In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about Oregon's new law that decriminalizes possession of a small amount of drugs, and why this is a good thing. We also talk about why we should all be worried about fentanyl and why it s bad for us. And we talk about how the political left has lost the ability to say "no." Don t miss it! Subscribe to, rate, and/or review the show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to get notified when we deconstruct the latest episode and give you the latest updates on future episodes. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode to let them know what's going on! Cheers, Joe and Vic xoxo - Tom and Sarah Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Oregon's law decriminalizing small amounts of drugs 4:30 - Why we should decriminalize almost everything 6:00 | How fentanyl is bad for you 7:00 What's the problem with fentanyl? 8:20 - How to deal with it? 9:15 - Is fentanyl a good or bad thing? 11:30 | Why it s good for you? 12:30 13:40 - What s the problem? 14:40 15:20 16:15 17:15 | Why we need to have a structure 18:00 // 15:00 + 16: How do we have a purpose to our lives? 19: What does it matter? 21:00 / 22: What are we all need a purpose? 22:00/23:00 & 23:00 @ what do we need a structure? 26:00+ 27:00 Is it better than a purpose ? 25:00 Can we have structure to our kids have a good life? 30:00 Or are we happier? 35:00 What do we really need a good purpose to live in a healthy life ? 36: Is there a purpose we can we really be happier than a good day? 37:00 Do we really have it all a good enough? 39:00 We can be happier without structure to be happy? 40:00 Are we all happier than we can be a better than that?
00:00:21.000This just came out the last week, but Washington state, rather Oregon state, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy.
00:00:59.000It is a little shocking that they figured it out.
00:01:01.000It just doesn't seem like when you go and drive through Oakland, for example.
00:01:07.000It doesn't seem like anybody's trying to put a cork on that.
00:01:10.000They'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.
00:01:44.000It 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.
00:04:20.000Because 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.
00:04:31.000I have no idea what's going on and I could stay out late all night.
00:04:37.000But by imposing structure on them, it gives them comfort.
00:04:41.000And I find that's the case with human beings.
00:04:43.000I 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,
00:05:05.000They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life.
00:05:08.000The 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.
00:05:17.000That gives people happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just...
00:06:39.000But 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.
00:06:57.000And so, you know, you're trying to kind of navigate your kids around.
00:07:01.000There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble.
00:07:10.000And then you talk to the administrators at the time, say, hey, this is a problem.
00:08:42.000This 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?
00:09:06.000I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.
00:09:10.000You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour.
00:09:16.000You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.
00:09:18.000These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children.
00:09:27.000That 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.
00:09:41.000But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.
00:12:03.000Because 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.
00:12:25.000And so, you know, what I think is so important is...
00:12:29.000To 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.
00:12:42.000And that to me is the name of the game.
00:12:44.000Well, 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,
00:13:03.000even 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.
00:13:12.000They were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags.
00:13:16.000They're completely ignoring what happened in Cuba.
00:13:19.000They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship.
00:13:40.000It'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.
00:13:47.000Because 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.
00:13:55.000And eventually the rabies wins and it always wins.
00:13:57.000So 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.
00:14:12.000Because she was just completely immobile and in a medically induced coma.
00:14:16.000So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies.
00:14:26.000Marxism will put your whole society, at best, in a medically induced coma, and at worst you get starvation, gulags, mass suppression, and so...
00:14:36.000Well, it kills the society, is what the point is.
00:14:37.000The point is, the best case scenario is that you somehow, through a medically induced coma, fucking survive it.
00:14:45.000You're probably wrecked for the rest of your life.
00:14:48.000I mean, it's probably such a horrific disease that everything's compromised after that.
00:14:52.000When 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.
00:15:05.000And 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.
00:15:17.000And so when you travel through those countries, It is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.
00:16:12.000And 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.
00:16:24.000And 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.
00:16:45.000They use the nice language about DEI or what have you.
00:16:48.000But, you know, we should take ideas seriously.
00:16:53.000And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.
00:16:56.000And it's a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating kids.
00:17:03.000And 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?
00:17:55.000It'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.
00:18:20.000And none of these people exist that are teaching these things.
00:18:23.000None of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of university world.
00:18:31.000These 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.
00:18:39.000And they're not out there in the world.
00:18:44.000But 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.
00:18:56.000It 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.
00:19:04.000The kids go to Princeton, and they get two years with the Marxist whack job, and then they get out in the real world.
00:19:11.000The problem is that that ideology that was I think we're good to go.
00:19:39.000Is that the representation of the people?
00:19:41.000If 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.
00:19:55.000It'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.
00:20:06.000When 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.
00:20:16.000And it seems like it's willing participation by the masses as well because they feel like they're a part of change.
00:20:24.000They 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.
00:20:36.000And it's very strange to watch it play out.
00:20:40.000Because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point.
00:21:05.000And they're talking about the drop in crime, but it's because crime's not reported in a lot of places now.
00:21:10.000Because 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...
00:21:21.000I believe there was 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the Black Lives Matter protests.
00:21:27.00017 of those cases, I think, have been dropped.
00:22:24.000If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress.
00:22:27.000You 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.
00:22:54.000The solution is stop that from happening in the future.
00:22:57.000And there's no effort whatsoever put on that.
00:22:59.000There's no conscious thought of like, how do we get at the beginning of this?
00:23:06.000Yeah, 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.
00:23:15.000You 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.
00:23:22.000And 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%.
00:23:40.000It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.
00:23:43.000Now it's per capita, you know, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.
00:23:49.000The lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes.
00:23:59.000And so it's not that you have to have a kind of soul searching and endless kind of navel gazing and philosophizing.
00:24:09.000It'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.
00:24:25.000And it's something that people have been scared to talk about.
00:24:30.000But 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.
00:24:41.000Yeah, they're letting people out of jail who are violent criminals doesn't seem to be working.
00:25:32.000So 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.
00:25:54.000There's no rational justification for it.
00:25:56.000And so it's almost like— Oh, it says Panera is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all.
00:26:03.000On 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?
00:26:25.000It said, okay, Governor Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times Panera would not be exempt from the law.
00:26:31.000The 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.
00:27:28.000But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that, if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses would do or tax laws, that seems insane.
00:27:37.000How Panera Bread ducked California's new $20 minimum wage.
00:28:11.000It's like he's playing someone in a movie that's a crazy person.
00:28:19.000That'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.
00:28:39.000But the problem is that that's not wrong.
00:28:42.000Gavin 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.
00:28:55.000I love that he keeps getting busted too.
00:28:57.000I love that he got busted during the pandemic, eaten inside with no mask on.
00:29:13.000I 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.
00:29:22.000Well, I think you're probably right, and I think there's also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team.
00:29:43.000Obama was like the best example of what we have to offer.
00:29:46.000But Biden is, without doubt, anyone can beat him.
00:29:49.000If 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.
00:29:59.000He's not going to be a single living politician.
00:30:02.000Since he's a top of this team, that people are like, this team is our team, no matter what.
00:30:47.000According 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.
00:31:01.000The 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.
00:31:14.000The 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.
00:31:25.000In 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.
00:31:35.000The governor never met with Flynn about this bill, and the story is absurd, Stack said.
00:31:56.000The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills.
00:32:04.000The exemption, as we mentioned above, is real and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.
00:32:10.000However, 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.
00:36:18.000But the Harvard story is this exact phenomenon.
00:36:22.000And, you know, after the 10-7 attack, Harvard kind of reveals the ideology and the institution.
00:36:28.000And then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents.
00:36:33.000We were the ones who broke the plagiarism story.
00:36:35.000Just 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,
00:37:18.000It'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.
00:37:32.000The question was, if students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard's policy?
00:37:40.000And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was, it depends on the context.
00:37:47.000It'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.
00:37:59.000And so this caused all sorts of chaos, predictably.
00:38:08.000And 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.
00:38:22.000And 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.
00:39:26.000I 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.
00:39:35.000Yeah, and I think people are waking up.
00:39:37.000Jamie, why don't you shut your mic off because Carl is snoring up a storm over there.
00:39:51.000But the curious thing to me was that most people, until they saw those videos, weren't aware of how far it had gone.
00:39:59.000And then they're like, okay, now I kind of get it.
00:40:02.000And there's been a very, very big reaction since then of people realizing, How insane everything has gotten.
00:40:08.000I 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?
00:40:48.000But back then, the pushback was so fascinating.
00:40:51.000Because 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?
00:41:33.000When 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.
00:41:46.000And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me.
00:41:55.000So I'm currently under investigation by federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to call this woman by Zzer pronouns.
00:42:19.000Are we going to legislate against rudeness?
00:42:22.000Are 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?
00:42:31.000If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that's where it's going.
00:42:57.000You 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.
00:43:27.000Let me give you this beautiful St. Christopher medal or St. Joseph medal to celebrate this.
00:43:33.000And 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.
00:44:36.000I don't think that this is how we should be making decisions.
00:44:39.000And I don't think that we should be submitting to the original lie.
00:44:44.000You should never submit to the original lie because if you do, you can never successfully push back again.
00:44:49.000It's certainly odd that they're pushing that.
00:44:57.000You 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.
00:45:11.000I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.
00:45:18.000I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.
00:45:24.000I'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?
00:47:30.000And then once women figure out what you're doing, they don't respect you anymore.
00:47:33.000But what happens, so we go to the university and, you know, we're the new bosses.
00:47:38.000The governor gives us a mandate to do significant changes and reforms.
00:47:42.000And I remember I took some of my guys.
00:47:44.000We kind of landed on campus the first time.
00:47:47.000Student protests, death threats, you know, SWAT team mobilized to protect us.
00:47:53.000And 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.
00:48:05.000They're saying, oh, you can't do this.
00:48:07.000You're opening up the community to violence.
00:48:10.000You can't host a talk on campus because all this same stuff you're talking about.
00:48:41.000But what I realized in that moment is that the people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged.
00:48:49.000No one in a meeting says, actually, this is a stupid idea.
00:50:04.000You're turning the whole world Into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend.
00:50:19.000And 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.
00:50:28.000The whole thing behind it is just so unhinged.
00:50:34.000And 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,
00:50:51.000that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way?
00:50:57.000We're not preparing people for that because the people that are preparing the people have never done that.
00:51:32.000It's presented as this amazing life path.
00:51:35.000And 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...
00:51:49.000Training 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.
00:52:06.000They're not hiding the ideology that's driving this, if you dig far enough.
00:52:12.000And they really say, they say, we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family because that's oppressive.
00:52:19.000Having 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.
00:52:30.000We have people that have no sense of responsibility.
00:52:33.000We've inherited some good and some bad.
00:52:36.000You're born into the world in a tragic state of being.
00:52:39.000Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad.
00:52:44.000I think on the whole, our history, our tradition, is on net very positive, very good.
00:53:35.000And a lot of people are asking that question right now.
00:53:38.000I 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.
00:54:10.000And 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.
00:54:20.000It's really scary to them because they're like, look, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.
00:54:26.000They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, get caught up in momentum and not realize...
00:54:33.000That you're not contributing to any good.
00:55:06.000And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it.
00:55:09.000If 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.
00:55:48.000If 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.
00:56:48.000And you can't protect people every goddamn step of the way.
00:56:51.000We'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.
00:57:04.000Every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil.
00:58:00.000Our whole society collapses instantly.
00:58:03.000Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds.
00:58:06.000And 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.
00:58:16.000I mean, these are people that don't know what it means to be human.
00:58:40.000If 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.
00:58:53.000We all operate on a sense of values, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
00:58:57.000And 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.
00:59:14.000And 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.
01:00:08.000That's scary because that's the opposite of where we expect.
01:00:11.000If 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,
01:00:30.000but that one year was just three years ago, kids, okay?
01:00:33.000Another 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.
01:00:52.000And these are ironically the same people that don't want anybody to be armed.
01:00:57.000It'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.
01:01:07.000You 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,
01:01:24.000especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you could throw at it.
01:01:32.000Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you could say.
01:01:43.000It's a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that's around us.
01:01:46.000If 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.
01:02:00.000Because if it can get like this, where people could just smash into stores and loot, that's what I started seeing.
01:02:04.000That's one of the things that got me out of California.
01:02:06.000I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything.
01:03:25.000And 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.
01:04:12.000Like, are we ignoring facts and statistics?
01:04:15.000If 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.
01:04:23.000And you fucking fly off the handle and you have 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager.
01:04:41.000Where we have decided that, listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria.
01:04:49.000I'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.
01:05:04.000When 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.
01:05:21.000I think you should just let everybody be whoever the fuck they are.
01:05:24.000But don't tell me that I'm supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play.
01:05:31.000Say 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.
01:05:42.000Don't tell me that just because you're trans, like, I'm supposed to abandon that.
01:05:48.000Like, 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.
01:05:58.000Now 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.
01:06:13.000These 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.
01:06:27.000You're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women, and there's no consideration for that at all.
01:06:35.000Yeah, and look at this kind of sorority house.
01:06:37.000I 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.
01:06:49.000And look, obviously, you know, this guy's a pervert.
01:06:53.000Full stop, that is a kind of patently obvious thing, right?
01:07:01.000You should certainly consider the possibility that he's a pervert.
01:07:04.000I think it's at the minimum a big bright red flag that is waving in your face.
01:07:10.000But the question is an institutional question.
01:07:13.000You 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,
01:07:32.000figure out some alternate arrangement for this person.
01:07:36.000But 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.
01:07:43.000It's a failure on our social institutions that we haven't developed any kind of method for solving this problem.
01:07:51.000Well, 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,
01:09:40.000I 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.
01:09:53.000And so it really is up and down the line.
01:10:09.000You know, there's consequences in terms of your own personal safety.
01:10:13.000There's a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating.
01:10:17.000And it's so strange for me for, you know, I'm 56 years old.
01:10:21.000I was born in 1967. I lived in a different world.
01:10:25.000And, you know, I grew up in a world with no internet.
01:10:28.000And 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.
01:11:19.000It's also, it gets you very accustomed to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face.
01:11:26.000And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they're not just the educators.
01:11:37.000They're also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic.
01:11:42.000And 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.
01:12:00.000And 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.
01:12:13.000They will do that because you don't want your social credit score system to drop.
01:12:17.000And 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.
01:12:32.000And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted.
01:12:37.000And 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.
01:12:52.000Yeah, that could be our first female president.
01:12:57.000I 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.
01:13:17.000Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents.
01:13:23.000And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the nth power.
01:13:31.000And, you know, I spent a year living in Western China when I was a documentary filmmaker.
01:13:37.000And this is like where the Uyghurs are.
01:13:39.000The Uyghurs are the Muslim minority population of China's West.
01:13:43.000And they're, you know, ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country.
01:13:47.000And so I'm observing kind of what they're doing, what they were doing over time.
01:13:53.000And it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.
01:13:58.000You know, they wouldn't allow Uyghur men to wear mustaches, like trivial things that are the beginning.
01:14:04.000But then it's like very serious kind of regulation of thought and opinion.
01:14:09.000And so it's propaganda that is backed up by force.
01:14:13.000That's really all that we're talking about.
01:14:15.000And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form, Propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state.
01:14:25.000And we have to push at every opportunity.
01:14:30.000And look, I'm a conservative, I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals, because we're cobbling together the only viable counter movement.
01:14:39.000You can't solve this by culture alone.
01:14:42.000You 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.
01:14:51.000There's not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal.
01:14:57.000But 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,
01:15:12.000and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems.
01:15:16.000And If we don't, we lose the great promise.
01:15:20.000We were promised liberty and equality.
01:15:46.000And so every day that I wake up, it's like, that's what I'm doing.
01:15:50.000What wins are we putting up on the board?
01:15:52.000Because 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.
01:16:04.000When 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?
01:16:22.000Because 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,
01:16:49.000for 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.
01:17:06.000And then I saw Kevin O'Leary explain it from Shark Tank.
01:17:10.000He was saying, this is what every real estate developer does.
01:17:13.000They say, my building's worth $400 million.
01:17:16.000And then someone comes along from the bank and they say, no, it's worth $300 million.
01:17:20.000We'll give you a loan on $300 million.
01:18:18.000It covers both sides of the little quay or whatever you call it, the little island.
01:18:22.000But 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.
01:18:51.000And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim.
01:18:59.000We want to bankrupt him so he can't become the president, even if the people support him.
01:19:04.000We want to deprive the people of making the decision.
01:19:06.000So 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.
01:19:48.000And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we've built up.
01:19:53.000And 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.
01:20:07.000And I'm of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy.
01:20:11.000And this is a contest where Democrats are saying, essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.
01:20:20.000Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages in that sentence.
01:20:25.000We 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.
01:20:40.000And 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,
01:20:57.000And they're going to have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, you know, that's when dissent becomes a crime.
01:21:08.000And 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.
01:22:07.000And 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?
01:22:17.000And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go, this is our modern Hitler.
01:25:49.000But 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.
01:26:00.000Like a buddy of mine's mom, who was like super fucking left wing, Full-on leftist.
01:26:09.000She had kids and then the riots and COVID and all the chaos.
01:26:19.000They 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.
01:26:30.000You know, especially if you're certain ideological hubs, you know, like fucking Silver Lake.
01:26:36.000There's like these spots where you can't escape.
01:26:38.000Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year.
01:29:34.000But the second you're like, yeah, now we want drag queens in schools.
01:29:37.000You're a bad person because your ancestors came from Europe.
01:29:40.000And by the way, we want to destroy the whole society.
01:29:43.000That's when I'm like, I'm going to tap out and now we're going to fight about it.
01:29:46.000Well, 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.
01:31:11.000But 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?
01:32:33.000Let's focus on reading, writing, and math.
01:32:35.000Let's focus on a good civics curriculum so that we have real citizens, that we're graduating from our Public K-12 schools.
01:32:41.000And 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.
01:32:55.000No 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.
01:34:11.000And then it caused this massive uproar.
01:34:14.000And the legislator said, all right, you know, we're just going to double down.
01:34:17.000Now 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.
01:34:28.000And look, there is a reasonable argument to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it.
01:34:32.000Maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there's more latitude.
01:34:35.000Like, okay, that's a reasonable consideration.
01:34:38.000But it's also eminently reasonable to just say we're taking it all off the table.
01:35:04.000I'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.
01:36:14.000Because it's not inclusive of many other perspectives, a traditional perspective, a religious perspective, a general kind of conservative perspective.
01:36:22.000Also, how much are you screening these drag queens?
01:36:41.000However, there's a possibility that you might be a kinky freak.
01:36:46.000There'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.
01:37:02.000And 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.
01:37:12.000But 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.
01:37:23.000Reasonable 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.
01:37:31.000But 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?
01:37:46.000Like, you're just enforcing indoctrination and you're just making sure that I comply.
01:37:52.000And 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.
01:38:02.000But what if someone else gets into office?
01:38:10.000No one's gonna give you those laws back.
01:38:11.000You'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.
01:38:20.000If you've done that, you've fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control.
01:38:25.000And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize the same donors donate to both people.
01:38:58.000Look, 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.
01:39:12.000And 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.
01:39:31.000I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.
01:39:40.000You 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.
01:39:50.000You 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.
01:39:58.000You 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.
01:40:11.000The 2020 was a wake-up call for many people.
01:40:14.000The next wake-up call is going to be 2020 a hundred times over.
01:40:19.000And 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.
01:40:33.000And 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,
01:40:49.000institutional, financial, political, cannot hold and they can't be covered over with ideology for anymore.
01:40:56.000You know, we have to have responsible, civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again.
01:41:03.000And 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.
01:41:16.000And 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.
01:42:21.000But 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.
01:42:35.000The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what's happening and fight the good fight.
01:42:42.000But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty To provide protection for the average person.
01:42:49.000The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions.
01:42:59.000Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and offering a plausible vision for how that could be accomplished?
01:43:08.000I think very few people are thinking in those terms and to me that's a shame.
01:43:11.000Well, 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.
01:43:19.000And you see what happens when anyone runs for office.
01:43:23.000It's just these attacks are merciless and ruthless, and it's all in your character and your past.
01:44:22.000And 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.
01:44:35.000Remember COVID? They were calling him all sorts of names.
01:44:58.000But 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.
01:45:08.000And 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.
01:45:16.000And so he won a very narrow election his first time.
01:45:20.000He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with history curriculum, whatever it is.
01:45:28.000The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20-point victory, unprecedented.
01:45:33.000And 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.
01:45:47.000And I've certainly seen that in my own experience, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with people screaming at my kids.
01:46:00.000And 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.
01:46:08.000But 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.
01:46:16.000You 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.
01:46:33.000But until you get through that barrage, I don't think that you're free at all.
01:46:37.000And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige, Are sometimes desperately holding on to that.
01:46:46.000They want to protect it as much as they can.
01:46:49.000But 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.
01:46:59.000You're kind of wasting away your life and your opportunities.
01:47:02.000And 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.
01:47:16.000Because as we get people who have something to lose, When they start talking, people listen.
01:47:23.000I live on a small farm in rural Washington state.
01:47:26.000There's only so much I can do personally.
01:47:29.000But 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.
01:47:45.000And 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?
01:48:21.000And 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.
01:48:31.000And that there's real urgency involved here.
01:49:57.000I 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.
01:50:10.000And you could distribute that in mass.
01:50:12.000Give me 45 different versions of this attack.
01:50:16.000And they'll give you 45 different versions of it.
01:50:35.000No, I think it's actually a little difficult to learn.
01:50:37.000Because 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...
01:51:09.000Because 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.
01:51:19.000You'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!
01:51:28.000You know, lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that, and it's just like, man.
01:51:36.000The opportunity for other people to successfully counter those statements exists too.
01:51:43.000The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid.
01:51:47.000You know, take into consideration that.
01:51:53.000And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech.
01:52:01.000The problem with blocking hate speech is You block the potential condemnation of hate speech.
01:52:09.000You block the potential intellectual battle between morons who believe stupid shit and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb.
01:52:20.000This 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...
01:52:26.000Taking into consideration this perspective or that perspective, that's what free speech is supposed to be all about.
01:52:31.000The answer to bad speech has always been better speech.
01:52:36.000But 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.
01:53:14.000One 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.
01:55:15.000And it was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere.
01:55:20.000And I think they erased him particularly.
01:55:23.000The first part was his criticism of Ghostbusters.
01:55:27.000And 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.
01:55:38.000And then he got into it with Leslie Jones.
01:55:42.000So Leslie Jones and him got into it and I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones.
01:57:59.000But this guy was minor attracted, and I was a minor, and it was fine.
01:58:03.000He needs to come back as a drag queen.
01:58:04.000But 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.
01:58:20.000It's something that is within the bounds.
01:58:21.000Look, 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.
01:58:31.000That is a prudent limit that I think we can all agree on.
02:00:15.000But 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.
02:00:28.000The issue is with the man who did that to him.
02:01:56.000The way to find out Let's say he says there's a false flag and some attack somewhere.
02:02:01.000The way to find out if he's telling the truth is to have people investigate it.
02:02:05.000If 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,
02:02:32.000And 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.
02:02:40.000And you're talking about a guy who's doing this all day long, every day.
02:02:50.000But he's out there talking about the World Economic Forum.
02:02:54.000I've said this a hundred times, and I'll say it again.
02:02:56.000He told me about Jeffrey Epstein over a decade before anybody was in the news.
02:03:03.000He 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.
02:03:19.000And then now everybody knows it's true.
02:03:21.000And 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.
02:04:24.000If you believe that the world is flat, it's obviously false.
02:04:27.000Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous, crazy thing to believe.
02:04:31.000And 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.
02:04:46.000And so what we're having is we're trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds.
02:04:52.000It 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.
02:05:01.000But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.
02:05:07.000It's not really even about censorship.
02:05:09.000It's about power and the distribution of power.
02:05:12.000If 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.
02:05:22.000And so you have to then say, well, why is that?
02:05:30.000What views are they trying to suppress?
02:05:32.000And 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.
02:05:42.000Trump was president and this was still happening.
02:05:44.000And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it.
02:05:48.000And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, more quirky people, more people that are way out there.
02:06:01.000If 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,
02:06:25.000you know We get all worked up about it because, look, every political faction has their fringe.
02:06:31.000We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition.
02:06:37.000But you have to figure out what's harmful and what's relatively harmless.
02:06:40.000And 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?
02:06:52.000It's usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness and even the WEF kind of thinking.
02:07:01.000They 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.
02:07:13.000I actually don't think that that's the case.
02:08:07.00099 times out of 100, they're harmless.
02:08:09.000They should just be tolerated and respected.
02:08:12.000I think it's an important part of how I grew up.
02:08:15.000I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And we lived in a super gay neighborhood.
02:08:21.000Our 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.
02:09:18.000Like, if you're not gay, why do you care if they get married?
02:09:20.000But I didn't say it because I was 11. I just wanted to be quiet.
02:09:23.000But 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.
02:09:37.000And then all of a sudden I was in Gainesville, Florida.
02:09:39.000And I was around this guy who was angry that gay people wanted to get married.
02:09:43.000I 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.
02:09:53.000You can have a successful, interesting, functioning society where you have a portion of people who are getting stoned and banging the bongos.
02:10:03.000The 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.
02:10:18.000That works when it's a counterculture.
02:10:32.000You know, I wanted to get into politics.
02:10:35.000My political formation was from my father's side.
02:10:39.000Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists.
02:10:44.000And so that was like my political upbringing.
02:10:47.000I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and seeing like the books on their shelf.
02:10:51.000And it's like, oh, they have this beautiful collection of bound books.
02:10:54.000And I talked to my aunt and I say, oh, what is this book?
02:10:57.000And it's like, oh, this is the collected works of Lenin.
02:11:01.000Not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.
02:11:07.000And so that was my political formation.
02:11:09.000I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.
02:11:14.000The 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.
02:12:12.000And then I made a film for PBS, of all places, looking at three of America's poorest cities.
02:12:20.000And 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.
02:12:30.000When 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,
02:12:45.000compassion, 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.
02:13:01.000And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about people's lives and then how politics affects them.
02:13:09.000And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster.
02:13:17.000Even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good.
02:13:21.000And 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.
02:13:35.000And you realize that the consequences are no longer abstract.
02:13:38.000They're no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state.
02:13:46.000But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes.
02:13:51.000This is something that wants total domination.
02:13:54.000And so I got canceled out of my documentary career.
02:13:58.000Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution.
02:14:05.000And then it's like I'm out, kind of launched into the wilderness.
02:14:08.000Like, all right, well, that career is done.
02:14:30.000But 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.
02:17:01.000I 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,
02:17:17.000being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone but themselves.
02:17:26.000It's such a betrayal of the principles of the left, but really the principles of the country.
02:17:33.000And 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.
02:18:17.000And that's why I'm really happy that you're out there.
02:18:19.000And 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.
02:18:30.000I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I'm happy that you're out there.
02:18:34.000Yeah, 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.
02:18:47.000I operate in a political bubble every day.
02:18:50.000But 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.
02:19:17.000And the people that are talking about these things aren't even necessarily interested in these things.
02:19:21.000And that also resonates with the people that listen and watch.
02:19:24.000Like, I don't have people on that I don't want to talk to.
02:19:27.000I just have people on that I'm only interested in talking to.
02:19:29.000And if you can do that and you're actually interested, that's contagious.
02:19:35.000And 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.
02:20:03.000The 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.
02:20:15.000And that's what's happening right now.
02:20:17.000And if you don't wake up to it and you think it's okay because your side is winning, you're actually anti-American.
02:20:42.000There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right.
02:20:47.000And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the left.
02:20:51.000And 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.
02:21:03.000And 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.
02:21:13.000It 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,
02:21:28.000you know, X or Y. It's just like that's not good for anybody.
02:22:01.000The 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.
02:22:42.000And 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.