did.

00:41:28.060 Marxism, Marxism though does, it does carry with it a lot of antisemitism.

00:41:33.480 It does.

00:41:34.520 Indeed.

00:41:35.580 I mean, it's usually, usually when you start to hear antisemitic things, that's the first,

00:41:41.320 uh, you know.

00:41:41.920 The left is riddled with this.

00:41:43.120 This happened in the labor party in England is going, in Great Britain is going through this

00:41:46.900 right now too.

00:41:47.440 I mean, there's the, the, the antisemitism on the left is just viral over there.

00:41:52.460 Okay.

00:41:52.680 Yeah, that's true.

00:41:53.360 All right.

00:41:53.580 So 1968.

00:41:54.820 68.

00:41:55.920 So what happens is these theorists say, okay, so you can't overthrow the totality.

00:42:01.120 This, this, let's go at it in a different way.

00:42:04.020 In effect, let's attack the character of language.

00:42:07.280 Language is the big power structure now.

00:42:09.540 So deconstruction is born.

00:42:12.180 Jacques Derda, he's a philosopher.

00:42:14.460 He says that there is nothing outside of text.

00:42:19.260 Okay.

00:42:20.240 He says this in his book of grammatology in 1968.

00:42:23.620 There is nothing outside.

00:42:25.020 There is no outside of text.

00:42:26.720 Meaning those words are the words.

00:42:31.080 And, and what he's saying is this, that language doesn't have any real connection to anything

00:42:38.940 but itself.

00:42:39.820 So this is, I'm sorry, this, I mean, you may not even know this reference.

00:42:44.160 I read Saul Kripke.

00:42:45.640 Okay.

00:42:45.960 And he, and he basically, a wheel is a wheel because we call it a wheel.

00:42:49.860 And that's part of it.

00:42:51.080 Yeah.

00:42:51.200 The arbitrary nature of language, right?

00:42:53.320 That every word is arbitrary.

00:42:54.800 For example, tree has no relation to the plant.

00:42:57.400 Right.

00:42:57.860 Tree.

00:42:58.580 Right.

00:42:58.800 We'd call it tree.

00:42:59.480 And some of that makes sense.

00:43:00.720 I mean, when you think of the wheel is the wheel because we call it a wheel.

00:43:03.620 Yeah.

00:43:04.420 It, it, it, I've always used that as an understanding of handicapable.

00:43:08.180 You, you can, you can call them Superman.

00:43:11.300 Yeah.

00:43:11.580 But in one generation, it's, you're going to think, well, I have to build a ramp for Superman.

00:43:16.660 That's right.

00:43:16.960 So it, it, it, it doesn't matter what word you attach to it.

00:43:20.240 That's right.

00:43:20.380 It doesn't matter.

00:43:21.060 But from that, he decides the idea is that all philosophy, all of Western philosophy, all

00:43:29.860 of Western thought, he thinks is invalidated by the idea that these words that are supposedly

00:43:36.120 connected to real things are not connected to real things at all.

00:43:40.180 And so the whole of Western society and Western philosophy is just like, is bogus.

00:43:45.680 Okay.

00:43:47.200 And, uh, it's different from the Christian notion or the Judeo-Christian notion that in

00:43:53.020 the beginning was, there was the word.

00:43:55.020 Okay.

00:43:55.820 In the sense that the word is, is God.

00:43:59.980 Yes.

00:44:00.340 Okay.

00:44:00.760 So there is an ontological connection and ontology means on the register of being, whether something

00:44:06.640 exists or not, there is an ontological connection between the word and God.

00:44:11.540 Yes.

00:44:11.860 Right.

00:44:12.120 Yes.

00:44:12.540 It's inherent.

00:44:13.520 Right.

00:44:13.700 It is identified with.

00:44:15.480 Yes.

00:44:15.660 Okay.

00:44:16.040 So here in this case, language is broken off from the world.

00:44:20.420 And, but they also, this suggests there's nothing but language, nothing but language.

00:44:25.360 That's it.

00:44:26.340 That everything is text.

00:44:28.880 Yes.

00:44:29.360 That's how far they went with this.

00:44:30.820 And therefore they say, if we really want to subvert society, we've got to subvert it textually.

00:44:36.240 We've got to subvert it through textual politics.

00:44:40.100 Okay.

00:44:40.300 So, um, let me go back in time.

00:44:43.260 1920.

00:44:43.780 Harvard, I think is the first one that starts to say, forget reading the constitution.

00:44:47.720 Harvard is the first one that takes up deconstruction.

00:44:50.160 Right.

00:44:50.420 In the seventies.

00:44:51.620 In the seventies.

00:44:52.160 Okay.

00:44:52.360 Early seventies.

00:44:52.760 Let me go, let me go back to the twenties here for a second.

00:44:54.820 Okay.

00:44:55.200 They're saying, um, you know, in law school, don't study the constitution.

00:44:59.860 We're going to do case law.

00:45:01.280 Yeah.

00:45:01.300 And they start to study case law, which gets us away from the text.

00:45:04.440 Yeah.

00:45:04.640 You also, in the twenties, start to have people rewriting history books.

00:45:08.800 Yeah.

00:45:08.940 This is, this is entirely different.

00:45:11.360 This isn't different.

00:45:12.080 Did we say Harvard?

00:45:13.120 It's Yale.

00:45:13.760 Is it Yale?

00:45:14.300 It's Yale that takes, uh, takes up the construction.

00:45:17.040 Okay.

00:45:17.780 And you know, here's an interesting story.

00:45:20.260 Sitting on the tarmac after they landed in the United States in Boston, Derrida and his

00:45:26.680 co-conspirator of deconstructionism said to each, they said to each other, one of them

00:45:31.940 said to the other, you know, we're about to unleash a virus on this culture.

00:45:35.840 And that's exactly how they saw it.

00:45:37.580 They saw it as a virus that would, that would eat at the very foundations of all of our cultural

00:45:44.200 values.

00:45:44.900 And that's exactly what they did.

00:45:46.840 I think that's what people are feeling now, but they don't understand it.

00:45:50.000 They don't realize this is where it came.

00:45:51.180 This virus was unleashed on us and has worked its way into the entire body politic and it's,

00:45:56.860 it's undermined all of our ontological beliefs.

00:46:00.300 And this was where all of this crazy stuff about gender and gender differences and non-binariness

00:46:06.760 and all this that has nothing to do with biology.

00:46:09.340 This is where it came from.

00:46:10.700 So I had, I had somebody who is a lefty, but reasonable, um, say, um, you know, postmodernism

00:46:17.960 is really dangerous.

00:46:19.160 Um, you know, but it has its place in, for instance, um, the literary realm.

00:46:24.040 Yeah.

00:46:24.280 But as I understand it, and please help me understand this, as I understand it, what postmodernism

00:46:30.940 gives you license to do is to go up and say, well, this is what this word means.

00:46:36.320 I don't care what it meant back then.

00:46:38.280 Yeah.

00:46:38.680 This is what it means.

00:46:39.560 So you can basically deconstruct and reconstruct any story out of its time.

00:46:46.600 Is that right or wrong?

00:46:48.200 Well, the, what it really is, is that that this isn't important.

00:46:53.560 No, this is important because the thing is about, about the idea that it's valuable in

00:46:58.920 literature.

00:46:59.240 That's a good point, but they believe they're undertaking politics through literature, right?

00:47:04.460 That this is all, this is all political, right?

00:47:07.440 Everything is political.

00:47:08.520 All texts are political.

00:47:09.440 Correct.

00:47:09.780 The novel, the novel is political.

00:47:12.380 You can see the gender constructions here.

00:47:15.400 You can see the, you can see the patriarchy here.

00:47:18.360 You can see the colonialism here.

00:47:20.000 You can see all this literature now is not read for this, the aesthetic value anymore.

00:47:24.360 It's read for the political valences that it supposedly contains.

00:47:28.520 And deconstruction is like, is a way of saying, let's expose the way Western culture has been

00:47:34.180 setting up this hegemony over all of, over all these people.

00:47:38.180 Let's expose it through deconstruction.

00:47:40.320 Let's take these texts and take them apart and show how, in fact, they're kind of, they're

00:47:44.500 trying to make me the other, they're trying to demote these people, that people, the other

00:47:48.460 people, things like that.

00:47:49.880 So that's, it's, it's, it is, it is, it is something that they, you know, that was used

00:47:56.140 in literature, but literature studies now, literary studies was not deemed anything but political

00:48:00.400 work, a cultural politics.

00:48:02.760 Okay.

00:48:03.040 Yeah.

00:48:03.520 All right.

00:48:04.060 So, um, again, it helped me in this, I got to go back to Frankfurt because the Frankfurt

00:48:09.340 school in 59, they're, they're kind of, I could be wrong.

00:48:14.080 Um, they're kind of seeing the post-world war or the post-war world.

00:48:19.680 And they're saying, these guys are not going to stand up and be, they're not going to,

00:48:24.920 they're, they're, they are driving those huge cars with big fins and they're just not

00:48:30.940 going to do it.

00:48:31.500 That's right.

00:48:31.940 Right.

00:48:32.260 That's right.

00:48:32.880 That's exactly right.

00:48:34.040 And so they said the working class is not do, is not the agent that Mark said they were.

00:48:39.200 Right.

00:48:39.360 They weren't it.

00:48:40.060 They weren't going to be the ones to do it.

00:48:41.960 And so then they come to this understanding that, and I don't know how much of this they

00:48:46.780 actually believed or how much they just thought this was a working way to get around it was,

00:48:51.500 it's because they don't even know there.

00:48:54.280 It's almost like they're hypnotized by all this.

00:48:56.080 They don't even know they're oppressed.

00:48:57.420 That's right.

00:48:58.040 Well, one of the things is that, you know, they've been bought off by consumerism is one

00:49:02.320 of the things.

00:49:03.060 Also, they have been, um, they've been duped and completely sort of drugged by the culture

00:49:10.840 industry, as they put it.

00:49:12.180 Right.

00:49:12.360 The culture industry has inculcated their minds with capitalist ideology.

00:49:17.360 Right.

00:49:17.840 Um, that's what, uh, Horkheimer and Adorno said in their essay, the culture industry, enlightenment

00:49:23.300 as mass deception.

00:49:24.580 And in, and in some ways though, I mean, if you, if you read, uh, I'm trying to remember

00:49:30.240 his name, uh, the, the, the guy who really came up with propaganda under Wilson.

00:49:35.720 Oh, what was his name?

00:49:37.600 Um, anyway, now known as the greatest advertising man.

00:49:41.820 Oh yes.

00:49:42.460 Okay.

00:49:42.700 I know who you're referring to, but the name is also losing me.

00:49:45.320 He had women, you know, with the cigarettes and the Statue of Liberty and okay.

00:49:49.200 So in some ways the left is the one who created this way through Freud of, of actually indoctrinating

00:50:00.140 us.

00:50:00.760 Yeah.

00:50:00.900 And it is happening now.

00:50:03.400 Culture is steering.

00:50:04.980 We're not steering culture.

00:50:06.420 It's not a reflection.

00:50:07.620 It is.

00:50:08.160 Everything is.

00:50:08.840 Yeah.

00:50:09.000 Politics as we now see it, but we know this now we see it.

00:50:12.180 We're living this politics is so far downstream from culture.

00:50:15.060 It's, it's, it's impossible to, it is the beginning of the poop coming out of the dog.

00:50:20.220 That's right.

00:50:20.420 Not even that's what we're, that's what we're experiencing here.

00:50:23.500 And this is where this whole, this whole, let's, I call them the robotic left.

00:50:29.140 I call them the histrionic left.

00:50:30.660 I call them the, you know, the resistance.

00:50:33.080 I call them a lot of names.

00:50:35.820 Anyway, I saw in the, the Kavanaugh hearings.

00:50:38.840 Um, uh, no, it was actually, uh, somebody else during that week, there was, uh, uh, uh,

00:50:44.620 disruption on a campus in a class where these people came in and one person was shouting

00:50:49.320 and everybody else was shouting back.

00:50:51.080 Right.

00:50:51.200 That's right.

00:50:51.580 And I thought this is a, uh, I mean, almost what they accused the Catholic church of doing

00:50:57.680 all those years.

00:50:58.460 Absolutely.

00:50:58.780 You're just, you're just garbage in garbage out.

00:51:02.020 You're just repeating it.

00:51:03.240 This is, this has been one of my major complaints, you know, is to say what's happened to academia

00:51:07.740 with the left and their, their, their just robotic repeating of mantras, political mantras.

00:51:15.440 Right.

00:51:16.080 Like, uh, you know, it started, I guess, at Stanford when, when they had the chant to get

00:51:21.000 rid of a Western Civ and then they didn't mean the whole of Western civilization.

00:51:24.940 Yeah.

00:51:25.140 They meant a course called Western Civ.

00:51:27.040 Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.

00:51:29.020 You know, now that chant, Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.

00:51:32.800 So that became not the, not the course, but Western civilization itself has got to go.

00:51:37.580 And that's been really the object here.

00:51:39.980 They want to get rid of Western civilization entirely.

00:51:43.760 So tell me, explain how, cause I don't think people really get this.

00:51:47.560 They hear people are conservative, especially here postmodernism and they don't even know

00:51:52.000 what it means.

00:51:52.540 Yeah.

00:51:52.760 But if you, if, if you don't understand that it is the modern world is the world created

00:52:00.460 by the enlightenment and the enlightenment took us out of the dark ages, this is why

00:52:06.000 anything that stands to prop Western civilization up is, uh, needs to be destroyed.

00:52:14.280 And that's why you, that's why you can say mathematics is racist.

00:52:18.380 You say mathematics is racist, that it's, it's patriarchal, it's phallic, it's white supremacist.

00:52:24.160 And you say that because if you convince enough people, then you reject math.

00:52:30.180 And if you reject math, you got nothing.

00:52:32.640 Yeah.

00:52:32.900 Well, this is, you know, you, you're hitting a very big point here is that postmodernism

00:52:37.000 is anti-enlightenment.

00:52:38.480 It has always been against the enlightenment.

00:52:40.120 It's considers the enlightenment a means of, uh, of rationality used for power and domination

00:52:49.340 over others.

00:52:50.180 Okay.

00:52:50.760 That's the big sin of enlightenment.

00:52:52.760 People use science as a tool to oppress.

00:52:56.260 Right.

00:52:56.440 And that's why science is no good.

00:52:58.240 Well, in some ways, eugenics, it didn't necessarily start that way, but it certainly ended that way.

00:53:02.960 I mean, some, some, you, you know, eugenics, I would call eugenics more a social, uh, experiment,

00:53:09.300 you know, that draws from science.

00:53:11.200 It's not sick, strictly, you know, genetics is the science.

00:53:14.360 Right.

00:53:15.080 Uh, eugenics is the social project that uses science, but yeah.

00:53:18.920 Right.

00:53:19.800 Uh, let's, let's go to social media.

00:53:21.940 Social media can be used to oppress, but that's, you know, it's, uh, there's nothing

00:53:27.780 intrinsic about rationality that oppresses anyone just like language.

00:53:31.500 That's the other thing.

00:53:32.660 Another phrase that postmodernists through Iran was this thing called what they called

00:53:36.040 logocentrism and what they meant, logocentrism, which means a centering, centering on the

00:53:42.360 word.

00:53:42.740 And it was, the idea was languages is a form of domination over people.

00:53:47.540 Okay.

00:53:48.920 That's why deconstruction comes in because it wants to undo that domination of language.

00:53:55.480 So you're, if you were to ask me what then is postmodernism, Michael, I would say it is a,

00:54:01.960 a toolkit for dismantling all power structures without bombing the building.

00:54:12.400 Right.

00:54:12.680 Beyond, it's almost an, it's a, it's a neutron bomb.

00:54:15.840 Yeah.

00:54:16.260 Of logic and reason and anything.

00:54:21.360 Against those.

00:54:22.240 Yeah.

00:54:22.440 Yeah.

00:54:22.580 Against those.

00:54:23.160 Anything standing.

00:54:24.380 Anything standing, anything, anything established is bad.

00:54:27.500 Yeah.

00:54:28.160 Anything established is bad.

00:54:29.520 Any types of organization, structural hierarchies, anything like that is bad, bad, bad, just by

00:54:34.560 virtue of existing.

00:54:36.060 And I mean, you know, colonialism, everything and everything is the white man's fault.

00:54:40.520 I mean, everything where the only evil, the only evil that's ever been done on earth has

00:54:45.020 been done by white men.

00:54:46.220 Did you know that?

00:54:46.940 Europeans and Western Western, other Westerners.

00:54:49.840 That's it.

00:54:50.560 There's never been colonialism by others.

00:54:52.740 There's never been race.

00:54:53.900 There's never been.

00:54:54.960 I mean, unless you study history.

00:54:55.960 Yes.

00:54:56.160 Unless you study, which they don't do.

00:54:57.400 Yeah.

00:54:57.800 Right.

00:54:57.920 They have a cartoon version of history that they follow.

00:55:02.360 And you can't even, if you say something like, did you know that there's still slavery

00:55:06.780 going on today and that it's being undertaken by Islamists over people that are actually

00:55:13.160 black?

00:55:13.600 Did you know that's happening and that this is not, this is not the white man that's doing

00:55:18.140 this today?

00:55:18.540 In fact, the only people that ever ended slavery in history were European, were based, were

00:55:23.880 Eurocentric, if you will, or Euro-based.

00:55:26.800 So isn't that interesting?

00:55:28.040 But if you say that, they're just going to say, you're just saying that because you

00:55:30.780 are one of them and you're one of the oppressors.

00:55:33.200 So even saying that is a form of violence.

00:55:35.920 In the 90s, when we started first to become politically correct, you know, I knew control the

00:56:03.460 language win the argument, you know, but there's something in humans, maybe it's, you know, Americans

00:56:12.240 or I think it's all of us, I don't know, that I don't want to hurt your feelings.

00:56:17.620 You know, I don't, I want to get along with you.

00:56:19.380 Right.

00:56:19.480 So if you want to be called this, you want this to happen, I don't care.

00:56:23.940 I don't care.

00:56:24.620 As long as you don't force me to do it.

00:56:28.000 Right.

00:56:28.340 Right.

00:56:29.020 So political correctness, this kind of creeped up on us because it played to our heart.

00:56:34.360 Yes.

00:56:34.800 Right.

00:56:35.200 Right.

00:56:35.420 Um, but this is not political correctness that we're seeing now.

00:56:42.040 I mean, unless you emphasize political.

00:56:44.900 Yeah.

00:56:45.300 Right.

00:56:45.620 That's right.

00:56:45.860 Yeah.

00:56:46.020 If you're in line and you're correct with the political power.

00:56:50.000 Right.

00:56:50.280 You're fine.

00:56:50.960 But now there comes a big penalty.

00:56:53.180 Oh yeah.

00:56:54.540 And it seems every day, I think the, I think the enemy of civilization is obviously chaos.

00:57:03.000 And people feel that they are surrounded by chaos because you get up every day and there's

00:57:12.060 a new term that you'll be crucified for if you don't use today, even though yesterday

00:57:18.520 it was fine not to.

00:57:19.280 It was a different term.

00:57:20.080 Like literally that fast.

00:57:21.860 It's that fast.

00:57:22.780 And, and so there's lots of people who have never heard any of these terms.

00:57:27.820 They don't have any idea the source of where this stuff is coming from.

00:57:30.680 They're like, who's doing this?

00:57:32.360 Who's in control?

00:57:33.260 What is this?

00:57:33.760 I know it's incredible.

00:57:34.780 I, even in the, while I was amongst the left, in the left, I saw these terms coming up all

00:57:40.080 the time.

00:57:40.480 And I was, I was like, what is going on here?

00:57:42.320 Somebody said, well, you're as a cis hetero male, you dot, dot, dot, dot.

00:57:47.820 And I'm like, what is this?

00:57:50.300 You know, and I, you know, the term, I had no idea.

00:57:53.280 Yeah, I think this was about 2015 or 14 when this term first surfaced in my consciousness.

00:58:00.720 And then I found out it was something bad to be.

00:58:03.560 I mean, and what it meant was somebody who accepts the gender, they were assigned at birth.

00:58:12.000 I didn't know I was assigned a gender and they mean socially assigned.

00:58:15.920 They don't mean assigned by your chromosomes.

00:58:17.580 They mean assigned by the social order.

00:58:20.440 When you come out looking like this or that, that you were assigned to a gender.

00:58:24.400 Well, I know, you know, um, Brett Weinstein.

00:58:27.100 Yes, I do.

00:58:27.620 And I mean, he's an evolutionary scientist and that's why he got in trouble.

00:58:30.940 He's like, no, I'm a scientist, man.

00:58:32.780 Yeah.

00:58:33.280 You can't, you don't just assign, it's assigned by science.

00:58:36.780 It's assigned by the chromosomes, actually.

00:58:39.220 Right, right.

00:58:39.500 You know, by whether you have XX or XY.

00:58:41.980 Right.

00:58:42.160 I mean, there are some anomalies, of course.

00:58:44.540 Yes.

00:58:44.880 That are XXY or XYY, but you know, the great majority fall at the pools, at the binary ends.

00:58:51.680 Right.

00:58:51.820 You know, so those kinds of terms, you know, so they were subverting ontologies again, right?

00:58:57.140 Ontology is that entities, the beings, you know, established entities in the social order

00:59:04.100 by virtue of language.

00:59:05.520 Here we go again.

00:59:06.160 See how language is working to undercut social certainties of all types.

00:59:11.920 So tell me, because this is an argument that I had with my daughter.

00:59:16.480 She went to Fordham.

00:59:17.840 Mm.

00:59:18.400 Yeah.

00:59:19.520 Fordham is a Catholic social justice university.

00:59:22.360 Oh my.

00:59:22.820 Well, she was taught by the Jesuits there that the Bible is nonsense and that, I mean,

00:59:28.120 it was, it was crazy.

00:59:29.720 And she was taught that in Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah, that sodomy was just a greeting.

00:59:36.760 It wasn't a bad thing.

00:59:37.840 It's how you greeted people.

00:59:39.740 And I'm like, wow, that's quite an aggressive greeting.

00:59:42.920 You know?

00:59:43.400 Hey.

00:59:43.880 I don't even want to, I don't even want to.

00:59:46.580 So, but she had, it took me, it took me almost three or four years to get my relationship back

00:59:51.780 on track with my daughter after this indoctrination because she wouldn't even talk about it with

00:59:58.100 me.

00:59:58.560 I would be like, okay, wait, okay, let's just, let's think here for a second.

01:00:03.180 Yeah.

01:00:03.400 And there is this, um, there's this underlying thing that if, if you don't know, then you're

01:00:12.700 part of the problem.

01:00:14.100 That's right.

01:00:14.540 And, um, and the, the professor or whoever is at the top of the ladder here knows.

01:00:20.500 And I think some of the students, they are told you don't even have to talk about it.

01:00:26.340 You don't have to, they just won't ever get it.

01:00:28.100 Right.

01:00:28.380 And some of it is such nonsense that I think that the weaker will, won't even want to talk

01:00:37.300 about it because you start to think about it and it all falls apart.

01:00:41.760 The reason why your daughter's not talking to you about it and not even soliciting your

01:00:46.240 view is because you're, you're going to try to think about it using rationality.

01:00:50.420 Correct.

01:00:50.860 And rationality has been, it's been banished from the start.

01:00:54.380 Right.

01:00:55.040 A priori, that's out.

01:00:56.240 So, you know, terms like you, you want to talk about some terms like intersectionality.

01:01:01.440 Don't even know what that means.

01:01:02.380 Okay.

01:01:02.740 I can explain that one for you.

01:01:04.720 Okay.

01:01:05.340 Intersectionality was actually came, uh, was derived, uh, or I guess inaugurated by a law,

01:01:12.660 a legal, uh, person, a legal, a lawyer, a feminist lawyer who said that, uh, it wasn't

01:01:19.760 satisfactory to call somebody just, you know, to, to, to refer somebody as black or as a

01:01:26.220 woman or as, you know, some other marginalized, supposedly subordinated type.

01:01:31.300 There are, it's called intersectionality because there's the vectors of power intersect people in different ways.

01:01:40.040 And there are more than one vector of power.

01:01:42.140 There's racial, sexual, gender.

01:01:46.000 So being a white, I am, I am being a white male who is heterosexual.

01:01:50.920 Yeah.

01:01:51.540 I am the top of the power.

01:01:53.600 You have no power vectors intersecting over you.

01:01:56.700 You're not being subordinated by any of these vectors.

01:01:59.280 And even if, because I'm conservative, that says, well, you're, you have the hierarchy and you're trying to keep things.

01:02:06.600 That's right.

01:02:07.020 Because I'm Christian or faith believer, if it's not really Christian, well, the Christians have dominated everything.

01:02:12.800 So I have no, I have nothing intersecting.

01:02:15.480 You've got, so I'm, I'm intersecting everyone else.

01:02:17.840 Because you're at the top, you're at the bottom.

01:02:20.400 I'll get into that in a minute.

01:02:22.400 Being at the top is not where you want to be in this, in this social justice realm.

01:02:26.960 This is the worst place to be.

01:02:28.320 Right.

01:02:28.520 Because they're going to flip the hierarchy.

01:02:30.920 That's the whole thing is an inversion.

01:02:32.720 They want to invert the hierarchy basically.

01:02:35.200 Anyway.

01:02:35.520 Has anybody talked, you talk about inverting.

01:02:38.300 I mean, this is something that we, it's beyond politically correct to talk about.

01:02:41.880 Now, the Judeo-Christian world has done a whole bunch of bad things.

01:02:46.520 You know, it's like Winston Churchill and Gandhi.

01:02:49.620 Yeah.

01:02:49.900 Same time against each other.

01:02:51.700 Both seem to be a little racist.

01:02:54.320 You know, both said some crazy things.

01:02:57.280 You look at Churchill in, in the Western point of view, he's great.

01:03:00.600 You learn about Churchill, what he did in India.

01:03:02.740 Not so great.

01:03:03.500 Yeah.

01:03:04.040 We're all of it.

01:03:04.920 We're both good and bad.

01:03:06.200 It's which direction are we going?

01:03:08.220 Are we getting better or not?

01:03:09.520 Right.

01:03:09.740 And also, how, what were the founding principles?

01:03:13.180 Are they good or not?

01:03:14.660 Yeah.

01:03:15.000 So when you look at the Judeo-Christian world, it has been really modeled around two guys,

01:03:21.320 Moses and Jesus.

01:03:23.900 I don't think there's anybody that would say, you know, if, you know, I'm, I'm alone in a,

01:03:30.920 in a very white neighborhood, but it's a dangerous, you know, the, the cisgender neighborhood

01:03:36.220 is, you know.

01:03:37.360 I don't feel safe, as they would say.

01:03:39.480 And if you don't feel safe.

01:03:40.600 Yeah.

01:03:41.080 And it's in the middle of the night, your car broke down, you're changing your tire and

01:03:45.040 you see all these white guys, you know, I mean, you know, obviously, and they're coming

01:03:50.740 at you at night.

01:03:52.200 Would you feel better or not at all?

01:03:56.100 If you knew that they were coming from, um, uh, uh, church choir practice or a, a Bible

01:04:03.420 study group, would that ease your mind?

01:04:06.260 Most people would say, yes, yes, but they'll say no.

01:04:10.160 Right.

01:04:10.740 Right.

01:04:11.040 Okay.

01:04:12.060 Who's replacing?

01:04:13.280 You've taken, you're taking our pinnacle of Jesus of be good to each other.

01:04:18.700 Or, you know, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, help the poor.

01:04:22.880 Do unto others.

01:04:23.720 Right.

01:04:24.080 We're taking that away.

01:04:25.460 Right.

01:04:26.240 Who are we replacing that with?

01:04:28.020 Hmm.

01:04:29.460 Well, we're replacing it with this, with this ideology that says Christianity has been part

01:04:39.040 of the dominant culture.

01:04:41.100 It has been the hegemonic religion.

01:04:43.540 Right.

01:04:43.600 The people that are Christian have been, as you said, the hegemonic people.

01:04:48.620 Right.

01:04:49.040 They're, they're mostly white or they're mostly, and they're mostly, you know, European and

01:04:53.240 you're European and it's men and all that.

01:04:55.280 So.

01:04:55.920 And, and you can't argue against that.

01:04:57.520 They don't, they don't say do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

01:05:01.280 They, they say do unto others as they've done unto you.

01:05:05.300 Right.

01:05:05.780 So that they won't do it again.

01:05:08.040 So theirs is a vindictive religious belief system.

01:05:11.300 And it's about, and it's about taking the hierarchy and on which men are putatively on

01:05:15.920 top, white men in particular.

01:05:17.740 And it goes down this scale to the subordinated, the most subordinated, you know, you'd get

01:05:23.120 African Americans or Africans or blacks and you'd get women, you'd get trans people, everybody.

01:05:30.100 And those people, it's not about equalizing everything, even though they say they're for

01:05:34.660 equality.

01:05:35.060 It's about flipping that hierarchy so that those who.

01:05:38.060 You're punishing the.

01:05:39.500 Yes.

01:05:39.720 The punished get punished.

01:05:41.420 Punishment has to happen.

01:05:42.480 It's, it's, it has to happen.

01:05:44.200 It's very much like the, you know, the terror.

01:05:46.980 So how does the mind work when it comes to, for instance, um, I think there's a difference

01:05:55.580 between Islam and an Islamist.

01:05:58.200 An Islamist wants that state control.

01:06:01.460 They want the political ideology.

01:06:03.000 Correct.

01:06:03.360 And it's very dangerous.

01:06:04.780 Right.

01:06:05.000 You see the left embrace Islamists.

01:06:08.920 Yeah.

01:06:09.380 Okay.

01:06:09.800 Right.

01:06:10.400 Um, how does.

01:06:12.720 Or they say that if you criticize them, you're a Islamophobic.

01:06:16.820 Correct.

01:06:17.260 Right.

01:06:17.600 So at worst, they say, don't look here.

01:06:22.380 Right.

01:06:22.500 How do, how do you, how does an intelligent person get to that point?

01:06:29.220 What, what is the, what's the.

01:06:31.100 There's, there's a couple of factors.

01:06:32.420 Okay.

01:06:32.740 One of the main things that has been inaugurated by the left is cultural relativism and cultural

01:06:39.900 relativism also brings with it a more relativism, but main thing about cultural relativism is

01:06:45.400 that you can't, from your, from your culture, you're not allowed to criticize people of another

01:06:51.280 culture because you're in, you're, you're suggesting that your culture is better than

01:06:55.900 theirs.

01:06:56.220 And that's, so when I meet in this actually happened, I met, I asked for a meeting with

01:07:01.940 people of glad this is when the height of, uh, Ahmadinejad throwing people off the building,

01:07:09.520 you know, gay people off, torturing them, killing them.

01:07:12.200 Uh, Russia is starting to take driver's license away and, and absconding people at night.

01:07:17.440 And they're never seen again because they're homosexual.

01:07:20.380 You can say, well, their culture is different.

01:07:23.040 So I can't comment.

01:07:23.880 But we all know, yeah, killing is someone because they're homosexual is a no go zone.

01:07:31.980 Yeah.

01:07:32.120 How come they, they won't make that step?

01:07:36.340 Well, there's another aspect to it.

01:07:37.940 Not just the relativism.

01:07:39.060 The other thing is the enemy of my enemy is my friend and you're there.

01:07:44.280 You, they are the enemy of, you know, Western civilization.

01:07:48.460 Yeah.

01:07:48.820 All right.

01:07:49.120 So intersectionality is how many times that's why basically how many?

01:07:53.620 Yeah.

01:07:53.840 How many power vectors are intersecting you and subordinating you?

01:07:57.580 And does that give you the hierarchy?

01:07:59.180 Once you have more vectors, the lower you are, the higher you are.

01:08:02.880 Right.

01:08:03.040 This is why there's a race to the bottom in the oppression Olympics.

01:08:05.820 That's, it's called a rather derogatorily.

01:08:08.480 You want to rush to the bottom because when, by the time you get there, you're going to be on top.

01:08:14.260 Okay.

01:08:14.820 Yeah.

01:08:15.420 What are the other words that we need to really understand?

01:08:18.260 Okay.

01:08:18.680 Well, one of them we mentioned already, cis.

01:08:20.860 Yeah.

01:08:21.100 We talked about that.

01:08:21.980 That's, you know, accepting the, the gender you were quote unquote assigned at first.

01:08:26.200 That is, that's a termite word.

01:08:28.080 Yeah.

01:08:28.580 Right.

01:08:28.900 To take away all understanding of gender.

01:08:32.580 Because if you do, what happens?

01:08:35.420 What is their, what is their ultimate goal here?

01:08:37.340 By taking away and confusing all gender.

01:08:39.960 Yeah.

01:08:40.420 How does that affect us?

01:08:41.480 Oh, well, it undermines many of the basic structures of the social order, like the family.

01:08:48.900 Right.

01:08:49.000 I mean, that's the object here, by the way, is to get rid of the family.

01:08:53.620 That's one of the main objects.

01:08:55.020 Why?

01:08:55.340 Because the family is a source of power in itself and it's a source of cohesion.

01:09:01.600 They don't want to exist.

01:09:03.020 Because there, there are, there are forces here that want to get rid of any kinds of, any kinds of organizational adhesions or groups of solidarity or, you know, cohesion that, that, that, that, that take power away from the state or that take power away from other forces outside of the state and cultural, you know, cultural power and cultural politics too.

01:09:29.100 So the family's got to get rid of, got to get, to undermine gender is to undermine the family.

01:09:36.260 There's no question about it.

01:09:39.880 Michael, I mean, I, I, I hate to use this language because it's so condemning.

01:09:47.500 Um, and you know, it, it pits us against each other, but I have, I have honestly thought like, for instance, progressivism, I can look and say, okay, I understand that we have a difference.

01:09:58.300 It's of opinion of either the welfare state on how big it should be or whatever.

01:10:03.340 That's, that's, that's, that's aggressive tax system.

01:10:05.260 Right.

01:10:05.540 So I get that and I disagree with the way it's done, et cetera, et cetera.

01:10:11.220 But postmodernism, I cannot, the, the first word that comes to mind when I hear, when I, when I read it, hear about it or anything is it's just evil.

01:10:22.300 There's no, I don't know of any other thing that is just pure poison.

01:10:28.380 It's evil to, to a system.

01:10:30.720 It's evil.

01:10:31.260 And social justice is the practical, is practical postmodernism.

01:10:37.140 You write in your book that postmodernism is dead.

01:10:40.940 It's theory.

01:10:41.680 The high theory era of postmodernism is dead.

01:10:45.260 That was the, the, the era in which people were theorizing all these things.

01:10:50.080 Now this is the era of practical, pragmatic postmodernism.

01:10:54.240 And so social justice.

01:10:55.420 Is the practical, so social justice is practical postmodern theory.

01:11:00.700 Is there.

01:11:01.840 Postmodern theory reduced and put in that kind of cartoon version too.

01:11:05.380 It's, it's definitely been dumbed down.

01:11:08.140 And, but that's what has to happen when you want to, you know, when you want to proliferate something across the whole mass of humanity.

01:11:14.860 You know, do you believe there is good social justice?

01:11:19.920 No, I'm not.

01:11:21.400 See, that's a word that sounds good.

01:11:23.340 And this is one of the tricks of the left is to use abstractions that sound wonderful.

01:11:27.400 And how could you possibly not want that?

01:11:29.540 Right.

01:11:30.240 Well, there's no meaning to it at all.

01:11:33.440 Intrinsically, so to speak.

01:11:34.520 There's been a lot of different versions of social justice over time.

01:11:38.340 I mean, Catholics will say that that's one of our.

01:11:40.100 In fact, it was founded by a Catholic.

01:11:41.720 The phrase was founded by Luigi Tapparelli in 1841 when he, when he wrote a massive, uh, uh, tome about, uh, Catholic social justice.

01:11:52.940 And the difference being.

01:11:54.340 The difference is it was conservative.

01:11:56.400 And this is, here's the case of cultural appropriation by the socialists and the left of a term that was actually a conservative term in the beginning.

01:12:04.680 It was about establishing a kind of, uh, charity between people.

01:12:11.920 It was a way of mitigating the difficulties that came with laissez-faire capitalism and the beginning of the industrial revolution.

01:12:20.920 It was all based on individuals and small groups undertaking charity to try to mitigate the, you know, the, the hardships of people on the bottom.

01:12:32.480 But not, not about equal, not about equating them or making an equality in real time and real life.

01:12:40.760 So there is a, I'm trying to remember what the theology is in, it started in South America.

01:12:46.300 Liberation.

01:12:46.820 Liberation theology.

01:12:47.960 Yeah.

01:12:48.140 The, the, the president, uh, president Obama used to talk about this, um, that it is, um, that there, that social justice is required because there is no individual salvation.

01:13:00.560 If we're not all working.

01:13:03.540 Wow.

01:13:04.040 This is scary.

01:13:05.280 It's funny because it's social justice was about individual salvation and individuals helping other individuals.

01:13:11.620 Right.

01:13:11.920 Okay.

01:13:12.500 He believed that charity was a part of human nature and, and social justice was just a way of, of, of talking about how human nature should be tapped, how human nature should be understood so that we could act properly towards our neighbors.

01:13:28.580 That's really what it was.

01:13:30.020 But it got hijacked by even within the Catholic church.

01:13:34.000 They hijacked it and turned it into socialism in effect.

01:13:39.320 Liberate, uh, liberation theology is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is socialism with holy water sprinkled on it.

01:13:45.780 That's all it is.

01:13:47.340 But if you could, um, look at the future and nobody can, nobody knows what tomorrow is going to hold.

01:13:56.680 But if we don't change course, what does our future look like near future, even scary what's coming?

01:14:05.660 It's scary.

01:14:06.180 I mean, it scares me to think that children are being indoctrinated for lack of a better term.

01:14:14.540 And I don't think it's really overstating it either into this system of practical postmodernism or social justice from kindergarten up.

01:14:22.700 I mean, this is, and they're being told that this undermining of all of these social ontologies, like gender, like, uh, the family are, that that is good.

01:14:38.780 This is the good that it's good to be like this and it's evil to oppose it.

01:14:44.120 What do you do if you're, I, my granddaughter just started kindergarten.

01:14:49.000 What do you do?

01:14:49.620 Um, I have to tell you that I, I pulled them out of every public school and most private ones as well.

01:14:55.740 I'd, I'd be very, very careful where I'd send my kids.

01:14:58.700 If I sent them anywhere outside of the house for education, I'm not, I was never believed that I would be somebody saying homeschooling might be the best option, but I'm starting to think, yes, it might be the only option.

01:15:11.120 If you don't want to end up with a kid who tells, who comes home one day as somebody else, uh, because they're being encouraged to get rid of these identities.

01:15:22.860 What are the warning signs that most people won't know?

01:15:26.740 What is, what's like buzz language that, uh, yeah, you'll hear, uh, people talking about, um,

01:15:34.120 the female brain, you'll hear people talking about, uh, the, um, you know, you'll hear the terms that we've talked about and you'll hear people talking about transitioning to hear.

01:15:47.240 If you hear a child come home and say, oh, my friend in school was in trans.

01:15:50.760 We had a transition party for my friend.

01:15:52.800 This means this is a party of celebrating their transition from one gender to the other.

01:15:58.920 This happened in California just recently in August.

01:16:17.840 You started off saying you were a libertarian communist.

01:16:20.760 Right.

01:16:21.000 I, I, and not get my arms around that.

01:16:23.740 A lot of people say that's an oxymoron.

01:16:25.560 Right.

01:16:25.820 There can't be such a thing.

01:16:27.120 How does that work?

01:16:27.580 It was a, there was a movement, uh, when people recognize what the Bolsheviks did, you know,

01:16:35.240 when they started the terror right after the revolution, there was no delay till Stalin, you know.

01:16:39.900 Right.

01:16:40.300 Lenin started killing people right away.

01:16:42.140 Right.

01:16:42.320 They even killed workers who, workers who had the audacity to go on strike were murdered, you

01:16:48.260 know, and people were sent to a gulag.

01:16:50.040 Now the concentration camp came later.

01:16:52.520 I'm sorry.

01:16:53.100 The Google came later.

01:16:54.180 There were the concentration camp came first and the Nazis, by the way, got their idea for

01:16:58.580 the concentration camp from the Soviets.

01:17:01.320 I don't think people realize this.

01:17:03.040 No.

01:17:03.080 Anyway, um, there was a movement that said this, that the Bolsheviks went wrong already, right

01:17:10.060 early, you know, that they became authoritarian.

01:17:13.060 They imposed their party value over everybody.

01:17:16.420 And instead of being democratic and so libertarian or that's already, I mean, we are living in

01:17:22.080 a Bolshevik time here in America.

01:17:23.460 Are we not?

01:17:24.040 Yes.

01:17:24.320 I mean, we do.

01:17:25.040 We're seeing that, that if they take control, you will toe the line or they'll be, they'll

01:17:31.040 destroy you.

01:17:32.120 You know, and they don't maybe shoot you in the back of the head, but if you, if you lose

01:17:35.340 your job and every respectability that you need to survive in society, it's the same

01:17:40.360 difference.

01:17:40.880 Yeah.

01:17:40.960 So I thought that there was a better socialist, a better version, you know, now I think that

01:17:49.240 there's, now I think there's no way it could ever be any different than that because you

01:17:53.840 can't enforce equality unless you squelch many people in the process and get rid of a lot

01:18:00.320 of them too.

01:18:01.380 And you, you don't, I'm, I, it's why I was so against, well, I mean, for one reason, why

01:18:06.600 I was so against like, for instance, TARP and the bank bailout.

01:18:09.280 We can talk about, yeah, you could talk about, that's not a role of government.

01:18:13.800 We could talk about, but that also takes away your right to fail.

01:18:18.560 That's correct.

01:18:19.060 And the learning, you have learned more because you dipped your toe and you dared to make a

01:18:27.420 mistake and look who you are now that you don't, nobody has a right to take my failures

01:18:33.740 away from me, away from me because it's what makes me.

01:18:37.840 That's right.

01:18:38.680 It's just a step on the way to where you're going.

01:18:42.620 And sometimes there are steps that are missteps, but in any way, if you take that away, you

01:18:48.020 take away person, you take away the person's actual rights.

01:18:50.580 You take away their rights to be self-determined.

01:18:53.640 Yeah.

01:18:53.980 So what are you now?

01:18:55.440 How would you classify yourself politically?

01:18:57.340 Well, politically, I would call myself a classical liberal or, you know, social and cultural

01:19:03.420 libertarian in terms of the, the market or in terms of the economic aspect, I would call

01:19:10.120 myself, um, I, I, I'm a believer in the market.

01:19:13.740 I believe that you, unless you have a free market where people can take their talents

01:19:17.660 to the marketplace and do what they will with them under their own free will, then you

01:19:23.340 have total, you have despotism.

01:19:26.260 Yes.

01:19:26.640 You, you have to.

01:19:27.360 The market is the only way.

01:19:29.440 But if you have the free market.

01:19:32.320 Yeah.

01:19:32.580 Without volume one of Adam Smith, moral sentiments.

01:19:37.600 That's right.

01:19:38.300 You also.

01:19:38.880 Theory of moral sentiments.

01:19:39.780 Right.

01:19:39.960 You know that book?

01:19:40.660 That's amazing.

01:19:41.220 That's great.

01:19:41.760 You also have totalitarianism.

01:19:44.080 That's right.

01:19:44.300 Just in a different way.

01:19:45.280 Yeah.

01:19:45.540 So it has, that's what Tapparelli was trying to mitigate as well.

01:19:48.700 That, that, uh, Jesuit would have founded the real social justice, uh, or the first

01:19:53.200 one, I should say.

01:19:54.120 Um, yeah.

01:19:55.300 So I say, um, uh, I call myself a classical liberal, uh, liberal, uh, uh, social and cultural

01:20:01.640 libertarian in the sense that I believe people, not that people should be excessive in there,

01:20:05.520 you know, doing whatever they want.

01:20:07.840 You should not violate other people's rights, but you should have the self-determination,

01:20:12.600 the freedom, the individual freedom to pursue your dream, which not only is your dream, but

01:20:18.980 might be, you know, part of a bigger plan.

01:20:21.740 Can you help me tie up one thing?

01:20:23.460 Cause I'm a, I'm a, I'm a libertarian.

01:20:26.540 Um, and for years because I was on Fox, people thought I was against,

01:20:31.560 I'm not against gay marriage.

01:20:32.040 I'm not against gay marriage.

01:20:33.100 I'm against the state being involved in marriage at all.

01:20:36.580 Ah, you know, no place.

01:20:39.120 Yeah.

01:20:39.640 I don't get any value from the state forcing me to take a blood test and, and give me a

01:20:45.180 license.

01:20:45.880 Right.

01:20:46.280 They have no place there.

01:20:47.320 Yeah.

01:20:47.740 Um, so do what you want, but how do we close the loop of, look, you want to be transgender?

01:20:55.720 That's fine.

01:20:56.560 That's fine.

01:20:57.380 Yeah.

01:20:57.600 But I don't, my church might marry gay couples, might not.

01:21:05.020 Right.

01:21:05.340 That's my church.

01:21:06.180 Yeah.

01:21:06.720 Um, we, you know, we might believe that transgendered is the absolute way to go.

01:21:12.080 We might look at the stats and say, it doesn't look like it's healthy long-term because suicide

01:21:17.720 rate actually goes up.

01:21:19.340 Yeah.

01:21:19.480 Um, I mean, without judgment, let's just talk about that.

01:21:22.880 Sure.

01:21:23.600 But we get into this place to where now who's teaching what is the norm?

01:21:29.320 How do you do that?

01:21:31.680 How do we have an open society that says, look, everybody's got to be left alone.

01:21:36.500 I see where you're going.

01:21:37.220 But there are moral principles or there are eternal value.

01:21:43.140 Let me say it this way.

01:21:44.720 I can't remember the name of the building, but it's one of the first modern as first modern

01:21:48.920 post-modern buildings in America.

01:21:51.800 Staircases lead to nowhere.

01:21:53.480 Columns that come down and are floating.

01:21:56.240 Yeah.

01:21:56.800 Yeah.

01:21:57.040 Yeah.

01:21:57.160 Yeah.

01:21:57.340 Whatever.

01:21:57.920 Okay.

01:21:58.260 Yeah.

01:21:58.460 But it still has a foundation.

01:22:00.680 Yeah.

01:22:00.880 They didn't, they didn't monkey with the actual foundation.

01:22:05.140 So you're asking me, how do we have, how do we reconcile social and cultural libertarianism

01:22:10.400 with holding on to values that we believe are necessary for a healthy and functioning

01:22:18.620 social order, right?

01:22:20.040 You have to have, you have to have an unum that you come running around and the only one

01:22:25.520 I can find is the bill of rights.

01:22:28.240 E pluribus unum and without which we have chaos.

01:22:31.400 Right.

01:22:31.840 Well, this may be where we differ slightly.

01:22:35.240 Okay.

01:22:36.440 And tell me if I'm wrong in thinking that we might, I think we, it requires a struggle

01:22:42.800 of ideas.

01:22:43.780 I agree.

01:22:44.660 We're not going to, we're not going to have, we're going to have to gain consent.

01:22:48.460 We're going to have to actually gain hegemony by duking it out, not physically in the marketplace

01:22:57.140 of ideas.

01:22:58.000 Yeah.

01:22:58.660 But the problem we have now is that the marketplace of ideas has been greatly curtailed, greatly

01:23:04.320 abbreviated by the social justice left such that we can't even get different ideas into

01:23:10.000 the marketplace.

01:23:10.640 So we're being banned from, there's putting tariffs that are impenetrable to our bringing

01:23:16.720 those goods to the marketplace of ideas at all.

01:23:19.380 We're stopped at the, at the perimeter.

01:23:21.860 So I think we're saying the same thing.

01:23:24.020 When I was interviewing schools for my kids to go to, I met with a science teacher and,

01:23:30.220 uh, and I said, you teach, you teach evolution.

01:23:34.720 Do you teach intelligent design?

01:23:37.460 Right.

01:23:37.560 Um, uh, do you teach creationism?

01:23:40.860 Yeah.

01:23:41.360 In my opinion.

01:23:42.720 Yeah.

01:23:43.360 All of those should be, we don't know.

01:23:44.940 Yeah.

01:23:45.440 You know what happened before the big bang?

01:23:46.940 We don't know.

01:23:47.580 We have nothing maybe.

01:23:48.960 Right.

01:23:49.360 But what happened?

01:23:50.020 How, what, what was the first cause that lit that fuse?

01:23:53.200 I don't know.

01:23:53.780 Right.

01:23:54.380 And it's good to know all of it.

01:24:00.240 And then it's up for you to decide.

01:24:01.980 Yeah.

01:24:02.440 Teach the controversy, but we're not letting that happen.

01:24:04.600 But so I, you know, I'm a, I am a social cultural and, you know, uh, libertarian and,

01:24:10.440 and libertarian in the marketplace of ideation or ideas.

01:24:13.880 And I think we have to have that, or we're going to have real problems because that's

01:24:17.760 what's happening.

01:24:18.400 There's no competition.

01:24:19.920 There's no competition in these places for, for thought.

01:24:22.780 Right.

01:24:22.900 So that's why our children are being told, you know, come and have a gender transition

01:24:27.380 party and everybody acts like it's normal.

01:24:29.940 Right.

01:24:30.580 Uh, and if you oppose it, you must be some Neanderthal.

01:24:33.060 Well, so the difference I'm thinking that we might have is I know you're real big on

01:24:37.520 reconciliation and I'm not sure we can have reconciliation with people whose ideas are

01:24:42.800 so injurious.

01:24:45.280 Okay.

01:24:45.380 So that's okay.

01:24:46.940 I do not believe, um, I mean, I couldn't reconcile with Adolf Hitler.

01:24:54.200 Yes.

01:24:54.660 Unless Adolf Hitler changed, changed.

01:24:57.100 But there's a lot of people who like you have kind of gone along and now these signs

01:25:04.180 are starting to pop up and they're like, wait a minute, just like me in 2004, 2003,

01:25:10.060 I was very raw, raw GOP.

01:25:12.720 Well, about 2005, I'm starting to wake up going, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

01:25:16.440 We're going where we're doing what?

01:25:18.140 And that's that.

01:25:19.080 Oh, wait a minute.

01:25:19.480 This is not right.

01:25:20.380 Something's wrong here.

01:25:21.340 And I started seeing the game that was played, but I had no place to go.

01:25:28.000 Um, that was, it was either this or that it's binary.

01:25:31.760 It's the only binary thing that's allowed.

01:25:35.540 Um, and so what do you do?

01:25:37.860 And so reconciling is we're reconciling.

01:25:40.920 Yes.

01:25:41.560 You know, we might've, we might, I might've seen you with Joe Scarborough and thought this

01:25:45.640 guy's a moron.

01:25:46.580 You might've watched me and said the same thing, but we now realize, no, we don't have

01:25:53.800 to agree on anything, but the unum for me, it's the bill of rights.

01:25:58.440 Yes.

01:25:58.820 You have a right to speak.

01:26:00.120 We have to have the standing principles, standing foundational beliefs.

01:26:03.140 And around that.

01:26:04.240 Unless we have that and unless they're good ones, right?

01:26:07.380 Yeah.

01:26:07.540 Ones that are based on what we think are, or make the happiness of everybody possible,

01:26:13.640 not guaranteed, but possible.

01:26:15.260 But don't we have that?

01:26:17.640 We do, but we're, it's being utterly avoided, utterly eschewed and actually dispensed with.

01:26:24.160 So Michael, my theory is, um, we need to start a whole different system of education.

01:26:31.700 I don't know.

01:26:32.220 I mean, how we can do that.

01:26:33.520 Yes.

01:26:34.160 But let me ask you in the short, in the short term.

01:26:36.740 Um, we, my theory is if we play into this outrage and we continue to call each other

01:26:47.740 names, um, we are going to miss the opportunity to meet people like you or for people like

01:26:53.540 you to meet people like me.

01:26:54.920 Yeah.

01:26:55.480 Because we're just going to say, you're on the other side.

01:26:58.460 Yeah.

01:26:59.000 Um, and, and we, we play in and actually accelerate the chaos.

01:27:05.480 Would you agree with that?

01:27:06.420 I agree with you entirely.

01:27:07.220 So what, if you had one piece of advice, what does somebody on a conservative side or a liberal

01:27:15.900 side say to the other to bring them to some sort of understanding of reason?

01:27:21.280 Wow.

01:27:21.720 Oh, wow.

01:27:23.640 What's your, what's your opening statement?

01:27:26.700 To tell, tell, tell either a conservative or somebody on the other side, how to broach.

01:27:32.040 How do I, how do I, how do I, what, I mean, there's a study and I write about it in the

01:27:38.440 book.

01:27:38.680 There's a study that says you have a great impact.

01:27:42.080 I think it's 65 or 75% chance of actually opening a door.

01:27:47.520 If you start with, you know what?

01:27:50.120 I got to tell you something.

01:27:50.860 One of the big mistakes that I made was X, Y, and Z.

01:27:55.640 Because people put their shields down and they go, oh, yeah.

01:27:58.360 And then they usually go, oh, I know I've done that too.

01:28:01.180 And it opens.

01:28:02.080 Yeah.

01:28:02.600 Is there.

01:28:03.280 Well, I think that's a good point.

01:28:04.600 Let's say, yeah.

01:28:06.120 Leading with questions rather than leading with declarations might be a way, you know, leading

01:28:12.320 with invitations rather than leading with daggers.

01:28:16.860 Yeah.

01:28:17.720 But we have to, how do we deal with something like Antifa?

01:28:20.860 I mean, they're not going to listen.

01:28:22.700 But I don't think.

01:28:24.260 There's not that many of them.

01:28:25.480 Look.

01:28:25.700 Yeah.

01:28:25.900 I think it's like a football field.

01:28:27.520 Yeah.

01:28:27.960 And we're, we're talking about reconciliation or understanding each other.

01:28:32.620 And we think that we have to, everybody has to agree from the 50 yard line to the end

01:28:38.140 zone.

01:28:38.340 Yeah.

01:28:38.900 No, those people at the three yard line, we're never going to get that.

01:28:41.860 No, no.

01:28:42.300 That's right.

01:28:42.760 They're crazy on both sides.

01:28:43.680 Yeah, that's true.

01:28:44.320 Let's just get the people who are.

01:28:45.860 No, okay.

01:28:46.200 So that's a, that's what we're looking for is a quorum.

01:28:48.660 Yeah.

01:28:48.800 And we can do that.

01:28:49.460 We can do that.

01:28:50.400 I think we can do that.

01:28:51.400 I know, we spoke beforehand and, you know, I know that you would say that, uh, oh no,

01:29:11.660 I, you know, I didn't have a problem with you.

01:29:13.340 I thought you were a smart guy, whatever.

01:29:15.260 But there had to be at least a lot of your friends who hated my guts and thought I was

01:29:20.280 the Antichrist 10 years ago.

01:29:21.240 Oh yeah.

01:29:21.640 I would have, I mean, the fact that I'm sitting down with you now is just further validation

01:29:26.120 for these people that, yeah, this guy.

01:29:28.140 Yeah, you've, you're gone.

01:29:29.000 Yeah, I'm gone.

01:29:29.620 You're gone.

01:29:29.860 You know, and they think I had a great fall.

01:29:32.900 Right.

01:29:33.240 Okay.

01:29:33.440 They think I've fallen from a great height.

01:29:35.880 I know.

01:29:36.640 And so I look at this and I think, um, uh, I'm an alcoholic.

01:29:44.960 Okay.

01:29:45.600 When I sobered up, all my friends changed and a lot of my old friends didn't want me

01:29:52.000 to sober up because I was fine.

01:29:53.660 That's right.

01:29:54.400 Changes the paradigm.

01:29:55.520 Right.

01:29:55.760 Changes everything.

01:29:56.440 Yeah.

01:29:57.040 Um, and you have to start life over.

01:30:00.560 Yeah.

01:30:01.180 You are going from respected intellectual New York, NYU.

01:30:07.300 It doesn't get any, no offense, easier in some ways.

01:30:12.240 Yes.

01:30:12.700 Uh, then pretty elite, you know, you were in the in crowd and the in place doing the right

01:30:17.240 thing.

01:30:17.740 Right.

01:30:17.980 Like now your whole life is, is different.

01:30:21.900 Yeah.

01:30:22.980 What happens to you?

01:30:24.760 Where are you?

01:30:25.300 Well, you know, what's happened?

01:30:26.720 You know, you mentioned being an alcoholic.

01:30:29.700 I gave up something and it might look like I've lost something by having given it up, but

01:30:36.900 I've gained my soul.

01:30:38.840 That's more important than the whole world.

01:30:41.140 As we know, I got my soul back.

01:30:43.640 I have a, I have a relationship with a God.

01:30:47.580 I have a relationship with my family that was never like this before.

01:30:51.920 I mean, I lost, I got divorced over this stuff.

01:30:55.820 I turned into a weirdo in graduate school and I couldn't have a relationship with my wife

01:31:01.280 anymore.

01:31:02.060 I lost the family over this.

01:31:04.460 So I don't care.

01:31:07.520 Uh, I don't care what they say.

01:31:09.160 They can say whatever they want.

01:31:12.980 I have a relationship with somebody that's far more powerful and meaningful and, and

01:31:17.760 glorious than them.

01:31:19.140 You were agnostic.

01:31:20.400 Yes.

01:31:21.660 Raised Catholic.

01:31:22.540 I was raised Catholic.

01:31:23.320 I was a seminarian in high school.

01:31:24.980 Wow.

01:31:25.440 Yeah.

01:31:26.400 And then you went agnostic.

01:31:28.360 So you never rejected, but I was like, uh, I wanted to be, it wasn't about being tepid or

01:31:33.600 anything, but I said, you know, you can't really know.

01:31:35.980 Yeah.

01:31:36.420 So an agnostic means don't, you don't know.

01:31:39.520 I would never say I would, I would never say I was atheist.

01:31:41.840 I never did because I thought that's arrogant and I still think it's arrogant.

01:31:45.060 I used to be God to say there's no God.

01:31:46.820 I mean, who are you to know?

01:31:47.900 Yeah.

01:31:48.100 And I was, I was the same way.

01:31:50.160 I, I got to, when I sobered up, I got to a point where I was like, you know what?

01:31:54.160 I believe in stuff because people told me I believed in it and I don't, I don't have

01:31:57.220 any relationship.

01:31:57.880 I don't know if any of that's true.

01:31:59.360 Yeah.

01:31:59.580 And I became an, uh, an agnostic.

01:32:01.960 Oh, uh, and, uh, and thought, you know, if God is real, he'd want me to find him.

01:32:09.140 And if he's a good God, he'll help me to get there.

01:32:12.200 He'll, he'll, he'll help me.

01:32:13.440 And he wants me to challenge him because he doesn't know what being, you know, the thing

01:32:18.380 I thought about is, you know, I thought that, uh, you know, way, the way I was raised in

01:32:22.880 sort of the, the religiosity of my family, I'm talking about not my kids and wife, but

01:32:27.220 my, you know, my siblings and so forth.

01:32:29.720 I thought that I couldn't trust God because he would take away my gifts, my intellect,

01:32:34.580 what I wanted, you know, what I, my goals and stuff like that, what I wanted to do for

01:32:38.360 my life.

01:32:39.700 I didn't trust him.

01:32:40.780 I thought he would, if he was there, he would take it away.

01:32:43.500 So why would I follow that?

01:32:44.800 I don't want to be.

01:32:45.300 So, uh, it's been a, I would say that this happened for a reason, what happened to me

01:32:55.860 and it wasn't my idea.

01:32:58.700 It was God's idea.

01:33:00.280 Now I'm not saying I'm some sort of a Moses here, but I'm saying that I have a small mission

01:33:05.680 and this is it.

01:33:07.080 All of us do.

01:33:08.020 I can't get over, I can't get over the idea that we were all born.

01:33:15.300 In this country, with this technology, at this time, with this struggle, and we're not

01:33:22.920 supposed to stand up one way or another, you're not supposed to, we're all placed exactly where

01:33:28.300 we're supposed to be.

01:33:29.580 Right.

01:33:29.880 And, and the people we meet and the seat, even sitting in an airport, the stranger right

01:33:35.000 next to you, it's no mistake.

01:33:37.540 It's no accident.

01:33:38.500 So what are you going to do now, Mike?

01:33:42.220 Well, um, I'm just following the path.

01:33:45.220 I don't, you know, I, I'm trying to follow the path that I've been put on and I believe

01:33:50.740 the next right thing will be revealed, you know, at the right time.

01:33:54.760 I can't say where the plans, where the plan leads, but I know it's really not, not up

01:34:00.260 to me really.

01:34:01.840 So I'll just follow the lead that I get and the hints that I get and the cues and the very

01:34:06.340 clear messages that I get along the way.

01:34:08.620 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend

01:34:24.260 so it can be discovered by other people.

01:34:38.620 I'll just follow the lead that I get and the hints that I get and the hints that I get

The Glenn Beck Program - September 22, 2018

Ep 3 ｜ Michael Rectenwald ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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