The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 3 | Michael Rectenwald | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: September 22, 2018

Glenn sits down with self described former libertarian communist, Michael Rectenwald. As a NYU professor, Rectenwald was a part of the radical marxist left until recently. Together they discuss what changed his mind and the importance of having the courage to stand up and speak up.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, welcome to the podcast episode number three. It features Michael Reckinwald, who is honestly a guy, and you'll understand right at the beginning. I wasn't sure if he was the real deal. I started reading his book and thought, boy, this is a great story. But is it real? Wow, it's even better than I thought. Listen all the way to the end of the podcast, because it's remarkable. So he's a self-described former libertarian. communist. I know. I ask him about that. He's worked in the university system his whole life. He has been part of the radical Marxist left until a few months ago. Today on this episode, he's going to share what happened to him when he finally woke up, what woke him up, and what happened to him. He's been, he's been busy on Twitter as deplorable NYU professor. He's a guy who's published white papers on communists for communists. He is well respected in the communist community, or was, but now he's writing tweets like this. Hey, Paul Parrott and robotic chanting leftists. You are losing the actual war of the intellect. Your minds are so utterly flabby from disused

that it's almost unfair to ask you to express a thought. The moon is the sun because I say it is, and if you disagree, you're a bigot. I see the right doesn't know a fraction regarding the insanity of the Identitarian Left. No father-daughter dances? Try people who identify a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin. And, quote, an expensive ornate building. It's way crazier than you think. That's real.

His new book is Springtime for Snowflakes. I think it's a must read. You're going to love Michael Rectinwald. So I wanted to sit down and talk to you because your story is absolutely incredible. incredible and fascinating. And I'm not sure I know who you are yet. So that's my goal.

Okay. Okay. That's great. So let's start at the beginning. Tell me who you were 10 years ago or who you've spent your life being and studying and thinking. Okay. Well, I mean, let me give you a sort of a anecdote that I'll tell you who I was. Okay.

I'd say about 10 years ago, I used to be a regular on Joe Scarborough's show called Scarborough Country. Yeah. I was brought on as the standard liberal pundit who they beat up on and then dispensed with, you know. Right. And so, you know, at one point, Joe Scarborough even suggested I might be a, I might be a traitor against the country that I should be tried for treason. Joe Scarborough said that. Yeah. Because I, because I took exception with George Bush's execution of the war in Iraq.

Right. So did I. Yeah. And, you know, so since he's leaned forward, I've leaned the other way. I was also a left communist at some point. You might have wanted to lead with that. Not want to lead with that? No, you might have wanted to lead with that.

Because that's where I find your transformation a little profound. How deeply into that theory and that belief are anti-capitalist pro-communist were you? Well, I was very well published as a known communist writer. I had essays all over the place. People referred to my work all the time. I had, I have essays that have been read by thousands of people. They were critiques of certain other aspects of the left a lot of the times. But they were committed to what I called a libertarian version of communism.

The idea was the Bolsheviks, they were right into having a revolution, but they were wrong and killing everybody afterwards. Right. But how is coming? This is a serious question. How does communism work? For instance, I think the, you know, everybody just make money, put it in a big pile and take what you need. Right. I think that's a great plan.

I really do in utopian. Right. But when you're dealing with man, men go bad quickly. Right. So how do you do that without the barrel of a gun? I mean, just tell you what it's really, what the people that espouse this belief are about. Okay. I'm going to give it to you from the inside.

This is a story you'll never have heard before. Okay. Here's what they think. They think because they have this ideal that we can establish a de facto, you know, equality in the world as it is. Because we have this idea, we're better than you, if you don't. Right. We're morally superior to you. Right.

And we're intellectually superior to you. And another thing about Marxism is it gives you a lot of intellectual grist to to grind on. It gives you a lot of intellectual work to do. And it's a sort of self-flattery that comes with that. It's very highly engaging intellectually, Marxism is. And there's a lot of different aspects to it that are quite compelling. They're good things to think. I mean, it's a good exercise for the mind. I will tell you, I am a baby in any of Marx philosophy, but I will tell you, it does, it pushes you to think differently. It does.

It's completely different. It's completely different. And so I was one of those people that thought that the world could be a much, much better place. And that this was the way to go about it. Now, we'll get to what I think now, but it's quite, quite different. I mean, it's completely radically different from that. And you are, you're a professor of, global liberal studies.

Okay. Basically anything I want to teach. What that means. What a gig. Yeah, it's a nice gig. Yeah. I teach my own textbook, for example. It's called academic writing real world topics,

and I approach various worldly topics from different. I let the students read about very controversial, contemporary issues, but I make them look at all these topics from multiple perspectives so that people aren't, I'm not in doctrine. anybody. I'm not trying to inculcate some particular ideology. Was that always that way? That's always been the way I've taught. I've never been. I don't believe the classroom should ever be a site of indoctrination. And I've, I've, I've differed with people, colleagues of my own, and other friends who are also professors and leftists who were, you know, they were trying to

drive somebody to Marxistist, you know, and that's just how they worked. Their syllabus were stacked that way. Best professor you could have is one that you, you might think, you might think, for half the class he's this. That's right. And then the other half, he's arguing the exact opposite, and you have no idea where they stand. That's what I do. I embody different positions, you know, rather believably.

Right. So that's been my approach. But when it comes to my own change, it came basically from the terrible run-in I had with the left. And the, you know, I thought the, you know, the atopian and the egalitarian veneer of leftists really is very thin. And when you scratch it a bit, underneath of that, I found totalitarians. Yeah.

And that's what scared the heck out of me. And that really is what caused my political conversion. I've had a daughter of one of the communists that was arrested during the, you know, communist trials from Hollywood. Yeah. Come to me. She still says, you'd call me a communist, Glenn. In my family, I'm called a conservative.

Yeah. Right. But she, she, we've had several conversations. and she and her friends are more afraid right now of what's happening on the campuses and the left than they are on the right. And they're really concerned about the right. I said this from the beginning when Trump got into office or before he got into office even. Oh, I guess it was after.

And we found the resistance. I said the resistance would be far worse than Trump. And I think that's been the case. I mean, the resistance is really unhinged. and it's fueled by all kinds of ideological error, I think, and it's fueled by a conviction, an absolute conviction of total moral certainty. And that's what's scary.

When people believe they're absolutely morally superior and certain, and they're absolutely right, they become like Antifa. Well, it is why totalitarianism always ends in massive death. Bloodshed. Because if you get to a point, I've asked this question from the left and the right, just let's imagine tomorrow you have your way. And everybody you've elected is in and you still have 50% of the country that doesn't agree with you.

That's right. What are you going to do with them? Well, even, you know, most Marxists won't admit this, but Marx himself said you have to kill them. There has to be a terror. And they got this idea of the terror from, of course, the French Revolution and the aftermath. You know, they said that that is the model. After a revolution, you must go on a terror spree. You must get rid of ideological opponents and you must get rid of the bourgeoisie

if they cling to their bourgeoisie character. Otherwise, you know, if they're willing to convert, then fine. But people are killed for having the wrong thoughts. That's basically what it comes down to. So you're a guy who, you weren't, I mean, you weren't against this stuff, but you didn't think that it was, it wouldn't end killing. Yeah, absolutely not.

In fact, I was never, you know, I've had friends that were communists that would joke about putting a bullet to the people's heads, you know, and they actually said if I had my chance, I would do it. And I never chimed in on that. That was not my cup of tea. I thought, yeah, that violates the deepest moral system that I have, the beliefs that I have that each person has an absolute right to live. live and nobody here on earth has a right to take that away.

So one more thing. And then I want to go to the first thing that it was kind of your red line. Yeah. But no pun intended, in the opposite direction. You describe yourself as not a John Stuart Mill kind of guy. Well, I am now. You are now. Yeah.

So because that gives us life liberty and the individual. Right. I'm basically a classical liberal, a libertarian, so cultural and social libertarian. That is, I believe, people should be allowed to do what they want. Right. As long as they're not infringing on my rights, other people's rights. Like, I have no problem. If you want to live as a communist with 10 people, that's fine.

And you don't have a right. But I have a right to get, I have a right to not be a part of that and live my life. I mean, I started a criticism of Marxism from the standpoint that, you know, the worst thing is politically, it's murderous. it's totalitarian. Then second, I got to the point where I understood the economics of it as well and why it's flawed, deeply flawed. The market has to be there. You have to have a market. You can't have individual rights without the market. And also, you can't have what socialists want most, which is what they would call economic democracy. You can't have that without the market. Because without a market, you have no prices. If you have no prices, you have no way of knowing what something's

worth to people. Right. And therefore, you have to dictate it. Right. And therefore, it's undemocratic. It's the opposite of what you tried to. Right. Okay.

So let's go to your, the first thing that woke you up and said, you know what? I got it. Yeah. It was a Twitter. I'm sorry, it was a Facebook post that I made. It was a joke. There was a student at the University of Michigan who posted, when asked by the university or given the right to use any pronoun he wanted and to enter it.

into the system under his profile, chose, quote, his majesty. I thought it was hilarious. And so I posted, I simply posted a link to that article, having, you know, thousands of leftist friends, a lot of trans friends at that time. And the vitriol, the outrage, the hysteria was just unbelievable. Why? They called me everything from a transphope to a committing discursive violence. A phrase I will explain later.

Yes, please. And of treason, you know, on and on and on, just for posting a link to an article with no comment. And I said, this is unbelievable. And then I realized that everybody was, everybody was cowtowing to this kind of ideological pressure. Everybody I knew, they were all careful not to say something, and would offend this crowd, this trans crowd and this social justice crowd. And they were so scary. many of your friends, because you being a professor at NYU, living in Manhattan, I've done it,

I was alone on that island, I felt. Wow. I know what that feels like. Yeah. Yeah, you bet. I bet you do. How many would you say of your friends are quietly, have a couple of glasses of wine and go, you know, Michael, don't say this to anybody, but I'm with you. And how many are diehard, you know, social justice, post-modernist radicals. From the earlier, a group of friends that I used to have? Yeah, from earlier. From earlier, they were, I would say that it was about 90% socialist, social justice, the whole nine yards.

Wow. And about 10% that were reasonable otherwise. You know, people that were less enthusiastic, shall we say, about the whole thing. How many of those, if any, are waking up with you? Oh, a several. I've actually led some people out of Egypt, if you will. I'm not, I don't mean to have any main grandiosity here, but I'm saying a lot of people followed me out of that.

And they followed my... Courage is contagious. Yes. It really is. It just takes one person to say, guys, what are you doing? And so I saw that. And then I set up the Twitter account,

I said, and I had been thinking that there's a lot of things are going wrong here in the left. This identity, politics, and social justice fanaticism. So I set up that Twitter account and started tweeting that, and I did it anonymously. And I called myself the deplorable NYU prof. I did that not as so much as a sign of a support of Trump, as a sign of solidarity with the Trump people who were treated so miserably and called, you know, those people holding onto their guns and Bibles, those people, those flyover state people who were called the, you know, thrown into the basket of deplorables by Hillary Clinton. And I just thought that was a despicable way to talk about people. And I just felt that these people, these are the people that are most maligned in our culture.

They're the most maligned people in our country. And I thought, I'll call myself by that name because I want to stand with them. How did you... And I want you to know, Michael, I think we're repeating the Obama years just at volume 10. We've just switched places. Yeah, okay. Perhaps. There are things that the people on the left see about.

Trump. I have seen about Trump that concern me. Right. And but he's kind of in with my side. And so we're not going to go crazy. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. Yeah. And the same thing with Obama. Yeah. Right. And so we've just switched places. And people don't realize none of us should be this afraid of a government or a president no matter which side. That's right. That should not be the case. So something's wrong in the whole process. As I think your work is pointing out. Something seriously wrong. Seriously wrong. Okay, so you start your tweets and you have just awesome tweets.

Oh, thank you. They're very, very satisfying. But then you decide to go on the record. That's right. I had a NYU student newspaper reporter contact me and said, you know, these tweets are really something else. Are you really an NYU professor? This was through a direct message. And I said, yes.

and so she asked me if I would sit down for an interview and I said yes I wasn't sure I would go on the record but I would talk to her so we did that and after I was done talking to her I thought there's really nothing what I've said here needs to be said and I actually want to put my name on it frankly because I think it's there's there's nothing objectionable and some you know there's nothing fundamentally abhorrent or deplorable about it it's just it's just another viewpoint and it's a vantage point I think needs to be aired and that went in the paper. She took a picture of me laughing, and that made the heresy somewhat redoubled. And then all hell broke loose within my university.

You were called in the middle of a class, were you not? I was called out in the middle of the class by the dean and said, you know, can you come over to see me? And I said, sure. I've got to have an idea what it was about. Although I was saying that this really is happening. I'm being called in for my political view. Think about that a minute.

I mean, I have. I mean, I have thought, I mean, because that's, if you're a conservative, if you're a conservative, I've talked to so many people that want to be a professor. Yeah. And they can't. No, they can't. So, I mean, we live this on this side. Yes, I understand. But for you now to see this and you, now it's, now maybe some things are starting to come to you, I'm guessing that you're like, oh, oh, crap.

Oh, they came to me right away. And so I go over and he comes up really close to me, but pulls me into the office. I come into the office. He pulls me real close by a handshake, you know, Michael, I want you to know, this has nothing to do with your Twitter account or the publicity you're getting.

I said, oh. Sure, sure. And then he said, just after that. Wait, hang on before this. Yeah. You are a well-liked professor. Well-liked. I was well-liked.

Students love me. My student, you know, evaluations are very high. I mean, I have done everything you're supposed to do. You were liked by your peers up until- And most of my colleagues liked me. Okay. There was a few that didn't. It's fine. It's always going to happen. And I had done everything that an academic is supposed to do. Published widely, committee work, all that stuff. Yep, yep. I was a good citizen, okay, until I said the wrong thing. Right. Right. And then he said, no, um, have. have a seat and if you don't mind, I would like the head of human resources to join us. Uh-oh.

Right. And so he continues by saying, people are worried about you. And I said, really, why? He said, they think that this Twitter account, which just has nothing to do with, represents a cry for help as one of the people put. I said, who said that? And he wouldn't tell me. He said, this is confidential.

Somebody in the department said they thought my Twitter account was a cry for help. And, you know, in other words, he was suggesting something was wrong with me mentally, like that I had some sort of a psychological problem. So in other words, I'm being called crazy for my views. It's that simple. And then the pressure came, you know, to accede to their view. They wanted me to take a leave of absence. Get off campus. Get out of here.

For my good. For my own good. No, wait, wait, wait. For your own good because it would become unsafe or because? Well, because they said I needed the rest of it. Rest. Right. Yeah. Right. So it's clear. And if you take that, did this occur to you? Yes, it did. Yeah. If you take that, I'm admitting in a way that I am exhausted and need. Yeah, that I need some help. I need rest. And I might need some sort of, I might need therapy, whatever. I might need medicine. I don't know. Whatever they thought or trying to insinuate, rather. And then. But you took them up on that. Well, I did because there was something else at stake.

Okay. That is, I had been up for a promotion to full professor since the previous April. Now, we're sitting here in September at this point, or October, I guess, by this time. And this, this, this, this promotion was largely dependent upon, uh, the upper administration approving me as, and I needed this, this promotion because, um, I worked your whole. I worked, yeah, I needed, I deserved it. Mm-hmm. There was nobody that had done. Dunmore publishing and so forth. In the department, I ran a massive conference on secularism

and brought scholars from all over the world, the first conference that was ever put up by this department. And I needed this promotion badly, and I wanted it badly. And I thought that if I didn't go along or acquiesce with what they wanted, that they would, you know, that I wouldn't get the promotion that I would be, you know, out of a lot. Maybe you could, maybe you could just do this thing and then it would be over and you could come back. Right. And then, you know, also the promotion would be announced and I'd get it because I gave into the demands and all that. But then after I left, you know, I felt very coerced into that. And the leftists are saying that I lied because they said, you know, and the university later said, you know, all leaves of absence for medical

reasons are voluntary. Yes, it was voluntary, but they were. twisting my arm, you know, certainly leftists should understand power differentials. Isn't that their thing? Yeah. Yeah, it is. I, you know, I took, I, I, I said okay, and then I went to my off. They actually had the head of human resources shadow me on the campus for the rest of the day, like, wouldn't leave my side. Wow. As if I was opposing some sort of a threat or somebody might pose a threat to me. I don't know why, but they just suggested that she stay with me while I was on campus. And, So she did. And then I got uncomfortable with her. And I said, listen, I just think you can go. I'm fine. I'm in my office. I said, I'll lock the door, whatever. You're worried about nothing's going to happen here.

So she left. And I got a call from the New York Post like five minutes later saying, you know, we're following this case with a great keen interest. And we think, you know, we really support what you're saying and what you're doing. And we think the university's treatment of you is bad, deplorable. And I said, what treatment? Because how would they know? could she know? Well, there was an open letter that had been published in the same newspaper where my interview was published in which I was denounced really wildly by this committee calling itself the diversity, equity, and inclusion group, which I've later dubbed the conformity, inequity, and exclusion group. Right. Because they certainly wanted to exclude me. Right. They wanted to, you know, debunk, they wanted me out. Right. They came out against me in no uncertain terms,

basically calling me guilty for the structure of my thought. That is for my thinking. They excuse me of wrong think, in effect. And so she told me about this open letter. I said, oh, wow, do you think there's any connection between my Twitter account, the interview and this open letter and the leave of absence? And she said, are you kidding? Of course there is.

So I said, I better, you know, so she convinced me to go on the record. I had to because I thought if I don't, they could just bury me. I'd be out of there and it would be over. So I went on the record and they, you know, they accused me of being, you know, media, you know, the university accused me of being sort of like media hungry or something. I was looking for attention.

I wasn't looking for anything. They were looking for attention. I was trying to, I didn't have opinions, but I certainly wasn't looking for this kind of attention. Right. And so I went on the record and I started to go on the record and tell them that, you know, tell them what I released, that I, to let them publish the story about this.

and they did. So I went on, you know, she asked them questions about what I thought about this and that and we went out with it. And then it just went viral. The biggest betrayal your friends must have felt was going on Fox. Yes, they did. Oh, they thought that was just unbelievable. And when you went on, what were you expecting? I was expecting supportive conversation. I didn't expect to be attacked and they didn't. You know, nobody on Fox attacked me at all. In fact, they were supportive. So if you're being chased and, you know, called a devil and Satan and white pants,

their shirtpants white boy by these other people. And this other group is being very friendly and nice and cordial and welcoming and supportive. Where are you going to go? So it made perfect sense for me to talk to that to Fox and other right-leaning media. And because they really, having been the victims, if you will, of this very kind of head. hunting. Yeah. They understood.

Yeah. And that was very nice. Yeah. And so I couldn't help but think that I've been with the wrong people for a long time, you know? Yeah. I suspect I've had no better friends than I've had since this. I mean, really, really good people. It's amazing the difference.

It's, I think there's a different, you know, there's some people, not all people, but some people because they've really been pushed for so long on what they believe, they've been called all kinds of names. Yeah. You, at least for me, when I left Fox, before I went to Fox, I was on CNN. Yeah. I won the most admired man in the world. I was tied for fourth between Nelson Mandela and the Pope.

Wow. Okay. That's crazy. That's impressive. I tell you. A year later, I wasn't on that list. Wow. I was hated by him.

everybody. Okay. I did the same show. Did the same show. Um, what happened? The platform was so huge. And, um, and, uh, I just, I think I misjudged. And I think this tool went into effect. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Yeah. Um, but, you know, I stepped back from that and I went, how does 50% of the country who didn't have a problem with me just a few years ago? Right. How are, what is, What have I done? Am I what they think I am? I know I'm not, you know, the hero that the right thinks I am. I'm not that guy.

Yeah. But I'm not that guy even. No, I know that guy. And so you self-reflect. I don't think people on the left for a long time have had to self-reflect. Oh. And it's, it's amazing to me that we're repeating McCarthyism in reverse. In reverse.

And it's also involving the Russians. Everything's there. All the players just taking it. It's the same characters, you know, with different script. Right. It's really unbelievable. So let me take you now into something that I am. I think that people on the right have absolutely no clue of what it really means.

One of your tweets was, you know, yeah, father, father, no more father daughter dances. Yeah. Yeah. How about this? What was the person that was somebody, actually it came out of the Google lawsuit with James DeMor. this person who identifies as a yellow wingless dragonfly kin and an ornate building. That's their sexual identity. An ornate building.

And an ornate building. So don't ask me how this, you know, sexuality works because it's an ornate building. I don't know. I'm sure there's some portals there, but I mean, you know, but that's. You just parked that tractor trailer in the back. Those are some of the people that work at Google that James DeMore, who got fired for expressing the view that there was a difference between the genders. Yes. Those are the kind of people.

Those identities are actually venerated. They're valued and they're actually observed at that organization. I mean, so you have to refer to people as if they are what they say they are. A large or neat building. Yes. I guess you've been described as that lately. I don't know if you go up and knock on their head or what. I mean, okay, so, so, okay, let me just, let me, one more, before we back up into all of this stuff.

Yeah. Were you for the gender thing when you were? The transgenderism and all that? Not transgenderism, the, the, yeah, the whole, everything is fluid. There's 183. It, it was disturbing to me from the beginning to tell you. So you didn't say anything about it. I didn't say anything about it. I figured it was like there were, there were some touch.

you know, touchy subjects on the left that you didn't go after. Yeah. Because you'd just be, you'd just be vilified instantly. I mean, you know, you're just a... But you didn't buy into it. I didn't buy into it at all. But I didn't touch it. Okay.

You know, I was, you know, you'd be just vilified for being who you are. And you're only saying that because you are a cis genetro male, you know, cis means, yeah, yeah. This is the word they made up for other than trans. It's the non-glorious category. Right. So yeah, you just, I knew that you didn't touch these things unless you wanted all, all this fear to come out. Yeah. So I've, I've written a book called Addicted to Outrage. I saw I know that. And we know the addiction is happening. I mean, these companies are designing those, you know, those apps to be addicted. Right. Then we're on top of that. We're yelling at each other, calling each other names, which shuts down all thinking. people are afraid on both sides, which shuts down all thinking.

Yes. We're becoming very tribal. Right. We have this when somebody says something. We now can say it back twice as loud, which is very addicting. Right. And when I found postmodernism about two years ago, I started going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, what? Because as a conservative,

you don't know all this crap. And you don't know, you just hear these words and you're like, what the hell is that mean? Where did that come from? Exactly. Okay. And it's really well thought out.

And when you understand the original birth and point of post-modernism, you realize, I mean, I cannot find a reason that that isn't just, 100% destructive. I mean, that's its point. Yes, it is its point. It's, its point is destruction. Right. And so if we are, if we are ramping it back up on our side, it doesn't leave a place for anyone like you or like me that goes, I don't want to be with either of those people. Exactly. Right. That's right. That's true. Let me give you a little, a very short, little metaphorical way of understanding the difference between, say, postmodernism and Marxism.

Okay. If Marxism is about blowing up the house and raising it to the ground, postmodernism is about putting a few little termites here and there in the walls and watch the house get eaten up slowly until it finally collapses out of its, under its own weight. So the point being is that Marxism was about overthrowing everything, overthrowing the whole social order, overthrowing capitalism, overthrowing the ruling class. No, no. Postmodernism said that can't be done because you can't tackle the totality of the world.

You can only do these little subversive things one at a time here and there and that we'll work on the system in a different way. Okay, so please, I know, I could tell you everything there is to know about progressivism early 20th century. Sure. I've studied it. Yeah. So correct, let me lay this out and you correct me where I, where I don't have it and I'm wrong.

Okay. That's fine. And then we'll, and then we'll, you can fill in all of the gaps. Okay. The turn of the century, the American system is not moving fast enough. We have science. We have eugenics. We have all these things. Bright horizon.

Yeah. And because, you know, a republic is plotting and ugly and, you know, it just doesn't move fast. Yeah. The idea is if we just put an authoritarian in, now this is before any of that's bad. Yeah. We put some strong leader in. Yeah. He'll be able to lead us and he'll the state will be able to say, no, we have to make this.

We have to make this. Right. Right. And it's all going to, because we're working together. Right. Correct? Right. There's the utopian early 1900s conversion.

Okay. Then revolution happens in Russia. Yeah. And the progressives have been arguing in the West. They want communism or fascism. Right. I think this is right before fascism really starts, right? They were eugenicist too.

Right. Right. And they want to create this utopian world. That's right. And there's no negative on it at this point. That's right. Okay. So they're moving towards that.

But they see the revolution and the West says we don't want a bloody revolution, right? Right. We don't want to do that. Right. But we want this. We want the object, though. Right. So we want to, we will just take progressive steps.

At what point does the postmodern theory of let's add some termite, let's speed this up. Yeah. At what point does that come in? That happens in 1968 in France. It's a result. The way to understand the. birth of postmodernism is this. It is a philosophical and social, cultural response to the failure of the 1968 student rebellion in France. The student rebellion also involved union workers from

public, from publicly held organizations or companies, you know, like the railroads, the subways and all that. The students and these workers, they were on the verge, they thought, of overthrowing capitalism in France and therefore throughout Europe and therefore perhaps after that in the United States. And it failed. It did not end in a revolution. It ended in anarchy. Nothing took place. They didn't overthrow the state. Nothing. Can you stop there for a second? Yeah. Back up. Tell me the significance of the Frankfurt School meeting in 1959. Well, the Frankfurt School is another, I would call them neo-Marxists. They're a different breed. They're coming out of Germany. They left Nazi, Germany, just in the beginning in like 33, after Hitler comes to power, and they realize they're in bad shape. If they stay, they're intellectuals, they're Jewish. Right. And they're, they'd be on the hunt list right away. Right. So they escape to the United States. And they set up at Columbia, actually, first. Right. And then out in Berkeley. They mostly are, they're just theorists.

They're not, they're theorists, but they're not theorists who are going to be, um, They're not the kind of theory that you read and say, let's put this into practice. They're rather theorists who say basically, let's just keep it theoretical, frankly. But that's not the case with what happens after the 1968 failure of the 1968 rebellion. It's a matter of fact, Hortno, Theodore Adorno, was one of the major players in that movement, the Frankfurt School. he was appalled by the 1968 student rebellion, which spread to Germany as well. He was totally appalled by it.

He thought it was horrific. It reminded him of fascism. How do you like that? Okay, so hang on. Let's stop in 1968. I think everybody knows 1968 in America, horrible. RFK, Martin Luther King, I think Malcolm X in the same year.

We have the same year we're doing the moon shot. That same summer is Woodstock. and I think Altamont. Yeah, perhaps. I'm not sure about that. One of them was in 68. I think it might have been Altamont. And I'd love to hear your theory of why it falls apart here. You know, this is when the Beatles come out with Revolution and their answer saying, I'm not doing that. We're not joining me.

And so the whole thing kind of falls apart here. How much of that is connected America, 1968, to Paris, 1970s. Very much so. Yeah. The same kind of people or actual connections? It's the same kind of people in the same spirit. You know, the movement, it's not necessarily like, there's no tactical connections that much. Right. But they're in the same spirit of a kind of cultural revolution that we had here, of course,

but a cultural revolution that they also wanted to become political. And it didn't happen. So postmodernism was born as a response to that. And how was it born? It started it what? It started this way. And so there, even though they were moving away from Marxism as such, they all, they did incorporate some techniques from Maoism. People were feminists were sitting around reading Miles Red Book. And in France, and they didn't know about the horrors that were happening there. Okay. They just thought this is the way to go. The cultural revolution, you know, we, we can, you know, have a full communism, a total communistic revolution. culturally, socially, politically, and every other way. I'm so riddled with ADD. I'm sorry to pull you off again.

But how do people still, Marxists and communists, how do they still not see every time it's dried? And then just draw the conclusion that you're going to have a great number of people that don't want to do it. We joke about this friends in mind now. It's always next time. Next time it's going to be right. Next time it'll be right. Next time we won't do that.

So they say that, you know, there was mistakes made or that wasn't really. really socialism. That's the other way they used to go. That was actually state capitalism, blah, blah, blah. So they have every type of excuse. Instead of seeing that when you run an experiment X amount of times and the result is the same no matter where it's run. So it can't be blamed on the people. Right. And their regional differences are peculiarities. It's got to be on the system that's being implemented. And it ends the same way every time. Paul Pot, you know, Mao, Stalin. I'm sorry, but I put I put Hitler in, I know there's a difference

but to me it is a difference of how much the state actually owns and and and and if it's international or national. But I mean those are both the same idea. It's socialism. There is one other difference though

and that is the type of people that are deemed villains or vilified and the reason they're vilified. In the case of Nazism. The difference is that the Nazis and Hitler is of course the main agent here, they see the enemy to the state in terms of race. Whereas in the Soviet Union and Communist China and Vietnam, North Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera, they see the enemy of the state in terms of ideology. So because putatively people can change their ideology, you're not trapped. Right, okay.

Like you are in the cases of race, where you can't get out of your racial identity. Communism, though, does, I mean, Marxism. Although George Soros did. Marxism, though, does, it does carry with it a lot of anti-Semitism. It does. Indeed. I mean, it's usually, usually when you start to hear anti-Semitic things, that's the first, you know. The left is riddled with this.

This is happening in the Labor Party in England, in Great Britain is going through this right now, too. I mean, this anti-Semitism on the left is just viral over there. Okay. Yeah, that's true. All right. So, 1968. 68. So what happens is these theorists say, okay, so you can't overthrow the totality.

This, this, let's go at it in a different way, in effect. Let's attack the character of language. Language is the big power structure now. So deconstruction is born. Jacques Derda, he's a philosopher. He says that there is nothing out. outside of text. Okay?

He says this in his book of grammatology in 1968. There is nothing outside. There is no outside of text. Meaning those words are the words and... What he's saying is this. That language doesn't have

any real connection to anything but itself. So this is... I'm sorry, you may not even know this reference. I read Saul Cripke. Okay. And he basically, a wheel is a wheel because we call it a wheel. Yeah, that's part of it.

Yeah, the arbitrary nature of land, right? That every word is arbitrary. For example, tree has no relation to the plant. Right. Tree. Right. And some of that makes sense. I mean, when you think of the wheel is the wheel because we call it a wheel,

yeah. I've always used that as an understanding of handy capable. You can call them Superman. Yeah, that's right. But in one generation, it's going to think, well, I have to build a ramp. for Superman. That's right. So it doesn't matter what word you attach to.

That's right. It doesn't matter. But from that, he decides the idea is that all of Western philosophy, all of Western philosophy, all of Western thought, he thinks, is invalidated by the idea that these words that are supposedly connected to real things are not connected to real things at all. And so the whole of Western society and Western philosophy is just like, is bogus. Okay. And it's different from the Christian notion or the Judeo-Christian notion that in the beginning

there was the word, okay, in the sense that the word is God. Yes. Okay. So there is an ontological connection. An ontology means on the register of being, whether something exists or not, there is an ontological connection between the word and God. Yes, right. Yes.

It's inherent. It is identified with. Okay. So here in this case, language is broken off from the world. But they also suggest there's nothing but language, nothing but language. That's it. That everything is text. Yes, that's how far they went with this.

And therefore, they say, if we really want to subvert society, we've got to subvert textually. We've got to subvert it through textual politics. Okay, so let me go back in time. 1920, Harvard, I think, is the first one that starts to say, forget reading the Constitution. Harvard's the first one that takes up deconstruction. Right. In the 70s.

Let me go back to the 20s here for a second. They're saying, you know, in law school, don't study the Constitution. We're going to do case law. And they start to study case law, which gets us away from the text. You also in the 20s start to have people rewriting history books. But this is entirely different. This isn't different. Did we say Harvard?

It's Yale. Is it Yale? It's Yale that takes up. deconstruction first. And, you know, here's an interesting story. Sitting on the tarmac after they landed in the United States in Boston, Derrida and his co-conspirator of deconstructionism said to each, they said to each other, one of them said to the other, you know, we're about to unleash a virus on this culture.

And that's exactly how they saw it. They saw it as a virus that would eat at the very foundations of all of our cultural values. And that's exactly what they did. I think that's what people are feeling now, but they don't understand it. They don't realize this is where it came. This virus was unleashed on us and has worked its way into the entire body politics. And it's undermined all of our ontological beliefs. And this was where all of this crazy stuff about gender and gender differences and non-binaryness and all this that has nothing to do with biology, this is where it came from.

So I had somebody who was a lefty, but reasonable. say, you know, postmodernism is really dangerous, you know, but it has its place in, for instance, the literary realm. Yeah. But as I understand it, and please help me understand this, as I understand it, what postmodernism gives you license to do is to go up and say, well, this is what this word means. I don't care what it meant back then. Yeah.

This is what it means. So you can basically deconstruct and reconstruct any story. out of its time. Is that right or wrong? Well, what it really is is that that this isn't important, no, this is important. Because the thing is about the idea that it's valuable in literature,

that's a good point. But they believe they're undertaking politics through literature. Right. This is all political. Right. Everything is political. All texts are political. Correct. The novel is political.

You can see the gender construct. here. You can see the, you can see the patriarchy here. You can see the colonialism here. You can see all this literature now is not read for the aesthetic value anymore. It's read for the political valances that it supposedly contains. And deconstruction is like is a way of saying let's expose the way Western culture has been setting up this hegemony over all of all these people. Let's expose it through deconstruction. Let's take these texts and take them apart and show how in fact they're kind of, to make me the other. They're trying to demote these people, that people, the other people, things like that. So that's, it's, it's, it's, it is, it is, it is something that they, you know,

that was used in literature, but literature studies now, literary studies was not deemed anything but political work, a cultural politics. Okay. Yeah. All right. So, um, again, it helped me in this, I got to go back to Frankfurt because the Frankfurt school in 59, they're, they're, they're kind of, I could be wrong, um, they're kind of seeing the post-world war or the post-war world. And they're saying, these guys are not going to stand up and be a, they're not going to, they're, they are driving those huge cars with big fins. And they're just not going to do it.

That's right. Right. That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. And so they said the working class is not, is not the agent that Mark said they were. Right. They weren't it.

They weren't going to be the ones to do it. And so then they come to this understanding that. and I don't know how much of this they actually believed or how much they just thought this was a working way to get around it was it's because they don't even know. It's almost like they're hypnotized by all this. They don't even know they're oppressed. That's right. Well, one of the things is that, you know, they've been bought off by consumerism is one of the things. Also, they have been duped and completely sort of drugged by the culture industry, as they put it.

Right. The culture industry has inculcated their minds with capitalist ideology. That's what Horcomer and Adorno said in their essay, The Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception. And in some ways, though, I mean, if you read, I'm trying to remember his name, the guy who really came up with propaganda under Wilson. Oh, what was his name? Anyway, now known as the greatest advertising man.

Yes. Okay. I know you're a refractive. The name is also a losing man. He had women, you know, with the cigarettes and the Statue of Liberty. Yes. Okay. So in some ways, the left is the one who created this way through Freud of actually indoctrinating us. Yeah. And it is happening now. Culture is steering it. We're not steering culture. It's not a reflection. No. Everything is. Yeah, politics as we now see it, but we know this now. We see it, we're living this. Politics is so far downstream from culture. Oh my gosh.

It's impossible. It is the beginning of the poop coming out of the dog. That's right. That's what we're experiencing here. And this is where this whole, this whole, I call them the robotic left. I call them the histrionic left. I call them the, you know, the resistance. I call them a lot of names.

Anyway, I saw in the Kavanaugh hearings. I know it was actually. somebody else during that week, there was a disruption on a campus in a class where these people came in and one person was shouting and everybody else was shouting back. Right. That's right. And I thought, this is a, I mean, almost what they accused the Catholic Church of doing all those years. Absolutely. You're just, you're just garbage in, garbage out. You're just repeating it. This has been one of my major complaints, you know, is to say what's happened to academia with the left and their, they're they're just robotic repeating of mantras,

political mantras. Like, you know, it started, I guess, at Stanford when they had the chant to get rid of Western Civ. And they didn't mean the whole of Western Civilization. They meant a course called Western Civ. Hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go. You know, now that chant,

hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go. That became not the course, but Western civilization itself has got to go. And that's been really the object here. they want to get rid of Western civilization entirely. So tell me, explain how, because I don't think people really get this. People are conservative especially, hear postmodernism, and they don't even know what it means. Yeah.

But if you don't understand that it is, the modern world is the world created by the Enlightenment. Yes. And the Enlightenment took us out of the Dark Ages. That's right. This is why anything that stands to prop Western civilization up is, needs to be destroyed. And that's why you can say mathematics is racist. You say mathematics is racist, that it's patriarchal, it's phallic, it's white supremacist. And you say that because if you convince enough people, then you reject math.

And if you reject math, you got nothing. Yeah. Well, this is, you know, you're hitting. a very big point here is that postmodernism is anti-enlightment. It has always been against the enlightenment. It considers the enlightenment a means of rationality used for power and domination over others. Okay. That's the big sin of enlightenment. People use science as a toll to oppress. Right. And that's why science is no good. Well, in some ways, eugenics, it didn't necessarily start that way, but it certainly ended that way. I mean, some, you know, you just,

I would call eugenics more a social experiment, you know, that draws from science. It's not sick, strictly, you know, genetics is the science. Right. Eugenics is the social project that uses science. But yeah. Right. Let's go to social media. Social media can be used to oppress.

But that's, you know, it's. There's nothing intrinsic about rationality that oppresses anyone. Just like language, that's the other thing. another phrase that postmodernist through Iran was this thing called what they called Logocentrism and what they meant Logocentrism which means a centering

on the word and it was the idea was language is a form of domination over people okay that's why deconstruction comes in because it wants to undo that domination of language so if you would have asked me

what then is postmodernism Michael I would say It is a toolkit for dismantling all power structures without bombing the building. Right. Beyond, it's almost a, it's a neutron bomb. Yeah. Of logic and reason and anything against those, yes. Yeah, against those.

Anything standing. Anything established is bad. Yeah. Anything established as bad. Any types of organizations. structural hierarchies, anything like that is bad, bad, bad, just by virtue of existing. And, I mean, you know, colonialism, everything, and everything is the white man's fault. I mean, everything, where the only evil that's never been done on earth has been done by

white men. Did you know that? Europeans and Western, Western, other Westerners, that's it. There's never been colonialism by others. There's never been racist. There's never been slaves. Unless you study history. Yes, unless you study, which they don't do.

Yeah. They have a, a cartoon version of history. they follow. And you can't even know, if you say something like, did you know that there's still slavery going on today and that it's being undertaken by Islamists over people that are actually black? Did you know that's happening? This is not, this is not the white man that's doing this today. In fact, the only people that ever ended slavery in history, well, are European or based, where Eurocentric, if you were, or Euro-based. So isn't that interesting? But if you say that, they're just going to say, you're just saying that because you are one of them and you're one of the oppressors.

So even saying that is a form of violence. In the 90s, when we started first to become politically correct, you know, I knew control the language win the argument. Yes. Right. But there's something in humans, maybe it's, you know, Americans or I think it's all of us. I don't know. that I don't want to hurt your feelings. You know, I want to get along with you.

Right. So if you want to be called this, you want this to have, I don't care. I don't care. As long as you don't force me to do it. Right. Right. So political correctness, this kind of creeped up on us because it played to our heart. Yes.

Right. Right. But this is not political correctness that we're seeing now. I mean, unless you emphasize political. Yeah, that's right. If you're in line and you're correct with the political power, you're fine. But now there comes a big penalty to it. And it seems every day, I think the enemy of civilization is obviously chaos.

And people feel that they are surrounded by chaos because you get up every day and there's a new term. that you'll be crucified for if you don't use today, even though yesterday it was fine. It was a different term. Like literally that fast. It's that fast. And so there's lots of people who have never heard any of these terms. They don't have any idea the source of where this stuff is coming from. They're like, who's doing this?

Who's in control? What is this? Right. I know. It's incredible. I even while I was amongst the left, in the left, I saw these terms coming up all the time. And I was like, what is going on here? somebody said, well, you're as a cis hetero male, you dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

And I'm like, what is this? Did you know the term cis? No, I had no idea. I think this was about 2015 or 14 when this term first surfaced in my consciousness. And then I found out it was something bad to be. And what it meant was somebody who accepts the gender they were assigned at birth. I didn't know I was assigned to gender. And they mean socially assigned.

They don't mean assigned by your chromosomes. They mean assigned by the social order. When you come out looking like this or that, you were assigned to a gender. I know you know Brett Weinstein. Yes, I do. And I mean, he's an evolutionary scientist. And that's why he got in trouble. He's like, no, I'm a scientist, man.

Yeah. You don't just assign. It's assigned by science. It's assigned by the chromosomes, actually. Right. You know, by whether you have X, X or X, X, Y. I mean, there are some anomalies, of course, that are X, X, X, Y, Y, Y, but the great majority fall at the polls at the binary ends.

Right. You know, so those kind of terms, yeah, so there was subverting ontologies again, right? Ontologies that entities, you know, established entities in the social order by virtue of language. Here we go again, see how language is working to undercut social certainties of all types. So tell me, because this is an argument that I had with my daughter. She went to Fordham. Fordham is a Catholic social justice university. Oh, my.

Well, she was taught by the Jesuits there that the Bible is nonsense and that, I mean, it was crazy. And she was taught that in Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah, that Sodommy was just a greeting. It wasn't a bad thing. It's how you greeted people. And I'm like, wow, that's quite an aggressive. grieving, you know. Hey, I don't even want to, I don't even want to. So, but she had, it took me, it took me almost three or four years to get my relationship back on track with my daughter after this indoctrination because she wouldn't even talk about it with me. I would be like, okay,

okay, wait, okay, let's just, let's think here for a second. Yeah. And there is this, there's this underlying thing that if, if you don't know, then you're part of the problem. That's right. And the professor or whoever is at the top of the ladder here knows. And I think some of the students, they are told you don't even have to talk about it. You don't have to. They just won't ever get it.

Right. And some of it is such nonsense. It's insane. That I think that the weaker won't even want to talk about it because you start to think about it and it all falls apart. What reason why your daughter's not talking to you about and not even soliciting your view is because you're going to try to think about it using rationality. Correct. And rationality has been, it's been banished from the start. Right.

A priori, that's out. So, you know, terms like, you want to talk about some terms like intersectionality. Don't even know what that means. Okay. I can explain that one for you. Intersectionality was actually came, was derived or, I guess, inaugurated. by a legal person, a lawyer, a feminist lawyer, who said that it wasn't satisfactory to call somebody just, you know, to refer somebody as black or as a woman or as, you know, some other

marginalized, supposedly subordinated type. There are, it's called intersectionality because there's the vectors of power intersect people in different ways. And there are more than one vector of power. There's racial, sexual, gender. So being a white, I am, being a white male who is heterosexual, I am the top of the power change. You have no power vectors intersecting over you. You're not being subordinated by any of these vectors. And even if, because I'm conservative, that says, well, you're, you have the hierarchy and you're trying to keep things. That's right. Because I'm Christian or faith believer, is not really Christian. Well, the Christian. Well, the Christian, have dominated everything. So I have nothing intersect.

I'm intersecting everyone else. Because you're at the top, you're at the bottom. I'll get into that in the minute. Being at the top is not where you want to be in this social justice realm. This is the worst place to be. Right. Because they're going to flip the hierarchy. That's the whole thing is an inversion. They want to invert the hierarchy, basically. Anyway. Has anybody talked, you talk about inverting. I mean, this is something that we, it's beyond politically correct to talk about. The Judeo-Christian world has done a whole bunch of bad things. It's like Winston Churchill and Gandhi. Yeah. Same time against each other. Both seem to be a little racist, you know. Both said some crazy things. You look at Churchill in the Western point of

view. He's great. You learn about Churchill what he did in India. Not so great. We're all of it. We're both good and bad. It's which direction are we going. Are we getting better or not? Right. And also, what were the founding principles? Are they good or not? Right. Yeah. So when you look at the Judeo-Christian world, it has been really modeled around two guys, Moses and Jesus. I don't think there's anybody that would say, you know, if, you know, I'm alone in a very white neighborhood, but it's a dangerous, you know, the cisgender neighborhood is there, you know. I don't feel safe, as they would say. you don't feel safe. Yeah.

And it's in the middle of the night. Your car broke down. You're changing your tire. And you see all these white guys, you know, obviously. And they're coming at you at night. Would you feel better or not at all if you knew that they were coming from a church choir practice or a Bible study group? Would that ease your mind? Most people would say.

Yes. Yes. but they'll say no. Right. Okay. Who's replacing? You've taken, you're taking our pinnacle of Jesus of be good to each other. You know, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, help the poor. Do unto others. Right. We're taking that away. Right. Who are we replacing that with? Well, we're replacing it with this, with this ideology that says Christianity has been, part of the dominant culture. It has been the hegemonic religion. Right. The people that are Christian have been, as you said, the hegemonic people. Right. They're mostly white or they're

mostly, and they're mostly, you know, European. And you're European and men and all that. So. And you can't argue against that. They don't, they don't say do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They say do unto others as they've done unto you. Right. So they won't do it again. So there's this vindictive religious belief system. And it's about taking the hierarchy on which men are putatively on top, white men in particular, and it goes down this scale to the subordinated, the most subordinated. You'd get African Americans or Africans or blacks,

and you'd get women, you'd get Palestinians, everybody. And those people, it's not about equalizing everything, even though they say they're for equality. It's about flipping that hierarchy so that, You're punishing the punished. The punished. Punishment has to happen. It has to happen. It's very much like the, you know, the terror. So how does the mind work when it comes to, for instance,

I think there's a difference between Islam and an Islamist. An Islamist wants that state control. That's a political ideology. Correct. And it's very dangerous. Right. You see the left embrace. embrace Islamists. Okay?

Right. Or they say that if you criticize them, you're a Islamophobic. Correct. Right. So at worst, they say, don't look here. Right. How do you, how does an intelligent person get to that point? What is the, what's the game there?

There's a couple factors. Okay. One of the main things that has been inaugurated by the left. is cultural relativism. And cultural relativism also brings with it a more relativism. But the main thing about cultural relativism is that you can't, from your culture, you're not a lot of criticize people of another culture because you're suggesting that your culture is better than theirs. And that's...

So when I meet, this actually happened, I met, I asked for a meeting with people glad. This is when the height of Amadinajad throwing people off the building, you know, gay people off buildings, torturing them, killing them. Russia is starting to take driver's license away and absconding people at night and they're never seen again because they're homosexual. You can say, well, their culture is different, so I can't comment. But we all know killing someone because they're homosexual is a no-go zone. Yeah. How come they won't make that step? Well, there's another aspect to it.

Not just the relativism. The other thing is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And they are the enemy of, you know, Western civilization. All right. So intersectionality is how many times? That's why. Basically, how many power vectors are intersecting you and subordinating you? And does that give you the hierarchy?

Once you have more vectors, the lower you are. The higher you are. Right. This is why there's a race to the bottom in the Oppression Olympics, as it's called, rather derogatorily. You want to rush to the bottom because by the time you get there, you're going to be on top. Okay. Yeah.

What are the other words that we need to really understand? Okay. Well, one of them we mentioned already, cis. Yeah. We talked about that. That's, you know, accepting the gender you were quote-unquote assigned at first. And that is, that's a termite word. Yeah.

Right? To take away all understanding of. gender because if you do what happens what is their what is their ultimate goal here by taking away and confusing all gender yeah how does that affect us well it undermines many of the

basic structures of the social order like the family right I mean that's the object here by the way it's to get rid of the family that's one of the main objects why because the family is a source of power in itself and it's a source of cohesion they don't want to exist. There are there are forces here that want to get rid of any kinds of any

kinds of organizational adhesions or groups of solidarity or, you know, cohesion that that, that take power away from the state or that take power away from other forces outside of the state and cultural, you know, cultural power and cultural politics too. So the family's got to get rid of, got to undermine gender is to undermine the family. There's no question about it. Michael, I mean, I hate to use this language because it's so condemning and, you know, it hits us against each other. But I have honestly thought, like for instance, progressivism, I can look and say, okay, I understand that we have a difference of opinion of either the welfare state on how big it should be. or whatever.

That's, that's... Aggressive tax system. Right. So I get that and I disagree with the way it's done, et cetera, et cetera. But postmodernism, I cannot... The first word that comes to mind when I hear, when I read it, hear about it or anything, is it's just evil. There's no...

I don't know of any other thing that is just pure poison... It's evil. To a system. It's evil. And social justice. is the practical, is practical postmodernism. You write in your book that postmodernism is dead. It's the high theory era of postmodernism is dead.

That was the era in which people were theorizing all these things. Now this is the era of practical, pragmatic postmodernism. And so social justice is the practical, social justice is practical postmodern theory. Is there? Postmodern theory, reduce. and put in that kind of cartoon version, too. It's definitely been dumbed down. But that's what has to happen when you want to, you know,

when you want to proliferate something across the whole mass of humanity, you know. Do you believe there is good social justice? No, not, see, that's a word that sounds good, and this is one of the tricks of the left, is to use abstractions that sound wonderful, and how could you possibly not want that? Right. Well, there's no meaning to it at all. intrinsically, so to speak, there's been a lot of different versions of social justice over time. I mean, Catholics will say that that's one of our...

In fact, it was founded by a Catholic. The phrase was founded by Luigi Tapparelli in 1841 when he wrote a massive tomb about Catholic social justice. And the difference being... The difference is it was conservative. Here's the case of cultural appropriation by the socialists and the left of a term that was actually a conservative term in the beginning. It was about establishing a kind of charity between people. It was a way of mitigating the difficulties that came with laser-faire capitalism and

the beginning of the industrial revolution. It was all based on individuals and small groups undertaking charity to try to mitigate the, you know, the hardships of people on the bottom. But not about equal, not about equating them or making equality in real time and real life. So there is a, I'm trying to remember what the theology is, and it started in South America. Liberation theology. Yeah. The president, President Obama used to talk about this.

Yes. That it is, that social justice is required because there is no individual salvation. if we're not all working. Wow, this is scary. It's funny because social justice was about individual salvation and individuals helping other individuals. Right. He believed that charity was a part of human nature.

And social justice was just a way of talking about how human nature should be tapped, how human nature should be understood so that we could act properly towards our neighbors. That's really what it was. But it got hijacked by even within the Catholic Church. They hijacked it and turned it into socialism, in effect. Liberation theology is socialism with holy water sprinkled on it. That's all it is. If you could look at the future and nobody knows what tomorrow is going to hold,

but if we don't change course, what does our future look like, near future even. It's scary. What's coming? It's scary. I mean, it scares me to think that children are being indoctrinated, for lack of a better term, and I don't think it's really overstating it either, into this system of practical postmodernism or social justice from kindergarten up.

I mean, this is, and they're being told that this under, of all of these social ontologies like gender, like the family, are that that is good. This is the good. That it's good to be like this and it's evil to oppose it. What do you do if your, my granddaughter just started, kindergarten? What do you do? I have to tell you that I pull them out of every public school and most private ones as well. I'd be very, very careful where I'd send my kids if I sent them anywhere outside of the house for education.

I'm not, I was never believed that I would be somebody saying homeschooling might be the best option, but I'm starting to think, yes, it might be the only option. If you don't want to end up with a kid who comes home one day as somebody else, because they're being encouraged to get rid of these identities. What are the warning signs that most people won't know? What's like buzz language that? Yeah, you'll hear people talking about the female brain. You'll hear people talking about the, you know, you'll hear the terms that we've talked about.

You'll hear people talking about transitioning. If you hear a child come home, say, oh, my friend in school was in trans. We had a transition party for my friend. this means this is a party of celebrating their transition from one gender to the other. This happened in California just recently in August. You started off saying you were a libertarian communist. Right. I can not get my arms around that.

None of people say that's an oxymoron. There can't be such a thing. How does that work? It was a movement when people recognized what the Bolsheviks did, you know, when they started the terror right after the revolution, There was no delay till Stalin, you know. Right. Lenin started killing people right away.

Right. They even killed workers. Workers who had the audacity to go on strike were murdered. You know, and people were sent to Gulag. Now, the concentration camp came later. I'm sorry, the Gugog came later. There were the concentration camp came first. And the Nazis, by the way, got their idea for the concentration camp from the Soviets.

I don't think people realize this. No. Anyway, there was a movement that said this, the bullshit. Bolsheviks went wrong already, right early, you know, that they became authoritarian. They imposed their party value over everybody, and instead of being democratic. And so libertarian or left. But that's already, I mean, we are living in a Bolshevik time here in America, are we not? Yes, I mean, we do.

We're seeing that, that if they take control, you will tow the line. Oh, yeah. They'll be, they'll destroy you. Yeah. You know, and they don't maybe shoot you in the back of the head. Yeah, but if you lose your job in every respectability, that you'll, that you'll, you need to survive in society, it's the same difference. So I thought that there was a better socialist, a better version, you know.

Now I think that there's no way it could ever be any different than that. Because you can't enforce equality unless you squelch many people in the process and get rid of a lot of them too. And you don't, I'm, it's why I was so against, well, for one reason, why I was so against, like, for instance, TARP and the bank bailout. We could talk about that's not the role of government. We could talk about that. But that also takes away your right to fail. That's correct.

And the learning, you have learned more because you dipped your toe and you dared to make a mistake. And look who you are now. Nobody has a right to take my failures away from me. That's right. Because it's what makes me. That's right. It's just a step on the way to where you're going. And sometimes there are steps that are in missteps. But in any way, if you take that away, you take away the person's actual rights. You take away their rights to be self-determined. Yeah. So what are you now? How would you classify yourself politically? Well, politically, I would call myself a classical, liberal, or social and cultural libertarian. In terms of the market or in terms of the economic aspect, I would call myself, I'm a believer in the market.

I believe that you, unless you have a free market where people can take their talents to the marketplace and do what they will with them under their own free will, then you have total, you have despotism. Yes. You have to. The market is the only way. But if you have the free market without volume one of Adam Smith, moral sentiments. That's right. Theory of moral sentiments. You know that book?

That's amazing. That's great. You also have totalitarianism just in a different way. Yeah. So that's what Taparelli was trying to mitigate as well. That Jesuit would have funded the real social justice, or the first one, I should say. Yeah, so I say I call myself a classical liberal, liberal, social and cultural libertarian in a sense that I believe,

not that people should be excessive in there, doing whatever they want. You should not violate other people's rights. Right. But you should have the self-determination, the freedom, the individual freedom to pursue your dream, which not only is your dream, but might be, you know, part of a bigger plan.

Can you help me tie up one thing? Because I'm a I'm a I'm a libertarian. And for years, because I was on Fox, people thought I was against gay marriage. I'm not against gay marriage. I'm against the state being involved in marriage at all. Ah, you know, you have no place. Yeah. I don't get any value from the state forcing me to take a blood test and give me a license.

Right. They have no place there. Yeah. So do what you want. but how do we close the loop of, look, you want to be transgender? That's fine. That's fine. Yeah.

But I don't, my church might marry gay couples, might not. Right. That's my church. Yeah. We, you know, we might believe that transgender is the absolute way to go. We might look at the stats and say it doesn't look like it's healthy long term because suicide rate actually goes up. I mean, without judgment, let's just talk about that. Sure.

But we get into this place to where now who's teaching what is the norm? How do you do that? How do we have an open society that says, look, everybody's got to be left alone? I see where you're going here. But there are moral principles or there are eternal value. Let me say it this way. I can't remember the name of the building, but it's one of the first modern, as first modern, postmodern buildings in America.

Staircases lead to nowhere, columns that come down and are floating. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay, yeah. But it still has a foundation. Yeah. They didn't monkey with the actual foundation. So you're asking me, how do we have, how do we reconcile social and cultural libertarianism with holding on the values that we believe are necessary for a healthy

and functioning social order, right? You have to have, you have to have an unum that you come running around, and the only one I can find is the Bill of Rights. Eploribus unum, and without which we have chaos.

Right. Well, this may be where we differ slightly. Okay. And tell me if I'm wrong in thinking that we might. I think we, it requires a struggle of ideas. I agree. We're not going to,

we're not going to have, we're going to have to gain consent. We're going to have to actually gain hegemony by duking it out, not physically, in the marketplace of ideas. Yeah. But the problem we have now is that the marketplace of ideas been greatly curtailed, greatly abbreviated by the social justice left, such that we can't even get different ideas into the marketplace.

So we're being banned from, there's putting tariffs that are impenetrable to our bringing those goods to the marketplace of ideas at all. We're stopped at the perimeter. So I think we're saying the same thing. When I was interviewing schools for my kids to go to, I met with a science teacher. And I said, you teach evolution. Do you teach intelligent design? Right. Do you teach creationism? In my opinion, all of those should be. We don't know. Yeah. You know, what happened before the Big Bang? We don't know.

We have nothing, maybe. Right, but what happened? What was the first cause that lit that fuse? I don't know. Right. And it's good to know all of it. And then it's up for you to decide. Yeah, teach the controversy, but we're not letting that happen.

So I, you know, I am a social, cultural and, you know, libertarian and libertarian in the marketplace of ideation or ideas. and I think we have to have that or we're going to have real problems because that's what's happening. There's no competition. There's no competition in these places for thoughts. So that's why our children are being told, you know,

come and have a gender transition party and everybody acts like it's normal. Right. And if you oppose it, you must be some Neanderthal. So the difference I'm thinking that we might have is I know you're real big on reconciliation. And I'm not sure we can have reconciliation with people

whose ideas are so injurious. Okay. So, okay. I do not believe, um, I mean, I couldn't reconcile with Adolf Hitler. Yes.

Unless Adolf Hitler changed. Changed. Yes. Okay. But there's a lot of people who like you have kind of gone along and now these signs are starting to pop up and they're like, wait a minute. Just like me,

in 2004, 2003, I was very raw, raw GOP. Well, about 2005, I'm starting to wake up going, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, we're going where, we're doing what? And that's, wait a minute, this is not right. Something's wrong here.

And I started seeing the game that was played. Yes. But I had no place to go. That was, it was either this or that. It's binary. It's the only binary thing. That's allowed. And so what do you do?

And so reconciling is, we're reconciling. Yeah. You know, I might have seen you with Joe Scarborough and thought, this guy's a moron. You might have watched me and said the same thing. But we now realize, no, we don't have to agree on anything. But the unum, for me, it's the Bill of Rights. Yes. You have a right to speak.

We have a standing principles, standing foundational beliefs. And around that. Unless we have that, and unless they're good ones, right, ones that are based on what we think are. or make the happiness of everybody possible, not guaranteed, possible. But don't we have that? We do, but it's being utterly avoided, utterly eschewed and actually dispensed with. So, Michael, my theory is we need to start a whole different system of education. I don't know, I mean, how we can do that.

Yes. But let me ask you in the short term. Um, we, my theory is if we play into this outrage and we continue to call each other names. Yeah. Um, we are going to miss the opportunity to meet people like you or for people like you to meet people like me. Yeah. Because we're just going to say, you're on the other side. Yeah.

Um, and, and we, we play in and actually accelerate the chaos. Would you agree with that? Yeah. I agree. with you entirely. So what, if you had one piece of advice, what does somebody on a conservative side or a liberal side say to the other to bring them to some sort of understanding of reason? Wow. Oh, wow. What's your opening statement? To tell either a conservative or somebody on the other side how to broach the... How do I, how do I, how do I, how do I, what, I mean, there's a study, and I write about it in the book,

there's a study that says you have a great impact. I think it's 65 or 75% chance of actually opening a door. If you start with, you know what, I got to tell you something. One of the big mistakes that I made was X, Y, and C. Yeah. Because people put their shields down and they go, oh. Yeah.

And then they usually will go, oh, I know I've done that too. And it opens. Yeah. Is there? Well, I think that's a good point. I'd say, yeah, leading with questions rather than leading with declarations might be a way. You know, leading with invitations rather than leading with daggers. Yeah.

But we have to, how do we deal with something like Antifa? I mean, they're not going to listen. No. But I don't think. There's not that many of them. Look, yeah. I think it's like a football field. Yeah.

And we're talking about reconciliation or understanding each other. and we think that we have to, everybody has to agree from the 50 yard line to the end zone. Yeah. No, those people at the three yard line who are never going to get them. No, no, that's right.

They're crazy on both sides. Yeah, that's true. Let's just get the people who are. Okay, so that's what we're looking for as a quorum. And we can do that. We can do that. I think we can do that.

I knowkes we spoke beforehand and, you know, I know that you would say that, oh, no, I, you know, I didn't have a problem with you. I thought you were a smart guy, whatever. but there had to be at least a lot of your friends who hated my guts and thought I was the antichrist 10 years ago. Oh yeah, I would have, I mean, the fact that I'm sitting down with you now is just further validation for these people that, yeah, this guy.

You're gone. Yeah, I'm gone. You're gone. And they think I had a great fall. Right. Okay. They think I've fallen from a great height. I know.

And so I look at this and I think I'm an alcoholic. Okay. When I sobered up, all my friends changed. And a lot of my old friends didn't want me to sober up because I was fond. That's right. Changes the paradigm. Right. Changes the dynamic.

Yeah. And you have to start life over. Yeah. You are going from respected intellectual, New York, NYU. It doesn't get any, no offense, easier in some ways. Yes. It's pretty elite. You were in the in crowd, in the,

in place doing the right thing. Right. Now your whole life is, is different. Yeah. What happens to you? Where are you? Well, you know, you mentioned being an alcoholic. I gave up something and it might look like I've lost something by having given it up. But I've gained my soul. That's more important than the whole world, as we know.

I got my soul back. I have a relationship with a God. I have a relationship with my family that was never like this before. I mean, I lost, I got divorced over this stuff. I turned into a weirdo in graduate school and I couldn't have a relationship with my wife anymore. I lost the family over this. So I don't care. I don't care what they say.

They can say whatever they want. I have a relationship with somebody that's far more powerful and meaningful and glorious than them. You were agnostic. Yes. Raised Catholic? I was raised Catholic. I was a seminarian in high school. Wow.

Yeah. And then you went agnostic. So you never rejected. I was like a, I wanted to be, it wasn't about being tepid or anything, but I said, you know, you can't really know. Yeah. So, and agnostic means, do, do, don't know. I would never say I would, I would never say I was atheist. I never did because I thought that's arrogant and I still think it's arrogant.

You have to be God to say there's no God. I mean, who were you to know? Yeah. And I was the same way. I got to, when I sobered up, I got to a point where I was like, you know what? I believe in stuff because people told me I believed in it and I don't have any relationship. I don't know if any of that's true. Yeah.

And I became an agnostic. Oh, wow. And thought, you know, if God is real, he'd want me to find him. And if he's a good God. he'll help me to get there. He'll help me and he wants me to challenge him. Yes. Because he doesn't know what being.

You know, the other thing I thought about is, you know, I thought that, you know, the way I was raised in sort of the religiosity of my family. I'm talking about not my kids and wife, but my, you know, my siblings and so forth, I thought that I couldn't trust God because he would take away my gifts, my intellect, what I wanted, you know, my goals and stuff like that, what I wanted to do for a little with my life. I didn't trust him. I thought he would, if he was there, he would take it away.

So why would I follow that? I don't want to be. So it's been a, I would say that this happened for a reason, what happened to me. And it wasn't my idea. It was God's idea. Now, I'm not saying I'm some sort of a Moses here, but I'm saying that I have a small mission and this is it. All of us do. I can't get over.

I can't get over. the idea that we were all born in this country with this technology at this time, with this struggle, and we're not supposed to stand up one way or another. You're not supposed to. We're all placed exactly where we're supposed to be. Right. And the people we meet and the see, even sitting in an airport, the stranger right next to you, it's no mistake. It's no accident. So what are you going to do now, Michael? Well, I'm just following the path. I don't, you know, I'm trying to follow the path that I've been put on and I believe the next right thing will be revealed, you know, at the right time. I can't say where the plan leads, but I know it's really not, not up to me, really. So I'll just follow

the lead that I get and the hints that I get and the cues and the very clear messages that I get along the way. And I'll end up where I end up. and I'll be happy and I know it's the best way to go. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.