The Eric Metaxas Show - Kevin McCullough and Naomi Wolf

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Kevin McCullough looks into the "bald-faced lying" that's going on with members of Congress; then, Naomi Wolf talks about being cancelled on Twitter for telling the truth about the vaccine.

Welcome to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, welcome to hour two. We continue a conversation with a guy named McCullough. Actually, it's not Dr. Peter McCullough. It is now Kevin McCullough. We switched him out that. Do you see what we did there? Oh, McCullough all the time.

It's Matacetachia. And actually, after talking to you, we're going to talk to my friend and former college classmate Naomi Wolf. But I want to talk to you, Kevin, about. Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday. I guess was it in Atlanta? Where was it that he gave his? It was, yes, I believe it was in Atlanta.

And it was directly trying to campaign and proposition for the very deceptively named voting rights bill that they were trying to push through. But they have a very sweet thesis. If you don't vote for us, you're a racist. Isn't that sweet? I love it when people call us names. And Democrats have really adopted this measure recently. You've got to really pay attention to legislation that is authorizing. by Democrats, because whatever they title it, it's almost always usually the opposite of what that is.

So build back better is really going to dig deep deeper, dig debt deeper. You're going to see things pretty much go in the opposite direction of whatever they named the bill. And in this particular situation where they're saying they want to expand voting rights, let's do the dot to dot on what they have to do to, quote, expand the right for people to vote. In order to do so, you have to decertify the actual voters. So they want to do a way in this legislation with every voter ID law that's been passed by any state nationwide. This is a federalization of all elections. If your state has voted a voter ID law into effect, this would neutralize that.

So get rid of all actual credible identification of the voters. They want to then make sure that whether or not this thing is voted on in the Senate formally and passed by a normal majority and what would be necessary to do that, the Republicans are going to filibuster this. This is a bad piece of legislation. And they probably don't have 60 votes to overcome that anyway. They probably don't have a simple majority vote to overcome it because Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema have both pledged to keep the voting rights legislation constitutional. But here's the thing. Now they're talking about getting rid of the filibuster in order to move to a simple majority vote. Now, I don't see any Republicans

saying that they're going to join the other side. So again, I think this is a lost cause. And Joe Manchin said as much last night. But they want to undo the filibuster in the Senate. They want to undo voter ID laws amongst the people. They want to have drop boxes that are allowed to be collected by third party people throughout the country. Now, the problem with that is the sacredness of the American vote is I vote. I give it directly to a vote. A vote. official, or I push the button, it goes directly into the computer that is then only contained and controlled by the voting officials. Third party collection was Mr. Zuckerberg's idea, and these collection boxes all over the place are just a rampant, fraudulent opportunity waiting to happen,

as I believe they did happen in 2020. The point here is everything they're trying to do to say that they want to expand voting rights is really an attempt to create fraudulent elections and by doing so, actually neutralize the votes of real Americans, whether you're left or right. These votes would cancel your votes out. These people are, listen, they are, this is, when you see this kind of behavior, you have to, you have to understand what it is. They are scared to death. They will do anything.

They've pulled out all the stops, using the Oregon metaphor. They pulled out all the stops, and they have decided that they're going to do anything they can do because if they follow the rules, they lose. People are on to them. So they have to ram this through. But I want to say, folks, this is the end of America. If they do this, they're not going to do it by the grace of God. But what they're trying to do, again, this is despicable.

This is really very, very ugly. And they do it with a smile and they use happy phrases like Voting Rights Act. they are, it's ugly, Kevin, to see people descend to this level. You want to think well of your enemies. You want to think, you know, even if we disagree, they're honorable, they think they're doing this for a good reason. But it really has become nakedly ugly. I mean, I think that even they can't possibly believe half of the rhetoric that they're spewing.

Well, we were talking in the last segment about the amount of bald-faced lines. that's now being done by the leaders of every sector of the government, not just the executive branch with the president and the vice president, but the leadership of Congress and the judges sitting on the Supreme Court, the elites in each circle now just baldface, just spitting out things that aren't true. And of course, we don't have a press corps that's doing its job. You know, 25 years ago, you had people hounding Ronald Reagan, if he said something that was, you know, 1% off of completely accurate. You don't have any of that now.

And the truth is that we have more inaccuracies being spewed on a daily basis than we've ever seen. And they're not about unimportant or non-substantial things. When you had the president last night in Atlanta saying to the crowd there that, you know, he didn't march in the shoes of the students that are marching today, but that he marched in the civil rights movement. And he remembers the first time he got arrested. when he never marched in any civil rights movement and has never been arrested. I mean, this is the kind of out.

Does he remember the last time that he went to the bathroom with no outside help? I mean, we're dealing with a level. We're dealing with a level of crazy that I don't know, do you joke? Do you weep? I mean, can we even believe this? That he routinely says things that everyone knows are made up. Nobody calls him on it. Look, this is why you do your program, I do my program.

We need to do our best to get the truth out. And we have to be clear. The president, he's plumb loco. I don't know what is going on, but it is just, it's just hard to believe that, I guess I would say this. I'll bet that within his administration, there is very nasty fighting because they see what we see. I'm sure Kamala Harris despises the Biden gang and the Biden gang despises her.

They have to keep that quiet. But it's really something that I think they're going to consume their own. I think that this is – I hope. I'm not – I'm not – I'm not totally convinced of that just given the amount of financial resources that they had backing them the first time. And let me just say – the Democratic Party knows that they're in trouble.

When you say that their staff sees what's going on and we all see it, we've got to remember one other thing. Vladimir Putin, Premier Xi, the leader of North Korea, the leader of Iran, these people all see it too. And there is a message being sent globally that America is a laughing stock right now, that the bowl of mashed potatoes that serves as the president in the White House, right now is nothing more than a suit that literally doesn't know what time of day it is or where he's at.

Okay, but when these leaders take action and destroy lives, murder people, use bombs, invade, when that happens, I just want to say to the pastors who didn't say anything or who said that it might be okay to vote for Joe Biden, I want to say, this is what you let happen, folks. Your theology, your bad theology, has led to disaster and is still leading to disaster. And we've got to be honest about this. We cannot ever say in America that, hey, it's a free country, so it really doesn't matter how you vote. You have a Christian conscience. If you vote for people that are dishonest, that are anti-religious liberty, that are anti-constitution, and on and on and on,

it is going to harm people. It is going to harm people that you purport to care about and that the gospel commands us to care about. If you care about the poor and you vote for socialism, you're going to destroy those people's lives. You're destroying those communities already by defunding the police. We have to be honest about this. And I just, I'm really encouraged, Kevin,

that you were saying that there are pastors that are coming up to you and saying, yeah, you were right. But, I mean, I hope that more. and more people will come out of the woodwork and say, we made some mistakes. And by the way, there is forgiveness, obviously. We're just got to keep that conversation going.

Yeah, we're out of time. I'm sorry. Kevin, just love to talk to you. Thank you so much. Hope to get you back. ASAP. God bless you. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father,

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Go to relieffactor.com, relief factor.com or call 800, 500, 800, 3884, 800, 500, 800, 800, 800, 800, 8384 relief factor.com. I use it. It works. Hey there, folks. Very exciting. As promised, we have as my guest for this hour, Naomi Wolf. Naomi, great to see you.

It's great to see you, Eric. You have been heroic during these dark times, and I wanted to just really find out where things are with you. You're in the news here and there. You've become a crazy conspiracy theorist like me. It's fascinating how otherwise intelligent people can buy into crazy conspiracy theories based on the facts available. What do you make of things right now? And by the way, is there any news before we get into what you make of where we are? But where are you in terms of your career and Twitter bans and that kind of thing?

So thank you for asking. Twitter bans turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me professionally because my reach is wider than ever. I've moved together and my own platform, Daily Cloud, and other free social media platforms that are not engaged in heavy-handed China Chinese Communist Party-style censorship. And yeah, so Daily Clout just quadrupled its reach to about 120,000 visits a month. And all of my platforms are about half a million.

And Getter, of course, has 3.5 million users. They just had an influx of a million. So the conversation is shifting away from the surveillance big tech platforms, the censorship big tech platforms. So I'm very happy. Yeah, sometimes the free market can work and make it. It's an extraordinary thing because, I mean, I always talk about how, you know, the free market and democracy only work if you have a virtuous population, right? We can elect evil dictators who crush our freedoms and we can cause the free market to create technologies that, you know, crush our freedoms because their leaders are evil or craven. And yet, sometimes in America today, we see that when folks like Twitter or you, to try to crush dissent, it can backfire. So I'm thrilled to hear this. This is really, this is wonderful news. Where do you think we are right now? I mean, because it's been a little while

since we spoke in terms of the vaccines. I mean, I'm horrified, living in New York City, as you know, I do, how fearful people are. It is just astonishing. It's actually depressing. It's difficult to see people give into this kind of fear and this hysteria because, you know, always say, hey, how did that happen in Germany in the 30s? Well, it happened precisely like this with people precisely like people haven't changed. Human nature hasn't changed. What's your view? Yeah, I'm really sorry. I mean, I used to live in New York until March of 2020. And when I go back, it's a ruined city. And what's ruined it. And I'm writing about this now is, is not just the fear, but the fear that allowed people who,

and I literally launched a substack about this, you know, the day before yesterday, people who were advocates for LGBTQ rights, for women's rights, for the rights of girls in Afghanistan to not be discriminated against an education, all the right-on people who are my tribe have stood by and supported the construction of a thoroughgoing apartheid society in New York City without a murmur. And they're now holding their gala to benefit people targeting with discrimination elsewhere

in medically segregated venues that I can't go to because I'm not vaccinated with that thing. So I think that that has crushed the spirit of New York City, which has always been a great melting pot of equality, a great exemplar that anyone can, be included. That's gone, and it's been horrifying. And not just to me, but to people writing into me after I wrote an essay about this, to see how all of these right-on communities who not only defended the Constitution, human rights, and other contexts, but who also cared about, were critics of

big pharma, critics of big medicine, where feminist health activists have just colluded, you know, without a peep in the construction of a truly evil edifice. So that is truly horrifying to me. I do want to say about kind of where we are, I do want to kind of lay to rest your intro about being a conspiracy theorist only because all the things that I got smeared and deplatformed and libeled for when I raised the alarms about them starting a year ago have all come true. And my crime was to be 10 months ahead of news cycle.

So, you know, CNN's Matt Goertz attacked me as a lunatic for warning about reports of menstrual dysregulation. You know, I've talked about this on your show before, and my deplatforming came soon thereafter. And now the CDC and, you know, medical journals and all these spokes models for the pandemic are conceding. A Norwegian study found that, you know, double-digit women are experiencing severe, you know, problems with their menarche, which of course goes to fertility as well as women's health overall. Okay, look, this is so huge, Naomi. And of course, when I was saying conspiracy theorists, I'm being sarcastic. It's just, you know, it's my way of dealing with the pain. Honestly, the idea that women's menstrual cycles or reproductive health could be adversely affected because they,

were bullied, badgered into taking a vaccine almost certainly unnecessary. The question is, who is going to be held to account? I am just astonished, as you are, that we live in an America where people blithely go along, I don't know, so I can go to a concert and hang out with my friends, I'm going to get this vaccine, which I certainly don't need for health reasons, but I'm just going to go along with it. And then you find out it has potential effects into the decades. It's an astonishing thing.

It's very difficult to make sense of this. Yeah, I totally agree. I want to add a shade of horror to what you're describing. You know, a group of students and faculty and parents at Cornell have issued a letter to Cornell because the IVs are all mandating boosters to students. just to come back onto campus. They've got the parent $60,000 a month. The kids have tried all their lives, worked all their lives to get in. And now, can you imagine, if you're 18 or 19 or 20 years old, you can't go back to campus unless you submit to this experimental injection. So from a feminist

point of view, you know, these are young women who have not had their babies yet. They're young women entering their childbearing phase of life, you know, for the next 15 years or so. And we don't know, what this is going to do to their reproductive health going forward. I have dissected the CDC study of pregnancy, and they cherry-picked the data in order to not find problems, but they didn't ask basic questions like, how healthy are the babies, apart from low birth rate, when they are born? They didn't ask that question. You know, they cut the data off before they could look meaningfully at spontaneous abortions or miscarriages, for instance. So not to go in the weeds with one health consequence,

but we're talking about the potential devastation of an entire generation of childbearing women who have not had their babies yet, right? And we don't know what that's going to do with the human race. I mean, it's not too much to say. This brings up, you know, it's like I'll see your shade of horror and I'll raise you two shades of horror by saying that this looks to me. diabolical. In other words, when I see the disregard for life, any kind of disregard for life or health or future, hope, family strikes me as diabolical, even if the purveyors are not themselves explicitly

doing something diabolical. Nonetheless, it seems to me a cavalier disregard for life that borders on an animus toward life. The idea that a woman has a child, who cares? We want her to have a career. We don't care about that. That other group of people cares about that. And I think this is, I feel like I'm seeing this more and more. When I look at the disregard for life, you know, Cuomo sending people, sending people, infected people into nursing homes, it seems like a disregard for life that we've really not seen in America. Or if we have seen it, we've eventually condemned it, you know, experiments on Tuskegee Airmen and that kind of thing. We eventually condemn it as the antithesis of who we are.

But right now, it seems to me growing, at least in the cultural elite classes, they seem to be going along with this idea. Yeah. I'm glad you're heading in that direction because I did, you know, this essay I launched on substaff a couple of days ago, kind of, you know, I come out of the closet as a a believing person in this essay. And one of the conclusions I reach, and it's called, is it time for intellectuals to talk about God or to start talking about God? One of the conclusions I reached toward the end of the essay is that the edifice of darkness that got constructed so quickly

in about 16 months ranging from, you know, what we've just described to really policies that strip people of their free will, you know, like Biden's mandates, you have to do this or else you can't feed your children to policies and schools that are taking parenting decisions away from parents and dissolving relationships, family relationships. Really to, you know, I just saw this on MSNBC, how to like shun your neighbor, how to mock your neighbor if they're not vaccinated, how to. Actually, this is this is red hot stuff. So let's pause briefly, folks.

We'll be right back with Naomi Wolfe. things that are please. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes,

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When you get the blues, come on, get rhythm. When you get the blues, get a rock and roll feet. Hey, folks, I'm talking to Naomi. Naomi, you were just saying something. It's so horrifying. But, you know, the idea of shaming your neighbor, unless you're an idiot who doesn't read books and has no sense of history,

you immediately think of Germany in the 30. you immediately think of similarly horrible periods and cultures. This is never who we have been in the United States. But right now, and again, the irony is that it seems mostly to be the left that is jumping aboard this bandwagon. It's truly horrifying, I think. Yeah. So just to pick up where I was sort of heading with my conclusion, because I knew at talking

about this in public, but, you know, this is a mass. edifice of the anti-human, right? Everything that characterized us as human beings, and this is actually subject of a book I'm writing now, you know, everything from smiling and hugging and speech and language and music, it's all being targeted by policies that otherwise don't make sense, except that they're massively anti-human and that they're based on lies, as, you know, we're seeing fall apart over and over.

you know, one of the main lies underlying the mandates is that vaccines prevent transmission. Even the CDC director is admitting they don't affect transmission. So the basis, like, you know, turn on MSNBC or CNN or The New York Times, the whole predicate of why you should shun your neighbor, why you should coerce your neighbor, why you should fire people who are just trying to do their jobs, you know, if they don't agree to this injection, is based on a lie. Right. So where I was going is that I've really studied history. I've looked at this edifice from every angle. I know about bad politics, you know, human politics. And this seems truly to be like beyond human construction. You know, I don't think it's more miltonic, right? It's more like, wow, in 16 months they turned a country that was, you know, kind and based on the rule of law, based on inclusion, based on civil rights. law, you know, objected to discrimination, where people worshipped in synagogues and mosques and, and churches, they turned it into a society where you get arrested in some states for gathering in a church or, you know, in other countries that's happening as well, or in a synagogue. My synagogue has been closed for 18 months. The synagogue across the river doesn't let unvaccinated

people in. Like, these are demonic policies. And they've done it so quickly and, kind of, you know, so many heads of state are in lockstep. And it really, I don't usually talk about spiritual matters, but I don't understand how mere human, you know, bumbling could coordinate something this complex and kind of beautiful in its horror. You know, so it does, I do feel, you know, there's no way to prove these things, right? But I am starting to talk about spiritual matters in public because I do feel the presence of the demonic around us. Well, but this is what's so interesting is that all truth leads.

to God. You know, truth is truth. And for me, what's fascinating is even when you say seems anti-human, you're already buying into something, right? The idea that the human is good, that it's good to be human. It's good to hug. It's good to see smiles. It's good to, all of that stuff, obviously, is important. And I think that you see this in history in different times when people are trying to, when people hate God, the first thing they're going to do is hate people. They're going to hate those made in God's image, whom he, who are sacred by dint of being made in his image. And so you do see dehumanizing at various times in history. Look, you even see it in art sometimes.

You know, you can see it in Picasso or you can see that. There are people that they have an almost, I would say, They're not explicit about what they're doing, but they know what they hate and they know what they want to destroy. And you see that being manifested right now, even if people aren't explicitly trying to serve the devil or don't believe the devil exists or don't believe God exists, what they're doing. If you look at it dispassionately, as I know you have, you say, this is curious. This looks like something that goes beyond mere ineptitude or greed. Greed I can understand. But this seems to have some patterns that are chilling.

And that's what you're talking about. Yeah. And I guess I'm also talking about the horror. And you saw this in the Nazi era as well, you know, which had the same kind of glamour of hideousness about it. You know, that was almost metaphysical. that all around me people are brainwashed. They can't think critically anymore.

And I'm talking about editors, journalists, you know, psychologists, educated people, our peers, right? The people we went to school with. So many people are writing to me, it's my experience, too, that there are some people you can no longer talk to or present evidence to because they're so enthrall of a belief system that gives no space to critical thinking. And it does, you know, and people are talking online as they should, Dr. Robert Malone, about mass formation psychosis. I've been reading, rereading, um, extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds. You know, I'm not aologian. And I also think that the Jewish tradition has a different, a less developed notion of kind of the satanic than the Christian tradition. Obviously, yeah.

But, but it, to me, like everywhere human, critical thinking agency and choice, bleed into the robotic or the controlled, you know, that is kind of satanic, right? That is a dark force. Even if you don't have words for it, you know viscerally. I mean, you know, in B movies from the 30s and 40s, there would be glassy-eyed, you know, robots, slaves that they've been, some Svengali has, you know, brainwashed them. And we all know that's bad. It is anti-human.

It's anti-everything that's good, even if we don't have a label for it. We're talking to Naomi. Well, folks, don't go away. Folks, Eric Matakas here. Somebody just handed me a piece of paper with insane information on it. But I know it's true because the other day, I literally got a phone call from Mike Lindell telling me, Eric, you got to check out. And then he tells me about this towel special, right? And he says, you've got to tell your audience.

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Eric, go to mypillow.com, click on the new radio listener specials. and or you can call 800, 978-3057, 800-978-3057. Use the code, Eric. Folks, it's Eric Metaxus show. I'm talking to Naomi Wolf. Naomi, I have to bring this up. You and I were in the same class at Yale, a class of 84, although you graduated at age 11. But I want to say that we were in the same class, didn't really know each other.

But I say that because the first time I bumped into this kind of. thing that we're talking about. You know, I'm a working class kid from Danbury, Connecticut public school, suddenly among the cultural elites. And it was very clear to me, if you were in the humanities, which is, which I was, that there's a certain way of thinking. And that if you don't think this way, you'll be labeled a bigot or something. And I remember not knowing better, kind of going along with it. And I remember at our graduation, being told, oh, you've got to wear these two. I wrote wrote about this in my book, Fish Out of Water, that at our graduation, everybody who was somebody had to wear two ribbons, one signifying solidarity with the, I don't know, the Yale union workers

or who were being oppressed by the man, you know, and with solidarity with the idea of taking our class funds out of companies that were invested in South Africa. And it was that kind of virtue signaling. It was the first time I'd bumped into that, but it was really strong in the early 80s at Yale in certain circles. I know you were also in those circles, but it was the first time I saw that, and all of those people have gone on to be the leaders of the world. And I feel like they bought into this,

and some of them, like you, were independent thinkers. I don't know how you have evolved, but it's interesting to me that you're willing to say these things now. I'm willing to say these things now, but a lot of people, they're still hanging back. They're afraid of something. Right. Well, oh, Eric, this is so painful. I mean, yes, there was a very kind of monolithic right on this, and that has only gotten

worse and worse over the decades on the left. I will note respectfully that I think the right has its own form of virtue signaling. And I guess I'll also say that, you know, when it comes to things, like publicly supporting decent wages for, you know, working people or publicly supporting divestment in South Africa, with ironically exactly the kind of thing that is being constructed everywhere around us, a discrimination society. You know, I agree with it. I don't think that public support for, you know, a cause necessarily is the opposite of free thinking and classical liberal values. Right. Right. Okay. Sure. But I want to go on because we're getting

into very deep waters that we need to get into. I am starting to look at, I've been doing a lot of reading about how the Chinese Communist Party is influencing academics. And I, clearly they've bought up, you know, along with World Economic Forum, any number of the policymakers that are implementing some of the most un-American, let's put it that way, attitudes that you have to have now, like cancel culture, totally un-American, right? Very, very, very, very. Chinese Communist Party, right? So the reason I bring this up, and communism, I used to think it was super cool in the 80s. I was a little Marxist.

I wrote for Marxism today. I've really thought about this. And as much as I hate, you know, the damage of unfettered capitalism, I now believe that Marxism really is, you know, the quickest way to enslave human beings. It's not a joke. It's not those silly conservatives. It is casting a dark shadow, and I'm going somewhere with this about Yale. I'm looking back at some of the main kind of right-on cultural tenets of the last 30 or 40 years

that I, as a progressive, was steeped in, right, as a liberal Jewish elite baby. I wasn't born into the elite circles, but I certainly was indoctrinated into them or welcomed into them as a young adult. And, you know, look back at it, like deconstruction, post-execrifice. structuralism. It basically says there is no author, right? There is no meaning. Existentialism, the way it's interpreted. There's no God. The real courageous intellectual faces the fact that we're all alone in the universe. It's stupid to believe in God. It's silly. And as I wrote in this essay, that's an aberration. Intellectuals from Darwin to Freud and Jung have been struggling with the issue of God and manifesting where is the divine in my material until literally the post-war period.

You could go on and on, you know, semiotics. Words have no meaning. You know, even what's become a feminism. You know, the feminism I've believed in as a young adult who became, if I may say, a leader in, was all about celebrating women's choices. And now it's about, like, coercive things you have to believe or else you get exiled from the club. And this incredible, you know, we used to believe in the rights of the individual that's essential to human rights. and now the left all around me is literally embracing.

And kids in college at the ivies, they're learning about harm reduction as a core value in human organization as opposed to the right of the individual, freedom, the constitution. So there's a real kind of Marxist, communist mission creep and a kind of demonic mission creep going into the messages that are at the core of our culture. And that really bears investigation because I used to think that conservatives said, oh, that rock music, it's got like satanic messages embedded, that they were insane. But maybe, you know, maybe like this beautiful thing that was created in North America that lasted 200 years, you know, that says human beings are sacred and they have inalienable rights. Maybe that is kind of shining a divine light and it's attracting very negative forces, both on the political and the election. No, no, no, there's no question. Naomi, there's no question. And it's just, it's a joy for me to hear you talk along these lines because, honestly, I've been trying to make sense of this over the decades. And I think back always, a critical theory was being taught at Yale when I was an English major there. By the grace of God, I didn't take any of those idiotic classes. But I was familiar with the territory. And I saw that there was something about it, kind of like critical race theory. it purports to be one thing, but it has different roots.

And the roots really are, it is cultural Marxism. Marxism is by definition atheistic. And it's curious, because when you look at atheist regimes around the world, they don't lead to utopia. They don't lead to human flourishing. So, of course, all this stuff is connected. But you and I grew up and were raised in a milieu where everybody thinks this way. This is the way we think.

and we don't question it very much, and only strange people question it. And I think that I had one advantage in the sense is because my mother and father came for war-torn Europe and could tell me about the horrors of communism and why America is good. And so I had a little bit of jaundiced view, but not enough to keep me safe. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Naomi Wolf. I'm talking to tell her. I'm talking to you. and Naomi Wolf, folks. It's the Eric Mattaxas show, and Naomi, we've just got a few minutes left today,

but I want to keep you over if you have the time, just to continue the conversation, because I think it is important. Because what we're doing really is we're trying to look at what are the intellectual roots of how you get to a place like this. And because you and I were at Yale at the same time, you're quite right. In other words, I often have to remind myself that it was at Yale in that, uh, liberal tradition that I learned some things that I carry with me this day, that inform my faith as a Christian to care for the poor. You know, the kinds of things that, you know, because I think people on the left get some things right, people on the right get some things right, and we're constantly dealing with human nature. So either side can go wrong and does go wrong

and has gone wrong. And we know that. But what's interesting to me is that there was a kind of lockstep at Yale. When you mention, when you speak in a positive way about America, right there, I think to myself, I learned at Yale to look cynically at America, to regard patriotism as one step from Heil Hitler. And I never encountered that. I grew up in middle America in a working class community where patriotism was the most basic thing. And I never saw any hints of any kind of evil national. It was just healthy and beautiful. And it was at Yale during this time that I kind of began to pick that up. And I write in my book, Fish Out of Water, how a friend, a good friend, had a sister who went to Moscow to study economics for a semester.

Like, what is the hippest thing you could do in Reagan's America? Go to Moscow, study economics. And came back with a raft of propaganda posters. And I tacked one up on my wall, like, hey, this is cool. and my dad, who had experienced the ugliness of communism, saw it and said, Eric, I'd like you to do me a favor. Would you take that down? You know, it was kind of like the reality check, like, whoa, how have I drifted? I mean, here I am at Yale among these wonderful friends, but there is a baked in hostility, in a sense, toward innocent, this innocent, maybe Norman Rockwell view of America.

and we disdain rhyming poetry like Paul Revere's Ride by Longfellow. And there was something going on there. And I realize that yes, and it has drifted us to where we are now. And there aren't so many who seem to have woken up. Yeah, you are saying so many important things. I mean, so to me, right, I think that the critical, approach to unquestioning

patriotism or the canon of only a certain kind of writer who's white and male, I think that was healthy right. A lot of those critiques had to happen. That said what

and I also remember in that time in the 80s, Reagan's era, our liberal democracy or our free democracy I should say and are preeminence as a world power that was a democracy was so secure and capitalism was kind of working better than it works now with all of its flaws. I think there was kind of space for kids like us to put up the Irish Marxist poster. It was the corrective, you know, for us to talk

about, well, Sweden is able to, you know, have socialized medicine. That's very cool. Or, you know, the kind of flirtation with Marxism that I certainly engaged in. And, you know, and there have been excesses in the other direction, like the 50s hearings in which intellectuals were hauled onto the carpet for their beliefs. That's not American, right? So in a healthy democracy, you know, these groups are having productive counter-challenges to one another. But also looking back, the critiques that we, the feminists, the racial theorists were raising, got exploited, I think, by very nefarious forces.

And now, you know, we see a movement what tear down all statues. We're going to let you finish this point on the other side. Folks, thanks for listening.