The Dan Bongino Show - How To Deprogram A Liberal (w/ Matt Van Swol) | Episode 115

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

On this Labor Day Special, Matt Van Swol and his wife Erin Derham join the show to discuss their radical transformation from staunch liberal to truth seeking conservative. Make sure to catch a new live show tomorrow, Tuesday 09/02.  Check out the full video show at rumble.com/VINCE Follow Matt on X https://x.com/matt_vanswol Follow Erin on X https://x.com/HistoryBoutique Tom Homan says Trump administration has located 23,000 of the 300,000 migrant children lost under Biden administrationhttp://theblaze.com/news/homan-300k-missing-biden-children After Days of Claiming Trump was Dead, Leftists Get a Nasty Shockhttps://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/08/30/after-days-of-claiming-trump-was-dead-leftists-get-a-nasty-shock-n4943193 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Vince Labor Day special. It is so good to have you with us. Brought to you by Blackout Coffee, the official coffee of all of us here at Silverlock. Go to blackout coffee.com slash Vince. Use the code Vince. That's V-I-N-C-E and get 20% off your first order. Coming up, I've got a great conversation ahead for you with Matt Van Swall and his wife, Aaron. These are two very interesting people who led a life as Democrats for the longest time. They believed what CNN was telling them. And then all of a sudden, their lives got turned upside down by an awful storm in western North Carolina. And ever since, they realized, wait a second, we've been lied to.

And now they're proud conservatives. How that all happened? That's ahead on this edition of events. It's a great conversation. You're going to love it. Please share it with others, too. It's important, I think. A fall is planting season.

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Also, thank you to hometitlelock.com for supporting this great program. homeowners when's the last time you checked on your home title that's the legal record that proves you actually own your home now if your answer is never then this is for you scammers are stealing titles and your equity is the target here's how it works criminals forge your signature on just one document and then they use a fake notary stamp pay a small fee with your county and just like that your home title's been transferred out of your name this is why i've partnered with home title lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim use my promo code Vince at home title lock.com and you'll get a free title history report. Plus, you'll get a

free 14-day trial of their million dollar triple lock protection. That's 24-7 monitoring of your title. Urgent alerts to any changes. And if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to one million dollars to fix it. You need to protect your identity and what is often the biggest asset we have, our home. Go to hometitlelock.com. Use the promo code, Vince. That's home titlelock.com. Promoc code Vince paid subscription after 14-day trial ends cancel anytime all right joining me now matt van swall is a growth marketer you can find him on x at matt van swall there's an underscore in there easy to find now you can find him and aaron durham is also here with us documentary filmmaker at matt's wife uh you find her on x at history boutique thank you both

so much for doing this today i appreciate you yeah thanks thanks thank you so much So let's, I want to just start with kind of a primer on your, on your bio, who you are and where you came from. I know that the big traumatic experience that you had was living through the flooding in Western North Carolina and the eye-opening experience that that you had going into that. Just give me a sense of, of you, who you are and how that changed your life. Yeah, so, you know, we were pre-Hurricane Helene, you know, pre-September of last year. We were aggressive liberals, basically anything that came down the CNN pipeline, we believed. And we fought for.

And when Helene hit, I'm a filmmaker. I'm with the largest agency in Los Angeles. So I reached out to my agent and said, you know, connect me with CNN, MSNBC, everyone who will listen. Some of these people I even had shows with in the past, have worked with producers. I got zero responses back. I got crickets, not even, is your family okay? And that was that kind of very quick turning point where I was like, oh, this doesn't fit the agenda.

This is, it sounds like I'm bashing Biden because I'm saying, where is FEMA, where is the national response? So they didn't have me on. They didn't even check on me. And it was Fox News and multiple, incredible independent journalists and conservative journalists that reached out and had us on the air and helped us get help and that was the moment and in response our liberal friends in our city got really angry at Matt and I for for being on these conservative outlets even though we were actively getting help to our city and that was the moment where I was like I think I'm on the wrong team like this doesn't this doesn't seem right and and we're working our butts off through the night getting people out of the cold, out of tents and into hotels with non-profits and with churches. And we're getting demonized. Even by FEMA itself was demonizing us at the time, saying

these people are, you know, full of it. And they're not, they're not telling the truth. Everything's fine. And we're like, everything is not fine. So that was just a massive turning point that luckily Matt and I got to go through together. So there wasn't a big, you know, moment in our relationship, we were able to just have these moments every morning drinking coffee with our kiddos and going like, what the heck is happening? Like, why? Do you remember, was there like a breaking moment where all of a sudden your mind just opened up?

You're like, whoa, wait a second. I've been getting this thing all wrong because I think it's big. I mean, for anybody, regardless of where you're coming from, your political adherence is a strong magnetic pull. And I think it would be very hard to just wake up one morning and just be like, whoa, whoa, Whoa. I've been attached to something that I didn't realize was alive for a very long time, and I need to break free from that. Was there a pivot point, like a moment where you realize this? Yes, sort of. You know, it's hard to impress this upon people. Probably your listeners or viewers

would probably be hard pressed to understand this. But when you're in a media ecosystem, you tend to stay in it. And it's almost impossible to break out of it unless something dramatic happens that makes you go looking for other sources. And for us and for me, that moment was getting on Twitter. So once we got on Twitter, I saw on X, sorry, on X. I saw that there was very little to no media coverage

about what was happening on the ground where I lived. And I saw CNN wasn't covering it. A lot of the major news outlets weren't covering it. So I was like, I guess I'm the one. I guess I'm the one that's going to bring the news out. And so I did. And it started getting millions of views on X. And even though I got millions of views on X,

I assumed that the media would equate that to, this sounds like a big story. Maybe we should cover this story. Look at all the views. I mean, hundreds of millions of views on X and no media coverage at all. And I was like, in other words, what I recognize this. What you're describing, and I've seen this happen before, is that you're at the center of a major news story all of a sudden. And then you're looking at the way the legacy media are covering it.

And you're saying, wait a second, this bears no resemblance to reality. I'm living through it. I actually know what it's like. why are you lying to people about the circumstances stop that somebody asked me what's going on i'm actually in the middle of it in that experience i've seen that happen before with things like with crime you'll see it where lefty media people will all of a sudden start admitting actually trump's right crime's kind of a problem and usually at the core it's they were mugged they were attacked they were robbed they had some sort of personal experience with it that has altered their

perception of the story that the media are telling yes and that's that's exactly what happened to us is we started working with nonprofits that, you know, we're delivering RVs like in the cold to people sleeping in sheds. And the media was like, FEMA's got it, or they were like, doesn't exist. It's one or the other, right? And you would read all these stories,

like, look at all the money that Biden's given to Western North Carolina. And while I'm driving an RV to someone, I open up my phone and there on a CNN push notification is Biden gives another, you know, couple billion dollars to Ukraine. Ukraine. And I'm like, I'm driving an RV to a woman and her son in 22 degree weather that are sleeping in a shed powered by protein. Like, no, this isn't working for me. And, yeah, the Western North

Carolina, when we would hear stories about what was going on there, you know, being off the grade like it was as a result of the storm, it was hard to get those stories out. And my impression is that the landscape has been in many ways irreversibly altered, that entire communities have shifted away from where they once were and that people are living in such remote and difficult to get to places that the only way to get there was horseback i mean it really sounded like a completely different country and yet the the message out of washington was that don't worry every everything's being taken care of yeah i mean it was unbelievable we were driving around with john hendricks who we found on x he was one of the first people in the in the region

helping people even though he didn't live here. And I remember like getting into his truck on the first day and I could like barely climb in. And that's the kind of vehicle it took to get to these places. And this is, you know, this is generational land. These are people that are off the grid. That's why I mean, we've talked so much about the death toll being so much higher, I think, than what's reported, even though we have no way of really identifying what it is.

Because these people, they have no interest in, you know, being a part of a community outside of the small one that they're in and we went directly into these places and they weren't getting help and if FEMA would come this is early in the days of FEMA they would be disrespectful they would try and take advantage of some of these people there's stories of these young women getting harassed by female workers and luckily Cameron Hamilton came in after the Trump administration jumped in and he fired all of those people which is then became a political story of look at them firing female workers when we need more on the ground. Like, no, those were corrupt people that did really bad things to our neighbors. So

just all of these things started to pile up and we realized if these liberal media outlets and the liberal politicians that we voted for were willing to not only not help us, But throw people like Matt and I and first responders, like our friend Samson, who actually did the deliveries with us, they were willing to throw them under the bus and demonize them and call them, you know, militia. That was just unconscionable to me. So was this experience, so obviously on this issue, you said, whoa, the left is getting this completely wrong. They're lying about the circumstances. Did that become a gateway for other issues for you? Is that when you started taking an inventory of everything that you thought you knew?

And you started kind of assessing, okay, what do I actually believe about this? Yeah, it was definitely like a slow role. You know, it's funny, I would like look back on my own tweets from like that time period where I'm like trying to rationalize why someone would vote for Trump like in that time period. And I, you know, I think the turning point for me was truly being on X and having my own assumptions challenged meeting with first responders who way more often than not were way more right wing and just you know we were on these road trips together and some of them would stay at our house and we'd have these fireside chats like you know what do you think's going on here

and you know we would talk about the disparities that we're seeing between the reality on the ground and you know what the media was saying and then things just started to pile up and so you would you would see like I had no idea a legal immigration was such a problem none at all zero clue never heard about it before and then all of a sudden you open up Twitter and you're like oh my gosh this is a serious problem you know and it was story after story after story just like that and you're like what I like I open up my phone even now and I'll see a story I've never seen before and I'll go how much of this did I miss like what? How much of this media bent just told me a half-truth? And I'm like, yep, expert said it, must be true. CNN said it. Then it was parodied on a TikTok video that I saw, posted on Instagram. And that whole ecosystem was just there.

And I was like, yeah, if everybody's saying it, it's probably accurate. But the system really is designed to tell you the truth in a bent. And I would not have believed that if you had told me unless it happened on the ground to me personally. Yeah, that's a radicalizing experience. So when you say you were consuming the media before all of this happened, before Hurricane Helene, how often were you consuming the press?

Was it just casually? Were you intense media consumers? Or was it just kind of in between things you would see stuff? And you're like, oh, I believe that. Depends on her or me. but we used to watch CNN together every morning with coffee, probably for, you know, just before work or whatever. And then I've had, you know, news outlets installed on my phone that would send me push notifications about the news. And you'd read the headline and you go, that's not good.

Or, you know, or whatever it might be. So, you know, I think a casual consumer of the news can turn into a high consumption consumer of the news if you only read the headlines. And that's what most people do, including me. I think you might have a different story, though. Well, it's, you know, I feel like I consumed it, but from a very strong place of ignorance. I didn't really understand politics. I understood that, you know, that there were echo chambers. But I thought because we got our sources from CNN, we got our sources from New York Times podcast,

from NPR's podcasts that we had enough variation there. And that's, I think, was the massive difference was realizing that these media outlets are truly there to push an agenda. And if it doesn't fit into the agenda, it doesn't go into the news. And that is so, as soon as we saw that, it was we need to rethink everything.

But the issue that we're finding now is unless you have a truly traumatic experience, you don't go looking for that. And I mean, we have lost so many friends. We have like, even thoughtful friends who are like, help us understand what you're going through. Like, why aren't you? And then they're like, you know what? We can't take it. We're out.

We just, we need some space. And I'm like, I don't know how. how they say that they can't be friends with you they can't maintain a relationship with you because of what you've learned and and the life you're now leading as a result of it absolutely and these are people that in my opinion like uh you know these are right or die friends these are people in my past and in our past that have been through serious traumas with us and experienced you know what it was like for days not really not knowing if matt or i or our children were alive after Helene and they are so willing to go or they're so manipulated that they think

we have joined a cult and I've said very recently I feel like I just got out of a cult like I feel like I can have conversations with conservatives and disagree with them and I don't get you know they don't treat me poorly they just go I don't believe that but you know you do you but it is not the same from the people of our past. And I mean, my industry in general, L.A., I think there's one that still speaks to me. And I haven't got. So in the industry side, you can see one of the rationales might be professional preservation, like you're doing that because you know that the only way you'll continue to gain access to the work you want to do is you have to share the politics. Yeah. But I do wonder about like your other personal friends. What could what could possibly

motivate that attitude? What do you think that is that you would be rejected as a person just for coming to a conclusion based on the experiences that you've lived i yeah i'll take this one i i truly think that people think they're doing something correct right and moral by pushing someone they view as let's just say a bigot let's just say a racist let's just say someone who supports Trump, who they fit into all of those categories. I think they think it's moral to push them out so that they can kind of save their own morality, so to speak. And this is something we did not that long ago. Like Aaron's parents would come to our house and they were pretty hardcore MAGA supporters. And Aaron's dad would wear a MAGA hat.

you know, left his tears tumbler. Like, he would bring these things to our house. And we would say, you can't have that in here, right? And the reason for that... And my dad is like... He's a wonderful man. He's like the nicest, most thoughtful human, helps anybody. Like, he is like the guy that everyone I know is like,

your dad is the best. I mean, he is Santa Claus, literally Santa Claus during Christmas. He is. And I was like crying. how dare you wear a MAGA hat in my house and now when I see him wear a MAGA hat I'm like yay it's I have to daily apologize to my parents like I and they were so kind to just just be patient and wait and not get mad at me and not tell me I'm wrong they just he just took the hat off and he said you know whatever you want babe and like that should have told me right

there that I was wrong you know all right more ahead of my conversation with matt and aaron but before that we have to thank our great sponsors did you ever think about aging until you started aging well now that you are aging is your body constantly reminding that you are look here's the thing you can get your energy back and you can do it with c15 from fatty 15 it's the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in more than 90 years fatty 15 co-founder dr stephani van watson discovered the benefits of c15 while working with the U.S. Navy. And based on studies, we do know that when our cells don't have enough C-15,

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Now, back to my conversation with Matt and Aaron. You know, it's funny. I'm listening to this, and I'm almost getting emotional thinking about it because as a father, and Matt, you may share this and just as a mother, Aaron, you may share this too, that, like, you just think about, like, imagine your child heading off in a direction that you know is wrong for them. You're like, oh, man, it seems as you're an adult, it's like, it's probably beyond salvaging. She may never come back to me.

And then suddenly now the two of you are on board, I can't imagine how filled with joy your dad He's so happy. You have no idea. He's so happy. And he's still very, you know, he's still very respectful of people who think differently of him. But he's been, you know, my parent, both of my parents have been the biggest advocates for Matt and I to just keep putting this out there because he's like, if you guys can change,

if you, the most liberal people we knew can change and can listen to other perspectives, then there's hope. So one thing that I'm detecting. from both of you is that you have a healthy marriage. So the fact that you both, that you both made this change at the same time, you both kind of came to these conclusions, means that you were having these conversations. Is there, is there one person in the relationship who was more of the driving force on this? I'm just curious because I do think it's interesting that you didn't do this independently. You coincidentally decided, actually, man, I got to break free. Well, we both got on

x around the same time and i do think that's probably one of the driving forces but it was also just something we were both so engrossed in and having the conversations with first responders um you know with we i mean i remember i was vividly going back and forth one evening before we were going to go on fox and friends we're like should we just cancel like i don't know if we want our friends to think we're promoting fox news you know like and we would i mean it was tough you know we did the same thing with like the blaze and like should we talk to this right wing reporter you know and we kind of rationalized it by like you know we might hate everything that therefore but at least we're getting the news out about western north carolina and conservatives raised a lot of money to help you so much

North Carolina. Yes. And you know, Elon gave us Starlink for free. Trump flew in his helicopter dropped off Starlink then. I didn't know any of those things till much later. But I mean, I guess you were probably more of the driving force than me. Well, it started, you know, for me it started a little bit before where after October 7th, I started to see, you know, And I have a ton of Jewish friends, you know, grew up Catholic. I understand. I just feel like Catholics and Jews like understand each other. And I was like starting to see CNN and other liberal outlets start to try and humanize

and try and relate to terrorists. And I was like, whoa, wait a second. So there were moments where I was starting to bring this up to Matt and he would go and he would, you know, kind of repeat what he heard on CNN. And I would be like, does that feel right to you? That doesn't feel right. And so it was moments like that, but Matt, Matt is very, very good at diving in, especially to a digital community, more than anybody I've ever met. And I think when he jumped into X, he jumped in so open-minded that he let the good people, The really strong writers on X help him understand what was going on.

And how much, so the two of you have three children, correct? Mm-hmm. Okay. And they're all pretty young relatively, all three kids? No, we have a 12, 14, and 5-year-old. Okay, well, young enough. Yeah, you know, and so I wonder, what role does having kids play in this? Because one thing that I know as a dad is that when my daughter was born,

that I had this realization that that playtime was over for me that I that my moral direction needed to be clear and that I needed to bring her to church for instance I needed to give her a good upbringing so a lot of what animates my thinking now is what kind of life am I leaving to her what is how does having children affect your thinking through all this yeah for for me when my son was born I gave up alcohol I saw that as a huge problem in my life. And so when my son was born, I gave up alcohol and I've been sober for going on five years. After Helene, especially once we had this kind of turning point of, you know, the things that we were believing is true, we only got half the story. I started to see most of the

organizations on the ground were Christian organizations. And Aaron and I had both left the church a long, long time ago for a lot of reasons. But the organizations we saw on the ground like Samaritan's Purse and Mercury One and Baptist on a mission and so many others started to make us think, you know, maybe there's something here if these organizations on the ground are all Christian and FEMA is nowhere to be found. You know, maybe we should link up with some of the local churches and we end up doing that. And I think over time I started to be very, I guess, convicted that my children were not getting any sort of moral teaching outside of just Aaron and I. And we were like, well, maybe we should try church.

You know, maybe that would be a good thing. And we kind of had this moment where our daughter said, oh, by the way, I'm actually a Christian. And we both went, what? Sorry, what? And she had just not told us. And you kind of have these, there are so many moments like this where you go, I think it may have been doing this all wrong. And for us, that was a really big one.

And I just wanted to make sure that, one, my children are being taught truth. period like just the truth and they can figure it out for themselves I don't want them being pulled in one way or another whether it's in education or politics just want them to understand the truth and I want them to grow up to be good people and that's that's all I want for my kids and I want them to you know have a better life than I did and you know part of that for us was you know they helped us volunteer you know they volunteered with us you know they saw some of almost daily yeah some of the worst of these stories and i hope that sticks with them um but yeah it's

unfortunately they they've had to defend us um to people who are like we saw or we heard your parents were on fox news and and they did it and you know luckily they they were there they saw the devastation so they were like yeah uh my mom was like on the phone all night every night with like women with babies trying to get them into hotel rooms and out of the cold hold, like, you know, they have to justify that we're telling the truth. And that's so not fair to them. And now I am, luckily, we have this incredible church that we've been going to since March, you know, every Sunday without fail. And, you know, primarily because our daughter was like, can we start doing this? And I was like, yes, like, let's do this. And it's something,

you know we talk about god now we talk about our faith and it's just this incredible um transformation oddly enough another thing that seems to uh make our old liberal friends uncomfortable you know like so it's like now i feel like we're defending both people's were like right to be religious of any you know of any kind and um and their right to change their mind so i think the kids are you know they've been through a lot this year and our goal right now is just to make it as easy on them as possible while also while also still maintaining that we need to show up and do what's right and say what's right so a question that i get a lot and i know a lot of people have is how do i convince my liberal family member to open their eyes that's that's a that's a core question that i

that lots of conservatives certainly discuss. And I wonder if you have thoughts about that that don't include forcing people to live through a traumatic hurricane as well as having the government failed them in the response. So is there, do you think there's a way to navigate through this? And what would you recommend? For the person asking that,

I would say it's probably not going to be you directly, but you can absolutely nudge someone in the right direction. And if that person, like Aaron and I have enough nudges in the right direction, there might be a breakthrough. And the best thing you could possibly do is just to have the conversation, don't demonize. Maybe, honestly, maybe don't even talk about politics unless they want to bring it up. But the best thing you can do is be kind to someone to show up for them when they need you. And eventually, that may, if you're lucky, open their eyes to say, maybe this person has a belief that I don't understand, but is causing them to act in a certain way.

And I like the way that they're acting. And that was it for us. It was a combination of hearing new news sources, so us looking for new information. But even more than that is the combination of seeing friends, seeing people we'd never met before, and seeing how they lived their lives, how they gave up everything for months. I mean, there are people still working in Western North Carolina, have been volunteering for 11 months, but going on a year. And you just ask, you're like, what makes you do this?

Why are you here? And you'll talk to them, and they'll tell you, you know, they really want. to. So I think the best thing you can do is just show up, be kind, and then have the conversation if the conversation arises. So in other words, the more you treat someone else like a human, the more likely it is that they'll view you as a human. 100%. Yeah. No, that seems to be, and that was the thing. I knew that people in MAGA were good people because, you know, my parents were in it. But seeing how many people were stopping on the side of the road, when they would see me you know um picking up or meeting someone they would see you know a mother

on the side and they would they would stop and say are you okay and these are people that had trump bumper stickers and um even trump decals on the side of their car you know um and and i was like huh like the people that are out patrolling and making sure like that nobody's in need right now yes they all seem to be mega um that's interesting like um and then riding around for hours on hours with these first responders to, you know, they were the ones with the trucks to help us get these RVs. But what you're talking about, I'm thinking about this, what you're talking about is actual physical human contact. Yes. So there's a difference between maintaining a Facebook page where you express your political opinions and try and convince people. And usually you're

not convincing anybody. You're speaking to an echo chamber or you're just alienating your family members. But once you're dealing with someone hands on, you're sitting in the same car, traveling to the same scene, trying to help people recover. You begin to have these very in-person human experiences that do have an effect on your mind as unlike anything that you're going to find on your phone. No doubt. That is so true. It is, I really wish we, and that's one of the reasons we joined the church. We were already talking about it before our daughter said anything was we need them to interact with human beings more, interact with people in their community. And anytime there's a charity event or a parade or, you know, anything, we go. Because I want them to

have even when they're awkward conversations, just conversations with people that are different from them. And I just think it's making them stronger humans. I love it. Well, it sounds like you have a great family. It's really, and I think through all of this, my guess is that having gone through the hardship of recovery from the storm and helping your neighbors, it's actually made your kids better for it. Like in the end, it ends up being this weird, this weird sort of bittersweet blessing that your children can learn these important lessons through this tough time yeah i think they're stronger i think the thing we need to work on now is they are very still very much caught up in the middle of this political ideology of yeah um in in academia they all go to you know really advanced schools

and in and they they're being taught that goodness and kindness is the liberal agenda and we're teaching them think for yourself in some ways that's strong true. And in other ways, that's wrong. So it's too, it's, it's really unfair to children to put them in that situation. And I'm starting to take, you know, a front row seat, a driver's seat in all of education to make sure that they're getting, they're getting education and they're not getting indoctrinated. All right. Let me, let me end with a question for Matt. Matt, I got to say, when i when i first saw your name matt van swall i thought to myself that guy has to be a fitness influencer i thought i thought that was a stage name for some dude who spends all of his time in

the gym and just films his workouts i was like that can't be real so why is it that you want with growth marketer instead of fitness influence oh man yeah oh man no definitely not a fitness influence i wish i had the time i have too much to you i did truly i think that The difference between people who are super buff and people who are not is truly just like hours you're willing to spend in the gym. So, you know, if you want to spend three hours in the gym, you probably will be super buff. Yeah. And no matter what you do, you'll always be swall. That's guaranteed.

That was like one of his campaigns in high school was like get swall or something. I read for like class president. I would have gone with the same tact. I love that. Matt Van Swal, Aaron Durham. You're both wonderful. Congratulations on everything. And thank you very much for your time.

we really appreciate you thank you appreciate it all right that's all for the labor day episode glad you were with us we'll be back again tomorrow right here on vims