Libby Reichich, creator of TikTok, joins me in Columbus, Ohio to talk about her journey to becoming a TikTok teacher, how she got her start in the world, and how she became a voice for the voiceless and voiceless. We talk about the importance of standing up and speaking the truth, and why we should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth. Let s talk truth. Thank you so much to Libby for coming on the show and sharing her story, and thank you to everyone who helped make this podcast possible. We are so grateful to have Libby on the podcast and we can't wait to have her back again. Thank you Libby, thank you for being here! We hope you enjoy this episode, and we look forward to hearing from you in the future. You can reach out to me on Anchor.fm and tell me what you thought of this episode and what you think of it! I'll get back to you in a future episode where we talk about TikTok and all things related to TikTok! Tweet me if you have any questions or comments! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - What do you think about the TikTok? 5:30 - How do you feel about this episode? 6:15 - What would you like to see more TikTok videos? 7:00 8:40 - What are you looking for? 9:00 | How do we should speak the truth? 11:30 | What are your thoughts on TikToks? 12: What do we need to do more? 13:40 14: What s your favorite part of the culture? 15: What is your biggest piece of advice? 16:50 - What is the biggest thing you would like to hear from someone else? 17:40 | What's your biggest takeaway from this podcast? 18:00 +16: How do I feel about Tik Tok? 19: What should I do? 21:10 | What do I want to see me talk about? 22:00 / 16: What are my answer? 23:10 - What s a good day? 26:00 // 17: What does your answer to a question? 27: What kind of story do you would you want to hear? 25:00 & 17:10 24:30
Transcript
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00:00:00.000You were, like, on TV all the time, exposing what's already out there.
00:00:03.000LGBTQ activists, teachers, people in the medical industry, doctors, and they were basically this sexualized agenda onto kids.
00:00:27.000Most people know you as Libs of TikTok.
00:00:32.000But your real name is Haya Reichich, if I got that right.
00:00:35.000We share something in common with a name that requires teaching people how to pronounce it, so we're already starting from some common ground here.
00:00:43.000I've been looking forward to this conversation.
00:00:45.000I have been following you from afar, like literally millions of others.
00:00:51.000But I wanted to get to the story behind the TikTok account, and it's grateful to me that you've been...
00:00:58.000I'm really grateful that you have taken the time to come here in Columbus, Ohio, and we're gonna dive into your story if you're cool with that.
00:01:06.000It's great to be here to have this conversation.
00:01:08.000I think this topic is extremely important, especially for someone who can possibly have more power to do something about this cultural phenomenon that we're seeing.
00:05:07.000And that's when I created my Twitter account.
00:05:15.000And I was like, I started really paying attention.
00:05:18.000And I started watching the news and listening to podcasts.
00:05:22.000And that's when I really started getting into politics.
00:05:27.000And then, obviously, the election happened in 2020. And then I... Over COVID also, I think, is when TikTok got really popular because TikTok has really been around for years.
00:05:40.000And it's only in the last, like, two, three years that we're really hearing about it.
00:05:44.000And I think it's because everyone was stuck at home.
00:05:59.000Maybe it's related to something in China, I don't know.
00:06:01.000- Did you actually make your account then? - So I made it at the end of COVID.
00:06:05.000- Okay, you did. - And so there's a few reasons why my account became so popular so fast.
00:06:13.000It was the timing because like I said, TikTok was all of a sudden like everyone's like, what is this TikTok thing?
00:06:19.000You know, all of a sudden there's TikToks being posted everywhere on Twitter and on Instagram and everyone's talking about TikTok.
00:06:25.000And then there was also this other thing we were seeing where Parents all of a sudden were seeing what was going on in their kids classrooms right because their classrooms suddenly was in their dining room and parents are like looking at the teachers and the content and they were like what's going on here because there was a lot of really disturbing things yeah and I think people just weren't paying enough attention before so Then I started talking about the stuff going
00:06:56.000on in the schools and the classrooms, and I think that really resonated with a lot of parents and a lot of people.
00:07:01.000So the timing of Libs of TikTok's creation really could not have been more perfect, and I think that's part of its success.
00:07:11.000So basically, I discovered TikTok, and I started seeing TikToks being shared on Twitter.
00:07:20.000They would go viral, and I was like, what is TikTok?
00:07:23.000So I started going on it and at first I was sharing a lot of the COVID-related videos.
00:08:08.000Was that horse one that like trampled on all of the other horses and like stampeded them to death or was it just like a normal innocent horse?
00:08:27.000So anyway, so you basically were frustrated by a year of, maybe a couple years of being told to shut up, sit down, do as you're told, locked in your home.
00:12:00.000One are the vestiges of critical race theory, of being able to teach young kids that they're oppressed based on the color of their skin, based on their genetics.
00:12:14.000Then there's the version of that that bleeds over into some of those genetic factors are sexual in nature, you know, whether you're gay or not.
00:12:22.000And then you go into the modern trans thing, which is a whole nother fixation altogether, that then just started getting into outright sexual content that they're foisting onto kids at an inappropriately young age.
00:12:33.000Which of those were you kind of focused on the full spectrum or more on the LGBT stuff and less on the race stuff?
00:12:39.000So it is more in the LGBTQ stuff, but it's everything.
00:12:44.000So it's basically anything, any insane wokeness happening, not just in schools, but in hospitals, in institutions, in companies.
00:12:58.000You know, anything that is basically affecting our culture that I think needs to be called out.
00:13:02.000Yeah, and so that just started getting under your skin a little bit.
00:13:04.000And again, you're posting just videos that are already out there.
00:13:08.000So sort of like a news service in a certain way.
00:13:42.000Because I think one of the things that I've noticed happening in this debate, and I think that's maybe what makes your case pretty interesting, like I kind of want to get into this, is The dynamic—and you might have seen this, right?
00:13:55.000I'm more in the political world now than you are.
00:13:58.000But the dynamic is if, you know, someone, broadly speaking, the right, is talking about critical race theory or, in a technical sense, the vestiges of critical race theory in schools or talking about the trans indoctrination in schools— I
00:14:29.000instead of taking that concern seriously and saying this is crazy and we shouldn't be doing this is to say look at these crazy people on the right making up something that doesn't actually exist so we have a manufactured hysteria a manufactured outrage
00:14:46.000that's the term they usually use a fake outrage manufactured outrage and then that becomes the whole msnbc talk track is don't talk about the underlying issue instead talk about how it's a projection of something artificial that's made up and so that's what i was asking you like if you're drawing mostly from videos of other people on the right who are outraged that still allows the msnbc cover to persist and
00:15:10.000But if these are people boasting about or even highlighting the fact that this is indeed what we're doing, that completely undercuts that narrative.
00:15:19.000Which is what probably caused you to take off, actually.
00:15:22.000And that's why they hate me so much and try to do everything to silence me.
00:17:05.000We're the ones that have the issue here.
00:17:08.000And then it's like, I'm coming with these videos and it's literally a teacher, for example, saying like, hi, I teach second grade and today I told my students that they could be transgender.
00:17:20.000And it's like, how could you defend that?
00:17:23.000And then how could you claim that this is not happening when I have absolute first-hand proof that it is?
00:17:29.000So at first they would try to- Like, give me an example.
00:17:39.000So this isn't some one fringe example somewhere that you're making up that you might have side paid them to do it so that you could have a story.
00:17:46.000I mean, that's the left wing narrative.
00:17:48.000So that's one of the accusations that the far left used to use for me.
00:17:51.000They were like, oh, she's cherry picking or it's just fringe.
00:17:55.000But it's like, you can't say that if we're two years in to live to TikTok and every single day there is new content that aligns with that.
00:18:06.000So how can you say that I'm cherry picking and it's fringe?
00:18:09.000It's like, this is so common, much more common than anybody could ever believe.
00:18:14.000So yeah, I mean, for example, there was a video that I posted about a teacher in California.
00:18:20.000And it was sort of a conservative area.
00:18:24.000And she basically was saying that her students, they were pledging allegiance.
00:18:30.000And her students said, but there's no American flag here.
00:18:32.000And she was laughing about how she hid the American flag because she didn't want it in her classroom.
00:18:37.000And then she told them that they could actually pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag because that was hanging proudly in her classroom.
00:19:11.000There was another video I posted just a couple months ago of another teacher saying that she told her students to pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag.
00:19:19.000So this is something that is not fringe.
00:19:59.000My first temporary Twitter suspension was a couple months after I opened my account.
00:20:07.000It had nothing to do with any TikTok video.
00:20:12.000It was something else that I reported where DuckDuckGo, which is an alternative to Google, was basically they rejected an applicant because he didn't fit their...
00:20:29.000It was a while ago, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but that was my first temporary Twitter suspension.
00:20:36.000And I remember I had probably 200,000 followers then, and I remember being terrified.
00:20:45.000And I was like, I really don't want to lose my Twitter account.
00:20:48.000And people were getting suspended left and right from Twitter.
00:20:51.000It was every day another account was getting suspended from Twitter, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Facebook.
00:22:15.000I think that they just envision some kind of society where everyone is just confused and it's just chaotic and there's a couple of people who are making all the decisions and running everything and everyone else is just kind of robotic and I don't think they actually have a plan for what comes after that if they achieve what they want.
00:22:39.000I think it's an interesting observation, right?
00:22:41.000Because if you think about, like, what is that agenda?
00:22:43.000And it does seem kind of incoherent, because at least if you knew what the agenda was, but I think you're right.
00:22:53.000It's not that they're trying to enforce one orthodoxy.
00:22:56.000I don't think they particularly care for the racial hierarchy any more than they do to the sexual indoctrination, any more than they do to the climate cult or religion, any more than they do about Ukraine.
00:23:17.000The proof is that whenever one of these things that they claim to care so strongly about is inconvenient for them, they'll just give that up.
00:23:50.000So I think that actually that urge exists within each of us.
00:23:58.000And I think in some ways the societal introspection is even easier than a deep individual introspection.
00:24:07.000And I think there's a side to each of us That favors order, what is true, what is right.
00:24:14.000And then there's an element of us, the fallen nature of man, that calls on us to suppress the better angels in our nature, to choke them to death with...
00:24:31.000The sin that resides, or the impulse towards sin that resides in each of our hearts.
00:24:37.000And I think that there's a kind of spiritual warfare that is eternal.
00:24:43.000And I think that by suppressing that reality in each of ourselves, or at least the willingness to introspect and engage with that...
00:24:52.000When that becomes suppressed, it then finds its way out into the societal sphere where you have groups of people who allow that element, chaos, disorder, that which is wrong, to roam free over that which is right and true.
00:26:08.000I mean, every sort of fictional epic drama has a version of this, you know, the Game of Thrones, the whites or whatever, the people who are just, you know, hollowed out husks, dead bodies walking around being guided by some sort of deeper force, causing them to be the instruments of whatever philosophy they're purveying, which isn't even a philosophy.
00:26:29.000It's just a mechanism for implementing disorder.
00:26:42.000And I think that that's something I sometimes talk about in the campaign trail, is that we are so starved for purpose and meaning, that when we completely drain the lifeblood out of our core, Belief in God is high on that list, but even for those who don't believe in God, belief in nation, grounding in family.
00:27:28.000And that's, you could view it in theology as, I mean, that's what Satan is all about.
00:27:35.000But you could even view it in the context of modern cultural warfare.
00:27:40.000If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in climate instead, right?
00:27:44.000If you don't believe in the true equality of man, because we're equal in the eyes of God, made in the image of God, as we say in the tradition I was raised in, God resides in each If you stop, if you abandon these beliefs, then you start seeing one another as an inevitable and inextricable power relationships with one another based on our genetics and that life is nothing more than the aimless passage of time adjudicating these invisible power relationships.
00:28:10.000It's going to have to be some other comprehensive worldview that fills the void when you actually lack the time-tested ones that are Served up to us by history, but that we reject.
00:28:21.000And so I think that's what's mostly going on.
00:28:40.000I don't think most of what I talk about on my account is really it shouldn't be political.
00:28:46.000Like I don't understand why it's a political idea to not chop off the breasts of young confused teenagers or even the whole thing with like Sound of Freedom and human trafficking and child sex trafficking.
00:29:00.000It became so political and it's like this is All of this is stuff that a couple of years ago the entire country agreed on.
00:29:08.000Like we all agree that it's bad to, like human trafficking is bad.
00:29:12.000We all agree it's bad to chop off the body parts of young confused kids.
00:29:16.000We all agree it's bad to give kids porn in school.
00:29:32.000They're a party platform that they promote bringing kids to stripper shows, giving kids porn in schools, teaching four-year-olds that they could be transgender and that they could chop their breasts off.
00:29:42.000And it's really sad because it's really not political.
00:29:49.000I think that there's a danger in that.
00:29:52.000That might be another trap we're actually being led into.
00:29:58.000That we need to be careful about on the right.
00:30:00.000Because I think it has presented itself as a convenient opportunity for the Republican Party.
00:30:08.000And I think what you have right now is a bunch of professional politicians seizing on that energy, but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against and using it to put their name on some bill that makes their way through a legislature or Congress or but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against
00:30:29.000Without actually understanding the essence of what's going on, which then turns something that which should be unifying across purpose driven human beings to restore our sense of purpose to becoming some partisan struggle and tug of war.
00:30:45.000I'm sure some people may, you know, further eyebrows hearing me say this because I'm a presidential candidate.
00:30:52.000But actually, the way certainly I have aimed to talk about this issue transcends Republicans and Democrats and the partisan stuff.
00:30:59.000That's about raising taxes and lowering taxes.
00:31:01.000This is something deeper about answering the question of who we are as individuals and as a people.
00:31:07.000And this is why I don't think these are issues that congressmen or senators or even governors are necessarily going to be well positioned to address.
00:31:18.000But the president is a cultural symbol of this nation.
00:31:23.000And I think the more important job of the next president is more than any policy, actually, is going to be to set a tone of national character of who we are as a people.
00:31:36.000And that means something in a way that goes beyond any given law or executive order that we sign.
00:31:41.000And so anyway, that's what calls me into this.
00:31:43.000I don't think about this as actually a political journey.
00:31:52.000And right now, the person occupying the Oval Office is someone who had a trans person come and shake their breasts in front of the White House at a Pride event.
00:33:03.000It's like almost like, yeah, I mean, that's like worse than Ibram Kendi, preaching about the need to fight discrimination with more discrimination.
00:33:10.000This is, that's really, that's actually pretty remarkable.
00:33:43.000So, I mean, I think that they're, just going back to what you were saying before, I think that there are certain policy issues that are really harming kids and are very dangerous that legislators are doing something about and I think should be.
00:33:57.000So I think that's where they fall into place in all this.
00:34:01.000Like in Florida, DeSantis banned sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors.
00:34:14.000I'm pretty sure that state, like every other, doesn't allow you to get a tattoo before the age of 18. Because you don't want to make a body-altering change to a minor that the minor will later regret later in life.
00:34:26.000And yet, it is barbaric to then allow those same minors to undergo genital mutilation and chemical castration that many of them do later regret later in life.
00:34:38.000In a certain sense, Dylan Mulvaney, I don't know, but that just seems very cynical, or Leah Thomas, but many of these kids are obviously going through a mental health disorder.
00:35:35.000But the pre-existing condition there is...
00:35:38.000Social media algorithms or gender ideology as a worldview that only works if you have a subject, a human being, who is susceptible to that trick.
00:36:11.000It is because it's all based on falsehoods.
00:36:15.000And particularly for youth, it is so, so dangerous.
00:36:19.000Let me ask you how you feel about this one.
00:36:23.000To take that hard line as applied to youth.
00:36:28.000And then not open ourselves up to sort of the rejection, because I'm a free speech absolutist, right?
00:36:34.000I mean, the fact that your account is locked down is an affront to me.
00:36:39.000The path to truth runs through free speech, period.
00:36:45.000And so where I land on this is, Look, if you're an adult and you want to dress a certain way, regardless of your gender, I'm not going to stop you.
00:36:53.000I still might think that you need help, mental help.
00:36:56.000And as a fellow human being, I'll be compassionate in trying to lead you to that help.
00:37:01.000But if you're 35 years old and want to dress how you want, I'm not going to stop you.
00:37:07.000For an iota of a second, think that you're going to voice that onto our kids or change our language or the way we have our customs of which bathrooms we use or how we play sports.
00:37:16.000No, that is a tyranny of the minority.
00:37:18.000That's kind of like where I land on it versus...
00:37:21.000And I understand the intuition versus saying that we need to actually just eliminate...
00:37:28.000That possibility of behavior altogether.
00:37:30.000Eradicating gender ideology doesn't mean that we're going to tell adult men that it's illegal to dress up as a woman.
00:38:05.000That actually, that's actually another good point.
00:38:08.000That example you just brought up about the CDC. We talk about the spiritual vacuum, and that's like at a deep individual level.
00:38:14.000But part of the thing that I've noticed happens is when you have a bureaucracy that exists for an institution that has either lost its way or has no actual purpose for continued existence, this is one of the things that fills the void of the institution.
00:38:33.000Where's wokeism in the military coming from?
00:38:35.000My views is from our military taking on a bunch of other ill-defined causes, wars in Iraq to, you know, now in Ukraine, in my opinion, that they should not be engaged in.
00:38:46.000When you lose your way, that's what creates the vacuum for some poison to fill the void.
00:38:51.000And so the CDC... Or the US Department of Education.
00:38:55.000These things have lost their purpose for existence if they ever had one.
00:38:59.000And so they kind of make up new purposes instead by latching on to these ideologies.
00:39:03.000And so in a certain sense, it is a void at the heart of an institution, just like it's a void at the heart of an individual.
00:39:09.000I don't know what your perspective is on that.
00:39:17.000You know, that would be an interesting thing to dissect.
00:39:21.000But it's, yeah, I mean, would you say that you want to, would you rebuild these institutions, like tear them down and rebuild them, or just do we not need them all together?
00:39:31.000Well, I think the first step is tearing them down.
00:39:55.00020,000 of them are in back office functions doing more or less nothing, which then creates a vacuum for creating politicized policy agendas that they were never supposed to be coming up with in the first place.
00:40:07.000Those 20,000 are going to have to go home and find honest work in the private sector.
00:40:10.000The remaining 15,000, look, it's an agency whose culture is still built in the backdrop of J. Edgar Hoover's legacy.
00:40:17.000It is literally the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that these people walk into.
00:40:21.000I say let's put them into agencies that actually have much more specific purposes that haven't yet been politicized.
00:40:27.000U.S. Marshals doing a good job with busting up child sex trafficking rigs, for example, much better than the FBI is.
00:40:53.000And then if there's something wrong with that restructuring, fine.
00:40:56.000It'll be narrowly purpose-tailored to bring back whatever's missing.
00:40:59.000What about the Department of Education?
00:41:01.000I'd say shut it down and don't bring it back because the federal government should not be involved in education.
00:41:05.000There's a narrow sliver that's now come up with respect to at least supporting some kinds of workforce training.
00:41:11.000You could debate the need for its existence, but that's not something that I'm going to be firmly on the cap of eradicating.
00:41:16.000Move that to the Department of Labor, which is where it would more naturally sit anyway.
00:41:20.000It's a labor participation training grant program.
00:41:24.000But everything else done because they're using the federal money as a cudgel to get local schools to adopt ideologies that they would or should have never adopted in the first place.
00:42:52.000But the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.
00:42:57.000The benefits dramatically outweigh the risks.
00:43:00.000And so we've got to have the courage to say that, yes, is somebody going to blame me if some one small tidbit goes wrong of some piece of research or a grant that somebody got that they didn't get and, you know, something fell through the clunkiness of how we were shutting it down?
00:43:27.000And the way you fight the creation of institutionalized chaos is by using some form of entropy in our own favor to restore actual order in this country, in our government, in our culture, in our sense and conception of self.
00:43:44.000That's how we revive our fortitude and our strength.
00:43:47.000And then if we're missing some gaps along the way in a narrowly tailored way, we'll fill those gaps.
00:44:44.000Frankly, you're one of the heroes in literally exposing those flaws.
00:44:49.000But it is the job of other people, right?
00:44:52.000Not journalists, but of, say, elected leaders or a president or a pastor or a parent to offer a different vision, an affirmative vision to say, okay, this is what we're running from.
00:45:10.000But more importantly, this is what we're running to.
00:45:29.000And each of us has a side of our human nature, but I think the better angels of our nature will choose that which is right, that which is true.
00:45:36.000But the job of leaders is at least to serve up the menu for individuals to have that choice and then to call on the better angels of their nature to select that which is true and right over that which is wrong and false.
00:45:48.000And at least we as a conservative movement, you know, at least put myself in that bucket because that's what I'm in.
00:45:54.000This journey is wearing the mantle of the Republican Party or whatever in this journey to be U.S. president.
00:46:15.000And then we have to come and fight those slogans with actual truth and facts and logic and common sense.
00:46:21.000And for the average person who has that void, like we've been talking about, The left really, it does appeal to them because they make it sound really fluffy and really great.
00:46:32.000And we need to do more to offer an alternative to choose from.
00:46:37.000Instead of just always reacting to what the left is doing and sort of trying to counter that and explain it, we have to actually be proactive and offer them something else to choose from.
00:47:30.000And I think that it's part of what pulled me into this race, actually.
00:47:34.000I see a lot of other good people, good Republicans, good leaders, some of them are governors, etc.
00:47:38.000Understanding how to play whack-a-mole and honing the toolkit to do it a little bit more effectively.
00:47:45.000And then sometimes going, I wouldn't call it too far, but losing the plot a little bit.
00:47:52.000Versus the real acknowledgement being this is the wrong game.
00:47:58.000It's a method of short-term survival, but it's a short-run game and it's a losing game in the end because eventually there's going to be too much popping up, too many of the zombies, right?
00:48:37.000And I think that in some ways we were set up by the left to To actually make this the dynamic, right?
00:48:46.000In a certain sense, if we're already playing that game, the left has already won.
00:48:50.000And I don't think it has to be that way.
00:48:52.000And I don't even view it—I try not to talk as much as I can between left and right or Republican versus Democrat, but between what are the shared values that ground us as Americans.
00:49:03.000And I think that's something we've lost, but not permanently.
00:50:40.000It's the values that I was brought up with, to believe in God, to act in this lifestyle.
00:50:51.000And that is something that is very important to me.
00:50:54.000And I think in some ways, the Because religious people, not just Jews, any religious person has that faith, I think that that will actually help a lot in fighting this...
00:51:17.000Agenda that we're seeing from the left, like we were discussing the whole time.
00:51:21.000It's from that void of lack of belief in God and a lack of feeling like there's a higher purpose.
00:51:30.000So I feel very grateful to have grown up as a religious Jew and to obviously continue In that path.
00:51:41.000And like I said, I never went to public school.
00:51:51.000A lot of the stuff that we're seeing in public schools are not going to make it to the religious schools, you know, the Christian schools, Jewish schools, whatever schools, those private religious schools that people send their kids to because they have that belief in God and in their values and in their traditions and they stick by that.
00:52:14.000So I'm very grateful and I'm going to raise my kids that way as well.
00:52:21.000I mean, one of the things I love about many practices in the Torah is that they're Some of them are just good ideas.
00:52:31.000Imagine what you just described today in the modern world.
00:52:36.000We live in a world of social media, eroding our social fabric, our own ability to think clearly on a day-to-day basis.
00:52:44.000And what you just said is, I take one day a week, as somebody who's a social media influencer, journalist, etc., to say that one day a week, I'm not doing that.
00:52:58.000People tell me all the time that they're so jealous of me.
00:53:00.000And that, to me, strikes me as something that the people who were around when the stories of the Torah came to be, that's the spirit they probably appreciated in their moment of saying there's a day a week where we're just putting it all down.
00:53:41.000And, yeah, I mean, so I was, as a side of this is neither here nor there, but I was actually part of the Jewish society at Yale when I was in Yale Law School.
00:53:50.000I was recruited into it, even though I'm not Jewish.
00:53:55.000But, you know, we would go to the Shabbat dinners on Friday night, and then I was almost envious of Saturdays being...
00:54:05.000Now, in principle, I could have done it and practiced it myself, but I didn't because it wasn't tied to like a faith-based or family tradition.
00:54:13.000And as you said, it's hard enough for you to do, but you're anchored based on a true family tradition and grounding that was passed on to you, not even just by your family, but by millennia of history.
00:54:26.000And I was raised in a similar tradition where there's other things that ground me similarly as well.
00:54:34.000And I do think that this is not a substitute for faith, but it can be a supplement, that we have certain traditions that ground us as Americans, that we had passed down to us maybe not for millennia.
00:54:49.000But for a couple and a half centuries now, that we're enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and certain traditions we go through, that we pledge allegiance not to some trans flag, but to the United States of America.
00:55:02.000And that's a tradition that we start our day in the schools by stating that pledge of allegiance to a nation that unites us across our superficial, skin-deep differences, shades of melanin and diversity.
00:55:17.000And I think that is something that it doesn't take—I mean, being a pastor or a rabbi or a priest, that's beyond my pay grade.
00:55:25.000But that is something that a U.S. president can deliver or that a teacher in the public schools can deliver to say that that grounds us.
00:55:33.000That is true, that I pledge allegiance to that flag, and that means something.
00:55:37.000People made a sacrifice and spilled blood for the ideals enshrined in that flag.
00:55:42.000And that's something that strikes me as easier, even, to bring back than the revival of a national religious awakening.
00:55:51.000Yeah, and it's interesting because the American flag and what it symbolizes is something that also became really political, right?
00:56:03.000I've posted so many different videos of people saying that they hate the American flag, the American flag stands for racism, The American flag.
00:56:13.000There was a video of this mom, and she said that her son, who's a little kid, like a toddler, said something like, oh, hey mom, where did that Trump flag go?
00:56:25.000And she was like, which flag are you talking about?
00:56:32.000And she was like so proud of her son that he knew.
00:56:35.000And it's like, it's weird because For us, it's kind of like a compliment.
00:56:41.000Like, yes, I want to be known as the person who believes in what America was founded on and what America stands for.
00:56:50.000But it feels like the left has actually made that political as well.
00:56:55.000And, you know, every last year, I remember on the 4th of July, there was an MSNBC contributor who went on and said that she's seeing so many American flags and it's making her really uncomfortable.
00:57:08.000Well, you know, what's interesting is, so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you began with your social media account being locked is that just story just reminded me of this is there's good evidence that actually many of the algorithms or third party monitors of inappropriate so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you Look at elements of the profile of the person who's posting that content, right?
00:57:33.000So you would have been censored, and you were, you know this well, because you were libs of TikTok, that somebody else posting that same video in the first instance wouldn't, which means it's not just the content, they look at who the speaker is.
00:57:44.000And this isn't done by a human being at scale, right?
00:57:47.000This monitoring is done by algorithms, which is where they can shunt that accountability to say, oh no, it wasn't one human doing it, it was the algorithm.
00:57:53.000Well, the algorithm is trained by the human beings who feed the algorithm what's good and bad.
00:58:00.000People who have American flags in their profile are systematically more likely to be targeted as purveyors of hateful content than Or to show up even in the Twitter feed as show.
00:58:19.000You have to hit show and extra show before these comments may contain offensive content.
00:58:25.000Just in virtue of the American flag being in their profile.
00:58:31.000So now it's not just individuals who are targeting people with American flags in the real world.
00:58:37.000But to know that that itself has become a symbol of In the United States of America of subversion of the agenda in the United States of America.
01:00:47.000Find encouragement and inspiration in that.
01:00:50.000I think that this is something, I'm saying this primarily, it makes some people uncomfortable when I say it, but there are other good people in the Republican Party or otherwise who want reform, who argue for incremental reform or that we need reform within the institutions we have.
01:01:05.000And my question is, do you want reform or do you want revolution?
01:01:14.000And I stand on the side of revolution right now, the American Revolution.
01:01:19.000I stand on the side of 1776. I think that we have a chance to revive those ideals and what they actually mean today.
01:02:09.000And you and I have the unique gift to be put on this earth with a purpose to participate in whatever small way each of us does in that revolutionary revival.
01:02:25.000Yeah, when people ask me about my account and how do I keep going when it gets really tough and even how it started and my journey, I always say I feel like God...
01:02:43.000Gave me this platform for a reason and there is a purpose of me doing this.
01:02:49.000And some days I don't even know what the answer is.
01:02:52.000And then, you know, and I think it could change constantly.
01:02:56.000So, you know, in some days I'm like, I know what my purpose is with this.
01:03:03.000And then I really believe that God put me in this position for a reason.
01:03:11.000And I'm going to continue trying every day to find out What that reason is because it does keep changing and I'm going to do everything I can to help this movement and to take back our country and take back our culture.
01:03:34.000You know, and I think that that's actually the way we've got to look at it.
01:03:37.000Not because it's fake and, you know, it's like a self-help, self-motivator.
01:03:44.000But because it's true, actually, that we live in a time where electricity is in the air, okay?
01:03:55.000And there's a lot of times where you can try to light a match and then it's just going to burn out.
01:04:02.000We live in a moment where we light a match.
01:04:05.000We set something into motion and That's far bigger than each of us alone.
01:04:11.000There are rare times in history where that's the case.
01:04:14.000I think we live in one of those moments now.
01:04:17.000And so when I say it's a 1776 moment, I mean that in the best of ways, in the most hopeful of ways, that there's more to life than just the aimless passage of time through a day.
01:04:38.000And right when we worry about, oh, the cultural degradation of our society, that it couldn't be any worse, we wake up and see, actually, this is our moment, right?
01:04:51.000As George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams or Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin would have said it in 1775, and again in 1789 when they got together to frame the Constitution, this is one of those moments we have.
01:05:11.000We have that to work with, to revive that.
01:05:14.000And in certain sense, they had a head start.
01:05:17.000It was built against the backdrop of a tradition that came before them.
01:05:20.000And we live in one of those moments today.
01:05:21.000And I think that people who really truly believe that with their entire heart and who are authentic about it, I think end up being so much more effective and powerful.
01:05:35.000And I think you're a great example of that.
01:07:32.000I think that the purpose of that was to try to silence me and intimidate me.
01:07:41.000That was obviously the greatest example, but there have been so many other things like all the death threats and people showing up to my house.
01:07:49.000All of these things, I think, are designed to silence you and to shut you up and to bring you down and to destroy your morale.
01:08:00.000And then for me, it was never even an option to give into that because there is just so much work to be done.
01:08:08.000And every single day, I go into the trenches.
01:08:13.000My location on Twitter, I set as the depths of hell.
01:09:06.000I appreciate you, and I have a feeling that we are going to be doing together what the likes of our forefathers did in 1776. It's coming soon.