The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2113 - Christopher Rufo

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:12.000 You were just telling me that Washington state recriminalized, or is it Oregon, recriminalized drugs?

00:00:20.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:00:21.000 This just came out the last week, but Washington state, rather Oregon state, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy.

00:00:34.000 I think?

00:00:49.000 Oregon lawmakers, all Democrats of course, said, you know what?

00:00:53.000 We've gone too far.

00:00:55.000 Let's bring it back to the center.

00:00:56.000 And I think that's something that's very good.

00:00:58.000 It's definitely very good.

00:00:59.000 It is a little shocking that they figured it out.

00:01:01.000 It just doesn't seem like when you go and drive through Oakland, for example.

00:01:07.000 It doesn't seem like anybody's trying to put a cork on that.

00:01:10.000 They're just like letting it be insanely chaotic, like the areas where they have the shantytown set up and people have tents everywhere and these makeshift structures.

00:01:20.000 How?

00:01:21.000 At what point in time do you stop letting these open-air drug dens exist where people are just cooking meth in front of everybody?

00:01:27.000 That just seems so insane.

00:01:30.000 So it's nice to see that Oregon's like, hey!

00:01:34.000 Err!

00:01:34.000 Let's hit the brakes.

00:01:35.000 Yeah.

00:01:36.000 Is it all drugs now?

00:01:37.000 Did they just put everything in the same category?

00:01:39.000 Which is also quite insane.

00:01:41.000 Yeah, I mean, no, it's not all drugs, obviously.

00:01:43.000 It just says it right here?

00:01:44.000 Yeah.

00:01:44.000 It says, the measure makes the possession of a small amount of drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail, and enables police to confiscate the drugs, and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks.

00:01:57.000 But what about...

00:01:58.000 What are the other...

00:01:59.000 See, the thing is, it basically...

00:02:02.000 What Oregon did is decriminalize almost everything. 0.71

00:02:08.000 The weird thing about drugs is you throw them all into one blanket.

00:02:12.000 You cover them all with one blanket drugs because caffeine is a drug.

00:02:16.000 Alcohol is a drug.

00:02:16.000 There's a lot of drugs that we're accustomed to using and I'm not necessarily in favor of those being illegal.

00:02:23.000 And when you add in heroin And methamphetamine to something that we're already accustomed to, like alcohol or caffeine.

00:02:34.000 Why are these the same things?

00:02:38.000 Why don't you just individually say fentanyl is unbelievably bad for you?

00:02:43.000 Marijuana, not so much.

00:02:45.000 Let's figure out which ones are okay and which ones are not, instead of just saying drugs.

00:02:51.000 A hundred percent.

00:02:52.000 I mean, you just have to do a really simple calculation.

00:02:54.000 You say, is this drug correlated with extreme social pathology?

00:02:59.000 Does it obliterate the individual?

00:03:02.000 Does it cause social problems, social chaos?

00:03:05.000 And then you can categorize them very simply.

00:03:08.000 Yes and no.

00:03:08.000 Okay, you have alcohol, caffeine, marijuana.

00:03:11.000 You can have a functioning society where those are used.

00:03:15.000 But you can't have a functioning society Where people are foiling fentanyl.

00:03:21.000 And especially if you look at the cities, it's wrecked these cities.

00:03:25.000 The big problem, though, Is that the political left in the United States has lost the willingness and the capacity to say no.

00:03:35.000 This is something we've all seen.

00:03:36.000 You know, we're raised a generation of kids where like saying no and imposing limits is something that you can't do.

00:03:43.000 It's this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits.

00:03:46.000 But, you know, some limits aren't necessary.

00:03:49.000 Some limits are important.

00:03:50.000 And so I think we're starting to finally see the consequences of Obliterating limits.

00:03:57.000 And then now we're starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way, we should start reimposing some guardrails.

00:04:02.000 Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive.

00:04:07.000 But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy.

00:04:15.000 But they're happier and they have less anxiety, apparently.

00:04:19.000 Obviously, I'm not a doctor. 0.84

00:04:20.000 Because by having structure to life, it doesn't seem like everything is – like if they're in charge, like, oh my god, I'm fucking 12 and I'm in charge. 0.72

00:04:31.000 I have no idea what's going on and I could stay out late all night.

00:04:34.000 The world's chaos.

00:04:35.000 Which it kind of is in some ways.

00:04:37.000 But by imposing structure on them, it gives them comfort.

00:04:41.000 And I find that's the case with human beings.

00:04:43.000 I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis that they're very dedicated to,

00:05:02.000 Those are the happiest people.

00:05:03.000 They're the healthiest people.

00:05:05.000 They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life.

00:05:08.000 The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is, pickleball, whatever it is.

00:05:17.000 That gives people happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just...

00:05:31.000 Just able to fly away on a whim.

00:05:34.000 That doesn't promote happiness. 0.67

00:05:36.000 What are you trying to get out of this life?

00:05:39.000 Don't you want it to be as enjoyable as possible?

00:05:41.000 We've all had bad times. 0.98

00:05:43.000 They suck. 0.65

00:05:43.000 We try to avoid those. 0.65

00:05:45.000 We try to have the good times.

00:05:46.000 But That can be applied to a society as well.

00:05:49.000 The way you raise children can be applied to a society.

00:05:52.000 Like, you need structure.

00:05:53.000 You need rules.

00:05:54.000 You need love and compassion.

00:05:56.000 You need examples of good behavior.

00:05:59.000 You need all of those things. 0.98

00:06:02.000 And when you let people fucking cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window. 0.99

00:06:06.000 Imagine being 12, driving by a fucking drug den every day on your way to school. 1.00

00:06:11.000 You're like, oh my god. 0.99

00:06:12.000 What do I have to look forward to?

00:06:14.000 Yeah, I mean, that was my life and my experience and observation.

00:06:19.000 We moved out of Seattle in 2020. My wife, at that time, two kids.

00:06:24.000 Because of this precise phenomenon, the politics had gone totally sideways.

00:06:28.000 Well, Seattle in 2020 was particularly insane.

00:06:31.000 Particularly insane.

00:06:32.000 That was the area, what was it called?

00:06:35.000 The glory of the Chaz. 0.98

00:06:36.000 Chaz, that's right.

00:06:39.000 But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten, first grade at the time, and we would be walking to school a few blocks up, and we'd have to be avoiding schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street.

00:06:54.000 Walking.

00:06:55.000 Just walking.

00:06:56.000 It's so sketchy.

00:06:57.000 And so, you know, you're trying to kind of navigate your kids around.

00:07:01.000 There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble.

00:07:10.000 And then you talk to the administrators at the time, say, hey, this is a problem.

00:07:14.000 I don't accept this.

00:07:15.000 I don't like this.

00:07:16.000 And they say, oh, well, you know, we have to be compassionate to our houseless neighbors.

00:07:20.000 It's like, no, we don't.

00:07:22.000 This is a danger to kids.

00:07:23.000 And it got so bad that they were teaching the kids what to do when they found hypodermic needles in the playground.

00:07:30.000 Oh my god.

00:07:31.000 This is a problem.

00:07:32.000 I don't want this as a parent.

00:07:33.000 I want you to prevent them having to pick up hypodermic needles.

00:07:37.000 And it's like a group of people that are so...

00:07:42.000 It's like compassion also has to be limited.

00:07:45.000 You have to have compassion within reasonable limits.

00:07:48.000 You're dealing with people that will just burn it all down.

00:07:51.000 If you say arson is no longer punishable, they'll burn all the houses down. 0.99

00:07:56.000 These are insane people. 0.95

00:07:57.000 They don't have anything. 1.00

00:07:58.000 Why wouldn't they just burn it all down just for funds?

00:08:02.000 It's so hard to understand how it got this far.

00:08:06.000 I love when they use terms like the houseless.

00:08:10.000 You already have a word for it.

00:08:13.000 Stop trying to dress it up with a new word.

00:08:15.000 You already have a word for it. 0.99

00:08:16.000 This one's been driving me fucking crazy lately. 0.91

00:08:20.000 Minor attracted persons. 0.94

00:08:23.000 I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting minor attracted persons.

00:08:32.000 You're talking about pedophiles.

00:08:33.000 That's what we're talking about.

00:08:34.000 It must be that these people have no children.

00:08:37.000 It must be.

00:08:38.000 I don't know. 0.98

00:08:40.000 If they do, they're monsters.

00:08:42.000 This idea that you are going to minimize the harm caused by evil criminals who steal children's lives, ruin their lives forever, and you're just going to call them a minor attracted person and try to say that it's an identity?

00:09:01.000 To what, for what reason?

00:09:03.000 To what end?

00:09:04.000 Like, why would you want to do that?

00:09:06.000 I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.

00:09:10.000 You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour.

00:09:16.000 You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.

00:09:18.000 These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children. 0.64

00:09:27.000 That should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language, like you're talking about, euphemisms, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.

00:09:41.000 But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.

00:09:46.000 And I wouldn't want to do that.

00:09:49.000 Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children? 0.68

00:09:52.000 No! 0.61

00:09:53.000 Not in a million years.

00:09:55.000 That's like the thing you'd want to avoid most in life.

00:09:57.000 There's no reason to talk to them about that.

00:09:59.000 There's no reason.

00:10:01.000 They're not interested in it.

00:10:02.000 They're little kids.

00:10:04.000 They're not interested.

00:10:05.000 It's the adults that are interested.

00:10:07.000 So the question is, why?

00:10:09.000 Why are adults so interested in this?

00:10:10.000 What is the ideological goal, the personal goal?

00:10:13.000 It's influenced.

00:10:15.000 They're influencing children because, like all groups, as much as people hate to hear this, Everyone wants you to join their group.

00:10:23.000 It is a natural human instinct.

00:10:25.000 The idea that that would not apply to gender identity, that that would not apply to sexual orientation is crazy.

00:10:31.000 It applies to phones.

00:10:32.000 It applies to, like, people who have Android phones are like, dude, switch over.

00:10:36.000 Look, you can use the S Pen.

00:10:38.000 Dude, you can switch over.

00:10:39.000 Look at my AI features.

00:10:41.000 Dude, you don't need iMessage.

00:10:42.000 You know?

00:10:43.000 It's with everything.

00:10:44.000 And if you don't think that happens with sexuality or with gender, you're out of your mind.

00:10:51.000 It's a natural human characteristic.

00:10:52.000 Why would it be absent there when it's present in literally everything?

00:10:59.000 People use Windows computers. 0.99

00:11:01.000 Shit on people use Apple computers. 0.99

00:11:02.000 You should just try Windows, man. 0.99

00:11:04.000 There's so much more variety.

00:11:06.000 They want you to join.

00:11:07.000 They want you to be a part of their church.

00:11:09.000 They want you to move into their neighborhood.

00:11:11.000 I'm guilty of it, too.

00:11:12.000 I got a bunch of people to move to Austin.

00:11:14.000 For sure.

00:11:15.000 It's a thing that people do.

00:11:16.000 It's a thing that people do, especially if they found something that's awesome. 0.99

00:11:20.000 But this idea that a guy with fucking heavy makeup on dressed like a tart. 0.98

00:11:27.000 Like, if that was a woman, I'd be like, what's wrong with that lady? 1.00

00:11:31.000 She's not dressing like a teacher. 0.79

00:11:33.000 This is crazy.

00:11:33.000 What is she doing?

00:11:35.000 Why is she dressed like that? 1.00

00:11:36.000 Is that a costume?

00:11:37.000 Is she in a play?

00:11:38.000 She's not in a play.

00:11:39.000 Okay, cut! 1.00

00:11:40.000 Yeah, let's pump the brakes on this one. 1.00

00:11:42.000 That fucking lady's gotta be insane! 1.00

00:11:44.000 Does she have any kids? 1.00

00:11:45.000 Well, actually, she doesn't even have a vagina. 1.00

00:11:46.000 You know, she's got a penis. 1.00

00:11:48.000 What? 1.00

00:11:48.000 Hold the fuck on. 1.00

00:11:50.000 Now we're getting to a whole nother level of this. 1.00

00:11:52.000 What are we doing here?

00:11:54.000 What's going on?

00:11:55.000 But that opinion is completely normal, completely mainstream, held by virtually everyone.

00:12:01.000 Yes.

00:12:01.000 But people are silent about it.

00:12:03.000 Right.

00:12:03.000 Because they've been stigmatized into believing if you offer any criticism of the ideology, of gender theory, or the practice, you are somehow a bigot.

00:12:13.000 You're somehow homophobic.

00:12:15.000 You're definitely far right. 0.98

00:12:16.000 You're a far right extremist.

00:12:18.000 And you're lumped in with KKK. You're lumped in with, like, storm front people.

00:12:22.000 This is a 90% opinion.

00:12:24.000 Yeah.

00:12:25.000 And so, you know, what I think is so important is...

00:12:29.000 To stop playing the game and say, you know what, I'm going to tell the truth and I'm going to take the slings and arrows because I know that the public opinion is on my side and people fear speaking out but they need representation.

00:12:42.000 And that to me is the name of the game.

00:12:44.000 Well, you are really good at explaining everything that's happening and really good at like laying it out in a very easy to understand pattern, like where it first was introduced into the education system, the blind spots that people have towards how Marxism works,

00:13:03.000 even Especially, like, during the time of the 1960s and the 70s when a lot of this stuff was gaining momentum in the United States because of the anti-war movement.

00:13:12.000 They were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags.

00:13:16.000 They're completely ignoring what happened in Cuba.

00:13:19.000 They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship.

00:13:26.000 Always!

00:13:27.000 There's no evidence of it ever not leading to that.

00:13:30.000 It's like the idea of, like, You know, I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don't think I'm gonna die of rabies.

00:13:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:36.000 I'm just gonna get bit by it.

00:13:37.000 Fucking rabies kills everybody! 0.99

00:13:40.000 It's like one lady who didn't die of rabies because of a very novel treatment where they have to put her into a medically induced coma. 0.99

00:13:47.000 Because rabies is such an old disease and it's such an aggressive disease that your immune system can fight it off, but it can't keep up with it.

00:13:55.000 And eventually the rabies wins and it always wins.

00:13:57.000 So by putting her in a medically induced coma, I don't know what about the biological process of it, but it somehow or another shorted out her body to the point where it had the resources to effectively battle the rabies.

00:14:12.000 Because she was just completely immobile and in a medically induced coma.

00:14:16.000 So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies.

00:14:22.000 The analogy is perfect. 0.92

00:14:24.000 We can do it!

00:14:26.000 Marxism will put your whole society, at best, in a medically induced coma, and at worst you get starvation, gulags, mass suppression, and so...

00:14:36.000 Well, it kills the society, is what the point is. 0.98

00:14:37.000 The point is, the best case scenario is that you somehow, through a medically induced coma, fucking survive it. 0.99

00:14:43.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:14:44.000 There's no improvement.

00:14:45.000 No.

00:14:45.000 You're probably wrecked for the rest of your life.

00:14:48.000 I mean, it's probably such a horrific disease that everything's compromised after that.

00:14:52.000 When I was in my 20s, I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union socialist republics, so Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and Mongolia and other countries that had been ruled by the Soviets.

00:15:05.000 And what happened, and I think there is, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest, it generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest.

00:15:17.000 And so when you travel through those countries, It is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.

00:15:26.000 It's these Soviet block housing.

00:15:29.000 It has enormous rates of alcoholism.

00:15:31.000 You see people strewn on the road, freezing to death in the winters.

00:15:34.000 There's no economic productivity.

00:15:36.000 There's no culture.

00:15:37.000 The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs. 0.99

00:15:41.000 And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions.

00:15:48.000 They've been totally annihilated as far as their economic possibilities.

00:15:53.000 But you still have, you know, three, four, five million people.

00:15:56.000 And it's what happens when your society is devoured by ideology.

00:16:01.000 And so the ideology that we're seeing in American institutions is, of course, different.

00:16:05.000 We're blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history.

00:16:09.000 But it's it's functionally the same.

00:16:12.000 And to your point, in the late 80s or late 60s and early 70s, you had true Marxist Leninist radicals, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, the Weather Underground.

00:16:24.000 And if you look at their literature, their propaganda materials from that time, and you compare it to what's happening in, let's say, Buffalo Public Schools, their BLM curriculum. 0.59

00:16:32.000 I actually did this.

00:16:33.000 I looked at the Black Panther Party pamphlets they were selling to Foment Revolution and the Buffalo Public Schools curriculum.

00:16:40.000 You know, it's like pretty close.

00:16:43.000 The ideas are the same.

00:16:44.000 Of course, they're softened.

00:16:45.000 They use the nice language about DEI or what have you.

00:16:48.000 But, you know, we should take ideas seriously.

00:16:53.000 And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.

00:16:56.000 And it's a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating kids.

00:17:03.000 And that's why you're seeing kids today that grow up with this version of the society and reality that we live in that so doesn't jive with people that are older than them, who didn't grow up in that system, who are like, what are you talking about?

00:17:16.000 Like, it's not that bad.

00:17:18.000 Like, the things you're saying are insane.

00:17:20.000 You're freaking out over almost nothing and not paying attention to the important things.

00:17:24.000 There's important things going on in this world, but it's not microaggressions.

00:17:29.000 It's not that Google shouldn't show images of white men when you pump in the AI and ask who the founding fathers are.

00:17:39.000 Did you see what they did with Nazis?

00:17:42.000 Did they make multiracial Nazis? 0.93

00:17:44.000 Multiracial Nazis! 0.99

00:17:44.000 They had an Asian woman Nazi. 0.99

00:17:47.000 It's fucking bananas. 1.00

00:17:50.000 It's bananas. 1.00

00:17:51.000 It's literally like a movie.

00:17:53.000 It's a Mike Judge movie. 0.83

00:17:54.000 It's Idiocracy.

00:17:55.000 It's a very strange thing where logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and challenging young minds Have completely abandoned that task and are now wholesale focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to.

00:18:20.000 And none of these people exist that are teaching these things.

00:18:23.000 None of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of university world.

00:18:31.000 These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated, and then they indoctrinate more and educate more, and they stay in this system.

00:18:39.000 And they're not out there in the world.

00:18:41.000 They're just not.

00:18:42.000 They don't speak for us.

00:18:44.000 But they don't speak for us, they don't agree with us, and yet they're ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very vocabulary that we use.

00:18:56.000 It used to be that you'd have a quirky, tweeted-out Marxist professor who would be smoking a pipe in an Ivy League school, and you could say, well, that's fine.

00:19:04.000 The kids go to Princeton, and they get two years with the Marxist whack job, and then they get out in the real world.

00:19:11.000 The problem is that that ideology that was I think we're good to go.

00:19:35.000 What kind of system do we live in?

00:19:37.000 Is that democratic governance?

00:19:39.000 Is that the representation of the people?

00:19:41.000 If we're paying for it, we're sending our kids through it, but we don't have a stake in and the control of the values that are being formed in those institutions.

00:19:53.000 I think it's a very serious question.

00:19:55.000 It's not trivial to say we're kind of beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints that make a democratic form of government meaningful.

00:20:06.000 When the bureaucracy rules and it's pushing ideology against the will of the majority of the people, We're in a kind of scary position in our country.

00:20:16.000 And it seems like it's willing participation by the masses as well because they feel like they're a part of change.

00:20:24.000 They feel like they're a part of imposing these ideas on the rest of the world and the rest of the world is going to have to catch up and they will be the ones that were correct because they were on the right side all along.

00:20:36.000 And it's very strange to watch it play out.

00:20:40.000 Because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point.

00:20:43.000 It's very disheartening.

00:20:45.000 You see it with DAs.

00:20:47.000 There's an issue going on right now in Austin where they have this progressive Soros-funded DA who's just letting everybody out of jail.

00:20:56.000 What'd you do? 0.66

00:20:57.000 Rape people? 1.00

00:20:58.000 Let them out of jail. 0.99

00:20:59.000 Murder someone?

00:20:59.000 Let them out of jail.

00:21:00.000 It's fucking bananas. 1.00

00:21:04.000 Microaggression? 1.00

00:21:04.000 Straight to prison. 1.00

00:21:05.000 And they're talking about the drop in crime, but it's because crime's not reported in a lot of places now.

00:21:10.000 Because the crime went up so high and they defunded the police, it's like, in Austin they need, they're 500 cops down, and the morale is down because of the defund of police and because, you know, cops...

00:21:21.000 I believe there was 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the Black Lives Matter protests.

00:21:27.000 17 of those cases, I think, have been dropped.

00:21:29.000 I don't know.

00:21:30.000 I'm sure if that...

00:21:31.000 Here, I'll send you an article.

00:21:33.000 You can tell me if that...

00:21:34.000 It's in Barry Weiss's substack today, or her newspaper.

00:21:39.000 Sure.

00:21:40.000 But this is a real problem where you see the results playing out.

00:21:46.000 You see that they're negative.

00:21:47.000 And I mean, kudos to Oregon for...

00:21:49.000 You know, correcting course.

00:21:51.000 But you see it playing out with crime and with prisons.

00:21:56.000 And here's my number one beef with this.

00:21:59.000 All this effort to do that, all this effort to let people out of jail, no cash bail, what about reform?

00:22:09.000 What about putting all that effort into reforming people?

00:22:12.000 How come that doesn't exist?

00:22:13.000 What about funding reform inside the prisons?

00:22:16.000 What about going to all these impoverished, drug-ridden, gang-ridden communities and doing some good?

00:22:22.000 How come there's no effort there? 0.99

00:22:24.000 If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress. 0.98

00:22:27.000 You don't want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual criminals, and just let them loose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone's anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever. 0.99

00:22:40.000 That's not the solution. 0.96

00:22:41.000 It's very unfortunate those people are in that situation where they are habitual criminals.

00:22:45.000 And I'm sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that, without doubt, right?

00:22:50.000 Sure.

00:22:51.000 But the solution's not let them out.

00:22:54.000 The solution is stop that from happening in the future.

00:22:57.000 And there's no effort whatsoever put on that.

00:22:59.000 There's no conscious thought of like, how do we get at the beginning of this?

00:23:06.000 Yeah, and that's an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex, there are so many contributing factors, but I actually don't think it's totally necessary to do that.

00:23:15.000 You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate, here are the ones that we don't tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences.

00:23:22.000 And so what we're seeing in El Salvador, which of course is ongoing, it's fraught with potential problems, But what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%.

00:23:40.000 It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.

00:23:43.000 Now it's per capita, you know, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.

00:23:49.000 The lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes.

00:23:59.000 And so it's not that you have to have a kind of soul searching and endless kind of navel gazing and philosophizing.

00:24:09.000 It's simply to say You know, people who are a direct threat to others that commit violent crimes that maybe have 20, 30, 40, 100 convictions in their criminal history, you know, cannot participate in society without limits.

00:24:25.000 And it's something that people have been scared to talk about.

00:24:30.000 But I think that that is ending because when people start to feel a sense of danger in their daily lives, They're going to start to break through some of those taboos and to say, hey, wait a minute.

00:24:41.000 Yeah, they're letting people out of jail who are violent criminals doesn't seem to be working.

00:24:45.000 And I think we're there.

00:24:47.000 Even in Seattle, they elected a Republican city attorney.

00:24:51.000 They elected a moderate city council, a moderate mayor.

00:24:55.000 And the big cities, especially the West Coast cities, are waking up to this citizen rage.

00:25:03.000 These are the most prosperous cities in the history of the world.

00:25:07.000 But they can't keep the streets clean.

00:25:09.000 They can't keep people safe.

00:25:10.000 Well, they can when Jijing Ping comes to town. 1.00

00:25:12.000 That's right.

00:25:13.000 Yeah.

00:25:13.000 How wild is that one?

00:25:15.000 That dude is so wild.

00:25:16.000 Yeah.

00:25:17.000 Because what he does is so blatant.

00:25:19.000 Yeah.

00:25:20.000 Like the Panera Bread thing.

00:25:21.000 The Panera Bread thing.

00:25:22.000 The Panera Bread thing is amazing.

00:25:24.000 You almost have to respect it.

00:25:25.000 You almost have to respect it.

00:25:26.000 It's so brazen.

00:25:28.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 Explain it to people.

00:25:30.000 Wait, hold up.

00:25:31.000 Yeah, the Panera Bread.

00:25:32.000 So it's like you're going to raise the minimum wage for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour except for Panera Bread because the Panera Bread guy is his friend and donor.

00:25:41.000 I think it's except for it.

00:25:42.000 But the way around that to make it don't look that obvious is places with bakeries.

00:25:46.000 But that's not—what is the—I mean, why?

00:25:50.000 Why a specific way of cooking?

00:25:52.000 There is no rational justification.

00:25:54.000 There's no rational justification for it.

00:25:56.000 And so it's almost like— Oh, it says Panera is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all.

00:26:03.000 On February 28th, Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California's AB1228 law, a law that raises minimum wage for fast food workers from $16 to $20 an hour start at 81. So why is that?

00:26:17.000 How is it not exempted?

00:26:18.000 That's a hell of a fact check.

00:26:19.000 I didn't know that.

00:26:20.000 But they were saying that it was bakeries were exempt.

00:26:23.000 So what is exempt?

00:26:25.000 It said, okay, Governor Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times Panera would not be exempt from the law.

00:26:31.000 The spokesperson also did not acclaim the Bloomberg piece, which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item, calling the report absurd.

00:26:44.000 So is it a fake story?

00:26:47.000 Or is it something that they hustled on and corrected course quickly?

00:26:51.000 Roll up to the top?

00:26:54.000 So where's the initial report?

00:26:56.000 Let's find the initial report. 0.99

00:26:57.000 Because why would Bloomberg spread bullshit? 0.98

00:27:01.000 Bloomberg is a financial paper. 0.99

00:27:03.000 Right?

00:27:04.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:27:05.000 That's not something...

00:27:07.000 I don't think it would be, yeah.

00:27:08.000 You really can't do that if you're running a financial paper.

00:27:11.000 It's not like the New York Times.

00:27:13.000 The New York Times can say Israel bombed the hospital and 500 people were killed and put it on the front page, even if it's not true.

00:27:21.000 And everybody just assumes it's true because it's the New York Times.

00:27:24.000 But they can kind of get away with that.

00:27:26.000 Yeah.

00:27:27.000 And then they still exist. 0.96

00:27:28.000 But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that, if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses would do or tax laws, that seems insane. 0.97

00:27:37.000 How Panera Bread ducked California's new $20 minimum wage. 0.98

00:27:41.000 This is Bloomberg.

00:27:42.000 Governor pushed for a carve-out that's perplexed industry observers and benefited a donor.

00:27:46.000 So how do we know that this is true?

00:27:49.000 Do we have to subscribe?

00:27:50.000 The dreaded paywall.

00:27:52.000 Okay, no worries.

00:27:53.000 We'll subscribe.

00:27:54.000 We owe you a blue rug.

00:27:56.000 But there must be something to it.

00:27:59.000 And it's so hard with that guy.

00:28:01.000 Because when you just look at the way he praised Biden, I would never run against him.

00:28:07.000 A man of character.

00:28:08.000 You know, like, I'm old school. 0.89

00:28:11.000 It's like he's playing someone in a movie that's a crazy person.

00:28:19.000 That's how, like, a really good actor would play a complete crazy person who's insincere enough that smart people recognize it, but that, like, really dull-minded, blue-no-matter-who people are like, he's a winner. 0.86

00:28:34.000 That guy, he's got my vote.

00:28:36.000 I'll tell you what, he can win.

00:28:37.000 He can win this for us.

00:28:39.000 But the problem is that that's not wrong.

00:28:42.000 Gavin Newsom is a fearsome political talent and his willingness to do or say anything and do it with a straight face, with that sincere voice and that cool swoopy hair.

00:28:55.000 I love that he keeps getting busted too.

00:28:57.000 I love that he got busted during the pandemic, eaten inside with no mask on. 1.00

00:29:01.000 He's just fucking... 1.00

00:29:02.000 The shamelessness on that guy is like, it's like a laboratory specimen. 0.99

00:29:07.000 I mean, it actually is an interesting guy and fascinating person in that way.

00:29:12.000 I'm not a fan.

00:29:13.000 I disagree with him politically, but I don't think he should be underestimated because those of us who can see through it, I think are actually a pretty small number of people.

00:29:22.000 Well, I think you're probably right, and I think there's also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team.

00:29:28.000 That's what I think.

00:29:29.000 I think they barely care who the president is, and I think that's obvious with Obama.

00:29:37.000 Excuse me, with Biden.

00:29:40.000 Not with Obama at all.

00:29:42.000 The opposite with Obama.

00:29:43.000 Obama was like the best example of what we have to offer.

00:29:46.000 But Biden is, without doubt, anyone can beat him.

00:29:49.000 If you were just comparing competence, you know, someone who you would trust talking, someone who you would trust to go meet foreign dignitaries, there's zero, no one he's going to beat.

00:29:59.000 He's not going to be a single living politician.

00:30:02.000 Since he's a top of this team, that people are like, this team is our team, no matter what.

00:30:08.000 Like, we're all in. 0.99

00:30:09.000 I'm a fucking 49ers fan for life. 1.00

00:30:11.000 That's what these people are doing. 1.00

00:30:13.000 And they literally don't kill.

00:30:15.000 They'll gaslight you into a coma.

00:30:17.000 Did you see that piece that someone wrote the other day?

00:30:19.000 How his age is his superpower? 1.00

00:30:22.000 Did you see that shit? 1.00

00:30:23.000 I didn't see that. 1.00

00:30:24.000 Panera exempted from California's minimum wage hike, thank the Newsome link.

00:30:28.000 Okay, and this is Snopes.

00:30:30.000 What does Snopes say?

00:30:31.000 Here's them explaining what the article was, and then I'll skip to the paragraph where it talks about it.

00:30:36.000 Do they debunk it?

00:30:39.000 No, I didn't get through all the article, but it is explaining what happened here.

00:30:44.000 Okay, the confusion exception...

00:30:47.000 According to California state law set to take effect April 1st, 2024, a restaurant chain with more than 60 locations nationwide that produces for sale bread as a standalone menu item does not count as fast food.

00:31:01.000 The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Bloomberg article published February 28th reporting that the fast-casual chain Panera Bread has dodged an upcoming minimum wage increase for fast food workers in California at $20 an hour.

00:31:14.000 The article connected the bread exemption to billionaire Greg Flynn, a frequent donor to California Governor Gavin Newsom's political campaigns, who owns more than two dozen Panera Bread locations in the state.

00:31:25.000 In a statement to Snopes, however, Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection, played a role in the law, and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Panera.

00:31:35.000 The governor never met with Flynn about this bill, and the story is absurd, Stack said.

00:31:40.000 Well, they don't have to meet.

00:31:41.000 They can talk on the phone.

00:31:42.000 Our legal team has reviewed, and it appears that Panera is not exempt from the law.

00:31:48.000 Whoops!

00:31:48.000 The legal team reviewed it after they...

00:31:50.000 So there is an exemption.

00:31:52.000 Right, right.

00:31:52.000 So that's where I was going to get to this.

00:31:54.000 Okay, so how would they not be?

00:31:56.000 The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills.

00:32:04.000 The exemption, as we mentioned above, is real and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.

00:32:10.000 However, Newsom's office said a legal analysis determined Panera, like other chain bakeries, does not fall under the exemption because it mixes its dough off-site instead of fully producing bread on the premises of its retail locations.

00:32:24.000 Interesting.

00:32:25.000 But that makes sense.

00:32:27.000 It's like Subway, right?

00:32:29.000 Subway doesn't make the dough either.

00:32:31.000 Why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill?

00:32:38.000 Is the baker's lobby that powerful?

00:32:41.000 The opposite.

00:32:42.000 Yeah.

00:32:43.000 Yeah.

00:32:43.000 I mean, well, the bakers are the ones who'd be lobbying for more money.

00:32:47.000 That's what I mean.

00:32:48.000 Yeah.

00:32:48.000 The actual bakers.

00:32:49.000 Yeah.

00:32:50.000 But even look at Snopes.

00:32:53.000 Snopes has done a fact check on my work that actually got debunked.

00:32:56.000 PolitiFact has done it.

00:32:57.000 Washington Post.

00:32:58.000 Well, the history of Snopes is wild.

00:33:00.000 Is wild.

00:33:01.000 But a lot of these fact check sites, they've actually had to retract claims against me where they say, oh...

00:33:07.000 You know, Chris Rufo in his reporting said X, Y, and Z. It's not true.

00:33:09.000 And then I provide them the documentation, the evidence.

00:33:12.000 I raise a stink about it.

00:33:13.000 And then they reverse course.

00:33:14.000 And a lot of these, like, that's such a mess of facts.

00:33:18.000 And who did they reach out to to verify?

00:33:20.000 Governor Newsom's office.

00:33:21.000 Right.

00:33:21.000 Who said it's absurd.

00:33:22.000 Yeah.

00:33:23.000 Of course he's going to say it's absurd because he got in trouble for it.

00:33:26.000 But I think the point about Biden that you were making is really instructive because...

00:33:31.000 Biden is like the weekend at Bernie's president.

00:33:34.000 I mean, it's like they wheel him around.

00:33:36.000 And so what you get a glimpse of is the Democratic Party machine.

00:33:41.000 What are their priorities?

00:33:42.000 What are they going to put on the teleprompter?

00:33:44.000 What is the staff level going to decide is important?

00:33:47.000 And then they kind of wheel Biden out there to kind of kind of stammer for a couple of minutes, say the talking points and get out.

00:33:53.000 And so we're seeing what's important to the party as a movement.

00:33:57.000 The opposite is Trump.

00:33:58.000 Trump is, you know, a unique individual figure.

00:34:03.000 The party is following him.

00:34:05.000 Look, these are the two models that we have and increasingly the voters are saying we want to have a rematch.

00:34:12.000 What do you think?

00:34:13.000 Well, it is interesting that he's so frail that he's transparent, right?

00:34:19.000 And he's so transparent to the point where the White House press secretary accidentally tweeted as him from her account.

00:34:25.000 You saw that.

00:34:26.000 Yeah.

00:34:27.000 Right?

00:34:27.000 Which is wonderful.

00:34:28.000 I love when that happens, because it's like, thank you.

00:34:30.000 I was wondering, and now I know, you know?

00:34:32.000 I was really confused.

00:34:34.000 Kind of had a feeling it was you.

00:34:36.000 And is there ever been a worse White House press secretary?

00:34:41.000 How did she get that job? 0.87

00:34:43.000 She's so bad at convincing people.

00:34:45.000 There's a bunch of hardcore, ideologically driven, left-wing pundits that are on YouTube that could do a way better job. 0.99

00:34:54.000 And they would be fucking psycho about it. 0.99

00:34:57.000 They would be psycho about it, and the left would be like, yeah! 0.99

00:35:00.000 She's not the one. 1.00

00:35:01.000 She's fucking terrible at it. 1.00

00:35:03.000 She gets called out for stuff all the time. 1.00

00:35:04.000 She gets set up for stuff all the time. 1.00

00:35:06.000 Peter Doocy's always setting her up.

00:35:08.000 He talks to her.

00:35:10.000 Doocy's amazing.

00:35:11.000 He's so good.

00:35:12.000 He'll provide a little bit of this, but then what about that?

00:35:15.000 And, you know, she's just awful at it. 0.97

00:35:18.000 And she's only really challenged by one person in the briefing room and still manages to bungle it on the daily. 0.93

00:35:24.000 Well, it's just there's so much madness that she has to, like, cover up.

00:35:28.000 And look, this is, again, a kind of brass tacks way of talking about it, but it's what happens when you put identity over competence.

00:35:36.000 Yeah.

00:35:37.000 Everyone knows explicitly.

00:35:39.000 And then when you hire someone, it's a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities the candidate has.

00:35:44.000 This is our first black female, I don't know, LGBTQ, not really sure.

00:35:49.000 And so the problem with that, though, is when you're not making a decision based on competence, merit, excellence...

00:35:56.000 You're buying into it at the front end on that different hierarchy of decision making.

00:36:01.000 But then on the back end, you can't do anything about it.

00:36:04.000 You say, well, you elevated this person for identity.

00:36:06.000 You can't fire that person because of incompetence.

00:36:09.000 Unless they steal women's clothes from the airport. 1.00

00:36:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:13.000 Unless they get a little sideways, you know.

00:36:16.000 That guy was my favorite.

00:36:18.000 But the Harvard story is this exact phenomenon.

00:36:22.000 And, you know, after the 10-7 attack, Harvard kind of reveals the ideology and the institution.

00:36:28.000 And then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents.

00:36:33.000 We were the ones who broke the plagiarism story.

00:36:35.000 Just for people that aren't aware, so this can be standalone, what Christopher's referring to is that Harvard, the president of Harvard and the president of MIT and Penn, they all had this meeting where they were grilled by,

00:36:53.000 which was the congressman?

00:36:55.000 Stefanik.

00:36:56.000 Yes.

00:36:56.000 Who grilled them about using anti-Jewish hate.

00:37:02.000 And is that hate speech to say death to the Jews?

00:37:05.000 And their answer was essentially, if it's actionable, then it's hate.

00:37:09.000 It was the most brutal.

00:37:11.000 Bonkers, bizarre mental gymnastics and also with that one woman from Penn done in the most condescending way. 1.00

00:37:18.000 Oh yeah. 0.99

00:37:18.000 It's like she is so accustomed to being the boss, so accustomed to people like accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world that she doesn't realize how fucking insane what she's saying is. 0.99

00:37:31.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:37:32.000 The question was, if students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard's policy?

00:37:40.000 And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was, it depends on the context.

00:37:47.000 It's like, I mean, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people on the center-left, suddenly became clear.

00:37:59.000 And so this caused all sorts of chaos, predictably.

00:38:03.000 You have donors dropping out.

00:38:06.000 You have alumni furious.

00:38:08.000 And then a little birdie sent another reporter and me a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, you know, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized dozens of passages in her PhD thesis. 0.99

00:38:22.000 And so, in this context of this big fight, you know, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict.

00:38:32.000 And so, published it.

00:38:34.000 Obviously, it causes a huge firestorm.

00:38:36.000 But the question is the same.

00:38:38.000 It's to say to Harvard, okay, DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.

00:38:47.000 That's clear.

00:38:48.000 But your motto for the last, you know, three, four hundred years has been Veritas, truth.

00:38:53.000 And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one.

00:38:57.000 You either choose DEI or you choose truth.

00:38:59.000 Which one are you going to sacrifice?

00:39:01.000 And I think as a country, the reason that story drove so much attention is because that's where we are politically.

00:39:07.000 That's where we're on policy.

00:39:08.000 That's where companies find themselves.

00:39:11.000 Where are we going?

00:39:13.000 What are our values?

00:39:14.000 And we have this competing set of values.

00:39:17.000 And for me, as someone who, look, I'm unabashed.

00:39:21.000 I'm a political person.

00:39:23.000 I try to drive political change.

00:39:26.000 I think framing the question clearly so that people really understand what's at stake is just the beginning part of the process of getting sanity back.

00:39:35.000 Yeah, and I think people are waking up.

00:39:37.000 Jamie, why don't you shut your mic off because Carl is snoring up a storm over there.

00:39:42.000 Carl.

00:39:42.000 While you were talking, I was here.

00:39:44.000 Yeah.

00:39:46.000 Geez, Carl, is that boring?

00:39:48.000 Carl gets bored quick.

00:39:49.000 He's only four months old.

00:39:51.000 But the curious thing to me was that most people, until they saw those videos, weren't aware of how far it had gone.

00:39:59.000 And then they're like, okay, now I kind of get it.

00:40:02.000 And there's been a very, very big reaction since then of people realizing, How insane everything has gotten.

00:40:08.000 I think that this is something that came up, like when Jordan Peterson first started doing my show, which was I think, when was Jordan's first appearance?

00:40:18.000 Was it 2015?

00:40:20.000 2016?

00:40:21.000 Somewhere around then?

00:40:23.000 When I had seen his story and seen these videos of him being interviewed, explaining to people, no, you don't understand.

00:40:32.000 If you impose this legislation that makes it a hate crime to not use someone's preferred gender pronouns, this is not going to stop there.

00:40:41.000 It's going to keep going and going and going and going, and you can't let it happen.

00:40:46.000 And he's right.

00:40:47.000 He's 100% right.

00:40:48.000 But back then, the pushback was so fascinating.

00:40:51.000 Because people were like, why are you having this guy on your show to talk about this thing that's happening only in these obscure universities?

00:40:56.000 It's never going to go anywhere. 0.97

00:40:58.000 But now you look at it eight years later, and it's fucking everywhere. 0.99

00:41:02.000 It's everywhere. 0.98

00:41:04.000 Dude, so one of the things that I do, I'm a trustee at a public university in Florida, New College of Florida.

00:41:10.000 Governor DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to take over this university.

00:41:17.000 We're good to go.

00:41:33.000 When we did this, what we did is we came in, we replaced the leadership, we abolished the DEI department, we terminated the gender studies program, and then we said, you know, we're not going to comply with these ridiculous pronoun rules. 0.99

00:41:46.000 And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me.

00:41:55.000 So I'm currently under investigation by federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to call this woman by Zzer pronouns.

00:42:06.000 Zzer.

00:42:06.000 Not, you know, okay, trans, okay, man, woman, okay, whatever.

00:42:10.000 Zzer.

00:42:11.000 Either way, federal indictment, imagine for even just refusing to call this person he or her.

00:42:17.000 People have always been rude.

00:42:19.000 Are we going to legislate against rudeness?

00:42:22.000 Are we going to say that if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan, Can I get them arrested and locked in a cage because they're being rude to me because they're calling me a girl?

00:42:31.000 If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that's where it's going.

00:42:35.000 That's where they'd like it to go.

00:42:36.000 And look, I have to spin up lawyers.

00:42:38.000 Thankfully, the university is handling it.

00:42:40.000 But I mean, this is not trivial.

00:42:42.000 And what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great.

00:42:46.000 What he brought up illustrates this point.

00:42:50.000 If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything.

00:42:55.000 It's a simple sales technique.

00:42:57.000 You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them to kind of cash up, and then you work them up the chain to a bigger purchase or a bigger commitment or a bigger ideology.

00:43:07.000 It's how cults work.

00:43:08.000 Yeah.

00:43:09.000 And so, like, I learned this as a kid.

00:43:12.000 My father's Italian from Italy, and we went to Rome, to the Vatican, this sales guy.

00:43:17.000 It's like everything about sales and persuasion I learned, like, 10 years old, watching this guy.

00:43:22.000 He came up, he said, oh, you know, sir, It's a beautiful day.

00:43:25.000 I had a new grandchild that was born.

00:43:27.000 Let me give you this beautiful St. Christopher medal or St. Joseph medal to celebrate this.

00:43:33.000 And as soon as you take it, you know you're hooked because he's going to sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever.

00:43:41.000 And so this is the ante.

00:43:43.000 You know, once you put in the ante, you're playing the hand.

00:43:45.000 And so this stuff is like, it's rage bait for the right.

00:43:48.000 It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives, you know, some kind of momentum.

00:43:53.000 Ratings.

00:43:54.000 Ratings.

00:43:54.000 But what it's not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback.

00:43:59.000 Legal, administrative, policy, and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes.

00:44:05.000 But I'm very concerned because these are just these gambits where they make, and once they stick, Then you're in.

00:44:14.000 It's very hard to roll back.

00:44:15.000 Look at the military.

00:44:16.000 You have all of these men masquerading as women that are now suddenly elevated in the military hierarchy. 0.98

00:44:24.000 This is not trivial.

00:44:26.000 We're the most powerful military in the world.

00:44:28.000 We maintain international peace.

00:44:30.000 And it's like now the highest concern is trans?

00:44:35.000 No.

00:44:36.000 I don't think that this is how we should be making decisions.

00:44:39.000 And I don't think that we should be submitting to the original lie.

00:44:44.000 You should never submit to the original lie because if you do, you can never successfully push back again.

00:44:49.000 It's certainly odd that they're pushing that.

00:44:57.000 You know, this is where I get so confused because if I really want to go full tinfoil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was a foreign country, I would be promoting this as much as possible in any way I could.

00:45:11.000 I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.

00:45:18.000 I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.

00:45:24.000 I'd be teaching them the kind of things that they taught People, where that woman, do you remember, you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley, and he was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods?

00:45:37.000 And she is actually laughing.

00:45:41.000 I just want to point out, what you're saying is transphobic, and opens up trans people to violence.

00:45:49.000 Like what?

00:45:50.000 I think she was a Stanford law professor. 0.52

00:45:53.000 She was somewhere.

00:45:55.000 Might have been Berkeley.

00:45:57.000 But it was whatever it was.

00:45:58.000 It was like, what did you just say?

00:46:01.000 What did you just say?

00:46:02.000 And why did you say it that way?

00:46:04.000 You think you're so accustomed to being in your bubble that you don't recognize how gross it is when you giggle before you say something. 0.59

00:46:13.000 I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.

00:46:19.000 Like, some men can have periods.

00:46:22.000 But this is the dominant culture in HR departments, K-12 schools, universities, government bureaucracies.

00:46:30.000 That is the social game that has been established.

00:46:33.000 And so, you know, when we took over New College of Florida, it was the most left-leaning university.

00:46:38.000 It's basically the evergreen—it was the evergreen state of Florida.

00:46:42.000 It was, the student population was more than 50% trans, queer, and non-binary.

00:46:47.000 More than 50%?

00:46:49.000 More than 50%.

00:46:49.000 What is the odds of that in terms of like the normal account when they do, if they get a random group of 100 human beings in the country.

00:46:56.000 There's a bit of a disparity there, you know, especially because like non-binary is fake. 1.00

00:47:01.000 It's not a thing, right?

00:47:02.000 It just doesn't exist.

00:47:03.000 You can be non-binary.

00:47:05.000 Maybe I am.

00:47:06.000 You can be.

00:47:06.000 You can just say it.

00:47:07.000 You just say it.

00:47:08.000 I knew a dude who used to say it.

00:47:09.000 I used to date only girls.

00:47:11.000 That was his strategy?

00:47:13.000 Yeah, it's like a con.

00:47:14.000 It's a con.

00:47:15.000 You're part of the...

00:47:17.000 Male feminists, basically. 1.00

00:47:18.000 Exactly. 0.92

00:47:19.000 It's a little cuttlefish.

00:47:20.000 You know, it is like a...

00:47:22.000 It's a strategy.

00:47:24.000 100%.

00:47:25.000 And it works maybe at the initial, but there are negative consequences.

00:47:28.000 Yeah, there's flaws.

00:47:29.000 There's flaws.

00:47:30.000 And then once women figure out what you're doing, they don't respect you anymore. 1.00

00:47:33.000 But what happens, so we go to the university and, you know, we're the new bosses.

00:47:38.000 The governor gives us a mandate to do significant changes and reforms.

00:47:42.000 And I remember I took some of my guys.

00:47:44.000 We kind of landed on campus the first time.

00:47:47.000 Student protests, death threats, you know, SWAT team mobilized to protect us.

00:47:53.000 And I remember meeting with the old administrators, you know, and walking in and And these are people that are just wagging their finger in my face.

00:48:05.000 They're saying, oh, you can't do this.

00:48:07.000 You're opening up the community to violence.

00:48:10.000 You can't host a talk on campus because all this same stuff you're talking about.

00:48:16.000 And then I think like...

00:48:19.000 All of you are about to get fired.

00:48:21.000 Do you not understand the situation that you're in?

00:48:23.000 Your finger wagging is not going to work anymore.

00:48:26.000 The governor is tough as nails.

00:48:28.000 He told us before we took over, if you're not driving massive negative headlines, if you're not getting flack, you're not doing your job.

00:48:37.000 I'll back you up 100 percent.

00:48:39.000 Go in and make the change.

00:48:41.000 But what I realized in that moment is that the people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged. 1.00

00:48:49.000 No one in a meeting says, actually, this is a stupid idea. 0.99

00:48:52.000 We should get back to business. 0.99

00:48:54.000 And so for me, it was this remarkable realization that we've created this social and psychological pattern within our institutions.

00:49:02.000 Where they're like fragile, brittle, unhinged.

00:49:07.000 Because the most passive-aggressive, the most ideological, the most kind of nagging person ends up winning.

00:49:14.000 And if we're going to have better institutions, we have to have people, men and women, that go in and just say, no. 0.97

00:49:21.000 No more bullshit. 0.96

00:49:22.000 No more games. 1.00

00:49:24.000 No more ideology.

00:49:25.000 We have a serious job to do.

00:49:27.000 We're going to get it done.

00:49:28.000 And if you don't join the mission, you're out.

00:49:32.000 Pink slip, you know, and so that's kind of what we did.

00:49:36.000 You saw the same thing at Twitter when Elon took over Twitter.

00:49:39.000 These are the hard decisions that we haven't made in a long time that I think are desperately needed.

00:49:46.000 I think so too and I think that...

00:49:49.000 What they're doing by allowing this culture where every anxiety gets justified and amplified, you're just creating more anxious people. 0.99

00:50:01.000 You're creating more fucked up kids. 0.96

00:50:04.000 You're turning the whole world Into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend. 0.99

00:50:19.000 And you have to amend it through DEI, and you have to amend it through Equality of Outcome, and you have to amend it through Tax the Rich.

00:50:28.000 The whole thing behind it is just so unhinged.

00:50:34.000 And how many of those people, if they had gone to a place where they were met with intellectual challenges by motivated professors who are not ideologically driven, who could have taught them important things about life,

00:50:51.000 that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way?

00:50:57.000 We're not preparing people for that because the people that are preparing the people have never done that.

00:51:05.000 And it's a giant part of the problem.

00:51:07.000 It's like someone teaching you how to do a thing that they don't do.

00:51:13.000 That's what I say about drag queens. 1.00

00:51:15.000 Unless they're teaching you how to be a drag queen, I'm not But that's what they're doing. 1.00

00:51:22.000 Yeah, they're doing that, sort of.

00:51:24.000 For sure, it's a modeling thing.

00:51:26.000 The drag queen comes in with a position of status, prestige, admiration.

00:51:32.000 Right.

00:51:32.000 It's presented as this amazing life path.

00:51:35.000 And even the drag queen theorists, if you read their academic papers, which is not everyone's cup of tea, but I've made the sacrifice, they say very clearly and very queerly, they say, we are...

00:51:49.000 Training kids to move into the queer ideology, the ideology of queer theory, the academic discipline, but also for kind of other ways of knowing, creating a, you know, one of the phrases they use is a site of queer pleasure.

00:52:04.000 And it's like...

00:52:06.000 They're not hiding the ideology that's driving this, if you dig far enough.

00:52:12.000 And they really say, they say, we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family because that's oppressive.

00:52:19.000 Having a mother and a father in a nuclear household environment is a form of racism, transphobia, whatever, all of the different kind of social ills you could imagine.

00:52:30.000 We have people that have no sense of responsibility.

00:52:33.000 We've inherited some good and some bad.

00:52:36.000 You're born into the world in a tragic state of being.

00:52:39.000 Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad.

00:52:44.000 I think on the whole, our history, our tradition, is on net very positive, very good.

00:52:49.000 Still problems to solve.

00:52:51.000 That's a kind of universal human nature.

00:52:53.000 But what we're training kids to believe is that everything behind them is evil.

00:52:57.000 All of the structures that have provided a sense of discipline and meaning and purpose should be demolished.

00:53:03.000 And they should be replaced by ideological communities.

00:53:06.000 I mean, that to me is evident in the outcomes.

00:53:10.000 We're creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids.

00:53:17.000 That have been deprived of all these structures that could actually help them along.

00:53:23.000 I've seen that across the board in my reporting, in my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life.

00:53:30.000 And so we have to start first by, I mean, assessing your own situation.

00:53:34.000 What do I do with my kids?

00:53:35.000 And a lot of people are asking that question right now.

00:53:38.000 I don't know about you, but when I grew up, if you were an upper-middle-class, professional-class household, your parents bought a house in a nice neighborhood, enrolled you in public kindergarten, and you kind of went up.

00:53:49.000 It was set it and forget it.

00:53:51.000 That's over.

00:53:53.000 Parents are finally starting to say, hey, wait a minute.

00:53:55.000 I actually have to look into this.

00:53:57.000 I want to be careful and considerate about where I'm sending my kids and what kind of life I'm raising them to live.

00:54:06.000 Yes.

00:54:07.000 And there's not a lot of good options.

00:54:09.000 That's what gets confusing.

00:54:10.000 And for a lot of my friends whose kids are about to go to high school and about to go to college, you know, they're making these next steps towards adulthood. 0.96

00:54:20.000 It's really scary to them because they're like, look, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.

00:54:26.000 They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, get caught up in momentum and not realize... 0.98

00:54:33.000 That you're not contributing to any good. 0.96

00:54:35.000 You're just fucking things up worse.

00:54:38.000 And that none of this unhoused or home-free or whatever you want to call it, that's not helping anybody.

00:54:44.000 All this language, all this verbiage, it's not helping anybody. 1.00

00:54:48.000 And you have to fucking work hard to get by in this world. 0.94

00:54:51.000 And it's important. 0.98

00:54:52.000 It's an important facet of being a human being.

00:54:57.000 You have to learn what your capabilities are.

00:54:59.000 You have to learn how to push yourself.

00:55:02.000 You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable.

00:55:05.000 You have to learn that. 0.97

00:55:06.000 And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it. 0.96

00:55:09.000 If we protect kids every step of the way from any sort of difficult thing at all, lower math scores because too many people aren't graduating. 0.99

00:55:18.000 So this must be racist.

00:55:20.000 Let's lower the scores.

00:55:21.000 Let's just pass people. 1.00

00:55:23.000 Fuck it. 1.00

00:55:24.000 We don't want to be bad people. 1.00

00:55:25.000 Let's just pass people instead of teaching them. 1.00

00:55:27.000 It's hard to learn shit. 1.00

00:55:28.000 It's hard. 1.00

00:55:29.000 It takes work.

00:55:30.000 That's the whole reason why it's so impressive when someone is really well-read.

00:55:35.000 Like, wow, that guy put in the work.

00:55:37.000 It's really impressive when someone knows a lot of stuff.

00:55:40.000 It's really impressive when someone's really good at something.

00:55:43.000 Well, why is it impressive? 0.95

00:55:45.000 Because we know it's fucking hard to do. 0.97

00:55:47.000 It's that simple. 0.94

00:55:48.000 If you want to develop human beings that have potential and can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you've got to teach them how to work hard.

00:55:59.000 That's part of the process.

00:56:01.000 It's unavoidable. 0.99

00:56:03.000 And if you don't have that facet, if you don't have that as a core tenet of how you view the world, You're fucking up. 0.99

00:56:12.000 100%. 0.98

00:56:12.000 There's no way you're gonna get everything out of life without hard work. 0.98

00:56:17.000 You'll be anxious.

00:56:19.000 You'll be depressed.

00:56:20.000 You'll feel lost.

00:56:22.000 You won't feel like you accomplished anything.

00:56:24.000 You'll feel like it's been handed to you.

00:56:26.000 You'll be a trust fund, baby. 1.00

00:56:27.000 You'll be fucked. 1.00

00:56:29.000 It's not good for you. 1.00

00:56:30.000 You have to work hard.

00:56:32.000 And so you have to overcome, including emotional harm. 1.00

00:56:36.000 You have to go through bullshit. 0.99

00:56:38.000 You have to go through bad friendships and bad relationships and bad co-workers and bad employers. 1.00

00:56:44.000 You have to go through that.

00:56:45.000 It's part of the process.

00:56:46.000 It's how you become a human being. 0.98

00:56:48.000 And you can't protect people every goddamn step of the way. 0.94

00:56:51.000 We're just going to create a bunch of grown-up babies who are screaming in the streets, stop oil now, blocking the highway with signs painted with oil, wearing sneakers made with oil. 0.99

00:57:04.000 Every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil. 0.99

00:57:08.000 It's insanity. 1.00

00:57:10.000 And this is what we've got.

00:57:12.000 Look, I'm in that world of words, ideas, publication.

00:57:17.000 It's a pretty easy life in some ways, right?

00:57:20.000 You're doing reading, you're doing writing, you're doing media.

00:57:23.000 But I have a lot of friends that live in my small town that do actual hard work.

00:57:28.000 They're working in the oil business.

00:57:31.000 They're working on commercial plumbing.

00:57:32.000 They're working in actual real things that we depend on, but we take for granted.

00:57:37.000 Right.

00:57:37.000 And those things are actually hard.

00:57:39.000 Super fucking hard. 0.87

00:57:40.000 Super hard. 0.99

00:57:40.000 It takes a ton of dedication, a ton of skill. 0.99

00:57:43.000 And it's the reason that those of us who are privileged enough, in the real sense of the word, can do what we do.

00:57:49.000 We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world.

00:57:54.000 And so I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these, oh, ban oil.

00:57:59.000 Oh, ban oil?

00:58:00.000 Our whole society collapses instantly.

00:58:03.000 Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds.

00:58:06.000 And so it's like we've created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings.

00:58:16.000 I mean, these are people that don't know what it means to be human.

00:58:20.000 They're just...

00:58:21.000 Kind of symbols of ideology.

00:58:23.000 They're like, you know, you look at those videos and you're like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions.

00:58:29.000 These are kind of puppets as part of some agenda, as part of some mimetic ideology that is nihilistic at its heart.

00:58:38.000 And that's where I think we're going.

00:58:40.000 If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color, you know, You have no sense of values. 1.00

00:58:52.000 And that's what we all want.

00:58:53.000 We all operate on a sense of values, whether it's conscious or unconscious.

00:58:57.000 And when you try to wipe away all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal, You're dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know north from south.

00:59:12.000 They know up from down.

00:59:14.000 And so, you know, with my own kids, that's what I'm trying to do is protect them to the extent that's necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to fight.

00:59:26.000 Because life is a fight.

00:59:28.000 Life is a struggle.

00:59:29.000 They're gonna confront very difficult things as they grow up.

00:59:33.000 And, you know, and then at some point, you know, you hope that you've prepared them enough.

00:59:38.000 Yeah, and when you're looking at the difference between the world of today and the world of just 20 years ago, the change is so quick.

00:59:47.000 There's never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly.

00:59:53.000 Like, what year was it?

00:59:55.000 Was it 2020 that we had the highest jump in murder ever?

01:00:00.000 The same year we had the defund the police?

01:00:06.000 That's scary.

01:00:08.000 That's scary because that's the opposite of where we expect.

01:00:11.000 If you look at like Pinker's work on violence over time, you see that societies are trending in a very positive direction, at least we were until 2020, and that this one change Just because it was just one year,

01:00:30.000 but that one year was just three years ago, kids, okay?

01:00:33.000 Another thing like that could do that again, especially when you're dealing with even more people who are released out into the world with these radical ideas, especially the people that are inclined to believe that violence is a necessary aspect of change.

01:00:52.000 And these are ironically the same people that don't want anybody to be armed.

01:00:56.000 It's all so wild.

01:00:57.000 It's so wild because if you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, you would have a president who's not there. 0.97

01:01:07.000 You would have a society that is It's run by fucking maniacs in the educational institutions that when Antifa commits violence, somehow it's mostly peaceful, but yet when anyone else does it, 0.96

01:01:24.000 especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you could throw at it. 1.00

01:01:32.000 Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you could say. 0.99

01:01:36.000 It's everything wrong with the world. 1.00

01:01:38.000 Like, this is a recipe for a civil war.

01:01:41.000 It's a recipe for chaos.

01:01:43.000 It's a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that's around us.

01:01:46.000 If you just go from what happened so quickly in 2020, it's not hard to imagine if you could bring yourself back to the time in 2020 To think, this is never coming back, and it's going to be like this forever, and it's going to get way worse.

01:02:00.000 Because if it can get like this, where people could just smash into stores and loot, that's what I started seeing.

01:02:04.000 That's one of the things that got me out of California.

01:02:06.000 I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything. 0.84

01:02:11.000 By the way, all white kids.

01:02:13.000 And I saw...

01:02:15.000 Or down in Santa Monica or something?

01:02:16.000 It was in Woodland Hills.

01:02:17.000 Woodland Hills.

01:02:17.000 And I saw there was a target there that got targeted too.

01:02:24.000 They lit like a dumpster on fire and pushed up against the door. 0.99

01:02:27.000 There was a lot of shit that people weren't getting caught for. 0.99

01:02:30.000 And it was like right after the George Floyd riots. 0.99

01:02:33.000 So the cop cars burning on the highway were an image burning in everyone's mind still.

01:02:40.000 And I was like, oh...

01:02:41.000 I know how this movie plays out. 0.98

01:02:43.000 I'm getting the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:02:45.000 That was my first thought. 0.95

01:02:46.000 I was like, I need to figure out how to get out of here.

01:02:49.000 I can't stay.

01:02:50.000 Because this is only going to get worse.

01:02:52.000 And if you don't get out now, you're going to wish you got out when something happens to someone you love. 0.99

01:02:56.000 We've got to get the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:02:57.000 This is bad. 0.96

01:02:59.000 And it's not hard to imagine that our society, given the current situation and given the current influences, It's going in that direction. 0.96

01:03:11.000 And if I was another country, I'd be fucking pumped. 0.95

01:03:14.000 I was looking at, what's that lady's name? 1.00

01:03:16.000 Rachel, whatever it is.

01:03:17.000 The Admiral.

01:03:18.000 First female Admiral.

01:03:21.000 Madame Rachel Levine.

01:03:23.000 Yeah, Madame. 0.88

01:03:24.000 Wonderful.

01:03:25.000 Hilarious.

01:03:25.000 And this other one that was some recent trans-military person who was saying we should all put our pronouns in all of our emails, even if it's obvious.

01:03:34.000 Like, shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:03:35.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:03:37.000 How come something that used to be considered a mental illness just 10 years ago is now at a precedent? 1.00

01:03:45.000 Now it's a valuable asset?

01:03:47.000 Now it's an important part of our community?

01:03:50.000 Now it's not?

01:03:52.000 Like, if you found out someone was suicidal, would you want them in charge of the nukes?

01:03:55.000 You wouldn't, right?

01:03:57.000 Well, you know, just on paper, the amount of trans people that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else.

01:04:05.000 Isn't it something insane like 40%?

01:04:08.000 It's something crazy like that.

01:04:10.000 What are you doing?

01:04:12.000 Like, are we ignoring facts and statistics?

01:04:15.000 If you know that someone is a bipolar schizophrenic and you got them working on a gun range, she can say, hey, Harry, we just pulled your file. 0.98

01:04:23.000 And you fucking fly off the handle and you have 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager. 1.00

01:04:30.000 Give me that gun, you motherfucker. 1.00

01:04:31.000 Get out of here. 1.00

01:04:32.000 You can't work anymore.

01:04:33.000 It's like putting Kanye in charge of like an air wing in the Air Force or something.

01:04:36.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:04:37.000 I don't know about that.

01:04:38.000 It's just nuts.

01:04:41.000 Where we have decided that, listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria.

01:04:49.000 I've met many people that I truly believe they have somewhere in there, they're a woman, and they got stuck in a man's body, and I think that's real, and I think that's always happened.

01:05:01.000 But...

01:05:04.000 When you make that more powerful than just being a normal person, more preferable than just being a normal person, subject to less scrutiny than being a normal person I'm not saying you should discriminate against trans people. 0.99

01:05:21.000 I think you should just let everybody be whoever the fuck they are. 0.97

01:05:24.000 But don't tell me that I'm supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play. 0.99

01:05:31.000 Say if you're a biological male inmate and you decide that you're a woman and you want to transition to women's prisons, which in California 47 men have done.

01:05:42.000 Don't tell me that just because you're trans, like, I'm supposed to abandon that. 1.00

01:05:48.000 Like, I'm supposed to ignore that sex offenders could just walk into a women's locker room with an erection, and everyone's supposed to ignore that. 0.99

01:05:56.000 Like, what do you do? 0.99

01:05:58.000 Now you are fucking up the acceptance of trans people, because you're saying that trans people are gonna come along with all these sex offenders. 0.99

01:06:08.000 Which is not really true. 0.99

01:06:09.000 There's a lot of the trans people that aren't sex offenders.

01:06:12.000 They're just trans. 0.98

01:06:13.000 These other people are taking advantage of this fucking massive loophole that you've left in here, and you're victimizing female professional athletes, female college athletes, you're jeopardizing scholarships for those athletes. 0.99

01:06:27.000 You're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women, and there's no consideration for that at all. 1.00

01:06:35.000 Yeah, and look at this kind of sorority house. 1.00

01:06:37.000 I think it's probably the best example of this phenomenon where you have some, you know, 6'2 male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women in a sorority house somewhere. 0.97

01:06:49.000 And look, obviously, you know, this guy's a pervert. 0.92

01:06:53.000 Full stop, that is a kind of patently obvious thing, right? 0.98

01:06:58.000 They're exploiting it.

01:07:00.000 They're manipulating it. 0.87

01:07:01.000 You should certainly consider the possibility that he's a pervert.

01:07:04.000 I think it's at the minimum a big bright red flag that is waving in your face.

01:07:10.000 But the question is an institutional question.

01:07:13.000 You know, the fathers of these young girls, the deans of the universities, the university presidents, it's like, hey, wait a minute, like, accommodate this person, try to talk to this person, figure out what the deal is, assess whether it actually is kind of a real threat or not,

01:07:32.000 figure out some alternate arrangement for this person.

01:07:36.000 But especially if the young women are telling you, we don't want this, we're uncomfortable with this, we don't like this, get this person out.

01:07:43.000 It's a failure on our social institutions that we haven't developed any kind of method for solving this problem.

01:07:51.000 Well, it also shows our oppression hierarchy, that we have always protected women from sexual predators, unless that sexual predator identifies as a group that has a social hierarchy above biological women,

01:08:07.000 which is a trans woman.

01:08:09.000 And that's where we're at.

01:08:10.000 Yeah.

01:08:10.000 And it just shows that this is cult thinking.

01:08:13.000 We're in a cult.

01:08:14.000 This is a doctrine that could have been created in the top of a mountain by a wizard.

01:08:18.000 It's nonsense. 1.00

01:08:19.000 It's fucking nonsense. 1.00

01:08:21.000 And somehow or another, it is the norm in a lot of universities. 1.00

01:08:26.000 And it's fucking crazy. 1.00

01:08:28.000 And these women that have to deal with this shit, that's... 1.00

01:08:32.000 It's fucking nuts that people aren't Insanely outraged. 1.00

01:08:38.000 And that it's not stopped immediately. 0.99

01:08:40.000 People are scared.

01:08:41.000 That's the common denominator to all of these things.

01:08:45.000 But the problem is the rebound of that is equally horrific.

01:08:49.000 Because the rebound of that is that people have enough.

01:08:51.000 And then when people have enough and they find out there's this biological male that's being housed in this women's... 1.00

01:08:59.000 Sorority and this biological man, maybe he does something to one of those women. 1.00

01:09:03.000 That person, there's going to be vigilante justice and that's the last thing you want.

01:09:06.000 We want to avoid that by having sensible policies now and head off these problems before they balloon into something that is unmanageable.

01:09:16.000 If it's not already.

01:09:18.000 Again, people are scared to speak out.

01:09:21.000 You talk to folks that are... 0.99

01:09:24.000 I used to have this idea that, oh, you know, there's the concept of fuck you money. 0.98

01:09:29.000 Once you have a certain kind of net worth, you're untouchable, you're kind of immune to social consequences, you can do whatever you want. 0.96

01:09:38.000 That's not even true.

01:09:40.000 I talk to a lot of folks of considerable means and not all of them, but many of them are also scared because there's status and prestige concerns, family concerns, business concerns.

01:09:53.000 And so it really is up and down the line.

01:09:56.000 People are scared to speak.

01:09:58.000 They're scared to tell the truth.

01:09:59.000 And because there are real social consequences for doing so.

01:10:03.000 Well, there's real consequences across the board.

01:10:06.000 It's not just social.

01:10:07.000 There's economic consequences.

01:10:09.000 There's consequences.

01:10:09.000 You know, there's consequences in terms of your own personal safety.

01:10:13.000 There's a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating. 0.96

01:10:17.000 And it's so strange for me for, you know, I'm 56 years old. 0.97

01:10:21.000 I was born in 1967. I lived in a different world.

01:10:25.000 And, you know, I grew up in a world with no internet.

01:10:28.000 And so to watch this world change the way and to be a part of the internet now and to have existed in both worlds is a very fascinating contrast because I get to see.

01:10:38.000 How old are you?

01:10:39.000 39. Okay, so you don't know shit. 1.00

01:10:41.000 You don't know shit about the pre-internet days. 0.99

01:10:43.000 I didn't get a cell phone until my senior year in high school. 0.99

01:10:46.000 Oh, you poor baby. 0.98

01:10:47.000 But you had a computer at home, though, huh?

01:10:48.000 Yeah, we had a computer, for sure.

01:10:50.000 And it was attached to the internet.

01:10:50.000 It was attached to, like, AOL. Yeah, yeah.

01:10:53.000 Well, that's something. 0.92

01:10:54.000 The kids today, like the 20-year-olds, they don't know jack shit about no internet. 0.98

01:10:58.000 That's crazy. 0.86

01:10:59.000 They have full 5G everywhere they exist.

01:11:02.000 And they're always on.

01:11:03.000 They're always on.

01:11:04.000 They're always on.

01:11:05.000 They also know where everybody's location is because they use SnapMap.

01:11:08.000 They're all SnapMapping each other.

01:11:11.000 So they know, like, oh my god, she told me she was going to go to Becky's house and she's over at Debbie's house.

01:11:16.000 It's like surveillance of your friends. 1.00

01:11:18.000 It's fucking nuts, man. 1.00

01:11:18.000 Can you imagine? 1.00

01:11:19.000 It's also, it gets you very accustomed to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face.

01:11:26.000 And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they're not just the educators.

01:11:37.000 They're also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic.

01:11:42.000 And the amount of influence that you can have, if you can get people to adhere to these things, you can get them to do something really stupid, like submit to a social credit score system, which you would attach to a centralized digital currency. 0.54

01:11:55.000 Now you've got communism, and it's... 0.82

01:11:58.000 Like that.

01:11:59.000 It's very quick.

01:12:00.000 And just like people self-censored on Twitter and self-censored before Elon Musk and self-censored on YouTube because they don't want to get demonetized, people will start doing that in regular society.

01:12:13.000 They will do that because you don't want your social credit score system to drop.

01:12:17.000 And it could be something as simple as not using ZZR. Not using ZZR and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using ZZR. And now you are being tried for discrimination.

01:12:32.000 And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted. 0.99

01:12:37.000 And now all of a sudden you've got a real Soviet Union-style gulag situation in 2029, United States of America, with Admiral Levine as our first female president. 1.00

01:12:52.000 Yeah, that could be our first female president. 1.00

01:12:54.000 We're not far from there right now.

01:12:57.000 I mean, the absurdity of the ACLU filing a complaint and now the Department of Education Civil Rights Division following up for refusing to use Zsir pronouns.

01:13:06.000 I mean, it's like it is what it is.

01:13:08.000 This is something we're already here.

01:13:10.000 And so the first step is to intimidate, right?

01:13:13.000 It's an intimidation mechanism.

01:13:14.000 You got to defend yourself.

01:13:15.000 You got to get a lawyer.

01:13:16.000 You have to spend time on it.

01:13:17.000 Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents.

01:13:23.000 And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the nth power.

01:13:31.000 And, you know, I spent a year living in Western China when I was a documentary filmmaker.

01:13:37.000 And this is like where the Uyghurs are. 1.00

01:13:39.000 The Uyghurs are the Muslim minority population of China's West.

01:13:43.000 And they're, you know, ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country.

01:13:47.000 And so I'm observing kind of what they're doing, what they were doing over time.

01:13:53.000 And it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.

01:13:58.000 You know, they wouldn't allow Uyghur men to wear mustaches, like trivial things that are the beginning. 1.00

01:14:04.000 But then it's like very serious kind of regulation of thought and opinion.

01:14:09.000 And so it's propaganda that is backed up by force.

01:14:13.000 That's really all that we're talking about.

01:14:15.000 And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form, Propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state.

01:14:25.000 And we have to push at every opportunity.

01:14:30.000 And look, I'm a conservative, I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals, because we're cobbling together the only viable counter movement.

01:14:39.000 You can't solve this by culture alone.

01:14:42.000 You have to get in the arena of politics, you have to change the law, and you have to replace institutions that are broken with new institutions.

01:14:50.000 It's an uphill fight.

01:14:51.000 There's not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal.

01:14:57.000 But what I've been trying to do, whether it's with Harvard or critical race theory or DEI, all of these stories that I've broken and campaigns that I've run, is at least turn people on to the idea that something is deeply wrong, put a name and a face to it,

01:15:12.000 and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems.

01:15:16.000 And If we don't, we lose the great promise.

01:15:20.000 We were promised liberty and equality.

01:15:23.000 Those are the two fundamentals.

01:15:27.000 People don't even have an understanding of what that means anymore.

01:15:30.000 And so we have to recover intellectually what has been erased from our discourse.

01:15:37.000 And then we have to fight in the arena of actual political power.

01:15:40.000 We have to take action.

01:15:42.000 We have to change laws.

01:15:43.000 We have to reform bureaucracies.

01:15:45.000 We have to lead institutions.

01:15:46.000 And so every day that I wake up, it's like, that's what I'm doing.

01:15:50.000 What wins are we putting up on the board?

01:15:52.000 Because unless we're having substantial wins in all these little areas, that social credit system that you're talking about, it's just a matter of time.

01:16:04.000 When you look at the current political landscape, particularly these trials, how disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?

01:16:22.000 Because to me, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, Setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another either put them in jail or make them seem like complete total criminals In a way that would – for the casual, 0.99

01:16:49.000 for the person who's not reading deep into the headlines, for the casual Democrat that sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened where he got fined $365 million, the casuals – I've seen people argue that fraud is fraud and this and that and he's a fucking fraud. 0.98

01:17:06.000 And then I saw Kevin O'Leary explain it from Shark Tank. 0.93

01:17:10.000 He was saying, this is what every real estate developer does.

01:17:13.000 They say, my building's worth $400 million.

01:17:16.000 And then someone comes along from the bank and they say, no, it's worth $300 million.

01:17:20.000 We'll give you a loan on $300 million.

01:17:21.000 Or whatever it is.

01:17:22.000 Whatever the number.

01:17:23.000 It's a negotiation.

01:17:24.000 But also, real estate pricing in general is a strange thing to say that's fraud-based.

01:17:33.000 Because people overvalue their property all the time.

01:17:36.000 I mean, it's a standard thing that people do.

01:17:38.000 When someone has a house and it's worth $700,000, they decide to list it as $900,000.

01:17:44.000 And the real estate person says, well, you know, it's really pushing it.

01:17:50.000 The guy's like, that's what I want.

01:17:51.000 I think it's worth $900,000. 0.92

01:17:52.000 People have always done weird shit like that. 1.00

01:17:55.000 And then when you have this leftist judge that says that Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million, then you just showed all your silly hands. 0.99

01:18:04.000 You showed your hand, because that's a crazy thing to say in a place that has the most expensive real estate on earth. 0.96

01:18:11.000 Yeah, and the Mar-a-Lago property is not worth $18 million.

01:18:15.000 I mean, that's absurd.

01:18:16.000 Isn't it like 18 acres?

01:18:17.000 Yeah, it's huge.

01:18:18.000 It covers both sides of the little quay or whatever you call it, the little island.

01:18:22.000 But the bigger question is, the question that was first raised by the presidency of Richard Nixon that is now coming to fruition with the presidency and the kind of ex-presidency of Donald Trump, We have a democratic system that favors Trump in the sense that he won in 2016. He's winning the primary right now for Republicans in 2024. But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him.

01:18:51.000 And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim.

01:18:56.000 We want to keep him off the ballot.

01:18:57.000 We want to put him in prison.

01:18:59.000 We want to bankrupt him so he can't become the president, even if the people support him.

01:19:04.000 We want to deprive the people of making the decision.

01:19:06.000 So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts.

01:19:18.000 I mean, the cases are bogus.

01:19:21.000 And so what you're...

01:19:23.000 The question that we're raising is, who actually rules in this country?

01:19:27.000 Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government?

01:19:32.000 Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?

01:19:36.000 What they can say even to Donald...

01:19:38.000 I mean, Donald Trump has been one of the most famous people in the world for decades.

01:19:41.000 He's enormously wealthy.

01:19:43.000 He's already been the President of the United States.

01:19:46.000 He's a powerful person.

01:19:48.000 And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we've built up.

01:19:53.000 And so as someone who I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, I did vote for him for 2020. I'll absolutely vote for him now in 2024. It is a contest of how we think of our democratic system.

01:20:07.000 And I'm of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy.

01:20:11.000 And this is a contest where Democrats are saying, essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.

01:20:20.000 Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages in that sentence.

01:20:25.000 We have to destroy democracy as we've traditionally known it, electing a president through a vote of the people, in order to save democracy, which is rule by expert opinion, rule by the bureaucracy, and essentially left-wing hegemony, left-wing domination over institutions.

01:20:40.000 And as someone who tries to maximize whatever I can do to push forward on these issues politically, It's not lost on me that if they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, you know, we're all table stakes,

01:20:56.000 relatively.

01:20:56.000 Yeah.

01:20:57.000 And they're going to have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, you know, that's when dissent becomes a crime.

01:21:08.000 And we've already seen that, you know, I reported on the gender ideology in schools and, you know, work with some of the parent groups that we're trying to mobilize.

01:21:17.000 And they all got put on an FBI list.

01:21:20.000 We know this for sure.

01:21:21.000 A FBI counter-terrorism list that was specifically for parent school board protesters.

01:21:28.000 So if you participate in the democratic process, we'll turn you into a criminal.

01:21:33.000 I hate that with every fiber of my being.

01:21:38.000 And whatever threats come my way, whatever lawsuits, whatever investigations come my way, it's worth it.

01:21:47.000 Take me to prison.

01:21:49.000 You know, fine, let's do this.

01:21:51.000 Because we have to actually confront these questions head on.

01:21:54.000 We need to have people to have enough courage to put, to actually, you know, courage without risk is not courage.

01:22:02.000 What you're saying is not hyperbole.

01:22:04.000 No, these are facts.

01:22:05.000 These are documented facts.

01:22:07.000 And again, because it's a person like Donald Trump, you get people thinking, like, if you could stop Hitler by any means necessary, wouldn't you stop Hitler?

01:22:17.000 And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go, this is our modern Hitler.

01:22:21.000 Do you see what Whoopi Goldberg said?

01:22:22.000 What'd she say?

01:22:24.000 Whoopi Goldberg said that Biden could arrest all the Republicans and put them in jail.

01:22:30.000 You just need to see how unhinged this kind of thinking is.

01:22:34.000 Well, you know what Joe Biden could do?

01:22:37.000 Joe Biden?

01:22:38.000 You have to see it.

01:22:39.000 Because it's so crazy.

01:22:41.000 On television.

01:22:43.000 Find that one, Jamie.

01:22:46.000 Let's look at a scenario where the Supreme Court says, yes, he has all those rights.

01:22:51.000 He is immune from everything.

01:22:53.000 You know what Joe Biden could do since he is presently president?

01:22:56.000 What?

01:23:00.000 He could throw every Republican in jail.

01:23:08.000 What this means is he can do anything.

01:23:15.000 That's not what it means at all.

01:23:18.000 But the fact that she says that so confidently.

01:23:23.000 If you're willing to let Donald Trump use presidential immunity, that means Joe Biden could just go crazy and arrest all the Republicans.

01:23:31.000 Because that's what that means.

01:23:32.000 No, that's not what that means.

01:23:34.000 Even a little bit.

01:23:35.000 You just added a whole bunch of stuff to what that means.

01:23:38.000 I mean, in fairness, though, the view has to be... 0.99

01:23:43.000 You know, if you average out the Vue hosts, among the dumbest people on television. 0.76

01:23:48.000 It's like they say the thing that people are thinking, but they say it very directly, so they expose whatever truth. 0.99

01:23:54.000 I don't think some of them are dumb. 0.94

01:23:55.000 You don't think so? 1.00

01:23:56.000 No, I don't think Sunny Hostin's dumb. 1.00

01:23:57.000 You think it's deliberate? 0.96

01:23:58.000 I think she's ideologically driven, and they have blinders on, for sure. 0.98

01:24:03.000 I don't think Sonny's dumb.

01:24:06.000 But Whoopi is certainly not the brightest person. 0.61

01:24:09.000 And what she just said just doesn't make any sense. 0.93

01:24:11.000 It's just like so silly to say.

01:24:13.000 It's not a well thought out... 0.99

01:24:14.000 It's like if you had an idea for a premise and it was totally baked and half-baked and you went on stage with it and it's fucking... 0.98

01:24:20.000 There's nothing there. 0.98

01:24:21.000 Just go for it.

01:24:22.000 Yeah, there's nothing there.

01:24:23.000 Sometimes comics do that.

01:24:25.000 For fun.

01:24:25.000 The other question is then, is that representative of a big constituency?

01:24:29.000 I think probably yes.

01:24:30.000 Well, a lot of people...

01:24:31.000 MSNBC viewers are probably also thinking...

01:24:33.000 I don't even think the MSNBC viewers...

01:24:35.000 I think they're a little bit more sophisticated than that.

01:24:37.000 This is like low information, blue no matter who, like older housewives who are mad at the world. 1.00

01:24:46.000 That's the appeal that Whoopi Goldberg has.

01:24:50.000 Does Whoopi have children?

01:24:52.000 No idea.

01:24:53.000 It's interesting too, like really politically motivated older women who don't have children. 1.00

01:24:59.000 Yeah.

01:25:00.000 They're very specific.

01:25:02.000 Like you can kind of guess the way they think.

01:25:05.000 I would like to see what the stats are on older post-menopausal women with no children and how they lean politically. 0.59

01:25:15.000 Yeah, college educated.

01:25:17.000 I bet it's like my fans being male.

01:25:22.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:25:23.000 It's like ocean blue.

01:25:25.000 I mean, the depths of that.

01:25:27.000 Because the women that I know that are Republican, they're almost all moms. 1.00

01:25:33.000 It's kind of wild.

01:25:34.000 Well, there's a lot of young, hot Republican women that are social influencers now, too, which is hilarious. 1.00

01:25:39.000 Yeah.

01:25:40.000 It's fun.

01:25:40.000 It's fun to see these trends.

01:25:42.000 You see them in things where people realize, like, oh, this is a path to success.

01:25:45.000 I'm going to be a black Trump supporter.

01:25:46.000 Totally. 0.74

01:25:46.000 They just run with it. 0.74

01:25:47.000 Yeah.

01:25:47.000 You see a little bit of that.

01:25:49.000 But I feel like with a lot of moms that I know that were like hippies, they were like, and then they had kids and they're like, fuck this, like immediately. 0.99

01:26:00.000 Like a buddy of mine's mom, who was like super fucking left wing, Full-on leftist. 1.00

01:26:09.000 She had kids and then the riots and COVID and all the chaos. 1.00

01:26:14.000 She's like, fuck this. 1.00

01:26:15.000 It red-pilled so many of those folks. 1.00

01:26:17.000 They're just not talking about it.

01:26:19.000 They don't talk about it outwardly because they're real uncomfortable with being ostracized and being yelled at, especially with groups of their old friends that are single, that still live in Los Angeles. 0.93

01:26:30.000 You know, especially if you're certain ideological hubs, you know, like fucking Silver Lake.

01:26:36.000 There's like these spots where you can't escape. 0.86

01:26:38.000 Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year.

01:26:39.000 Oh boy, that's a good one.

01:26:41.000 Yeah, that's a hub.

01:26:42.000 I went to look at a house in Topanga Canyon.

01:26:45.000 And the house had a tennis court.

01:26:47.000 It was this beautiful house with a tennis court.

01:26:49.000 I went, wow, that's really cool.

01:26:50.000 So we're going through the house, and we're checking out the kitchen and all this stuff.

01:26:54.000 And then the neighbor just drops in.

01:26:57.000 And she goes, if you buy this house, you're going to let us use the tennis court, right?

01:27:01.000 I go, what?

01:27:02.000 She goes, the community uses the tennis court. 1.00

01:27:04.000 I go, the community uses the tennis court that's in my fucking backyard? 0.99

01:27:08.000 If I buy this house, I have to agree that maybe I can't play tennis because you're playing tennis? 1.00

01:27:13.000 What the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

01:27:14.000 I don't even know you. 1.00

01:27:14.000 You gotta sign up on the list, man. 1.00

01:27:16.000 But she got in my face with beads on and shit. 1.00

01:27:20.000 You know, the whole deal. 0.99

01:27:21.000 But she didn't say it like, are you going?

01:27:25.000 The community is traditionally allowed.

01:27:28.000 We're a really close-knit group.

01:27:30.000 You're gonna love living here.

01:27:32.000 Really nice people.

01:27:33.000 But one thing I want to tell you is like, we all like to get together and play tennis back there.

01:27:37.000 Do you think that would be okay if you bought this house?

01:27:39.000 That would be a different conversation.

01:27:41.000 I'd be like, maybe I like this lady. 1.00

01:27:43.000 Maybe, look, Alice is out there playing tennis.

01:27:45.000 Maybe we're friends.

01:27:46.000 Maybe it's cool.

01:27:47.000 Like, if I lived next door to my buddy and he was over there playing tennis, I'd be like, what's going on, man?

01:27:52.000 What are you doing?

01:27:53.000 What's happening?

01:27:53.000 It'd be fun.

01:27:54.000 It'd be like a cool thing to have your friends playing tennis in your yard.

01:27:57.000 Maybe this would be fun.

01:27:58.000 But you're going to let us use, the community's going to use your tennis court, right?

01:28:02.000 Eyes wide open.

01:28:03.000 What am I getting to use yours?

01:28:04.000 Can I use your kitchen? 1.00

01:28:05.000 The fuck are you talking about, lady? 1.00

01:28:06.000 I'm gonna go fishing in the back of your yard. 1.00

01:28:09.000 What are you saying?

01:28:10.000 What are you saying?

01:28:11.000 It's a wild place, though, because it's like a time capsule.

01:28:15.000 There's some of the old-timey hippies that I get along with.

01:28:18.000 It's like, I love those people.

01:28:19.000 I grew up around those people.

01:28:20.000 Unless they want to use your tennis court.

01:28:22.000 Yeah, but then it's like, oh, yeah.

01:28:23.000 Can't use my tennis court.

01:28:24.000 I lived next to a guy.

01:28:28.000 This guy, white dude from Georgia, went by an Indian spiritual name.

01:28:32.000 Oh, nice.

01:28:34.000 And this dude was...

01:28:35.000 He set up a business called Live Water.

01:28:38.000 So he was rappelling down mountainsides, gathering water, and then selling it to all the rich housewives down in the Palisades.

01:28:46.000 It was like living water.

01:28:48.000 I'm waiting for the scam.

01:28:49.000 Was there a scam?

01:28:50.000 Yeah, the scam is completely dangerous, right?

01:28:53.000 But a well-meaning guy, he would walk around.

01:28:56.000 He was a duplex we shared.

01:28:58.000 He would walk around, no pants on, just totally naked.

01:29:02.000 Really?

01:29:02.000 Yeah, just like, what's up, man?

01:29:03.000 Just talking to you like it's just a normal conversation.

01:29:06.000 Naked?

01:29:06.000 Naked, yeah.

01:29:06.000 Normal conversation.

01:29:09.000 And it's like, oh, good to see you, Mukande.

01:29:11.000 Were you single at the time?

01:29:12.000 I was single at the time.

01:29:13.000 So it was like...

01:29:13.000 And he has a girlfriend there.

01:29:14.000 They were making like nut butters and selling this raw water.

01:29:17.000 You know, that's what they were doing.

01:29:20.000 And they're like, yeah, you want to come to a tea ceremony tonight?

01:29:22.000 It's like, yeah, I'll check that out, man.

01:29:24.000 We'll go to tea ceremony.

01:29:25.000 And there was like a peaceful, hippied out California culture that was fine.

01:29:34.000 Yeah.

01:29:34.000 But the second you're like, yeah, now we want drag queens in schools.

01:29:37.000 You're a bad person because your ancestors came from Europe. 1.00

01:29:40.000 And by the way, we want to destroy the whole society. 0.99

01:29:43.000 That's when I'm like, I'm going to tap out and now we're going to fight about it.

01:29:46.000 Well, you know how you know that this is an ideologically driven thing that, you know, you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the Gays Against Groomers movement. 0.61

01:30:01.000 Right.

01:30:02.000 Because they attack those people, mercilessly.

01:30:06.000 It's like, no, we are just homosexual men, and we don't think that indoctrinating children the way you're doing is right.

01:30:15.000 It's not right. 0.99

01:30:16.000 Like, what you're doing is fucked up. 1.00

01:30:18.000 You're not supposed to be teaching kids about blowjobs. 1.00

01:30:20.000 When they're six. 1.00

01:30:21.000 They don't need to know about sucking dick when they're six. 1.00

01:30:24.000 That's nuts. 1.00

01:30:24.000 And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornographic... 1.00

01:30:29.000 And then here's the thing.

01:30:30.000 This one drove me bananas when they said the don't say gay.

01:30:36.000 That it's don't say gay law.

01:30:37.000 And everybody kept repeating it.

01:30:39.000 All these liberals that I know kept repeating it.

01:30:41.000 It says the don't say gay law.

01:30:43.000 Nowhere in that law does it say don't say gay.

01:30:45.000 Right.

01:30:46.000 That's not what it's about.

01:30:48.000 And it's a very specific age group.

01:30:50.000 It's about introducing sexually explicit books to kids that are a certain age.

01:30:56.000 And they're calling it the don't say gay law.

01:30:59.000 And I'm going to say it. 0.99

01:31:00.000 I'm going to say gay, gay, gay. 1.00

01:31:02.000 Yay! 1.00

01:31:03.000 You deserve a prize.

01:31:04.000 Yay! 0.99

01:31:05.000 Older women, no kids, liberal, right? 1.00

01:31:09.000 But that's not what the law said.

01:31:11.000 But for low information viewers of The View or listeners of MSNBC and the people that kept repeating that, that don't say gay law over and over, they go, wow, you hear what they're doing in Florida?

01:31:23.000 You can't say gay in school.

01:31:24.000 Imagine being a gay kid and you're in that class and you can't even say you're gay. 1.00

01:31:28.000 That's fucking nuts. 1.00

01:31:29.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:31:30.000 Like, hey, pal, we're talking about seven-year-olds.

01:31:32.000 Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's, yeah.

01:31:34.000 And, you know, I did a bunch of reporting, and the stuff that they're doing is, like, insane.

01:31:38.000 It's not just, oh, teaching kids about sex.

01:31:40.000 Okay, fine.

01:31:41.000 Obviously, they have to know certain, like, biological realities that, you know, sooner or later we all figure out. 0.98

01:31:46.000 But it was like, you know, artificial penis packers. 0.95

01:31:49.000 That was a story I did. 0.99

01:31:51.000 They were teaching, like, Chicago public school kids in middle school how to wear, you know, like, fake penis. 0.98

01:31:58.000 And then setting them up with the hormone clinics. 0.93

01:32:01.000 But if they don't teach them that, who's going to teach them?

01:32:04.000 That's right.

01:32:05.000 The older guy down the street who runs by in the van.

01:32:09.000 Come on in, I've got lessons.

01:32:10.000 But it's like, I worked a lot on the policy in Florida.

01:32:18.000 What it boils down to in Florida is a pretty simple thing.

01:32:22.000 There's been such a politicization and radicalization of gender theory in schools.

01:32:27.000 The governor wisely just said, you know what?

01:32:31.000 Let's just take that off the table.

01:32:33.000 Let's focus on reading, writing, and math.

01:32:35.000 Let's focus on a good civics curriculum so that we have real citizens, that we're graduating from our Public K-12 schools.

01:32:41.000 And then let's let families, churches, and, you know, private society determine for themselves what they would like to teach their kids about these controversial issues.

01:32:53.000 Just take it off the table.

01:32:55.000 No instruction on gender ideology, no instruction on, you know, of course, the explicit, you know, kind of sexual materials beyond some reasonable, you know, considerations.

01:33:08.000 This to me is fair.

01:33:10.000 You can't teach religion in schools. 0.78

01:33:14.000 They delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families.

01:33:19.000 And so unless we want to have an all-out fight all the time over these issues, why is it even necessary?

01:33:26.000 It's not.

01:33:26.000 I have kids.

01:33:27.000 I don't want them.

01:33:28.000 I don't feel like a need for the school to teach them about these things.

01:33:34.000 We teach them at home.

01:33:35.000 We talk about them.

01:33:36.000 They naturally kind of learn and develop.

01:33:39.000 And so I think that it is very wise to just say, let's take it off the table.

01:33:44.000 Let's delegate this back to people in their personal lives.

01:33:47.000 That seems like a solution that everyone should agree with.

01:33:49.000 Completely logical, unless you're dedicated To indoctrinating people.

01:33:54.000 Yeah.

01:33:54.000 Into your movement.

01:33:55.000 What is the don't say gay law? 0.68

01:33:57.000 Let's be specific about that, just in case anybody tries to call us on this.

01:34:01.000 So it was initially no teaching on gender identity and sexual orientation in K-3.

01:34:08.000 Which is super reasonable.

01:34:09.000 Super reasonable.

01:34:11.000 And then it caused this massive uproar.

01:34:14.000 And the legislator said, all right, you know, we're just going to double down.

01:34:17.000 Now it's K through 12. They're saying no gender identity, no sexual orientation, no explicit, you know, kind of pornographic materials in K through 12. We're taking it totally off the table.

01:34:28.000 And look, there is a reasonable argument to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it.

01:34:32.000 Maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there's more latitude.

01:34:35.000 Like, okay, that's a reasonable consideration.

01:34:38.000 But it's also eminently reasonable to just say we're taking it all off the table.

01:34:43.000 And just teach people.

01:34:44.000 And just teach people what they need to know to be successful in life.

01:34:46.000 Also, I'm sorry, but I had good teachers growing up.

01:34:51.000 I had quite a few that I remember.

01:34:53.000 I have a science teacher from seventh grade that to this day I think about fondly.

01:34:58.000 He was a brilliant man and he taught me about wonder.

01:35:02.000 I think about that guy. 1.00

01:35:04.000 I've also had a gang of fucking morons who taught me, and I don't want that gang of morons teaching my children about biological sex or gender or homosexuality or heterosexuality or oral sex or anal sex. 1.00

01:35:20.000 Nothing. 1.00

01:35:21.000 No, thank you.

01:35:21.000 I don't want you teaching them anything about any of those things.

01:35:23.000 I don't want you telling them that you're a Zzer. 0.98

01:35:26.000 I don't want you pretending that you're Foxkin. 1.00

01:35:29.000 I don't want any of that shit. 0.99

01:35:30.000 If you're teaching history, I want you to teach what happened in 1943. I want you to teach math. 0.99

01:35:37.000 This is how you count.

01:35:39.000 This is how you divide.

01:35:40.000 This is algebra.

01:35:41.000 This is what you're supposed to be doing.

01:35:44.000 That's what you're hired for.

01:35:46.000 If you're a drag queen and you're not teaching how to be a drag queen, That's it! 1.00

01:35:53.000 If somebody wants to take drag queen courses, all for you. 1.00

01:35:58.000 But I don't think you should be reading stories to little kids. 0.98

01:36:02.000 It just seems fucking bizarre. 0.95

01:36:03.000 It's one more factor that kid has to deal with. 0.98

01:36:06.000 Totally.

01:36:07.000 For what reason?

01:36:08.000 For what reason?

01:36:10.000 Inclusiveness? 1.00

01:36:11.000 That's bullshit. 1.00

01:36:12.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

01:36:13.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

01:36:14.000 Because it's not inclusive of many other perspectives, a traditional perspective, a religious perspective, a general kind of conservative perspective. 0.99

01:36:22.000 Also, how much are you screening these drag queens? 0.82

01:36:24.000 Well, not enough.

01:36:26.000 Yeah.

01:36:27.000 What is the odds that someone who's a man who likes to dress in drag has other problems?

01:36:32.000 I'm not accusing all of them of having other problems.

01:36:35.000 I'm sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women's clothes. 1.00

01:36:39.000 Have at it.

01:36:40.000 Have a good time. 0.95

01:36:41.000 However, there's a possibility that you might be a kinky freak. 1.00

01:36:46.000 There's a real possibility if you're putting fake eyelashes on and 10-inch heels and you're calling yourself Miss Wanda and you're wearing fishnets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down, or whatever they do, It's a possibility you might be out of your fucking mind. 1.00

01:37:02.000 And if you're doing a drag show at a bar in the Castro and that's a kind of subculture where they're all adults, they're all opting in, have a good time, knock yourself out, totally fine. 0.99

01:37:12.000 But it's like bringing that into the public schools with government funding, with other people's kids, that's when I think reasonable people say no.

01:37:22.000 Yeah.

01:37:23.000 Reasonable people should say no, and the people that don't say no think that they're going to be attacked for being bigoted if they do. 0.89

01:37:31.000 But there's so many people that are like on the fence and scared and don't know what to do, and their kids are coming home with these wacky ideas, and they're like, what the fuck do I do? 0.80

01:37:40.000 What do I do? 0.91

01:37:41.000 And if you try to go to the school board meetings, you get labeled a domestic terrorist.

01:37:45.000 Yeah.

01:37:45.000 This is insanity.

01:37:46.000 Like, you're just enforcing indoctrination and you're just making sure that I comply.

01:37:52.000 And that is a slippery slope, kids, because you might be getting your way right now doing this and you might think that you should be able to get your way.

01:38:02.000 But what if someone else gets into office?

01:38:04.000 What if there's a war?

01:38:05.000 What if there's chaos?

01:38:06.000 What if we have a military dictatorship?

01:38:08.000 You've already established the rules.

01:38:10.000 No one's gonna give you those laws back.

01:38:11.000 You've already set it so that the state and the government and the institutions can dictate personal behavior and how people are allowed to communicate. 0.86

01:38:20.000 If you've done that, you've fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control.

01:38:25.000 And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize the same donors donate to both people. 0.90

01:38:29.000 So what have you done?

01:38:31.000 You've empowered the deep state to control your lives and make it easier to steal your money.

01:38:37.000 Yeah.

01:38:38.000 And the economics of it is also perilous, right?

01:38:43.000 All of these systems are functionally insolvent, right?

01:38:47.000 University system, our federal budget.

01:38:50.000 Federal budget is wild.

01:38:52.000 It's just crazy.

01:38:53.000 You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term.

01:38:57.000 And so...

01:38:58.000 Look, as a political person, what I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have.

01:39:11.000 That's how it works.

01:39:12.000 And so when there's the kind of Hamas attacks and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy or it's the capture of K-12 schools and the gender ideology is going radical, you know, all of these problems also provide opportunities.

01:39:31.000 I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.

01:39:40.000 You have this confrontation between Trump and Biden, but really between Trump and the entire state apparatus that's trying to jail him and prevent him from running for president.

01:39:50.000 You have a military budget and a federal budget more broadly that is running, you know, trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

01:39:58.000 You have a higher education system that is now, I think, 1.6, 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt that the government has absorbed that's ready to blow up at any time.

01:40:11.000 The 2020 was a wake-up call for many people.

01:40:14.000 The next wake-up call is going to be 2020 a hundred times over.

01:40:19.000 And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives that are listening should be figuring out what to do, how to best position themselves to be successful for their families, for their careers, for whatever they're working on.

01:40:33.000 And those of us who want to see deeper changes You know, we're all preparing, we're all getting ready to say when the House of Cards falls over and it's revealed that none of this is sustainable, the fundamentals of our country,

01:40:49.000 institutional, financial, political, cannot hold and they can't be covered over with ideology for anymore.

01:40:56.000 You know, we have to have responsible, civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again.

01:41:03.000 And I think that it may not be this election cycle, it may not be in a year, it may not be in two years, but by any vector, if you talk to people who really know, we're heading towards a big shift.

01:41:16.000 And I hope that we can emerge on the other side, just freeing ourselves from a lot of this ideological capture that I think is hurting people and hurting our country.

01:41:26.000 I couldn't agree more.

01:41:28.000 And just leave people the fuck alone and stop using this as a vector of control because that's what they're doing. 0.98

01:41:34.000 And it's also... 0.96

01:41:35.000 There's a problem with that, though.

01:41:37.000 The ideology, leave me alone, the kind of philosophical statement, is correct.

01:41:42.000 I believe in it.

01:41:43.000 It's a kind of civic, Republican ideal.

01:41:46.000 It's been the American way is give people the maximum autonomy to their lives, delegate to civil society as much as you can.

01:41:53.000 But we don't live in that world anymore.

01:41:55.000 We have a massive federal bureaucracy.

01:41:58.000 We have these huge institutions that control the culture.

01:42:02.000 And so, if you're arguing to be left alone, you're always going to be run over by people who don't want to leave you alone.

01:42:09.000 The solution is not to then, you know, assume it and impose your vision.

01:42:13.000 But you at least have to have people who are willing to fight the public fight.

01:42:17.000 Because, you know, most people want to be left alone.

01:42:19.000 They deserve that.

01:42:21.000 But we need to have a leadership class, a kind of counter-elite capable of taking over these institutions that can then adopt the policies and administer the centralized institutions to protect the average person.

01:42:35.000 The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what's happening and fight the good fight.

01:42:42.000 But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty To provide protection for the average person.

01:42:49.000 The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions.

01:42:59.000 Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and offering a plausible vision for how that could be accomplished?

01:43:08.000 I think very few people are thinking in those terms and to me that's a shame. 0.99

01:43:11.000 Well, it's also a shame that people that have these ideas are not willing to run for office because running for office is such a shit show. 0.98

01:43:19.000 And you see what happens when anyone runs for office. 0.98

01:43:23.000 It's just these attacks are merciless and ruthless, and it's all in your character and your past.

01:43:29.000 We saw it with Kavanaugh.

01:43:30.000 We saw it with Joe Biden.

01:43:32.000 You see it with everybody.

01:43:33.000 You've been through it?

01:43:34.000 Yeah, everybody's been through it.

01:43:35.000 Obviously, I'm not running for office.

01:43:38.000 When they're trying to attack you and they're trying to do that, that discourages so many people that would be great leaders.

01:43:45.000 But it's also now been accepted as a part of the political process.

01:43:49.000 But it's always been part of the political process.

01:43:52.000 If you go back to the history of the founding of the country, you can read Jefferson's letters.

01:43:56.000 And he's bitching about the press, slandering his character, like for decades.

01:44:01.000 Right.

01:44:02.000 He's still bitter about things that happened when he was dying in the early 1800s.

01:44:06.000 He's still bitter about some slanderous journalist who was impugning his character 30 years prior.

01:44:12.000 And so, look, I've been through it to a certain extent.

01:44:16.000 You've been through it.

01:44:19.000 That's the price.

01:44:20.000 That's the price of admission.

01:44:22.000 It is.

01:44:22.000 And so I think rather than lamenting the fact that it's this way, we need people, and I certainly adopt this attitude, and I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this.

01:44:35.000 Remember COVID? They were calling him all sorts of names.

01:44:38.000 Yeah.

01:44:39.000 I mean, they fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way.

01:44:44.000 And as conservatives, I've estimated...

01:44:47.000 That we take somewhere between 100 to 1 and 1,000 to 1 negative to positive stories in the press.

01:44:53.000 That's just the ratio that we have to live with.

01:44:55.000 100 to 1, negative to positive.

01:44:58.000 But what he taught me, and I think it's a valuable lesson for more people to understand, is he's saying, look, the people are smarter than the press.

01:45:08.000 And so when we're fighting, when we're raising the issues, when we're getting attacked, when we're driving forward something that's the right thing to do, you'll be rewarded by the people later.

01:45:16.000 And so he won a very narrow election his first time.

01:45:20.000 He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with history curriculum, whatever it is.

01:45:28.000 The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20-point victory, unprecedented.

01:45:33.000 And to me, that's a sign that when you take ownership, when you take courage, when you take the hits, and when you do the right thing, people are smart enough to sift through the lies, the propaganda, the suppression, the censorship, and reward you.

01:45:47.000 And I've certainly seen that in my own experience, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with people screaming at my kids.

01:45:56.000 I mean, like real...

01:45:59.000 Intimidating things.

01:46:00.000 And you have to say, you know, you have to make prudent decisions, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you can not get wiped off the board.

01:46:08.000 But then once you get past that, what I found, when you get past that initial barrage, when you get through the gauntlet, you feel freedom.

01:46:16.000 You feel this incredible sense of you've survived, you've gotten to the other side, and now people can't hurt you because they've tried, they've failed, and now you have the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom to do what you want, the freedom to chart your own path.

01:46:33.000 But until you get through that barrage, I don't think that you're free at all.

01:46:37.000 And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige, Are sometimes desperately holding on to that.

01:46:46.000 They want to protect it as much as they can.

01:46:49.000 But I think what happens is they become, they go through life and they get to a point where they'll finally speak out if this happens, if that happens, if the cost is lower.

01:46:59.000 You're kind of wasting away your life and your opportunities.

01:47:02.000 And so my goal, and for the past year especially, is to radicalize America's elites, to show them the problems that our country is facing, and then to summon them to courageous action to fix it.

01:47:16.000 Because as we get people who have something to lose, When they start talking, people listen.

01:47:23.000 I live on a small farm in rural Washington state.

01:47:26.000 There's only so much I can do personally.

01:47:29.000 But certainly with the book that I wrote, with the articles that I'm doing, with the media engagement that I'm trying to drive, What I found is that the attitude among America's elites, finance, tech, entertainment, have changed dramatically in the last few years.

01:47:45.000 Yes.

01:47:45.000 And we just have to get them over that hump so that they're saying, the things that they tell you in private and tell me in private, when you have those conversations, I would just recommend to say, hey, what about saying that publicly?

01:47:58.000 People don't want to lose their jobs.

01:48:00.000 But these are people who are, you know, they don't have jobs.

01:48:06.000 They're titans of finance.

01:48:08.000 They're people in prestigious positions.

01:48:10.000 They're kind of university professors with tenure protections.

01:48:12.000 People are scared.

01:48:13.000 They really are.

01:48:14.000 They're scared of repercussions.

01:48:15.000 How do we get them to cross over that fear?

01:48:18.000 We have to make it less fearful.

01:48:19.000 We have to make it more common.

01:48:21.000 And I think these conversations happen and more of them happen and more people listen to them and it changes people's perspective and they realize that this is kind of dangerous.

01:48:31.000 And that there's real urgency involved here.

01:48:35.000 This could really go sideways for us.

01:48:37.000 And there's a lot of factors that are trying to force it into going sideways, and not all of them are domestic.

01:48:43.000 There's a lot going on with social media influence that's 100% manufactured.

01:48:49.000 There's manufactured arguments, manufactured dissent.

01:48:53.000 There's a lot of manufactured conflict that happens online that we have documented very clearly. 0.95

01:48:59.000 It's coming from Russian troll farms. 0.60

01:49:01.000 It's coming from various different Eastern Bloc countries. 0.90

01:49:04.000 It's coming from China.

01:49:05.000 It's coming from all over the place.

01:49:07.000 And it has an effect on us, whether we like it or not, and it certainly has an effect on young people.

01:49:12.000 It certainly has an effect on self-censorship.

01:49:15.000 It certainly has an effect on stifling dissent.

01:49:18.000 It has an impact.

01:49:19.000 They attack people, and they attack people with thousands of trolls.

01:49:24.000 They know what they're doing, and it's very effective.

01:49:26.000 And if you pay attention to your comments, you're going to get run over by it.

01:49:30.000 Yeah, never read the comments.

01:49:32.000 Can't read them.

01:49:33.000 Can't read them. 0.87

01:49:33.000 Some of them are nonsense. 0.87

01:49:34.000 I read comments on other people's stuff sometimes when someone writes something controversial, and I'll just go, that seems crazy to say.

01:49:41.000 Let me go to that person.

01:49:42.000 And that's a, you know, A, B, Z, 2, 2, 2, 1, 5, 6. That's a fake person.

01:49:48.000 It's a fake person that got a Twitter profile and now...

01:49:51.000 It's like a guy in an Eastern Bloc country with a thousand phones that he's kind of... 0.93

01:49:56.000 It might not even be that anymore.

01:49:57.000 I believe it's probably AI. I mean, with the ubiquitous use of ChatGPT and all these different things, you could easily attack a tweet in a progressive fashion and you could give it parameters of how to attack it and what to say.

01:50:10.000 And you could distribute that in mass.

01:50:12.000 Give me 45 different versions of this attack.

01:50:16.000 And they'll give you 45 different versions of it.

01:50:18.000 I think that's probably true.

01:50:19.000 But I think that, in my opinion, I think we overestimate the potential influence of kind of foreign operators.

01:50:27.000 Foreign operators don't know the language of American ideologies.

01:50:33.000 You don't think that's easy to learn?

01:50:35.000 No, I think it's actually a little difficult to learn.

01:50:37.000 Because even if you look at kind of Chinese, kind of CCTV, which is the national Chinese broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they're actually trying to push, it's like...

01:50:47.000 Awful.

01:50:47.000 It's not persuasive at all.

01:50:49.000 The movies are amazing.

01:50:50.000 The movies are amazing, yeah.

01:50:51.000 And those are commercial enterprises.

01:50:54.000 I actually think it puts the real kind of villains off the hook.

01:50:57.000 It's not them, it's really us.

01:50:59.000 It's the people who run our institutions domestically, who set policy for YouTube and other platforms.

01:51:07.000 That's probably the bigger factor.

01:51:08.000 I think it's a bigger factor.

01:51:09.000 Because if you can have people organically talking about things, which you do on Twitter, and when you see the things that are happening on Twitter, a lot of it's very distasteful.

01:51:19.000 You'll see some very racially charged, frankly racist arguments about things, just openly discussed, and people agreeing with them openly, and it's like, whoa!

01:51:28.000 You know, lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that, and it's just like, man.

01:51:36.000 The opportunity for other people to successfully counter those statements exists too. 1.00

01:51:43.000 The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid. 1.00

01:51:47.000 You know, take into consideration that. 1.00

01:51:49.000 Take into consideration this.

01:51:50.000 You don't know about that.

01:51:51.000 You don't know about this. 0.80

01:51:52.000 What you're saying is nonsense.

01:51:53.000 And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech.

01:52:01.000 The problem with blocking hate speech is You block the potential condemnation of hate speech. 1.00

01:52:09.000 You block the potential intellectual battle between morons who believe stupid shit and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb. 1.00

01:52:17.000 And this is all good for the viewer. 1.00

01:52:20.000 This is all good for people, the young minds and the people that are easily influenced and the people that are on the fence and the people that hadn't...

01:52:26.000 Taking into consideration this perspective or that perspective, that's what free speech is supposed to be all about.

01:52:31.000 The answer to bad speech has always been better speech.

01:52:34.000 It's always been the case.

01:52:36.000 But when you got people that will ban your account, if you use a person's name that they used to have when they were a man, but now they're a woman, so you dead-named them.

01:52:49.000 So you made up this thing. 0.98

01:52:50.000 At the same time, will you have the fucking Taliban on Twitter? 1.00

01:52:56.000 You're insane. 1.00

01:52:58.000 You're an insane person. 1.00

01:53:00.000 And Elon has done a service for the entire human race by purchasing that platform. 0.98

01:53:06.000 And I do not say that lightly.

01:53:08.000 I do not say that flippantly.

01:53:10.000 Him purchasing Twitter is...

01:53:14.000 One of the most important things that's ever happened to us in terms of pushback, in terms of just recognizing, like, this is insane to tell people that they have to abide by your insanely rigid ideology that doesn't make sense.

01:53:30.000 It's not logical.

01:53:31.000 And if they don't, they can no longer participate in the discussion.

01:53:35.000 They're removed from the town square.

01:53:38.000 That's bonkers.

01:53:39.000 I remember even, you know, Andrew Tate, who I think is like obviously very self-evidently a bad person.

01:53:47.000 I don't think that he's a good model for young men.

01:53:50.000 But I remember, you know, he didn't call for terrorist violence.

01:53:54.000 He didn't, you know, say anything, you know, extremely racist, I don't think, that I saw at least.

01:54:00.000 And I remember just it was like one day he's nuked from every online platform simultaneously.

01:54:08.000 Yeah.

01:54:09.000 And I say, what?

01:54:09.000 You don't have to like the guy.

01:54:10.000 You don't have to agree with the guy.

01:54:11.000 But the fact that all of these companies can set off a little cascade where you can disappear someone from the internet overnight.

01:54:20.000 Milo Yiannopoulos.

01:54:22.000 Milo Yiannopoulos was the first one.

01:54:24.000 Yeah, they really silenced him.

01:54:25.000 That guy was a powerful voice.

01:54:27.000 And he was nuked from the discourse.

01:54:29.000 Also, in real life, very nice.

01:54:31.000 In real life, hilarious, very smart, very nice.

01:54:35.000 Every time I met him, he was cool.

01:54:37.000 He was playing a character, and I think there's a lot of drugs involved as well.

01:54:43.000 But he was certainly playing a character that had good points. 0.98

01:54:49.000 He was playing this character that was this like right-wing gay guy who likes to talk about sex and drugs. 0.92

01:54:55.000 And I was like, this guy's fascinating. 0.99

01:54:57.000 But they decided that he was problematic and they fucking erased him. 0.93

01:55:01.000 They memory holed him. 0.98

01:55:02.000 That guy was on Bill Maher and Bill Maher compared him to Christopher Hitchens.

01:55:06.000 Remember that?

01:55:07.000 Wow, I didn't know that. 1.00

01:55:08.000 Yeah, and then he got attacked by some other guy on the show, told him, fuck you. 1.00

01:55:11.000 There was a lot of fuck you with that guy. 1.00

01:55:13.000 There was a lot of drama. 1.00

01:55:13.000 But that's what he liked. 1.00

01:55:15.000 He liked that.

01:55:15.000 And it was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere.

01:55:20.000 And I think they erased him particularly.

01:55:23.000 The first part was his criticism of Ghostbusters. 0.99

01:55:27.000 And then he was criticizing the new all-female cast of Ghostbusters, saying how sexist it is and every man's a moron and the women save the day and how ridiculous it is. 0.99

01:55:38.000 And then he got into it with Leslie Jones. 0.97

01:55:42.000 So Leslie Jones and him got into it and I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones.

01:55:52.000 What was it exactly?

01:55:54.000 I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was something racist or something gross or something unflattering, something.

01:56:00.000 And, you know, people were tweeting it at her and they were blaming him.

01:56:05.000 And then they got rid of him.

01:56:07.000 He's gone.

01:56:07.000 Did they just say, oh, it's mobilizing harassment or something?

01:56:10.000 Oh, no.

01:56:11.000 I can't believe I forgot this. 0.68

01:56:13.000 What started is him justifying himself being sexually molested by older men when he was young.

01:56:22.000 And he was saying on my show, That he was the predator.

01:56:25.000 He goes, trust me, I was the predator.

01:56:27.000 He was the seducing... 1.00

01:56:29.000 First of all, anybody who doesn't think that Milo Yiannopoulos is gay is out of their fucking mind. 1.00

01:56:33.000 You think that's a choice? 1.00

01:56:35.000 That's not a choice. 1.00

01:56:36.000 That dude's fucking gay. 1.00

01:56:37.000 He's baked in by the universe. 1.00

01:56:39.000 He is, yeah.

01:56:40.000 That is the prime example that I always throw in the face of people who...

01:56:44.000 It's usually for religious reasons.

01:56:46.000 Who are unwilling to accept biological reality.

01:56:51.000 Here's some biological reality for you.

01:56:53.000 Want to know this?

01:56:54.000 The first video ever captured of humpback whales mating was just recently filmed.

01:57:03.000 And they're both male.

01:57:05.000 Nice. 1.00

01:57:07.000 So, the first evidence that we have of humpback whales engaging in sexual intercourse is gay sex. 1.00

01:57:15.000 Humpback, huh? 1.00

01:57:16.000 Yeah, they had to go real...

01:57:17.000 Listen, humpbacks are mammals.

01:57:20.000 Humpbacks are intelligent. 0.99

01:57:22.000 Humpbacks likely are gay. 1.00

01:57:24.000 There's probably... 0.98

01:57:25.000 If they exist in us, why would they not exist in other intelligent mammals that are on Earth with us, like dolphins? 0.94

01:57:32.000 I'm sure there's gay dolphins. 1.00

01:57:33.000 There's probably gay orcas. 0.99

01:57:35.000 It's probably normal. 0.94

01:57:36.000 It's probably there's a percentage in every population that's gay. 1.00

01:57:40.000 Who gives a fuck? 1.00

01:57:42.000 The point is that, like, that guy's gay, right? 1.00

01:57:45.000 And he claims that he was the predator and everyone was like, oh my god, he's normalizing pedophilia. 0.91

01:57:52.000 If he had just tried that today, it would have been a minor attracted person.

01:57:56.000 He would be celebrated.

01:57:58.000 I mean, he'd be, yeah.

01:57:59.000 But this guy was minor attracted, and I was a minor, and it was fine.

01:58:03.000 He needs to come back as a drag queen. 1.00

01:58:04.000 But he would say, like, now, like, literally, in the amount of time from him being cancelled to today, that statement is not nearly as controversial.

01:58:13.000 Yeah.

01:58:13.000 Isn't that wild?

01:58:14.000 Yeah, and look, you don't have to agree or disagree with the statement.

01:58:18.000 That's irrelevant.

01:58:20.000 It's something that is within the bounds.

01:58:21.000 Look, if you're calling for, like the Harvard example, the genocide of all Jews around the world, you should be banned from social media platforms.

01:58:31.000 That is a prudent limit that I think we can all agree on.

01:58:35.000 But on more nuanced issues or more...

01:58:39.000 I mean, even if you take it at face value, I think he's probably going for shock value.

01:58:43.000 100%.

01:58:44.000 But also, he was telling an anecdotal story about how...

01:58:49.000 It was on another podcast, I believe he said this, that it plays a very important role in young gay men to have an older gay mentor.

01:58:59.000 I... I have no fucking dog in this race. 1.00

01:59:02.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:59:03.000 I don't, you know, I don't know.

01:59:05.000 But I do know that I feel very differently about a sexual predator that's a man that targets girls.

01:59:13.000 Like if I found out that a football coach was targeting young 14 and 15 year old girls, I would be furious. 0.62

01:59:20.000 If I found out a hot teacher, usually from Florida, with a push-up bra, was banging all the high school football kids, I'm laughing. 1.00

01:59:28.000 It's a little different.

01:59:29.000 I think it's funny.

01:59:30.000 You know why?

01:59:30.000 Because I think those kids are going to be fine.

01:59:33.000 They're going to be legends. 0.99

01:59:36.000 Zach Galifianakis had a fucking amazing joke. 0.99

01:59:38.000 One of them died. 1.00

01:59:39.000 His friends high-fived him to death.

01:59:43.000 I think that's Zach.

01:59:45.000 But this is because people want to pretend that there's no difference between men and women.

01:59:49.000 Right.

01:59:50.000 That's all it is.

01:59:51.000 It's like everyone wants to pretend that's true.

01:59:54.000 It's obviously not true. 0.59

01:59:56.000 And of course, the football coach who's like a pervert going against the young girls, that's a totally different scenario.

02:00:03.000 It is a different scenario. 0.68

02:00:05.000 Also, the lady who's blowing all the high school football kids also shouldn't be a teacher. 1.00

02:00:10.000 Yeah.

02:00:10.000 Get her out of there.

02:00:11.000 Get her out of there. 0.96

02:00:11.000 Get rid of her. 0.96

02:00:13.000 She should be doing porn or something. 1.00

02:00:14.000 Yeah. 0.71

02:00:15.000 But the point is, it's like, if he's talking about his life and saying that this was his choice and that he wanted this, the issue is not with him.

02:00:28.000 The issue is with the man who did that to him.

02:00:30.000 Right.

02:00:31.000 Right?

02:00:31.000 So he's literally talking about his own personal experience.

02:00:37.000 That memory hold him.

02:00:38.000 He's not saying, hey, I should be able to go to high schools and pick up 14-year-olds because they want it.

02:00:44.000 Okay.

02:00:45.000 Yeah.

02:00:45.000 Now we're talking a different thing.

02:00:46.000 Now we're talking about a guy who's advocating pedophilia, right?

02:00:49.000 This is different.

02:00:51.000 He was merely talking about his own life.

02:00:54.000 And that's how rabid everybody was to get rid of him.

02:00:58.000 And it was, at that point, effective.

02:00:59.000 And I think that became a problem.

02:01:01.000 Because once it became effective, then they became emboldened.

02:01:04.000 It's like the Alex Jones argument.

02:01:06.000 When people say, yeah, ban Alex Jones.

02:01:08.000 And everyone's like, hey, hey, hey. 0.99

02:01:10.000 This is a fucking very slippery slope. 0.99

02:01:12.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:01:12.000 Because if you want to ban everybody who's made disinformation and put it out publicly, how's Rachel Maddow still on? 0.98

02:01:19.000 Yeah.

02:01:20.000 How is she still on?

02:01:21.000 Everybody's seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine.

02:01:23.000 That's insanity.

02:01:25.000 The government.

02:01:25.000 I mean...

02:01:26.000 Yeah.

02:01:26.000 How are they still on?

02:01:28.000 How many different stories were incorrect?

02:01:32.000 Not apologizing for what he did, what Alex did.

02:01:35.000 He doesn't apologize for it.

02:01:36.000 I mean, he apologized for it, but he feels deep remorse that he did it.

02:01:41.000 He's just overwhelmed by it.

02:01:43.000 But getting rid of that guy is a slippery slope.

02:01:48.000 And no matter what you think about what he said, you can't support that.

02:01:54.000 You've got to let people sort it out.

02:01:56.000 The way to find out Let's say he says there's a false flag and some attack somewhere.

02:02:01.000 The way to find out if he's telling the truth is to have people investigate it.

02:02:05.000 If you say that Operation Northwoods was a document drawn up and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was going to attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans to start a war, and you say that on your show, People will go, 1.00

02:02:21.000 you're a fucking crazy person. 1.00

02:02:22.000 How are you allowing these? 1.00

02:02:23.000 No, no, no.

02:02:24.000 You have to be able to have someone come on and say, hey, actually, this is true.

02:02:28.000 And then you realize like, oh, wait a minute.

02:02:30.000 Some conspiracies are real. 0.90

02:02:32.000 And if you silence this one guy that calls out all of them because he fucked up on one, you're also limiting his ability to call out the ones that are legitimate. 0.64

02:02:40.000 And you're talking about a guy who's doing this all day long, every day. 0.95

02:02:44.000 That's all he does.

02:02:46.000 And he's out there.

02:02:48.000 I mean, he's an out-there personality.

02:02:49.000 He's out there.

02:02:49.000 That's why he's fun.

02:02:50.000 But he's out there talking about the World Economic Forum.

02:02:54.000 I've said this a hundred times, and I'll say it again.

02:02:56.000 He told me about Jeffrey Epstein over a decade before anybody was in the news.

02:03:03.000 He was telling me that there was this operation, and they take these guys, high-profile public figures, and a lot of politicians, and they compromise them with young girls.

02:03:12.000 I was like, what?

02:03:13.000 On an island?

02:03:14.000 What is this for? 1.00

02:03:15.000 Fucking ABC after-school movie. 1.00

02:03:17.000 That's crazy. 1.00

02:03:18.000 That sounds nuts.

02:03:19.000 And then now everybody knows it's true. 0.99

02:03:21.000 And there's been a ton of those from him infiltrating Bohemian Grove and catching these fucking wackos and heads of state, burning an effigy in front of an owl god. 1.00

02:03:31.000 Like, what the fuck? 1.00

02:03:31.000 That's real? 1.00

02:03:32.000 The video he did with John Ronson in the 90s.

02:03:35.000 So it's like all of this stuff at a certain point in time It needs to be out there.

02:03:42.000 And people need to find out what's real and what's not real.

02:03:45.000 What's real?

02:03:46.000 And the only way to find out what's real is not to silence everybody who says something that's incorrect.

02:03:50.000 It's to let people talk it out. 0.98

02:03:53.000 So when someone gets on there and says, the Earth's hollow and there's fucking aliens inside shooting laser beams. 0.99

02:03:59.000 Let's talk to geologists and have them explain to you that they would be boiling in lava. 0.99

02:04:04.000 They don't live in the center of the Earth.

02:04:06.000 We know what the Earth's made out of.

02:04:07.000 We know all the planets.

02:04:08.000 This is how we know.

02:04:09.000 This is why we know the Earth is round. 1.00

02:04:11.000 Because every fucking body of mass, as it's spinning around, it takes on that fucking form. 0.99

02:04:17.000 All the planets. 1.00

02:04:18.000 Every one of them.

02:04:19.000 This one's not unique.

02:04:20.000 There's also an element of this is part of American folklore.

02:04:23.000 Yes.

02:04:24.000 If you believe that the world is flat, it's obviously false. 0.98

02:04:27.000 Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous, crazy thing to believe.

02:04:31.000 And yet having a group of flat earthers in our broader society, provided that they're not given power over NASA or something, Adds texture and richness to our culture, even if they're totally wrong.

02:04:46.000 And so what we're having is we're trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds.

02:04:52.000 It actually ends up breaking this great proliferation of culture, some of it which is good, some of it bad, some of it's crazy, some of it's insightful.

02:05:01.000 But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.

02:05:07.000 It's not really even about censorship.

02:05:09.000 It's about power and the distribution of power.

02:05:12.000 If you stack up all of the people who have been kind of nuked from orbit online on the right and then on the left, you have a graph that looks out like this.

02:05:22.000 And so you have to then say, well, why is that?

02:05:25.000 Who's making the decisions?

02:05:27.000 How are decisions being made?

02:05:28.000 And who are they going after?

02:05:30.000 What views are they trying to suppress?

02:05:32.000 And so again, getting it out of the realm of the abstract debate and into the realm of a political analysis gets us to this uncomfortable point.

02:05:40.000 This was happening during Trump.

02:05:42.000 Trump was president and this was still happening.

02:05:44.000 And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it.

02:05:48.000 And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, more quirky people, more people that are way out there.

02:05:57.000 My old naked neighbor in Topanga.

02:06:00.000 Let the guy speak!

02:06:01.000 If he believes that we have to have live water and it's like the average person is not going to be persuaded and the view is not correct but the broader culture suffers when everyone is fearing that if they step outside of the box that they're going to get crushed and conservatives,

02:06:25.000 you know We get all worked up about it because, look, every political faction has their fringe.

02:06:31.000 We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition.

02:06:37.000 But you have to figure out what's harmful and what's relatively harmless. 0.88

02:06:40.000 And a lot of these folk beliefs and superstitions, if you take them not to condemn people as stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but you actually talk to people and try to get a sense of why do you believe this? 0.85

02:06:52.000 It's usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness and even the WEF kind of thinking. 0.62

02:07:01.000 They want to believe that there's someone out there that is calling the shots, that is the problem, that is controlling the society, because they feel that just by identifying a single point, they have a sense of understanding, a sense of power.

02:07:13.000 I actually don't think that that's the case.

02:07:15.000 I think it's misleading.

02:07:18.000 I don't think it's the right way to look at it.

02:07:20.000 But I try to also forgive people to say, people are entitled to their superstitions.

02:07:25.000 We all have superstitions.

02:07:27.000 And we want a society where superstitions are eradicated.

02:07:31.000 But you actually end up getting rid of a lot of the texture and a lot of the variety of culture.

02:07:37.000 When you try to have a hygienic treatment of culture, you treat culture like a disease, like a petri dish culture.

02:07:47.000 And look, I think like Go as far out as you want.

02:07:51.000 Go wild with it.

02:07:53.000 Be respectful.

02:07:54.000 Follow the rules.

02:07:55.000 Maintain some core commitments.

02:07:59.000 I'm always fascinated with those characters.

02:08:01.000 I lived in Topanga.

02:08:01.000 I lived in Berkeley.

02:08:02.000 You meet these people all over.

02:08:05.000 You've lived in these kind of places.

02:08:06.000 Yeah, I have.

02:08:07.000 99 times out of 100, they're harmless.

02:08:09.000 They should just be tolerated and respected.

02:08:12.000 I think it's an important part of how I grew up.

02:08:15.000 I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And we lived in a super gay neighborhood.

02:08:21.000 Our downstairs neighbor used to – these gay guys that would get stoned with my aunt and they would play bongos naked because she could play bongos naked with these gay guys. 0.99

02:08:33.000 They didn't give a fuck about her. 1.00

02:08:34.000 They were just into playing bongos naked. 0.99

02:08:36.000 They would just get really high.

02:08:37.000 And it was the anti-war movement days.

02:08:39.000 And so I lived around that and then I moved to Florida, to Gainesville, which is very conservative.

02:08:44.000 It was really interesting to watch.

02:08:47.000 I've talked about this before.

02:08:48.000 I had this friend who was Cuban.

02:08:51.000 His name was Candy. 0.93

02:08:52.000 And his dad was, like, super homophobic.

02:08:55.000 And he was so mad. 0.79

02:08:56.000 He slammed the paper down on the table. 1.00

02:08:58.000 He's like, these fags want to get married. 1.00

02:09:00.000 And I was like, what? 1.00

02:09:02.000 I was like, what do you care?

02:09:04.000 Like, that's so weird.

02:09:06.000 They're just playing the bongos.

02:09:07.000 It was so weird.

02:09:08.000 When he said it, I was like, what?

02:09:09.000 I mean, I remember very clearly I was 11 at the time.

02:09:12.000 And I was just blown away.

02:09:14.000 I'm like, do you not know any gay people? 0.96

02:09:15.000 This is crazy. 0.97

02:09:17.000 Like, what do you care? 0.94

02:09:18.000 Like, if you're not gay, why do you care if they get married?

02:09:20.000 But I didn't say it because I was 11. I just wanted to be quiet.

02:09:23.000 But it burned in my head that I had gone from San Francisco in the 1970s, which was like this very open-minded, hippie-dominated culture of music and art.

02:09:37.000 And then all of a sudden I was in Gainesville, Florida.

02:09:39.000 And I was around this guy who was angry that gay people wanted to get married.

02:09:43.000 I think the question, if you look at the cultural left of San Francisco at that time, I think it's always a question of proportion.

02:09:53.000 You can have a successful, interesting, functioning society where you have a portion of people who are getting stoned and banging the bongos. 0.98

02:10:01.000 Okay, fine.

02:10:03.000 The problem is, though, that when it becomes out of proportion, when that ideology, that kind of elimination of prohibition or limits or constraints becomes the dominant Policymaking regime.

02:10:18.000 That works when it's a counterculture. 1.00

02:10:20.000 Right, right.

02:10:21.000 The kind of left-wing, and look, I come from the left.

02:10:22.000 I was a radical leftist.

02:10:24.000 I was a Gramscian Marxist, you know, so I know that world intimately.

02:10:29.000 What made you take a turn?

02:10:32.000 You know, I wanted to get into politics.

02:10:35.000 My political formation was from my father's side.

02:10:39.000 Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists. 1.00

02:10:44.000 And so that was like my political upbringing.

02:10:47.000 I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and seeing like the books on their shelf.

02:10:51.000 And it's like, oh, they have this beautiful collection of bound books.

02:10:54.000 And I talked to my aunt and I say, oh, what is this book?

02:10:57.000 And it's like, oh, this is the collected works of Lenin.

02:11:01.000 Not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.

02:11:07.000 And so that was my political formation.

02:11:09.000 I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.

02:11:14.000 The first thing that really kind of disillusioned me Was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man.

02:11:24.000 It's not to uplift the downtrodden.

02:11:27.000 It's about maintaining their own status and prestige with the institutions.

02:11:32.000 It's like a McKinsey consultant kind of worldview with the trappings of the left.

02:11:39.000 It's the Harvard student who's wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh who then goes on to become an investment banker.

02:11:46.000 And it's like, to me, it was so phony.

02:11:50.000 I mean, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.

02:12:01.000 The second thing that really changed me, I spent five years, well first I traveled around the world making documentaries.

02:12:07.000 I saw how Marxist and communist governments actually work out in practice.

02:12:11.000 Not great.

02:12:12.000 And then I made a film for PBS, of all places, looking at three of America's poorest cities.

02:12:20.000 And my, by then, kind of center-left views, which was, oh, you know, the Great Society, you know, public welfare programs, trying to help people.

02:12:30.000 When you actually see how those programs manifest in the south side of Memphis, south side of Youngstown, south side of Stockton, California, the poorest places in the country— You realize that many of those ideals that are presented to you as care,

02:12:45.000 compassion, concern, equality, reparations for our racial past, are at best cynical and at worst deeply destructive to the people that they're supposed to help.

02:13:01.000 And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about people's lives and then how politics affects them.

02:13:09.000 And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster.

02:13:17.000 Even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good.

02:13:21.000 And then the final change was in the run-up and then after 2020. I mean, 2020 radicalized me because you realize how profound this cultural capture is.

02:13:35.000 And you realize that the consequences are no longer abstract.

02:13:38.000 They're no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state.

02:13:46.000 But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes.

02:13:51.000 This is something that wants total domination.

02:13:54.000 And so I got canceled out of my documentary career.

02:13:58.000 Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution.

02:14:05.000 And then it's like I'm out, kind of launched into the wilderness.

02:14:08.000 Like, all right, well, that career is done.

02:14:09.000 What do I do next?

02:14:11.000 And then say, all right, well, let's get into politics.

02:14:13.000 Let's use some of the skills that I've developed as a filmmaker and I'm not a traditional conservative.

02:14:18.000 I'm not a college Republican.

02:14:20.000 I don't own a bow tie.

02:14:22.000 Do you have a bow tie?

02:14:23.000 I think you have to have a bow tie. 0.96

02:14:24.000 But if you're a gay guy, you can have a bow tie and be super left. 0.99

02:14:26.000 That's true.

02:14:27.000 There's nuance to it.

02:14:30.000 But what I realized is that the conservative principles are sometimes expressed awkwardly, are sometimes articulated poorly, but there's some deep truths We're good to go.

02:15:04.000 You have a huge advantage.

02:15:06.000 And the left, kind of elite, kind of academic, leftists in the United States have no idea what conservatives think.

02:15:13.000 They have zero curiosity about it.

02:15:16.000 And so that affords us a kind of advantage because they don't know how we think, how we operate, what our principles are.

02:15:22.000 They just assume the worst.

02:15:24.000 And so I kind of wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and saying, you know...

02:15:31.000 In an odd way, you're fighting for people that are actually voiceless.

02:15:34.000 You know, the left is the dominant voice of the country, of all of our institutions, of all of our tech companies.

02:15:43.000 The voice that really is voiceless are the people who are supposedly the oppressors.

02:15:48.000 You have this book that just came out, White Rural Rage. 1.00

02:15:51.000 You know, bullshit. 0.99

02:15:54.000 You know, rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly. 1.00

02:15:59.000 And so...

02:16:02.000 I just try to think in those terms always.

02:16:04.000 And I've taken over some of the tactics of the left, some of the maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful.

02:16:13.000 But I just have this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige.

02:16:32.000 They give all this rhetoric about helping the oppressed, the underprivileged, the whatever is the kind of term of the day.

02:16:39.000 But they're actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status.

02:16:43.000 I find that a betrayal of true left principles.

02:16:47.000 And I don't think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal.

02:16:53.000 Up close and personal and really want to fight.

02:16:59.000 I want to destroy that.

02:17:01.000 I want to take all of those people who are Selling a bill of goods to the people who are struggling in this country under these principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it's just about having a tenured position, having a feather-bedded job,

02:17:17.000 being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone but themselves.

02:17:25.000 I think that that is...

02:17:26.000 It's such a betrayal of the principles of the left, but really the principles of the country.

02:17:33.000 And I think the way you're explaining it, particularly in the desire to have a richness of culture and not have rigid rules and to have the openness to have basically anybody.

02:17:51.000 Just be who you are.

02:17:53.000 But recognize that being captured by this ideology that supposedly supports you, it's doing it for its own means.

02:18:01.000 It's doing it for a very specific purpose and it's not doing it to support you.

02:18:06.000 It's using these ideas and principles as camouflage.

02:18:11.000 To sneak in through your defenses.

02:18:13.000 And it's dangerous.

02:18:14.000 And it's creepy.

02:18:15.000 And it's weird how effective it is.

02:18:17.000 And that's why I'm really happy that you're out there.

02:18:19.000 And I'm really happy that you can lay it down so articulately and express, especially coming from your background of being a guy who grew up that way, grew up leftist, to be able to express it.

02:18:30.000 I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I'm happy that you're out there.

02:18:33.000 Appreciate that.

02:18:34.000 Yeah, and likewise, I mean, what I think is so special about what you do is that you're You're talking about culture and politics, society, business, for people who aren't in that bubble.

02:18:47.000 I operate in a political bubble every day.

02:18:50.000 But what you've built, and I think it's a testament to the possibilities of the internet, you don't have to be an ABC, NBC, CBS talking head.

02:19:00.000 You don't have to have the...

02:19:01.000 Massive studio lights and the eight layers of makeup.

02:19:04.000 You're doing something that's real.

02:19:06.000 And people have really responded to that.

02:19:07.000 And I think that it's a reflection of something that we need more of.

02:19:11.000 We have an artificial culture that is trying to take over.

02:19:14.000 Yeah, propped up by corporations.

02:19:17.000 Exactly.

02:19:17.000 And the people that are talking about these things aren't even necessarily interested in these things.

02:19:21.000 And that also resonates with the people that listen and watch.

02:19:24.000 Like, I don't have people on that I don't want to talk to.

02:19:27.000 I just have people on that I'm only interested in talking to.

02:19:29.000 And if you can do that and you're actually interested, that's contagious.

02:19:35.000 And these principles that we're talking about and this thing, the way you're laying it out, it's important for people, even that consider themselves leftist, to just consider what you're saying.

02:19:51.000 It's for you too.

02:19:52.000 It's for everybody that we can't let this happen.

02:19:56.000 It's for all ideas.

02:19:57.000 It's for gay people, straight people, trans people, white people, black people, Asians.

02:20:02.000 It's for everybody.

02:20:03.000 The reason the founding fathers of this country set all these checks and balances in place is because they didn't want anyone to get total complete control over the people.

02:20:15.000 And that's what's happening right now.

02:20:17.000 And if you don't wake up to it and you think it's okay because your side is winning, you're actually anti-American.

02:20:24.000 That's right.

02:20:24.000 And it creates this winner-take-all danger.

02:20:27.000 Yeah.

02:20:27.000 And I don't want to see either side have that complete control because...

02:20:32.000 Either side.

02:20:33.000 Either side.

02:20:34.000 That's not what we want.

02:20:35.000 That's not good for the country.

02:20:36.000 We need to have a healthy left and a healthy right.

02:20:39.000 Yeah.

02:20:39.000 And healthy is the right perspective.

02:20:42.000 There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right.

02:20:47.000 And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the left.

02:20:51.000 And because they have this idea in their head that they're on the good side and these people are on the bad side, you don't consider that these are just human beings that think about things differently than you.

02:21:03.000 And that is the only way we're all going to get along, is if we realize there's just human beings that think about things differently and we should be able to engage with those people peacefully.

02:21:13.000 It used to be you could sit down with a conservative person or you could sit down with a liberal person and you might not agree with them, but you could have a friendly discussion and it doesn't have to be a hate-filled attack on your very humanity because, you know, because you don't think,

02:21:28.000 you know, X or Y. It's just like that's not good for anybody.

02:21:33.000 We don't even want to debate.

02:21:34.000 I don't know if you've come across it, but 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this culture of debate.

02:21:41.000 Left and right got together, they hashed it out.

02:21:43.000 I've challenged people to debates.

02:21:44.000 I've been, you know, people try to set up debates and it's like we don't even talk even in a confrontational way, conflict of visions.

02:21:52.000 It's like everyone in their corner, everyone's trying to make the play.

02:21:57.000 And I think that's too bad.

02:21:59.000 I think we need more.

02:22:00.000 Actually, more friction is good.

02:22:01.000 The more public friction, engagement debate will get to that point where it's like, all right, we're up on stage debating, but then we go to the green room and we can talk about kids, music, sports, whatever it is.

02:22:14.000 Everything.

02:22:14.000 And just be a nice person.

02:22:16.000 It's not that hard to do.

02:22:18.000 It's not that hard to do.

02:22:19.000 It's rewarding.

02:22:20.000 It's good for everybody.

02:22:22.000 Christopher, I appreciate you, man.

02:22:23.000 Thank you very much for being here and being so articulate about this.

02:22:26.000 It's very enjoyable to listen to you.

02:22:28.000 You're on top of it, and I think you make some great points.

02:22:31.000 Thanks for having me.

02:22:32.000 I appreciate you.

02:22:33.000 All right.

02:22:33.000 Tell everybody your social and all that jazz.

02:22:35.000 Sure.

02:22:36.000 Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Real Chris Ruffo.

02:22:38.000 I have a sub stack.

02:22:40.000 It's ChristopherRuffo.com.

02:22:42.000 And I have a New York Times bestselling book, America's Cultural Revolution, that tells the history of the radical left's long march through the institutions.

02:22:50.000 Available everywhere.

02:22:51.000 All right.

02:22:51.000 Beautiful.

02:22:52.000 Thank you.

02:22:52.000 Bye everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 05, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2113 - Christopher Rufo

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