362. Dark Parody and Villainous Clowns ｜ Matt Walsh
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 34 minutes
Words per Minute
169.52155
Summary
Matt Walsh is a writer, speaker, documentarian, and podcast host. He is best known for his hit documentary, What is a Woman? How dark parody can act as a means of social rebellion against tyranny. In this episode, we discuss the early inception of Matt s hit film, How Dark Parody Can Act as a Means of Social Rebellion, the villainous clowns grifting off narcissistic compassion, the abdication of ethics from healthcare and education professionals, and the trauma suffered by children being deceived. As well as those fighting for a return to sanity. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. . . . . , . . , , , and ... : & , & ; and , in his new documentary What Is A Woman? ? And, is a documentary about the demonetization of the world? , so you can be a demonetized. , right here on the other side of The Demonetization? . And, you ve got a chance to be a part of the Demonetisation? ... and you ve been kicked down to size, period period, right here, period, period ... And, then you have been kicked off to a permanent kick offs, right offs. ... then you re still demonetize it, right down to it, so let s cut it down to the size, right back to the rest, right to the whole thing, right on it s got it s gonna cut it off, right in the other part, right right, right away, right so it s not so?
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:09.900
Today, I'm speaking with wildly popular and equally infamous writer, speaker, documentarian, and podcast host Matt Walsh.
00:01:19.200
We discuss the early inception of Matt's hit documentary, What is a Woman?
00:01:25.340
How dark parody can act as a means of social rebellion against tyranny, the villainous clowns grifting off narcissistic compassion,
00:01:34.820
the abdication of ethics from healthcare and education professionals,
00:01:39.060
and the trauma suffered by children being deceived, as well as those fighting for a return to sanity.
00:01:45.660
Hey, Matt. I'm looking forward to talking to you today.
00:01:49.460
We're colleagues, and we've met a couple of times, but we've never really had a chance to sit down and talk one-on-one at any great length.
00:02:00.400
We have a lot of shared experiences in common, I think, and a lot of issues to discuss.
00:02:06.900
First thing I'd like to know, though, how are you doing?
00:02:14.360
It's been, last year especially, has been quite a ride for me and my family as well.
00:02:22.260
But it's been mostly positive, talking about something, a message that resonates with people.
00:02:29.620
A lot of the blowback and everything that we've gotten was expected, you know,
00:02:34.840
and unfortunately, it comes with the territory these days.
00:02:37.520
Yeah, well, let's start talking about the last year.
00:02:47.340
So we just had twins, and we started with twins.
00:02:50.800
So now we have six kids, two sets of twins, and then two individual kids.
00:02:56.320
So you, twins, that'll get you all in real quick.
00:03:00.520
Yeah, it's kind of a nice bookend because, you know, you start with twins.
00:03:04.440
And I think this is probably our end point, but who knows?
00:03:18.320
They're about to turn 10 at the end of this month and then down to four months old.
00:03:27.720
And you've got plenty to preoccupy yourself in the social world.
00:03:31.380
And things are going well for you with Daily Wire?
00:03:40.140
My show has really gained a lot of traction, especially over the last year.
00:03:45.060
Now, not that it all started over the last year, but that's really, when the film came
00:03:48.120
out, that was kind of another, you know, watershed moment in my career personally.
00:04:05.240
And I'm not sure what the exact number is, but then we got-
00:04:11.580
And then, but then we got hit with the demonetization.
00:04:16.900
And it kind of felt like, because we know how big tech works.
00:04:19.960
And it's just sort of, we were sort of expecting that we're growing too fast.
00:04:24.220
And it's like, we're kind of sticking our head up above all the other weeds, and they're
00:04:29.180
going to notice us and try to, you know, cut us back down to size, which is basically
00:04:33.780
what they've, what they did with the demonetization.
00:04:43.000
Yeah, the demonetization, I don't know exactly how it works, but they put you on some sort
00:04:47.120
of like probationary period where they demonetize you.
00:04:50.200
And then if you have any more violations, then it's a permanent demonetization, or they
00:04:56.620
I mean, all these, I mean, you know this, the rules for all these companies, but especially
00:05:01.260
on YouTube, the rules are intentionally vague and very opaque.
00:05:04.540
And so you're never sure, like they didn't, they never told us exactly what I even said
00:05:12.120
But it was, it was, we do know that it, it's, it's all sort of in the vein of quote unquote
00:05:21.700
Well, they demonetized my daughter, I think for two years, and we never had any idea why.
00:05:25.960
They've left me alone, you know, which is kind of strange because I've gone after the
00:05:30.440
trans activists with, you know, tong and hammer as hard as I possibly could.
00:05:35.460
I've probably said the harshest things I've ever said in public about anyone about the
00:05:40.080
trans activists and yet let YouTube has, it hasn't touched me.
00:05:45.900
And like you said, the rules are vague and arbitrary.
00:05:50.020
Yeah, I think, I think they realize that they can't, because I had thought the same thing
00:05:55.440
I'd see all, I'd see other people get demonetized, suspended from all these platforms.
00:05:59.480
And I think like, why haven't they gone after me yet?
00:06:01.180
Because I'm certainly, I'm saying things that are at least as, you know, quote unquote
00:06:05.340
I think it's just, they realize that they can't, if they try to just wipe out all conservatives
00:06:11.100
or anybody on the right, they try to wipe them all out at once.
00:06:16.500
It's like every year they have a new person that they, that they pick to make an example
00:06:26.360
Well, you know, on YouTube, I called for the liars and butchers who are pushing the
00:06:30.620
trans surgery agenda and the counselors that are facilitating them to be, to be imprisoned
00:06:41.020
I think they're criminal and that they should be imprisoned.
00:06:43.740
And yet YouTube has pretty much decided not to pursue me, you know?
00:06:49.600
And I suppose I'm guilty of dead naming people like Will Thomas as well.
00:06:53.760
And so, but, um, and that's got me in trouble on Twitter, although that, and as you know,
00:07:02.380
So let's talk about your documentary to begin with.
00:07:07.080
And so that's caused all sorts of misery and grief around the world and made people happy
00:07:12.080
as well to have someone finally come out and make what was essentially a kind of black
00:07:17.860
comedy about this preposterous state of affairs that we happen to find ourself in.
00:07:21.940
And so tell us about the genesis of the idea and why you thought that was your problem.
00:07:28.060
You know, people ask me, well, why does this trans thing bother you?
00:07:33.400
Why can't you just leave these poor people alone?
00:07:35.400
And I mean, my answer to that is because they're cutting the musculature off the forearms of
00:07:43.640
That's one of the reasons that I can't leave it alone.
00:07:48.400
But in your situation, why did you decide to go after this particular topic?
00:07:56.160
I think, well, the reason that you gave is a very good one.
00:08:00.680
Like, you really don't need, there are so many reasons why this issue matters and we ought
00:08:06.900
But you don't actually need to go past the simple fact that they're mutilating and butchering
00:08:16.100
On a personal level, the fact that I am a dad and I do have six kids, four kids at the
00:08:23.740
But the fact that my kids are inheriting this culture that has forgotten some of the most
00:08:29.820
basic facts of reality really distresses me and troubles me.
00:08:34.580
And I hear stories all the time, and I'm sure you hear these stories too, constantly from
00:08:38.740
parents of usually, you know, kids are a little bit older than mine, adolescent kids, they
00:08:43.960
go off to school, they come home, and almost seemingly out of nowhere, the child is a new
00:08:50.660
person that's totally transformed for the worse.
00:08:54.280
Doesn't, you know, maybe your daughter comes home, declares, oh, I'm a boy.
00:08:58.140
And then I've heard these kinds of stories so many times, and it's terrifying, it's harrowing.
00:09:05.680
And so just on a personal level, I'm worried about my kids being in that kind of environment.
00:09:12.280
But then also underneath all of that, yeah, there's what this does to kids.
00:09:17.420
There's the fact that opportunities are being taken away from women, and women are being,
00:09:20.800
you know, they're being degraded by this and dehumanized by it, and all of that appropriated,
00:09:28.260
But what is underneath it, the underlying issue under all of that is that this is just an attack
00:09:34.800
So the reason why I really care about it, first and foremost, is that it's not true.
00:09:38.880
Like, we are being told that we must accept something that is not true, that we must go
00:09:48.260
And I care about the truth, because if you don't care about the truth, then what's the
00:09:53.380
Like, what's the point of anything that we're doing or saying or any of that if we're willing
00:09:59.400
And when I first noticed this trans issue becoming kind of mainstream, which was probably
00:10:06.300
around, you know, it's hard to pinpoint a year, but 2014, 2015, around the time when
00:10:10.760
Bruce Jenner, you know, declared himself Caitlyn Jenner, was crowned Woman of the Year.
00:10:14.860
I think that was kind of the, that's not where all this started, but that was the moment,
00:10:19.100
if there was one particular moment, where it surged into the mainstream.
00:10:22.660
And I remember that quite vividly, and I also remember being distressed by the fact
00:10:28.620
that so many people who I thought were on my side thought that this was kind of a
00:10:38.220
There were a lot of conservatives who just went along with it because they were trying
00:10:46.080
And it's unfortunate because it's like, in some ways, it's a good impulse that you want
00:10:58.380
And those good intentions are exploited to a great extent by the left.
00:11:03.240
But that was what, when I noticed people on the right completely dropping the ball on
00:11:09.260
this subject or refusing to pick up the ball to begin with.
00:11:11.300
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00:11:14.020
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And is that when you started to lay the groundwork for making the film?
00:13:02.460
When did you actually start working on the film proper?
00:13:05.600
It would have been about a year and a half before it came out.
00:13:12.460
The groundwork for the film, though, was just this question, which obviously I didn't invent
00:13:22.100
I mean, the fact that we have to ask that question.
00:13:24.120
You know, I was looking at this on the biological front.
00:13:28.180
So sex is older than nervous systems by almost a billion years.
00:13:35.960
It's probably more fundamental as a biological reality than up or down in terms of the stable
00:13:43.360
phenomena that our nervous systems have actually adapted to.
00:13:47.280
I think you could make a very strong case that there is no bit of reality that's more bedrock
00:13:53.720
than sexual differentiation, not least because any organism that propagates itself sexually,
00:14:01.640
and that's pretty much any complex organism for all sorts of complicated reasons, if an organism
00:14:08.540
can't tell the difference between its sex and the opposite sex, then it doesn't propagate.
00:14:13.920
And so failure to propagate might constitute the most fundamental of category errors, right,
00:14:24.840
And so if you do believe that there's biological reality at all, which the hedonistic, narcissistic,
00:14:31.180
postmodern types like to deny, although good luck to them, you have to believe in the bedrock
00:14:38.500
reality of sex, and to overlay that notion of mutable gender on top of it is, well, it's
00:14:50.460
We could talk about that a little bit because, you know, there are men with feminine temperaments
00:14:59.260
But that has virtually no bearing on the issue of biological sex.
00:15:03.780
You know, I told the bloody Senate here in Canada, too, when Canada, which has gone woke
00:15:08.920
in a way that, you know, puts San Francisco to shame, I told them in no uncertain terms
00:15:15.160
that they were going to produce a psychological epidemic.
00:15:17.640
Because I knew the literature on psychological epidemics, which has been traced back about 300
00:15:21.620
years, not least by a man named Henry Ellenberger, who wrote a great book called The Discovery of
00:15:27.160
the Unconscious, and multiple personality disorder, for example, has cycled as a psychological
00:15:34.360
And there's been epidemics of cutting and bulimia and anorexia and Tourette's in very
00:15:41.980
There was an epidemic of paranoia about satanic ritual daycare abuse back in the 80s, and that
00:15:50.460
There's a great book on that topic called Satan's Silence that was written by a lawyer and a
00:15:55.700
social worker detailing out the absolute hysteria that emerged around the possibility that people
00:16:02.900
were being, children were being abused, you know, in these underground caverns, underneath
00:16:12.500
The FBI invented an entire new category of sex criminal, by the way, a category that doesn't
00:16:18.220
exist, which is late-onset female serial sexual abuser, right?
00:16:26.140
And so I knew that the possibility of psychological epidemic was real.
00:16:31.380
And the best way to cause a psychological epidemic is to confuse young women in particular, because
00:16:35.820
as a general rule, it's young women who are prone to psychological epidemics for whatever
00:16:41.740
Higher levels of negative emotion, I would say, and probably earlier onset of puberty and more
00:16:48.100
dramatic transformation, all of that seems to tie together to make young women in particular
00:16:56.260
But, you know, nonetheless, we've run down that road like mad, and now we have a psychological
00:17:03.660
And, of course, what's happening on the ideological front is that all the people who deny that an
00:17:10.000
epidemic is occurring say, no, no, we've just freed people to pursue their own identity,
00:17:15.960
and now they don't have to be afraid of being who they are, which is, of course, I can tell
00:17:23.920
So about 20%, thereabouts, of young people now hypothetically identify as somewhere on
00:17:35.320
And, but there's no indication that their actual sexual behavior has changed, you know?
00:17:45.500
So if you look at the girls, for example, who identify as bisexual, and I suppose that's
00:17:50.520
the most common of the identity transformations, they're no more likely to have had a same-sex
00:18:01.280
Because you'd think that human sexual behavior might be mutable because of social pressure
00:18:08.000
And, you know, what you say about yourself, that's obviously more susceptible to psychological
00:18:14.940
But you might expect that what you do would move a little bit.
00:18:17.860
But I haven't seen any evidence at all that actual sexual practices among young people have
00:18:22.360
changed, except that there's pretty compelling data to suggest that young people are actually
00:18:27.760
having a lot less sex than they were, say, 20 years ago.
00:18:31.200
And that's reached epidemic proportions in places like Japan and South Korea.
00:18:35.920
And so, anyways, you know, that's what, these are all the fun things that happen when you
00:18:41.400
start blurring the distinction between men and women.
00:18:43.560
And then, of course, confusing kids who are already hyper-confused because of where they
00:18:51.640
All right, so you started, you started laying the groundwork for the movie.
00:18:58.680
Like, what did you think you were doing to begin with?
00:19:01.640
And how did that change as you pursued the topic?
00:19:06.740
And by the way, just to say one other thing about this, about the, you know, the rise in
00:19:15.720
And as you point out, I mean, they claim that, well, it's not a social contagion, right?
00:19:22.220
It's just that they were hiding in the closet and they weren't free to come out.
00:19:25.000
Well, the point that I always like to make here is that, and it's a little morbid, I
00:19:28.360
suppose, but, you know, keep in mind that what the left also tells us is that if we do
00:19:33.700
not aggressively affirm people who identify as trans or really anyone in the LGBT, under
00:19:39.260
the LGBT umbrella, if we don't aggressively and, like, systematically affirm these people,
00:19:44.780
then we're going to have suicides and they're going to kill themselves.
00:19:47.800
Well, so what that should tell us then is that if you go back through history, and according
00:19:52.440
to them, there were millions and millions, every year, millions of trans people who were
00:19:56.980
just not out in the open because they weren't being affirmed, well, then we should be able
00:20:00.900
to see through history just a terrible epidemic of suicide the world over, especially among
00:20:11.860
Especially among kids who would also claim in their suicide notes that the reason they
00:20:16.200
killed themselves is because they had an identity that was cross-sexual that wasn't being
00:20:20.240
affirmed. And that didn't happen. And in fact, if any data I've ever looked at, childhood
00:20:27.020
suicide in particular was pretty unheard of until recently. So this is a terrible epidemic
00:20:32.360
and a recent one. So that's one of the points to make there. But in terms of the film, I
00:20:37.620
think we wanted to structure it all around this really basic question of what is a woman?
00:20:42.300
Because it occurred to me a couple of years before we started making the film that this
00:20:46.360
is, yeah, it's a very basic question. It's a very simple question. It's the kind of question
00:20:49.680
we shouldn't have to ask. It's the sort of question that the answer is so obvious that
00:20:54.580
some people struggle with it just because of that, because it's so innate that you don't
00:21:01.540
But it is, the simplicity is, that's where you find the beauty and the power in the question.
00:21:07.500
Rather than making arguments at the other side, it's like you're giving the floor to them
00:21:12.760
and you're saying, okay, here's, you're claiming this and this. Well, tell me more about that.
00:21:17.500
So when a man says, I identify as a woman, I can respond and say, well, you're not a woman
00:21:22.700
and here are my reasons. A more powerful response is to say, oh, you're a woman. What do you mean
00:21:27.300
by that? What do you mean you identify as a woman? What are you trying to say exactly?
00:21:31.640
So that's all, all that question is really accomplishing is just, it's really giving the floor
00:21:35.980
back to the other side and saying, explain to us what you mean by that. And they're not
00:21:43.160
able to do it. And if you can demonstrate that they themselves can't explain their own
00:21:48.420
ideas and their own claims, then it's pretty much over. There's nothing else to say. They've
00:21:56.040
There's also something else that's stunningly immature and pathological about that whole
00:22:02.660
problem. And I'm deeply ashamed of my colleagues on the psychological front, especially clinical
00:22:10.600
psychologists who've been silent during this, because clinical psychology is actually a pretty
00:22:16.320
rigorous discipline, at least at the high end. It was very difficult to obtain graduate training
00:22:22.220
as a clinical psychologist to get into a research-oriented, bolder Colorado model clinical
00:22:29.580
program. You had to be able to do scientific research and publish and become a clinical
00:22:36.120
practitioner. Unlike medicine, like people think of physicians as scientists, but they're
00:22:41.540
not. They don't publish. They don't analyze the scientific research. They don't know how
00:22:46.360
to do statistics. They don't know how to read scientific papers. They're not scientists,
00:22:50.720
whatever else they might be. But clinical psychologists are scientists and they were practitioners.
00:22:55.980
And clinical psychologists also know, not only know with 100% certainty that subjectively defined
00:23:03.300
identity, that identity isn't subjectively defined, they're actually bound by their own code of ethics
00:23:10.120
to reject subjective identification as a diagnostic, what would you say, certainty. So for example,
00:23:19.120
I'm bound by my code of ethics, if you come to me with a claim even that you're depressed,
00:23:24.680
to assess that depression using multiple different methods. They have to be qualitatively
00:23:31.160
different methods. And I have to see that there's convergence across multiple methods before I can
00:23:37.440
accept your self, let's say, your self-identification, your subjective claim. And the reason that that's the
00:23:47.260
case among psychologists is because we know that mere self-report, which is the technical term for
00:23:53.600
it, isn't, you can rely on it if you have absolutely no other evidence, but it's incumbent upon you to try
00:24:00.480
to gather other evidence. And so if you're diagnosing someone, you can be hauled in front of your
00:24:07.680
disciplinary committees for only relying on subjective self-report. But now, as a clinical psychologist,
00:24:14.960
guided, let's say, by the American Psychological Association ethical guidelines, you have to
00:24:22.100
transgress against one or other set of guidelines because you are compelled by the new guidelines and
00:24:27.300
also by law in most state and provinces to accept subjective identification. And yet, you're bound by the
00:24:35.280
other set of ethical codes not to because you have to use multiple converging methods to diagnose.
00:24:40.100
And so that's put clinicians in an impossible situation. And, you know, they're damned if they
00:24:46.440
do and damned if they don't. And I can understand why they're silent, but they shouldn't be because
00:24:50.260
the contradiction is obvious. And there's one other thing, too. So the notion that identity, ID,
00:24:57.360
I'm a woman because I say I am, the idea that identity is self-proclaimed is also utterly preposterous.
00:25:04.620
And every psychologist who isn't a moron knows this. And the reason for that is that you have
00:25:10.160
to negotiate your identity with other people. In fact, the entire process of establishing a
00:25:16.160
harmonious relationship with another person, whether it's a friend or a wife or a husband, a child,
00:25:22.240
a parent, a business colleague, a stranger on the street, every single interaction you have
00:25:28.380
socially, is a negotiation of your subjective identity. And if you're someone who says,
00:25:34.740
I am exactly what I say I am, even though that can shift from moment to moment, and you have to
00:25:42.760
play along, even though you don't know the rules, first of all, if you're a child, you're the kind of
00:25:47.780
child who's going to be unpopular. And psychologists should know that because Jean Piaget documented that
00:25:52.640
extensively. And secondly, that's a form of psychopathology because it's narcissistic and
00:26:00.320
psychopathic and self-centered to the point where there's no way you can establish a reasonable
00:26:05.040
relationship with anyone. And all psychologists who aren't utterly incompetent know that and yet
00:26:12.520
are in the main, 100% silent on this issue. And that's despite the fact that these kids,
00:26:19.060
for example, are being lied to by extraordinarily badly trained psychotherapists and then butchered
00:26:26.420
by, well, surgeons who are acting out a degree of self, what would you call, self-centered, greedy
00:26:37.860
virtue signaling that I think is actually unparalleled in the annals of medical malpractice.
00:26:44.100
And that's something to say, given that there were no shortage of physicians involved in the
00:26:49.540
Nazi atrocities. So anyway, that's just a shout out to all my colleagues who are remaining silent
00:26:56.160
while all of this is transpiring on the public front. All right, so now you went out and you
00:27:00.560
talked to a bunch of professionals, academics and so forth, and you asked this question,
00:27:06.380
what is a woman? And your documentary is interesting because there's a serious element to it
00:27:11.180
because you're posing this question, but there's also a satirical and tongue-in-cheek element to
00:27:16.020
it. And I didn't know what to make when I watched the documentary to begin with because it had this
00:27:21.320
kind of satirical edge. But I've come to realize more recently that almost everything that's
00:27:27.140
happening in our culture has a satirical edge. And that's probably too true of authoritarian,
00:27:33.340
totalitarianism in general, you know. And I started to understand that that's why the figure of
00:27:37.900
the evil clown is such a common trope in fiction, is that when you get a totalitarian, when you get a
00:27:45.100
rise in totalitarian ideology, you get a concomitant rise in, what would you say, the dominion of the
00:27:53.040
evil clown, and everything turns into a parody. And there was certainly an element of that in your
00:27:57.740
film. You know, I mean, I was watching you interview professors and so forth, and it's so preposterous that,
00:28:03.780
well, it looked at times that you were having a difficult time believing that you were doing this,
00:28:08.440
or even sometimes keeping a straight face. And so what was that experience like?
00:28:13.240
Yeah, it's interesting too, because the original movie, the way that I conceived it,
00:28:20.140
would have been even more satirical. I think I originally thought of this as a fully satirical,
00:28:26.360
almost in a certain way playing a character almost, as someone who's bought into this stuff.
00:28:31.860
And I'm getting these people to keep talking. And we kind of, as we began to film it, we started to
00:28:38.120
see it differently, where we needed, and so if you watch the movie, you can tell it's like almost
00:28:42.540
exactly halfway through, there's this kind of tonal shift as we get into the more serious
00:28:47.620
conversations. And we had to have that there, because some of this stuff that's happening
00:28:52.220
is so horrifically evil that there's no way that I can see to make it funny or anything.
00:28:58.100
And we have to be willing to stare right into that darkness. But then I didn't want to lose
00:29:03.200
the satirical part of it either, because it is also true. Although this stuff is horrifically evil,
00:29:08.160
it's also absurd. It is completely absurd. And we have to point that out. And I think that's
00:29:15.300
one of the first mistakes that we made when I say we, I mean, the team sanity, the people who know
00:29:22.520
better. One of the first mistakes we made was in thinking that the last thing we can do is ridicule
00:29:27.900
any of this, because that's too mean. No, we need to ridicule. And it's not about ridiculing
00:29:33.580
individual people who are confused or mentally ill or struggling. Ridiculing the idea, the notion,
00:29:40.080
the claims that are being made. And if any individuals are being ridiculed, it's the people
00:29:45.380
who know better and are out there propagating this stuff. Like, you know, we had, we talked
00:29:50.960
to a doctor in the film and who's a proponent of this stuff and transing the kids. And she's
00:29:55.940
involved in that. And the conversation devolves into this stuff about, do chicken, does a chicken
00:30:03.140
have a gender? And can a male chicken lay eggs? It gets really, really absurd. And she becomes kind
00:30:09.380
of the butt of the joke, but, but it it's, that's her fault. It's because her own position is so
00:30:14.760
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00:31:24.980
You know, I'm dubious about one of the claims that you just made. And I think maybe this has to do,
00:31:35.700
again, with the intrinsic politeness of conservatives. And by the way, politeness
00:31:40.080
technically is an element of agreeableness on the personality temperament front. And politeness is a
00:31:46.300
predictor of conservative belief. And so the idea that conservatives are polite actually turns out to
00:31:52.980
be technically true. I actually believe that a fair number of the individuals who are involved in
00:31:57.400
this actually deserve to be called out and satirized and actually punished for their actions.
00:32:03.620
And so, as you may know, or may remember, I got kicked off of Twitter because I went after
00:32:09.300
Elliot Page. And I went after Elliot Page, who I actually have a fair bit of sympathy for,
00:32:16.560
you know, as an individual, because my sense is that Ellen Page
00:32:22.040
wasn't, never found love in a manner that enabled her to fully appreciate what she was as a woman.
00:32:36.000
And I don't know why that happened or why she wasn't unable to deliver that to herself.
00:32:40.400
But as a clinician, I have a fair bit of sympathy for that because it's pretty damn awful to be so
00:32:47.960
at odds with yourself that the solution to your misery is mutilation. And then I went after her on
00:32:55.980
Twitter talking about the criminal physician that cut off her breasts and the sin of pride. And that's
00:33:03.480
why I got kicked off Twitter. And I got a lot of grief about that from friends and from the general
00:33:10.400
public and from my own licensing board, which is trying to remove my license in Ontario at the
00:33:16.640
moment, although they're not having a lot of luck with that, in no small part because of that tweet,
00:33:23.260
because I miss, what do they call that, dead named Elliot Page by using her name, Ellen, which is her name.
00:33:31.240
And the reason I went after her is because she paraded her new chest in a fashion magazine and got
00:33:39.940
1.5 million Instagram likes. And she's a star and has a fair bit of influence. And she's a model
00:33:48.720
because that's what a star is. A star is a model for emulation and imitation, for emulation and
00:33:54.200
imitation and admiration. And she misused that position to advertise this mutilation and
00:34:02.320
to contribute to the misery of foolish young women who are misguided, who are doing things to
00:34:10.440
themselves that will be atrocious and permanent. And so I felt she had crossed the line from victim
00:34:15.900
perpetrator and deserved a fair bit of trouble for her foolishness. And then I also think the same
00:34:24.860
about Will Thomas and Dylan Mulvaney. And I think as individuals, they deserve a fair bit of negative
00:34:32.660
public attention, no shortage of satire. But I look at Will Thomas, I talked to Riley Gaines,
00:34:37.840
I released a podcast with Riley Gaines, one of the swimmers who was forced, compelled, and chose
00:34:45.540
to swim against Will Thomas, this six-foot-four man with three-foot shoulders who was crushing the
00:34:53.920
women in all sorts of different subdivisions of swimming championships. And he is so bent that it's
00:35:03.640
almost incomprehensible from a psychological perspective. I mean, you think about what
00:35:07.700
you have to be like to be a six-foot-four man who was competing among other men, who wasn't doing
00:35:13.800
that great a job of it at a professional level. I think he was ranked 462nd, who then decided he was
00:35:19.840
a woman, even though he only took vague and tentative steps in that direction, and then competed against
00:35:26.340
women, and then took their trophies, and then paraded himself as a hero among victims, and
00:35:34.760
aggrandized himself narcissistically while he was stealing from these women, who were obviously his
00:35:42.980
physical inferiors on the swimming front, while parading his victory in front of them, and then
00:35:50.660
also assuming that he was some sort of victor and hero. Like, you're so far gone at that point that
00:35:56.720
you deserve a certain amount of, what would you say? You're kind of out of the realm of sympathy,
00:36:05.080
as far as I'm concerned. You've pretty much put yourself firmly in the camp of perpetrator at that
00:36:11.340
point. And I think the same thing about Dylan Mulvaney. You know, I watched Dylan Mulvaney's videos.
00:36:17.080
When I first saw him, I thought, man, this guy's definitely, he's a comedian. You know, like,
00:36:23.280
Mulvaney is obviously a born actor, and has been on stage, and this is technically true,
00:36:29.200
since he was very young. He's actually pretty damn funny. Like, as someone who can parody women,
00:36:36.180
he's pretty funny. But to take that joke seriously, and to undergo the surgical transformations,
00:36:42.500
and to put himself forward as a hero to victims. Like, sorry, buddy, you've crossed the line.
00:36:50.840
There isn't, there is, in fact, at that point, I think that sympathy and compassion actually start
00:36:55.980
to become vices rather than virtues. So, I don't know what you think. What do you think about that?
00:37:01.940
I mean, you know, you just made a case that we should be sympathetic towards the individuals, but
00:37:06.180
skeptical towards the ideas. And I'm thinking, yeah, most of the time, that's probably true, but...
00:37:10.780
Yeah, I have no, well, I certainly don't disagree with you at all on that. You're not going to get
00:37:16.360
the, an abundance of sympathy has never been one of my weaknesses, although I have many.
00:37:25.840
I totally agree with the distinction that you're drawing. I think that the people who are actually
00:37:30.020
promoting this stuff, propagating it, intentionally confusing other people, recruiting kids into it.
00:37:36.760
Dylan Mulvaney went to the White House and was promoting, you know, gender mutilation of kids.
00:37:41.440
So, the people who are promoting it deserve scrutiny, mockery, criticism. I mean, there's almost,
00:37:51.500
this stuff is so evil that in my mind, there's very little you could say about the people promoting
00:37:55.460
it that I would think goes too far, personally.
00:37:58.940
Well, this is pretty rough, given that it was also Kamala Harris, right? Because she sent him a letter
00:38:03.740
of commendation, Mulvaney, and called him a hero, right? So, it's not just fringe people on the
00:38:10.120
outskirts, let's say, like Mulvaney, or even arguably Will Thomas. It's people who are at the
00:38:16.040
pinnacle of political power, like Kamala Harris, who are also promoting this.
00:38:20.760
Exactly, exactly. For me, the sympathy goes to the people, the kids in particular, who are caught up in
00:38:27.940
this through no fault of their own, and then become desperately confused in a way that I think
00:38:34.980
any of us at a certain stage in life could have been susceptible to. I mean, it's impossible to
00:38:39.600
know, but if I had been born into a culture, into a family, God forbid, where these ideas were accepted
00:38:46.160
and promoted, and I had been told almost from birth that I could be a girl if I choose to be, and that
00:38:52.120
you know, if I ever, if I find the color pink appealing, or if I ever play with my sister's
00:38:58.100
Barbie dolls or something, that means I'm a girl. If I had been told that stuff from birth, and I'd
00:39:02.920
been in this kind of environment that these kids are in, who knows where I would end up? Who knows
00:39:06.300
where any of us would end up right now? And so, those are the victims, you know, and of course,
00:39:12.400
the victims of this stuff get our sympathy. But because we sympathize with the victims, and we care
00:39:18.180
about the victims, we love the victims, that means that we are all the more angry at the people who
00:39:23.360
are victimizing them. And it might be true that many of the victimizers were victims themselves at
00:39:28.780
one point in the past, you know? And that's true of anything. Like, you find a serial killer,
00:39:33.060
you're probably gonna find out that he was abused as a child. But, you know, and that's a terrible
00:39:38.300
thing. But the moment that you decide to become a victimizer, the moment that you cross that line from
00:39:43.900
victimized to victimizer, now that's where you are, and that's how you get treated. And I
00:39:48.120
think that's the case with a lot of these people. I think that's right, too. Well, and there's plenty
00:39:51.460
of people who were terribly abused as children who don't grow up to be abusive. In fact, the vast
00:39:57.540
majority of them is the case, right? Most people learn to not abuse, even if they're abused, even
00:40:04.460
though most people who abuse were abused as children. Otherwise, it would just spread through the
00:40:09.280
population in a few generations, right? Because what would spread, obviously, if it was, if it, if it spread,
00:40:16.120
then it would spread. And so it doesn't spread, it tends to be, and that's very interesting, you know,
00:40:21.480
because it means most people draw the conclusion from being victimized that victimizing is a bad
00:40:26.400
idea. And so, and thank God for that. And I think that's one of the pieces of evidence that people
00:40:31.760
are essentially good, even though they're strongly tempted to evil. So now you went out, you talked to
00:40:37.620
all these educated people, you went into universities, for example, and you talked to people who were utterly
00:40:43.120
possessed by whatever the hell this ideology is. And so what did that do to you? I mean, you had some
00:40:48.480
sense of what this was like to begin with and how widespread it was in the culture. But then you
00:40:52.960
went out and you, you talked to, I don't know how many people, and put them on the spot. And they came
00:41:00.160
up with the most preposterous explanations or pseudo explanations. What did, how did that change the way
00:41:05.920
you were looking at the culture? Yeah, it was quite, it was quite disturbing. You know, honestly, we obviously
00:41:11.820
knew this was an issue. We knew it was a problem. We wouldn't have set out to make the movie. But to me, you
00:41:17.280
know, going to a college professor, one of these trans doctors, we sort of knew what we were going to get
00:41:22.480
out of that. It was still quite difficult to sit across the room from someone who mutilates people for a living and
00:41:29.160
just sit and listen to them, especially given that we decided early on that the point of this movie is not for me to
00:41:35.060
go out and yell at these people and argue with them. As, as, as therapeutic as that would have been
00:41:39.820
for me, it would not have made, I don't think for as effective of a film. So what that meant in
00:41:44.800
practice is that like, I'm sitting there for an hour or more, mostly just listening to them say all
00:41:51.240
this stuff. And there are many arguments I want to make in response. And for the most part, I didn't
00:41:55.540
because that's not what the movie was. And we wanted to let, we wanted to let, we wanted to let sort of
00:41:59.400
gender ideology hang itself by its own words rather than by arguments that I make. But so that
00:42:05.000
was, that was pretty depressing and that could get kind of dark. The more depressing thing for me and
00:42:09.540
what was actually a surprise to me is when we went to all these different cities and we went out on
00:42:15.320
the street and we did man on the street interviews, just talking to regular people about these issues
00:42:20.860
and asking them if they can define the word woman and all this. And I really thought going into it
00:42:26.300
that we would be able to predict before we talk to somebody, what kind of answer they're going to
00:42:32.160
get. And I thought that we would talk to a lot of confused, younger, you know, Gen Z types and we
00:42:38.020
get the typical stuff from them. But then if we pulled aside some older guy, you know, with his
00:42:42.320
wife and they're walking down and we start talking to them, I thought we would get just plain common
00:42:46.660
sense. And we didn't. We found that the vast majority of people we talked to, no matter their
00:42:52.400
demographics, they were basically saying the same kinds of things that we heard from the college
00:42:58.080
professors, only they didn't know that that's where they got it from. So they didn't even know.
00:43:03.460
It was clear to me that they didn't know exactly what they were saying or why they were saying it,
00:43:07.480
but they had a party line that they were repeating.
00:43:09.800
You probably made a postmodern mistake in your assumptions.
00:43:15.020
Your mistake, I would say, in that initial assumption was that common sense was semantic,
00:43:22.520
that it was coded in explanation, that people know what a woman is because they can say what
00:43:27.900
a woman is and they can define it. And that's how they derive their knowledge. And I don't think
00:43:32.780
that's the case at all. And I actually think, you know, it isn't the case because you said that,
00:43:36.640
you know, knowing what a woman is, is so obvious that you don't need to be able to articulate it.
00:43:41.160
And most of the fundamental bedrock assumptions of our culture are actually beyond verbalization.
00:43:48.600
They're the nonverbal axioms of the set of semantic knowledge. And so then when you go talk to someone
00:43:56.940
who's an ordinary person and you ask them something preposterous, like defend marriage,
00:44:05.200
they have no idea what to say because they're not married because they had a lengthy philosophical
00:44:12.360
justification for being married. They're married because we decided as a species
00:44:18.160
seven million years ago that we were going to become heterosexually monogamous in the main.
00:44:28.740
And that's our nature and our customs. And that isn't coded primarily semantically. And so what happens
00:44:36.900
when you put people on the spot is that you reveal not exactly their confusion, but the lack
00:44:46.220
of their ability as philosophers. You know, people don't get married because they know why marriage
00:44:54.440
is a good thing in the way that someone like John Locke or John Stuart Mill or some great philosopher
00:44:59.960
might be able to elaborate. They get married for the same reason they put up a Christmas tree.
00:45:04.780
Because you can ask someone, why do you put up a Christmas tree? They have no bloody idea why they
00:45:10.060
put up a Christmas tree, like what the meaning is. They do it because everybody does it. It's part of
00:45:14.940
the shared set of nonverbal assumptions in the culture. And so you tapped into a semantic confusion,
00:45:23.860
right? And that's certainly preyed upon by the intellectual types who should know better.
00:45:30.140
Yeah, I think there was certainly an element of that. Although it was interesting when we went
00:45:37.020
over to Kenya and talked to traditional tribes there, there was not that same. It took them a
00:45:44.160
minute to understand what we were actually asking, because it is so obvious that when we first asked
00:45:49.780
the question, they thought I must be asking something else because I couldn't possibly be asking that.
00:45:55.200
Once I understood what the question was, they had no trouble talking about it in detail and being
00:46:00.020
very clear about it. I think that back in the United States, there was some confusion about
00:46:06.500
being put on the spot to explain something that's so innately understood. But then there was also
00:46:11.380
what seemed to me to be an awareness among many of these people that this is a loaded question now,
00:46:19.260
and they can't really talk about it and be honest. In fact, we heard about that.
00:46:24.160
There are many people that we talked to who aren't in the film because they didn't want to be on camera.
00:46:30.080
They refused to be on camera, and they would tell us, like, I can't talk about this with a camera rolling
00:46:35.160
because of my job, because I'm going to school, because of this and that.
00:46:38.120
So there's a real fear that people have that pervades through this whole conversation.
00:46:44.740
And I like to think that over the last year, some of that fear has dissipated a little bit.
00:46:49.240
Not completely, but it just seems to me that normal people are more open
00:46:53.580
about just saying what's clearly true when it comes to issues surrounding gender.
00:46:58.900
But at the time when we made the film, it was just everywhere, and it was really difficult
00:47:02.880
to get anybody to want to have this conversation at all.
00:47:08.120
Yeah, well, I think the seeds of semantic confusion have been sowed deeply,
00:47:15.420
and a fair bit of that is attributable to the leakage of postmodern-slash-neomarxist ideas
00:47:22.760
from the academy through the media into the broader culture.
00:47:26.240
So you were definitely picking up on some of that when you were interviewing people.
00:47:30.840
You know, and it's not surprising as well that people are afraid, you know,
00:47:34.520
because, well, and this is something we could talk about too,
00:47:44.140
You know, I've probably talked to 200 people who've been effectively mobbed.
00:47:47.480
And some pretty high-profile people like Jay Bhattacharya, for example, and Jonathan Haidt,
00:47:52.100
and many, many others, many professors I know and public figures.
00:47:55.860
And typically, my experience has been, you know, I've been mobbed lots of times,
00:48:03.920
My observation of people is that when they're mobbed,
00:48:07.220
they respond to it with about the same degree of catastrophic intensity
00:48:12.340
that you might experience if you were subject to a very, very long,
00:48:20.140
or a serious illness on your behalf or the behalf of someone that you love.
00:48:26.360
I mean, Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, you know, he got mobbed by his colleagues
00:48:30.360
and cancelled because he dared to say what he knew about the pandemic lockdown,
00:48:38.880
You know, and I know lots of people who were bullied into, you know,
00:48:44.520
near-nervous breakdown or physical illness as a consequence of being isolated and mobbed.
00:48:49.980
And so it's not surprising that people are afraid.
00:48:53.140
You know, there's something to be afraid of to be mobbed.
00:48:55.020
Well, now, you, tell me how you've coped with that.
00:48:58.200
I mean, you're, you know, you're sort of nefarious poster boy for the radical leftist activists,
00:49:06.940
and your reputation savaged in all sorts of ways.
00:49:12.140
You're fortunate because you're with the Daily Wire Plus,
00:49:14.460
and you have a group of colleagues that stand behind you,
00:49:16.660
and so, you know, that's very different than someone who finds himself
00:49:19.760
stripped bare of all his collegial support at a university.
00:49:22.540
But what's it been like being on the receiving end of that?
00:49:27.400
You know, I think you're right that it's definitely not pleasant.
00:49:29.600
I do have, I always keep in mind the advantages that you highlight,
00:49:33.340
that for one thing, I can't, I can't, they can't cancel me at my job.
00:49:38.580
It's just not gonna happen, especially with the methods that they choose
00:49:43.380
by accusing me of being a transphobe, a bigot, whatever.
00:49:46.480
It's not gonna land, and so I have that security, which is really important.
00:49:51.900
Also, just some other, you know, I've been hacked,
00:49:54.400
I've been at all these different things, doxxed, all the rest of it,
00:49:57.480
and we have some resources to deal with some of that.
00:50:00.320
But I still had to get, you know, 24-hour armed security at my house.
00:50:04.600
I think people maybe don't realize that it's never fun.
00:50:12.000
It's always unpleasant when you have the mob coming after you.
00:50:13.720
Not all mobs are made equal, though, and some mobs are much more vicious
00:50:19.520
and more personal and more willing to do pretty much anything to destroy you.
00:50:27.640
They've been told and they believe that your lack of affirmation
00:50:30.420
is a physical threat to them, so therefore, anything they do to you
00:50:40.100
I did some in-depth studies with a colleague of mine, a student of mine,
00:50:47.000
And she had toured mass grave sites with the UN
00:50:54.800
And we were looking into the precursors of genocide
00:50:59.340
And one of the precursors to that kind of extreme violence
00:51:06.480
is that genocides occur when you get them before they get you.
00:51:10.800
And you get them before they get you because they're coming for you.
00:51:15.080
And so the populist types who want to capitalize on the genocidal impulse
00:51:22.640
You know, when you talked about this unbelievably pathological claim
00:51:27.700
that counselors often make now, much to their eternal shame, I would say,
00:51:33.760
and evidence of their absolutely unprofessional and unwarranted conduct
00:51:42.100
well, would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?
00:51:47.400
And, you know, the evidence on that front, by the way,
00:51:52.820
I mean, the kids who suffer from gender dysphoria,
00:51:58.920
from bodily dysmorphia, let's say, are at higher risk for suicide.
00:52:03.300
But the reason they're at higher risk for suicide
00:52:05.220
actually isn't because of their gender dysphoria
00:52:28.260
And that's associated broadly with suicidality.
00:52:31.540
Now, what happens in the case of a psychogenic epidemic
00:52:34.000
is that that underlying proclivity for negative emotion,
00:52:41.180
searches for a culturally appropriate form of expression.
00:52:46.080
And that can be modified radically by the culture.
00:52:49.560
And so you see it taking all sorts of different forms
00:52:58.780
to the specific, say, body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria
00:53:04.460
is an absolute misreading of the clinical literature.
00:53:13.740
and surgical transformation of children decreases their risk for suicide.
00:53:20.920
In fact, the American Psychological Association itself,
00:53:24.260
in their position paper on gender-affirming care,
00:53:30.700
On one page, they claim that if you don't affirm gender identity,
00:53:37.200
which means lie to children about which sex they are,
00:53:40.760
then you increase the risk of suicide in the long run.
00:53:45.660
because of the prejudice of the research community,
00:53:48.200
there are really no valid long-term outcome studies
00:53:51.400
on the consequences of gender transformation surgery.
00:53:54.960
It's like, well, you can have one of those guys,
00:54:08.580
The clinical research community is not prejudiced.
00:54:12.300
Their whole bloody enterprise is to do long-term research
00:54:21.660
on the research front, they're the exact opposite of that,
00:54:35.640
Now, I would say the broader research indicates,
00:54:38.700
well, you're not going to decrease suicide risk
00:54:43.020
among depressed young people by subjecting them
00:54:46.600
to radical and unwarranted experimental surgery
00:55:07.640
That's why I, on this topic and so many others,
00:55:11.020
I tend to be, I guess I have an unscientific view,
00:55:17.500
at least the way people use studies these days,
00:55:21.200
whatever conclusion they've already arrived at,
00:55:34.320
first and foremost in these sorts of situations.
00:56:11.180
No 14 or 15-year-olds thinking about having kids.
00:56:31.400
to look like, it's just, it's almost meaningless.
00:56:40.320
and I'll be happy like that for the rest of my life.
00:56:55.660
in principle, you're taking an unstable identity,
00:57:32.160
with no clinical assessment to speak of at all,
00:57:39.480
and to call it appalling is to say virtually nothing.
00:57:43.200
She couldn't find anybody to date her in high school,
00:57:55.980
even if they're, you know, so-called normal kids.
00:58:30.260
It's just that it adds a level of insane complexity