Ask Dr. Drew - Does America Need A Cultural Revolution? Chris Rufo on Academic Infiltration & DEI – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 256

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

In his new book “America’s Cultural Revolution” Chris Rufo asks why so many major corporations are “bending the knee to a far-left agenda.” Why are the most radical and fanatic zealots – from all sides of the political spectrum – dictating the future of the USA? Rufo joins Dr. Drew to discuss DEI, racism, doublespeak, and academic infiltration by activists. 「 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS: Find out more about the companies that make this show possible, and get special discounts on amazing products! Visit https://drdrew.com/sponsors 」 Chris Rufo is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. He is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing edi­tor of the public policy magazine City Journal. His reporting and activism have inspired a presidential order, a national grassroots movement, and legislation in twenty-two states. Christopher holds a BSFS from Georgetown University and an ALM from Harvard University. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three sons. Follow him at https://twitter.com/RealChrisRufo and https://rufo.substack.com. Read his book at https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063227533 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PRIMAL LIFE - Dr. Drew recommends Primal Life's 100% natural dental products to improve your mouth. Get a sparkling smile by using natural teeth whitener without harsh chemicals. For a limited time, get 60% off at https://drdrew.com/primal • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We will be getting to our guest, Chris Ruffo, in just a second. I don't know if you all were seeing or watching what I was just watching. It's astonishing when you see these interviews strung together from their highlights. Wow. So Christopher F. Ruffo is a filmmaker, writer. He has directed documentaries for PBS. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of public policy magazine, City Journal.

He has been reporting on multiple, I've talked to him over the years on multiple areas, multiple areas. He was on KBC back in 2019 to talk about homelessness in Seattle and Los Angeles. It is good to touch base with him again. And what he's been worrying about now is that we either in need of or have been in the middle of a cultural revolution. So I'll be watching you guys on Restream, Twitter Spaces, and also, of course, on the Rumble Rants. We'll see you just after this break. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this.

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Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

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protect yourself and your family. To order this unique, specially formulated supplement, go to drdrew.com slash TWC. That is drdrew.com slash TWC. Use code Drew at checkout for 10% off today. Thank you all for joining us today. Chris Ruffo again is my guest. You can follow his Substack at ruffo.substack.com. And also on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it now, Real Chris Ruffo, R-U-F-O. Let's get Chris on in here. Chris, welcome to the program.

It's great to be with you. So we're no longer talking about homelessness, you and I, although all those conversations from long ago, I guess we're well ahead of their time. I mean, we saw the problem then, and of course, they've done nothing about it. And so many, many, many thousands have died because of it. I've been in the position that it's murder. And I continue to be of that opinion because it's something so easy to solve. It's funny, Chris. I was thinking to you the other day.

I gave a talk to a bunch of county supervisors, a national organization. And I just said, why are you trying to treat medical problems with social workers? What are you thinking? And they were like these are medical what are you talking about i was like and i gave a lecture i was like here's your data this is what you're dealing with this requires physicians to treat uh to lead teams to manage these things they were shocked and a lot of them defended their position as well we were just handed this by the previous uh administrations and this is how they did

it. We didn't understand. Yeah, it's beyond. It's become, which is a really interesting sort of observation, which this stuff has become endemic. It made me think also, and this is what I want to tee up for you. It made me think about what's going on on college campuses. And now we have two generations of indoctrination and endemic faculty. It's no longer the exception to have faculty with extraordinary ideas. It's this status quo that has been there for maybe two, certainly one generation. Let's hear your thoughts. Yeah, I think that's and and and what i think that the fundamental problem is and we see this at universities we see this on homelessness we see this on k-12 education is that the left has become so used to dominating its own environment and and essentially believing its own

lies and a lot of these lies come from good intentions. They want to avoid uncomfortable truths. They want to avoid offense. They want to avoid questioning their own ideas out of some polite instinct. But they actually have consequences. And that's what we're seeing everywhere. And I think it's just astonishing. And what I document in the book, but is seen very clearly in the response to homelessness, is that we've become so degraded in our, even our sensory capacities that you can walk by a street full of tents with people who are in an obvious mental, physical distress, you know, schizophrenics, talking to themselves, people doing drugs openly. And then you say, well, what's the problem here? And they can't even really trust their own eyes, their own observation. They say, well,

the problem is systemic racism, or the problem is historic oppression. I mean, things that have absolutely no immediate bearing on the situation, which they really refuse to even see. Well, I think it's not that that they've been using it for. I think they've been using it, their rhetoric constantly suggests that this is true. They use the homeless as a reminder of income inequality, right? Which it has nothing to do, there is income inequality, but that's the wrong poster for it. These are people with this. This is about a failure of the mental health system and a failure to treat drug addiction and a failure to ask people with serious brain diseases to do anything and to allow them to die. It's a,

it's a kind of murder. I don't understand why we can't see it that way. And anyway, what do you think? Yeah. I mean, look, there, there's certainly some truth to that, but it's actually a little bit more complicated, though. There's a wrinkle because in theory, the left offers compassion, offers health care, offers treatment. All of those are kind of therapeutic words that have a kind of left-wing cachet, and yet they're unwilling to deploy it in the situation of homelessness because it requires coercion, because they want every choice to be voluntary for groups that are considered lower down on the ladder. And coercion can only be applied to groups that are higher up on the ladder. And so they're caught between their own priorities. On the one hand, in opposition to coercion of the oppressed, of the dispossessed,

of the marginal. And on the other hand, they have all of these tools that they would supposedly want to deploy, but they're unwilling to do so given those constraints. But the people who really suffer from this are, of course, the people in the streets, but also the middle-class people who are trying to get on the bus, trying to go to work, trying to get inside the buildings where they need to go downtown, that are subjected to this nightmare that is created, of course, in some sense by the people on the streets, but I think in a greater sense by the politics. And so I wondered back then when we first talked a number of years ago,

when will voters start to connect the dots on this? And when will they start forcing the politicians to acknowledge the reality? I don't know. Tell me your sense in Los Angeles. Has that happened or is that really just still something that could possibly occur in the future? It's hard to understand. I was just talking to somebody about this this morning. I mean, why can't, why do you keep voting the same policy and the same types and the same people back in again and again? It's, you know, it's the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. It's really hard to understand. I do, I understand a little bit about why these people that are in these elected positions seem to refuse to change their recalcitrance or to change their position.

They are completely at the whim of activists, completely. I think it's they must need the activists to do some things and then they have to cave to activists in other areas. Because if you say the slightest thing about moving one of the 20,000 campers that line the streets of Los Angeles with terribly drug addicted individuals living in or talk about asking addicts to do anything, to do anything, to say, come with me, I can help you. You can't do that. That is coercion. And at the same time, mind you, these elected officials put laws in place that would put me in prison for elder abuse if I didn't manually take somebody with dementia with the same exact symptom complex and bring that person to treatment. The horror in all this is that dementias are inexorable. They're going to get worse no matter what. So bringing that person to treatment is for sure I want to get them to treatment so they're safe, but it's not going to change the course of illness. While addiction, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,

these things, you intervene early and you change the trajectory dramatically. While if you leave a schizophrenic in the street, they'll be done forever, forever. And drug addicts will die. So one of the little elements in all this, I've noticed that they always leave out and that is a wrinkle in their thinking about this,

is the progressivity of these illnesses. Opiate addiction, stimulant addiction is a progressive illness that ends in death, period. Schizophrenia is a progressive illness that destroys the brain if you don't help early. They refuse to acknowledge this. Their position is, well, let's have nurses give the heroin instead. If I give the heroin, it still progresses. It doesn't matter. It is a feature of the substance on the brain and the genetics of these individuals. So that's the part I can't get them to acknowledge. Yeah, and I think, you know, there's another social cost element to it as well. So you have, of course, it progressively gets worse for the people who are suffering from schizophrenia or heroin or meth addiction. But unlike the dementia patient, these folks also become more dangerous to others progressively as their illnesses get worse and

worse. And so, you know, at the end of the day, if a dementia patient or someone suffering from dementia isn't, you know, housed and treated and cared for, you know, this is a tragedy for that person, certainly, and that person's family in an emotional way. But they're not a threat to others. They're not going to do violent outbursts. They're not going to stab people in the street. They're not going to attack people, you know, on the subway. And so we're creating a situation that, you know, every day becomes more and more clear. And I think you're exactly right. It's a hostage style politics. Activists control the levers of power. Activ control the narratives, activists control, you know, even the kind of reputation and safety of political figures who then engage in a fiction.

And, you know, I think some of them don't understand. I think really genuinely they have no idea, but I think others do understand. And I think that they're willing to basically say in a cynical way, all right, well, you know, we're going to do a little bit. We're not going to really cross the activists, even though we really know what's happening. I don't understand who these activists are, what they intend, and why politicians even give them the time of day. I don't get it. Can you explain that to me?

Yeah. So, you know, certainly in Seattle and San Francisco, Los Angeles, these are big cities with very robust left-wing networks. So you have a couple key elements that create this ecosystem. You have, you know, very wealthy people who dump, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing causes. Then you have the staffers of these left-wing causes that are, you know, ideologues, that are utopianists, that are, you know, idealists, that are very, very committed to the ideology. And then you have the same money and the same institutions, whether it's foundations or private foundations, meaning kind of charitable donations, they go to the local media. So like the homelessness coverage at the Seattle Times is not funded by readers. It's funded by left-wing billionaires and left-wing, you know, centimillionaires. And then they also fund academic institutions. They fund other outlets. And then you have activists within the local government that administer the programs that are very much in line. And so what you have is an entire ecosystem that controls information,

that controls policy, that controls academic research, that controls street-level activism. So those 25 people that show up at your house if you vote the wrong way. And this is very overwhelming in a small environment. And you don't have anything on the other side. There are no, you know, moderate, centrist or conservative billionaires, media institutions, street-level activists. I mean, none of that exists in these places. So they're getting immense pressure narratively, financially, politically, you know, physically, only in one direction. And so it would take something of a of a kind of heroic figure uh in order to resist that i i i i i understand the infrastructure and

the think tanks and stuff like that and i'm actually quite fine with that uh i assume right has something like that going on as well but i i look at the activists who show up and they are violent and aggressive and seem like anarchists to me. They don't seem to be necessarily towing a specific policy line. Am I misreading what that is? Well, there's two kind of forms of activists. So you have on homelessness, you have the actual the homelessness service providers that make money on this. They're kind of like union muscle in a sense. You have the academics and journalists and intellectuals. They provide the intellectual scaffolding.

And then you have the street-level activists, the people that you're talking about. They're opportunists. They're left-wing anarchists. They're left-wing BLM rioters. They're left-wing anarchists. They're left-wing BLM rioters. They're left-wing provocateurs. And they jump onto any cause that allows them to vent their impulses out in public. So it's homelessness one day. It's BLM the next day.

It's trans activism the other day. And so it's a kind of motley crew that you see. But it's effective. I mean, if you can get 100 people to yell and scream at a public meeting or in front of someone's house or outside your office, it has an impact. It has a psychological impact and therefore has a political impact. And of course, I'm not suggesting that counter protesters should mobilize against them in the same way. But it does affect the calculus of politicians who, you know, if they have one great skill, it's being perceptive and having their antennas up for public opinion. I mean, that's their job.

And if they only hear it one way all day, every day, the money goes one way all day, every day. And then you have a circle of influence where the people who get funding for these absurd service programs and harm reduction programs, then funnel that money back into activism, funnel that money back into politics. You have to have something significant to break it. And I haven't seen anything to that scale where that might happen. Well, I mean, isn't the significant thing? What about the rest of us? What about all the people in this country, in this city, everyone in the middle, everyone, as you said, moderate, that's everybody, that's everyone else. And why do the, why are the politicians able to listen to these extremely, I don't understand why they listen to them, these very fringe, and you say they're part of a larger infrastructure. I get that.

But there's a gigantic population that is going, hey, what are you doing? Why do you listen to these people? They're not representing me. And you're letting them, as the the elected official you're the person that represents me not the people yelling at you and the i remember when they when they cleaned up las vegas a little bit they started saying they're they're not going to allow certain uh behaviors and they're going to put people in treatment and stuff and the mayor just went you don't have a vote here you get out get out you don't know what you're talking about you never treated somebody

with schizophrenia you've never treated a drug addict you these people are dying get out of here i thought oh my god an elected official that has got got a brain uh i don't know what the outcome of all that was i just happened to have seen that a couple years ago pre-covid i'd say maybe right the beginning of covid and uh and i thought why aren't they all doing that i don't understand it these are not physicians coming in and going hey hey, excuse me, this is the right. You're going to kill these people. No, it's quite the opposite. You are killing them if you don't.

If you keep listening to these assholes, you are killing people. By the thousands, six a day here in Los Angeles. I think that the big problem is that public opinion, if you look at public opinion on homelessness in particular, the public wants zero tolerance on encampments on the sidewalk. The public wants stricter enforcement of drug laws. The public wants coercive or mandatory mental health treatment for people on the streets. But the public, in a sense, majority is not as important as the It can be shaped. It can be directed. But it's not an organic process. Even if you have 70 percent of a majority, you're not winning those council seats. You're not driving policy. You're not changing the law and you're not changing how the laws are enforced. This is, in some sense, a democratic myth. I would like it to be that way.

My personal opinion on these issues is in line with the 70% majority. But in the actual practice of governance, it's simply not enough. Is that ideal? No. Is that how it's supposed to be? Not exactly. But that's really the practical matter in the blue cities. And you're right. Conservatives, we do have a think tank infrastructure. We have an activist infrastructure. We have politics in an organized way, but not in blue cities. It's just not worthwhile for conservatives to invest there. They invest in suburbs. They invest in rural areas. That's where their base is. most conservative politicians or people of influence, they really could care less about what happens in a place where they don't live. They say, well, I don't live in, you know, Capitol Hill, Seattle. I don't live in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I have no means of influencing it. And so they're less interested in getting involved. So that is an eye-opening statement to me. and again i'm i'm sitting right in the middle i'm

a moderate i see both sides of these things what is what's the answer one thing i see for sure as a moderate is that the the public the average person's interests are not being represented and in the process there are people being murdered. And so as a physician, I can't get it out of my head. So what is the answer here? Is there an answer? Yeah. I mean, the bad news is that there's not an answer that has been implemented or a model that has been successfully deployed with the partial exception of a city like Austin, Texas. So, and, and, but I think that Austin, Texas, you know, what worked there in a, in a limited, but real way, what worked in Houston, Texas, and in a, in a certain regard,

could work in the West coast cities, but it would need a twist. And so what they did is they organized politically. They had, they had grassroots groups, they had a movement. They had ballot initiatives. They had PR teams. They had wealthy donors funding their efforts. They conducted research. They hosted conferences. They mobilized voters in neighborhoods. They helped train police officers. They changed the laws on the books. They held the politicians' feet to the fire to enforce them. And could that work? You know, Austin is, of course, a kind of left-leaning city, but in a greater environment that is in a more conservative state. And Austin is politically more conservative than, let's say, San Francisco. I think it could also

work in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it would take a significant intervention. Austin is also much smaller than, say, Los Angeles County. I mean, Los Angeles County is enormous. So what I think it would take is a significant windfall investment from someone on the tune of, you know, $100 million to establish a think tank, to establish a grassroots organization, to establish the research, to establish the communications infrastructure, and then to actually put money into political campaigns and political influence. You know, that's how the game would have to work. And I wish it could be Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

But unfortunately, I think that's been tried and failed in these cities for quite a long time. I spent a lot of time in Austin and they still have a homeless problem. But there there's there's really it's very clear what's going on. The average homeless person is a drug addict. But there is also an interesting, and I'm not quite sure what to do with, population of down-and-out black men who are not addicted. I don't know if there's mental illness under it or anything, but that's the group that they are not supporting properly. The drug addict, I understand the frustration and difficulties with that. But there is this special group there that it'd be a great thing for them

to solve that for them and see what that is and maybe bring that to downtown Los Angeles. There's a lot of opportunity to do really powerful things for people here. And they don't look at it that way. It's just too much for me. I don't know. Well, listen, I got to take a little break in a second. But before we do, though, what led to you writing the book? What's going on in your head about what's your concern here? What is the thesis of the book? Yeah. I mean, the thesis of the book is really underlies, you know, why did things get the way they are onaries of the 1960s, and then showing how their ideas over time took control in the universities, took control in public policy,

took control of K through 12, took control really of the way that we think, the way that we speak, the way that we're permitted to act. And so all of these questions, well, you know, why can no one solve the problem of homelessness? Why are people not proposing solutions? Why is it difficult to even talk about the truth in public? That's the question I sought to answer. That's what I tried to do, which was showing this history of this slow-moving revolution, how it devoured our institutions of culture, how it destroyed some of our great institutions of knowledge, and then why it's left us in such a moral drift where, you know, really in 2020, I think was the first time people saw it clearly. Our institutions were hyper ideological all at once. And people

asked why, and the answer is in this book. All right, when we get back, I want to talk about why people can't talk about the truth. What is that? Why do we have such a difficult time with reality on reality's terms, which is the nature of mental health. It's being able to accept reality on reality's terms, and we seem that we'll have nothing to do with it. Chris Ruffo, you can follow him on Twitter at RealChrisRuffo, R-U-F-O. The book is America's Cultural Revolution. And you're not advocating a revolution. You're describing the revolution since the 60s, correct?

That's right. Just really quickly, it just occurs to me, what do you think of Ramaswamy's notion of a 2024 revolution? Is that too out there? No, I mean, in a sense, you know, what I advocate in the book is, I think, more accurately described as a counter-revolution. And so, you know, Ramaswami's idea was actually an old idea that he maybe consciously or unconsciously stole from President Nixon. And Nixon's, you know, Nixon's address to Congress in 1971, he said, we have a revolution in our streets, in our country, in our morals. And we need to, the only thing that could counter it is the revolution of 1776.

And so it's an old conceit. I think it's still a good one. You know, I'm not a Vivek supporter. I support his opponent, Ron DeSantis, but I appreciate that he's at least bringing some energy to the debate. And youth, right? That's the nice thing, you know, to see somebody representing young people for the first time in a while. Take a little break. Back to Chris Ruffo. Maybe you can get a chance to get a couple calls in here after this I want to share with you a teeth whitening system that goes beyond merely enhancing your smile Primal Life Organics real white teeth whitening system offers convenience and rapid results without harsh chemicals light blue light for whitening red light for gum and oral hygiene and you can just do both if you wish.

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Yeah, yeah. I mean, and in a variety of ways. And certainly, look, if you speak out on these issues, you will get attacked in an escalating manner. The first is simple criticism, which is part of the game. I mean, that's how it works. You enter the political arena, you expect to get attacked. Then you get the kind of smear pieces from some of the media outlets and they lie about you.

I got one smear piece from the Washington Post that I actually rebutted very significantly and I forced them to retract six entire pair retract or add clarification for six entire paragraphs their key you know claim against me uh totally fell apart they had to retract it and uh and uh you know so so you have that kind of level of attack and then of course you get you know especially on issues like homelessness, especially local issues, you get, you know, physically intimidated, threatened, followed, doxxed, you know, all of these very unsavory techniques that you have. And look, anyone in politics in, let's say, the big West Coast cities, you know, they know how it works. This happens immediately. If you pose any threat to the orthodoxy, if you pose any threat to the status quo, the attacks come very, very significantly. They'll try to get you fired from your job. They'll try to get you ejected from polite society. And I think a lot of people consequently determine that actually participating or fighting back is just not worthwhile.

What else do you think figures into why we can't speak about reality? Why we're not allowed to sort of even muse about the facts? I mean, there are the obvious things, right? You have, you know, kind of, you know, threats, intimidation, you know, media attacks, of course, you have censorship, obviously, you know, you've dealt with that in a very real way. So tech companies censoring opinion. But I think, you know, there's a more subtle and maybe more interesting, but I think almost certainly more pervasive method of, let's say, kind of pre-censorship. And it's this idea that people don't even have the language or the vocabulary or the concepts to describe reality, to describe what they believe, to describe what they would like to see. And so,

there's a vague dissatisfaction amongst so many people, but they don't have the information or they don't have even the vocabulary to describe it. And I think that that's a big problem with our education system. You know, a lot of times I ask people in higher education, I'm working a lot in higher education right now, well, what is the purpose of higher education? They have no idea. They've never thought about it. They've never developed an opinion about it. They have no idea of the tradition. And I think that there are so many issues like that where, you know, you talk about local government. Well, what is the purpose of local government? The first one is to secure the safety, to secure the life and the property of the inhabitants of the government. And people, you say that and it sounds like you're saying something totally new to people, but this is the very basic, this is how our system has,

well, not has worked, but was supposed to work since the very beginning. You know, you had natural rights to life, liberty, and property, the pursuit of happiness. The government is supposed to secure those very basic rights. And we don't have that in these cities. But these cities have record money. They have incredible technology. They have hundreds of thousands of people that work for them. But they don't even know the very basic purpose of what they're supposed to be doing. Yeah, it's what I've been saying for quite some time. I live a lot of my time in New York City.

And their government sort of works. and they sort of provide things. They've got their own problems, but you get transportation. You get streets. You get an extraordinarily complex sanitation, trash system, and you get water. I mean, everything is kind of incredibly complex, and they deliver on that you come to los angeles no no transportation no roads no power no water no safety i mean the basic basic reason for government i just keep saying why do we have a government this is a basic function of government they're not governing and you're saying they don't even seem to understand what governing is which is breathtaking i i just breathtaking. I remember back when I was probably in high school,

they always talk about transportation, and they talk about sanitation, and they talk about water, and the basic functions of government that, thank God, we get here in Pasadena quite well. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I started thinking about this. It stood out compared to Los Angeles. But what do people think they're doing? Well, they think that they're pursuing revolution and they think they're dispensing social justice.

They think they're standing on behalf of the oppressed. And here's why there's a discrepancy. Can't they do that and govern? Can't they do that and govern? Could they not leave out the governing part? That's astonishing to me. And here's why there's a discrepancy. Can't they do that and govern? Can't they do that and govern? Could they not leave out the governing part? That's astonishing to me. Listen, creating a water treatment plant, running an electrical grid, maintaining a network of thousands of miles of roads is actually very difficult and logistically complex. It's technically complex.

It's kind of thankless work. No one is excited when they have, you know, power 24-7. It's taken for granted at this point, although that's changing. But fighting for social justice, screaming at city council meetings, and calling someone, you know, a Nazi after work is immediately gratifying to the emotions. And it takes actually no effort, it takes no expertise, it takes no hard work, it takes no sacrifice of immediate interest. And so you have a governing class now in some places like San Francisco and Los Angeles and Seattle that is contenting itself with delivering these symbolic victories and fighting these symbolic fights, because governing a complex logistical effort is simply too difficult.

They have no interest in it. They have no capacity for it. And they'd substitute these symbolic concerns for the actual hard work of governing. Wow. I don't understand why that is more obvious to people, if that is true, which it seems to be. I keep pointing at it, and you're confirming it for the first time for me. The other thing that's troubling me here, a couple things I want to talk about. One is the role of money. It's come up in some really kind of odd ways in this conversation. One is that you need $100 million to have some sort of counterforce, but it's also very much figures into what politicians do. It's, as you said,

there's sort of a unionized system in delivery of care and homelessness and all these other phenomena. Money has a, it's too just so to say coercive. It's an entanglement that i i worry about is there anything can be done about that yeah i mean yes although what i would say is that um part of the reason why the system does not change is because the players in the system all benefit from the

system as it is today that That is to say the status quo. These cities are spending billions of dollars on homelessness services per year. I'm aware. I could cut that in half and deliver medical services for them. I know exactly how to do it. I told one of the supervisors to go get that Sears building. Here's the three system we're going to put in there. Here's how we'll staff it. No problem. That's not a billion dollars. That is not a billion dollars. It's not even a hundred million. It's not. And, but, but look, I mean, what you have to do is something that's very difficult. You have to separate the individual from the individual's paycheck. And, and so, uh, you know, people

fight for good governance, people fight for reforms, um, but to actually fight to separate a large group of people from all, from their paychecks, um, is going to create a furious reaction. Um, they will fight you, uh, you know, uh, seemingly to the death, uh, to protect their, their, their income stream, their cash flow. And so you are up against something that is a very profound connection. And then everyone is in on the corrupt system. I mean, they see the city, they see the lack of results, they see the numbers and the dashboards that they create. But they are willing to look the other way, or they're willing to rationalize it or make excuses for it because they are paid to the status quo. They are not paid to deliver results. And so you need someone that has the strength, that has the guts, that has the commitment,

that is willing to tell people, no more paycheck for you. Go find a real job. You're hurting people. You're not helping them. And we're going to find people who are actually dedicated to results. And I'm zeroing out your budget. That's what actually has to happen. And I'm afraid that that is actually a rare set of skills that very few people have. Well, and certainly the voting public doesn't seem to understand who that person is they they have no interest in that person it seems like so the other thing i wanted to ask about was you've framed this as a cultural revolution and i've been thinking two two things that there is sort of a you know the, the book, the fourth turning, uh, talking about generational

differences and things, you know, I've sort of lived through that and seen that in real time from the standpoint of psychology and psychopathology. And, you know, I've seen the narcissistic turn. I've seen now hysteria kick in. I've seen envy become the predominant psychological kind of wind of the day. I mean, people are into expressing envy, which is the thing that every religion on earth has injunctions against because it's the most destructive, disgusting of human emotions. And yet envy has value now. When I look about kind of how this happened it's interesting you mentioned richard nixon talking about this in 1971 it's always seemed to me like we've we've gone from glorifying certain pathologies over the last 50 years so when i was a kid you know if you really look at who the

rock stars were it ain't pretty we we glorified these guys and some of if you look look at who the rock stars were, it ain't pretty. We glorified these guys. And if you look at some of the lyrics from the 70s, it's just breathtaking what they were advocating and what they thought was okay. And look at the behavior of Led Zeppelin and the abuse of women. And you just go down the line. These are sociopaths. These are drug addicts and sociopaths.

And we elevated them to a very high status. It seems like we've gone through this period of 50 years where we used to elevate people that sort of did good things. And we switched somewhere in the 60s. Is that a post-World War II phenomenon? I've tried to look at the grand sweep of history and figure out how this all happened. Is that still remnants of the Civil War and Reconstruction that we were trying to work through? And the youth sort of brought it to the surface? What do you imagine that was, or do you have an opinion about that?

And where are we now, more importantly? I think a big reason for this is the process of secularization. So up until and really through the World War II period, you had a general moral consensus. And it was a generally Judeo-Christian, but really a Christian moral consensus. You still had very high rates of church attendance. Most people in the United States shared this basic ethical framework. It was understood. It was implicit. It was shaped daily life. It shaped the cultural prohibitions you're talking about. The disappearance of that has led to a vacuum that has been filled by sociopathy, as you're saying, by narcissism. You're talking about the 80s and 90s. But what I think is the dominant cast today

and something that I've been thinking about a lot, if you look at the cluster B personality disorders, which includes narcissism, which includes borderline, which includes antisocial personality disorder, which includes histrionic personality disorder. criteria, the kind of bullet points of the kind of traits exhibited by someone suffering from these cluster of disorders, or one of them, or one or multiple, you kind of read them, you say, oof, this very much reminds me of all of the cultural patterns that are rewarded and incentivized in our society. It's like all of the social media content you see. It's people who are valorized or lionized, certainly by left-wing activists. And then it's the pattern of behavior that you see, especially in universities. You have hysterical theatrics, demand on attention, narcissistic identity complexes, the demand for care while rejecting authority. I mean, you go down the list and you say, my God, our society has become this. And so I think that if, you know, if you compare them, you say, well,

you know, whatever the kind of restrictions were and, you know, the old term of the kind of Christian moral ethic and whatever we have now, you know, okay, maybe it's been liberated in some ways, but liberated towards what? It's a disaster, but it's a disaster that I think is going to only increase and only intensify in the future. So fascinating. Have you ever heard me talk about this, this very issue? I have not. Okay. So let me tell you, and for people that have, I apologize.

Tell me, yeah. So I wrote a book on this. I've done a lot of thinking about it. I've sort of stalled lately on it a little bit because people have become so histrionic, and I did not anticipate the histrionic move. I thought we were deep into the cluster B, but I didn't see a lot of histrionic. But let me just tell you. So I arrived as a young resident at the psychiatric hospital in 1985.

And when you fill out a, an admission form at a psychiatric hospital, certainly back in those days, they would have the primary thing, which would be a depression. Oh, there's the, yeah, that was the mirror effect where I wrote about that. And, but that didn't put everything in it. I wanted to put, that's why I explained to Chris. So the, major depressive disorder. Axis 2 is the personality disorders, right? And when I arrived at the psychiatric hospital, the personality disorders were across the spectrum, A, B, and C. I would see a lot of dependent personalities, a lot of obsessive-compulsive

personality, a lot of different things. And I noticed as we moved, and I stayed at that hospital for 35 years, so I got to see this all in real time. As we moved into the late 80s, we started seeing a lot of borderline. And by the time the 90s hit, it was all cluster B exclusively. You never saw A or C or almost never. So we literally literally it was played out in the mental health setting and it certainly continues until today and along the time there was a bunch of literature suggesting that narcissistic traits had become more common there was this whole argument about acquired narcissism but i'm here to tell you because i watched in real time i talked to people in real time hundreds of people on the radio every night and throughout the weeks. Trauma, childhood

trauma was at pandemic levels in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Go back to the lyrics of the guys in the 70s talking about acting out on 14-year-old girls as the coolest thing in the world, and you get a sense of what was going on. Whether it was childhood trauma, sexual abuse, neglect, physical abuse, and more drug addiction in the family systems, lots of adverse childhood experiences, which my profession finally caught up with by 2000, that, oh my goodness, adverse childhood experiences can affect people's health. Can you imagine that? But the trauma was really the, so the two issues, there was this trend and then there was childhood trauma on top of that. And then you add in, and so when I wrote that book, I spent a lot of time going, God, I wonder, we have historical antecedents where this has happened before.

The closest relative of that period of history I could find was pre-revolutionary France, where children were routinely abandoned on the steps of, you know, adoption homes, whatever they call them, orphanages, where children were acted out on sexually all the time. And what did you get? Guillotines. You get scapegoating. And I, at the time that I wrote that book, I wanted to write a chapter about scapegoating mechanisms and how there had to be a time when all this narcissistic rage had to get focused out there or else they

destroy each other. That's kind of what happens. It's why the Aztecs would tear the heart out every morning and throw it down the stairs. No, it's not because they thought the sun would come up. It's like, oh, it's because they needed it for the sun to come up. No, why did they do that in the first place? Why was that so necessary to maintain the stability of that society because that same phenomenon of scapegoating scapegoating is a very very powerful mechanism and by the way the aztecs had something called the codex which was a specific um guidebook for how to traumatize your child to turn them into a great warrior. That was adaptive for them. They needed to do that.

And they did it. But then they could tear each other apart if they didn't scapegoat every morning. France was a little closer relative to what we were dealing with. But you got guillotines. And when I wrote that book, whenever it was, I didn't know about social media yet. And I didn't understand that would be about the public square where cancellation would be the guillotine of our of our time you're absolutely right cluster b is uh ubiquitous and the way we dealt with cluster b at the time and still to this day is with firmness and unity and a consistent wall like you you don't, hey, stop it. Somebody goes, stop.

You're hurting people. You stop it. You're hurting yourself. You're firm with them. And you go, we're going to do something a little different here. You're going to be, I love you dearly, but stop. It's got to stop. The other thing about the systems part of this is back when I saw the borderline thing coming on in the 80s, that was when the

legal system was the playground for individuals with borderline disorders. I don't know if you were old enough to be aware of that, but that's when you had all the lawsuits about hot coffee spills and somebody scraping their knee and then taking down McDonald's. And that was all borderline. And the legal system caught on to that and started punishing people for doing that like no you're going to get slapped you can't do that where you're going to end up paying for the the procedures and people are people adjust themselves when when the consequences are intense the problem is the same people same disorders are in the government and there's no one to put a little stop to some of the behaviors now

and they can be very aggressive and very vengeful and very envious and envy is the is the it is the liability in nurse in cluster b disorders envy it's the worst part of those disorders and aggression i i have a question because this is something i've been this is something i've been thinking about. And so I think you're absolutely right. But the difference now is that there's been also a collapse of authority in the late eighties, early nineties. You still had the kind of old school people that were probably in high positions in the hospital. They had firmness, they had resolve, they could say no, they could set limits. That's gone. You have in a university setting, for example,

it's almost, you know, it's a very much of a feminine, archetypally feminine, but also demographically feminine domain. So you have different set of social strategies, different set of rules. There's been a sense, nobody has been willing to, in a university setting, leadership wise, to say no, to set boundaries, to impose limits, to have prohibitions of any kind. And so you have a kind of cluster B family drama where you have, and I'd be curious if you saw this in an actual real sense in your clinical work. You have, say, a female with a cluster B type symptoms that is acting out, that is seeking attention, that is pushing

and pulling, histrionic, et cetera. You have a kind of mother figure that is indulging, is codependent, rewards those behaviors, and you have, in a sense, an absent father figure. Father is gone. That's the archetypal drama that I see within our institutions today over and over. Is that something that dovetails with your actual clinical experience? Oh, this is all, absolutely. It is because the cluster B feels out of control and uncontained.

They don't like being that way. They look for some external containment to help them with some of these unregulated emotions. Listen, I worked a lot with Borderline. I have deep empathy for what they deal with. No one suffers more than them. But in the process, they wreak chaos. That's part of their thing is projective identification. And if there's not, I don't, you know, it doesn't have to be a father and mother.

There has to be just unity, there just has to be a unified front around them, that keep them glued together. And it's somewhat different for you know, as you move across the different cluster B disorders, but but it's all kind of its core, the same sort of phenomenon, which is I was, you know i was abused i was a i'm a victim and i'm i'm aggressive and i'm gonna you know i i can't i can't regulate my emotions because i didn't get what i need from from the environment and it's it's um it's something that if you you know i get overwhelmed thinking about it but it it running a, it's not a good thing for anybody.

It's particularly not good for the individual that's running a mock. They don't end up happier because of it. They end up much more miserable. And that's the part you will not get people to believe. Where do you think it goes from here, though? Because it's now been projected onto our institutions. It's not just a personal, private matter, psychological matter. What happened to your patients as a cohort, as a group that might give us some idea of where this could go

institutionally? You know, people, if they are not contained, will spiral. They will get worse and will do things that people will push back on, but they'll do it with aggression as opposed to sort of containment because it just keeps going. It does not have any end to it. And what has to come in, I'm imagining, is another generation that has not been so traumatized and is sort of wondering what the hell's going on here, kind of moving in and going, no, enough. You must stop. It's very simple. You don't have to be aggressive.

It's just, no, no, no, just no, no, no. Just the same with the homeless. Like, no, you can't lay down on the sidewalk. Yes, you can go live your life as you please, but I've got something good for you here. Let's go over here. I can help you. I can help you.

You really don't like living like this. I know your brain isn't working, so you can't see here. Let's go over here. I can help you. I can help you. You really don't like living like this. I know your brain isn't working, so you can't see that. That's the other part. We privilege denial. We privilege distortions. We privilege projection. We privilege projective identification. And all these things are extremely problematic for people's thriving. And by the way, you mentioned religion a little while ago.

That's all kind of designed to contain all that. You know, for the first time on this show, when people have called in, they've been talking about going back, even though they're not religious and don't necessarily have a faith in God, they're finding themselves going back to religion to sort of get something good out of it,

which it's designed to help with all of this. I mean, imagine where religion grew up in situations of extreme trauma and instability. And it was there to kind of contain what happens to us as adults when all that stuff gets a rolling. And guess what? People were happier. They were better. They thrived more. And I think that the political corollary is quite interesting. So if you say the French Revolution, we're in kind of a pre-French Revolution feeling, or at least, you know, in some loose sense. And then the guillotines come, and then the terror happens. You have the attempt to impose ideology and to reshape the

world without limits. And then who marches in, or rather, who rides his horse in? it's napoleon uh and so so i i i i feel that we are concerning right a very difficult and very um a frightening period where um both sides are are are are are are kind of jockeying for position and there seems to be the the the theounterpunch, the reach-overreach. I say this actually in a sad way. I think it's a sad thing, but it does seem like that there is also some sense of someone has to come in from the outside and make sense of it for us. Again, I don't like that. I don't want that.

But I do feel that there is a rising sentiment. I get what you're saying. And I look to history to try to imagine or understand what we're going through now. And you're right. That's certainly a possibility. But maybe that was Trump. Maybe we had a small version of that

in some people's minds. And I just believe, this is my belief, Chris, that our founding fathers were truly brilliant. And they really did use the wisdom of all history prior to 1776. And the state system is our buffer against this. The fact that we are not a federal government. We are a more perfect union of states. And those state systems and the functioning of local government, while you and I have been complaining about it's not really working,

Alexa Tocqueville in 1822 said, it's the local practice of democracy that makes America work. And when I spoke to all those national county board supervisors, I commended them for being the representative of that. And guess what? The vast majority of their counties did work and did function and they were well-meaning and they were able to take direction. So the vastness of our system and the localization and the statehood, I think that's our buffer. And the fact that in France, things were a lot worse. The reality of the economic situation, the reality of a hundred years war,

the realities of Britain breathing down their neck all the time, the excesses of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. These were real things that really pissed people off. And, you know, it was a totally different thing. So I'm going to say that was then, and we have certain things now that will sort of mitigate some of that. What do you say? Yeah, I'm with you. Certainly that's, that's my hope as well. And, and I think you're exactly right. Look, we have a system of states. I think for the first time in my lifetime, states are starting to look and act differently. And I think that this is good. It

allows people to move. It allows this is good. It allows people to move. It allows people to travel. It allows people to pick up stakes and go to a system of government that is more aligned with their values. I think that's good rather than bad. I think that the public is starting to reassert its authority over the state institutions and the government institutions. I think that is good. I think our founders had a system that works slowly on purpose at the federal level. You have to get your 60 votes in the Senate now. I think that is good. I think our founders had a system that works slowly on purpose at the federal level. You have to get your 60 votes in the Senate now. I mean, not exactly from the founders, but historical precedent on the filibuster, on the party system,

on kind of a mixed governing regime. And so I think we have all the tools that we need. I am committed to the idea that we can resolve all of our problems through peaceful democratic means. And I think that we have to all refocus on that. We have to all participate in that. And so I'm with you in the sense that- And I think it's going that way. I think it's going that way too. I think there's a, I think there's a trend. Yeah. I think there's a trend in that direction. And you're right.

If I really got tired of Los Angeles, I can always leave. I can always go to Miami. I can always go somewhere else. And it's, I go to Austin and, uh, and we have that, we have that. And it makes things different. And by the way, the, the abuse and the, the endorsement of abuse and stuff that I saw in the 80s, 90s, and 70s, it's over. That's not happening like that. There's still a lot of unstable family systems and kids are getting traumatized through that.

But at least there's an acknowledgement that that's not good. First time in the debates last night, I heard people say family and education. You couldn't say that without getting attacked for the last 15 years. So it's sort of these things that are matter of fact and that grandma knew and have been going on forever and we just know to be important for the human being. It's sort of slowly coming back. The question really is how much damage

is going to be done in places, in the stuff I have to look at, which is my patients in the street. Leopold, unmute your mic there, my friend. You're up on the podium. Good to hear from you. What's happening? Hey, good to hear from you too, Dr. Drew and Chris.

Really enjoyed what you had to say today. And I want to go back to some comments that were made. You mentioned the Las Vegas mayor who cleaned up the town. That was me. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Dr. Drew. And I saw this interview with that mayor. He was being interviewed actually quite recently and he described. Oh, wait, wait. I'm thinking of a way. Hang on. Hang on. I'm thinking of a woman.

There was a female mayor in before who made the first move and she was well pilloried for it, but go ahead. Tell me. Oh, well, well, well, Oscar Goodman, who was the first move and she was well pilloried for it but go ahead tell me oh well well well oscar goodman who was the mob lawyer i don't know if you know the little history about him but he did an interview uh actually uh about a year ago and he talked about how he cleaned up the uh you know the city and he was down in uh the san diego area he was actually in coronado and he mentioned uh he went to the chief of police of coronado and he asked how did he you know how do you keep this you know little island uh so wonderful and pristine and he quite literally said we we ship the homeless and undesirables back to san die, literally over the Coronado Bridge.

And this mayor, he talked about how he would take pretty drastic steps with folks. And he illustrated it with someone who was doing graffiti and actually had this graffiti, you know, vandal actually brought to his office and literally threatened him and all the pundits and all the liberal media types were after him and said, oh, you're going to lose the next election. Apparently that story got out. He was elected with even more of the vote. I think, I think we've reached a limit in the society where, where, you know, people who spend, you know, a couple million dollars on a, you know, a penthouse apartment don't want the homeless urinating in there, you know,

down below when they get out of the elevator, you know? Yeah. But yes, agreed, sir. You doing well, by the way, you good? Oh, I'm doing good. I'm doing good, but I wanted to say sound good. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Well, I wanted to segue into something else that was mentioned, which was, I remember how the, you know, the LA slimes went after you when you were being, uh, you know, considered for that position for the homeless and i think it was exactly what you mentioned i think you threatened the flow of money i think if you follow the money there's a lot of money in homelessness and and i think that i think i think you were going to shed some light

on that and and i think they were very threatened by that. Yeah, I know you would have. And I think they knew that. And by the way, the press played into it. The activists were the ones that they interviewed rather than people with a knowledge about how to treat these things or deal with these things. But okay. All right. Well done. The only times you were disgusting. You were disgusting. You want to be ashamed of yourself. I ended up calling the reporter back and I go, why didn't you ask me what my training is? Why didn't you ask me what my credentials are? You reported that I have a license in the state of California. I've had three clinical assistant professorships. I'm a fellow in two different societies. What the hell are you reporting on?

What kind of reporter are you? It's disgusting. Anyway, I got to throw you back in. I got to throw you. Well, go ahead. I call them the LA slimes for a reason. reporter are you it's disgusting well that's anyway I gotta throw you back in I got it through well go ahead I call them the LA slimes for a reason so that's there you go I appreciate that see you soon my friend yeah the heat but Leopold did you know he he touched on something without intending to we'll have to bring you back to talk about this, which is we do have a class problem. We do. And people are avoiding that, it seems to me. Do you agree with me on that?

Yeah. I mean, depending on in what sense, what do you mean in the last little bit that we have? Well, I'm not sure what sense. I'm just aware that there's some tension there and that people are avoiding it. That's sort of, I haven't thought a lot about it yet. Maybe I'll do some thinking on it and then bring you back in. But a lot of what we do focus on seems to me like a little bit of what would a slight not where magicians do when they try to get you to misdirection. Thank you. Some misdirection from a more challenging, difficult problem. They point at income inequality. That's not what we're looking

at in the streets. The income inequality is a much more dicey, complicated problem that we really should be talking about. And most of it, frankly, well, most of it, a huge piece is the erosion of the middle class, the ability to have a good life in this country. And that's the part they seem to run away from right now. But Chris, thank you so much. I'll leave it there. We can go on and on and on. Let's put the book up again. It is America's Cultural Revolution. Tell me again what I'm going to learn by reading the book. So we'll give that pitch. You'll understand left-wing ideology from 1968 to the present. You'll understand it as far as what these ideas are, but you'll also understand how they attach themselves to power, how they burrowed into our institutions, and how they seem to dominate American life in the years following 2020. You know, it's funny. Some of these tactics that I'm seeing made me, I keep reaching back in history. I've started reading a Lennon biography and lo and behold, he's advocating some of these

same damn, just yell at people until they get tired and shut up. That was his way of arguing early in his career. And he was explicit about it. So there it is. That's the activist thing. All right, guys. Thank you, Chris. Thank you everybody for calling.

Leopold, thank you. I'm sorry to get to more calls today. I've got to run to Bert Kreischer's podcast, interestingly. So look for that. And let's see, it's Thursday. So our next show will be on Tuesday. Are we put those up there

so I can make sure I get the times right? I screwed that all up this week. Let's see, on Tuesday. Are we, put those up there so I can make sure I get the times right. I screwed that all up this week. Let's see, on Tuesday, looks like the 29th, looks like normal time. Thursday, Wednesday with Dr. Victory

is going to be early at noon. And then on Thursday, Mark Cianchese, I'm very looking forward to this, the cognitive psychologist. And I believe there's a possibility on Wednesday that Dr. Freeman may make a command appearance, repeat performance, because there's been so much we learned from him that I've been sort of parsing out into the world and finding that there's a lot of layers to that part that he brought to light. So until then, we will see you next time.

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