In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend James Lindsey to discuss the rise of the mentally ill as a cultural icon, and why it's a symptom of a larger societal problem. We talk about the lack of mental health support for people with mental illness, the decline of mental illness as a brand ambassador, and the role of a mentally ill person who needs help. And we compare this phenomenon to the fall of the great brand ambassadors of the past, like Michael Jordan and Michael Jordan, and Dylan Mulvaney, and how it may have a lot to do with the current state of the country and the way we think about mental illness in America. We also discuss the parallels between China's Mao Zedong and the Soviet Union, and America's current political and economic systems, and what it means to be "deplorable" and "uninclusive" in the 21st century. You can find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes for our upcoming sponsorships here. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers! Thanks also to my guest, James Lindsey, for joining me on this episode. I hope you enjoy this episode and tweet me if you have any thoughts or ideas you d like to be part of the conversation. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's the problem? 2:30 - Why do people need mental illness support? 3:00 | Why are people with a mental illness need help? 4:15 - Why is someone who needs it? 5:20 - How to be mentally ill? 6:40 - What is the most important thing? 7: What do we need to be an icon? 8: Why do we have to be a cultural hero? 9:00 10:30 11:15 What is a mental ill person? 12:40 13:10 - What are we all have to do? 15:00 What does it matter? 16:30 | Why is it wrong? 17:10 14:00 Why are we need a culture that needs to be better than other people? 16 - How can we be a better than a better country? 19:00 How do we know we can be better? 21:00 Can we be more diverse? 22:20 Is it possible to be more inclusible?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:21.000my friend james lindsey and uh he's just recovering from some covet but uh fortunately a man with as much brain power as he has when it sort of you know gets a little bit covet brained for a couple of days is still a man with a lot of brain power so So we're going to talk about something.
00:00:43.000He caught my attention when he was tweeting, James, welcome back to the podcast.
00:01:09.000But the mentally ill person who needs help is actually getting endorsement deals and being turned into a cultural icon because of their mental illness.
00:01:18.000I'm talking about Dylan Mulvaney and the rest of the country that believes it's a cool thing to think of yourself as being born into the wrong gender body type world.
00:01:43.000As for why this is happening, but there are a lot of features that are part of why I think we're seeing this kind of fall from the great brand ambassadors like Michael Jordan for Nike back in the day to Dylan Mulvaney now.
00:02:03.000And one of those factors seems to be, in their own admission, we just saw a video, I guess, went viral around social media that is one of the...
00:02:14.000I'm not exactly sure what her title is, but marketing people at Bud Light or Anheuser-Busch came out and said, well, we were trying to figure out how to reach a new demographic.
00:02:24.000The Bud Light brand was going to die, so we're trying to figure out how to reach to a different demographic.
00:02:29.000So this, I don't know, 30-something woman sitting there in a corporate environment saying that it was her brainchild was to try to reach to a different demographic because the brand was going to die out.
00:02:44.000Apparently, millennials are into a, as you said, blatantly mentally ill man pretending not to be a woman, but a girl, which is an extra layer of strange, right?
00:03:00.000organic component to it, which is that for some reason there is a significant swath of the population that is moved by the value, the kind of very synthetic value of inclusivity that's been pushed upon them as a core value for what the future should the kind of very synthetic value of inclusivity that's been pushed upon And there is a kind of organic push to feed into that.
00:03:23.000I don't think it's as organic as all of that.
00:03:26.000I think that in fact, as a synthetic value, there's sort of the same kind of things that have been seen in regimes, and I use that word quite intentionally in the past, where only the people who have the new values are the ones who count as the people who are interesting and everybody else can be alienated or to where only the people who have the new values are the ones who count as use are the ones who count as the people who are interesting and everybody else can be alienated or to be quite blunt about it.
00:03:46.000You know, when we look at a place like North Korea and it calls itself the People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Korea, the only people who count as the people are the people who are on board with the program and nobody else is the people.
00:04:00.000This was a feature in the Soviet Union that when you get kind of this totalizing ideology being pressed from the top, there's a tendency to decide that there are the people who are on board and then there are deplorables who are not.
00:04:17.000And And the deplorables can basically be discounted and ignored and so on.
00:04:21.000Let's just talk about that for a second.
00:04:23.000Are you drawing an analogy to other totalitarian regimes in the past there or you think that's more of a specific to American context?
00:04:30.000I don't think that there's a whole lot of daylight in between the regimes of the past and the direction of America right now actually.
00:04:38.000I think that if you read Mao, as I have spent much of the past several months doing in some detail, that you find a very similar blueprint to the way that things have been evolving in the United States.
00:04:54.000So, in this case, I actually think that when you hear their excuses that they make, Larry Fink made similar excuses talking about this kind of transformation of the market recently.
00:05:08.000The people are demanding more inclusive brands.
00:05:11.000They're demanding a more inclusive environment.
00:05:14.000I mean, like, let's just, I mean, before, I mean, you and I, we should get to, like, all the made-up BS, astroturf, you know, appearance of this demand side.
00:05:24.000It's really just supply-side driven, but forget that for a second.
00:05:28.000Like, the inclusivity, it's just an interesting framing, right?
00:05:33.000Because I think in the name of being inclusive, there's a new culture of exclusion where somebody who has a different point of view, where in this Dylan Mulvaney thing, a grown man acting like a girl in a way that's effectively making fun of women is not all that inclusive to women. a grown man acting like a girl in a way But let's just start with that, let alone the majority of Americans who recognize that gender dysphoria, as it's been recognized for most of our country's history, is a mental health condition that deserves to be treated.
00:06:03.000But like, how do we square that with this idea that she's taking the best possible argument year for why that inclusivity would that that version of inclusivity would help Bud Light increase its market share?
00:06:16.000I just think it is destined to not have that effect, which gets me back to the question of what the heck is going on here.
00:06:22.000Well, I mean, the biggest – the best argument – so let's do the steel man approach to this.
00:06:27.000The best argument is that the culture has changed.
00:06:30.000The culture in America throughout the West has changed.
00:06:33.000It looks back at the past where we were exclusive of LGBT or gays and trans people in general that we saw them as different or weird or unacceptable or sinful or whatever the different thing is.
00:06:47.000And that the young people in particular, the generations 45 and under, so really us and everybody younger than us coming up, refuse to participate in a world that's like the world used to be.
00:07:02.000And so it's not so much that the demand across the board is one way or another.
00:07:08.000It's the changing demographics indicate that the changing demand says that we have to behave in a different way.
00:07:14.000And inclusion is the value that they've picked up.
00:07:17.000Now, I don't think this is comprehensible.
00:07:19.000This is why I invoked Mao, which is a heavy name to throw onto the table, I fully admit.
00:07:24.000I don't think this is comprehensible, this concept of inclusivity, which clearly, as you said, it doesn't seem to include women.
00:07:31.000It doesn't seem to include most Americans.
00:07:34.000It certainly isn't inclusive of the so-called straight white male or whatever else.
00:07:41.000I think it has to be understood in terms of the way that Mao laid out his formula to transform China in the 1940s.
00:07:47.000In 1942, he expressed the formula that he was going to use to transform China, which was called unity criticism unity.
00:07:55.000And so what you do is you create, in his words, the desire for unity.
00:07:59.000You put forth a standard of unity and say, we're going to unify as a country around this.
00:08:04.000And then you start to criticize people who don't live up to that standard of unity.
00:08:08.000And you get them to start to criticize themselves.
00:08:10.000They're not inclusive enough in today's parlance.
00:08:13.000We just want a place where everybody feels welcome, like they belong.
00:08:17.000That's sort of the creating that desire for unity.
00:08:19.000And then he says on the other side of this, after the criticism, you have unity under a new standard.
00:08:25.000And so what you're doing is a – what he's doing with his formula is a deliberate shift in what the culture accepts and doesn't accept.
00:08:33.000And it's done through this approach to what will the society include and what will the society exclude with criticism.
00:08:42.000You know, we're going to have a new inclusive society.
00:08:44.000Well, you're transphobic, so you're not part of that, so we're going to criticize you and teach you to criticize yourself.
00:08:49.000Now, for Mao, the new standard, he called it socialist discipline.
00:08:53.000But I think for us, it's sustainability and inclusion unquestionably as the new value system.
00:08:59.000We're not so interested in the West and so-called socialist discipline.
00:09:03.000But sustainability and inclusion sound really good.
00:09:05.000And so when we see events like this and we say, well, we're looking for a more inclusive future, which is a buzzword we hear all the time.
00:09:14.000I think that this is the concept that we're seeing put into play.
00:09:20.000And I would be surprised if it's not, you know, with self-awareness by some of the people putting it into action that this is the formula Mao used to transform China in the 1940s and 1950s.
00:09:36.000I think that there are versions of the identity and then criticism that might even make sense.
00:09:45.000I'm not saying they're good, but they're coherent.
00:09:47.000I think the version that's grounded is inclusiveness.
00:09:51.000Is itself kind of circular because once it's achieved, you no longer have the inclusiveness as a rallying cry anymore because the excluded or the allegedly excluded has already internalized and become included.
00:10:09.000And I think that there was a point in our history where that actually might have been a powerful galvanizing tool, right?
00:10:14.000The Civil Rights Revolution was all about that, right?
00:10:18.000And there were people of certain races that were not included in the literal sense.
00:10:22.000They couldn't walk into a diner in certain parts of this country and sit in the same part of the restaurant, right?
00:10:29.000I mean, there were certain periods of time, you know, until even relatively recently, a decade or so ago, where people couldn't get married to a person of the same sex or whatever.
00:10:40.000But the thing that's interesting about the moment we live in right now, and my friend Douglas Murray, your dad was right, right?
00:10:49.000I think he's the one who was, we have all others who have pointed this out.
00:10:52.000I've pointed this out and chatted about it too.
00:10:55.000It's sort of a weird thing when it's precisely when that movement reached its promised land that it went most haywire, which is...
00:11:08.000I don't want to say it's uniquely American.
00:11:10.000Maybe it's actually, you know, a pattern that repeats itself through human history.
00:11:14.000But it was when the stated civil rights movement reached its own stated goals.
00:11:23.000That it started making up new civil rights instead.
00:11:26.000Which weirdly, because inclusivity in some ways is a part of a zero-sum whole.
00:11:34.000You want to get everyone into that hole.
00:11:35.000The process of once you've done it, then still running on the same engine.
00:11:42.000It's like an immune system that's on overdrive.
00:11:44.000Is you start then killing the host, where here, the way you do it is some of the people you took that much trouble to include inclusively, say, with it, are now trampled under the weight of actually denying the existence of womanhood.
00:12:02.000Or either not denying it or fetishizing it through effectively the likes of Dylan Mulaney, who then gets showered on with lucrative endorsement deals to actually trample on the vision of femininity that 70 years ago or 30 years ago was the product of inclusion of including women.
00:12:19.000Or this trans movement that now says that rejects the premise of the gay rights movement that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.
00:12:29.000That was what the gay rights inclusiveness movement was all about.
00:12:33.000Because someone was hardwired this way, it's an unfair thing to penalize the movement.
00:12:38.000Now, to make the exact opposite move, to say, no, no, no, forget we ever said that, your own biological sex and sexuality is entirely fluid over the course of your own lifetime.
00:12:47.000And so it's sort of this weird thing where when you reach the promised land, what your own belief system says is the promised land.
00:12:57.000It stops being the promised land because you have to wreck it to continue in your never-ending march towards inclusivity.
00:13:06.000And so that's why that seems like a weirdly unachievable goal versus at least a raw nationalistic water, even one that's grounded in ethnic homogeneity, our ethnicity good, someone else's ethnicity bad.
00:13:19.000It seems like that would be much more effective for even unifying a group of people, even if it's towards a bad end.
00:13:26.000That even this model, which just sort of crumbles under the weight of its own incoherence.
00:13:33.000You sort of see what I'm saying there?
00:13:34.000I do, but I think there is a pretty simple explanation for this.
00:13:38.000And just to stay within the realm of organic movements without having to say...
00:13:42.000You know, as you articulated in Woke Inc, that some big financiers figured out that this is a powerful tool they can fund and use.
00:13:51.000So I think there is an organic explanation here.
00:13:54.000We don't even have to invoke any of the kind of, you know, these companies have figured out that they can use this like you wrote about in Woke Inc as a tool.
00:14:03.000And that is that in any given movement, not to speak too statistically, but there is a distribution of different types of activists involved.
00:14:10.000There are people who say within say, let's just stick with the gay civil rights movement.
00:14:15.000There are people whose goal it is to say achieve marriage equality and to be able to live their life, no criminalization of homosexuality, you know, just very basic civil rights.
00:14:26.000And when they reach the promised land, as you said, what are they going to do?
00:14:31.000Well, they're going to go live their lives.
00:14:35.000And then there are going to be people who are more at the margins of that movement, who are more into, you know, whether it's with pride, there's just been this debate.
00:14:45.000You know, is it people that are going to march just for gay civil rights or do we have to include fetish at pride?
00:14:50.000Do we have to have somebody dressed up in a costume?
00:15:18.000Together, you have a group of people who still are outside of the acceptable, the people who want to show up to work in fetish gear or whatever else.
00:15:25.000I mean, that's quite literally a demand written in the queer theory literature is that people should be...
00:15:30.000Gail Rubin's Thinking Sex talks about how people should be able to come to work in fetish gear and not be judged for it.
00:15:35.000And people are going to judge you for this.
00:15:38.000And this is still going to be excluded.
00:15:40.000And so what you end up with is in some sense a remnant after the success of a movement where the only people left are the people who are kind of the most radical.
00:15:49.000The people who are the most committed.
00:15:51.000But also the people who are still actually outside of the bounds of acceptability.
00:15:55.000So the only place the movement can go, if it continues, is crazy.
00:16:00.000And what we see with kind of leftist activism very commonly, with this identity activism very commonly, is we see them engaging in egregious bad behavior.
00:16:09.000And then when somebody says that's egregious bad behavior and we don't want you to do egregious bad behavior, they say, you're doing – you only say so because of my race.
00:16:36.000They get expelled from two of them anyway, got expelled from the state legislature.
00:16:41.000And immediately they say, well, you expelled us because of race where the violation of House decorum was quite explicit.
00:16:48.000We find that the guys have histories of causing at least one of the guys, the Justin Jones guy, has a history of causing problems.
00:16:56.000He actually assaulted the previous speaker of the House in 2019 and was banned from the floor of the House entirely.
00:17:04.000I mean, I think the reality is it's the opposite.
00:17:07.000If they were black, I think there's a decent chance the investigation would have actually been far more aggressive than just a legislative procedure, right?
00:17:17.000I mean, just think about what happened on January 6th in the Capitol.
00:17:21.000And in the way that was treated by the federal police state, I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making an analogous observation that, if anything, it's actually these identitarian labels are a shield against how people actually are held to account for The way they would have been treated regardless of the color of their skin or regardless of their sexuality.
00:17:47.000And, you know, the interesting thing is we are reaching a breaking point, though, where the very people who fought vehemently, a breakpoint in coherence, I would say, is even on the left, where the very people who fought for Title IX saying that there had to be equal funding.
00:18:02.000And look, I think the Title IX is not...
00:18:07.000I mean, if there are more boys who wish to participate in sports than girls, I think there was a legitimate debate.
00:18:15.000It's not an issue that I'm particularly passionate about, but I could see reasonable debate to say that, well, it should be at least ratably...
00:18:26.000actually want to participate in sports versus girls, as opposed to saying it has to be 50-50, even if four times as many boys actually want to participate in sports versus girls.
00:18:38.000The progressive left won on that movement only to now have that same progressive left unwind the coherence of its stance or just take something from the other side of the world with respect to Islamophobia.
00:18:53.000You say anything that's critical of Islam And you may be Islamophobic, and yet look at what Islam has to say about gay people, let alone the modern version of queer.
00:19:05.000Those butt up against each other as you have, like, let's just say a devout Muslim who needs to pray five times a day in the workplace.
00:19:11.000You have to make accommodations in the workplace for that person to be able to do it, according to civil rights laws, etc., reasonable accommodations.
00:19:18.000And then somebody shows up wearing fetish gear.
00:19:22.000Like, those two things don't work at the same time if they're supposed to sit next to each other at work because one runs against the fundamental religious precept of the guy who has to go to the prayer room five times a day because the civil rights laws demand it.
00:19:34.000It's just that once the inclusivity umbrella...
00:19:40.000Forget the criticisms that people like you and I would have for what it does to national character, or the fact that it's not even inherently inclusive at all, or it's not inclusive of a majority of Americans, which I think is the essence of the issue.
00:19:52.000There's this side issue that I was just thinking about over the weekend where it almost doesn't work on its own terms.
00:19:59.000If you look at it for the last 30 years, you can't have It is at once Islamophobic to say that that Islamic included person should not be offended by this fact, as it is to say it's not inclusive of women to deny the existence of women's sports that the same progressive women fought a bunch of time fighting for.
00:20:22.000Actually, I'm curious if somebody else has brought this point up, James.
00:20:25.000You're much more on the bleeding edge of this stuff, but I was thinking about this over the weekend, where you've heard this term, let me get it right, neurotypical Was it exclusion?
00:20:40.000It sort of basically says that, like, we have this exclusive culture with respect to people with mental illness, that we're not inclusive enough of mental illness.
00:20:49.000You know, we could have that debate, but the people who found it really offensive when people like you or I say that trans is a mental illness...
00:20:59.000More often than not, if you believe you're born into the wrong body and that your gender doesn't match your biological sex, more often than not, that's indicative of a mental health disorder.
00:21:08.000The people who find that offensive are themselves guilty of, what should we say, neurotypical-ism, which is neurotypical ableism, we could call it that.
00:21:21.000That's, I think, a term that you sometimes use, which is to say that if you find the characterization of Gender dysphoria as a mental illness, if you find that characterization offensive, that isn't that offensive to the next person that needs to be included with the mentally ill.
00:21:36.000Like, it just doesn't work on its own terms.
00:21:41.000Yeah, and so how do you make something work that doesn't work on its own terms?
00:21:47.000Well, I mean, that's where you have to start...
00:21:51.000That's where you have to start creating incentive structures.
00:21:53.000And I think that that's the other side of this.
00:21:54.000And I'm pretty sure that's part of why you wanted to have this conversation with me is because I pointed out that there was a – on Twitter that there was a phenomenon out there that the human rights campaign has a scoring system.
00:22:07.000Technically, you sign up for the scoring system.
00:22:11.000You sign up to join what they call their corporate equality index scoring.
00:22:16.000And corporations, I think there's thousands of them are involved now, are given a score from zero to 100 based on how LGBTQ inclusive they are according to the standards set by the human rights campaign, which happened to also change every year.
00:22:33.000Every year there's new things added if you wish to maintain your score.
00:22:37.000Some 840 corporations in the United States have a perfect 100. Some have had that since the inception in 2002. American Airlines for example has had I've very proudly bragged that they've had a 100 since 2002. Others have had it less amount of time.
00:22:56.000Anheuser-Busch has a 100 CEI. And so it turns out, I think, so does Molson Coors and so do basically all of the major competitors that one might try to switch out Bud Light for something else or All the major airlines have it.
00:23:12.000So there's this scoring system, though.
00:23:14.000And for some reason, corporations are very proud of this score.
00:23:42.000So, I mean, you and I, we, you know, are kind of hovering over similar targets here and have been for a couple of years, but they're kind of doing to the S prong of ESG what's already been quantified for the E. So for the E, you have, like, actual hard data points, scope 3 emissions, net zero pledges by 2050. Forget whether you're measuring the right thing.
00:24:11.000I mean, the anti-carbon framework is itself based on a flawed premise.
00:24:15.000Another thing that I think is an unspeakable truth, as it's even more unspeakable than the stuff we're talking about moving to the trans movement.
00:24:26.000But suffice to say, though, there's been a rigorous standard created for that.
00:24:31.000There again, the equivalent of the Human Rights Campaign is the Climate Action 100 Plus Network, which was founded by CalPERS.
00:24:37.000CalPERS is the California State Pension Fund, which then sort of, you know, cascades down the chain for what that, you know, means for how corporations behave.
00:25:04.000So the governor of California says, why does the governor of California say that?
00:25:07.000We have a culture that elects that person to put in that office.
00:25:09.000So that's the cascade you sort of trace all the way up to that chain.
00:25:13.000This stuff with the Human Rights Campaign, so effectively HRC, Human Rights Campaign, creates CEI, Corporate Equality Index, which is a subset of ESG, sort of part of the alphabetist superstition of social norms.
00:25:28.000This is doing to the S prong of ESG bringing a level of rigor that was missing by comparison to what they had done to the E already.
00:25:37.000And so the way this tale plays out is that the Black Rocks of the world effectively then import that as an input to give themselves rigor to either the ESG scores that they apply...
00:25:49.000Or even if not ESG scores, inputs to know how they're supposed to vote on a corporate proposals related to executive pay or whatever of a company that scored really poorly on the corporate equality index.
00:26:02.000So anyway, to answer your question, why does anyone care?
00:26:03.000I think that that's a big part of the story is it relates to literally executive compensation in part relates to ESG goals.
00:26:11.000The number of companies that have executive comp tied to ESG goals is growing.
00:26:19.000Then the question of the boardroom becomes, well, how do we, if executive pay depends on if we need rigor, they have the rigor on the E, they don't have it on the S.
00:26:27.000So this is providing some of the stuff for that, which is in the shadow of why those companies begin to care.
00:26:33.000Because even if it hasn't been included, they know when something is measured this rigorously and amusing rigorously air quotes, then, you know, they understand that that's where their future bread will be buttered in terms of directors elected to the board, executive compensation being pegged to it, et cetera.
00:26:59.000It's certainly acting as a proxy for the S-score in ESG. And the problem with it, though, is like everything else under ESG is that it operates like an extortion racket.
00:27:11.000You know, every year they say that you've got your corporation and you've had your 100 for five or six years.
00:27:20.000You know, one of the requirements is that you're doing stuff to promote LGBT visibility.
00:27:25.000And so HRC comes along and tells you some things that you can do this year to promote LGBTQ visibility.
00:27:33.000And I don't know that the Dylan Mulvaney brand ambassador was a particular demand of the HRC in particular, but...
00:27:43.000For instance, last year, I've heard, at least in the Whisper network, that the airlines were pressured to fly activists to Pride events for discounted airline ticket prices or free airline ticket prices.
00:28:01.000So that they could have more people visible for the gigantic push for pride that they did through June and July last year.
00:28:08.000And so they come along and ask you to do more things each year in order to maintain your score.
00:28:15.000And they also have a negative scoring system built into the CEI, where if you fall afoul somehow of whatever they don't like, they can give you up to negative 25 points.
00:28:27.000So, you know, you check off this box, you get 5 points, you check off that box, you get 10 points.
00:28:31.000But if you, say, contribute money to a cause that they deem as anti-LGBTQ, as Chick-fil-A got in trouble for however many years ago, for example, they might dock you some of your points, and then you're no longer listed as an LGBTQ best place to work.
00:28:47.000And whatever seat at the table that you get for having your 100 gets revoked from you, Until you recover your lost points one way or another.
00:28:59.000And so what you have is kind of a carrot stick mechanism being wielded by the HRC and because very likely because of its connection to the, as you said, the kind of rigor is a rigorous as Asian or whatever, making rigorous the S scoring in ESG.
00:29:16.000You have a mechanism by which, like you said, corporate leaders are extremely sensitive to this to the point where they don't seem to care that much how many customers they're alienating.
00:29:28.000We can speculate what will happen with Anheuser-Busch or Bud Light and we see the backlash already and we see vendors denying, rejecting Bud Light and refusing to stock it and all of this.
00:29:41.000But we don't have to speculate with what happened to Disney.
00:29:44.000Disney lost massive amounts of shareholder value.
00:30:06.000You know, this is it's cost a third of our stock value, so on and so forth.
00:30:10.000And the CEO more or less came back and said, you know, well, we're just going to do this anyway.
00:30:14.000To put it very politely, we're just we're glad you care.
00:30:19.000shut up was the vibe of the answer that he got.
00:30:24.000And the reason is when you see this kind of behavior, the reason must be that they're beholden to something else.
00:30:29.000And this is a problem in my opinion, and I don't think it's just my opinion, for American industry.
00:30:36.000I think our American industry has to be rescued from this kind of ESG cartel, frankly, in order for it to be able to do business.
00:30:47.000And this isn't just to free up American innovation and American production.
00:30:50.000When we start talking about American production, it's also a severe matter.
00:30:54.000It sounds silly to think Dylan Mulvaney is a threat to national security.
00:30:58.000But this is a severe national security threat because if we start to look at how things are heating up now with China and with Russia, this BRICS nation thing, and you think, well, primary manufacturing really does need to come back to the United States, at least for essential goods and services.
00:31:14.000Because, say, China could turn off the spigot at any point and put us in a very vulnerable position.
00:31:20.000Then you say, well, okay, let's fire up the factory.
00:31:23.000And you find out that ESG makes it prohibitively expensive or just outright disallowed.
00:31:28.000You find that that leaves America in a very vulnerable position.
00:31:31.000So ESG becomes a gigantic national security threat by virtue of the fact that it blocks American interests from being able to do primary manufacturing at a rate where they can afford to do it whatsoever, if they can even get around the regulatory apparatuses that prevent it from being able to get off the ground entirely.
00:31:54.000And so this is a very serious issue that is a lot deeper than a strange decision to put Dylan Mulvaney's face on the can of beer to make everybody in America mad about it.
00:32:08.000There's also something very interesting going on where all of the ESG unfriendly activity is literally just moving like a magnet, like metal to a magnet.
00:32:21.000To parts of the world where those same ESG constraints don't apply.
00:32:28.000If you press on it over here, it's literally going to go over there.
00:32:32.000And in some ways, this is part of China's plan.
00:32:38.000This is a little bit off topic, but one of the things that I tweeted about it over the weekend was...
00:32:46.000Yeah, I was a little concerned watching Elon Musk's Shanghai, what they call Master Plan 3, is literally what their name of it was, was for production of a bunch of the mega-pack batteries that are designed to eventually power an electric grid in Shanghai.
00:33:17.000But that, I think, causes, I think, even a lot of Conservatives or whatever to then fall into hero worship complexes to actually miss the plot where, in the same way, the woke weapon is unrestricted warfare.
00:33:33.000And I love how you draw the analogies to Mao.
00:33:35.000Xi Jinping draws some analogies to Mao too.
00:33:50.000And I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China.
00:33:53.000To do so in ways that they understand are socially popular in the US.
00:33:59.000So Tesla's not a woke company by any stretch, but BlackRock and Apple are.
00:34:03.000So they use that social popularity over there to sort of cover up for the way in which we have them beholden and holding them by the next Here, but Tesla's popular in a different way here because of the cult around Elon, but actually is effectively beholding to China in a different way.
00:34:21.000That's just an example of unrestricted warfare to say that if China then pulls the rug or even threatens to pull the rug out, all of those people turn into pawns.
00:34:34.000Don't jump like a circus monkey when she should pay calls in the hour of need as well.
00:34:39.000And by the way, all of this is for an electric vehicle movement that is about actually, in part, subsidizing a form of behavior in the United States that leaves the U.S. less competitive when it comes to fossil fuel production as well as fossil fuel utilization.
00:34:53.000By the way, constraints that don't apply in China in the same way.
00:34:57.000And, you know, it's sort of interesting, you know, you and I were criticized the left a lot, but it's sort of funny, not funny in a great way, but funny in a sardonic and sad kind of way.
00:35:06.000The way in which I think the conservative movement can fall into its own version of the same trap when, you know, the left is duped into submission by its own addiction to these causes that are being put, missing the national security erosion.
00:35:22.000But I kind of see, you know, with the hero worship culture on the right, you know, more or less the same thing pop up and it could be Elon Musk doing the same thing for China in an unrestricted warfare mode.
00:35:33.000And that somehow is something that conservatives decide how to pay attention to, at least for the time being.
00:35:40.000It's sort of a game whose principles can apply outside of the left, too.
00:35:45.000And I think more of us would be better to wake up to it.
00:35:48.000Yeah, I mean, it kind of harkens back to our previous conversation that we had where we talked about how operationally, we were talking about how the left moves operationally and the right often isn't aware of that.
00:35:58.000But like you're saying, China moves far more operationally than the left even.
00:36:02.000I mean, China's China's kind of running the board right now.
00:36:07.000I read a quote at some point from the 90s, maybe a year or two ago, that it was some Chinese analysts had said that Americans' capacity for political warfare had degraded so far as to be non-existent.
00:36:22.000In essence, the Chinese have realized for a while that they have an advantage over the United States and that the United States doesn't know how I think that
00:36:54.000I see the right tends to get very – it's an uncomfortable term for me to use this, but it's almost like they're looking for a messiah figure.
00:37:08.000One character, whether it's Donald Trump is going to come in, or maybe it's Ron DeSantis, or Maybe it's going to be, you know, Elon Musk comes in and saves everything, or maybe even for a while a segment was Vladimir Putin.
00:37:20.000You know, there's this guy, this one guy, and he's going to solve all of our problems finally.
00:37:25.000And then, you know, we saw that, for example, in the midterm elections last year, there's going to be the red wave.
00:37:29.000It wasn't this one guy, but the red wave was going to come, and then all of our problems are going to go away.
00:37:34.000Then it didn't materialize the way that the right thought that it should.
00:37:42.000They're miserable in the way that you would expect to see somebody become miserable when their hopes get dashed upon rocks.
00:37:49.000While they simultaneously miss how many great wins there have been at the local levels, how much energy has kind of been unleashed there at local levels, where the odd outcome in Congress enabled that small group of congressmen, the Freedom Caucus, to put some demands on Speaker McCarthy before he took the gavel and therefore, you know, get some concessions out of him that may be very helpful going forward.
00:38:18.000So there are a lot of things where instead of figuring out how to understand the world that we live in and capitalize upon it, they put their hopes in one gigantic basket.
00:38:26.000And then, I mean, I can't tell you how many friends I lost by saying that at certain points that I thought that Elon was making some mistakes, especially early on when he took on Twitter.
00:38:40.000And so here, you know, Elon can't possibly, he's got to be playing six-dimensional chess against China, and I don't think that that's actually how this works.
00:38:53.000It's not quite reached the level of cultishness on the left.
00:38:57.000I mean, every time you think it gets crazy, you add one more letter to the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+. But you can just put a little plus at the end of how many dimensions of chess Donald Trump or Elon Musk must be played, where you realize that, guys, if you wake up to the reality staring you in the face, it's that if you want to be saved, conservative movement, wake up, maybe we'll wrap with this one, James, and we'll just pick it up.
00:39:45.000I don't remember how it goes, but it's, you know, the work is made light by a thousand small hands or something like that, or a thousand small hands working together accomplishes a lot or makes the work easy or something.
00:39:55.000That's where it really is, is people have got to be willing to get involved, get local, and start, you know, strengthening their families, strengthening their communities, I mean, think of the things that the left wants to attack most vigorously.