The Atlantic Magazine has outed Mitt Romney for using a secret Twitter account named Pierre Delecto to criticize President Trump as well as his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Meanwhile, a man named Rhea who identifies as a woman files a hate crime report against a pornographer because he refused to have sex with him after learning he isn t a woman. We will examine what Pierre and Rhea tell us about identity in the age of social media.
00:02:01.500Now, obviously, we know Mitt Romney doesn't like Newt Gingrich.
00:02:03.960They ran against each other in 2012 for the presidential nomination.
00:02:06.940So, it's not that Mitt Romney or Pierre Delecto wrote that tweet, but he liked that tweet from someone else.
00:02:13.860Here's another one from Matthew Dowd, who's an ex-Republican and an ABC News political analyst, also liked by Pierre Delecto.
00:02:21.220Now, watching Rudy Giuliani's transition from America's mayor to what he is today is like watching how a villain comes to be in a Batman movie.
00:02:39.560Quote, this can't be retweeted enough.
00:02:41.860And what it was, was a retweet of Bill Kristol, who himself was tweeting out an old clip of Lindsey Graham calling for Clinton's impeachment in the 1990s.
00:02:50.360And this was being used as a case to impeach Donald Trump.
00:03:53.980The reason it matters is that he's not doing it honestly.
00:03:57.760He's not, he doesn't have the guts to come out and actually like these tweets or tweet these things or say these things to people's faces.
00:04:04.100You know, if this were President Trump, he would do it from his own Twitter account.
00:04:08.100That's really the big difference between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump is not even, you know, the use of Twitter and the use of snark and the use of snide comments.
00:04:16.240It's just that Donald Trump owns up to his and Mitt Romney doesn't.
00:04:20.860Mitt Romney is the one who's going to like make a little snide remark and then hide behind a building before the guy comes and sees what someone said.
00:04:29.020And he regularly does use his own account with the verified checkmark and his own name and his own picture to throw these kinds of insults.
00:04:36.240President Trump also has used sort of fake personas before he he got made fun of a little while ago because it came out that he was impersonating his own publicist in the 1980s to get himself more news articles.
00:04:50.860President Trump or a person who sounds a whole lot like President Trump was pretending to be a publicist named John Barron.
00:04:59.160And this is what he sounded like in 1984.
00:05:51.400Also, President Trump named his son Barron.
00:05:53.260So he's got a kind of fascination with this name anyway.
00:05:57.000Again, this is not even a knock on false identities in the realm of politics, in the realm of show business, in the realm of theater.
00:06:03.240People put on a lot of false identities.
00:06:05.580The question is, what are you using it for?
00:06:08.580In the case of John Barron, the fictitious publicist, Trump was using it to build himself up, build up his brand.
00:06:15.600In the case of Pierre Delecto, Mitt Romney was using it to vent his frustration, to tear down his colleagues, to tear down the president because he didn't have the guts to do it publicly himself.
00:06:28.940It seems like an unimportant news story.
00:06:30.600I think it actually tells us a lot about identity in the age of social media, identity in this age that we're all living in right now.
00:06:40.440Because speaking of false identities, you have a transgender woman, so a man who identifies as a woman, now filing a hate crime report against a pornographer who he was working with because the pornographer wanted to sleep with him when he thought that he was a she.
00:06:59.740But then when he found out that he didn't want to sleep with him anymore, and this apparently constitutes a hate crime.
00:07:05.560This has many layers of identity, but it tells us a lot about our culture.
00:07:10.340Before we get to that, I have got to thank our friends over at First Leaf, a new sponsor of the show.
00:07:17.160So just that alone would make me love them.
00:07:20.240And a new wine sponsor for the show, that alone would make me love them too.
00:09:04.060So you've got Pierre Delecto, which is actually not the most absurd false identity story of the day because we have this transgender model in Britain who is suing a pornographer because he won't have sex with him who identifies as her.
00:09:23.380The model's name is Rhea Cooper, and Rhea Cooper was contacted by this photographer who asked if she wanted to appear in porn, and they're kind of flirting.
00:09:36.320It's this highly sexually charged conversation, and then the pornographer finds out that Rhea is a man who looks like a woman, and he went back on the offer, and the transgender model said,
00:09:50.000well, why don't you want to work together anymore, and the pornographer said, well, we can't sleep together because you have a, and then he used a vulgar term, but to refer to male genitalia.
00:10:03.680And Rhea, the transgender model, was shocked and terribly offended by this, said that it was transphobic behavior, and contacted the Humberside police.
00:10:12.360This was in the United Kingdom, and the police are actually looking into the matter as a hate incident.
00:10:19.700How does someone become so deluded that you think that if you're a man, and a man doesn't want to have sex with you, that you're the victim of a hate crime?
00:10:27.840Well, Rhea Cooper, a while ago, became Britain's youngest person ever to transition.
00:10:39.040So he was 15 years old, and some sick perverts were preying on this 15-year-old boy and told him to transform his body and take hormones and go through this identity transition so that he could appear to be a woman.
00:10:54.580Obviously, this is incredible medical malpractice.
00:10:58.480There's nothing rooted in science or medicine here.
00:11:01.440This is a social experiment that is being conducted on a child, and not just one child.
00:11:05.240This is happening all throughout the West, so I can sort of understand why Rhea Cooper is confused here, but this is lunacy.
00:11:17.620Where does this idea that we need to hide behind these false identities come from?
00:11:25.100This is basically the inevitable consequence of a selfish culture and high-speed internet.
00:11:31.140This is what happens, because on the internet, you can go into your own little corner in your own little room where you can be whatever you want to be in your own fantasies.
00:11:44.160Look, Mitt Romney, he's a really stern, dignified guy.
00:11:53.280He's as American pie as they come until he gets on his little troll Pierre D'Electo account, and then he's throwing stones at Trump, and he's making fun of Newt Gingrich for having multiple wives, and he's going after Marco Rubio for being little Marco.
00:12:09.720I mean, he's actually hurling the same insults at Marco Rubio that Donald Trump hurled at Marco Rubio, and then all of the genteel Republicans like Mitt Romney say it's so awful for Trump to say that.
00:12:18.800Mitt Romney's doing exactly the same thing.
00:12:20.380He just doesn't have the guts to come out and do it in his own identity.
00:12:24.020He has to do it behind this little secret account, Pierre D'Electo.
00:13:04.920But you do wonder, if you saw any of these people in person, if they actually had to stand behind their own identity, would any of them say these things?
00:13:18.220Even in the case of Rhea Cooper, this transgender model in Britain, it is identity under several layers because it's a man who is trying to hide behind this false identity of a woman.
00:13:30.240But the interaction that took place with the pornographer also took place on social media.
00:13:34.780So you're another level removed from an actual human interaction.
00:13:39.760I suspect, I obviously don't know this transgender model, but I suspect if you got to know him in real life and you said, listen, I'm a man and I don't want to sleep with you.
00:13:50.020It's nothing against you, but you're a man and I'm not attracted to men.
00:13:54.540And, you know, that's kind of like one of the top reasons why this isn't going to work out.
00:13:58.800I suspect he wouldn't run out and file a police report.
00:14:02.300But because there's another level of removal from identity, this allows people to just indulge all of their worst inclinations, all of their own delusions.
00:14:13.280I mean, this actually, speaking of pornography, this is the illusion of pornography.
00:14:17.480In porn, you can live out any fantasy that you want.
00:14:21.280This is why it's so pervasive, especially with high speed Internet, because you can do whatever you want.
00:14:26.300If you if you can imagine it, there's a porn for it.
00:14:29.320OK, there was a liberal writer, Kurt Eichenwald, who he got caught.
00:14:33.360He posted a screenshot of something and then the Internet made fun of him because there was a tab of tentacle porn, which I have not researched since that news story came out.
00:17:00.140Even Mitt Romney, he goes in before the public and he's got these preening and he's preaching and he's moralizing and talking about all the terrible things Trump does.
00:17:09.280And then he does exactly the same things behind closed doors, behind an anonymous Twitter account.
00:17:14.520But it's okay for Mitt Romney because he wants to do them.
00:18:10.840You know, we talked to that trans ex-transgender guy, Peter Benjamin on the show the other day.
00:18:15.760And he said what was so heartbreaking is he was so excited to finally live in what had been a very compelling fantasy for decades of his life, which is that he would become a woman.
00:18:27.220And then he became a woman and he had this moment of euphoria.
00:18:30.400And then he realized he wasn't really a woman.
00:18:33.620He had the fantasy being lived out almost as perfectly as possible, but it was still a fantasy.
00:18:58.620Rates of suicide are way up among the general population, but over a 10-year period, 2006 to 2016, they're up 70% among white children, 10 to 17 years old.
00:19:14.080Among black and other minority children, they're up 77%, which is wild because black and minority children kill themselves at a lower rate than white children.
00:19:23.080But they're up even more among the minority children.
00:19:25.440This is not a single demographic problem.
00:20:14.040And what's so amazing about this is you see somebody like Mitt Romney, who you expect to be the most prim and proper, put-together, stable guy.
00:20:26.700You see him hiding and sniping behind this anonymous Twitter account.
00:20:30.680And then you see a guy like Kanye West.
00:20:33.580Kanye West, who embodies in many ways everything about our technological, postmodern, narcissistic age.
00:20:42.500And while Mitt Romney is running in the direction of that fantasy, while Mitt Romney is running in the direction of that anonymity and those petty snipes, Kanye West is running in exactly the other direction.
00:20:52.960He apparently nearly quit rap when he had this conversion experience to Christianity.
00:20:58.620There was a friend of his, Adam Tyson, who is the head pastor of the Placerita Bible Church, apparently knows Kanye West.
00:21:04.820And Kanye came to him and said, I don't even want to rap anymore.
00:21:08.240And Adam Tyson, I guess, talked him out of that.
00:21:10.580But that's how serious, that's how profound Kanye's conversion or reversion experience was.
00:21:27.220I think he was already thinking about it a little bit, but I just definitely said, hey, bro, I think you need to use your talents that God's given you and use that platform for God.
00:22:28.060And this pastor was largely wrong, I think, on the question, which is Kanye appears to be experiencing a submission of the ego or a restraining of the ego.
00:22:39.340And for somebody like Kanye West, that's got to be on the one hand kind of easy because he's got ample ego to restrain.
00:24:53.500And this is why you see people losing their mind in identity politics because they're grasping for something that's bigger than them, something that will give them some sort of permanence.
00:25:03.700And that might be racial solidarity or sexual solidarity or class solidarity.
00:25:10.240But those things don't give permanence either because even those are social creatures.
00:25:18.540Even those are things of this world that will pass away.
00:25:20.780Very difficult time to live in when Kanye West has greater clarity about the culture and about religion and about identity itself than the 2012 Republican nominee for president.
00:25:35.580That's very difficult time for the culture when the 2012 Republican nominee for president has more in common with a UK transgender model than he does with with a sort of a stable person, a very stable genius, you might say.
00:25:51.240Those are the times we're living in, though.
00:25:52.680So we've got to get to the 2020 election because Liz Warren, who was running on the one hand to moderate in recent weeks, is now running back to the left and the mainstream media is following her.
00:26:04.340The mainstream media has a great idea for the vice president if Bernie Sanders is nominated by the Democratic Party.
00:26:11.880And all of this is having an effect on President Trump, though it's probably not the effect that they want.
00:26:28.640That means that the loudest, the most celebrated and the highest paid leftists say that it is their duty to defend their freedom of speech by kneeling in protest during our national anthem and completely disrespecting our own country.
00:26:44.880Meanwhile, meanwhile, they're going to have to stand with the communist government of China, one of the worst regimes in the history of the world and which currently has about three million people in concentration camp.
00:32:16.240If you stand in the middle of the road, you are going to get hit by a truck.
00:32:20.160Now, the mainstream media understand this.
00:32:24.040That's why the mainstream media are just running as far to the left as they possibly can.
00:32:27.560Even if it means that they disregard the Constitution, most of them probably haven't read the Constitution in the first place.
00:32:34.220You saw this when recently Bernie Sanders was doing an interview alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.
00:32:43.340And CBS News asks Bernie and AOC if they would ever consider running as a ticket.
00:32:50.200If AOC could possibly be the vice presidential candidate for Bernie Sanders in 2020.
00:35:25.400And if the mainstream media and the left are going to persist in believing that's going to give them the White House, they are in for a rude awakening.
00:36:27.780Even a lot of Democratic strategists, though, are pointing out that money is all going to go to cross-purposes.
00:36:33.080They're running a primary campaign, which Trump doesn't need to do.
00:36:36.740And they're going to spend that money tearing each other down.
00:36:40.260Joe Biden, who is theoretically the frontrunner, is burning through his campaign funds at a rate that is simply too fast to sustain a general election campaign.
00:36:48.840He is spending 12% more than he's taking in.
00:36:52.540Because he knows his campaign might not be long for this world.
00:36:54.800So he's trying to burn that cash now to at least keep his head above water, because the minute that he really falls down in those polls, he's over.
00:37:02.560Joe Biden is spending 30% more than the Liz Warren campaign, and Liz Warren is the one nipping at his heels.
00:37:08.420But even Warren is not fine on that front, because Warren is cutting herself off from high-dollar donors, and she's refusing to appear at big-money fundraisers.
00:37:18.460Because she's having this identity crisis, and she needs to figure out if she's going to be the big establishment heir to Hillary Clinton, or if she's going to be the heir to Bernie Sanders, and she's going to be the small-dollar donations, and she's going to be a woman of the people.
00:37:30.620So she's going to try to win some fans among the Democratic primary voters, but it's going to starve her campaign of money that she needs.
00:37:41.740Bernie, he raises a lot of small-dollar donations.
00:37:45.100Bernie has a problem, too, though, which is that one of Bernie's biggest donors is the Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, and Tom Steyer is now running for president himself.
00:37:57.200Trump enjoying all of this, raising a whole lot of cash.
00:38:00.800We all remember how the mainstream media got the 2016 election completely wrong, so I'm very skeptical of polls.
00:38:08.180You know, there was that Fox News poll the other day that came out and showed the majority of Americans support impeachment and removal from office.
00:38:14.760And I saw that poll, and I said, I just don't believe that.
00:38:20.460I think I have a pretty clear eye when it comes to these things, or I certainly try to have a clear eye when it comes to these things.
00:38:26.220And I thought, that just doesn't sound right to me.
00:38:28.280I don't think that after three years of all these BS attempts to overturn the 2016 election, that right now the majority of Americans want to throw the president out of office because he made a long-distance phone call to Ukraine or something.
00:38:42.440I don't even think most people have any idea what this non-troversy is about.
00:38:48.980It later came out that that poll grossly oversampled Democrats, so it skewed the poll very much in the favor of impeachment and removal from office.
00:38:56.520This is why I'm much more interested in hard dollars, intangible indicators of how this election is going.
00:39:27.960This is not even just affecting pop culture.
00:39:30.000This is affecting increasingly young people.
00:39:33.720So the transgender activist or the transgender model in the United Kingdom was 15 years old when medical malpractitioners and a confused culture convinced him to live the rest of his life as a woman and possibly make permanent alterations to his body because of that.
00:40:17.140It means that we are not, not only are we going to erase standards of truth and reality from our curricula, which has been happening for decades now, it's just perspectives.
00:40:30.260But they're going to follow that idea to its logical conclusion and erase standards from grading as well.
00:40:35.840This was not a one-off workshop at Boise State.
00:40:39.060The same event was hosted at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
00:40:43.620This event was aimed to, quote, engage instructors in conversations and activities designed to foreground diversity and inclusion in considerations of assessment and grading practices.
00:40:56.800Have you made your way swimming through all that jargon yet?
00:40:59.820What it means is you're going to grade different people, not based on the quality of their work, but on the color of their skin and on their sex and on their sexual preferences.
00:41:09.980There's a similar event at American University.
00:41:12.400This is how the event at American University built itself.
00:41:15.460How to assess writing without judging its quality.
00:41:35.960This workshop warned that, quote, the practices of grading writing maintained white language supremacy.
00:41:46.260That to use correct language is racist somehow.
00:41:51.520Another workshop was called Why Are You Reacting That Way?
00:41:54.920And it promised to, quote, give participants opportunities to examine the lens they use to interact with others and understand why there is resistance.
00:42:02.720What this means is it was going to teach teachers not how to deal with bad students who were disrupting class and causing problems,
00:42:11.820but to teach teachers not to discipline those students, just to learn from them.
00:42:18.140And when the student acts up, realize that it's probably your fault and to figure out what you're going to learn from the student that way.
00:42:26.220And everything about this comes from the exact same identity crisis that affects Rhea Cooper and Pierre Delecto and all the rest of us in the me, me, me social media era.
00:42:38.720All the rest of us in the era of being one and all the Time Magazine person of the year.
00:42:44.140With the writing quality, writing expresses and reflects your thoughts.
00:42:51.300To write well is to think clearly, which is why it's so hard.
00:42:54.200That's what the great historian and writer David McCullough said.
00:43:24.680It can't admit to any of that because that would contradict the self.
00:43:27.660So, if you are really bad at writing and you put out some bad writing, it couldn't possibly be that you're bad at writing.
00:43:34.500The premise is I'm perfect at everything and all of my desires must be satisfied.
00:43:40.320So, then the only other option is writing itself is not objective.
00:43:45.260It couldn't possibly be that you got a bad grade because you're a little slow or you didn't do the work or you're a little bit lazy or you stayed up too late going to a party.
00:44:16.120It comes right down to the central problem of preferring fantasy to reality, to preferring the indulgence of our own appetites, to the satisfaction of eternal longings, bigger longings than ourselves.
00:44:29.180And it comes down to the identity question.
00:46:05.720Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:46:09.500You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:46:15.900But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
00:46:19.080So come on over to The Andrew Klavan Show and laugh your way through the apocalypse with me, Andrew Klavan.