The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 435. This Is One of the Biggest Medical Malpractice Scandals in History ｜ Michael Shellenberger

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I'm talking today with journalist and author Michael Schellenberger.

00:01:14.060 Michael wrote Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, and also San Francisco.

00:01:21.420 There's a new book coming out called Pythocracy. It won't launch until next year.

00:01:27.420 But I'm talking to him today about something more specific and more controversial, I suppose, and that's his recent release of the so-called WPATH files.

00:01:37.900 Now, WPATH is arguably an association, but certainly not professional and also an organization that has nothing to do whatsoever with health.

00:01:50.420 And so, we walk through his release of about 170 pages of material documenting the activities of this group.

00:02:00.020 It's important because this association has issued the guidelines upon which the more established medical, psychological, psychiatric communities have predicated their analysis of the gender dysphoria phenomenon.

00:02:15.100 It's a way of thinking about it, and from whom they've taken advice about proceeding with this absolutely atrocious sterilization and butchery that the medical community and the counseling community have become complicit in, in what?

00:02:32.680 Complicit in criminally propagating. How about that?

00:02:35.980 Right, right, right. So, we're going to discuss all that, and we're going to see what happens as a consequence. So, come on board for the ride.

00:02:45.580 You were instrumental in the release of the so-called WPATH files very recently, and you keep dumping catastrophes into the public sphere.

00:02:56.180 Yeah, yeah. Who knew that would be your role? So, but you seem to be playing it very effectively. So, why don't you tell us what's... Clue us in, man. Take us from the top.

00:03:08.180 Well, sure. So, this is the organization in question. It's called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and it's called WPATH, and it's an organization I hadn't heard of until a source or sources gave me about 170 pages of the internal files from the discussion boards of WPATH,

00:03:29.520 along with about a 90-minute video of WPATH leaders and members talking about some of the problems they were encountering.

00:03:39.480 And so, what you're seeing in these files, and I encourage people to read the files themselves. There's really no substitute for confronting the evidence directly.

00:03:47.540 What you see are conversations about how to treat or mistreat, I think I would say, people who are experiencing gender distress as ages as young as 10 years old, 14 years old.

00:04:03.140 There's a discussion of a 13-year-old adolescent with developmental delays.

00:04:06.480 There's a conversation about whether to perform genital surgeries on somebody that's suffering from symptoms like schizophrenia and maybe homeless.

00:04:14.340 Concerns expressed about whether that person would be able to care for their wound, supposedly a neovagina.

00:04:20.720 Sorry to get right into it right away, but this is the material we're discussing.

00:04:23.700 There's a lot of conversations about the problems they have in getting kids and adolescents and their parents to understand that these procedures will result in sterilization and likely a loss of sexual function.

00:04:40.020 The picture that this organization, WPATH, had presented to the world and to the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, every major medical organization, was a picture of real professionalism grounded in the best available science and evidence.

00:04:57.780 They have something called standards of care, which are ostensibly guidelines for proper medical care for people suffering from so-called gender dysphoria or gender distress.

00:05:07.900 And they're in their eighth version of that.

00:05:10.920 So they call it standards of care eight or SOC eight.

00:05:13.540 Based on their public presentation, you would think that this is a serious scientific and professional body.

00:05:19.360 It is not.

00:05:20.580 When you read these documents, what you see is a lot of spitballing, a lot of people making things up.

00:05:27.280 You don't see a lot of references to what's in the standards of care.

00:05:31.320 But even if you did, you would learn that what's in the standards of care is effectively pseudoscience.

00:05:36.400 There is no evidence base to support these radical interventions, which is puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, meaning testosterone for females and estrogen for males, and then surgeries.

00:05:49.300 Both they euphemistically refer to as top and bottom surgeries.

00:05:52.340 And people can understand that.

00:05:54.000 We're talking about breast elimination, double mastectomies for girls as young as 13, 14, 15 years old, and genital surgeries, which are, of course, irreversible, including on adolescents.

00:06:09.780 It's extremely shocking to read these conversations.

00:06:14.500 There's so much to unpack in them.

00:06:16.000 I think there's a kind of horror to it that, for people like me that have tried to stay away from this for a long time, I've certainly heard you talk about it and seen you write about it.

00:06:25.640 I'd read Abigail Schreier's book.

00:06:28.140 But honestly, my psychological reaction until I was confronted with these files and asked to effectively bring them into the world was of denial.

00:06:38.060 I just didn't really think that these things were going on at the scale at which they're occurring.

00:06:42.100 I thought maybe people were exaggerating what's happening.

00:06:46.920 These files put to rest any doubts anybody should have that what is happening is one of the greatest medical mistreatment scandals in human history, in recorded human history.

00:06:56.600 It might be the worst.

00:06:58.020 It's certainly up there with lobotomies. 0.62

00:07:00.500 It's up there with the Tuskegee experiments.

00:07:03.960 It's way worse than both of those.

00:07:05.820 I think you may be right.

00:07:07.540 It's so bad.

00:07:08.960 And so there's a lot to unpack.

00:07:10.440 But anyway, that's an overview of it.

00:07:12.820 It's 170 pages, the video.

00:07:15.180 Oh, the one final thing I'll say, Jordan, is just that it also shows without a shadow of a doubt that they themselves, the people that are performing these mistreatments, are aware that they are not getting what's called informed consent.

00:07:28.380 This is as important as do no harm.

00:07:30.820 So they are acknowledging that the kids and the parents don't understand that.

00:07:35.040 And then they just sort of throw up their hands and they say, well, yeah, we don't really know how to solve this problem.

00:07:39.300 At no point in the video does anybody say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this.

00:07:44.400 It's a truly just from the, you know, there's a basic horror to it.

00:07:49.760 But then at an intellectual level, you can't help but be slightly fascinated by these people.

00:07:55.480 What is wrong with them that they're so in the grip of an ideology that they're doing these mistreatments and never questioning, effectively never questioning that perhaps they shouldn't be doing them at all?

00:08:07.940 Yep. Okay, so let's walk through that, right through everything you said.

00:08:13.820 So we're going to start with the professional association.

00:08:18.260 Okay, so it turns out, apparently, that all you have to do to become a professional association that other professional associations can rely on is to call yourself a professional association.

00:08:30.300 And the way you finesse that, if you aren't actually a professional association, which means you're not a group of scientists and you're not qualified to be doing what you're doing,

00:08:40.320 is to proclaim as loudly as you can that you're operating on behalf of someone who's oppressed.

00:08:46.000 Because then it becomes a moral crime to question anything you say. 0.93

00:08:49.100 And so that means if you're an absolute bloody narcissistic piker who's also incompetent, the best way to clamber yourself to the top of a hierarchy that would otherwise be unattainable is to lie about who you are and what you're doing. 0.99

00:09:02.160 So great. 0.99

00:09:02.760 So that's a wonderful invitation to the willfully blind narcissistic psychopaths. 0.98

00:09:08.320 Okay, so that accounts for W-Path.

00:09:10.480 And then with regards to the medical associations and the psychological associations who've gone along with this in the most despicable, imaginable way, well, they can point to the fact that they consulted the true experts.

00:09:24.240 And who more to know than those with lived experience in the area, right?

00:09:28.400 So great.

00:09:29.180 We've got all sorts of excuses at hand.

00:09:31.980 Okay, so that's appalling on the professional side. 0.86

00:09:34.740 And what it really is, is the invasion of, what would you say, domains of specialization that once required effort by parasites who use ideology to game the system. 0.85

00:09:47.380 So great.

00:09:48.180 Now, that's the American Psychological Association.

00:09:50.680 That's the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and it's certainly W-Path. 0.83

00:09:56.580 Inexcusable.

00:09:57.340 I've never seen anything like this.

00:09:58.900 I'm absolutely appalled and ashamed of my therapist colleagues, for example, of not being rioting in the streets because of this.

00:10:06.680 That brings us to the next issue in your progression, because then you describe gender distress.

00:10:12.360 Okay, so let's think about that.

00:10:14.140 Two words, gender and distress. 1.00

00:10:16.660 Okay.

00:10:17.760 Distress is indistinguishable from two things.

00:10:21.480 Generalized negative emotion and absence of positive emotion.

00:10:25.300 Okay, so that's the core for depression and anxiety.

00:10:27.660 And it's the core set of symptoms for virtually every form of pathology that comes to the attention, not only of psychologists, but also of medical professions.

00:10:37.020 Right?

00:10:37.260 So distress is a very, very large bin.

00:10:41.560 And what you do if you're a credible diagnostician is you assume to begin with that the more generalized diagnosis applies, depression and anxiety, and then you further specify that as necessary.

00:10:56.440 Understanding that a lot of what you might attribute to the more specialized problem is actually a manifestation of the more general problem.

00:11:04.600 Right?

00:11:04.860 Because one question is, well, what the hell is the difference between gender distress and anxiety and depression?

00:11:11.920 And the answer is mostly nothing.

00:11:14.480 Mostly nothing.

00:11:15.280 And so maybe there's something left over that's specific to something like body dysmorphia, but probably not.

00:11:22.300 And you need pretty solid proof that there is something in addition.

00:11:26.400 And then, see, that's another part of the sleight of hand.

00:11:30.040 Because you might say, well, people with gender dysphoria are more likely to commit suicide.

00:11:34.180 It's like, no.

00:11:35.480 Depressed and anxious people are more likely to commit suicide.

00:11:38.420 You have to demonstrate that there's an additional utility in your diagnostic label.

00:11:44.380 And that turns out to be extremely difficult.

00:11:46.560 But we're way past all that.

00:11:48.940 Okay.

00:11:49.220 So now then we have the additional lie.

00:11:52.300 So we've mucked up the notion of distress.

00:11:54.600 Now we've appended another lie to it.

00:11:56.660 Some of this distress is attributable to confusion about gender.

00:12:00.180 There's no difference between confusion about gender and confusion about identity, right?

00:12:08.180 Those are the same thing.

00:12:09.820 And everybody who seeks psychological treatment has confusion about identity.

00:12:15.380 That's why they seek treatment.

00:12:17.380 So you can't just take all that and rename it gender and think that you can get away with it, 0.81

00:12:21.760 although apparently you can.

00:12:23.160 So that's appalling on the conceptual side.

00:12:25.740 It's inexcusable.

00:12:26.800 So there's no reason whatsoever that any psychologist or physician who's been trained remotely in

00:12:33.840 the mental health sciences should ever fall for that, even for a second, no matter what.

00:12:37.820 But they did.

00:12:38.700 Okay.

00:12:39.400 Next.

00:12:40.720 Next.

00:12:41.280 And this is the progression that you laid out.

00:12:43.360 Okay.

00:12:43.760 So now we have gender distress as delineated by a pack of professionals who aren't professional

00:12:50.080 and who aren't a pack and are certainly not a professional association.

00:12:53.540 And what do they recommend?

00:12:55.060 Again, they don't recommend the minimal necessary intervention.

00:12:59.080 So the clinical literature six years ago was absolutely clear with regard to the small

00:13:04.600 number of cases of gender dysphoria that emerged in early childhood.

00:13:08.820 Very rare.

00:13:09.560 One in 3,000.

00:13:10.600 Very rare. 0.76

00:13:11.680 Leave them the hell alone. 0.98

00:13:13.740 Right. 0.99

00:13:14.500 Till they're 18.

00:13:15.960 Yeah. 0.99

00:13:16.360 Most of them turn out to be gay. 0.93

00:13:18.040 And 90% of them, and the existence of that final 10% is highly debatable, accept the physical 0.64

00:13:27.640 reality of their embodiment.

00:13:30.380 Right. 1.00

00:13:31.120 So the rule is don't do anything stupid. 0.99

00:13:35.500 Now, the man who established that, who was the, what's it, Ken Zucker. 0.99

00:13:41.540 Right.

00:13:42.080 He ran the best journal that dealt with childhood gender dysphoria for years up in Toronto.

00:13:48.620 That was his recommendation for treatment.

00:13:51.240 And the bloody radicals ran him out of business 10 years ago.

00:13:55.380 Right. 0.99

00:13:55.500 That's when all this idiocy started up in Toronto, which bloody well figures. 1.00

00:13:59.640 Okay. 0.99

00:13:59.900 So now you're not supposed to do anything.

00:14:03.760 Right.

00:14:04.100 Just wait.

00:14:06.760 Bad treatment is worse than no treatment.

00:14:08.920 Okay.

00:14:09.300 But no, we're not going to do that.

00:14:10.620 We're going to do the opposite.

00:14:11.900 We're going to take the most extreme possible imaginable surgical intervention.

00:14:18.240 And then we're going to combine that with the most extreme possible imaginable hormonal

00:14:23.840 intervention.

00:14:24.440 And then we're going to recommend that.

00:14:26.880 And we're going to tell people that if they don't listen, their children are going to die.

00:14:30.920 Right. 1.00

00:14:31.120 They're going to commit suicide, which is a complete bloody lie. 0.99

00:14:34.060 There was never a bit of evidence for that. 0.98

00:14:35.920 Not even bad evidence.

00:14:37.240 It was just a lie.

00:14:38.680 And then, and then top it all off.

00:14:42.580 We're going to offer this absolutely cataclysmic treatment with unimaginably dire consequences

00:14:48.660 to people who don't even understand and can't understand what they're agreeing to.

00:14:53.800 Right.

00:14:54.020 Then we're going to promise them that's how they'll find their true self.

00:14:57.380 Right.

00:14:57.880 Right.

00:14:58.180 So that's where we're at.

00:14:59.640 Right. 0.59

00:14:59.900 It's so sickening. 0.54

00:15:01.280 It's so sickening that, well, and let's close with your final point.

00:15:05.920 You said you'd heard a little bit from Abigail Schreier.

00:15:09.820 You heard a little bit from me.

00:15:11.000 There's been some other people screeching and bitching about this in the background.

00:15:14.560 Like, I knew this was coming back in 2016.

00:15:17.040 I could see it just absolutely clearly.

00:15:19.680 I knew it was going to affect young women primarily because that's the historical part

00:15:23.680 for the course.

00:15:24.340 But you said, you know, you're a pretty astute guy and you're actually also pretty open to

00:15:29.860 the revelation of uncomfortable material.

00:15:32.600 But you said that even you were enticed into, well, into what exactly?

00:15:36.640 Like, what did you think of what's Abigail?

00:15:38.660 Okay, why?

00:15:39.480 I think it was some, I mean, it was, I should say, I mean, it wasn't totally, it's gradual.

00:15:43.700 But I mean, I think it's important to talk about because I think if we want to figure

00:15:47.940 out how to end this, we do have to figure out how to get through to people.

00:15:52.040 And I've been certainly talking about this with my friends and family who are very progressive

00:15:55.780 for a couple of years now.

00:15:57.760 And the most recent argument was last summer with, I don't want to say who, but people

00:16:02.660 that I'm close to.

00:16:03.540 And they also engaged in a kind of denial that this was in any way widespread.

00:16:09.160 Because I think that when I was describing a particular detransitioner who I'd gotten 1.00

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00:17:51.980 And I think because if you accept that this mistreatment is widespread, it is so damning.

00:18:01.460 It is such an indictment.

00:18:03.460 It's not just—it's an indictment of the entire what they call the chain of trust, from

00:18:08.360 the pseudoscientists to the practitioners to the associations to the news media, psychologists,

00:18:15.840 psychiatrists, the institutions.

00:18:18.420 Surgeons.

00:18:18.800 Every—every—I mean, every institution.

00:18:21.900 Pharmaceutical companies.

00:18:22.620 Yeah, drug companies.

00:18:24.240 The indictment is so serious, and it goes right—and you're—I'm very excited to talk

00:18:29.260 to you about it all, Jordan, because I think that it really goes to just the rotting away

00:18:35.780 of the core restraints the society used to impose, the guardrails, you know, the gatekeeping.

00:18:44.640 And what's—I want to clarify one thing, by the way, which is that in the files, they

00:18:48.860 don't talk about gender distress.

00:18:50.380 That's more neutral language that some of the people in the gender-critical movement

00:18:54.040 use.

00:18:54.600 They just think they're all trans.

00:18:56.480 If you are someone that expresses confusion about your gender identity, the assumption is

00:19:02.260 that you are trans.

00:19:03.340 And it clearly comes right out of the gay rights movement, where there was a sense in which—and

00:19:08.200 this is, I think, what's been so, you know, at the heart of a lot of it for how liberals

00:19:13.720 accepted it, was that I think a lot of us accepted gay relationships and same-sex relationships

00:19:18.620 and the innateness of them.

00:19:20.620 And so, when it came to trans, it basically was just the application of this rule of innateness 1.00

00:19:26.400 onto trans. 0.77

00:19:27.580 There was never a question that there was a misdiagnosis and a mistreatment—two separate

00:19:33.320 things, by the way, misdiagnosis and mistreatment.

00:19:36.480 And then when you kind of—when it just runs away, and it's like, you know, the front page—the

00:19:40.000 cover of Time magazine, and it's all the—everybody's talking about, this is the new form of liberation.

00:19:46.020 And then you had, as you were saying, there's different characters, right?

00:19:49.600 There's the—there's the psychopaths and the narcissists who are—who are the bullies,

00:19:55.820 and they're sort of—the narcissists are mesmerizing people, the psychopaths are bullying 0.60

00:19:59.740 people, and then all of the nice guys, all of the kind liberals, the compassionate, caring

00:20:06.140 liberals cave in, and they kind of go, I can't deal with it.

00:20:09.900 So that—I'm talking about the journalists, the medical associations, the other doctors.

00:20:14.440 It is—it is just—the Democrats, the liberals. 0.84

00:20:19.200 I mean, it is—it is a—just an absolutely shocking cowardice, dogma, psychopathologies. 0.84

00:20:28.940 You know, you look at the people that are really—

00:20:30.540 Don't forget sadism.

00:20:32.340 Don't forget sadism.

00:20:33.660 Yeah.

00:20:34.180 I mean, it's just—

00:20:35.040 That's a fun addition.

00:20:36.860 Yeah.

00:20:37.080 You know, we're going to write—I mean, there's—there's—there are going to be—there

00:20:39.160 will be books written about this episode.

00:20:41.420 I mean, I don't want to race ahead to looking back.

00:20:44.420 I don't—part of me, that may be my coping mechanism.

00:20:47.300 This all has to be stopped.

00:20:49.060 I mean, this is—I will say, and you probably—we'll probably get to it, but you—one week

00:20:53.640 after we released the WPATH files, Britain's National Health Service came out and finally

00:20:59.700 banned puberty blockers in all of its clinics.

00:21:02.540 The Times of London then came out the next day.

00:21:04.760 This is a center-left newspaper.

00:21:06.520 Remember, they called this quack medicine in the lead editorial.

00:21:10.560 They called for expanding the ban.

00:21:13.380 They were worried—they are worried, as we should be, that puberty blockers are still

00:21:17.020 going to be prescribed in private clinics.

00:21:18.960 But you could see with the WPATH files, the NHS decision, a huge opening where finally

00:21:24.520 people that had, I think, including me, that had been sort of quiet on this, maybe a little

00:21:29.160 bit like unsure, is this my role to speak out on this?

00:21:32.300 Finally going, no, this is absolutely bonkers and has to be stopped.

00:21:37.100 This is a—this is a—yeah, maybe the greatest medical mistreatment scandal of the last,

00:21:42.320 you know, 100 years, 200 years, I don't know.

00:21:45.880 Yeah, it's hard to—it's hard to identify a worse one.

00:21:49.540 It's hard to identify a worse one.

00:21:50.560 It's like Unit 7—what was it?

00:21:52.780 Unit 713, the Japanese—that's Japanese medical experiments on the Chinese when they 1.00

00:21:59.660 invaded.

00:22:00.100 That's the worst—that's the worst of the horrors that I've ever familiarized myself

00:22:06.700 with.

00:22:06.980 This is at that level.

00:22:08.360 And that's really something.

00:22:09.720 It's—it's because the nitty-gritty of the details of this are so shocking that you

00:22:13.780 can't believe it's true.

00:22:14.980 You just can't believe it's true.

00:22:16.080 And one other final detail, the picture is, oh, yeah, we're doing all the science.

00:22:22.740 The people will—in these conversations, the doctors will say, well, I don't know.

00:22:28.800 I mean, we haven't seen anybody really come in to complain with us, at least the people

00:22:32.400 we followed up with over the few weeks after the surgeries.

00:22:35.500 There's like—not only is there no serious study or follow-up of the victims of these mistreatments,

00:22:41.580 they're not interested.

00:22:43.080 It's a complete abdication of responsibility by everybody involved.

00:22:46.660 Nobody even chimed in and said, hey, maybe we should follow up with these people.

00:22:50.480 What about the person that had tumors on their liver?

00:22:54.160 Maybe we should find that person.

00:22:55.860 We did not see this anywhere in the files.

00:22:58.400 Like, nobody piped up and tried to take responsibility.

00:23:01.580 It was a complete abdication of responsibility.

00:23:04.520 It was just—it's just this kind of mania that we have.

00:23:08.740 We're going to mess with people's bodies, and then we don't care what happens afterwards. 0.99

00:23:11.720 It's almost like they're getting a hedonic pleasure from it, and then they're done with it.

00:23:16.520 Well, sadists are overrepresented among surgeons.

00:23:19.800 That's known clinically.

00:23:21.280 And I mean, you know, every—I'll contextualize that.

00:23:26.320 Every profession attracts a range of temperamental talents that have, as associations, their temperamental

00:23:34.340 temptations, right?

00:23:35.600 So, there's more narcissists among movie stars and politicians and media people, obviously. 0.94

00:23:41.400 Well, there's more sadists among those who cut up people for a living, right?

00:23:45.800 That doesn't mean they're all that way.

00:23:47.360 Certainly, it doesn't mean that at all.

00:23:48.860 That is not at all the point.

00:23:51.620 Well, and we haven't even—we haven't even talked about one of the absolute bloody horrors

00:23:56.020 of this, which is the fact that it's unbelievably profitable.

00:23:59.040 You know, I saw a projection.

00:24:00.960 This was three years ago. 0.99

00:24:02.040 Some idiot consultant company came up with a, you know, 130-page PDF showing the trans 1.00

00:24:09.340 industry as its growth projections for the next seven years, right? 0.99

00:24:12.920 In this, like, marketing speak.

00:24:14.500 It's like, well, it's going to go from a few hundred million to something, you know,

00:24:18.700 something approximating 1.3 billion in the next seven.

00:24:21.760 Get in while the getting's good.

00:24:23.540 You know, and every bloody butcher that can't make a living as a genuine physician and surgeon 0.96

00:24:29.080 can easily turn their attention to producing, like, pseudo-penises out of cut-off flesh. 0.99

00:24:35.620 It's so sickening.

00:24:37.720 It's so—but again, I want to concentrate on your response because it's very interesting

00:24:42.240 to me, because, look, I've watched Canadians become selectively blind in Canada over the

00:24:48.100 last 10 years, and I can understand why.

00:24:50.140 I really can't.

00:24:50.840 It's like, here's the situation in Canada.

00:24:53.360 For 150 years, every single one of our major institutions was middle-of-the-road and reliable.

00:24:59.540 The United Church, that's kind of the mainstream Protestant organization in Canada, or the Catholics,

00:25:05.480 if you're French-Canadian, you know, they had their problems, but they weren't completely

00:25:13.940 pathologized.

00:25:14.860 Let's put it that way.

00:25:15.640 You could rely on them.

00:25:16.820 Same with the news media.

00:25:17.940 Same with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, even though it was a crown corporation.

00:25:23.220 You could basically trust them.

00:25:25.080 Same with the universities.

00:25:26.340 Same with the education system.

00:25:27.540 It's not like it was top rate, but it wasn't riddled with pathology.

00:25:32.220 And this is a terrible thing for someone with a conservative bent to, you know, to indicate.

00:25:37.360 It's like, well, none of that's true anymore.

00:25:39.260 The federal liberals subsidized the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to the tune of $1.4 billion

00:25:45.460 a year for no customers, right?

00:25:47.960 But that's where everybody over 50 gets their news.

00:25:51.500 It's like, I told my mother a year ago, everything the CBC tells you is a lie.

00:25:56.220 And she said, well, where am I supposed to get my news?

00:25:58.860 Which is a really good question, right?

00:26:01.100 So you imagine the conundrum that faces people.

00:26:05.180 It's like all the institutions, you have two choices. 0.95

00:26:08.620 Either those like me who are screaming about this are like right-wing conspiratorial lunatics.

00:26:15.260 Or all those things you thought you could trust, like the hierarchy you just described in the

00:26:20.300 medical community, you can't trust that anymore.

00:26:22.600 Well, first of all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

00:26:27.720 So even if you were just using a rule of thumb, you'd screen out the people who are, you know,

00:26:34.120 crying in the wilderness, so to speak.

00:26:36.060 And this is even worse.

00:26:37.520 But I'm very curious about it in relationship to you.

00:26:40.740 Because like you've already, you investigated the Twitter files, for example.

00:26:44.540 You've already seen this happen.

00:26:46.460 But you said that even in your case, what do you think it was that made you initially

00:26:51.600 resistant to believing that this might be the case?

00:26:58.380 It's just too shocking.

00:26:59.400 I mean, I think it's interesting.

00:27:00.840 I was thinking about your work.

00:27:03.380 You talk in some of your earlier work was about kind of finding yourself disoriented or thrown

00:27:08.760 into a sense of chaos after these foundational things you were—the things you had counted

00:27:15.920 on or believed in.

00:27:16.940 And I still had that around some sense of the medical system.

00:27:20.100 I still had some confidence in the medical system before really getting into this.

00:27:24.840 And I think that was part of what was a barrier.

00:27:28.300 I mean, I read Abigail Schreier's book twice.

00:27:30.920 I spoke to her on the phone multiple times.

00:27:33.040 I think she grew a little frustrated with me because I think there was a sense among some

00:27:37.140 gender-critical folks of like, where are the men?

00:27:40.740 I don't mean—I mean, I don't want to overly gender it.

00:27:42.800 But there was a sense in which it's disproportionately women that have been raising the alarm about

00:27:47.220 this.

00:27:47.440 You're one of the—you and some of the other folks at Daily Wire are the exception, I think.

00:27:50.740 But I think she was a little annoyed with me, which is like, why is it taking so long?

00:27:55.560 We did publish a few articles on it.

00:27:57.420 Then we got the WPATH files.

00:27:59.020 But there's that sense of like, you know, look, if this is really what it appears to

00:28:02.860 be, and now we have the evidence overwhelming that it is.

00:28:06.600 In the WPATH files, you have everything you need to know that this is just as awful as

00:28:11.620 it appears to be.

00:28:12.920 If that's true, then you cannot trust the American Medical Association, the Endocrine

00:28:19.040 Society.

00:28:19.720 You cannot trust the health insurance companies.

00:28:21.860 You cannot trust the hospitals.

00:28:23.540 You cannot trust the doctors.

00:28:24.840 It means that this—the fancy word for this, of course, is iatrogenesis.

00:28:30.620 That's when the medical system makes people sick.

00:28:34.760 It's an old phenomenon.

00:28:36.440 There's a wonderful book about it.

00:28:37.820 Fourth leading cause of death.

00:28:39.060 Fourth leading cause of death.

00:28:40.840 And that was before—that was before.

00:28:44.400 That was when it was functioning, right?

00:28:46.400 We have no idea what its contribution to death is now, especially in the aftermath of the

00:28:51.800 vaccine compulsion, right?

00:28:53.880 We have no idea.

00:28:54.920 We may never find out.

00:28:56.620 You know, maybe we will, but we might not.

00:28:59.320 Yeah, it's really—okay, so fine.

00:29:01.540 So your explanation is—

00:29:02.560 I mean, because part of it is also I want to be—I want to respect local knowledge.

00:29:05.160 And so I know that the people that call themselves an environment—I knew the people that were

00:29:08.640 calling themselves an environmental NGOs weren't really saving the environment.

00:29:12.360 Like, that was my life's work for 20 years.

00:29:14.160 I then discovered the same thing on homelessness.

00:29:17.100 These are not people that are trying to end homelessness.

00:29:19.360 They're trying to enable addiction and prevent the proper medical care of people with psychiatric

00:29:25.380 disorders and serious mental illness.

00:29:27.260 You then get to this, and it's such a grotesque perversion of the promise of health care and

00:29:36.560 a perversion, as you were saying before, of the lesbian, gay rights, and bisexual movement.

00:29:41.440 They're literally destroying the bodies of people that, if you left them alone, almost 0.89

00:29:47.960 most of them would grow up to be gay, lesbian, and bisexual.

00:29:51.020 So you should see the gay rights movement be the first out there to express outrage. 1.00

00:29:55.340 But of course, they were the first to get co-opted by it.

00:29:58.560 You know, the corruption of it, it starts with the people that would have been the first

00:30:02.860 line of defense.

00:30:03.920 If you had said, there's going to be an effort to completely undermine the reproductive capacity 1.00

00:30:13.740 and sexual function of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents, you would have said, well, no,

00:30:19.400 the lesbian, gay, bisexual movement would never allow that.

00:30:22.260 No, no.

00:30:22.720 They just, they're part of it.

00:30:24.400 It is the LGBT movement.

00:30:26.140 They facilitated it.

00:30:27.240 Yeah.

00:30:27.340 Okay, let's zero in on that, because we might as well go where, you know, angels fear to

00:30:34.640 tread.

00:30:35.460 Okay, so let me, let me contextualize this first.

00:30:41.020 Yeah.

00:30:41.380 Or can I contextualize it?

00:30:41.840 I have a lot of thoughts on this, too.

00:30:43.500 I'm excited to get into this.

00:30:45.280 All right.

00:30:45.660 So one of the things we wrestled with, with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that

00:30:50.280 I put together that you came, you mentioned it earlier, that we had our first conference

00:30:55.400 in October, is we have a family policy.

00:30:57.680 Okay.

00:30:58.000 And we had a lot of scraps about that.

00:31:01.080 And part of the reason for that was, there was a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons

00:31:05.640 was we had a number of people who were gay, who were in our advisory group, and we were

00:31:10.140 very happy to have them.

00:31:11.280 And, but our sense was that the long-term relationship-oriented heterosexual couple

00:31:20.720 is the bedrock for the communal enterprise, and that can't be replaced.

00:31:25.940 Okay.

00:31:26.260 And so then we really, we argued about that a lot.

00:31:28.360 And part of the reason we argued about that was because that relationship is honored in

00:31:35.280 the breach more often by most people than it's honored in the, what would you say,

00:31:41.180 in the celebration.

00:31:42.300 So like in my own family, for example, there's plenty of people, my own immediate and extended

00:31:47.340 family.

00:31:48.580 I suppose the divorce rate in my extended family is approximately the same as the national

00:31:53.200 divorce rate.

00:31:54.180 I don't imagine it's any different.

00:31:56.300 And so, you know, there's plenty of single mothers, there's plenty of divorced people, 1.00

00:32:00.120 there's plenty of people who have affairs, there's plenty of gay people, there's plenty

00:32:03.860 of single people.

00:32:05.540 So there might be even a majority of those people.

00:32:09.240 You know, if you, if you looked at it cross-sectionally, but, and so what does that mean?

00:32:15.960 Does it mean that you destroy the ideal upon which community itself is founded?

00:32:20.520 It's like, no, I don't think so.

00:32:22.020 I think you have to live with the tension between the ideal and the exception.

00:32:25.940 And it's something like you establish the core, and then there's a zone of tolerance for

00:32:30.640 the margin.

00:32:31.340 And not only tolerance, appreciation for the experimentation that could take place on the margin.

00:32:36.600 But then you have the demand now to put the margin in the center.

00:32:40.580 And my sense of that was, well, that's fine, except now the margin of the margin will come

00:32:46.120 forth.

00:32:47.160 And if they're not frightening enough, then the fringe of the margin of the margin will

00:32:51.500 come forth.

00:32:52.120 And if you're not frightened then, that's because you're not paying attention.

00:32:56.040 And like, this is a big problem.

00:32:57.460 And so I want to delve into this.

00:32:59.740 It's such a core problem because you said yourself, and this was part of your resistance,

00:33:05.680 I think, if I've got this right, is that we had this movement of liberalization of the

00:33:10.960 concept, of the conception of coupling and family that really, let's say, unrolled from

00:33:17.600 the 1960s to the 1980s.

00:33:19.460 And it culminated in the almost universal acceptance, I would say, of, let's say, gay marriage.

00:33:25.300 And that was an attempt to bring homosexuality, and I would say, mostly on the male side, because 0.96

00:33:32.160 I don't really believe in lesbians, by the way. 1.00

00:33:35.520 But I think the evidence that male homosexuality is like a permanent part of the human condition 0.98

00:33:43.860 and biologically predicated, I think it's quite strong.

00:33:47.960 Now, why that is, is a very difficult question.

00:33:50.040 But in any case, we all agreed that we could expand the conception of the core to include

00:33:55.400 those relationships.

00:33:56.720 And over time, even the more conservative people more or less came aboard, I would say.

00:34:02.120 But then we got this morph, and you said the thing that's so bloody perverse about it.

00:34:07.440 It's like, in a way, here's an argument, and I'm not making this a canonical argument.

00:34:14.540 We reconfigured the norm and the ideal, but that invited something even more marginal to

00:34:21.660 make itself manifest.

00:34:23.040 And then you said yourself that that new marginal identity was then conceptualized in the same

00:34:30.040 civil rights-oriented terms.

00:34:32.360 And the consequence of that, this is what's so cool and so horrible, the consequence of

00:34:37.320 that wasn't further degeneration of the nuclear family. 0.97

00:34:40.940 The consequence of that was that the first people on the firing block were the gay, was 1.00

00:34:48.060 the gay community, right?

00:34:49.260 Because as you said, if the conservatives had conspired to produce a catastrophe that

00:34:55.480 was aimed more horribly at the gay community, they couldn't have done worse than this. 1.00

00:35:00.840 Yeah. 0.89

00:35:01.700 It's beyond comprehension, right?

00:35:04.060 It's truly beyond comprehension.

00:35:05.380 So what do you think that, now, first of all, is the tension between the lesbian and 1.00

00:35:14.340 gay rights movement and its extension into this trans domain, was that part of what?

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00:36:28.360 Motivated your psychological resistance, and then also, what do you think about how this

00:36:36.200 unfolded?

00:36:37.060 What do you make of that?

00:36:38.660 Well, so I think, so yeah, so I mean, first of all, I am, I'm from the left.

00:36:42.760 I've, I'm obviously much more, I've abandoned a lot of those radical left views, but I'm still

00:36:48.800 very high on openness in terms of personality trait, right?

00:36:51.480 So I'm sort of like, so if a man, if a biological male wants to dress up as a woman and go out

00:36:57.720 in public dressed up as a woman, my first instinct is, I'm fine with that.

00:37:01.780 Like, it's a free country.

00:37:03.180 You should be able to do that.

00:37:04.380 And then, and so, and I think this is an, I'm using this case in particular, because you

00:37:09.860 may know that there are two psychologists who have done a lot of work studying the people

00:37:16.720 that call themselves trans women.

00:37:19.020 We might say trans identified males, or you, or, you know, you say trans women, it's fine.

00:37:25.580 But there's two psychologists, Ray Blanchard and, oh my gosh, now I'm blanking on the second

00:37:32.960 one.

00:37:33.720 Basically, two psychologists that have done the research on, on these men, and they've

00:37:37.840 identified them.

00:37:38.920 They say they're, they say that what, what it is, it's autogynephilia.

00:37:42.780 Yeah, that's Blanchard's word.

00:37:43.380 The word they've invented, Blanchard, right? 1.00

00:37:45.480 So it's.

00:37:46.160 Nobody disputed that, by the way.

00:37:48.280 Right.

00:37:48.420 Five years ago.

00:37:49.140 No.

00:37:49.380 Every mainstream clinician.

00:37:51.360 Yes.

00:37:51.540 Who was educated understood this, right?

00:37:54.780 That, that, that transsexualism was an autogynephilic condition, right? 1.00

00:37:59.440 Right.

00:37:59.640 And it primarily affected men or primarily manifested by men.

00:38:04.160 And it, it often was fully realized, let's say in, in the, in their thirties and forties,

00:38:09.380 although there might be a history of such behavior.

00:38:11.620 Like the psychoanalysts had a whole well-developed theory, which I think is one that's very, like

00:38:16.700 the, the theory there in part, the deep theory, the one that I thought was most appropriate

00:38:21.000 was that these were often men who, and this goes along with the openness idea, who had

00:38:26.860 constrained the development of their personality in the stereotypically masculine direction

00:38:33.080 too much.

00:38:34.260 They'd put a, a more open temperament into a too tight box.

00:38:37.820 And what was happening was that the impulse to have them develop the cross-sex proclivities 0.76

00:38:45.580 that might've expanded their personality, that was all suppressed and it emerged in a warped

00:38:50.800 and sexualized manner. 1.00

00:38:52.200 And they started to play out in the world what they should have been manifesting as a psychological

00:38:56.980 transformation.

00:38:58.600 Right.

00:38:58.700 That's so interesting.

00:38:59.140 That's a Jungian take.

00:39:00.000 It's a great take.

00:39:00.960 Yeah.

00:39:01.100 It's a great take.

00:39:01.780 And so the, the play that autogynephilia is a form of sexualized play in relationship

00:39:07.240 to identity transformation.

00:39:08.980 And I think that's right.

00:39:09.800 That's so interesting.

00:39:10.280 Yeah.

00:39:10.460 It's great.

00:39:10.980 It's great.

00:39:11.440 And by the way, it's Mike, the other psychologist is Michael Bailey and he wrote a book on it.

00:39:16.220 So it's really, he's two characters, he's two psychologists.

00:39:18.460 What was Bailey's book?

00:39:19.360 I can't, I, it's something, I think it was something like the man who wanted to be a woman.

00:39:23.980 Yeah.

00:39:24.360 The man who would be queen.

00:39:25.480 Yeah.

00:39:25.880 Yeah.

00:39:26.080 That's right.

00:39:26.500 I know Blanchard's work and that work too.

00:39:28.460 Yeah.

00:39:28.620 So, yeah, so they, they come out with this theory of autogynephilia, which is the, uh,

00:39:32.080 defined as the attraction to oneself as a woman, or it's having the fantasy of oneself

00:39:38.100 as a woman.

00:39:38.720 It's a sexual fantasy of oneself as a woman. 0.92

00:39:42.420 And this was pretty well supported.

00:39:44.780 These, you know, these two psychologists really did a lot of work on it.

00:39:48.120 And then some of the autogynephilic men started going after Bailey, I think in particular.

00:39:55.160 And Blanchard actually talked about having survivor's guilt because he felt like he had helped

00:39:58.360 develop the concept, but Bailey took the brunt of the attacks and it was trying to get him

00:40:03.000 fired and they were harassing him and they were doxing him.

00:40:06.140 And it was very, very shocking treatment.

00:40:09.880 And they basically, the, I think they both came to conclusion, at least Bailey did, that

00:40:15.400 they were undermining the fantasy.

00:40:18.860 Oh, absolutely.

00:40:20.660 Absolutely.

00:40:21.060 And these autogynephilic men were attacking them for undermining the fantasy.

00:40:24.480 Now, well, look, Michael, what happens is, okay, well, you can see this with these, with

00:40:28.840 these like absolutely abhorrent displays of narcissistic fetishism online.

00:40:33.520 You get these men who are dressed up as women, but who couldn't pass as a woman for anyone

00:40:38.760 within like 200 yards of them, you know, but their fantasy, see, they idealize themselves

00:40:44.960 in their fantasy play as a sexually attractive woman, because what the hell good is the sexual 1.00

00:40:50.500 fantasy without that.

00:40:52.220 And then that is undermined by any evidence whatsoever that what they're making manifest

00:40:58.900 as imagination is tantamount to a delusion.

00:41:02.360 And so they, they get narcissistically outraged, just like a two-year-old or a three-year-old

00:41:07.880 who's, who's disrupted in their fantasy play.

00:41:10.320 It's like, well, you know, you're not really a woman.

00:41:13.360 It's like, well, what do you mean?

00:41:15.260 I'm not really a woman.

00:41:16.400 My entire fantasy is predicated on the notion that not only am I a woman, but I'm a beautiful,

00:41:22.020 hyper-feminine woman.

00:41:23.400 I'm the best of all, I'm the best of all possible women.

00:41:26.740 And you, the fact that you would dare to oppose that, there's two, two interpretations. 0.76

00:41:32.660 Either I'm delusional beyond belief or you're, you're cruel.

00:41:36.900 Well, it's easy to figure out which one of those they're going to take.

00:41:41.300 Like, and then they go and bully everybody around them and they use, they use, I mean,

00:41:46.840 honestly, I just think it's psychopathic.

00:41:48.540 Like the, the tactics they're using, showing no regard for others, engaging in very high

00:41:53.540 risk behavior and who, and so you look at these folks and, and these people are the leaders.

00:42:00.700 They're the ones that are the president of WPATH.

00:42:03.980 They are the, the surgeon, Marcy Bowers, who's the president of WPATH.

00:42:07.000 Oh yeah, she's fun. 1.00

00:42:08.200 She's real fun. 0.87

00:42:09.040 She, who, who operated, who, who blocked the puberty of Jazz Jennings. 0.99

00:42:14.740 Yeah.

00:42:15.020 Did a botched surgery, a botched genital surgery on Jazz.

00:42:20.680 There's video of Marcy in the-

00:42:22.880 And we, and we, and we publicized that for, for like tens of millions of dollars to the

00:42:26.980 entire, what, when the entire low level IQ TV watching community and glamorized it and

00:42:34.520 glamorized it and sacrificed Jazz Jennings in the process and, what would you say, brought

00:42:40.560 his stunningly narcissistic mother into exactly the kind of spotlight that her cluster B personality 1.00

00:42:47.780 demanded. 0.95

00:42:48.760 Right.

00:42:49.320 And, and her child was a small price to pay for that.

00:42:52.480 Right.

00:42:52.740 It's so shocking.

00:42:53.840 So basically you have a situation where when you piece it all together, you have a situation 0.98

00:42:59.140 of powerful narcissistic and psychopathic men who, in order to fulfill their sexual fantasies, 0.97

00:43:08.720 are needing to construct the idea and then the reality of trans children. 0.98

00:43:16.480 And this is where the, it really-

00:43:19.160 Well, that's how they get out of the moral conundrum, Michael, because, so sure, because,

00:43:24.940 and this is a typical psychopathic narcissist move.

00:43:28.600 It's like, I bear no moral responsibility for that. 0.57

00:43:32.320 In fact, I've always been like this.

00:43:34.780 And the fact that that wasn't recognized is an indication of two things.

00:43:38.800 My unbelievable moral virtue and, and, and specialness, because I was that sort of special

00:43:44.280 person and the absolute pathology of anyone who got in the way, which was basically, you

00:43:49.220 know, the entire world, the entire patriarchy, everyone that knew them.

00:43:53.180 Right.

00:43:53.600 Right.

00:43:53.940 It's, it's so, it's so narcissistic that it, it, it beggars belief.

00:43:59.020 It beggars belief.

00:43:59.580 It's, um, right.

00:44:00.400 So, so my understanding, and you're obviously the expert, uh, my understanding is that psychopathic

00:44:05.400 narcissists, the psychopathy is in service of the narcissism.

00:44:10.200 And so if being an autogynophile is a kind of narcissism, the psychopathy then is that

00:44:17.520 you will, you don't care about the feelings of others and you'll engage in highly risky

00:44:21.800 behaviors in order to service your narcissism.

00:44:24.620 That that's how it works.

00:44:25.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:25.860 Well, service.

00:44:26.660 Well, and what, well, we should, we can qualify that even further because I think it's useful

00:44:30.660 to do so.

00:44:31.900 So you, what's the difference between a mature person and an immature person?

00:44:37.200 Okay.

00:44:38.200 So we'll, we'll, first of all, hope that we can all agree that there is a difference

00:44:42.920 between like a toddler and a responsible adult, you know, cause otherwise, why would

00:44:48.560 we grow up?

00:44:49.360 Okay.

00:44:49.680 So what characterizes a toddler?

00:44:51.820 Well, a toddler is characterized by possession by a sequence of whims.

00:44:57.180 Okay.

00:44:57.640 So why is that counterproductive?

00:44:59.360 Well, because the toddler wants what he wants right now, no matter what.

00:45:06.020 Okay.

00:45:06.380 So what does that mean?

00:45:07.360 No matter what it means, no matter what it costs his future self and no matter what

00:45:12.940 it costs other people.

00:45:14.440 Okay.

00:45:14.880 So why is that bad?

00:45:16.100 Well, if you betray your future self, you die.

00:45:19.200 And if you can't get along with other people, then, well, then you die.

00:45:23.480 You can't engage in, in reciprocal altruism, for example.

00:45:27.500 So what you try to do when you socialize children is that you extend their purview so that as

00:45:35.620 their cortex integrates, they're able to regulate their impulsive whim in accordance with their

00:45:41.700 future self and with other people, right?

00:45:43.880 So that's like the definition of maturity, right?

00:45:47.460 And that, okay.

00:45:48.580 So you're, you're perfectly describing and explaining one of the things in the files that

00:45:53.820 we see over and over again.

00:45:54.800 And you also see it in the Jazz Janine show, which is, it's a complete focus by the, by

00:46:01.460 the gender quacks to, to service some, to service somebody's needs right now without any sense 1.00

00:46:08.560 of what will, the consequences will be in the future.

00:46:11.120 On the video, one of the people literally says, well, we just want to provide that care

00:46:16.280 and comfort right now.

00:46:18.360 Well, but you're talking about, you're talking about lifelong sterility and loss of sexual

00:46:22.340 function, and you're actually concerned.

00:46:24.040 And then similarly, you see this Dr. Marcy Bowers, who's operating on Jazz Jennings, obsessed

00:46:29.200 with doing surgical procedures, having an argument in the, while conducting the surgery, in the

00:46:35.800 operating room, having an argument with her colleague, who's telling her that she doesn't

00:46:38.840 need to remove what she's calling a stark issue.

00:46:41.300 She says, no, I hate it.

00:46:42.560 I hate it.

00:46:43.800 You can see her.

00:46:44.460 She's just really, really, she's like, I got to get rid of that because it's got to

00:46:48.760 look this right way.

00:46:50.480 It's, they're playing, I mean, to really get into it, they're playing God.

00:46:54.540 They're trying to play God.

00:46:55.820 And of course, the problem is they're not gods.

00:46:58.920 And so they, but it's like, you're, it's like, they're just, there's a sense in which

00:47:03.280 you read this.

00:47:03.960 They're just, they're, yeah, they're like toddlers.

00:47:05.920 They're just wrecking things.

00:47:07.940 They're just, they just don't care.

00:47:10.140 And there's no sense of the future.

00:47:11.860 You pointed to something, since we're going down the rabbit hole, that's even

00:47:16.160 worse.

00:47:16.460 Yeah, let's go.

00:47:16.720 I would say, well, look, there's a lot of things going on underneath this.

00:47:22.620 And one of them is the devouring mother. 1.00

00:47:25.620 Okay.

00:47:25.900 So what's a devouring mother? 1.00

00:47:27.400 Okay.

00:47:27.700 Let's, well, let's define that technically.

00:47:29.380 Now, Freud intuited that the Oedipal situation was at the root of much psychopathology.

00:47:35.380 Now he over-sexualized that.

00:47:37.160 That was a mistake, but the core insight was brilliant.

00:47:40.300 And here's the insight.

00:47:41.820 Okay.

00:47:42.100 So human infants are born in an incredibly underdeveloped state.

00:47:47.540 Then there's a couple of reasons for that.

00:47:49.520 But the fundamental reason is that our brains are so big that in order for us to be born

00:47:54.780 through a functional female pelvis, we had to be born in a fetal stage. 1.00

00:48:00.780 That's why our heads are compressible.

00:48:02.580 It's a compromise.

00:48:04.140 Now, the cost that we pay for that is the unbelievable vulnerability of human infants.

00:48:09.280 Okay.

00:48:09.540 Now, the cost the mothers pay for that is that the neonate is so dependent that they need 0.98

00:48:17.720 100% care.

00:48:20.080 Okay.

00:48:20.460 So that means that the impetus of agreeableness, that personality trait, in combination with

00:48:27.380 negative emotion, that's the two feminine personality traits, high negative emotion and 1.00

00:48:32.660 high agreeableness.

00:48:33.260 The purest expression of that is give the suffering infant what it needs right now, no matter what.

00:48:43.660 Right.

00:48:44.080 Okay.

00:48:44.380 And that's perfectly legitimate for six months.

00:48:47.860 For an infant.

00:48:49.440 Well, for six months.

00:48:50.600 For six months.

00:48:51.240 It's the right attitude.

00:48:52.880 Now, okay.

00:48:53.740 So then, and it's a very, very powerful instinct.

00:48:56.600 It's the maternal instinct upon which the human species depends.

00:49:01.180 Okay.

00:49:01.360 The question is, what happens when that pathologizes?

00:49:04.500 Okay.

00:49:04.740 So what does it look like when it pathologizes?

00:49:06.820 Well, the first is you treat a one-year-old like a six-month-old or you treat a five-year-old

00:49:14.840 like a six-month-old.

00:49:16.020 You just give in to whatever they want right now.

00:49:18.300 Well, that means that you start to interfere with their development.

00:49:21.720 That's where the devouring mother comes in. 1.00

00:49:23.940 Right.

00:49:24.100 And that's very, very bad. 0.99

00:49:26.440 That's how you make useless, entitled, narcissistic, privileged, dependent, and terrified children. 0.99

00:49:34.380 Right. 1.00

00:49:34.640 Who also hate their parents.

00:49:36.920 Right.

00:49:37.320 So that's a very bad idea.

00:49:39.520 Okay.

00:49:39.660 But here's something even worse than that, which no one will talk about and which no one will contend with.

00:49:46.700 Okay.

00:49:47.320 That maternal instinct is hyper-powerful.

00:49:50.040 And it's the defining characteristic of femininity. 1.00

00:49:52.460 The question that our culture is facing now is, what happens when that, when women enter into the political arena and that instinct doesn't find its proper place? 0.99

00:50:05.580 And the answer is, as far as I can tell, is that childless women infantilize everything. 1.00

00:50:12.900 Yep.

00:50:13.900 Yeah.

00:50:14.320 Well, God, Michael, if that's true, we are in serious trouble.

00:50:17.860 Like, you know, because we know the most woke disciplines, for example, in the universities are the ones with the highest percentage of women. 1.00

00:50:25.300 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:50:27.680 I'm not blaming women.

00:50:29.540 And because I think men have abdicated the responsibility on that front as well.

00:50:34.060 And I'm also not unhappy that we've been able to determine how to capitalize on the broad intellectual abilities of women in the broader civilizational scheme of things, let's say.

00:50:46.700 That's not my point.

00:50:47.860 My point is that we don't know what sort of political psychopathologies will be specific to females, and we bloody well know now. 0.66

00:50:55.920 And part of that's that infantilization of everything.

00:50:59.320 And then there's another associated issue, which is women are also very good, let's say, at spotting predators. 0.99

00:51:06.200 Okay, if you have an infant, and you misidentify a predator, you know, you call something a predator that isn't, whatever, you protect your baby, it's not a problem.

00:51:18.740 It's kind of hard on the misidentified predator.

00:51:22.700 Right, and so part of that cluster B proclivity of the psychopathological woman to cry wolf continually and profit thereby is also a manifestation of that maternal instinct.

00:51:35.600 It's right.

00:51:36.080 You oppose me? 0.99

00:51:37.260 You must be a predator. 1.00

00:51:38.400 And if you're, this is the terrible thing about the devouring mother pathology is, if you're a predator, no punishment is too harsh for you. 0.98

00:51:47.660 Right?

00:51:48.000 No quarter.

00:51:49.340 Right?

00:51:49.600 Why would you give quarters something that wants to eat your child? 0.99

00:51:52.660 Right?

00:51:52.920 It's like, no quarter.

00:51:54.120 And so that's, that's another problem that we have, that we have no idea what to do with.

00:51:59.540 So.

00:52:00.260 Well, yeah, I was going to just say a couple of thoughts about that.

00:52:02.840 I mean, I think that, so first of all, yeah, I mean, you look at Jazz Jennings' mom, that's absolutely how she's, but then you look at her dad, and Jazz's dad, here they are, the surgery's botched.

00:52:15.780 You know, I just watched some of the video from it.

00:52:17.380 The surgery's botched, and the dad's kind of like, well, yeah, it didn't quite go like we thought it was.

00:52:22.620 You know, what I have heard, when I talk to the parents of the detransitioners and the desisters, the desisters, of course, are the parents that got their, that saved their kids before real danger was done.

00:52:34.680 What they say is they go, often the dad was finally like, I don't want to do this.

00:52:39.120 The dad had to step in and say no, and perform that role that traditionally, I'm not saying every case.

00:52:43.680 That's what dads do.

00:52:45.020 That's what dads are supposed to do.

00:52:46.460 That's the role of dads.

00:52:46.980 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:47.380 They're supposed to be like, no.

00:52:49.000 Yeah.

00:52:49.840 That didn't happen.

00:52:51.920 And then the, but then also just you pull back even further, and you go, what is this really about?

00:52:57.280 Look what they're doing.

00:52:58.160 They're blocking puberty.

00:53:00.740 Puberty is a fundamental human right.

00:53:04.600 Growing up is a fundamental human right.

00:53:06.960 They're depriving people of the right to be an adult.

00:53:10.540 That's what the witch in Snow White does. 1.00

00:53:14.060 That's so interesting.

00:53:15.120 That is, I'm, it's, it's, it's a, it's a standard form of female pathology, which is, that's how you eliminate competitors. 1.00

00:53:24.380 Ugh.

00:53:24.940 Right, right.

00:53:25.560 Yeah, no kidding.

00:53:26.560 Yeah, no kidding.

00:53:26.840 No kidding.

00:53:27.380 It's really bad.

00:53:28.080 Well, it's, you know, you know the story of Snow White is that she's the most beautiful, which means she's fecund and she's, she's at her peak. 0.91

00:53:36.040 But the next generation is coming and she's going to be supplanted. 1.00

00:53:40.600 And so instead of accepting that gracefully and making the transition to grandmother, which is what she should do, she attempts to prolong her, her youthful adulthood beyond its acceptable point.

00:53:55.300 And she does that by sacrificing the up and coming next feminine generation. 1.00

00:54:02.520 Exactly, exactly.

00:54:03.520 So she poisons Snow White. 1.00

00:54:04.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:05.520 She's the witch that lives in the forest and has always lived in the forest. 0.88

00:54:09.520 Yes, yes. 0.89

00:54:10.580 Well, so the witch is in power. 0.82

00:54:12.080 I mean, this is what's so shocking about it.

00:54:13.780 It's that the witch is in power, like, across all these institutions and the men are completely, you know, simped out.

00:54:22.600 I don't know how else to describe it.

00:54:23.580 The men have abdicated their authority, abdicated their responsibility, the core responsibility of the father at a minimum.

00:54:31.840 All these dads are focused on playing with their kids.

00:54:34.400 Protect your kids.

00:54:35.880 Protect your kids from these creepy, these deeply creepy doctors that are trying to prey on your child.

00:54:43.780 I mean, I couldn't—it's so—it's so—it gets to the spiritual stuff, too, I think, because I watched the Barbara Walters special on Jazz Jennings before they performed this horrible surgery on her.

00:54:57.300 Barbara Walters opens that special.

00:54:59.360 Barbara Walters is the, like, trusted face of the news media, right?

00:55:02.540 I mean, she's like the—she's like—I mean, Walter Cronkite is dead, but Barbara Walters is still there.

00:55:07.940 Someone like my parents, my family would rely on.

00:55:09.920 She gets up and she goes, beautiful little girl born into the wrong body. 1.00

00:55:16.800 I mean, I look at—I've been working on nihilism and the ways in which nihilism is the—I mean, when you are sterilizing your children, when you are depriving them sexual function, when you are denying them puberty, you are—you are just—it's nihilism.

00:55:35.820 I mean, you're just saying no to life, you're negating life, you're negating your own immortality project.

00:55:41.980 That's how most—a lot of people feel like their lives have meaning that goes on by having kids and then grandkids.

00:55:46.800 So, the hard nihilism of it, and underneath it is a kind of hedonism of the immediate pleasure of exercising your power over other people's bodies or your body.

00:55:59.060 I think that nihilism is at the heart of this.

00:56:01.660 I just look at it and I go, this is—I mean, nihilism, you know, in the Nietzschean sense, in the classical sense, is just a kind of rejection of reality for some alternative world.

00:56:12.720 Yeah, well, you remember Nietzsche—Nietzsche concentrated—see, he didn't stop with nihilism, right?

00:56:19.660 He pursued that into resentment, which is the—like, so I would say your concentration on nihilism is insufficiently pessimistic.

00:56:27.700 Because nihilism is a step on the way to resentment, right?

00:56:32.280 And resentment, man, if you're looking for—if you're looking for a cardinal sin, resentment is—it's a contender.

00:56:39.000 It's a contender for what's at the bottom—resentment, arrogance, and deceit.

00:56:43.520 You know, those make one evil triad.

00:56:46.140 While we were talking about power, the reason I brought up the infants to begin with is because there's this unholy relationship between power and hedonism.

00:56:54.460 Because I will turn to power to gratify my hedonism.

00:56:59.580 Because I don't have to otherwise.

00:57:01.020 Like, if I can invite you to play along with me and you want to, well, I don't need to use power.

00:57:06.960 The only time I need power is when I want you to do something that you don't want to do.

00:57:12.000 And worse than that, I want you to do something that isn't going to be good for you in the medium to long run that's also not going to be good for me.

00:57:20.060 You know, because one of the things I've been looking into, for example, is the personality structure of short-term maters.

00:57:26.200 So, like, human beings are a pair-bonding species that invest heavily in their offspring.

00:57:32.140 But within the human realm, there are, like, temperamental long-term maters and, let's say, temperamental short-term maters.

00:57:39.300 And you might say, well, who are the one-night-stand crowd?

00:57:42.200 So these are the hedonists.

00:57:43.260 Well, we know what their personality characteristics are because it's being studied.

00:57:49.280 Narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, and that wasn't enough.

00:57:53.440 So after studying those three for seven or eight years, the relevant psychologists added sadism because that's where it ends up.

00:58:00.580 And so you get this unholy dynamic of part of that is the inevitable dynamic between hedonism and force, is that if you're going to pursue short-term hedonistic ends, then force will enter into it.

00:58:17.020 I just re-watched Cabaret.

00:58:19.820 Remember Cabaret?

00:58:21.260 Oh, sure. 0.85

00:58:22.060 It's so bloody brilliant because you see this Cabaret, where all the transsexuals are, by the way. 1.00

00:58:26.980 And Lisa Minnelli, who's the cluster B wannabe actress-narcissist, and they're dancing away madly, having their hedonistic orgy, and the Nazis are in the audience. 0.97

00:58:41.420 And it's so interesting. 0.89

00:58:42.580 Joel Gray does a lovely job of this because the hedonists are in a dance with the Nazis, you know? 0.74

00:58:49.360 And I think both of them know it.

00:58:51.700 Yeah.

00:58:52.320 And we're doing the same thing.

00:58:53.560 We're doing the same thing now.

00:58:54.740 We are doing exactly the same thing now.

00:58:56.480 This is where I was headed, too.

00:58:57.840 I mean, this is how you get totalitarianism.

00:59:02.180 You know, if you read Political Ponerology, this really interesting book on the psychology of totalitarianism, he argues that totalitarianism is defined by the narcissists and the psychopaths taking over every major institution in society.

00:59:19.220 And emerging from the bottom up, the narcissist, there's power is exercised, I think, in those two ways.

00:59:25.460 The psychopath, it's through raw power, it's through bullying, being domineering, trying to get people canceled, trying to get people fired, you know, harassment.

00:59:37.000 The narcissist, this is, I'm borrowing from the Ponerology book, it's, I think, last name is pronounced, Lobožewski.

00:59:42.280 He argues that the narcissists are spellbinders, so they're casting a spell.

00:59:48.140 I mean, speaking of the witch, right, there's a spell cast.

00:59:50.660 And so, I've been, really, we wrote, I mean, I think there's like a trance that has come over, it comes over individuals.

00:59:58.580 It's cast by these really charismatic trans leaders, and they sort of mesmerize, hypnotize, put people in a sort of particular state.

01:00:11.200 Seduce. 0.65

01:00:11.520 Seduce.

01:00:12.200 Seduce.

01:00:12.680 Yes, definitely.

01:00:13.800 Yeah, and then everybody, their brainwave, our brainwaves get to some level or whatever, and then anybody who veers outside of it and goes, wait a second, this doesn't seem right.

01:00:21.560 Then they're there with the bully to keep them in line and make an example of them and scapegoat them in order to create this culture of fear and conformity.

01:00:32.480 So, and we see it in the files.

01:00:34.200 I mean, the files themselves are so chilling.

01:00:36.100 Like, if you were just a scholar of totalitarianism, you know, everybody spends, we spend so much time talking about, you know, those studies that were done in the 50s, the electroshock studies or the prison Stanford experiments.

01:00:49.300 Read these files.

01:00:50.760 You want to see what totalitarianism looks like.

01:00:52.920 Somebody says, hey, maybe we should take a minute and think about whether or not to give drugs and surgery to somebody that has multiple personalities.

01:01:01.860 Yeah, no, we'll just get consent from each personality.

01:01:06.860 That's right, the alters.

01:01:08.120 Right, oh my God, oh my God.

01:01:09.420 And so then somebody goes, maybe, why don't we take, or why don't we have like, why don't we actually maybe pause about or think about it, and then there's somebody in the room, in the chat room or the message board saying, oh, how dare you gatekeep?

01:01:22.260 How dare you create barriers to providing this healthcare just because they happen to have multiple personalities?

01:01:32.880 I mean, it is so crazy.

01:01:36.060 You kind of can't even believe that it's actually happening.

01:01:38.940 Like, if you were to make a Hollywood movie out of the WPATH files, you would, I think you would be like, this is not realistic.

01:01:44.860 Like, this would not be able to occur in today's society, and yet here we are, it's not just occurring.

01:01:49.080 Well, you know firsthand why the Germans didn't wake up in the late 1930s. 0.97

01:01:53.080 Yeah.

01:01:53.720 It's because they couldn't believe it.

01:01:55.260 They literally couldn't.

01:01:56.100 Now, first of all, they didn't want to believe it, and they put their heads in the sand, you know, but it was, but they also couldn't believe it.

01:02:02.800 There's no way, there's no way that can be happening, and you can understand why.

01:02:06.680 I was there.

01:02:07.660 I mean, I was there like a year or two ago, being like, this can't be true, because if it were true, then we are already living.

01:02:17.320 Do something about it.

01:02:18.340 Yeah, or somebody would do something about it, or yeah, or it would mean that we're living in a totalitarian society already.

01:02:24.760 It would mean that the medical institutions, that it's like a horror, it's like that thing in the horror movie.

01:02:28.520 You get to the middle of the horror movie, and you discover everybody's brain has been taken over by the aliens, or it's actually a secret brain-swapping exercise.

01:02:38.840 There's some horror in the middle of it, and then you have to figure out how to get out of it, you know, which is, I think, where we are now.

01:02:44.320 That's what we're on to.

01:02:45.400 Well, okay, okay, so let's approach that in two directions.

01:02:49.480 Okay, so now one of the things you pointed out, so the manifestation of the narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian sadist is different in men than women. 0.94

01:02:59.700 Okay, so in men, it tends to be more, get the hell out of my way, or I will definitely hurt you. 0.98

01:03:06.320 Like, it's really in your face.

01:03:08.780 With women, it's much more subtle. 1.00

01:03:11.200 It's much more behind the scenes. 0.93

01:03:12.840 They're much more manipulative, and the proclivity of the female antisocial type is to reputation savage and to gossip. 1.00

01:03:20.940 And now there's a big, so tell me what you think about this.

01:03:26.040 So first, it's very difficult to fight against that.

01:03:31.260 So, like, women can't fight other women who do that. 1.00

01:03:33.920 It's very hard for them to do that. 0.97

01:03:35.940 But men also can't fight, because the thing is, if I figure out that you're a psychopath and you're interacting with me, and you're manipulating me, I can actually punch you.

01:03:45.940 And there's a high likelihood of that if you push it, right?

01:03:49.600 And that's one of the things that regulate social interaction between men.

01:03:53.000 It's like, don't push your luck.

01:03:54.680 Not too far.

01:03:55.600 But that wave is barred 100% for women against women, or virtually 100%, and even more so against men.

01:04:05.260 And so men, I believe that men have abdicated their responsibility to say no.

01:04:11.340 But I have a certain sympathy, because, for example, I've had clients who were unfortunate enough to take up residence, for example, with a woman with cluster B psychopathology.

01:04:21.140 And it was like their lives were over.

01:04:22.660 Those women would light themselves on fire to singe them. 1.00

01:04:26.420 And they had no defenses.

01:04:28.000 And if they did ever raise a hand in defense of any sort, then the cluster B type would call the authorities, lie about what had happened, invite a knight in shining armor to save her in tears, which is really effective as she also happens to be attractive. 0.97

01:04:44.400 And that guy was done.

01:04:46.680 He was done.

01:04:47.740 His life was over.

01:04:49.360 Right.

01:04:49.920 Right. 0.99

01:04:50.240 Yeah, his little dried up corpse was being sucked dry by the psychopathic woman on the side of the road. 0.99

01:04:56.880 And that was it. 0.93

01:04:57.760 So that's a big problem.

01:04:59.820 And so that's another.

01:05:02.600 Go ahead.

01:05:03.580 No, no, sorry.

01:05:04.140 No, I was going to say, I mean, I think it seems like we're turning a little bit to how do we handle this.

01:05:09.000 I mean, I think that one of the things that Loboszewski describes in the Ponerology book, and of course, it's just a theory because he couldn't prove it.

01:05:16.640 By the way, he lived through Nazism and communism.

01:05:19.360 He opens the book describing a really lousy academic being appointed as the president of his university in Poland. 0.98

01:05:27.020 And the guy was just a psychopath. 0.90

01:05:28.820 Like, that's how he made it to that position. 0.93

01:05:31.040 And what Loboszewski's argument is.

01:05:33.140 That could never happen, Michael.

01:05:36.160 No, I know you're reading it being like, oh, I think we're there.

01:05:38.820 Yeah, no kidding.

01:05:39.680 We're definitely there.

01:05:40.800 We're definitely there.

01:05:41.540 So you kind of go once.

01:05:42.280 So he argues very persuasively, I think, that it's not enough to condemn.

01:05:47.800 It's not enough to say this gender mistreatment is bad. 0.80

01:05:52.620 It's pseudoscience.

01:05:53.360 It's hurting people.

01:05:54.040 We should definitely do that.

01:05:56.060 But you have to actually do what you're doing, I think.

01:05:59.320 And what I'm realizing I need to do, which is you have to describe the psychopathology quite specifically.

01:06:06.700 You have to describe it.

01:06:08.120 You must, and so in that sense, everybody says, oh, I don't want to get into the, are they autogynophiles or whatever.

01:06:14.060 Under Loboszewski's view, he says, you must describe the psychopathologies of the leaders.

01:06:20.540 You must distinguish between the narcissists, the psychopaths, the psychopathic narcissists. 0.67

01:06:25.060 You must describe, I think he would probably go by extension, you must say these are autogynophiles. 0.91

01:06:29.940 These are not actually women. 1.00

01:06:31.620 These are people that think they're women and they get angry at you. 1.00

01:06:34.160 And the reason they're angry at you is because you deny their fantasy and you must deny their fantasy because their fantasy is driving such a huge amount of this.

01:06:45.880 And then you must also say to the people around them.

01:06:48.420 It's perfect narcissistic fantasy, isn't it?

01:06:50.880 Because they are literally in love with themselves.

01:06:54.340 Like literally.

01:06:55.220 That's the fantasy is that my alter ego is the perfect mate. 0.98

01:06:59.240 They're so narcissistic that they transform themselves into their own sexual partner. 0.98

01:07:04.620 Right. 0.99

01:07:04.780 That's right.

01:07:05.060 You don't get any more narcissistic than that.

01:07:07.520 And you think about that.

01:07:08.700 These guys who cross-dress in their 40s and then they have like three kids and then they decide to go full woman. 0.88

01:07:16.200 And it's like, well, I don't know if you noticed, buddy, but you got a wife and kids.

01:07:20.220 This isn't about you anymore. 0.99

01:07:21.560 Who gives a goddamn about your sexual gratification? 1.00

01:07:24.240 Like, why does that enter? 0.99

01:07:27.240 Well, everyone should be able to do what they want. 0.98

01:07:29.480 It's like, how about not the narcissistic psychopaths? 0.94

01:07:32.560 Like Will Thomas, for example. 0.94

01:07:35.760 Yeah.

01:07:36.020 Well, no, exactly.

01:07:36.760 That's where I was going to go, too.

01:07:37.460 I mean, you may know there's this evidence that certain kinds of pornography, I don't really want to get into it, but appear to be creating autogynophilia in men at younger ages.

01:07:47.920 And those are the men that are then entering women's sports with a sense of entitlement that they should be allowed to compete in their sports because they insist that they're women.

01:07:59.060 Victimized women, even. 0.96

01:08:00.740 Victimized women. 0.96

01:08:01.540 Oppressed.

01:08:02.060 So much the better.

01:08:03.020 Yeah, oppressed.

01:08:03.720 The ultimate.

01:08:04.480 I'm the ultimate in an oppressed woman.

01:08:06.520 Plus, I'm very sexually, you know, attractive.

01:08:08.980 Yes.

01:08:09.380 What a deal.

01:08:10.980 Yeah.

01:08:12.100 And so I think you have to describe that for what it is.

01:08:15.800 You have to be honest.

01:08:16.820 You have to tell the truth.

01:08:17.880 Again, we come back to, you know, the key is actually telling the truth. 0.98

01:08:23.540 And then I think you also have to then look at everybody else and go, you're behaving like a coward. 0.95

01:08:28.500 You have got to stop. 0.97

01:08:29.960 You're the head of the American Medical Association.

01:08:33.200 You're the head of the American—you're the head of the endocrine society.

01:08:36.740 Yeah.

01:08:37.940 Be the head—be the president of it, which means you must have courage or step down.

01:08:42.500 Yeah.

01:08:42.720 And allow somebody with the courage— 1.00

01:08:44.620 Try saying no, you son of a bitch. 1.00

01:08:46.900 Yeah. 0.99

01:08:47.380 And then I think it has to be like, we have—I think we have to go—unfortunately, and it's going to take some time, I don't think there's any substitute between going institution by institution in the society, explaining what's going on, challenging these leaders.

01:09:02.760 And it's really simple.

01:09:04.900 American Medical Association, you can end with—stop with the pseudoscience and cowardice or stop being respected by anybody as the American Medical Association.

01:09:15.180 Those are your two choices.

01:09:16.480 Like, this can't continue.

01:09:18.720 I mean, Jordan, on the AMA website, they still say that gender medicine prevents suicide.

01:09:23.720 That piece of pseudoscience is still on the website, despite multiple studies showing quite the opposite.

01:09:30.560 So, I do think that those are the—for me, I look at how do you get—how does this end?

01:09:35.020 Okay.

01:09:35.520 And it's starting to happen.

01:09:36.280 Let's delve into the—okay, so let's delve into that a bit more.

01:09:38.680 Okay, so there's a—so this has been infuriating me for quite a long time, right?

01:09:44.860 Like, I knew, I knew in 2016, when Bill C-16 came out in Canada, that mandated pronoun use, I went to the Senate and I said, you are going to cause an epidemic among young women. 0.97

01:09:59.140 This is what's going to happen.

01:10:00.300 And the senators, of course, knew better and just, you know, asked me why I was such a mean man and why I was making such a mountain out of a molehill, right?

01:10:08.480 It's like, well, it's because I can see exactly what's going to happen. 0.96

01:10:11.860 And I can actually see why you're doing it, you bloody virtue signalers, right? 1.00

01:10:16.640 You hypocrites. 1.00

01:10:17.700 We're so compassionate. 1.00

01:10:19.280 It's like, oh, I'll love my son no matter what.

01:10:22.280 And how am I going to demonstrate that? 0.99

01:10:23.600 Well, I'll castrate and mutilate him and turn him into a monster, and I'll still love him. 1.00

01:10:28.200 And that's how wonderful I am, right? 1.00

01:10:31.280 Jesus, man, it's no wonder people can't admit that that sort of thing exists, because that's so goddamn dark. 0.96

01:10:37.820 It puts almost everything else to shame. 0.88

01:10:40.200 You just can't believe that could happen.

01:10:42.520 It happens, right?

01:10:43.940 And a fair bit, right?

01:10:46.100 So, there are plenty of mothers who will hoist their child's severed body parts up on a flag to signal their maternal virtue, right?

01:10:54.780 Brutal.

01:10:55.300 It's unbelievable.

01:10:56.180 It's child sacrifice.

01:10:56.900 It is unbelievable.

01:10:57.300 It's sacrifice, right?

01:10:59.000 That's for sure.

01:10:59.960 That's exactly what it is.

01:11:01.600 Yes.

01:11:02.040 It's child sacrifice to the demon of pride.

01:11:05.200 That's what it is.

01:11:06.220 And it's bad.

01:11:07.480 Okay.

01:11:07.740 Yes.

01:11:08.720 So, then I think, well, you know, what do we do?

01:11:11.880 Do we have like a truth and reconciliation, like hug fest?

01:11:15.360 I don't think so.

01:11:16.600 I think we put the people who've done this in prison.

01:11:20.780 I mean that.

01:11:22.620 Like, I think anybody who's transitioned a minor should be, they should lose their license. 1.00

01:11:29.420 This includes, this includes, this includes the counselors.

01:11:32.100 They should lose their license and they should be put in prison.

01:11:34.900 There's no excuse for it.

01:11:37.140 And so, I'm afraid that we're going to do-

01:11:38.340 Well, we'd have to change the laws first.

01:11:40.820 Yeah.

01:11:41.300 You have to change the laws.

01:11:42.100 I mean, I think if you go stepwise, Jordan, I would say, let's go institution by institution.

01:11:48.380 And I mean, medical, sports, you know, LGBT-

01:11:52.440 Riley Gaines is trying to do that on the sports side.

01:11:55.060 Riley's doing it.

01:11:55.660 Yeah.

01:11:55.840 And she's going to succeed.

01:11:57.060 She's going to succeed.

01:11:58.100 I mean, look, I will say, I think the public is really with us.

01:12:01.360 They're already with us and they don't even understand because I think a lot of the public's

01:12:05.820 in denial.

01:12:06.960 But I would say we got to go institution by institution.

01:12:08.940 And then, yeah, the laws have to change.

01:12:10.300 I mean, the Republican states in the United States are already changing.

01:12:13.960 We have to complete that.

01:12:15.860 And then we're going to have to go into the Democratic states and explain what's really

01:12:19.160 going on and change the laws in those states.

01:12:22.080 I mean, I think it's a lot harder for my liberal friends and family to justify this medical mistreatment

01:12:30.100 when the National Health Service of Britain says that they're no longer going to do it.

01:12:35.520 I think it's a lot easier for them to- because they're all partisan Democrats.

01:12:38.500 I think it's a lot easier for them to dismiss what's been happening in Republican states

01:12:43.380 because they're just so partisan.

01:12:45.140 But the British National Health Service is different.

01:12:48.560 You know, the Times of London is different.

01:12:50.360 Because they did it and they've done it in the Netherlands.

01:12:52.780 They've done it in Scandinavian countries, right?

01:12:55.040 They've pulled back quite- and the Netherlands example is particularly apropos because that's

01:13:00.660 where that bloody Dutch, so-called Dutch protocol of gender affirming care came from, right? 0.54

01:13:05.440 So for the Dutch to reverse that, and they're quite left-leaning, and so for them to reverse 0.80

01:13:10.040 that, well, I understand it's not as signal a reversal as we saw in the UK, right?

01:13:16.100 And the fact that the Times actually wrote an article and published it was also, you know,

01:13:20.280 definitely worthy of note, right?

01:13:22.880 Right?

01:13:23.120 But it's going to- like, the problem is, is that the rot that's generating this thing,

01:13:27.720 and the problem is, again, is that horrible as this is, it's merely the worst- it's the

01:13:33.340 worst symptom of an underlying systemic problem.

01:13:37.080 And it's even hard to characterize this systemic problem.

01:13:41.100 Well, so here's part of a reflection of that.

01:13:43.560 You tell me what you think about this.

01:13:44.960 So, the Democrat, the Democratic slice that's most supportive of the Democrats is childless

01:13:53.660 women under 30.

01:13:55.040 Mm-hmm.

01:13:55.800 Right, right.

01:13:56.580 So, but that's- now, forget the bloody politics.

01:13:59.780 We go down to the biological, psychological, and the biological level.

01:14:03.020 Like, there's a reason for that.

01:14:04.980 Like, the policies that the Democrats have devised, which are variants of the victim-victimizer

01:14:12.560 narrative, play very well into a misapplied maternal instinct.

01:14:17.760 Because the maternal instinct is, find the infant and protect it.

01:14:22.120 It's like, well, I don't have an infant.

01:14:23.820 Well, do you have a dog?

01:14:24.820 No.

01:14:25.620 Well, I don't have a dog either.

01:14:26.760 Well, how about the oppressed?

01:14:28.220 Oh, yeah, I've got the oppressed.

01:14:30.060 Right, exactly.

01:14:31.040 And so, now, the oppressed are infants.

01:14:33.300 They can do no wrong.

01:14:34.740 Now, all we have to do is find the oppressor.

01:14:36.980 This has turned out to be, by the way, quite hard on the Jews, as we're seeing.

01:14:41.900 Right.

01:14:42.000 Right.

01:14:42.560 Right, right.

01:14:43.440 Because if we're going to play oppressor-oppression, or victimizer-victim, and we do that by classifying

01:14:50.860 disproportionate representation in the upper strata of hierarchies as evidence of oppression

01:14:58.420 and victimization, then the Jews win that contest.

01:15:02.320 Right.

01:15:03.220 Well, right.

01:15:04.000 And this is not much different, by the way, than what happened in Austria and in Nazi Germany.

01:15:08.340 This is a very old story.

01:15:09.720 Like, I went through, for example, I went through the story of Exodus in great detail recently.

01:15:16.220 And the reason the Egyptians enslaved the Jews is because they're disproportionately successful 1.00

01:15:21.280 minority.

01:15:23.200 Right.

01:15:23.680 So, this has been going on for a very long time.

01:15:25.940 Yeah.

01:15:26.720 So, what do you—so, it seems like if—I agree with your assessment.

01:15:30.620 So, what do you think, then—how would you describe the way forward?

01:15:36.060 It seems like you have to find some secular way to affirm that everybody's born into the right

01:15:44.720 body, you know, that there's biological differences, that everybody has the right

01:15:49.280 to puberty, that nobody shall be denied the right to puberty.

01:15:52.680 But I think you're right.

01:15:54.180 The nihilism, until we address it with some life-affirming, human, pro-human vision—and

01:16:02.000 I know you're—I'm a person of faith, you're a person of faith, but I recognize also I'm

01:16:06.040 in a secular society.

01:16:07.260 So, I mean, how do you answer the question of how do you make this case for a pro-human,

01:16:15.180 life-affirming vision in a society that's so secular and so nihilist?

01:16:19.680 Michael, I don't think there is a secular reform.

01:16:23.880 Okay.

01:16:24.400 I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.

01:16:29.460 Mm-hmm.

01:16:30.220 I think the secular experiment has collapsed.

01:16:33.580 I think it's collapsed because it's technically wrong.

01:16:37.180 The book I've just published, or will publish in November, the one I'm touring about, is

01:16:41.420 the book is We Who Wrestle With God.

01:16:43.400 And I make an elaborate case for this.

01:16:46.180 I think the evidence now—this is the scientific evidence, by the way—the evidence is overwhelming

01:16:51.800 that we see the world through a structure of value.

01:16:55.000 And the description of a structure of value—the description of the structure of value of a

01:17:01.860 person is a story.

01:17:03.420 That's what a story is.

01:17:04.400 So, when you go to a movie and you watch someone characterized, what you're seeing is the

01:17:10.100 embodiment of their value structure.

01:17:12.660 And you want to see that because you need a value structure to orient yourself in the

01:17:15.940 world.

01:17:16.280 That's what makes you pay attention to one thing rather than another.

01:17:19.440 Because attention itself is value-predicated.

01:17:21.580 And the monotheistic hypothesis is that all values unify at the pinnacle, and that people

01:17:27.420 should orient themselves towards that.

01:17:29.380 And I think that's—I think there's every reason to assume that that's exactly right.

01:17:35.060 I also think it's irreplaceable.

01:17:37.240 What do you say—how do you—so, you and I have a lot of mutual friends that are—

01:17:41.140 Yeah.

01:17:41.520 —self-describe as atheists.

01:17:44.460 Yeah.

01:17:45.240 Our friend Steve Pinker, I have, you know, a lot of my supporters are atheists.

01:17:51.260 Michael Shermer.

01:17:52.900 So, there's obviously some—and they're not nihilists, right?

01:17:56.160 And they're very pragmatic and very sensible.

01:17:58.460 So, do you just sort of think, well, they're a minority of folks that are not overwhelmed

01:18:04.340 by the nihilism of life, and they have a way to affirm it despite their atheism?

01:18:09.000 Or do you feel like—like, what do you—how do you reconcile—

01:18:13.260 I mean, how are they managing it?

01:18:15.240 Well, I guess it's both—it's not just a personal question.

01:18:17.840 I also think I'm asking a political question, which is, it seems like if we need to get

01:18:21.480 a majority on our side on these issues, and you're in a secularizing society, how do you

01:18:27.540 build those alliances?

01:18:30.320 Yeah.

01:18:30.760 Well, I mean, I don't have an answer for that.

01:18:33.740 I mean, what I'm trying to do is to tell a better story.

01:18:37.000 And, you know, that has a certain impact.

01:18:39.040 And that's the right way to do it, because I think the right way forward is always—it's

01:18:44.120 always invitation.

01:18:45.300 The right way forward is invitation.

01:18:48.120 And so, if you can't tell a better story, then you don't win the contest.

01:18:52.460 What's the best story?

01:18:54.400 Well, look, the leftist story is one of power, right?

01:18:59.240 Look, the postmodernists discovered that we see the world through a structure of value,

01:19:04.600 which is partly why they've been able to kind of scuttle the scientific enterprise, because

01:19:08.980 raw empiricism doesn't work.

01:19:11.440 This is partly why the Enlightenment has to come to an end.

01:19:14.400 You cannot orient yourself with knowledge of the facts.

01:19:18.460 And the reason for that is that there's an infinite number of facts.

01:19:20.880 You have to organize the facts.

01:19:22.680 And as soon as you organize them, you're in a value hierarchy.

01:19:25.940 So the postmodernists figured that out, which is why—and it's so interesting, because

01:19:30.700 most of them were literary critics, right?

01:19:32.100 They were critics of story.

01:19:33.380 They knew there was something key to the story.

01:19:35.860 Well, the problem with the postmodernists wasn't that they got that right, and that

01:19:39.780 was a major accomplishment.

01:19:41.160 But they leaped immediately to the assumption, because of their Marxism, they leaped immediately

01:19:46.460 to the assumption that the fundamental story was one of power.

01:19:50.400 Mm-hmm.

01:19:51.320 Right.

01:19:51.680 And you can understand why that's an attractive story.

01:19:53.820 It's easy to understand.

01:19:56.060 You can understand every human dynamic in relationship to power.

01:19:59.580 Plus, when interpersonal dynamics—marriage, business, society—when they become corrupt,

01:20:07.920 they do become corrupt in the direction of power.

01:20:11.440 So it's a powerful diagnostic observation.

01:20:16.320 But it's wrong.

01:20:18.460 So you might say, well, if the story isn't one of power, what's the story?

01:20:21.960 And I know what the story is.

01:20:23.080 The story is one of—the story is one of voluntary sacrifice.

01:20:26.780 That's the story.

01:20:28.700 And the Christian mythos got that exactly right, as far as I can tell. 1.00

01:20:36.040 And so the reason for that is that community itself is a sacrificial operation.

01:20:43.020 To become a member of a community, you sacrifice yourself.

01:20:47.420 That's the definition of community.

01:20:49.840 Now, you might be able to sacrifice yourself in a manner that benefits you and everyone else.

01:20:57.120 Right?

01:20:57.380 That would be the highest form of self-sacrifice.

01:20:59.860 That's what God calls Abraham to do when God calls Abraham to adventure.

01:21:04.660 He offers him a sacrificial path forward that would be optimally beneficial to him and to everyone else.

01:21:10.720 And so there's an equation in that story of the call to the adventure of sacrificial transformation and the simultaneous establishment of social harmony.

01:21:21.600 And I think that's right.

01:21:22.880 And that's not power.

01:21:24.860 And I think the country that got that most right has been the United States.

01:21:29.080 Right?

01:21:29.260 Is that people have their responsibility.

01:21:31.860 It's—they bear that responsibility.

01:21:34.520 That's a—they work.

01:21:36.540 Because work is sacrifice.

01:21:37.760 It's the sacrifice of the present to the future.

01:21:40.980 So it's voluntary self-sacrifice is the right basis for community.

01:21:44.580 And the image of the crucifixion is that.

01:21:47.200 That's—that's—that's why it's in the—on the altar.

01:21:50.520 That's why it's at the center of the church.

01:21:52.580 That's why the church is the center of the community.

01:21:54.680 That's all dramatized.

01:21:56.200 And it's right.

01:21:57.600 And it's the antithesis of the claim that power unites.

01:22:01.640 Now, what it means that that's right, that shades off into the ineffable.

01:22:07.760 Like, there's—there's—I don't know.

01:22:10.660 Like, I—human beings are communal animals.

01:22:14.080 What does that mean metaphysically or theologically?

01:22:17.140 Well, you know, that's where human knowledge meets its limit.

01:22:21.820 You can't say in the final analysis.

01:22:24.320 And Jordan, how do you—how do you—what's the difference?

01:22:26.540 So we—so Jazz Jennings' mom really—she sacrificed her son for something.

01:22:34.200 How is—

01:22:34.860 How is the—what's the difference of—yeah, exactly.

01:22:38.100 So what is the difference between that sacrifice that they're doing?

01:22:42.920 They're sacrificing others for themselves, I guess you would say, rather than sacrificing some part of themselves for others.

01:22:49.140 No, it's worse than that.

01:22:50.700 It's worse than that.

01:22:51.580 No, first of all, that's a very astute question.

01:22:53.720 And second, you're not pessimistic enough in your—in your analysis.

01:22:58.660 So, because it's not that they're exactly sacrificing, say, their children to themselves.

01:23:05.260 It's that they're sacrificing their children to the narrowest of their whims and their demand for prideful power.

01:23:14.000 Right, so it's—mythologically speaking, it's a Luciferian sacrifice, right?

01:23:21.760 And then, see, because you might say, well, they're gaining.

01:23:24.240 It's like, wait a minute.

01:23:25.480 Who are you talking about exactly?

01:23:27.240 Because it's not exactly obvious that Jazz Jennings' mother gained.

01:23:30.540 Not in some comprehensive analysis.

01:23:33.400 I mean, a more comprehensive analysis would mean that she couldn't have possibly failed on every front more spectacularly.

01:23:40.140 So, what did she get out of it?

01:23:42.560 That isn't the right question.

01:23:44.100 The right question is, what did the worst impulses within her garner from the situation?

01:23:51.180 Right, and so she subjected herself to her own narcissistic, hedonistic whim and allied herself with the spirit of pride and power.

01:23:59.580 Right, and then performed the requisite sacrifice.

01:24:02.480 And we're doing that everywhere.

01:24:04.420 It's brutal.

01:24:05.820 And the deeper you look into it, the worse it—

01:24:08.420 It's no wonder people don't want to look, you know?

01:24:12.220 And is there—

01:24:13.020 That's not surprising.

01:24:14.840 Yeah.

01:24:15.420 So, the Enlightenment is arguably a secularized version of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

01:24:22.840 Yeah.

01:24:23.020 That's the argument that Tom Holland makes and Dominion and Nietzsche made it.

01:24:26.680 Others make it.

01:24:27.720 Yeah.

01:24:28.200 Is there a secularized version of the story you're describing that would appeal to our friends Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer?

01:24:37.120 We'll see how they respond to this book.

01:24:40.800 You know, I think the answer to that is yes.

01:24:45.040 And the reason I think that is because I think that the intuition that has possessed Western civilization in many forms for thousands of years is that truth in its highest form is a unity.

01:25:02.160 And so, I think we'll find that there's no distinction between the religious and scientific enterprise if they're both properly understood.

01:25:09.620 And I actually think—I really believe this.

01:25:11.840 I think we're on that cusp.

01:25:13.800 I mean, partly because, for example, the great neuroscientist that I've talked to over the last year, I asked—what's his name?

01:25:22.600 Oh, man, now I'm going to forget his name.

01:25:23.800 That's Sapolsky.

01:25:24.560 Yeah, no, it wasn't Sapolsky, although I did talk to Sapolsky.

01:25:30.940 He's developed an entropy theory of anxiety.

01:25:33.680 His name will come to me.

01:25:35.040 Anyways, he's the world's most cited neuroscientist at the moment, and he's really quite the genius.

01:25:39.780 And I asked him—this is an odd question—I said, is every object perception a micronarrative?

01:25:47.380 And he said, yes.

01:25:49.400 Now, you know, it's not easy to understand what that means, but what it means is that the sense data that the empiricists confused with the raw stuff of matter presents itself in its isolated elements as a story.

01:26:05.360 Like, a drinking glass is a prop in a play.

01:26:09.320 It's not an object.

01:26:12.060 Right?

01:26:12.620 It's not a dead material object.

01:26:14.520 It's a prop in a play.

01:26:15.600 It has—that's like a platonic ideal, right?

01:26:18.300 It's very similar to the notion of platonic ideal.

01:26:21.100 And that means that what presents itself to us in the form of apprehensible objects—so that's the sense data—it's all micronarrative.

01:26:32.180 It's all within a coherent story or an incoherent story sometimes, because you can be fragmented.

01:26:36.940 But there's no getting away from the story.

01:26:38.800 And the great neuroscientists—look, this discovery has emerged in four different areas.

01:26:46.400 The AI people know it, which is why they started training AI systems in a completely different way.

01:26:51.560 They're not rule-based.

01:26:53.160 Right?

01:26:53.580 They're value-based.

01:26:54.300 And now they're very much like human beings, because they were trained—they were trained to identify value.

01:27:01.340 That's exactly how they were trained.

01:27:03.380 The robotics engineers figured this out.

01:27:06.460 The psychologists who were studying perception figured this out.

01:27:10.800 And the postmodernists figured it out.

01:27:12.580 So four different scientific disciplines simultaneously converged on the realization that even sense data presents itself as value.

01:27:23.960 You don't derive value from the underlying data.

01:27:26.880 That's wrong.

01:27:27.680 It's backwards.

01:27:28.260 And so I would say—this is another elaboration of that to some degree—the biblical library is the repository of the value structure through which we see the world.

01:27:43.300 That's literally the case.

01:27:44.840 Now, you could argue maybe that's for the worse.

01:27:47.360 It's like, no, I don't think so.

01:27:48.800 But you could make that argument.

01:27:50.560 But I don't think you can escape from that conclusion.

01:27:54.480 I can't see how.

01:27:55.640 I've tried to escape from it.

01:27:56.960 But I haven't been able to.

01:27:59.220 And so the—but the idea is sort of—I mean, this is very—I mean, this is very profound stuff, because I think if you kind of go, yeah, these—we have this civilization that was oriented towards God as a source of value.

01:28:11.340 God dies.

01:28:12.480 People stop believing in God.

01:28:14.540 Yeah.

01:28:14.760 Meaning people stop believing in God.

01:28:15.880 Power and sex come up. 0.99

01:28:16.520 Power and sex arise as alternatives.

01:28:18.160 Yeah.

01:28:18.180 And we create our—and we turn ourselves—and we fantasize of ourselves as gods.

01:28:22.660 Yeah.

01:28:22.860 Now, our atheists and secular friends, Michael Shermer and Steve Pinker, if I were to try to channel them, I think they would say, I believe also in being in service to higher values.

01:28:34.800 They would say things like—they would say things like family, community, rationality, enlightenment.

01:28:40.820 And so I guess one question is whether—because I've been playing with this idea that really where we need to get—we can build a political majority to prevent these atrocities from continuing is around the idea of civilization.

01:28:54.280 But I think what you're saying is that that's not good enough, that the civilization has to be in service of something even larger than the civilization itself.

01:29:00.680 Look, look, look, look, look, here's the problem with the perspective that Pinker and Shermer might adopt.

01:29:06.120 So let's say family, justice, truth, beauty.

01:29:11.000 Okay, why?

01:29:12.160 Why those?

01:29:13.520 Well, because they all share something.

01:29:17.060 They all share something good.

01:29:18.540 They all partake in the good.

01:29:20.420 Okay.

01:29:21.500 This is a definition.

01:29:23.680 The good they partake in is God.

01:29:26.880 It's a definition.

01:29:28.740 So it's not the summum bonum exactly.

01:29:31.440 It's a slightly different twist on that.

01:29:33.540 It's that the ultimate unity of the spirit that is good is the good that makes itself manifest in all good things.

01:29:42.020 Right.

01:29:42.400 And you see, that's a different way of concept.

01:29:44.380 Now, Pinker and Shermer might say, well, that's not a spirit and you can't have a relationship with it.

01:29:49.660 Right?

01:29:49.940 Because that would be the next object.

01:29:51.220 Okay, there's a higher good, but it's impersonal and you can't have a relationship with it.

01:29:56.220 I would say, I think that's a demolishable argument too, because the fundamental mode of human apprehension is relationship.

01:30:04.880 Like at the highest level of being, we're a personality.

01:30:07.420 We exist in relationship.

01:30:08.540 So now you might say, just because there's human beings doesn't mean there's a spirit with whom we can establish a relationship.

01:30:15.160 And the first thing I would say is, that's not absolutely crystal clear.

01:30:19.520 So, you know, don't get the cart ahead of the horse.

01:30:21.800 But I also think you can make a very credible case that the proper way of conceptualizing the manner in which we interact, do and should interact with the highest good, is in covenantal relationship.

01:30:36.980 I think that's how people do it.

01:30:39.620 I mean, so, and I think that's the defining characteristic of the relationship between man and the transcendent.

01:30:45.560 And so, I'll give you an example of that, just a quick example.

01:30:49.120 So, you know, Pinker works.

01:30:52.640 Well, why?

01:30:53.880 Well, when he's working, he's sacrificing the pleasures of the present for the future, and maybe even for the community.

01:31:00.160 Okay, why?

01:31:01.180 Well, because he, because it's a contractual understanding.

01:31:05.560 His understanding is that he exists in relationship with something, and if he makes the proper sacrifices, there will be a commensurate return on that offering.

01:31:17.940 Right.

01:31:18.380 That's, so, you see, what happens in the biblical stories is that you get the idea of sacrifice established very early.

01:31:25.440 There's no difference between that and work.

01:31:27.540 And you might say that the spirit that guarantees the fruits of your labor is God.

01:31:33.080 That's another way of thinking.

01:31:34.280 These are definitions, right?

01:31:36.020 This is the problem with the Enlightenment mentality, is that God was conceptualized.

01:31:42.540 First of all, religion was conceptualized as a scientific theory, which it isn't.

01:31:46.560 And then God was conceptualized as a caricature of the ineffable and dismissed.

01:31:52.960 It's like, no, none of that's accurate.

01:31:55.760 None of that's, it's not the right starting point.

01:31:57.980 It's the wrong mode of inquiry.

01:31:59.660 See, see, the Jews, like the Greeks, the Jews posited that at the highest level of value, there was unity.

01:32:08.120 That's the monotheistic hypothesis.

01:32:09.720 And the alternative is, well, there's nothing, well, that's not helpful, or that it's fragmented, and that's also not helpful.

01:32:18.100 So, you can't escape from the value hierarchy.

01:32:22.100 You can't escape from the problem of its potential unity.

01:32:25.020 And then you can have a debate about the characterization of that unity.

01:32:28.380 And that's useful.

01:32:29.340 But you're going to find out that the proper characterization is relationship.

01:32:34.460 You know, so here's a way of thinking about it.

01:32:36.460 God, let's say you have a loving relationship with your wife.

01:32:40.240 It's like, well, what you actually have is a relationship with the highest spirit within her.

01:32:47.700 That's actually the way the relationship lays itself out, if it's proper.

01:32:51.920 And the relationship is actually something transcendent within you relating directly to something transcendent within her.

01:32:57.340 And any genuine conversation is a manifestation of that as well.

01:33:02.000 And that points to a transcendent reality, right?

01:33:06.020 It's the reality that makes communication itself.

01:33:08.300 That's the logos, man.

01:33:09.480 That's exactly what that is.

01:33:10.840 That's even how it's conceptualized, right?

01:33:13.380 So, and it's not just our reality.

01:33:17.200 It's the reality upon which all other realities are predicated, including the scientific.

01:33:22.100 And I think we're at a point where if you look very carefully at the converging evidence, there is no other viable conclusion.

01:33:32.320 Yeah.

01:33:32.600 I mean, well, Jordan, I mean, do you worry that, I mean, you clearly don't think it's enough for there to be agreement on these core values.

01:33:41.540 In other words, if you go family, truth, beauty, progress, you don't think that's enough.

01:33:47.320 You think there needs to be convergence on a higher value than those.

01:33:50.500 But don't you worry that that's going to reduce the size of your, that's going to alienate allies and reduce the size of the coalition that we need in order to resist totalitarianism?

01:34:01.820 I think the problem with the fundamentalists and the conservatives is that they shake their stick and they hit the rocks with their rod to make the water come forward, right?

01:34:13.940 Well, that stops you from entering the promised land, right?

01:34:18.120 So, what's the way forward?

01:34:19.440 You invite.

01:34:20.540 No, I think there's a way of formulating this story that is purely invitational.

01:34:25.940 It's like, and the proper offering would be, this way of looking at things is so much richer than any of the alternatives that, like, the problem is, is you've got to hoist your cross, right?

01:34:38.240 You've got to bear your responsibility.

01:34:39.980 That's the price.

01:34:41.260 But I think that's an illusory price in some sense because you're going to sacrifice everything you have to something.

01:34:49.400 Like, that's the nature of life, right?

01:34:51.500 You're going to exhaust your life in the service of something.

01:34:55.020 It might be a multitude of things.

01:34:57.400 So, the sacrificial part, you don't get to choose that.

01:35:02.960 You get to choose in service of what?

01:35:05.820 Well, they would say, I think if you were to say, I think we would have a broad, I mean, I'm trying to, I feel like we have to resist totalitarianism.

01:35:14.420 And so, I'm trying to figure out how do you get to a majority?

01:35:17.040 I, seems to me, you know, family, truth, beauty, you know, care, you know, all these values that we have, that they are, they are where I think we can attract a lot of people.

01:35:30.760 I think we get to God, faith, and I think we start to lose people.

01:35:34.740 Look, we've been having that problem with this arc enterprise, right?

01:35:38.120 Because we have six core domains that are very similar to the ones that you just laid out, right?

01:35:43.220 Core values, right?

01:35:44.580 And we've been arguing back and forth consistently, continually, about how much you leave the divine unity that, what is the source of those things, so to speak, implicit versus explicit.

01:35:56.260 And the answer is, we don't know, right?

01:35:58.740 We don't know.

01:35:59.500 But we certainly, I certainly do understand, I believe, that you don't insist upon it or use force.

01:36:07.100 That's where you get the totalitarian alliance between the religious spirit, so to speak, and the totalitarian state.

01:36:13.820 That's the sort of things that people like Dawkins object to, right?

01:36:16.920 And rightly so.

01:36:18.860 But look, like, well, one example.

01:36:21.240 See, I don't know how anybody can dispute the idea that the ground of community is sacrifice, is self-sacrifice.

01:36:29.800 Like, that's, right?

01:36:30.980 I mean, obviously, when you mature, you give up the narrow whims of a hedonistic two-year-old for the broader—

01:36:39.760 Right.

01:36:40.160 So, okay, so then you might say—

01:36:41.640 On that, I think we would get—I think you would get Pinker and—I mean, I don't know, but I think we would get Pinker and Shermer on that.

01:36:49.800 Well, then you might ask—well, then you'd say, well, okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that that's the case.

01:36:56.680 Well, then you might ask yourself as a historian or even as a biologist, imagine that human beings came to that explicit realization, at least in part, that the core to the eternal community is voluntary self-sacrifice.

01:37:14.160 Okay, how best should that be represented so it was memorable at hand for everyone, regardless of intellect, and transmissible down the generations?

01:37:25.960 I'd say, well, you didn't code it in a story.

01:37:29.220 Right.

01:37:29.660 And then you might say, well, is that story true?

01:37:31.600 And the right answer to that is it depends on what you mean by true.

01:37:35.920 Right?

01:37:36.480 Because you don't get to play—see, that's the thing is, at the level of religious inquiry, you don't get to play that game anymore.

01:37:41.880 Because when you say, does God exist, let's say, the right rejoinder is, what's your definition of exist?

01:37:50.180 Oh, well, that's obvious.

01:37:51.280 It's like, no, that's where your unconscious religious presuppositions are making themselves manifest.

01:37:57.760 And so, your question is really, I'm a materialist, and I believe that there are tables.

01:38:04.980 Is God a table?

01:38:06.520 It's like, okay, have it your way.

01:38:08.340 No, God's not a table.

01:38:10.880 Are you satisfied?

01:38:12.980 Well, you know, what kind of useful discussion is that?

01:38:16.260 That's not useful.

01:38:17.560 It goes nowhere.

01:38:19.200 It's just, it's completely the wrong level of—it's like, what color is a musical note?

01:38:24.420 It's not helpful.

01:38:27.120 That's not a helpful question.

01:38:28.520 And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment, because the dichotomy between rationality and the religious is, it's a false dichotomy.

01:38:37.660 We got it conceptualized wrong.

01:38:39.760 We didn't understand.

01:38:40.900 It was something we didn't understand, something profound.

01:38:44.380 And I'm very interested in seeing what—you know, I brought some of these ideas forward to some of the more atheistic types, the Enlightenment types that I talked to.

01:38:52.960 You know, and sometimes I'll hit a sticking point where I just can't discuss the ideas any further.

01:38:57.600 But generally, as long as I proceed on the scientific side, there's no dispute at all.

01:39:04.220 Right.

01:39:04.580 There's going to be some more bitter pills to swallow, I'm afraid, but that's life.

01:39:08.600 Well, you've helped me.

01:39:09.500 I think this is very interesting, because I've been playing with how do you create some framework that you can build a proper majority to resist the totalitarianism or overcome it.

01:39:22.740 And I've been coming to a lot of, you know, an affirmation of the human.

01:39:26.480 If you're pro-human, then you're pro-civilization.

01:39:29.260 If you're pro-civilization, you need cheap energy, law and order, meritocracy.

01:39:33.220 If you want that civilization to be liberal democratic, then you need free speech, free and fair elections, and equal justice under the law.

01:39:42.160 I'm not sure where the gender medicine one fits into that. 0.63

01:39:45.000 I've been playing with that, because I can kind of come up with six core pillars of liberal democratic civilization.

01:39:50.900 I'm not sure any of those six actually protect kids and vulnerable adults in the ways that they clearly need to be protected.

01:39:58.260 Well, be fruitful and multiply is not a bad axiom.

01:40:03.600 There is no civilization if you don't protect puberty and protect the right of people to grow up.

01:40:09.340 Well, there's also a reason that the image of mother and child is sacred, and it wasn't just sacred to the Christians, right?

01:40:16.000 I mean, there are images of ISIS and Horus dating back to Egyptian times that are essentially indistinguishable from Mary and Christ.

01:40:24.100 The same idea was being put forward, and the reason for that is that if the image of mother and child is not sacred, then society decays.

01:40:35.980 What you get, you're going to have the Virgin Mary.

01:40:38.460 You're either going to have the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ, or you're going to have the Whore of Babylon. 1.00

01:40:42.660 Those are your options, right, right, right. 0.95

01:40:44.920 And we've got plenty Whore of Babylon, right? 0.92

01:40:47.720 Plenty of it, and more all the time, right? 0.96

01:40:50.460 More than a mouthful, you might say, right?

01:40:53.880 More than a surfeit.

01:40:55.820 Yes.

01:40:56.800 I think this is great because you're actually giving me the seventh pillar of civilization, which is really the right to continue the human—

01:41:05.020 The obligation, even.

01:41:06.760 The obligation, yeah.

01:41:08.380 The obligation, right?

01:41:09.460 Well, that's even—you know, people say, well, why should I bring a child into a world such as this?

01:41:15.080 It's like, well, that's your sacrificial duty.

01:41:18.500 You know, the world will tear my child apart.

01:41:20.320 It's like, yeah, that's right.

01:41:21.680 That's exactly right, you know.

01:41:23.520 That's what—so there's this—there's a statue in St. Peter's of the Paeda, right, which is Mary with her broken son in her arms.

01:41:31.300 Well, that's motherhood. 0.99

01:41:32.780 Like, that's not the infant anymore.

01:41:34.260 It's like, yes, your child will be broken by the world.

01:41:37.360 Right.

01:41:38.220 Right.

01:41:38.840 Definitely.

01:41:39.700 Well, do you make that a sacred necessity?

01:41:41.920 Well, that's what—that's Mary's decision.

01:41:43.580 Her decision is, I have faith in this—I have faith in the central structure of being and becoming.

01:41:49.820 I will bring a child into the world, right, with all its horror, you know, and then I'll launch him so that he can pursue his redemptive mission, which is what you do to a child if you love them.

01:42:00.760 It's like, go out there and, like, pick up the challenges, man.

01:42:05.840 Push yourself out against the world, right?

01:42:07.800 And so the Freudians knew this.

01:42:09.780 They said this a century ago.

01:42:11.260 The good mother fails.

01:42:13.580 What was the alternative—what was the mother that they advocated for the good mother?

01:42:18.620 Devouring mother.

01:42:19.960 Oh.

01:42:21.380 Right.

01:42:22.000 The good mother fails.

01:42:23.620 Yeah.

01:42:24.220 Brutal.

01:42:24.800 That's the sacrificial gesture of the eternal feminine. 1.00

01:42:27.900 That's what it is, yeah.

01:42:29.240 And that's—it's a sacred image because there's no replacement for it.

01:42:32.980 Right.

01:42:33.580 Right.

01:42:33.800 You know, so, look, maybe I'll send you a copy of this manuscript and you can tell me what you think, man.

01:42:39.000 Oh, I can't wait to read it, Jordan.

01:42:40.240 I'm delighted.

01:42:40.820 I'm delighted.

01:42:41.380 Kick the hell out of it if you can, because I've been, like, trying to break it apart with hammer and tongs, you know, and I'm not putting forward any argument that I can break.

01:42:50.680 Well, I think we're in a real emergency at this point.

01:42:55.140 I mean, I feel that, you know, you look at what's happening and you see basic attack on human development in the form of gender pseudoscience and medical mistreatment, an attack on our energy systems in the form of Malthusian anti-humanism, and a basic, you know, war on meritocracy, on law and order, on the basis of civilization.

01:43:23.500 So, it's coming a lot faster and a lot more powerful than I think many of us realize.

01:43:29.420 Well, I think that's also, Michael, I think that's why the archetypal structures are becoming obvious, because it's happening so fast that the lines are becoming starker, right?

01:43:41.360 This has always happened.

01:43:42.820 This has always been happening, but it's happening way faster now, right?

01:43:48.400 And so, it's like, oh, you can see the metaphysical characters behind the scenes, right?

01:43:53.700 Much more clearly, yeah.

01:43:55.200 And it's not a pretty picture, and this is why people turn away.

01:43:59.040 And I can understand, but that it's not—look, when the Israelites get all clamory in the desert for the last time in the story of Exodus,

01:44:10.740 they're all bitching and whining because, oh, they're not in the lovely tyranny, and all they have to eat is manna. 0.98

01:44:16.420 It's like, it's real rough, and they run out of water. 0.98

01:44:19.780 So, they go to Moses and bitch and squawk about it, and they're complaining and clamoring away, and God gets sick of them, 0.99

01:44:27.080 and so he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in there to bite them. 0.98

01:44:30.080 This is the sort of thing that God does that makes people like Dawkins hate him, right?

01:44:33.840 It's like, what sort of God would throw in the snakes?

01:44:35.860 It's like, lose faith and see how many snakes appear there, boys and girls.

01:44:40.480 So, anyways, in come the snakes, and the Israelites repent because of the snakes, 0.90

01:44:45.800 and they ask Moses to go to God and call them off, and Moses said, okay.

01:44:50.540 And so, he has a chat with God, and he says, you know, do you want to call off the snakes?

01:44:54.960 And God says, yeah, I don't think so, but I'll make you a different deal.

01:44:58.340 You make a brazen serpent, make a pole, and put a serpent on it, and get everyone to come and look at it.

01:45:08.420 And if they look at it, if they look at what's poisonous, they'll be immune from it, right?

01:45:15.000 That's the symbol of Asclepius, by the way, right?

01:45:17.940 The universal physician, right?

01:45:19.660 Right.

01:45:19.840 So, what's the antidote to pathology and totalitarianism?

01:45:25.060 It's like, and despair.

01:45:27.220 It's like, look upon that which poisons you.

01:45:31.660 Right, in faith.

01:45:32.680 Yes.

01:45:33.180 Right, right.

01:45:33.780 Yeah, that's right.

01:45:34.220 Exactly, exactly.

01:45:35.040 That is right, man.

01:45:36.520 That is right.

01:45:38.380 I was reading Ivan Illich's book, Medical Nemesis, which is about iatrogenesis, the way the medical system makes people sick.

01:45:46.800 And he really makes a big point of stop looking to the medical, stop looking to fix the medical system so that it stops poisoning you.

01:45:55.140 You have to build the internal resources, the internal ability to withstand the pain and suffering that is life.

01:46:02.360 Okay, okay.

01:46:03.220 That's the only solution to it.

01:46:05.360 Well, let's close this with this.

01:46:07.400 So, one of the things we talked about right at the beginning was your initial resistance to even delve into this domain.

01:46:13.400 And you said why.

01:46:14.260 It's like, who wants to look at that?

01:46:16.160 And the answer is, no one.

01:46:18.160 But you did.

01:46:19.280 So, let's ask two questions then.

01:46:21.700 Why did you?

01:46:23.220 Like, what drove you to do that and to overcome your resistance?

01:46:26.380 And what has been the consequence for you?

01:46:29.220 Right?

01:46:29.800 Because that's the end of the story.

01:46:31.040 You looked on the snake that no one wants to look at and it's certainly poisonous.

01:46:35.020 So, the question is, you know, why?

01:46:37.140 What drove you to do that?

01:46:38.580 What voice did you hearken to that invited you on that adventure?

01:46:42.200 Let's say.

01:46:43.020 And then, what's the consequence for you of doing this?

01:46:46.540 It's such a great question, Jordan.

01:46:48.000 I mean, it's so funny because when you say what was the—I had this call to do something on it that I refused.

01:46:54.660 I mean, I saw it happening and I refused the call.

01:46:58.200 And then, of course, it was, you know, in the classic Hero's Journey narrative, I finally felt compelled because this person or persons who gave me the files, I knew that nobody else would be able to bring them into the world in the way that we could do it.

01:47:15.540 You may know that we wrote a—or I didn't write.

01:47:18.500 I had my colleagues wrote a 70-page report to accompany the files.

01:47:24.200 We had attempted to do it journalistically.

01:47:26.620 It was too much, too complex.

01:47:27.980 So, we spent eight months working on this report.

01:47:31.600 The consequences, I'm afraid that they're only starting.

01:47:36.640 I mean, I've never—look, I've been taking on the CIA, the FBI, been writing about Jeffrey Epstein.

01:47:42.520 None of it worries me.

01:47:43.540 None of that scared me.

01:47:45.920 These people—and look, I'm not so scared of them, but I'm also—I think the people that are involved in this, which is frankly a cult, a child sacrifice and castration cult, if we're just being perfectly honest, like that's what—as an objective description of it.

01:48:03.580 They're very dangerous.

01:48:06.000 They're violent.

01:48:06.920 They're aggressive.

01:48:08.160 They attack.

01:48:08.940 So, I've taken my own personal security—I won't say what, but I'm taking measures to protect my personal security at this point.

01:48:15.740 Do you regret it?

01:48:17.480 Not for a minute.

01:48:18.700 No, no, of course not.

01:48:19.640 Why not?

01:48:20.480 Because that's surprising.

01:48:21.860 Like, you know, you just said there's a most dangerous opponent that you've probably faced.

01:48:26.120 By far.

01:48:26.180 And I believe that, by the way.

01:48:27.520 I believe that's to be the case, yes.

01:48:29.400 And a very well-organized one, too.

01:48:31.780 The only YouTube videos I've had taken down have been the ones that touched on the transition.

01:48:36.200 On this.

01:48:36.920 Right, right.

01:48:37.520 Well, we'll see if this one—we'll see what happens with this one.

01:48:39.880 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:48:40.820 Exactly.

01:48:41.340 We will see.

01:48:42.020 We'll see.

01:48:42.820 Okay, so you're putting yourself in danger.

01:48:44.900 So, why don't you regret it?

01:48:46.120 Well, this is—it comes back to this thing we were just talking about, right?

01:48:51.600 It's like, if you're not going to take some amount—and I don't want to overstate it either—but if you're not going to be willing to take on some amount of sacrifice on something like this, then what good are you?

01:49:02.400 Like, what is the point?

01:49:03.360 You're not really a man, right?

01:49:05.220 That's right.

01:49:05.400 You're not really a father.

01:49:07.320 You're just not a—like, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I had said no to this. 1.00

01:49:12.480 You're the slave of psychopaths. 1.00

01:49:14.680 That's what you are. 1.00

01:49:15.480 That's right.

01:49:16.500 That's right.

01:49:17.080 Yeah, I would be a—

01:49:17.680 That's right. 1.00

01:49:18.400 Voiceless, braying slave of psychopaths. 1.00

01:49:21.540 That's right. 1.00

01:49:22.440 Right.

01:49:22.880 That's exactly right.

01:49:23.360 And now I can be in a position where, like, we're not going to be afraid of them.

01:49:26.800 We're going to overcome them, and we're going to figure out how to do that.

01:49:31.040 I have a lot of—I do have faith.

01:49:32.660 I think I am—I do tend towards optimism.

01:49:36.600 So, but I think this is—this part—Jarden, this is a helpful conversation because I do think

01:49:42.060 being able to describe what's happening in very specific psychological terms, I think,

01:49:48.560 is one of the keys to overcoming the totalitarianism that we're facing at different places in different

01:49:54.660 parts of society simultaneously.

01:49:56.520 Yep.

01:49:56.860 Yep.

01:49:57.140 Definitely.

01:49:57.680 Well, you've got to get the diagnosis right before you can prescribe the cure.

01:50:01.600 Right.

01:50:01.820 That's right.

01:50:02.180 Right.

01:50:02.660 Yep.

01:50:03.140 Yep.

01:50:03.620 All right, man.

01:50:04.340 Well, it's going to be a crazy year.

01:50:09.540 Buckle up. 0.96

01:50:10.740 Yep.

01:50:11.940 Yeah.

01:50:12.420 Well, congratulations, man.

01:50:14.020 Good work.

01:50:14.580 Thank you, Jordan.

01:50:15.260 Thank you for—

01:50:15.980 Seriously.

01:50:16.440 Thank you for the conversation.

01:50:17.760 I always learn so much when I talk to you.

01:50:19.340 Yeah.

01:50:19.660 Yeah.

01:50:19.860 It was great to talk to you, man.

01:50:21.240 All right.

01:50:21.620 So, for everybody watching and listening, well, that was a trip.

01:50:24.620 I think you might agree with that.

01:50:26.360 Thank you very much for your time and attention, and, you know, there's plenty to digest in

01:50:31.500 that.

01:50:31.660 Thank you to The Daily Wire for facilitating this conversation and the film crew here in

01:50:35.720 Savannah.

01:50:36.800 That's where I am today.

01:50:38.620 And all of you who are watching, many of you know I'm going to talk to Michael for another

01:50:42.080 half an hour on The Daily Wire side.

01:50:43.900 Not exactly sure where we'll go with that, but join us and throw some support their way

01:50:49.620 because they're what's allowing these sorts of conversations to move forward.

01:50:54.320 And so, thanks, Michael.

01:50:55.520 Very interesting.

01:50:57.040 Thank you, Jordan.

01:50:58.120 Thanks for having me.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 28, 2024

435. This Is One of the Biggest Medical Malpractice Scandals in History ｜ Michael Shellenberger

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