Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, "Dr. Peterson's New Series: Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Finding a Good Place in the Present" he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. B.P. Peterson is a psychiatrist, author, and public speaker who focuses on mental health, anxiety, and depression. His work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, and is a frequent contributor to the Daily Wire. . He is also the author of several books, including "Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, "Restoration." Ayaan has been described as "a force of nature." and is one of the bravest people in the world. She is a political women in the modern history. She has been a fierce opponent of Islamic fundamentalists, and a fierce defender of Western civilization, and antheism, and she has recently converted to Christianity, and converted from Islam. She's been a Christian, and has been converting to Christianity in order to join the Christian religion. She also has a new venture, Restoration, which she calls for a return to her old religion, the Christian faith. ... and she's got a plan to restore sanity and reclaim her old ideas and a new understanding of the old ways of seeing the world through a new way of seeing things through a modernity. This is a must-listen to understand what's at stake is at stake here. in this episode of Daily Wire Plus! Listen to find out more about this incredible humanist, radical feminist, feminist, and feminist, anti-colonialist, and anti-Islamist, feminist icon, Ayaann Hirsi-Ali. Subscribe to her work, and why she's a force to be reckoned with.
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:10.360I had the privilege today to speak with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who, I don't know, if you took the ten bravest people in the world, she'd be one of them, as far as I can tell.
00:01:20.060And she made a remarkable splash years ago with her first book, Infidel, which talked about her experience about moving from Somalia to the Netherlands, which is like the center of Western civilization.
00:01:34.120And Ayaan has had a very storied political career, to say the least, and a threatened life in many ways, standing up against the Islamic fundamentalists.
00:01:43.920She's recently converted to Christianity, which is also a stunningly brave move for someone in her situation.
00:01:50.040And she's launched a new enterprise called Restoration, which is a substack media enterprise designed to make a case for the necessary primacy and, what would you say, bedrock, foundational necessity of the presumptions of Western civilization.
00:02:09.040And so we had a chance to talk about all that, and so I would say it'll be 90 minutes well worth your while with the additional conversation that I had with her as well on the Daily Wire side.
00:02:31.660And so, as I said, it was a privilege to talk to her again.
00:02:35.140All right, so you've recently announced a new writing and media endeavor, and I've been following that quite avidly, particularly on Twitter, and so called Restoration.
00:02:49.620And so do you want to tell us how that came to be and what it is and what you're hoping to accomplish with it?
00:02:57.260Well, Restoration, I think the word says it.
00:02:59.840My mission is to restore our institutions that you and I love to their original missions, ideas, our culture, the origins and history of our culture,
00:03:16.560institutions like the family, schools, the university, democratic institutions, what political parties are supposed to do, what our governments are supposed to do, what they're not supposed to do.
00:03:34.880And then discourse, a lot of us have been talking quite a bit about freedom of speech and the institutions that protect freedom of speech, the free press, all of these have been, in my view, they've been subverted.
00:03:57.700There's been an effort to subvert our institutions, and we're in a place now where we cannot communicate with people we disagree with or we have a different perspective from without immediately seeing an enemy status in them.
00:04:18.840And I think the first and I think the first and I think the first and I think the first and most important thing to do is to bring back that civic discourse.
00:04:26.620When I came to Europe in 1992, and over the course of the first 10 years of my residence there, conversations between people who disagree with one another were seen as what defined Europe and what defined the West and what made it different from other places.
00:04:45.920And now look at where we are, and so restoration is an attempt to awaken people, to recognize what's at stake, and then to restore, yeah, in one word, to restore sanity.
00:05:04.700Okay, so you brought up a lot of points there, and I want to delve into them one by one.
00:05:10.060And I guess I'll start with an overarching question and then drill in a little bit.
00:05:19.520Do you find yourself surprised to have developed the beliefs that you have developed?
00:05:29.580I mean, in your description of your project, you pointed to the dissolution of civic discourse, the threat to democratic institutions, the threat to our culture, the collapse of freedom of speech.
00:05:48.020And those are all, all of those are serious charges, right?
00:05:57.480Especially, let's say, the observation of subversion.
00:06:02.120And it's difficult to, it's easy for, let's see, it's easy for the apprehension of something like subversion to be tossed into the conspiracy theorist bin, let's say that.
00:06:21.320I mean, in the things that you've been writing about in Restoration and pointing to, they're quite dramatic.
00:06:30.160The first is, why don't you talk a bit more about what you mean by subversion, where that might be stemming from, right?
00:06:38.660Because that's, well, that's a mysterious question.
00:06:41.980And then also address the issue of whether or not you find yourself surprised to be in the position that you're in, having to say the sorts of things, let's say, that you're saying to be now.
00:06:53.860I start, the opening essay in Subversion, the bulletin, so my platform on Substack, has to do with, I start by describing the fact that many of us feel that something is off.
00:07:10.120And that, like in the parable of the Buddhists, we're all trying to figure out what is it that is off.
00:07:18.300So, we're all these blind people, we're touching different parts of the elephant, and we're trying to figure out what this hole is.
00:07:24.120But when I look at these, you know, take any list, I'm in the academic world, and I see what has happened to academia from the time I came as a student in 1995 in the University of Leiden to my present role at Stanford.
00:07:43.440And there is just this churning out of very expensive, useless degrees in gender and race and you name it.
00:08:01.500There is this crisis that I see, because I'm a parent.
00:08:05.720Parents around me, homeschooling their children, going from A to B, just completely confused about what is it that's going on with our education systems.
00:08:19.340There are these statements that are contrary to reality that there is an endless number of genders.
00:08:27.220There's this whole, what seemed like in, you know, 10, 15 years ago when I first heard about terms like intersectionality and oppressor and oppressed and all the rest of it.
00:08:39.120It just seemed like some, to me, juvenile, intellectual mishmash, nonsensical, the sort of things that first year freshmen students dapple in, and then they grow up and they grow out of it.
00:08:56.700And then along comes 2020, and we have that incident with George Floyd in the United States of America.
00:09:04.080And what then happens is what I only see, can't describe as a revolution, because we went full on with the defund the police, let's abolish SATs and other standardized tests, mathematics is racist, everything is racist.
00:09:25.040And this demolition, clearly demolition of ideas and institutions like the family education.
00:09:34.180And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, this is familiar.
00:09:40.100And let's pay attention to the people who are leading the charge in these projects to destroy the structures and the institutions that have served us so well.
00:09:55.040And on the one hand, you have this identity politics, cultural Marxists that have developed this elaborate theory, theories, that they call critical theory, critical theories.
00:10:08.400And it's not a conspiracy theory, Jordan.
00:10:11.800They state it as clearly as possible, that they want to bring down, they point to all of these injustices and they say the answer to all of this is to bring down these structures and destroy them.
00:10:22.440And then on the other hand, I see the Islamists and the Islamists have never really been dishonest.
00:10:29.820It was always in your face, but they first tried many years to bring down our system through terror and terrorist threats and relentless terrorist attempts.
00:10:42.640We are militarily and economically and technologically superior to them.
00:10:47.720And so, obviously, they went down the path of dawa, which is religious subversion, which is, it has a much longer timeline.
00:10:58.720And then, of course, you look at the CCP and Putin, and these are external adversaries, and they're looking at what's going on on our soil domestically.
00:11:09.080And they would be stupid not to take advantage of that.
00:11:13.440So, as I try to look into and analyze, again, think of me as one of the blind men touching the elephant, is to say, where have we seen this before?
00:11:26.160Now, communist attempts at subverting the West are as old as communism.
00:11:33.280They're as old as, you know, the times of the Bolsheviks and Lenin and all the various Marxists.
00:11:42.640And when the Soviet Union was established, they had programs to subvert us.
00:12:14.220So, what's interesting about all of this is to see this collusion between the Islamists and the neo-Marxists or cultural Marxists, what is called the unholy green-red alliance.
00:12:28.740Some people describe it as the watermelon.
00:12:30.600And you think, okay, where is this going?
00:12:32.800Queers for Palestine looks nice in Colombia on a plaque that students hold up.
00:12:43.360But what would queers look like if they were actually in Gaza or the West Bank?
00:13:13.820And then we have to come together and restore this.
00:13:18.580And so, not together in these empty sort of platitudinous ways, but to say we used to, what made us different as Western societies is that we used to disagree.
00:13:29.720And actually, we used to think it was fun to disagree.
00:13:32.020The other day, I had a debate with what I didn't think of it as a debate.
00:13:36.500I thought it was a lovely conversation with Richard Dawkins, where, I mean, we live in a world where a lot of people who watch that discussion, their takeaway was not, oh, how interesting.
00:13:48.080This one has to say that, and, you know, what are the arguments that they're making, et cetera.
00:13:54.240No, it was, you know, there was suddenly this enemy friend thing.
00:14:01.020And, yeah, I think, for me, the greatest takeaway from that whole thing was the hug at the beginning and the hug at the end, that it is possible to disagree on fundamental issues and continue to have that affection for one another.
00:14:19.920And if you don't want to have affection for one another, still, you know, peaceful handshake.
00:14:27.160Well, with Dawkins in particular, like I've met him a couple of times, and I've read his books, and I learned a lot from his books.
00:14:36.860And one of the things that I've thought about Dawkins all along, and I think this is reflected in the fact that he described himself as a cultural Christian recently, is that he is a good scientist, and a good scientist is someone who strives to seek the truth.
00:14:55.960And I think that truth-seeking is a religious enterprise, and so a true scientist is embedded in a religious enterprise, and I think that's why Richard Dawkins understands that he's a cultural Christian.
00:15:09.220But it's very—there's many things that Dr. Dawkins and I don't see eye-to-eye about, but some of that is because we don't understand each other, like a fair bit of it.
00:15:21.960And some of it is that the issue at hand is insanely complex and difficult to figure out, and neither of us should be presuming that we've got the right answer.
00:15:32.800And then the discourse that you're describing, which is competitive discourse, should be conducted in a manner that enables both of the participants to further seek the truth.
00:15:42.620And then you actually want that enmity, so to speak, you want the person you're talking to to come at you with ideas that you haven't heard and positions that you haven't thought through, because in principle, they move you closer to the truth.
00:15:59.340And so, hypothetically, Dr. Dawkins and I will be speaking at some time in the next few months.
00:16:08.240We're trying to arrange that now, and I'm really looking forward to it, because—
00:16:11.340Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:18.360Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:26.120In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:31.080Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:40.560And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:43.760With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:16:51.140Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:17:48.060I think that we can talk because I think that he's trying to pursue the truth.
00:17:58.680And I found the same thing with Sam Harris, and I recently spoke to Dan Dennett, which went very well.
00:18:04.020I've managed to speak to him in a few short weeks before his demise, and we had a very productive conversation.
00:18:10.700And you want conversations between people who don't hold the same viewpoint, if they're reliable people, because that's where the real thinking takes place.
00:18:21.040And so for me, what you just described was the defining feature of Western civilization.
00:18:30.040I came from, I was born in Somalia, and I lived in Saudi Arabia, and I lived in Kenya, and I lived in Ethiopia, and then I landed in the Netherlands in 1992.
00:18:38.980And there were so many differences between the world, the non-Western world I grew up in, and the Western world that I came to.
00:18:48.680But the one thing that I would say was really different, and was this, that you can't really have these radically different views.
00:18:59.500Because you can be religious, you can be atheist, you can be pro-market, you can be anti-market, you can, in fact, in the streets of America, shout the most anti-American things, even burn the American flag.
00:19:20.660And when I say, let's talk about restoration, I'm now seeing a breakdown for that, a near collapse of that.
00:19:30.360On the political level, on the academic level, on the civic level, on the journalism level, we are breaking up into tribes, like the world where I came from, where you have not the pursuit of the truth, but ownership of the truth.
00:19:48.380My truth versus your truth and that kind of nonsense is now a serious, serious, deep-rooted problem in the West.
00:19:57.560And that, I think, is an outcome of subversion.
00:20:01.800Well, okay, so let's take that apart further.
00:20:05.920So, you talk about a relapse into a kind of tribalism of idea ownership.
00:20:14.120So, there's a disintegration of something that was unified into a more pluralistic tribal landscape.
00:20:22.260Let's identify some of the other characteristics of the collapse.
00:20:27.000So, we could talk about purposeful and accidental subversion.
00:20:31.340So, let's start with the Marxists with regard to purposeful subversion.
00:20:36.440Okay, so Karl Marx split the world into oppressor and oppressed in an envious manner, presuming that all the moral virtue was with the oppressed and all the evil was with the oppressor and that that all could be understood from within the framework of economics.
00:20:57.660So, the primary axis of oppression and oppressed for Marx was the economic axis.
00:21:05.320And he presumed that the reason that that inequality between oppressor and oppressed exists was because of the structure of capitalism.
00:21:17.280Now, whether or not he believed that is a whole different issue.
00:21:20.280Okay, so now I want to take that in two directions.
00:21:23.280I want to point to how that's metastasized into what I think is less than ideally conceptualized as cultural Marxism.
00:21:34.020And I want to also discuss its precursors, its archetypal precursors.
00:21:38.440Okay, so what seems to me to have happened, and I want your thoughts on this, is that Marx established the framework for an elaborated victim-victimizer narrative.
00:21:52.140But he basically stuck to the economic realm when he made that case.
00:21:58.880Now, as the revolution unfolded, what we found out was that the subversion of the capitalist order in favor of the oppressed only produced the universalization of poverty and produced no viable redistribution of equity or income.
00:22:17.440And so, by the 1970s, the hollowness of the economic approach to the victim-victimizer had been demonstrated so thoroughly that even idiot Marxists in France were forced to accept it.
00:22:34.700And so, you know the proof is compelling when a French intellectual is forced to swallow it.
00:22:40.640And so, then what happened, as far as I could tell, is the postmodernists, who were all Marxist at their core, decided that there was no utility in beating the economic inequality drum anymore,
00:22:54.820but that they could fragment the victim-victimizer narrative into a metastasis and say, well, the basic idea that it was a power dynamic that ruled everything was correct.
00:23:10.100But we underestimated the seriousness of the power dynamic because it shows up in the relationship between men and women,
00:23:20.440and it shows up in the patriarchal structure of the family, and it shows up in the dynamic of sex, and then the dynamic of gender and race and ethnicity.
00:23:30.120So, all of a sudden, you had the same victim-
00:24:19.560Now, I want to bring it backward, and you tell me what you think about this,
00:24:22.980because I think Marxism itself is a variant of something deeper, much deeper.
00:24:31.200So, there's a Marxist-like spirit that inverts the French Revolution soon after it occurs.
00:24:40.800And so, and that was well before Marx, and I've been thinking more archetypally, let's say,
00:24:47.360in relationship to fundamental stories, that Marxism is a variant, Marxism versus capitalism, let's say,
00:24:57.820as a variant of the story of Cain and Abel, right?
00:25:02.500Because Cain and Abel is really the first victim-victimizer narrative,
00:25:06.800and it basically presents the human moral landscape,
00:25:11.980because it's the first story about human beings in history, right?
00:25:16.320Because Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, let's say.
00:25:19.860Cain and Abel are the first two human beings that are born in the world of history,
00:25:24.880and they develop modes of being that are antithetical to one another,
00:25:29.540with Cain being the oppressed, angry, bitter, malevolent, murderous, and then genocidal victim,
00:25:36.420and Abel being the successful, right, the successful individual who strives forward,
00:25:44.760aims up, and makes the proper sacrifices.
00:25:47.100Now, that's presented in the biblical corpus as the fundamental spiritual division,
00:25:54.240and Cain's failure to make the proper offering, and then his rebellion against God,
00:26:00.140like there's a Luciferian touch to that, and it's definitely something that attracted Marx.
00:26:06.420Because Marx was an admirer of Mephistopheles, of Goethe's Mephistopheles,
00:26:13.760and Mephistopheles was the variant of the usurping spirit whose motivation was nothing but destruction.
00:26:23.060You know, you talked about the attack on all the levels of subsidiary society simultaneously, right?
00:26:30.900I mean, the Marxists definitely planned that.
00:26:33.640We can't have marriage because men and women are in a power battle.
00:26:37.540We can't have families because the family is a patriarchal, oppressive institution.
00:26:42.300We can't have communities because all powers should be ceded to the state, etc.
00:26:47.900But it seems to me that all of that has that roots in that fundamental antagonism that's laid out initially in the story of Cain and Abel.
00:26:59.820And what we are seeing is we're seeing variants of that story play out and also at an accelerated rate because of the rate of technological change.
00:27:08.840So, well, so, I've been thinking about those things a lot.
00:27:13.160That's what I've been lecturing about on this last tour.
00:27:15.440And in part, that's what my new book is about.
00:27:17.940So, I'm curious about your reaction, first of all, to the idea of a metastasizing Marxism.
00:27:23.960And then to the idea that Marxism itself is a variant of a, it's a retelling of a more fundamental story.
00:27:36.840Okay, so, my two reactions then, just as I was listening to you, one thing that has occurred to me is Marx and his work and his legacy and what we've done with it.
00:27:54.980So, you know this history better than I do.
00:27:58.540But the reaction he was hoping for, he had created a new religion, Marxism, it failed because instead of people sticking, his followers, his own disciples sticking with his revolutionary goals, what sprung up is the reformists.
00:28:25.280Basically, what I'm getting at, I'm schooled in political science, you're a psychologist, but it was, you know, the left and the right, the left divided up into these two branches.
00:28:34.480And one branch is fully Marxist and revolutionary and committed to the revolution and the other one becomes reformist.
00:28:42.180And I think that is the first defeat of the Marxist idea, that instead of overturning the capitalist system, you work within the capitalist system.
00:28:52.380And through incremental means, everybody's life gets better.
00:28:58.620Up until 1989, that whole economic argument of take from the rich, give to the poor, falls apart when it becomes, I think, obvious.
00:29:11.760If you stick with the material economic, the economic topic, that the Soviet Union collapses.
00:29:21.120And not only does the Soviet Union all have satellites everywhere that these five-year plans touch, you have devastation, you have masses of deaths, you have concentration camps, you have starvation.
00:29:37.440And then you look at the West and there's growth and so on.
00:29:44.560So, in 1989, I think there's this sense, the winners, the victorious, those who are victorious, maybe you want to say, you were comparing Cain and Apple, you could say, those who are victorious make one big mistake in my view after 1989, which is they forget about it.
00:30:05.060They think, they think, we've won this.
00:30:13.480The loser, for the loser, history is never over.
00:30:17.780For the loser, history begins when he loses.
00:30:20.460He has to shake off all of this and come up and come back.
00:30:24.080And they come back now with this idea of identity groups, of culture.
00:30:29.380The person who can tell this way better than I can is James Lindsay, who has been through all of their creeds and screeds and is really eloquent in the way he tells this.
00:31:01.020I was a Muslim, so it's like if we have the, as a Muslim, if I have God's last prophet, God's last book, God is on my side, then why are we poor and miserable and so on?
00:31:13.040And so in that world of ideas, in the 1990s, when I'm going to university, I'm acquainted with the idea of national socialism that nearly destroyed European society and Western society.
00:31:26.160And what follows after the defeat, listen to this, Jordan, after the defeat of national socialism, what happens is an intense process of de-Nazification.
00:31:38.680In fact, using some of the tools of subversion that Bezmanov speaks about.
00:31:44.520And after the process of de-Nazification, what follows is another reckoning of what was national socialism.
00:31:51.820Why would a society as advanced as Germany fall victim to ideas that later on we all understood to be so destructive?
00:32:05.720I come into the West just as it's going through that reckoning of the idea.
00:32:11.160And the idea is forensically scrutinized, and it becomes, after we fully understand what Hitler's ideas were, that this is something that would never and should never happen again.
00:32:28.980Now, this is something we did not do to communism.
00:33:02.500We were still trying to go after them and put them in jail.
00:33:05.260But we never did anything of the sort with Marxism.
00:33:10.080So the first thing I noticed, the big thing is, of course, this terrible idea keeps recurring, and it metastasizes, and it manifests itself in different ways.
00:33:20.660Because for the young generations, it never really has been here.
00:33:26.240This is what Marxism led to the death toll.
00:33:29.460I mean, we all have been schooled in how many people actually died.
00:33:33.420But more interesting, I think more fascinating is the Nazi psyche.
00:33:38.980Do you know, we explored it to the point that right now, there are conversations we can't have without everyone referencing Nazism.
00:33:50.380In fact, I think one of the reasons why Europe is completely paralyzed when it comes to the issue of immigration is because there is this terror, this fear that they might fall again into that nasty collective madness of putting people in concentration camps.
00:34:21.060So, well, you've got two issues there that run in parallel because, okay, three.
00:34:26.360So, the first is your observation that we assumed too prematurely after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that the spirit of communism was dead and buried.
00:34:43.000Now, if that spirit is a reflection of something far deeper, say, like the internal antagonism between Cain and Abel, then it's not going to be dead and buried, or at least it's not going to stay buried without a lot of work.
00:34:57.760And your point is, well, we didn't do that work.
00:35:00.700Now, we might have thought that the object lesson of the collapse of the Soviet Union, plus the capitalist transformation of China and the triumph of the democracies, was enough evidence that the West had something right.
00:35:18.360No, the house cleaning wasn't deep enough.
00:35:21.400Well, then you point out, though, that there's an additional problem, which is that we're not exactly sure how to handle internecine conflicts at a deep ideological level without falling prey to something like the worst excesses of the Nazi regime.
00:35:39.840It's like, well, let's imagine, for example, that we did do something like a demarxification of the institutions.
00:35:46.380I've been thinking about this in relationship to universities.
00:35:51.560So, you know, when Musk took over Twitter and demarxified it, he fired like 80% of the people.
00:36:01.320Now, I do not believe for a moment that an institution like Harvard can be reconstituted or restored when all of the same players are still in place,
00:36:14.780and they're doing the same thing with different words.
00:36:18.260Now, you know, I just met a couple of Harvard professors last week when I was in Boston who are at the forefront of the genuinely active free speech movement at Harvard.
00:41:19.180He makes a distinction between open societies and closed societies.
00:41:22.320And we know that the characteristics of an open society is that it's easier for the forces of subversion to access our institutions.
00:41:35.880And not only to access those institutions, but actually to use the laws and the conventions of open societies to establish themselves within universities, K2, 12, and all the various—just within our society.
00:41:51.540And so, we don't want to become closed societies.
00:41:58.580We have to pay the price of being an open society and remaining an open society.
00:42:04.560And one of those prices is this permanent vigilance where we can never forget what these ideological threats are.
00:42:12.600But also, we must not allow ourselves to fall into this trap of everything is gone.
00:42:21.500Because I think if you say all of these institutions are corrupt beyond repair, in a way, you do sort of propel the subversion further and you validate it.
00:42:35.280And I think we have to look at what our strengths are.
00:42:41.120And let's not forget, we have enormous resources.
00:42:49.160So, when the meltdown of our mainstream media, which is really a meltdown, the open society, what we responded is this independent media.
00:42:58.960Obviously, Elon Musk is this giant who stood up to, not just by establishing Twitter, but using his power and his leadership to say, this is what I stand for.
00:43:12.740So that his millions of followers know what his morals are and what his principles are.
00:43:19.200So, for me, Elon Musk is the definition of courage, standing up to all his different forces, putting his own, almost his life at stake and his life's earnings.
00:43:31.580And Elon Musk is this big visible guy, but there's so many people like that.
00:43:38.940So, we have all of these resources and starting new things like new universities, new media, I think that's a good thing, if only even to catch some of those people who despair of the existing institutions.
00:44:02.380I think in many ways the brand Harvard is ruined.
00:44:05.520But I don't think we should throw the baby with the bathwater.
00:44:08.200We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:44:10.980We should not declare that the Ivy League and all of the universities that we have in America and beyond in Western societies are beyond repair.
00:44:21.340I think some of them are terminal and have stage four cancer.
00:44:25.640And it will probably cost more to try and rescue them than to just let them die.
00:44:30.960But I think there are many that can be rescued.
00:44:33.260Ben Sass has made this very clear in Florida.
00:44:36.240You just have to change the leadership in some of these places.
00:44:41.760In other places, you have to go much deeper and turn around the demoralization process.
00:44:51.960The places that are actually on the level of destabilization try to turn those things around.
00:44:57.000But all of that starts with leadership.
00:44:59.180Have you talked to John Chalmers by any chance?
00:45:13.660We just had a very interesting discussion, which you might want to check out, about how—see, it's very much related, for example, to this idea of denazification that you described.
00:45:26.160So, in his analysis of the history of military endeavor, he's also thought through, from a strategic perspective, some of what's necessary in the transformation of institutions.
00:45:40.480Because certainly it was the case that after Nazi Germany, most of the Germans—it wasn't like all the Germans who participated in some ways in the Nazi regime were all tried and executed or confined to perdition.
00:45:55.620And most of them, except for a few leaders, were regarded as redeemable.
00:46:05.100And the leadership transition happened at the top.
00:46:08.020And Chalmers told me, you know, I asked him what he thought about the situation in Gaza, because so many of the Palestinians purport to support the Hamas regime and its aims.
00:46:22.920And so, a pessimist might say, well, that has to be dealt with in the most severe possible manner.
00:46:31.240And an optimist and hopefully a realist would say, well, no, if you're careful in analysis of the key people, you can produce a leadership change and then a transformation of spirit, let's say, that redeems people who've been possessed by these pathological ideas.
00:46:50.420And then, like Germany or like Japan, which are stellar examples of this, obviously, and, well, South Korea, for that matter, at least in terms of economic transformation, that great things are still possible without institutional devastation.
00:47:09.620So, that is a good vision of optimism, and I suppose Rufo did that to some degree by focusing his attention, for example, on Claudine Gay, which was an object lesson that perhaps many institutions took to heart.
00:47:25.460And it's also, that is why the trajectory of restoration is, I hope, is one that is going to be fruitful.
00:47:34.780And it's, I think we are in a place where, Jordan, I've never been more optimistic.
00:47:41.220And the reason is because people are waking up, and they're waking, people who are, I mean, busy with their industries, busy with their art, with their music, with whatever it is that they were doing.
00:47:58.440This subversion virus is touching on everyone's lives.
00:48:03.120There are people who are happy to ignore these things because they hate trouble, they don't like politics, they don't want to be involved in other fields.
00:48:11.840I'd say the general public in the West is, just loves going about their lives.
00:48:18.940And, by the way, that is, you know, when we talk about freedom, most of us really think about that.
00:48:26.380You know, we elect people who represent us, and we pay taxes, and I just want to get on with my life.
00:48:37.780People are feeling affected in every way, shape, and form.
00:48:41.100October 7th opened the eyes of many people.
00:48:46.000Our friend Barry Wise, I remember, she said everyone went to bed on October 7th and was, what did she say, went to bed as a liberal and woke up as a conservative.
00:49:00.540You know, it's funny, like, well, I wrote an article, which I'm going to read on my YouTube channel and publish on my blog.
00:49:09.600I wrote an article, I'll just lay it out for you very quickly, because I guess it's a bit of a pushback against your optimism.
00:49:16.460Although I share that optimism in a fundamental way, I don't want to get optimistic too early.
00:49:23.000So, here's the basic outline of the argument.
00:49:26.220So, and I sent it to the National Post in Canada, which always publishes what I wrote, and they took it and then rejected it.
00:49:36.120And then I sent it to the Telegraph, which also always publishes what I send them.
00:49:41.060And they took it and edited it and then rejected it.
00:49:44.100So, this is what I said, you know, it's a very contentious piece.
00:49:49.720So, I pointed to the fact that in the United States, something approximating 75% of the Jewish population supports the Democrats.
00:49:58.560Now, the problem with that is the Democrats have allowed themselves to be infiltrated by the radicals, who they will not attend to and whose existence they deny.
00:50:11.800And I know this full well, having worked on this issue for like five years and talked to hordes of moderate Democrats.
00:50:23.680It's like, yeah, they mean exactly what they're saying.
00:50:27.800The radicals have adopted the victim-victimizer narrative.
00:50:32.260Now, the problem with that for the Jews is that if we're going to play victim-victimizer,
00:50:38.920and the victims are the people who are the victimizers, are the people who are successful,
00:50:44.640then the Jews are first on the firing line, like they always have been since the time of Exodus,
00:50:52.620because the Jews are the perpetually successful minority.
00:50:56.100And I think that's why they're the canary in the coal mine,
00:50:59.220is that when a society flips and the successful become the criminals, let's say, in the eyes of the ideologues,
00:51:07.980the first criminals identified are the Jews, because they are overrepresented in positions of success.
00:51:16.980And so part of what I suggested, and this is what Barry Weiss has realized, let's say,
00:51:23.140is that the worst possible game for the Jewish community to play is any game that has anything to do with a victim-victimizer narrative.
00:51:33.340Now, there's something also very interesting about that, like I've spent a lot of time looking at the Old Testament in recent years,
00:51:41.240and there's something very interesting about the Israelites, at least insofar as they maintain their alliance with the prophetic tradition and the laws,
00:51:51.380is that every time something untoward happens to Israel,
00:51:56.280the prophets call upon the Jews to take personal responsibility for that and not to regard themselves as victims,
00:52:05.420no matter what, to reestablish their covenant, so that would be this restoration,
00:52:11.600and to proceed with cleaning up the, what would you say, the cancer in their own souls first.