Well, you were just telling me that Washington State recriminalized or was it Oregon?
Recriminalized drugs?
Yeah, that's right.
This just came out the last week that Washington State, rather Oregon State, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy, and there's now this dramatic reversal.
Because guess what?
When you let people shoot up heroin on the side of the road, snort meth, intense downtown Portland, it actually is not good for society and there's such this dramatic pushback and I wish actually shocked to see it that Oregon law makers, all Democrats of course, said you know what we've gone too far let's bring it back to the center and I think that's something that's very good.
It's definitely very good.
It is a little shocking that they figured it out.
It just doesn't seem like like when you go and drive through Oakland for example.
It doesn't seem like anybody's trying to put a cork on that.
They're just like letting it be insanely chaotic.
Like the areas where they have the shanty town set up and people have tents everywhere and these makeshift structures.
How?
At what point in time do you stop letting these open air drug dens exist where people are just cooking Methan front of everybody that just seems so insane.
So it's nice to see that Oregon's like, yeah, let's hit the brakes.
Is it all drugs now?
Did they just put everything in the same category, which is also quite insane.
Yeah, I mean, no, it's not all drugs.
It just says it right here.
Yeah.
It says the over here.
Yeah.
It says the measure makes the possession of small amount of drugs, such as heroin or methane, fetamine, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and enables police to confiscate the drugs, and crack down other use on sidewalks and in parks.
But what about, what are the other, see the thing is, it basically what Oregon did is decriminalize almost everything.
[2:09] The weird thing about drugs is you throw them all into one blanket.
You know, you throw, you cover them all with one blanket drugs because caffeine is a drug.
Alcohol is a drug.
There's a lot of drugs that we're accustomed to using.
And I'm not necessarily in favor of those being illegal.
And when you add in heroin and methamphetamine to something that we already accustomed to, like alcohol or caffeine, it's like, what are we, you know, why are these the same things?
Like what I just individually say, the ventanol is unbelievably bad for you.
Marijuana not so much.
Let's figure out which ones are okay and which ones are non, instead of just saying drugs.
100%.
I mean, you just have to do a really simple calculation.
You say, is this drug correlated with extreme social pathology?
Does it obliterate the individual?
[3:02] Does it cause social problems, social chaos?
And then you could categorize them very simply.
Yes and no.
Okay, you have alcohol, caffeine, marijuana.
You can have a functioning society where those are used.
Yeah.
But you can't have a functioning society where people are foiling fentanyl.
And especially if you look at the cities, it's wrecked these cities the big problem though Is that the political left in the United States has lost the a willingness and the capacity to say no This is something we've all seen you were raised a Generation of kids where like saying no and imposing limits is something that you can't do It's this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits.
But you know, some limits are necessary, some limits are important.
And so I think we're starting to finally see the consequences of obliterating limits.
And then now we're starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way, [4:01] we should start reimposing some guardrails.
Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive.
But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy.
But they are happier and they have less anxiety, apparently, obviously I'm not a doctor, because they're by having structure to life.
It doesn't seem like everything is like a there in charge like oh my god I'm fucking 12 and I'm in charge.
I have no idea what's going on and I get stay out late all night.
The world's chaos which it kind of is in some ways but by imposing structure on the New Gism comfort and I find that's the case with human beings.
I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis [5:00] that they're very dedicated to, those are the happiest people.
They're the healthiest people.
They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life.
The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is, pickle ball, whatever it is.
That gives people like happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just able to fly away on a whim, that doesn't promote happiness.
What are you trying to get out of this life?
Don't you want it to be as enjoyable as possible?
We've all had bad times, they suck, we try to avoid those.
We try to have the good times.
But that can be applied to a society as well.
The way you raise children can be applied to a society like you need structure.
You need rules.
You need love and compassion.
You need examples of good behavior.
You need all of those things.
And when you let people [6:03] fucking cook math in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window.
Imagine being 12 drive by a fucking drug den every day on your way to school.
You're like, oh my God, what do I have to look forward to?
Yeah, I mean, that was my life and my experience and observation.
We moved out of Seattle in 2020, my wife, at that time, two kids.
Because of this precise phenomenon, the politics had gone totally sideways.
Well, since Seattle in 2020 was particularly insane.
It particularly insane.
That was the area.
What was it called?
The glory of the Chaz.
Chaz, that's right.
But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten first grade at the time, and we would be walking to school a few blocks up and we'd have to be avoiding, schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street.
Walking.
Just walking.
Yeah, just walking.
And so you're trying to kind of navigate your kids around.
[7:01] There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys, cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble.
And then you talk to the administrators at the time, say, hey, this is a problem.
I don't accept this.
I don't like this.
And they say, oh, well, you know, we have to be compassionate to our houseless neighbors.
It's like, no, we don't.
This is a danger to kids.
And it got so bad that they were teaching the kids what to do when they found hypodermic needles in the playground.
Oh my God.
This is a problem.
I don't want this as a parent.
I want you to prevent them having to pick up hypodermic needles.
And, you know, and it's like a group of people that are so, it's like compassion also has to be limited.
You have to have compassion within reasonable limits.
Well, you're dealing with people that will just burn it all down.
If you just, you say, arson is no longer punishable, they'll burn all the houses down.
Yeah.
These are insane people.
They don't have anything.
Why wouldn't they just burn it all down?
Just for funds.
[8:00] Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so hard to understand how it got this far.
You know, I love when these terms like the house list.
Like, you already have a word for it.
Yeah.
Like, stop trying to dress it up with a new word.
You already have a word for it.
The word, this one's been driving me fucking crazy lately.
Minor attracted persons.
Yes.
I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting minor attracted persons.
You're talking about pedophiles.
That's what we're talking about.
It must be that these people have no children.
It must be.
I don't know if they do their monsters, this idea that you're going to minimize the harm caused by evil criminals who steal children's lives, ruin their lives forever.
And you're just going to call them a minor-attracted person and try to say that it's an identity.
[9:00] To what reason?
To what end?
Like, why would you wanna do that?
I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.
You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, drag queen story hour.
You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.
These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children.
That's like, should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language, like you're talking about euphemisms, very soft sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.
But you're concealing from people, the fact that it's like, ah, actually no, this is kind of uncomfortable.
And like, I wouldn't want to do that.
Well, not only that.
Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children?
No.
No.
That's like the thing you'd want to avoid, like most in life.
There's no reason to talk to them about that.
There's no reason.
[10:01] They're not interested in it.
They're little kids.
And they're not interested.
It's the adults that are interested.
So the question is, why?
Why are adults so interested in this?
What is the ideological goal, the personal goal?
And I find it.
They're influencing children because, like all groups, as much as people hate to hear this, everyone wants you to join their group.
It is a natural human instinct.
The idea that that would not apply to gender identity, that that would not apply to sexual orientation is crazy.
It implies to phones.
And it applies to like people have Android phones or like, dude, switch over.
Look, you can use the S-pan dude, you can switch over.
Look at my AI features, dude, you don't need a high message.
There, it's with everything.
dude, you don't need a high message.
It's with everything.
And if you don't think that happens with sexuality or with gender, you're out of your mind.
It's a natural human characteristic.
Why would it be absent there when it's present and literally everything?
People use Windows computers, [11:01] shit on people use Apple computers.
You should just try Windows, Matt.
There's so much more variety.
They want you to join.
They want you to want you to be a part of their church.
They want you to be moving to their neighborhood.
I'm guilty of it too.
I got a bunch of people to move to Austin.
For sure.
It's like, it's like, think that people do.
It's a thing to be able to do, But this idea that a guy with fucking heavy makeup on dress like a tart, like if that was a woman, I'd be like, what's wrong with that lady?
She's not dressing like a teacher.
This is crazy.
What is she doing?
Why is she dressed like that?
Is that a costume?
Is she in a play?
She's not in a play.
Okay, cut.
Yeah, let's hope the break's up this one.
That fucking lady's gotta be insane.
Does she have any kids?
Well, actually, she doesn't even have a vagina.
You know, she's got a penis.
What?
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Hold the fuck on.
Yeah.
What are we held by virtually everyone.
Yes.
But people are silent about it.
Right.
Because they've been stigmatized into believing [12:06] if you offer any criticism of the ideology, of gender theory, or the practice, you are somehow a bigot, you're somehow homophobic, you're definitely far right.
You're a far right extremist.
And you're locked in with KKK.
You're locked in with like stormed front people.
This is a 90% opinion.
Yeah.
And so, you know, what I think is so important is to stop playing the game.
Yeah.
And to say, you know what?
I'm going to sell the truth and I'm going to take this links and arrows because I know that the public opinion is on my side.
And people fear speaking out, but they need representation.
And that to me is the name of the game.
Well, you are really good at explaining everything that's happening and really good at like laying it out in a very easy to understand pattern.
Like where it first was introduced into the education system, the blind spots that people [13:02] have towards how Marxism works works even especially like during the time of the 1960s and the 70s when a lot of this stuff was gaining momentum in the United States because of the anti-war movement.
They were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags.
They're completely ignoring what happened in Cuba.
They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship, always.
There's no evidence of it ever not leading to that.
It's like the idea of like, you know, I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don't think I'm gonna die of rabies.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm just gonna get bit by it.
Fucking rabies kills everybody.
It's like one lady who didn't die of rabies because of a very novel treatment where they have to put her into a medically induced coma Because rabies is such an old disease and it's such an aggressive disease that your immune system can fight it off But it can't keep up with it and eventually the rabies wins and it always wins So by putting her in a medically induced coma I don't know what about the biological process of it, but it somehow or another [14:05] I don't know what about the biological process of it, but it somehow or another Shorted out her body to the point where it had the resources to effectively battle the rabies Because she was just completely immobile and in a medically induced coma So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies.
Oh to survive rabies.
So because it's a plot for this, it's a plot for this.
I mean, we can do it.
Marxism will put your whole society at best in a medically induced coma.
And at worst you get starvation, who logs, mass suppression.
Well, it kills the society is what the point is.
The point is the best case scenario is that you somehow through a medically induced coma fucking survive it.
There's no improvement no you're probably wrecked for the rest of your life i mean it's probably such a horrific disease and everything's compromised after that what when i was in my twenties i traveled through a lot of the former soviet union uh...
socialist republics so cause extend kyrgyzstan central asia [15:02] and mongolia another another countries that have been ruled by the Soviets.
And what happened, and I think there is, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest, it generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest.
And so when you travel through those countries, it is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.
It's these Soviet block housing.
It has enormous rates of alcoholism.
You see people strewn on the road freezing to death in the winters.
There's no economic productivity.
There's no culture.
The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs.
And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions.
They've been totally annihilated as far as their economic possibilities.
But you still have three, four, five million people.
And it's what happens when your society is devoured [16:00] by ideology.
And so the ideology that we're seeing in American institutions is, of of course different.
We're blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history.
But it's functionally the same.
And to your point, in the late 80s or late 60s and early 70s, you had true Marxist-Leninist radicals, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, the Weather Underground.
And if you look at their literature, their propaganda materials from that time, and you compare it to what's happening in, let's say, Buffalo Public Schools, their BLM curriculum.
I actually did this.
I looked at the Black Panther Party pamphlets.
They were selling to FOMENT Revolution and the Buffalo Public Schools curriculum.
You know, it's like pretty close.
The IDEs are the same.
Of course, they're softened.
They use the nice language about DEI or what have you.
But, you know, we should take ideas seriously.
And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.
And it's a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating [17:03] kids.
And that's why you're seeing kids today that grow up with this version of the society and reality that we live in that so doesn't jive with people that are older than them who didn't grow up in that system.
Who are like, what are you talking about?
Like, it's not that bad.
Like, the things you're saying are insane.
You're freaking out over almost nothing and not paying attention to the important things.
There's important things going on in this world, but it's not microaggressions.
It's not that Google shouldn't show images of white men when you pump in the AI and ask where the founding fathers are.
They wouldn't even, they just see what they do with Nazis.
Did they make multi-racial Nazis?
Multi-racial Nazis.
see had an asian woman not see inclusive yeah it's fucking bananas it's bananas it's literally like a movie it's a might judge movie it's idiocracy yeah it's a very strange thing word logic is just [18:00] been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and challenging young minds have completely abandoned that task and are now wholesale focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to and none of these people exist that are teaching these things none of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of university world.
These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated and then they indoctrinate more and educate more and they stay in this system and they're not out there in the world.
They're just not.
But they don't speak for us.
But they don't speak for us.
They don't agree with us.
And yet they're ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very vocabulary that we use.
You know, used to be that you'd have a quirky, tweeted out, you [19:00] know, Marxist professor who would be smoking a pipe in an Ivy League school and you could say, well, that's fine.
The kids go to Princeton and they get two years with the Marxist whack job and then they get out in the real world.
The problem is that that ideology that was confined to a relatively small part of society where it was tolerated because it added some diversity of experience or ideas has now extended to institutions that really do matter.
And so the question is, if you're sending your kids to school, the majority of the parents don't like what's being taught and it's being taught anyway, what kind of system do we live in?
Is that democratic governance?
Is that the representation of the people?
If we're paying for it, we're sending our kids through it, but we don't have a stake in and the control of the values that are being formed in those institutions.
I think it's a very serious question.
It's not trivial to say we're kind of beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints [20:04] that make a democratic form of government meaningful.
When the bureaucracy rules and it's pushing ideology against the will of the majority of the people, we're in a kind of scary position in our country.
And it seems like it's willing participation by the masses as well because they feel like they're a part of change.
They feel like they're a part of imposing these ideas on the rest of the world and the rest of the world is going to have to catch up and they will be the ones that were correct because they were on the right side all along.
And it's very strange to watch it play out because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point.
It's very disheartening.
Like you see it with DAs, like there's an issue going on right now in Austin where they have this progressive Soros-funded DA who's just letting everybody out of jail.
Like would you do rate people, let them out of jail, murder someone, let them out of jail?
[21:01] It's fucking bananas.
Yeah.
This idea that's...
Migra aggression, straight to prison.
They're talking about the dropping crime, but it's because crimes not reported in a lot of places now because the crime went up so high and they defunded the police.
It's like in Austin, they need there 500 cops down and the morale is down because of the defund the police and because you know cops like there was I think there I believe there's 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the Black Lives Matter protests.
17 of those cases, I think have been dropped.
I don't know.
I'm sure if that find that what at the here, I'll send you an article.
You can tell me if that it's in Barry Weiss's substack today or her, her newspaper.
Sure.
But this is a real problem where you see the results playing out.
You see that they're negative.
And you mean kudos to Oregon for, you know, correcting course.
But you see it playing out with crime and with prisons.
And here's my number one beef with this.
All this effort to do that.
[22:02] All this effort to let people out of jail no cash bail What about reform?
What about putting all that effort into reforming people?
How come that doesn't exist?
What about funding reform inside the prisons?
What about going to all these impoverished drug-ridden gang-ridden communities and doing some good?
How come there's no effort there?
If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress.
You don't want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual criminals, and just let them lose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone's anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever.
That's not the solution.
It's very unfortunate those people in that situation where they are habitual criminals.
And I'm sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that without doubt, right?
Sure.
But the solution's not let them out.
The solution is stop that from happening in the future.
And there's no effort whatsoever put on that.
[23:00] There's no conscious thought of like how do we get at the beginning of this?
Yeah, and that's an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex, there are so many contributing factors, but I actually don't think it's totally necessary to do that.
You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate, here are the ones that we don't tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences.
And so what we're seeing in El Salvador, which of course is ongoing, it's fraught with potential problems, but what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%.
It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.
Now it's per capita, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.
The lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes.
[24:00] And so it's not that you have to have a kind of soul searching and endless kind of naval gazing and philosophizing.
It's simply to say, you know, people who are a direct threat to others that commit violent crimes that maybe have 20, 30, 40, 100 convictions in their criminal history, you know, cannot participate in society without limits.
And it's something that people have been scared to talk about, but I think that that is ending because when people start to feel a sense of danger in their daily lives, they're gonna start to break through some of those taboos and to say, hey, wait a minute, yeah, they're letting people out of jail who are violent criminals, doesn't seem to be working.
And I think we're there, even in Seattle, they elected a Republican city attorney, they elected a moderate city council, a moderate mayor, and the big cities, especially the West Coast cities, are waking up to this citizen rage.
These are the most prosperous cities in the history of the world.
[25:08] But they can't keep the streets clean.
They can't keep people safe.
Well, they can when jeezing pink comes to town.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
That one.
That's really so wild because what he does is so blatant.
Yeah.
Like the Penaer bread thing, the Penaer bread thing.
The Penaer bread thing is amazing.
You almost have to respect it.
You go almost have to respect it.
It's so brazing.
It's like, explain it to people.
Wait, hold on.
Yeah, the Penaer bread.
So it's like, you're gonna raise the minimum wage for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour, except for Penaer bread.
Because the Pena Penera bread guy is his friend and I think it's exept, but the way around that to make don't look that obvious is places with bakeries.
But the, what, that's not, what is the, I mean, why, why a specific way of cooking?
There is no, no, no, no justification.
There's no rational justification for it.
And, and so it's almost like, oh, what says, Penera is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all on February 28th Bloomberg reported that bakery chain penair would be exempt from California's [26:08] AB1228 law a law that raises minimum wage for fast food workers from $16 to $20 an hour star and 81 so why is that?
How is it not exempted?
That's a hell of a fact check.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, but they were saying that it was bakeries were exempt.
So what is exempt?
It said okay, Governor Gavin Newsom told Los Angeles Times Penaer would not be exempt from the law The spokesperson also did not acclaim the Bluebird piece which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom Push for exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell as a standalone sell it as a standalone item calling the report absurd So it is it a fake story?
Or is it something that they, they might have corrected course quickly.
They might have corrected course quickly, yeah.
Yeah, roll up to the top.
So where's the initial report?
Let's find the initial report because why would Bloomberg spread bullshit?
[27:02] Bloomberg is a financial paper, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That's not something.
I don't think it would be.
Yeah, you really can't do that if you're running a financial paper.
It's not like the New York Times.
The New York Times can say Israel bombed the hospital and 500 people are killed and put in the front page even if it's not true.
And everybody just assumes it's true because it's the New York Times.
But they can kind of get away with that and then they still exist.
But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that, if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses are doing or attacks laws, that seems insane.
How Panere bread duck California's new $20 minimum wage.
This is Bloomberg.
Governor push for a carve out that's perplexed industry observers and benefited a donor.
So how do we know that this is true?
Do we have to subscribe?
The dreaded paywall.
Okay, no worries.
We'll subscribe.
We owe you Bloomberg.
But there must be something to it.
And it's so hard with that guy because when you just look at the way he [28:03] praised Biden, I would never run against him.
A man of character.
You know, like, I'm old school.
It's God.
It's like he's playing someone in a movie that's a crazy person.
It's like that's how, that's how like a really good actor would play a complete crazy person who's insincere enough that smart people recognize it.
But that like really dull-minded blue no matter who people are like, he's a winner.
That guy, he's got my photo.
I'll tell you what, he can win.
He can win this for us.
But the problem is that that's not wrong.
I mean, Gavin Newsom is a fearsome political talent and his willingness to do or say anything and do it with a straight face with that sincere voice and that cool, you know, swoopy hair.
I mean, I love that he keeps getting busted too.
I love that he got busted during the pandemic, eating inside with no mask on.
[29:02] He's just fucking shh.
The shamelessness on that guy is like, it's like a laboratory specimen.
I mean, it's actually, is an interesting guy and fascinating person in that way.
I'm not a fan, I disagree with him politically, but I don't think he should be underestimated because those of us who can see through it, I think are actually a pretty small number of people.
Well, I think you're probably right, and I think there's also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team.
That's what I think.
I think they barely care who the president is, and I think that's obvious with Obama, excuse me, with Biden, not with Obama at all, the opposite with Obama.
Obama was like the best example what we have to offer, but Biden is without doubt anyone can beat him.
If you were just comparing competence, you know, someone who you trust, talking, someone who you trust to go meet foreign dignitaries, there's zero, he has no one he's gonna beat.
He's not gonna be a single living politician, [30:02] but since he's a type, a top of this team that people are like, this team is our team, no matter what.
Like we're all in, I'm a fucking 49ers fan for life.
That's what these people are doing.
And they literally don't care.
They'll gaslight you into a coma.
Did you see that piece that someone wrote the other day?
How his age is his superpower?
Did you see that shit?
I didn't see that.
Penaer exempted from California's minimum wage hike thanked a new sum link.
Okay, and this is Snopes.
What does Snopes say?
Here's the ex-slam explaining what the article was and then I'll skip to the paragraph for a talk.
Do they debunk it?
Yeah, this is...
No, I didn't get through all the article with six.
It is explaining what.
Okay, the confusion exception led.
Okay, here's according to California State law set to a take effect April 1, 2024, a restaurant chain with more than 60 locations nationwide that produces for sale bread as a standalone menu item does not count as fast food.
[31:01] The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Bloomberg article published February 28th reporting that the fast casual chain Penaire bread is dodged and upcoming minimum wage increase for fast food workers in California $20 an hour.
The article connected the bread exemption to billionaire Greg Flynn, a frequent donor to California governor Gavin Newsman's political campaigns who owns more than two dozen Penaire bread locations in the state.
In a statement of snopes, however, Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection played a role in the law and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Panera.
The government never met with Flynn about this bill and the story is observed, Stack said, well, they don't have to meet.
They can talk on the phone.
Our legal team has reviewed and it appears that Panera is not exempt from the law.
Whoops.
Yeah.
The legal team reviewed it after they, so there is an exemption.
Right.
Right.
So that's why I was going to get to this.
Okay.
So how would they not be?
The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills, the exemption, as we mentioned above, is real [32:07] and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.
However, Newsom's office set a legal analysis determined panera like other chain bakeries does not fall under the exemption because it mixes his dough off site instead of fully producing bread on the premises of its retail locations.
Oh my God.
Interesting, but that makes sense.
Yeah.
That makes sense because they're just, it's like subway, right?
Subway doesn't make the dough either.
That's right.
So this, so this, but that, why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill?
I got it.
Is the baker's lobby that powerful or the opposite.
The opposite.
Yeah.
Well, the bakers or the ones who'd be lobbying for more money.
That's what I mean.
Yeah.
The actual bakers, yeah.
But even look at snopes.
Snopes has done a fact check on my work that actually got debunked.
Politifact has done it.
Washington Post.
The back check.
Well, the back check.
[33:01] The back check.
It's wild.
Is wild, but a lot of these fact check sites, they've actually had to retract claims against me where they say, oh, you know, Christopher Fowler is reporting said X, Y and Z, it's not true.
And then I provide them the documentation, the evidence, I raise a stink about it.
And then they reverse course.
And a lot of these, like, that's such a mess of facts.
And who did they reach out to verify?
Governor Newsom's office.
Right.
You said it's absurd.
Yeah.
Of course he's going to say it's absurd because he got in trouble for it.
But I think the point about Biden that you were making is really instructive because Biden is like the weekend at Bernie's president.
Exactly.
I mean, they wheel him around and so what you get a glimpse of is the Democratic Party machine.
What are their priorities?
What are they going to put on the teleprompter?
What is the staff level going to decide is important?
And then they kind of wheelbiden out there to kind of kind of stammer for a couple minutes, say the talking points and get out.
And so we're seeing what's important to the party as a movement.
The opposite is Trump.
Trump is, you know, a unique individual individual figure the party is following him [34:06] look these are the two models that we have and increasingly the voters are saying we want to have a rematch what do you think it's it's it is interesting that he's so frail that he's transparent right and it's so transparent to the point where uh...
the white house press secretary accidentally tweeted as him from her account.
You saw that, right?
Which is wonderful.
I love when that happens because it's like, thank you.
I was wondering.
Now I know, you know?
I was really confused.
I kind of had a feeling it was you, you know?
And is there ever been a worse White House Press Secretary?
How did she get that job?
She's so bad at convincing people.
There's a bunch of hardcore, ideologically driven, left-wing pundits that are on YouTube that could do a way better job.
And they would be fucking psycho about it.
They would be psycho about it.
And the left would be like, yeah!
[35:00] Like she's not the one.
Like she's fucking terrible at it.
She gets called out for stuff all the time.
She gets set up for stuff all the time.
Like Peter Duce, he's always setting her up.
He talks to her, but he's amazing.
He's so good.
It'll provide a little bit of this, but then what about that?
And you know, she's just awful at it.
And she's only really challenged by one person in the briefing room and still manages to bungle it on the daily.
Well, it's just there's so much madness that she has to cover up.
It's what, and look, this is again a kind of brass tax wave talking about it, but it's what happens when you put identity over competence.
Everyone knows explicitly, and then when you hire someone, it's a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities that the candidate has.
This is our first black female, I don't know LGBTQ, not really sure.
someone, it's a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities the candidate has.
Yeah.
You know, this is our first, you know, black female, I don't know, LGBTQ, not really sure.
Yeah.
And so the problem with that, though, is when you're not making a decision based on competence, merit, excellence, you're buying into it at the front end on that different hierarchy [36:01] of decision making.
But then on the back end, you can't do anything about it.
You say, well, you elevated this person for identity, you can't fire that person because of incompetence.
Unless they steal women's clothes from the airport.
Yeah, unless they get a little sideways, you know?
That guy was my favorite.
But the Harvard story is this exact phenomenon.
And, you know, after the 10, 7 attack, Harvard reveals the ideology in the institution.
And then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents.
We were the ones who broke the plagiarism.
Just for people that aren't aware, so this can be stand alone.
What Christopher's referring to is that Harvard, the president of Harvard, and the president of MIT and Penn, they all had this meeting where they were grilled by, which was the...
Stefanik.
Yes.
Who grilled them about using anti-Jewish hate, and is that hate speech to say death to the Jews?
[37:06] And their answer was essentially if it's actionable.
Yeah.
Then it's hate, it was the most bonkers, bizarre mental gymnastics, and also with that one woman from Penn, done in the most condescending way.
It's like she is so accustomed to being the boss, so accustomed to people like accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world, that she doesn't realize how fucking insane what she's saying is.
Yeah.
The question was, if students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard's policy?
Yes.
And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was it depends on the context.
It's like, I mean, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people in the center left, suddenly became clear.
Yes.
And so this caused all [38:02] sorts of chaos predictably.
You have donors dropping out, you have alumni furious, and then a little birdie sent another reporter and me, a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, you know, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized dozens of passages in her PhD thesis.
And so in this context of this big fight, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict.
And so, published it obviously causes a huge firestorm, but the question is the same.
It's to say, to Harvard.
OK, DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.
That's clear.
But your motto for the last, you know, three, four hundred years has been Veritas truth.
And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one.
You either choose DEI or you choose truth, which one are you going to sacrifice?
[39:02] And I think as a country, the reason that story drove so much attention is because that's where we are politically, that's where we are on policy, that's where companies find themselves.
Where are we going?
What are our values?
And we have this competing set of values.
And for me, as someone who, look, I'm unabashed, I'm a political person.
I try to drive political change.
I think framing the question clearly so that people really understand what's at stake is just the beginning part of the process of getting sanity back.
Yeah, and I think people are wager.
Jamie, why don't you shut your mic off because Carl's snoring up a storm over there.
Carl.
While you were talking, I was here.
Carl.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeez, Carl.
That's boring.
Yeah.
Carl gets bored quick.
He's only four months old.
But the curious thing to me was that most people, until they saw those videos, weren't aware of how far it had gone, and then they're like, okay.
[40:02] Now I kind of get it.
And there's been a very, very big reaction since then of people realizing how insane everything has gotten.
I think that, this is something that came up, like when Jordan Peterson first started doing my show, which was I think, when was Jordan's first appearance?
Was it 2015, 2016?
Somewhere when then?
When I had seen his story and seen these videos of him being interviewed Explaining to people no you don't understand if you impose this legislation that makes it a hate crime to not use someone's preferred gender pronouns This is not gonna stop there.
It's gonna keep going and going and going and going and you can't let it happen.
And he's right.
And back then.
But back then, the pushback was so fascinating.
Because people were like, why are you having this guy on your show to talk about this thing that's happening only in these obscure universities, it's never gonna go anywhere.
But now you look at it eight years later [41:01] and it's fucking everywhere.
It's everywhere.
Dude, so one of the things that I do, I'm a trustee at a public university in Florida, New College of Florida.
Governor DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to take over this university, replace all of the leadership and then turn it into a classical liberal arts university.
It's in Sarasota, it's a beautiful campus.
The tuition is less than $7,000.
And we want to turn it into a place where conservative families can send their kids and feel like they're getting a good education.
But when we did this, what we did is we came in, we replaced the leadership, we abolished the DEI department, we terminated the Gender Studies Program, and then we said, we said, we're not going to comply with these ridiculous pronoun rules.
And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me.
So I'm currently under investigation by federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to [42:01] call this woman by Zezur pronouns.
Zezur.
Not, you know, okay, trans, okay, man, woman, okay, whatever.
Zezur.
And it's like, either way, federal indictment imagine, imagine for even just refusing to call this person, you know, people have always been rude.
Are we gonna like legislate against rudeness?
And we're gonna say that like if someone decides to call me Mrs.
Rogan, can I get them arrested and locked in a cage because they're being rude to me, because they're calling me a girl?
If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that's where it's going, that's where they'd like it to go.
And look, I have to spin up lawyers, thankfully the university is handling it.
But I mean, this is not trivial.
And the what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great, what he brought up, um, illustrates this point.
If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything.
Mm-hmm.
It's a simple sales technique.
You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them [43:01] to kind of cash up.
And then you work them up the chain to a bigger purchase or a bigger commitment or a bigger ideology.
It's how cults work.
And so like, I learned this as a kid, my father's Italian from Italy, and we went to Rome to the Vatican.
This sales guy, it's like everything about sales and persuasion I learned, like 10 years old, watching this guy.
He came up and said, oh, sir, it's a beautiful day.
I had a new grandchild that was born.
Let me give you this beautiful St.
Christopher Medal or St.
Joseph Medal to celebrate this.
And as soon as you take it, you know you're hooked because he's gonna sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever.
And so this is the ante.
Once you put in the ante, you're playing the hand.
And so this is the anti, you know, once you put in the anti, you're playing the hand.
And so this stuff is like, it's rage bait for the right.
It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives, you know, some kind of momentum.
Ratings.
Ratings.
But what it's not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback, legal, administrative, policy, and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes.
[44:06] But I'm very concerned because these are just these gambits where they make.
And once they stick, then you're in.
It's very hard to roll back.
Look at the military.
You have all of these men masquerading as women that are now suddenly elevated in the military hierarchy.
This is not trivial.
We're the most powerful military in the world.
We maintain international peace.
And it's like now the highest concern is trans?
No.
I don't think that this is how we should be making decisions.
And I don't think that we should be submitting to the original lie.
You should never submit to the original lie because if you do, you can never successfully push back again.
It's certainly odd that they're pushing that.
This is where I get so confused [45:01] because if I really wanna go full tinfoil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was foreign country, I would be promoting this as much as possible.
In any way, I could.
I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.
I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.
I'd be teaching them the kind of things that they taught people where that woman, do you remember you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley and he was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods?
And she is actually laughing.
I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence like what I think she was a Stanford law professor She was some somewhere.
Yeah might have been Berkeley Yeah, but it was whatever it was it was like what did you just say?
[46:01] What did you just say and why did you say it that?
You think you're so accustomed to being in your bubble that you don't recognize how gross it is when you giggle before you say something.
I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.
Like some, some men can have periods.
But this is the dominant culture in HR departments, K through 12 schools, universities, government bureaucracies.
That is the social game that has been established.
And so when we took over at New College of Florida, it was the most left-leaning university.
It's basically the evergreen state of Florida.
It was, the student population was more than 50% trans queer and non-binary.
More than 50%.
More than 50%.
What else is the odds of that?
In terms of like the normal account when they do, if they get a random group of 100 human beings, there's a bit of a disparity there.
You know, especially because non-binary is fake, [47:01] it's not a thing, right?
This doesn't exist.
You can be non-binary is fake, it's not a thing.
This doesn't exist.
You can say non-binary.
I'm a maybe I am.
You can be, you just say it.
You just say it.
I knew a dude who used to say it.
He's the date only girls.
That was his strategy.
Yeah, it's like a con.
It's a con.
You're a part of the...
Male feminist.
You're LBGT.
Yeah, you know, it is like a it's a strategy 100% and it works maybe at the initial but there are negative consequences Yeah, there's flaws is flaws and then once women figure out what you're doing They don't respect you anymore, but what happens?
So we go to the university and you know We're the new bosses the governor gives us a mandate to do significant changes and reforms And I remember I took some of my guys we we kind of landed on campus the first time, student protests, death threats, SWAT team mobilized to protect us.
And I remember meeting with the old administrators and walking in and, and these are people that are just wagging their finger [48:02] in my faces, in my face rather, fingers in my face, they're saying, oh, you can't do this.
You're opening up the community to violence.
You're at this level.
You can't host a talk on campus because all these, all the same stuff you're talking about.
And then I think like all of you are about to get fired.
Do you not understand the situation that you're in?
Your finger wagging is not going to work anymore.
The governor is tough as nails.
He told us before we took over.
If you're not driving massive negative headlines, if you're not if you're not if you're not getting flack, you're not doing your job.
I'll back you up 100% go in and make the change.
But what I realize in that moment is that the people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged.
No one in a meeting says, actually, this is a stupid idea.
We should get back to business.
And so for me, it was this remarkable realization that we've created this social and psychological pattern within [49:01] our institutions where they're like fragile, brittle, unhinged because the most passive-aggressive, the most ideological, the most kind of nagging person ends up winning.
And if we're going to have better institutions, we have to have people, men and women that go in and just say, no, no more bullshit, no more games, no more ideology.
We have a serious job to do.
We're going to get it done.
And if you don't join the mission, you're out.
Pink slip, you know.
And so that's kind of what we did.
You saw the same thing at Twitter when Elon took over Twitter.
These are the hard decisions that we haven't made in a long time that I think are desperately needed?
I think so too.
And I think that what they're doing by allowing this culture where every anxiety gets justified and amplified, you're just creating more anxious people.
[50:02] You're creating more fucked up kids.
You're turning the whole world into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend.
And you have to amend it through DEI and you have to amend it through equality of outcome and you have to amend it through equality of outcome and you have to mend it through tax the rich and like the whole thing behind it is just so unhinged.
And how many of those people, if they had gone to a place where they were met with intellectual challenges by motivated professors who are not ideologically driven, who could have taught them important things about life, that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way.
We're not preparing people for that, because the people that are preparing the people have never done that.
[51:06] And it's a giant part of the problem.
It's like someone teaching you how to do a thing that they don't do.
Unless they're teaching, let's say about drag queens.
Unless they're teaching you how to be a drag queen, I'm not interested.
Nope, but that's what they're doing.
I mean, they're doing that sort of.
For sure, it's a modeling thing.
The drag queen comes in with a position of status, prestige, admiration.
Right.
It's presented as this amazing life path.
And even the drag queen theorists, if you read their academic papers, which is not everyone's cup of tea, but I've made the sacrifice.
They're very clearly, very clearly and very queerly.
They say, we are training kids to move into the queer ideology, the ideology of queer theory, the academic discipline, but also for other ways of knowing, creating [52:01] one of the phrase they use is a sight of queer pleasure.
And it's like, they're not hiding the ideology that's driving this if you dig far enough.
And they really say, they say we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family, because that's oppressive.
Having a mother and a father and a nuclear household environment is a form of racism, transphobia, whatever, all of the different social ills you could imagine.
And so we have people that have no sense of responsibility.
We've inherited some good and some bad.
You're born into the world in a tragic state of being.
Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad.
I think on the whole, our history, our tradition is on that very positive, very good.
Still problems to solve, that's a kind of universal human nature.
But what we're training kids to believe is that everything behind them is evil.
All of the structures that have provided a sense of discipline and meaning and purpose [53:02] should be demolished, and they should be replaced by ideological communities.
I mean, that to me is evident in the outcomes.
We're creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids that have been deprived of all these structures that could actually help them along.
I've seen that across the board in my reporting, in my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life.
And so we have to start first by assessing your own situation.
What do I do with my kids?
And a lot of people are asking that question right now.
I don't know about you, but when I grew up, if you were an upper middle class, professional class household, your parents bought a house in a nice neighborhood, enrolled you in public care kindergarten, and you kind of went up.
It was said it and forget it.
That's over.
Parents are finally starting to say, hey, wait a minute, I actually have to look into this.
I want to be careful and considerate about where I'm sending my kids and what kind of [54:03] life I'm raising them to live.
Yes, and there's not a lot of good options.
That's what gets confusing.
And for a lot of my friends whose kids are about to go to high school and about to go to college, they're making these next steps towards adulthood.
It's really scary to them because they're like, look, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.
They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, can't caught up in momentum.
And not realize that you're not contributing to any good.
You're just fucking things up worse.
And that none of this unhoused or home-free or whatever you want to call it.
That's not helping anybody.
All this language, all this verbiage, it's not helping anybody.
And you have to fucking work hard to get by in this world.
And it's important.
It's an important fact, facet of being a human being.
You have to learn what your capabilities are.
You have to learn how to push yourself.
[55:02] You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable.
You have to learn how to push yourself.
You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable.
You have to learn that.
And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it.
If we protect kids every step of the way, from any sort of difficult thing at all, lower math scores because too many people aren't graduating.
So this must be racist.
Let's lower the scores.
Let's just pass people, fuck it.
We don't wanna be bad people.
Let's lower the scores.
Let's let's just pass people fuck it.
We don't want to be bad people It's just past people instead of teaching them.
It's hard to learn shit.
It's hard.
It takes work That's the whole reason why it's so impressive when someone is really well read like wow that guy put in the work Yeah, it's really impressive when someone knows a lot of stuff It's really impressive when someone's really good at something.
Well, why is it impressive?
Because we know it's fucking hard to do.
It's that simple.
If you want to develop human beings that have potential and have and can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you got to teach them how to work hard.
That's part of the process.
It's unavoidable.
[56:03] And if you don't have that facet, if you don't have that as a core tenet of how you view the world, you're fucking up.
100%.
There's no way you're going to get everything out of life without hard work.
It's just you'll be anxious.
You'll be depressed.
You'll feel lost.
You won't feel like you accomplished anything.
You all feel like it's been handed to you.
You'll be a trust fund, baby.
You'll you'll feel lost you won't feel like you accomplished anything you all feel like it's been handed to you You'd be a trust fund baby.
You'll be fucked It's not good for you.
You have to work hard and so you have to overcome Including emotional harm you have to go through bullshit You have to go through bad friendships and bad relationships and bad coworkers and bad employers You have to go through that.
It's part of the process.
That's how you become a human being.
You can't protect people every goddamn step of the way.
We're just gonna create a bunch of grown-up babies who are screaming in the street, stop oil now, blocking the highway [57:00] with signs painted with oil, wearing sneakers made with oil.
Every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil It's insanity and this is what we've got and you people look I I'm in that world of words ideas publication it's a pretty easy life in some ways, right?
You know you're doing reading you're doing writing you're doing media But I have a lot of friends that are you, live in my small town that do actual hard work, you know.
They're doing the work in the oil business, they're working on commercial plumbing, they're working in actual real things that we depend on, but we take for granted.
Right.
And those things are actually hard.
Super fucking hard.
Super hard.
It takes a ton of dedication, a ton of skill, and it's the reason that those of us who are privileged enough in the real sense of the word can do what we do.
We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world.
And so I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these ban oil.
Oh, ban oil?
[58:01] Our whole society collapses instantly.
Yeah.
Everything that you do is vanishes in 10 seconds.
And so it's like we've created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings.
I mean, these are people that don't know what it means to be human.
They're just kind of symbols of ideology.
They're like, you know, you look at those videos and you're like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions.
These are kind of puppets as part of some agendas, part of some memetic ideology.
That is nihilistic at its heart.
And that's where I think we're going.
If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color.
You have no sense of values.
And that's what we all want.
We all operate on a sense of values, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
And when you try to wipe away all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal, you're [59:07] dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know, you know, North from South, they know up from down.
And so, you know, with my own kids, that's what I'm trying to do is, is, is, you know, protect them to the extent that's necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to fight.
Because life is a fight, life is a struggle.
They're going to confront very difficult things as they grow up.
And then at some point, you hope that you prepared them enough.
Yeah.
And when you're looking at the difference between the world of today and the world of just 20 years ago, the change is so quick.
There's never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly.
Like, what year was it?
Was it 2020 that we had the highest jump in murder ever?
[1:00:01] The same year we had the defund the police.
That's scary.
That's scary because that's the opposite of where we expect.
If you look at like Pinkers' work on violence over time, you see that societies are trending in a very positive direction, at least we were, until 2020.
And that this one change, just because it was just one year, but that one year was just three years ago, kids.
Okay, another thing like that could do that again, especially when you're dealing with even more people who are released out into the world with these radical ideas, especially the people that are inclined to believe that violence is a necessary aspect of change.
And these are ironically the same people that don't want anybody to be armed.
It's all so wild.
It's so wild because if you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, [1:01:05] you would have a president who's not there, you would have a society that is run by fucking maniacs in the educational institutions that when Antifa commits violence, somehow it's mostly peaceful, but yet when anyone else does it, especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you can throw at it.
Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you can say.
It's everything wrong with the world.
Like, this is a recipe for a civil war.
It's a recipe for chaos.
It's a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that's around us.
If you just go from what happened so quickly in 2020, it's not hard to imagine if you could bring yourself back to the time in 2020 to think this is never coming back and it's going to be like this forever and it's going to get way worse because [1:02:00] if it can get like this where people could just smash into stores and loot, that's what I started seeing.
That's one of the things that got me out of California.
I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything.
By the way, all white kids.
And I saw...
Or down in Santa Monica or something?
It was in Woodland Hills.
And I saw there was a target there that got targeted too.
They lit like a dumpster on fire and pushed up against the door.
There was a lot of shit that people weren't getting caught for.
And it was like right after the George Floyd riots.
So the cop cars in burning on the highway were an image burning everyone's mind still.
And I was like, oh, I know how this movie plays out.
I'm getting the fuck out of here.
Like that was my first thought.
I was like, oh, I know how this movie plays out.
I'm getting the fuck out of here.
Like that was my first thought.
I was like, I need to figure out how to get out of here.
Like this is, I can't stay.
Cause this is only gonna get worse.
And if you don't get out now, and you're gonna wish you got out when something happens to someone you love, we gotta get the fuck out of here.
This is bad.
And It's not hard to imagine that our society, given the current situation and given the current [1:03:09] influences, it's going in that direction.
And if I was in other country, I'd be fucking pumped.
I was looking at, what's that lady's name, Rachel, whatever it is, the Admiral, first female Admiral.
Admiral, Sir, or Madame.
The Ratio Levine.
Yeah, Madame.
Yeah.
Wonderful, hilarious.
And this other one that was some recent transmulinary person who was saying, we should all put our pronouns in all of our emails, even if it's obvious, like shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
How come something that used to be considered a mental illness just 10 years ago is now at a precedent, now it's a valuable asset, now it's an important part of our community, now it's not, if you found out someone was suicidal, would you want them in charge of the nukes?
You wouldn't, right?
Well, just on paper, the amount of trans people [1:04:03] that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else.
Like isn't it something insane, like 40%, it's something crazy like that.
What are you doing?
Like are we ignoring facts and statistics?
If you know that someone is a bipolar schizophrenic and you got them working on a gun range, she'd say, hey Harry, we just pulled your file and you fucking fly off the handle and you have a 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager.
Give me that gun, you motherfucker.
Get out of here.
You can't work anymore.
It's like putting Kanye in charge of like an air wing and the Air Force or something.
I just, whoa, I don't know about that.
It's just nuts where we have decided that listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria.
I've met many people that I truly believe they have somewhere in there, they are a woman and they got stuck in a man's body and I think that's real and I think that's always happened.
[1:05:01] But, but when you make that more powerful than just being a normal person, more preferable, than just being a normal person, subject to less scrutiny than being a normal person.
Just a regular, like, I'm not saying you should discriminate against trans people.
I think you should just like everybody be whoever the fuck they are.
But don't tell me That I'm supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play say if you're a biological male Inmate and you decide that you're a woman and you want to transition to women's prisons Which in California 47 men have done Don't tell me that just because you're trans, like I'm supposed to abandon that.
Like I'm supposed to ignore that sex offenders could just walk into a women's locker room with an erection and everyone's supposed to ignore that.
Like what do you do?
You're now you are fucking up the acceptance of trans people [1:06:04] because you're saying that trans people are gonna come along with all these sex offenders, which is not really true.
There's a lot of the trans people that aren't sex offenders.
They're just trans.
These other people are taking advantage of this fucking massive loophole that you've left in here, and you're victimizing female professional athletes, female college athletes, you're jeopardizing scholarships for those athletes.
You're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women and there's no consideration for that at all.
Yeah, I'm and look at the this kind of sorority house.
I think it's probably the best example of this phenomenon where you have some you know six two male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women, and it's already house somewhere.
And look, obviously, you know, this guy's a pervert that full stop.
That is a kind of patently obvious thing, right?
Well, you're certainly exploiting it.
They're [1:07:01] manipulating it.
You should certainly consider the possibility that he's a pervert.
I think it's at at at the minimum of Big bright red flag that is waving in your face, but the question is an institutional question You know who are the you know the fathers of these young girls the deans of the universities the university presidents It's like hey, wait a minute like the university presidents.
It's like, hey, wait a minute.
A accommodate this person, try to talk to this person, figure out what the deal is, assess whether it actually is kind of a real threat or not, figure out some alternate arrangement for this person.
But especially if the young women are telling you, we don't want this, we're uncomfortable with this, we don't like this, get this person out.
It's a failure on our social institutions that we haven't developed uh...
any kind of method for solving this problem will it also shows our oppression hierarchy that we have always protected women from sexual predators in less [1:08:01] that sexual predator identifies as a group that is a social hierarchy above biological women, which is a trans woman, and that's where we're at.
And it just shows that this is cult thinking.
We're in a cult.
This is a doctrine that could have been created in the top of a mountain by a wizard.
It's nonsense.
It's fucking nonsense.
And somehow or another, it is the norm in a lot of universities.
And it's fucking nonsense.
And somehow or another, it is the norm in a lot of universities.
And it's fucking crazy.
And these women that have to deal with this shit, that's, it's fucking nuts that people aren't insanely outraged.
And that it's not stopped immediately.
People are scared.
That's the common denominator to all of these things.
But the problem is the rebound of that is equally horrific.
Because the rebound of that is that people have enough.
And then when people have enough and they find out there's this biological male that's being housed in this women's sorority and this biological man, maybe he does something [1:09:03] to one of those women, that person, there's gonna be vigilante justice, and that's the last thing you want.
We want to avoid that by having sensible policies now and head off these problems before they balloon into something that is unmanageable.
And so, but, you know, it's not already.
Again, people are scared to speak out.
You talk to folks that are, you know, I used to have this idea that, oh, you know, there's the concept of fuck you money.
Once you have a certain kind of net worth, you're untouchable, you have your kind of immune to social consequences, you can do whatever you want.
That's not even true.
I talk to a lot of folks of considerable means and not all of them, but many of them are also scared because there's status and prestige concerns, family concerns, business concerns.
And so it really is up and down the line, people are scared to speak, they're scared to tell the truth.
[1:10:00] And because there are real social consequences for doing so.
Real consequences across the board.
It's not just social, it's economic consequences, there's consequences in terms of your own personal safety.
There's a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating.
And it's so strange for me for, you know, I'm 56 years old, I was born in 1967.
I lived in a different world.
And I grew up in a world with no internet.
And so to watch this world change the way and to be a part of the internet now, and to exist in both worlds is a very fascinating contrast because I get to see, how old are you?
39.
So you don't know shit.
You don't know shit about the pre-internet days days I didn't get a cell phone till my senior in high school.
Oh, you poor baby But you had a computer at home though, huh?
Yeah, yeah, and it was attached to the internet It was attached to like a well.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's something The kids today like the 20-year-olds they don't know jack shit about no internet They have crazy they have full 5G everywhere they exist and they're always on.
They're always on.
They're always on.
[1:11:06] They also know where everybody's location is because they use SnapMap.
They're all SnapMap in each other.
So they know, like, oh my God, she told me she was gonna go to Becky's house and she's over at Debbie's house.
Like, you know, it's like surveillance of your friends.
Yeah, we do imagine.
It's also, it gets you very accustomed to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face.
And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they're not just the educators.
They're also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic and the amount of influence that you can have if you can get people to adhere to these things, you can get them to do something really stupid, like submit to a social credit score system, which you would attach to a centralized digital currency.
Now you've got communism and it's like that.
It's very quick.
[1:12:01] And just like people's self-centred on censored on Twitter and self-sensored on you before Elon Musk and self-sensor on YouTube because they don't want to get demonetized, people start doing that in regular society.
They will do that because you don't want your social credits core system to drop.
And it could be something as simple as not using ZZer.
Not using ZZer and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using ZZer, and now you are being tried for discrimination.
And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted.
And now all of a sudden you've got a real Soviet Union style, GULOG situation in 2029 the United States of America with Admiral Levine as our first female president Yeah, that could be our first female president.
We're not far from there right now I mean the the absurdity of the ACLU [1:13:00] Finally a complaint and now the Department of Education Civil Rights Division following up for refusing to use Zezer pronouns.
I mean, it's like it is what it is.
This is something we're already here.
And so the first step is to intimidate, right?
It's an intimidation mechanism.
You got to defend yourself, you got to get a lawyer, you have to spend time on it.
Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents.
Right.
And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the end's power.
And you know, I spent a year living in Western China when I was a documentary filmmaker.
And this is like where the weekers are.
The weekers are the Muslim minority population of China's West.
And they're you know ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country.
So observing what they're doing, what they were doing over time, and it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.
They wouldn't allow weaker men to wear moustaches, trivial things that are the beginning.
But then it's like very serious kind of regulation [1:14:08] of thought and opinion.
And so it's propaganda that is backed up by force.
That's really all that we're talking about.
And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form, propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state.
And we have to push at every opportunity and look, I'm a conservative, I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals because we're cobbling together the only viable counter movement.
You can't solve this by culture alone.
You have to get in the rena of politics, you have to change the law, and you have to replace institutions that are broken with new institutions.
It's an uphill fight.
There's not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal, but what I've been trying to do, whether it's with Harvard or critical race theory or DEI, all of these stories [1:15:03] that I've broken and campaigns that I've run is at least turn people on to the idea that something is deeply wrong, put a name in a face to it, and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems.
And if we don't, we lose the great promise.
We were promised liberty and equality.
Those are the two fundamentals.
You don't see, people don't even have an understanding of what that means anymore.
And so we have to recover intellectually what has been erased from our discourse.
And then we have to fight in the arena of actual political power.
We have to take action.
We have to change laws.
We have to reform bureaucracies.
We have to lead institutions.
And so every day that I wake up, it's like, that's what I'm doing.
What wins are we putting up on the board?
Because unless we're having substantial wins on all these little areas, that social credit system that you're talking about, it's just a matter of time.
When you look at the current political landscape, particularly these trials, [1:16:14] how disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?
Because to me, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another either put them jail or make them seem like or make them seem like complete total criminals in a way that would, for the casual, for the person who's not reading deep into the headlines, for the casual Democrat that sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened, where he got fine $365 million.
The casuals, I've seen people argue, you know, [1:17:03] that you know, fraud is fraud and this is fraud, and he's a fucking fraud.
And then I saw Kevin O'Leary explain it from Shark Tank, he was saying, this is what every real estate developer does.
They say, my buildings worth $400 million.
And then someone comes along from the bank and they say, no, it's worth $300 million.
We'll give you a loan on $300 million.
So whatever it is, whatever the number.
It's negotiation.
But also, real estate pricing in general is the strange thing to say that's fraud because people overvalue their property all the time.
I mean, it's a standard thing that people do.
When someone has a house and it's worth $700,000, they start to decide the list that is $900,000 and the real estate person says, well, you know, it's really pushing it.
You guys, like, that's what I want.
I think it's worth $900,000.
Like people have always done weird shit like that.
And then when you have this leftist judge, it says that Mar-a-Lago is worth 18 million.
[1:18:01] Like then you just showed all your silly hands.
You showed your hand because that's a crazy thing to say in a place that is the most expensive real estate on earth.
Yeah.
And the Marlago property is not worth $18 million.
I mean, that's a absurd.
Is it like 18 acres?
Yeah, it's huge.
It covers both sides of the little key or whatever you call it, the little island.
But the bigger question is the question that was first raised by the presidency of Richard Nixon that is now coming to fruition with the presidency and the kind of ex presidency of Donald Trump.
We have a democratic system that favors Trump in the sense that he won in 2016.
He's winning the primary right now for Republicans in 2024.
But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him.
And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim.
They essentially say, we want to keep him off the ballot.
We want to put him in prison.
We want to bankrupt him so he can't become the president, [1:19:02] even if the people support him.
We want to deprive the people of making the decision.
So you wanna take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system.
And adjudicate it in that way, on bogus pretexts.
I mean, the cases are bogus.
And so what you're, the question that we're raising is who actually rules in this country?
Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote, who represents them in the government, or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?
What they can say even to Donald Trump has been one of the most famous people in the world for decades.
He's enormously wealthy.
He's already been the president of the United States, powerful person.
And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we've built up.
And so as someone who I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, I did vote for him for 2020.
I'll absolutely vote for him now in 2024.
[1:20:04] It is a contest of how we think of our democratic system.
And I'm of the mind that the people should decide not the bureaucracy.
And this is a contest where Democrats are saying essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.
Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages usages in that sentence.
We have to destroy democracy as we've traditionally known it, electing a president through a vote of the people, in order to save democracy which is ruled by expert opinion, ruled by the bureaucracy, and essentially left-wing hegemony, left-wing domination over institutions.
And as someone who tries to maximize whatever I can do to push forward on these issues politically, it's not lost on me that if they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, you know, we're all table stakes relatively.
And they're going to have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon metaphorically speaking, [1:21:03] you know, that's when descent becomes a crime.
once they cross the Rubicon metaphorically speaking, that's when descent becomes a crime.
And we've already seen that.
I reported on the gender ideology in schools and work with some of the parent groups that we're trying to mobilize.
And they all could put on an FBI list.
We know this for sure, an FBI counterterrorism list that was specifically for parents school board protesters.
So if you participate in the democratic process, we'll turn you into a criminal.
I hate that with every fiber of my being and whatever threats come my way, whatever lawsuits, whatever kind of investigations come my way, it's worth it.
Take me to prison.
Fine, let's do this.
Because we have to actually confront these questions head on.
We need to have people to have enough courage to put, to actually, courage without risk [1:22:01] is not courage.
Well, you say it's not hyperbole.
I mean, no, these are facts yes are documented documented facts and again because it's a person like donald trump you get people thinking like if you could stop itler by any means necessary wouldn't you stop Hitler and so they quit donald trump with Hitler and go here you go this is our modern Hitler do you see what would be gober said what you say what we gotberg said that Biden could arrest all the Republicans and put them in jail?
You just need to see how unhinged this kind of thinking is.
Well, you know what Joe Biden could do?
Joe Biden, you have to see it.
Because it's so crazy.
He said it's on television.
Find that, you know, Jamie.
Because it's so crazy.
She said on television Fine, you know, Jamie cuz it's so book.
Let's look at a scenario where the Supreme Court says yes He has that he has all those rights.
He is immune from everything.
You know what Joe Biden could do since he is presently president [1:23:01] He could throw every Republican in jail Yeah, I mean He could throw every Republican in jail.
Yeah.
I mean, you could.
I mean, not really.
No, no.
This is not a good thing.
You could because of that.
You could because of that.
He can go, what this means is it's, he can do anything.
That's not what it means at all.
Yeah, no.
But the fact that she says that so confidently, like if you're willing to let Donald Trump use presidential immunity, that means Joe Biden could just go crazy and arrest all the Republicans, because that's what that means.
No, that's not what that means, even a little bit.
Yeah.
Like you just added a whole bunch of stuff to what that means.
I mean, in fairness though, I mean, the view has to be, you know if you average out the view hosts among the dumbest people on television and so it's like they say the thing that people are thinking but they say it very directly so they expose whatever truth but I don't think some of them are dumb.
You don't think so?
No I think it's sunny host.
You think it's deliberate?
I think she's ideologically driven and they have blinds blinders on for sure.
I don't think Sonny's dumb, [1:24:09] but whoopi is certainly not the brightest person.
And what she just said just doesn't make any sense.
It's just like so silly to say.
It's not a well thought out.
It's like if you had an idea for a premise and you're like, it was totally baked and half baked and you went on stage with it and just fucking, it's nothing to do.
Just go for it.
Yeah, there's nothing there.
Sometimes comics do that.
Yeah, and the other question is then, is that representative of a big constituency?
I think probably yes.
Well, a lot of emissivity.
MSE viewers are probably also thinking, I don't even think that MSE viewers, I think they're a little more sophisticated than that.
This is like low information, blue no matter who, like older housewives who are mad at the world.
That's the appeal that would be Goldberg has.
Does it would be of children?
No idea.
It's interesting to, like, really politically motivated older women who don't have children.
[1:25:00] Yeah.
They're very specific.
Like, you can kind of guess the way they think I would like to see like what the stats are on Older post men appausal Women with no children and how they lean politically.
Yeah college educated.
Yeah It's like my fans being male Yeah, it's like yeah exactly.
It's like ocean blue.
I mean, the depths of that.
The demonanas.
Yeah, and because the women that I know that are Republican, they're almost all moms.
It's kind of wild.
Well, there's a lot of young, like hot Republican women that are social influencers now too, which is hilarious.
It's fun.
It's fun to see like these trends.
You see even things where people realize like, oh, this is a pastoral success.
How many of you have a black Trump supporter?
You know, they just run with it.
Yeah.
You see a little bit of that.
But I feel like, with a lot of moms that I know that were like hippies.
They were like, and then they had kids and they're like, fuck this.
Like, immediately.
Like, buddy minds mom, immediately like a buddy of mine's mom who was like super fucking left wing full on leftist [1:26:09] shit kids and then the the riots and COVID and all the K.
I just like fuck this like it redpilled so many of those folks they're just not talking about it they don't talk about it outwardly because they're real uncomfortable with being ostracized and being yelled at, especially with groups of their old friends that are single that still live in Los Angeles.
You know, especially if you're sort of like certain ideological hubs, like fucking silver lake.
There's like these spots where you can't escape.
Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year.
Oh boy, that's a good one.
Yeah, that's a good one.
I went to look at a house to pay a canyon.
And the house had a tennis court.
It was this beautiful house, the tennis court.
Wow, that's really cool.
So we're going through the house and we're checking out, you know, the kitchen, all the stuff.
And then the neighbor just drops in.
And she goes, if you buy this house, you're gonna let us use the tennis court, right?
I go, what?
She goes, the community uses the tennis court.
[1:27:05] I go, the community uses the tennis court that's in my fucking backyard.
If I buy this house, I have to agree that, like, maybe I can't play tennis because you're a play in tennis.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm gonna sign up on the list, man.
But she like got in my face with like beads on and shit.
You know, like the whole deal, like that.
But she didn't say it like, are you going?
Like this is the community is traditionally allowed.
Like we're like a really close knit group.
You're gonna love living here.
Really nice people.
But one thing I wanna tell you is like, we all like to get together and play tennis back there.
Do you think that would be okay if you bought this house?
That would be a different conversation.
I'd be like, maybe I like this lady.
Maybe look, Alice is out there playing tennis.
Maybe we're friends.
Maybe it's cool.
Like if I live next door to my buddy and he was over there playing tennis, I'd be like, what's going on, man?
What are you doing?
What's happening?
It'd be fun.
It'd be like a cool thing.
If your friends playing tennis in your yard, maybe The community's gonna use your tennis court, right?
Like the eyes wide open.
Where's, what am I gonna use yours?
I use your kitchen.
[1:28:05] The fuck are you talking about, lady?
You have a go fishing, but in your backyard.
What are you saying?
What are you saying?
It's a wild place though, because it's like a time capsule.
There's some old timey hippies.
I get along with.
It's like I love those people.
Less than one easier tennis court.
Yeah, yeah, but then it's like, oh yeah, I can't use my tennis court.
I lived it next to a guy.
This guy, white dude from Georgia went by like an Indian like spiritual name.
Oh nice.
And he was, and this dude was, he said about business called live water.
So he was like repelling down like mountain sides, gathering like water and then selling it to all the rich, like housewives down in the palisades.
It was like living water.
That was his scale.
That was still.
Was it a scam?
Oh yeah, this scam was like, it's completely dangerous, right?
But you know, it was like a well-meaning guy and then I mean, he would walk around, like he was a duplex we shared Just talking to you, like, it's just a normal, [1:29:05] naked conversation, naked, yeah, normal conversation.
And it's like, oh, good to see you, Mukande.
We were single at the time.
I was single at the time.
It was like, and he has a girlfriend there, they were making like nut butters and selling this raw water.
You know, that's what they were doing And they're like, yeah, you want to come to a tea ceremony tonight?
It's like, yeah, I'll check that out, man.
We'll go to tea ceremony.
And there was like a peaceful, hippied out, California culture that was fine.
Yeah.
But the second you're like, yeah, now we want drag queens in schools.
You're a bad person because your ancestors came from Europe.
And by the way, we want to destroy the whole society that's when i'm like i'm gonna tap out and now we're gonna fight about it well you know how you know that this is is a night allotted ideologically driven thing that you know you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the gaze against groomers movement [1:30:02] right because there's they they attack people, ruth mercilessly.
It's like, no, like we are just homosexual men, and we don't think that indoctrinating children, the way you're doing is right.
It's not right.
Like, what you're doing is fucked up.
You're not supposed to be teaching kids about blow jobs when they're sick.
Yeah.
They don't need to know about sucking dick when they're six.
That's nuts.
And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornographed, and then here's the thing.
This one drove me bananas when they said, the don't say gay, that it's don't say gay law.
And everybody kept repeating it.
All these liberals that I know kept repeating it says, the don't say gay law.
No where in that law does it say don't say gay.
Right.
That's not what it's about.
It's about introduce and it's a very specific age group.
It's about introducing sexually explicit books to kids that are a certain age.
And they're calling it the don't say gay law.
And I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna say gay, gay, gay.
[1:31:02] Yeah.
Wow.
yeah.
You deserve a prize.
Again, older women, no kids, liberal, right?
But that's not what the law said.
And for low information view viewers of the view, or listeners of MSNBC, and the people that kept repeating that, that don't say gay law over and over, and they were like, wow, this is what they're doing in Florida?
You can't say gay in school.
Imagine being a gay kid and you're in that class and you can't even say you're gay, that's fucking nuts.
Hey, hey pal, we're talking about seven year olds.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's, yeah.
And I did a bunch of reporting and the stuff that they're doing is insane.
It's not just kids about sex, okay fine, obviously they have to know certain biological realities that, you know, sooner or later we all figure out.
But it was like, you know, artificial penis packers.
That was a story I did.
They were teaching like Chicago public school kids in middle school how to wear, you know, like fake penis.
And then setting them up with the kind of, [1:32:01] with the hormone clinics.
But if they don't teach them that, who's gonna teach them?
That's right.
Yeah.
The older guy down the street who runs by in the van, you know, but I've got lessons.
Yeah, but it's like, I worked a lot on the policy in Florida and what it boils down to in Florida is a pretty simple thing.
There's been such a politicization and radicalization of gender theory in schools.
The governor wisely just said, you know what?
Let's just take that off the table.
Let's focus on reading, writing, and math.
Let's focus on a good civic curriculum so that we have real citizens that we're graduating from our public K through 12 schools.
And then let's let families, churches, and private society determine for themselves what they would like to teach their kids about these controversial issues.
Just take it off the table.
No instruction on gender ideology, no instruction on, of course, the explicit, [1:33:02] kind of sexual materials, beyond some reasonable considerations.
And this to me is fair, you can't teach religion in schools.
They delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families.
And so unless we want to have an all-out fight all the time over these issues, why is it even necessary?
It's not.
I have kids.
I don't want them.
I don't feel like a need for the school to teach them all of these things.
I was like, we teach them at home.
We talk about them.
They naturally learn and develop.
And so I think that it is very wise to just say, let's take it off the table, let's delegate this back to people in their personal lives.
That seems like a solution that everyone should agree with.
Completely logical and less you're dedicated to indoctrinating people.
Yeah.
And to your movement.
What is the don't say gay law?
Let's be specific about that.
Just in case anybody tries to call us on this.
[1:34:02] So it was initially no teaching on gender identity and sexual orientation and K through three, which is super reasonable.
It is super reasonable.
And then it caused this massive uproar and the legislators said, all right, we're just gonna double down.
Now it's K through 12.
They're saying no gender identity, no sexual orientation, no explicit, pornographic materials kind of pornographic materials, in K through 12.
We're taking it totally off the table.
And look, there is a reasonable argument to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it, maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there's more latitude.
I'm like, okay, that's a reasonable consideration.
But it's also eminently reasonable to just say, we're taking it all off the table and just teach people and just teach people what they need to know to be successful in life.
I'm sorry, but I had good teachers growing up.
I had quite a few that I remember.
I have a science teacher from Seventh grade that this day I think about fondly.
He was a brilliant man and he taught me about wonder.
I think about that guy.
I've also had a gang of fucking morons who taught me.
[1:35:08] And I don't want that gang of morons teaching my children about biological sex or gender or homosexuality or heterosexuality or oral sex or anal sex.
I don't want to, nothing.
I don't want you teaching them anything about any of those things.
I don't want you telling them that you're a zezer.
I don't want to, nothing.
I don't want you teaching them anything about any of those things.
I don't want you telling them that you're a zezer.
I don't want you pretending that you're a foxkin.
I don't want any of that shit.
If you're teaching history, I want you to teach what happened in 1943.
I want you to teach math.
This is how you count.
This is how you divide.
This is algebra.
This is, this is what you're supposed to be doing.
That's what you're hired for.
If you're a drag queen and you're not teaching how to be a drag queen, eh, that's it.
Exactly.
If somebody wants to take drag queen courses all for you.
Yeah.
But I don't think you should be reading stories to little kids.
It just seems fucking, but [1:36:03] it's one more factor that kid has to deal with.
Totally.
Yeah, yeah.
For what reason?
For what reason?
And so inclusiveness?
That's bullshit.
It's bullshit.
It's bullshit.
Because it's not inclusive of many other perspectives, traditional perspective, or religious perspective, of general kind of conservative perspective.
Also, how much are you screening these drag queens?
Well, not enough.
What is the odds that someone who's a man who likes to dress and drag has other problems?
I mean, I'm not accusing all them of having other problems.
I'm sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women's clothes.
Have at it.
Have a good time.
However, there's a possibility that you might be a kinky freak.
There's a real possibility if you're putting fake eyelashes on and 10-inch heels and you're calling yourself Miss Wanda and you wear in fish nets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down or whatever they do, it's a possibility.
[1:37:01] You might be out of your fucking mind.
And if you're doing a drag show at a bar in the Castro and that's a kind of subculture where they're all adults, they're all opting in, have a good time, knock yourself out.
Yeah.
Totally fine.
But it's like bringing that into the public schools with government funding, with other people's kids.
That's when I think reasonable people say no.
Yeah.
Reasonable people should say no, and the people that don't say no think that they're going to be attacked for being bigoted if they do.
But there's so many people that are like on the fence and scared and don't know what to do and their kids are coming home with these wacky ideas and they're like, what the fuck do I do?
What do I do?
And if you try to go to the school board meetings, you get labeled a domestic terrorist?
Yeah.
This is insanity.
Like you're just enforcing indoctrination and you're just making sure that I comply.
And that is a slippery slope, kids, because you might be getting your way right now doing this and you might think that you should be able to get your way.
[1:38:02] But what if someone else gets into office?
What if there's a war?
What if there's chaos?
What if we have a military dictatorship?
You've already established the rules.
No one's gonna give you those laws back.
You've already said it so that the state and the government and the institutions can dictate personal behavior and how people are allowed to communicate.
If you've done that, you fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control.
And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize the same donors don't need to both people.
So what have you done?
You've empowered the deep state to control your lives and make it easier to steal your money.
Yeah.
And the economics of it is also perilous.
All of these systems are functionally insolvent, right?
Yeah.
University system, our federal budget.
Federal budget, you know.
Wow.
It's just crazy.
You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable in a long term.
And so, look, it's a political person.
[1:39:01] What I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society, and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have?
That's how it works.
And so when there's the kind of homostatics and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy, or it's the capture of K through 12 schools and the gender ideology is going radical, you know, all of these problems also provide opportunities for correction, for reforms, for decentralizing some of these institutions.
And I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.
You have this confrontation between Trump and Biden, but really between Trump and the entire state apparatus that's trying to jail him and prevent him from running for president.
You have a military budget and a federal budget more broadly that is running trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
You have a higher education system that is now, I think 1.6, 1.7 trillion dollars [1:40:06] in student debt that the government has absorbed that's ready to blow up at any time.
The 2020 was a wake up call for many people.
The next wake up call is going to be 2020 100 times over.
And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives that are listening should be figuring out what to do, how to best position themselves to be successful for their families, for their careers, for whatever they're working on.
And those of us who want to see deeper changes, we're all preparing, we're all getting ready to say when the house of cards falls over and it's revealed that none of this is sustainable, the fundamentals of our country, institutional, financial, political cannot hold and they can't be covered over with ideology for anymore.
We have to have responsible civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again.
And I think that it may not be this election cycle, it may not be in a year, it may not [1:41:09] be in two years.
But by any vector, if you talk to people who really know, we're heading towards a big shift.
And I hope that we can emerge on the other side.
Just freeing ourselves from a lot of this ideological capture that I think is hurting people and hurting our country.
I could agree more.
And just leave people the fuck alone and stop using this as a vector of control because that's what they're doing.
And it's also...
There's a problem with that though.
The ideology, leave me alone, the kind of philosophical statement is correct.
I believe in it.
It's a kind of civic, Republican ideal.
It's been the American way is give people the maximum autonomy into their lives, delegate to civil society as much as you can.
But we don't live in that world anymore.
We have a massive federal bureaucracy.
We have these huge institutions that control the [1:42:01] culture.
And so if you're arguing to be left alone, you're always going to be run over by people who don't want to leave you alone.
The solution is not to then assume it and impose your vision, but you at least have to have people who are willing to fight the public fight.
Because most people want to be left alone, they deserve that.
But we need to have a leadership class, kind of counter-elite, capable of taking over these institutions that can then adopt the policies and administer the centralized institutions to protect the average person.
The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what's happening and fight the good fight.
But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty to provide protection for the average person.
The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions.
Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and [1:43:04] offering a plausible vision for how that could be accomplished?
I think very few people are thinking in those terms and to me that's a shame.
Well it's also a shame that people that have these ideas are not willing to run for office because running for office is such a shit show.
You see what happens when anyone runs for office.
It's just these attacks are merciless and ruthless.
And it's all in your character and your past.
And we saw it with Kavanaugh.
You see, saw it with Joe Biden.
You see it with everybody.
You've been through it?
Yeah, everybody's been through it.
But obviously, I'm not running for office.
But when they're trying to attack you and they're trying to do that, that discourages so many people that would be great leaders.
But it's also now been accepted as a part of the political process.
But it's always been part of the political process.
You go back to the history of the founding of the country.
You can read Jefferson's letters.
And he's bitching about the press, slandering his character.
[1:44:00] Like for decades, he's writing, he's still bitter about things that happened when he was dying in the early 1800s.
He's still bitter about like some slanderous journalists who is impugning his character 30 years prior.
And so, look, I've been through it to a certain extent, you've been through it.
That's the price, that's the price of admission.
And so, I think rather than lamenting the fact that it's this way, we need people and, you know, I certainly adopt this attitude and I think Governor DeSantis and Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this.
You know, remember COVID, they were calling him all sorts of names.
You know, I mean, they fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way.
And as conservatives, I've estimated that we take somewhere between 100 to one and a thousand to one negative to positive stories in the press.
That's just the ratio that we that we have to live with.
100 to one negative to positive.
But what what he taught me and I think it's a valuable lesson for more people [1:45:03] to understand is he's saying, look, the people are smarter than the press.
And so when we're fighting, when we're raising the issues, when we're getting attacked, when we're driving forward something that's the right thing to do, you'll be rewarded by the people later.
And so he won a very narrow election his first time.
He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with, you know, history curriculum, whatever it is.
The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20-point victory, unprecedented.
And to me, that's a sign that when you take ownership, when you take courage, when you take the hits, and when you do the right thing, people are smart enough to sift through the lies, the propaganda, the suppression, the censorship, and reward you.
And I've certainly seen that in my own experience, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with people screaming at my kids.
I mean, like real intimidating things.
[1:46:01] And you have to say, you have to make prudent decisions, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you can, you know, not get wiped off the board.
But then once you get past that, what I found, when you get past that initial barrage, when you get through the gauntlet, you feel freedom.
You feel this incredible sense of you've survived, you've gotten to the other side, and now the people can't hurt you because they've tried, they've failed.
And now you have the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom to do what you want, the freedom to chart your own path.
But until you get through that barrage, I don't think that you're free at all.
And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige are sometimes desperately holding onto that.
They want to protect it as much as they can.
But I think what happens is they become, they go through life and they get to a point where they'll finally speak out if this happens, if that happens, if the cost is lower.
You end up [1:47:00] wasting away your life and your opportunities.
And so my goal, and for the past year especially, is to radicalize America's elites, to show them the problems that our country is facing, and that to summon them to courageous action to fix it.
Because as you get people who have something to lose, when they start talking people listen.
And so I live on a small farm in rural Washington state.
There's only so much I can do personally.
But certainly with the book that I wrote, with the articles that I'm doing, with the media engagement that I'm trying to drive, what I found is that the attitude among America's elites, finance, tech, entertainment, have changed dramatically in the last few years.
Yes.
And we just have to get them over that hump so that they're saying the things that they tell you and private and tell me and private, when you have those conversations I would just recommend to say, hey, what about saying that publicly?
People don't want to lose their jobs.
[1:48:00] But these are people who are, you know, who are, you know, they don't have jobs.
They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're titans of finance.
They're, they're people in prestigious positions.
They're, kind of, university professors with tenure protections.
People are scared.
They really are.
They're scared of repercussions.
How do we get them to cross over that fear?
We have to make it less fearful.
We have to make it more common.
And I think these conversations happen and more of them happen and more people listen to them and it changes people's perspective and they realize this is kind of dangerous.
And there's real urgency involved here.
This could really go sideways for us.
And there's a lot of factors that are trying to force it into going sideways and not all of them are domestic.
There's a lot going on with social media influence that's 100% manufactured.
There's manufactured arguments, manufactured dissent.
There's a lot of manufactured conflict that happens online that we have documented very clearly.
It's coming from Russian troll farms.
[1:49:02] It's coming from various different Eastern block countries, it's coming from China, it's coming from all over the place.
And it has an effect on us, whether we like it or not, and it certainly has an effect on young people.
It certainly has an effect on self-sensorship, it certainly has effect on stifling dissent.
It has an impact, they attack people, and they attack people with thousands of trolls.
And they know what they're doing.
And it's very effective.
And if you pay attention to your comments, you're gonna get run over by it.
And it's never read the comments.
Can't read them.
Can't read them.
Some of them write nonsense.
I read comments on other people's stuff sometimes when someone writes something controversial.
And I'll just go, that seems crazy to say, let me go to that person.
And that's a, you know, A, B, Z, two, two, two, one, five, six.
Yeah.
That's a fake person.
It's a fake person that got a Twitter profile.
And now there's just- It's like a guy in an Eastern Block country with a thousand phones that he's kind of, yeah.
It might not even be that anymore.
I believe it's probably AI.
I mean ubiquitous use of chat GPT and all these different things, you could easily attack a tweet in a progressive fashion and you could give it parameters of how to attack it and what [1:50:10] to say and you could distribute that in mass, give me 45 different versions of this attack and they'll give you 45 different versions of it.
I think that's probably true but I think that in my, I think we overestimate the potential influence of kind of foreign operators.
Foreign operators don't know the language of American ideologies.
You don't think that's easy to learn?
No, I think it's actually a little difficult to learn.
Because if even if you look at kind of Chinese, kind of CCTV, which is the National Chinese Broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they're actually trying to push.
It's like awful.
It's like not persuasive at all.
The movies are amazing.
The movies are amazing.
Yeah.
And those are commercial enterprises.
But I actually think it puts the real kind of villains off the hook.
It's not them, it's really us.
It's the people who run our institutions domestically who who set policy for certainly a factor in that.
[1:51:05] And other platforms.
That's probably the bigger factor.
I think it's a bigger factor.
Because if you can have people organically talking about things, what you do on Twitter.
And when you see the things that are happening on Twitter, so a lot of it's very distasteful.
You'll see some very racially charged, frankly racist arguments about things, just openly discussed.
People agreeing with them openly, and it's like, woo, you know, lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that, and it's just like, man.
But the opportunity for other people to successfully counter those statements exists too.
The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid.
Take into consideration that.
Take into consideration this.
You don't know about that.
You don't know about this.
What you're saying is nonsense.
And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech.
[1:52:02] The problem with blocking hate speeches, you block the potential condemnation of hate speech.
The problem with blocking hate speeches, you block the potential condemnation of hate speech.
You block the potential intellectual battle between morons, I believe stupid shit, and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb.
And this is all good for the viewer.
This is all good for people, the young minds, and the people that are easily influenced, and the people that are on the fence, and the people that are easily influenced, and the people that are on the fence, and the people that hadn't taken into consideration this perspective or that perspective.
That's what free speech is supposed to be all about.
The answer to bad speech has always been better speech.
It's always been the case.
But when you got people that will ban your account if you use a person's name that they used to have when they were a man, but now there are women, so you dead name them.
So you made up this thing.
At the same time, well you have the fucking Taliban on Twitter.
You're insane.
You're an insane person.
[1:53:00] Exactly.
And Elon has done a service for the entire human race by purchasing that platform.
And I do not say that lightly.
I do not say that flippantly.
Him purchasing Twitter is one of the most important things that's ever happened to us in terms of pushback, in terms of just recognizing like this is insane to tell people that they have to abide by your insanely rigid ideology that doesn't make sense.
It's not logical.
And if they don't, they can no longer participate in the discussion.
They're removed from the town square.
That's bonkers.
I remember even, you know, Andrew Tate, who I think is obviously very self-evidently a bad person.
I don't think that he's a good model for young men.
But I remember, he didn't call for terrorist violence, he didn't say anything extremely racist, I don't think, that I saw at least.
[1:54:01] And I remember just it was like one day he's nuked from every online platform simultaneously.
Yeah.
And I say, what, you don't have to like the guy, you don't have to agree with the guy.
But the fact that all of these companies can set off a little cascade where you can disappear someone from the internet overnight.
O'Malley, you're an opalous.
O'Malley, an opalous was the first one.
Yeah, they really silenced him.
That guy was a powerful voice.
And he was mute from the discourse.
Also in real life, very nice.
In real life, hilarious, very smart, very nice.
Every time I met him, he was cool.
He was playing a character and I think there's a lot of drugs involved as well.
Yeah.
But he was certainly playing a character that had good points.
Yeah.
He was playing this character that was this like right wing gay guy who likes to talk about sex and drugs.
And I was like, this guy's fascinating.
But they decided that he was problematic and they fucking erased him.
[1:55:01] They memory-hold him.
That guy was on Bill Mar and Bill Mar compared him to Christopher Hitchens, remember that?
Wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah, and then he got attacked by some other guy on the show to him and fuck you.
There was a lot of fuck you with that guy.
There's a lot of drama.
But that's what he liked.
He liked that and it was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere.
and I think they erased him particularly the first part was his criticism of ghost busters and then he was criticizing the new all female cast of ghost busters Saying how sexist it is and every man's a moron and the women saved the day and how ridiculous it is and Then he got into it with Leslie Jones So Leslie Jones and him got into it and I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones.
What was it exactly?
I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was something racist or something gross or something unflattering, something.
[1:56:01] And people were tweeting it at her and they were blaming him And then they got rid of him he's gone did they just say oh it's mobilizing harassment or something Well, that was that's I'm can't believe I forgot this It's what started is him Justifying himself being sexually molested by older men when he was young and he was saying on my show That he was the predator he was saying on my show that he was the predator.
He was trusting me.
I was the predator.
He was the seducing.
Yeah, you know, first of all, anybody who doesn't think that my own unomalous guys out of their fucking mind.
Like, you think that's a choice?
That's a choice.
That's fucking gay.
Okay.
Faked in by the universe.
He is.
Yeah.
That is like the prime example that I always throw in the face of people who, it's usually for religious reasons, who are unwilling to accept biological reality.
Like here's some biological reality for you.
You wanna know this?
The first video ever captured of humpback whales, mating was just recently filmed and they're both male.
[1:57:05] Nice.
was just recently filmed and they're both male.
Nice.
So the first evidence that we have of humpback whales engaging in sexual intercourse is gay sex.
Humpback, huh?
Yeah, I had to go real.
Listen, humpbacks are mammals.
Humpbacks are intelligent.
Humpbacks likely are gay.
There's probably, if they exist in us why would they not exist in other intelligent mammals that are on earth with us like dolphins i'm sure this gay dolphins is probably gay workers it's probably normal it's probably there's a percentage in every population that's gay who gives a fuck the point is that like that guy's gay, right?
And he claims that he was the predator and everyone's like, oh my God, he's normalizing pedophilia.
If he had just tried that today, it would have been a minor attracted person.
Yeah, she would be celebrated.
I mean, he'd be, oh, but this guy was minor attracted and I was a minor and it was fine.
He needs to come back as a drag queen.
But he would say, like now, literally, in the amount of time from him being canceled [1:58:09] to today, that statement is not nearly as controversial.
Yeah.
Isn't that wild?
Yeah, and look, you don't have to agree or disagree with the statement.
That's irrelevant.
It's something that is within the bounds.
Look, if you're calling for the Harvard example, the genocide of all Jews around the world, you should be banned from social media platforms.
Yes.
That is a prudent limit that I think we can all agree on.
But on more nuanced issues, or more, I mean, even if you take it at face value, I think he's probably going for shock value.
100%.
But also, this is a tiny and total story about how, and it was on another podcast that I believe he said this, that it plays a very important role in young gay men to have an older gay mentor.
I have no fucking dog in this race.
[1:59:03] Yeah.
I don't, you know, I don't know.
But I do know that I feel very differently about a sexual predator that's a man that targets girls.
Like if I found out that a football coach was targeting young 14 and 15 year old girls, I would be furious.
If I found out a hot teacher, usually from Florida, with a push up bra, was banging all the high school football kids, I'm laughing.
It's a little different.
I think it's funny.
You know why?
Because I think those kids are going to be fine.
They're going to be legends.
Yeah.
I think those kids are going to...
Zach Alvinack has had a fucking amazing joke.
One of them died.
His friends high-fied him to death.
I think that's Zach.
But this is because people want to pretend that there's no difference between men and women.
Right.
That's all it is.
It's like everyone wants to pretend that's true.
It's obviously not true.
And of course, the football coach who's like a pervert going against, you know, the younger, that's a totally different scenario.
[2:00:04] It is a different scenario.
Also, the lady who's blowing all the high school football kids also shouldn't be a teacher.
Yeah, you have to get her out there.
Fire immediately.
Get her out there.
She should be doing porn or something.
Yeah.
But the point is it's like, if he's talking about his life, that and saying that this was his choice and that he wanted this, that the issue is not with him, the issue is with the man who did that to him.
Right.
So he's literally talking about his own personal experience.
That memory hold him.
It's not he's saying, he's not saying, hey, I should be able to go to high schools and pick up 14 year olds because they want it.
Okay.
Now we're talking to different thing.
Now we're talking about a guy who's advocating pedophilia, right?
This is different.
We're taught he's he was merely talking about his own life and That's how rabbit everybody was to get rid of him and it was at that point effective And I think that became a problem because once it became effective, then it became emboldened.
[2:01:05] It's like the Alex Jones argument.
When people say, yeah, ban Alex Jones, and everybody's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is a fucking very slippery slope.
Because if you want to ban everybody who's made disinformation and put it out publicly, how's Rachel Maddow still on?
Yeah.
How is she still on?
Everybody's seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine.
That's insanity.
The government, I mean.
Yeah, how are they still on?
How many different stories were incorrect?
Not apologizing for what he did, what Alex did.
He doesn't apologize for it.
I mean, he apologizes for it, but he feels deep remorse that he did.
He's just like overwhelmed by it but that get rid of that guy is a slippery slope and no matter what you think about what he said you can't support that you gotta let people sorted out the way to find out if let's say uh...
he says there's a false flag and some attack somewhere [2:02:02] the way to find out he's telling the truth is to have people investigate it.
If you say that Operation North Woods was a document drawn up and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was going to attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans to start a war, and you say that on your show, people go, you're a fucking crazy person.
How are you allowing these?
No, no, no.
You have to be able to have someone come on and say, hey, actually, this is true.
And then you realize like, oh, wait a minute.
Some conspiracies are real.
And if you silence this one guy that calls out all of them because he fucked up on one, you're also limiting his ability to call out the ones that are legitimate.
And you're talking about a guy who's doing this all day long every day that's all he does.
All he does is look in there.
I mean, he's an out there personality out there.
That's why he's fun.
But he's out there talking about the world economic forum.
I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it again.
He told me about Jeffrey Epstein.
Over a decade before anybody was in the news.
[2:03:04] He was telling me that there was this operation and they take these guys and pop-off public figures and a lot of politicians and they compromise with young girls.
It's like, what's on an island?
What is this fucking ABC after school movie?
That's crazy, that sounds nuts.
And then now everybody knows it's true.
And there's been a ton of those from him infiltrating Bohemian Grove and catching these fucking wackos and heads of state burning in effigy in front of an owl god.
Like what the fuck that's real?
The video he did with John Ronson in the 90s.
So it's like all of this stuff at a certain point in time needs to be out there.
And people need to find out what's real and what's not real.
What's real?
And the only way to find out what's real is not to silence everybody who says something that's incorrect.
It's to let people talk it out.
So when someone gets on there and says, here's hollow and there's fucking aliens inside of shooting laser beams, let's let's talk to geologists and have them explain to you that [2:04:03] they would be boiling in lava.
Like they don't live in the center of the earth.
We know what the earth's made out of.
We know all the planets.
This is how we know.
This is why we know the earth is round because every fucking body of mass has its spin it around.
It takes on that fucking form.
All the planets, every one of them.
This one's not unique.
There's also an element of this is part of American folklore.
Yes.
If you believe that the world is flat, it's obviously false.
Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous crazy thing to believe.
And yet having a group of flat earthers in our broader society provided that they're not like given power over the NASA or something adds texture and richness to our culture, even if they're totally wrong.
And so what we're having is we're trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds.
It actually ends up breaking this great proliferation of culture, some of it which is good, some of bad, some of it's crazy, some of it's insightful.
[2:05:02] But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.
It's not really even about censorship.
It's about power and the distribution of power.
If you stack up all of the people who have been kind of nuked from orbit online on the right and then on the left, you have a graph that looks out like this.
And so you have to then say, well, why is that?
Who's making the decisions?
How are decisions being made?
And who are they going after?
What views are they trying to suppress?
And so again, getting it out of the realm of abstract debate and into the realm of a political analysis gets us to this uncomfortable point.
This just happening during Trump.
Trump was president and this was still happening.
Yeah.
And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it.
And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, you know, more quirky people, more, you know, you know, people that are way out there, my old, you know, naked neighbor in Topanga, like, yeah, let the guy speak, you know, if he believes that though, If he believes that we have to have live water and it's like the average person is not [2:06:10] going to be persuaded and the view is not correct but the broader culture suffers when everyone is fearing that if they step outside of the box that they're going to get crushed.
And conservatives, you know, we get all worked up about it because look, every political faction has their fringe.
We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition.
But you have to figure out what's, you know, harmful and what's relatively harmless.
And a lot of these folk beliefs and superstitions, if you take them not to condemn people as stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but you actually talk to people and try to get a sense of why do you believe this?
It's usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness and even the WEF kind of thinking.
They want to believe that there's someone out there that is calling [2:07:04] the shots, that is the problem that is controlling the society, because they feel that just by identifying a single point, they have a sense of understanding, a sense of power.
I actually don't think that that's the case.
I think it's misleading.
I don't think it's the right way to look at it.
But I try to also forgive people to say, people are entitled to their superstitions.
We all have superstitions.
And we want a society that where superstitions are eradicated.
But you actually end up getting rid of a lot of the texture and a lot of the variety of culture.
When you try to have a hygienic treatment of culture, you treat culture like a disease, like a petri of culture.
You treat culture like a disease, like a petri dish culture.
And look, I think like, go as far out as you want, like go wild with it.
Be respectful of all the rules, maintain some core commitments, but I'm always fascinated with those characters.
[2:08:01] I lived into Peng, I lived in Berkeley.
Like you meet these people all over.
You've lived in these kind of places.
Yeah, I have for the 99 times out of a hundred they're harmless and they should just be tolerated and and respected What's an important part of how I grew up?
I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11 and we lived in a super gay neighborhood We are downstairs Stairs neighbor used to they're these gay guys that would get, um, stoned with my aunt and they would play Bongo's naked.
Cause she could play Bongo's with naked with these gay guys.
They didn't give a fuck about her.
They're just into playing Bongo's naked.
They just get really high.
And it was the anti-war movement days, you know.
And so I lived around that and then I moved to Florida to Gainesville, which is very conservative It was really interesting to watch like I've talked about this before but I had this friend who was Cuban his name is candy And his dad was like super homophobic and he was so mad He slammed the paper down on the table.
He's like these fags want to get married and I was like what?
[2:09:03] I was like what do you care?
That's so weird.
They're just playing the bongos.
It was so weird when he said it.
I was like, what?
I mean, I remember very clearly I was 11 at the time and I was just blown away.
I'm like, do you not know any gay people?
This is crazy.
Like, what do you care?
Like, that I had gone from San Francisco in the 1970s, which was like this very open-minded, hippie-dominated culture of music and art.
And then all of a sudden I was in Gainesville, Florida.
And I was around this guy.
I was angry that gay people wanted to get married.
I think the question, if you look at the cultural left of San Francisco at that time, I think it's always a question of proportion.
You can have a successful, interesting functioning society where you have a portion of people who are getting stoned and banging the bongos.
[2:10:02] Okay, fine.
The problem is though that when it becomes out of proportion, when that ideology, that kind of elimination of prohibition or limits or constraints, becomes the dominant policy-making regime.
That works when it's a counter-culture.
Right, right.
The kind of left wing, and look, I come from the left.
I was a radical leftist.
I was a Gramscian Marxist.
You know, so I know that world intimately.
What made you take a turn?
You know, I wanted to get into politics.
My political formation was from my father's side.
Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists.
And so that was like my political upbringing.
I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and seeing like the books on their shelf and I said, oh, that has this beautiful collection of bound books and I talked to my aunts and I say, oh, what is this?
See, what is this book?
And I go, this is the collected works of Lenin.
[2:11:00] You know, like, not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.
And so that was my political formation.
I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.
The first thing that really disillusioned me was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man.
It's not to uplift the downtrodden.
It's about maintaining their own status and prestige with the institutions.
It's like a McKinsey consultant kind of worldview with the trappings of the left.
It's the Harvard student who's wearing the Palestinian kefia who then goes on to become an investment banker.
And it's like, to me, it was so phony.
I mean, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement, run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.
[2:12:02] The second thing that really changed me, I spent five years, well, first I traveled around the world making documentaries.
I saw how Marxists and communist governments actually work out in practice, not great.
And then I made a film for PBS of all places, looking at three of America's poorest cities.
And by then, kind of center left views, which was so, the great views, which was so, the great society, public welfare programs, trying to help people, when you actually see how those programs manifest in the South Side of Memphis, South Side of Youngstown, South Side of Stockton, California, the poorest places in the country, you realize that many of those ideals that are presented to you as care, compassion, concern, equality, you know, reparations for racial past are at best cynical and at worst deeply destructive to the people that they're supposed to help.
[2:13:02] And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about people's lives and then how politics affects them.
And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster.
Even if rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good.
And then the final change was in the run up and then after 2020.
I mean, 2020 radicalized me because you realized how profound this cultural capture is.
And you realized that the consequences are no longer abstract.
They're no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods and in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state.
But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle class, the upper class, this is something that wants total domination.
And so I got canceled out of my documentary career.
Once I became known [2:14:00] as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution, and then it's like I'm out, kind of launched into the wilderness, like all right, well that career is done, what do I do next?
And then say all right, well let's get into politics, let's use some of the skills that I've developed as a filmmaker.
I'm not a traditional conservative, like I'm not a college Republican, I don't know, no bow tie tie?
I think you have to have a bow tie.
But if you're a gay guy, you can have a bow tie and be super left.
That's true.
There's nuance to it.
But what I realize is that the conservative principles are sometimes expressed awkwardly, are sometimes articulated poorly, but there's some deep truths that need to be resurrected and recovered for us to be successful again.
And so I threw in my lot with people that I would never have imagined being friends and allies and colleagues with growing up.
It's like this huge shift politically.
And I think it's been helpful because if you know how your political opponents think, you have a huge advantage.
[2:15:07] And the left kind of elite, academic, leftists in the United States have no idea what conservatives think.
They have zero curiosity about it.
And so that affords us a kind of advantage because they don't know how we think, how we operate, what our principles are.
They just assume the worst.
And so I kind of wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and saying, you know, in an odd way, you're fighting for people that are actually voiceless, you know.
The left is the dominant voice of the country, of all of our institutions, of all of our tech companies.
The voice that really is voiceless are the people who are supposed to be oppressors.
You have this book that just came out, White Rural Rage, you know, bullshit.
You know, rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly.
And so I just try to think in those terms always [2:16:04] and I've taken over some of the tactics of the left, some of the kind of maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful.
But I just have this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige, they give all this rhetoric about helping the oppressed, the underprivileged, whatever is the kind of term of the day, but they're actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status.
I find that a betrayal of true left principles.
And I don't think that I would be where I am today, where I am today, had I not seen that betrayal up close and personal and really want to fight it.
I want to destroy that.
[2:17:01] I want to take all of those people who are selling a bill of goods to the people who are struggling in this country under these principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But it's just about having a tenured position, having a featherbedded job, being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone, but themselves.
I think that that is, it's such a betrayal of the principles of the left, but really the principles of the country.
And I think the way you're explaining it, particularly in the desire to have a richness of culture and not have rigid rules and to have the openness to have basically anybody, just be who you are, but recognize that being captured by this ideology that supposedly supports you, it's doing it for its own means.
It's doing it for a very specific purpose and it's not doing it to support you [2:18:06] It's using these ideas and principles as camouflage to sneak in through your defenses and it's dangerous and it's creepy And it's weird how effective it is and that's why I'm really happy that you're out there And I'm really happy that you can lay it down So articulately and express, especially coming from your background of being a guy who grew up that way, grew up leftist, to be able to express it.
I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I'm happy that you're out there.
I appreciate that.
And likewise, I mean, what I think is so special about what you do is that you're talking about culture and politics, society, business, for people who aren't in that bubble.
I operate in a political bubble every day.
But what you've built, and I think it's a testament to the possibilities of the internet, you don't have to be a ABC, NBC, CBS, talking head.
[2:19:00] You don't have to have the massive studio lights and the eight layers of makeup.
You're doing something that's real and people have really responded to that.
And I think that it's a reflection of something that we need more of.
We have an artificial culture that is trying to take over.
Yeah, but...
Propped up by corporations.
Exactly.
And the people that are talking about these things aren't even necessarily interested in these things.
And that also resonates with the people that listen and watch.
Like, I don't have people on that I don't want to talk to.
I just have people on that I'm only interested in talking to.
And if you can do that and you're actually interested, that's contagious.
And these principles that we're talking about and this, this thing that you're the way you're laying it out, it's important for people even to consider themselves leftist to just consider what you're saying because it's for you too.
It's for everybody that we can't let this happen.
It's for all ideas.
It's for gay people, street people, trans people, white people, black people, Asians.
[2:20:03] It's for everybody.
The reason the founding fathers of this country set all these checks and balances in place is because they didn't want anyone to get total complete control over the people.
And that's what's happening right now.
And if you don't wake up to it and you think it's okay because your side is winning, you're actually anti-American.
That's right.
And it creates this winner take all danger.
And I don't wanna see either side have that complete control because that's either side, that's not what we want, that's not good in the country.
We need to have a healthy left and a healthy right.
Yeah, and healthy is the right perspective.
There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right.
And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the left.
And because they have this idea in their head that they're on the good side, and these people are on the bad side, you don't consider that these are just human beings that think [2:21:02] about things differently than you.
And that is the only way we're all gonna get along is if we realize they're just human beings and think about things differently and we should be able to engage with those people peacefully.
It used to be you could sit down with a conservative person or you could sit down with a liberal person and you might not agree with them, but you could have a friendly discussion and it doesn't have to be a hate-filled attack on your very humanity because you don't think X or Y.
It's just like that's not good for anybody.
People don't even want a debate.
I don't know if you've come across it, but 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this culture of debate left and right got together, they hashed it out.
I've challenged people to debates.
I've been, you know, people try to set up debates and it's like, we don't even talk even in a confrontational way, conflict of visions.
It's like everyone in their corner, everyone's trying to make the play.
And I think that's too bad.
I think we need more, actually more friction is good.
The more public friction engagement debate [2:22:08] We'll get to that point where it's like all right We're up on stage debating, but then we go to the green room and we could talk about kids music Yeah, whatever it is everything and just be a nice person.
It's not that hard to do.
It's not that I do it It's rewarding.
It's good for everybody Christopher appreciate you man.
Thank you very much for being here and being so articulate about this.
It's very enjoyable to listen to you on top of it and I think you make some great points.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate you.
All right, tell everybody your social and all that jazz where they can...
Sure, yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at real Chris Rufo.
I have a sub-stack.
It's ChristopherRufo.com and I have a New York Times bestselling book America's Cultural Revolution That tells the history of the radical left's long march to the institutions available everywhere.
All right, beautiful.
Thank you.
Bye everybody
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