#2113 - Christopher Rufo

27:14They can't keep people safe. Well, they can when gging 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, 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 going to raise the minimum wage for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour, except for Penaer bread, because the Penaer bread guy is his friend, and he's doing it.

27:47But the way around that to make don't look that obvious is places with bakeries. That's not what is the, I mean, why? Why a specific way of cooking? There is no sub -wraffing or justification. There's no rational justification for it. And so it's almost like, oh, what says Penaer is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all. On February 28th, Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Penaer would be exempt from California's AB1228 law, a law that raises the minimum wage for fast food workers from $16 to $20 an hour star in 81. So why is that? How is it not exempted? That's a hell of a fact check.

28:24I didn't know that. 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 Bloomberg piece which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell as a stand alone, sell it as a stand alone item calling the report absurd. So it is it a fake story? Or is it something that they, they might have corrected corn and corrected. They might have corrected corn and corrected corn quickly.

28:57Yeah. Roll up to the top. So where is the initial report? Let's find the initial report because why would Bloomberg spread bullshit? 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 it 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. Yeah. And then they still exist.

29:34But 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 pushed 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? They dreaded paywall. Okay, no worries. We'll subscribe. You owe, we owe you Bloomberg. But it's um, there must be something to it. And it's so hard with that guy because when you just look at the way he praised Biden, I would never run against him.

30:12A man of character. You know, like, 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. Yeah. But that like really del -minded blue no matter who people. 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.

31:00I mean, I love that he keeps getting busted too. I love that he got busted during the pandemic eating inside with no mask on. He's just fucking sh - 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. 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. Yeah. 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.

31:33That's what I think. I think they barely care who the president is and I think that's obvious with Obama. Excuse me. With this episode is brought to you by Buffalo Trace Distillery. Actually have some Buffalo Trace cigars here. They just sent me. One of the world's most award -winning distilleries that's been making whiskey the same way for more than 200 years, made as a tribute to the rugged, free -spirited pioneers who blaze their own trail to new frontiers. It embodies the perfectly untamed spirit of independence. It defines what an award -winning bourbon should be. Age nearly twice as long as competitors in new, charred, white oak barrels and bottled at 90 proof, Buffalo Trace is the perfect bourbon to be enjoyed in any way, anywhere.

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33:16But Biden is without doubt anyone can beat him. If you were just comparing competence, someone who you would trust talking, someone who you would 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. But since he's 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? Did someone wrote the other day? How his age is his superpower?

33:52Did 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 -explaning what the article was, and then I'll skip to the paragraph for a talk. Do they debunk it? Yeah, this is, no, 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 1st, 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.

34:31The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Bloomberg article published February 28th, reporting that the fast casual chain Penaer bread has dodged an upcalling 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 Penaer bread locations in the state. In a statement of Snopes, however, Newsman spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection played a role in the law and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Penaer.

35:05The governor never met with Flynn about this bill and the story is observed. Stack said, well, they don't have to meet. They could talk on the phone. Our legal team has reviewed and it appears that Penaer is not exempt from the law. Whoops. The legal team reviewed it after they, so there is an exemption. Right, right. So that's where 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 and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.

35:40However, Newsman's office said illegal analysis determined Penaer, 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 location. 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, but that, why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill? Like is the baker's lobby that powerful or the opposite? I mean, well, the bakers or the ones would be lobbying for more money.

36:17That's what I mean. Yeah. The actual bakers, yeah. So I, that, I mean, they, but even look at snopes. Snopes has done a fact check on my work that actually got debunked. Politifact has done it, Washington Post. They've been... Well, the history of snopes is wild. It's 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 Fohen is reporting SETX YNZ, 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.

36:48And 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. So, but I think the point about Biden that you were making is, is, is really instructive because Biden is like the weekend at Bernie's president. I mean, it's exactly. 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 wheel Biden out there to kind of kind of stammer for a couple minutes, say the talking points and get out.

37:23And so we're seeing what's important to the party as a movement. The opposite is Trump. Trump is, you know, a unique individual figure. The party is following him. 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 is interesting that he's so frail that he's transparent, right? And he's so transparent to the point where 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.

38:04I kind of had a feeling it was you, you know, and is there ever been a worse White House press secretary? She's, it's how, how did she get that job? She's so bad at convincing people. There's, there's a bunch of like 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. It would be a psycho about it. And the left would be like, yeah. 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.

38:39He talks to her, 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 like 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. Yeah. Everyone knows like explicitly. And then when you hire someone, it's a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities that the candidate has.

39:14Yeah. 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, those, 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 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.

39:51And, you know, after the 10, 7 attack, Harvard kind of reveals the ideology in the institution and then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents. We were the ones who broke the plagiarism story. Just for people that aren't aware, maybe so this can be standalone. 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... Stefano. Yes. Who grilled them about using anti -Jewish hate and is that hate speech to say death to the Jews? And their answer was essentially if it's actionable.

40:38Yeah. 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. Oh, yeah. So 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.

41:29Yes. And so this caused all 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 know, 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, okay. DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.

42:17That'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? 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.

42:56I 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, 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. Jesus, Carl, it's that boring. 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 they'd gone, and then they're like, okay, 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.

43:38I 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 going to stop there. It's going to 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.

44:21Because 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 going to go anywhere. But now you look at it eight years later, and it's fucking everywhere. It's everywhere. 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.

44:55And 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'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 call this woman by Zezur pronouns.

45:36Zezur, not, you know, okay, trans, okay, man, woman, okay, whatever. Zezur, and it's like a federal indictment, imagine, for even just refusing to call this person, you know, people have always been rude. Are we going to like legislate against rudeness? And we're going to say that like if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan, can I get them arrested and locked in the 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.

46:10But I mean, this is not trivial. And what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great, what he brought up, illustrates this point. If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything. It's a simple sales technique. You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them 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, this sales guy, it's like everything about sales and persuasion.

46:49I learned like 10 years old watching this guy. He came up and said, oh, you know, 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 going to sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever. And so this is the ante, you know, once you put in the ante, 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.

47:23Ratings. Ratings, but what it's not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback, legal, administrative, policy, and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes. 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, you know, 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, you know, kind of international peace. And it's like, now the highest concern is trans?

48:05No, 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. You know, this is where I get so confused. Because if I really want to go full tin foil 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 in same policy.

48:54I'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? 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 somewhere. Yeah, it might have been Berkeley. Yeah. But it was whatever it was, it was like, what did you just say? What did you just say? And why did you say it that way? 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.

49:43Yeah. I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence. Like some, some women can have periods. But this is, this is the dominant culture in HR departments, K through 12 schools, universities, government bureaucracies. Yeah. That is the social game that has been established. And so, you know, when we took over at New College of Florida, it was the most left -leaning university. It's basically the evergreen, it was 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%.

50:20What was 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. It's not a thing. It's, it doesn't exist. You can't non -binary. I mean, maybe I am. You can be. You just, you can just say it. You just say it. I knew a dude who used to say it. He said, they'd only girls. That was his strategy. Yeah, it's like a con. It's a con. You're part of the... Male feminist. You're LBGT. Exactly. It's little cuddle fish. You know, it is like a, it's a strategy.

50:54100%. A hundred percent. And it works maybe at the initial, but there are negative consequences. Yeah, there's flaws. There's 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 kind of landed on campus the first time. Student protests, death threats, you know, SWAT team mobilized to protect us. And I remember meeting with the old administrators, you know, and walking in and...

51:28And these are people that are just wagging their finger in my face. 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 getting flack, you're not doing your job.

52:08I'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 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.

52:56We 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. 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. 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.

53:49And you have to amend it through DEI, and you have to amend it through the quality 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.

54:35And 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. But that's what they're doing. For sure, it's a modeling thing. The drag queen comes in with a position of status, prestige, admiration. It's presented as this amazing life path. 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 say very clearly and very clearly, 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.

55:31One of the phrases they use is a site 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.

56:14I 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 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.

56:53I've seen that across the board in my reporting, my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life. And so we have to start first by, I mean, 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 cave 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.

57:27I want to be careful and considerate about where I'm sending my kids and what kind of 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 in 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 you caught up in momentum and not realize that you're not contributing to any good. You're just fucking things up worse.

58:08And that none of this unhoused or home free or whatever you want to call 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. 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.

58:48So this must be racist. It's lower the scores. Let's just pass people. Fuck it. We don't want to be bad people. Let's just pass 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. 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.

59:29That's part of the process. It's unavoidable. And if you don't have that facet, if you don't have that as a core tenant 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 you'll feel lost. You won't feel like you accomplished anything. You'll feel like it's been handed to you. You'll 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.

1:00:14You have to go through that. It's part of the process. It's how you become a human being. And you can't protect people every goddamn step of the way. We're just going to create a bunch of grown up babies who are screaming in the street. Stop oil now blocking the highway 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 people look, 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.

1:00:53But I have a lot of friends that are, you know, 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. 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, ban oil.

1:01:30Our 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.

1:02:09And that's where I think we're going. If you hate your traditions, 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 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 protect them to the extent that's necessary.

1:02:52Create 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've 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? The same year we had the defund the police.

1:03:36That'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 is that that 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.

1:04:22And 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, 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 could throw at it, transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you could say, it's everything wrong with the world.

1:05:08Like 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 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.

1:05:43And 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, I need to figure out how to get out of here. Like this is... I can't stay because this is only going to get worse.

1:06:22And if you don't get out now and you're going to wish you got out when something happens to someone you love, we've got to 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 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. The man named... The racial living. Yeah. The madam. 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.

1:07:02Even if it's obvious, like shut the fuck up. Yeah. 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, you know, just on paper, the amount of trans people that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else. Like isn't it something insane? Like 40 percent? It's something crazy like that. What are you doing? Like, are we ignoring facts and statistics?

1:07:45If 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 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 an airwang in the Air Force or something. 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.

1:08:30But, 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 to regular, like, well, I'm not saying you should discriminate against trans people. I think you should just like everybody be aware of 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.

1:09:18Like, 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 because you're saying that trans people are going to 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.

1:09:57You're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women and there's no consideration for that at all. Yeah, 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 to male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women, and sorority 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, he's certainly exploiting it. He's certainly manipulating it. You should certainly consider the possibility that he's a pervert. I think it's at at the minimum of big bright red flag that is waving in your face.

1:10:40But the question is an institutional question. You know, who are the 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 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 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 any kind of method for solving this problem.

1:11:21Well, it also shows our oppression hierarchy that we have always protected women from sexual predators, unless that sexual predator identifies as a group that has 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 crazy. And these women that have to deal with this shit, that's, it's fucking nuts that people aren't insanely outraged.

1:12:08And 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, are 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 to one of those women. That person, there's going to 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.

1:12:45And so, but you know, if 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, you know, 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.

1:13:26People are scared to speak. They're scared to tell the truth. And because there are real social consequences. What are you doing? So real consequences across the board. It's not just social. There's economic consequences. There's, you know, there's consequences in terms of your own personal safety. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot of weird shit is going on. The 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, you know, 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, like, how old are you?

1:14:0939. Okay. So you don't know you don't know shit about the pre internet days. I didn't get a cell phone till my senior in high school. 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, AOL. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's something. Yeah. 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. They also know where everybody's location is because they use snap map. They're all snap map in each other.

1:14:41So they know, like, oh my gosh, she told me she was going to go to Becky's house. She's over at Debbie's house. Like, like, like, 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, 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.

1:15:25Now you've got communism. And it's like that. It's very quick. And just like people self -centred, censored on Twitter and self -sensored on 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 credit score system to, to drop. And it could be something as simple, simple as not using Zezer. Not using Zezer. And all of a sudden, you get hit with a federal charge of not using Zezer. And now you are being tried for discrimination. And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted.

1:16:07And now, all of a sudden, you've got a real Soviet Union style, gulag 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. No, I mean, the absurdity of the ACLU, 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.

1:16:45You got to get a lawyer. You have to spend time on it. Right. Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents. And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the end power. And I spent a year living in western China when I was a documentary filmmaker. And this is where the weggers are. The weggers are the Muslim minority population of China's West. And they're ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country. And so I observing kind of what they're doing, what they were doing over time. And it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.

1:17:28You know, they wouldn't allow weger men to wear mustaches like trivial things that are that are that are the beginning. But then it's like very serious kind of regulation 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 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.

1:18:09You can't solve this by culture alone. You have to get in the rena of politics. You have to change the law. And we have to change the law. And so that's something that I think we should do 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 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.

1:18:47And if we don't, we lose the great promise. We were promised liberty and equality. Those are the two fundamentals. 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 rena 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 and all these little areas, that social credit system that you're talking about, it's just a matter of time.

1:19:33When you look at the current political lands, particularly these trials, 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 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 fined $365 million.

1:20:29The casuals, I've seen people argue that fraud is fraud and this is that 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. 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.

1:21:09When 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. And 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 that says that Mar -a -Lago is worth $18 million. 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 Mar -a -Lago property is, it's not worth $18 million.

1:21:45I mean, that's a good thing. Isn't 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, even if the people support him.

1:22:34We want to deprive the people of making the decision. So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system. And adjudicate 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.

1:23:12He's enormously wealthy. He's already been the president of the United States, a 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. 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 in that sentence.

1:23:55We 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, you know, that's when dissent becomes a crime.

1:24:38And we've already seen that, you know, I reported on the gender ideology in schools and you know, 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 parent 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, you know, kind of investigations come my way, you know, it's worth it. You know, take me to prison. You know, fine, let's do this.

1:25:21Because we have to actually confront these questions head on. We need to have people to have enough courage to put to actually, you know, courage without risk is not courage. Well, you say it's not hyperbole. No, these are facts. These are documented documented facts. And again, because it's a person like Donald Trump, you get people thinking like if you could stop Hitler by any means necessary, wouldn't you stop Hitler? And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go. This is our modern Hitler. Do you see what would be Goldberg said? What'd you say? What would be God will have said that Biden could arrest all the Republicans with them and Joe?

1:26:00You 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, it's so crazy. On television. Fine, Jamie, because it's so, 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. What? He could throw every Republican in jail. I mean, that's not good. If that's not good, you can go, what this means is it's he could do anything. That's not what it means at all. Yeah, no. But the fact that she says that's so confidently.

1:26:52Like 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, 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?

1:27:26No, I think it's sunny. 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. 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 it's fucking nothing. Just go for it. Yeah, it's nothing there. Sometimes comics do that. Yeah. And the other question is then, is that representative of a big constituency?

1:27:59I think probably yes. Well, a lot of people are probably also thinking, I don't even think that I'm a politician. Blue, no matter who, like older housewives who are mad at the world. That's the appeal that would be Goldberg has. Does Whippy have children? No idea. It's interesting to really politically motivated older women who don't have children. Yeah. They're very specific. You can kind of guess the way they think. I would like to see what the stats are on older, post men appausal, women with no children and how they lean politically. Yeah, college educated. Yeah. I know it's interesting. My fans being male.

1:28:51It's like, yeah, exactly. It's like ocean blue. I mean, the depths of that. Yeah. 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 to see these trends. You see them in things where people realize, oh, that's a pastoral success. I'm going to be a black Trump supporter. They just run with it. 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.

1:29:29Like immediately. Like buddy minds mom, who was like super fucking left wing, full on leftist shit kids. And then the riots and COVID and all the K. I just like, fuck this. I get red pilled 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 it, especially with like groups of their old friends that are single that still live in Los Angeles. You know, especially if you're like, sort of certain ideological hubs, you know, like fucking silver lake. There's like these spots where you can't escape.

1:30:08Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year. Oh boy, that's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, I went to look at a house to Panga Canyon and the house had a tennis court. It was just beautiful house. The tennis car. Wow, that's really cool. So we're going through this the house and we're checking out the kitchen and all this stuff. And then the neighbor just drops in and she goes, if you buy this house, you're going to let us use the tennis court, right? I go, what? She goes, the community uses the tennis court. 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 playing tennis.

1:30:43What the fuck are you talking about? I'm not a sign up on the list, man. Yeah. But she like, like, got in my face with like beads on and shit, you know, like the whole deal. Yeah, it's like that. But she didn't say it like, are you going? Like, this is the community has traditionally allowed. Like, we're like a really close knit group. You're going to love living here. Yeah. Really nice people. But one thing I want to 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. Yeah. I'd be like, maybe I like this lady.

1:31:13Maybe 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. Yeah. It'd be like a cool thing to have your friends playing tennis in your yard. Maybe it's to be fun. But you're going to let us use the community. It's going to use your tennis court, right? Like the eyes wide open. Where's your, what am I going to use yours? You're trying to use your kitchen? Yeah. The fuck are you talking about, lady? You have a go fishing butt in your backyard yard.

1:31:39Yeah. What are you saying? What are you saying? It's a wild, it's a wild place though, because it's like a time capsule. There's some of the old timey hippies that I get along with. Yeah. It's like, I love those people. I grew up around those people. The less than one of you used your 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.

1:32:16It was like living water. That was his scale. Was it a scam? And yeah, this game is like, it's completely dangerous, right? But, uh, but you know, it's like a well -meaning guy. And then I mean, he would walk around like he was a duplex we shared. And I mean, he would walk around just like, no pants on. Just totally naked. Yeah, he's like, what's up, man? Just talking to you like it's just a normal conversation naked. Yeah, normal conversation. Um, and it's like, oh, good to see you, Mukande. We were single at the time. I was single at the time. So it was like, and he has a girlfriend there. They were making like nut butters and selling this raw water.

1:32:47You know, that's what they were doing. And they'd be 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 going to tap out and now we're going to fight about it. Well, you know how you know that this is a zonite lodge, 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.

1:33:31Right. Because there's they they attack those people that root 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, well, you're doing is fucked up. Now it's supposed to be teaching kids about blow jobs. Yeah, they don't need to know about sucking dick when they're sick. That's nuts. And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornographs. 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.

1:34:09All 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 going to say it. I'm going to say gay, gay, gay. You deserve a prize. Again, older women, no kids, liberal, right? But that's not what the law said. And but for low information view viewers of the view or listeners of MSNBC and the people that kept repeating that, the don't say gay law over and over and over.

1:34:51They're 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 say you're gay. That's fucking nuts. 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 like insane. It's not just, oh, teaching kids about sex. Okay, fine. Obviously, they have to know certain biological realities that 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 fake penis and then setting it up with the hormone clinics.

1:35:32But if they don't teach them that, who's going to teach them? That's right. The older guy down the street who runs by in the van, you know, my man, 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 civics curriculum so that we have real citizens that we're graduating from our public K through 12 schools.

1:36:12And 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 kind of sexual materials, beyond some reasonable considerations. And this to me is fair. You can't teach religion in schools. You know, they delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families. You know, and so unless we want to have an all -out fight, all the time over these issues, like why is it even necessary?

1:36:56It's not. I have kids. Yeah, I don't want them. I don't, I don't feel like a need for the school to teach them all of these things. It's like, we teach them at home, we talk about them, they naturally kind of 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, unless you're dedicated to indoctrinating people. Yeah. Into your movement. What is the don't say gay law? Let's let's be specific about that. Just in case anybody tries to call us on this.

1:37:31So it was initially no, no teaching on gender identity and sexual orientation in K through three. Which is super reasonable. Super reasonable. And then it cost massive uproar. And the legislator said, all right, you know, we're just going to double down. Now it's K through 12. They're saying no gender identity, no sexual orientation, no explicit, you know, 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.

1:38:05Like, 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 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.

1:38:50I don't want to, nothing, 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, that's it. Exactly. If somebody wants to take drag queen courses all for you.

1:39:28Yeah, but I don't think you should be reading stories to little kids. It just seems fucking, but 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. 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. Yeah. What is the odds someone who's a man who likes to dress and drag has other problems? I mean, I mean, I'm not accusing all them of having other problems.

1:40:05I'm sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women's clothes. Have at it. Totally. 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 -in -cheeels and you're calling yourself Miss Wanda and you wear in fishnets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down or whatever they do is a possibility. 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.

1:40:39Have a good time. Knock yourself out. Yeah. Like 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.

1:41:15Yeah. 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. But would of someone else gets into office? Would of 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 going to give you those 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.

1:41:50If 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, right? All of these systems are functionally insolvent, right? Yeah. University system, our federal budget, federal budget, you know, it's just crazy. You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term.

1:42:27And so look, it's a political person. What I always do is try to figure out what riffs 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 in the universities reveal themselves to be crazy, or it's the capture of K through 12 schools and the gender ideologies 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.

1:43:10You 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, you know, a trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. You have a K through or rather a higher education system that is now, I think 1 .6, 1 .7 trillion dollars in student debt that the government is 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.

1:43:49And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives that are listening should be figuring out what they 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, you know, 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.

1:44:26You know, 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 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...

1:45:06There'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 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, you know, assume it and impose your vision.

1:45:43But 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, a 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.

1:46:29Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and 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. It's all in your character and your past. We saw it with Kavanaugh. You saw it with Joe Biden. You see it with everybody. You've been through it? Yeah, everybody's been through it.

1:47:05But 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. 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 some slanderous journalist who is impugning his character 30 years prior.

1:47:44I've been through it to the end of the year. 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 I certainly adopt this attitude and I think Governor DeSantis and Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this. Remember COVID? They were calling him all sorts of names. They fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way. As conservatives, I've estimated that we take somewhere between 100 to 1 and 1 ,000 to 1 negative to positive stories in the press. That's just the ratio that we have to live with.

1:48:26100 to 1 negative to positive. But what he taught me and I think it's a valuable lesson for more people 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 history curriculum, whatever it is. The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20 -point victory, unprecedented.

1:49:03And 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. The intimidating things. 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 can 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.

1:49:46You feel this incredible sense of you've survived, you've gotten to the other side. And now 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 wasting away your life and your opportunities.

1:50:32And 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.

1:51:15And 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 in private, when you have those conversations, I would just recommend just say, hey, what about saying that publicly? People don't want to lose their jobs. 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, 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.

1:51:45How 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 that this is kind of dangerous. And that there's, there's real urgency involved here. Like this, this could really go sideways for us. And there's a lot of factors that are trying to force it into go inside ways and not all of them are domestic. There's a lot going on with social media influence that's 100 % manufactured. There's a manufactured arguments manufactured dissent.

1:52:23There's, there's a lot of like manufactured conflict that happens online that we are have documented very clearly. It's coming from Russian troll farms. It's coming from various different eastern block countries. It's coming from China. It's coming from all over the place. And it, 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 like with thousands of trolls. And they know what they're doing. And it's very effective.

1:52:56And if you pay attention to your comments, you're going to get run over by it. And it's, um, had never read the comments. Can't read them. Yeah. 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, oh, 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 like a guy in an eastern block country with a thousand phones that he's kind of, it might not even be that anymore.

1:53:27I believe it's probably AI. I mean, with the 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 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 opinion, I think we overestimate the, 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?

1:54:05No, 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, you see this way. Seven. All the movies are amazing. The movies are amazing. Yeah. And those are commercial enterprises. 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 certainly see for YouTube and other platforms. That's probably the bigger factor.

1:54:38I think it's a bigger factor because if you can have people organically talking about things, what she 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 for people agreeing with them openly. And it's like, whoa, 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 exist too. The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid.

1:55:17You know, 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. Yeah. And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech. The problem with blocking hate speeches, you block the potential condemnation of hate speech. You block the potential intellectual battle between morons, 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 hadn't taken into consideration this perspective or that perspective.

1:55:59That'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 they're a woman. 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. 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.

1:57:00It'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 like obviously very self -evidently a bad person, don't I don't think that he's a good model for young men. But I remember, you know, he didn't call for terrorist violence. He didn't, you know, say anything, you know, extremely racist. I don't think that I saw at least. 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.

1:57:40You 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. Oh, Milo, you're an opalous. Milo, you know, I was the first one. Yeah, they really silenced him. That guy was a powerful voice. And he was mute from the, also in real life. Very nice. In real life. Really? 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.

1:58:19He 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. They memory hold him. That guy was on Bill Mar and Bill Mark 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. Fuck you. And there was a lot of 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.

1:58:50You know, 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 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 like 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. Sure. And, and people were tweeting it out her and they were blaming him.

1:59:35And then they got rid of him. He's gone. Did they just say, oh, it's mobilizing harassment or something? Oh, no, that was that's, I 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 trusting me. I was the predator. He was the seducing. Yeah. First of all, anybody who doesn't think that my own unobvious gaze either fucking mind like that you think that's a choice. That's a choice. That's the fucking gay baked 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.

2:00:21Like here's some biological reality for you. You want to know this? The first video ever captured of humpback whales mating 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. Yeah, I had to go real. Listen, humpbacks, 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.

2:01:06It'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. Yeah. But this guy was minor attracted and I was a minor. It was fun. He needs to come back as a drag queen. But he would say like now, like literally, in the amount of time from him being canceled to today, that statement is not nearly as controversial.

2:01:43Yeah. 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 like the Harvard example, the genocide of all Jews around the world, you should be banned from social media platforms. Yeah. 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, he's telling an anecdotal story about how 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.

2:02:29I have no fucking dog in this race. 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. Yeah. You know why? Because I think those kids are going to be fine. Yeah. They're going to be legends. Yeah. I see those kids going to, Zach Galvanack is that a fucking amazing joke.

2:03:08One of them died. His friends high fired 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, you know, it's like everyone, you know, 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, you know, with the younger, that's totally different scenario. 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.

2:03:42Get her out of her. 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, the issue is not with him. The issue is with the man who did that to him. Right. Right. So he's not, 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. Yeah. Now we're talking to different things. Now we're talking about a guy who's advocating pedophilia.

2:04:18Right. This is different. We're taught, he's, he was merely talking about his own life. And that's how rad it 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 they became emboldened. It's like the Alex Jones argument when people say, yeah, ban Alex Jones like and everyone's like, hey, hey, hey, this is a fucking very slippery slope. Yeah. Because if you want to ban everybody who's made disinformation and put it, put it out publicly, how's Rachel Matt out still don't know how she's still on? Everybody seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine.

2:04:54That's insanity. The government. I mean, yeah. How are they still on? I mean, how many different stories were incorrect? Not apologizing for what he did. What Alex did. He doesn't apologize for, I mean, he apologized for it, but he feels deep remorse that he did. He just like overwhelmed by it. But that getting rid of that guy is a slippery slope. And no matter what you think about what he said, you can't support that. You got to let people sort it out. The way to find out if let's say he says there's a false flag and some attack somewhere. The way to find out he's telling the truth is have people investigate it.

2:05:35If you say that operation northwards was a document drawn up by the joint 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 have someone come on and say, Hey, actually, this is true. And then you realize like, Oh, wait a minute, some conspiracy is 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.

2:06:10And 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 it'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 it was in the news. He was telling me that there was this operation and they take these guys with high profile 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?

2:06:47That'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 an effigy in front of an owl god. Like what the fuck? That's real. The thing that video he did with John Ronson in the 90s. So it's like all of this stuff at a certain point in time. It 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 the silence everybody who says something that's incorrect. It's to let people talk it out.

2:07:23So when someone gets on there and says, here's hollow and this fucking aliens inside shooting laser beams. Let's let's like talk to geologists and have them explain to you that 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.

2:07:57Any 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. But the I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.

2:08:37It'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 so 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.

2:09:14And 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, more quirky people, more people that are way out there. My old naked neighbor in Topanga, let the guy speak. If he believes that we have to have live water. And it's like the average person is not 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.

2:10:01We 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 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.

2:10:43I 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 dish culture. And look, I think like, go as far out as you want, like go wild with it. You know, be respectful of all the rules, maintain some core commitments.

2:11:27But I'm always fascinated with those characters. I lived into Peng, I lived in Berkeley. You meet these people all over. You've lived in these kind of places. Yeah, I have. For the 99 times out of 100, they're harmless. And they should just be tolerated and respected. Why is it 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. Our downstairs neighbor used to, they're these gay guys that would get stoned with my aunt. And they would play Bongo's naked. Because she could play Bongo's naked with these gay guys. They didn't give a fuck about her.

2:12:04They were just into playing Bongo's naked. They would 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. 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? I was like, what do you care? That's so weird. They're just playing the Bongo's naked. It was so weird when he said it.

2:12:38I 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, if you're not gay, why do you care if they get married? But I didn't say it because I was 11. I was like, ooh, it's wanted to be quiet. But I, it burned in my head 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.

2:13:13I 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 the, you know, getting stoned and banging the Bongo's. 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. Kind of left -wing. And look, I come from the left. I was a radical leftist.

2:13:54I was a Gramscian Marxist. 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 was like, oh, that was beautiful collection of bound books. And I talked to my aunt and I say, oh, what is this? See, what is this book? And I go, this is the collected works of Lenin. You know, not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.

2:14:37And 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 kind of 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, you know, 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, you know, become an investment banker.

2:15:15And 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. 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 my, by then kind of center left views, which was, oh, you know, the great society, you know, public welfare programs trying to help people.

2:16:00When 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. 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.

2:16:47Even 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 realize that the consequences are no longer abstract. They're no longer just destroying, you know, 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, as the upper class, as this is something that wants total domination. And so I got canceled out of my documentary career. Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast distribution.

2:17:35And 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. But I think you have to have a bow tie. But if you're a gay guy, you're going to have a bow tie and be super left. That's true. There's like, there's nuance to it. But what I realize is that the conservative principles are sometimes expressed awkwardly, are sometimes articulated poorly.

2:18:08But 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. 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.

2:18:52They just assume the worst. And so I kind of wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and saying, in an odd way, you're fighting for people that are actually voiceless. 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, bookshed. You know, rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly. And so I just try to think in those terms always. And I've taken over some of the tactics of the left, some of the, some of the kind of maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful.

2:19:44But I just have this visceral, you know, just this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige. They give all this rhetoric about helping the oppress, the underprivileged, that 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 were today, where I am today, had I not seen that betrayal, up close and personal. And really, you know, want to fight it, I want to destroy that. 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.

2:20:43But 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, 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.

2:21:47And 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, 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.

2:22:26You don't have to be a ABC, NBC, CBS, talking head, 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.

2:22:57I 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, 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, 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. 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.

2:23:45And 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 want to see either side have that complete control because 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, warmhearted people that are on the right. And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warmhearted people that are on the left.

2:24:22And 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 about things differently than you. And that is the only way we're all going to get along. As if we realize there's just human beings that 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.

2:25:01It's just like that's not good for anybody. People don't even want to 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, 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 can talk about kids, music, stuff, whatever it is.

2:25:44Everything. And just be a nice person. It's not that hard to do. It's not that hard to do. It's rewarding. It's good for everybody. Christopher, appreciate your man. Thank you very much for being here and being so articulate about this. It's very enjoyable to listen to you. You're 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 substack. It's ChristopherRufo .com. And I have a New York Times best -selling book, America's Cultural Revolution that tells the history of the radical left's long march through the institutions available everywhere.

2:26:21All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Bye everybody.