The Joe Rogan Experience - #2113 - Christopher Rufo

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Christopher F. Rufo is a writer, filmmaker, activist, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's also a Contributing Editor of "City Journal," a Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, and the founder of American Studio, a nonprofit focused on the American experience. https://christopherrufo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. You were just telling me that Washington State recriminalized, or was Oregon, recriminalized drugs? Yeah, that's right. This just came out the last week, but Washington state, rather Oregon state, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy. And

there's now this dramatic reversal. Because guess what? When you let people shoot up heroin on the side of the road, snort meth, intense downtown Portland, it actually is not good for society. and there's such this dramatic pushback and I was actually shocked to see it that Oregon lawmakers all Democrats of course said you know what we've gone too far let's bring it back to the center and I think that's something that's very good. It's definitely very good. It is a little shocking that they figured it out. It just doesn't seem like like when you go and drive

through Oakland, for example, it doesn't seem like anybody's trying to put a cork on that. They're just like letting it be insanely chaotic, like the areas where they have the Shanty Town set up and people have tents everywhere and these makeshift structures. How? At what point in time do you stop letting these open-air drug dens exist where people are just cooking meth in front of everybody? That just seems so insane. So it's nice to see that organs like hey Let's hit the brakes. Yeah, is it all drugs now did they just put everything in the same category which is also quite insane Yeah, I mean no, it's not all drugs. It just says it right here Yeah, says the measure makes the possession of small amount of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine a misdemeanor also quite insane. Yeah. I mean, no, it's not all drugs obviously. It just says it right here? Yeah.

It says, the measure makes the possession of small amount of drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine, a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail, enables police to confiscate the drugs, and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks. But what about, what are the other, see the thing is, it basically, what Oregon did is decriminalize almost everything. The weird thing about drugs is you throw them all into one blanket. You know, you cover them all with one blanket drugs, because caffeine is a drug, alcohol is a drug. There's a lot of drugs that we're accustomed to using, and I'm not necessarily in favor

of those being illegal. And when you add in heroin and methamphetamine to something that we are already accustomed to like alcohol or caffeine, it's like, what do we do? You know, why are these the same things? Like why don't you just individually say the fentanyl is unbelievably bad for you. Marijuana, not so much. Let's like figure out which ones are okay and which ones are non, instead of just saying drugs. 100%. I mean, you just have to do a really simple calculation.

You say, is this drug correlated with extreme social pathology? Does it obliterate the individual? Does it cause social problems, social chaos? And then you could categorize them very simply. Yes and no. Okay, you have alcohol, caffeine, marijuana. You can have a functioning society where those are used. But you can't have a functioning society where people are foiling fentanyl.

And especially if you look at the cities, it's wrecked these cities. The big problem though is that the political left in the United States has lost the willingness and the capacity to say no. This is something we've all seen. We're raised a generation of kids where saying no and imposing limits is something that you can't do. It's this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits. But some limits are necessary, some limits are important. And so I think we're starting to finally see the consequences of obliterating limits and then now we're starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way we should start reimposing

some guardrails. Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive. But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy. But they are happier and they have less anxiety, apparently. Obviously, I'm not a doctor. Because by having structure to life, it doesn't seem like everything is like if they're in charge, like, oh my God, I'm fucking 12 and I'm in charge, I have no idea what's

going on and I could stay out late all night. The world's chaos, which it kind of is in some ways, but by imposing structure on them it gives them comfort. And I find that's the case with human beings. I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines

or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis that they're very dedicated to, those are the happiest people. They're the healthiest people. They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life. The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is, pickleball, whatever it is. That gives people happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just able to fly away on a whim, that doesn't promote happiness. What are you trying to get out of this life?

Don't you want it to be as enjoyable as possible? We've all had bad times, they suck. We try to avoid those. We try to have the good times. But that can be applied to a society as well. The way you raise children can be applied to a society. Like, you need structure. You need rules. You need love and compassion. You need examples of good behavior. You need all of those things. And when you let people fucking cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window. Imagine being 12, driving by a fucking drug den

every day on your way to school. You're like, oh my god, what do I have to look forward to? Yeah, I mean, that was my life and my experience and observation. We moved out of Seattle in 2020. My wife, at that time, two kids. Because of this precise phenomenon, the politics had gone totally sideways. Well, since Seattle in 2020 was particularly insane.

It particularly insane. That was the area, what was it called? The glory of the Chas. Chas, that's right. Chas. But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten, first grade at the time, and we would be walking to school a few blocks up, and we'd have to be avoiding schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street.

Walking. Just walking. Just walking. It's so sketchy. And so, you know, you're trying to kind of navigate your kids around. There was a homeless encampment about 100 yards away from the school with probably 40 or 50 guys cooking drugs, stealing property, causing trouble. And then you talk to the administrators at the time, say, hey, this is a problem. I don't accept this. I don't like this.

And they say, oh, well, you know, we have to be compassionate to our houseless neighbors. It's like, no, we don't. This is a danger to kids. And it got so bad that they were teaching the kids what to do when they found hypodermic needles in the playground. Oh my God. This is a problem. I don't want this as a parent. I want you to prevent them having to pick up hypodermic needles. And it's like a group of people that are so, it's like compassion also has to be limited. You have to have compassion

within reasonable limits. And for us... Well, you're dealing with people that'll just burn it all down. If you just allow... Say arson is no longer punishable. They'll burn all the houses down. These are insane people. They don't have anything. Why wouldn't they just burn it all down? Just for funds. Yeah, it's so hard to understand how it got this far You know, I and I love when they use terms like the house list like you already have a word for it Yeah, like stop trying to dress it up with a new word You already have a word for it the word like this one's been driving me fucking crazy lately

Minor attracted persons. Yes. Um, I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting minor attracted persons. You're talking about pedophiles. That's what we're talking about. It must be that these people have no children. It must be. I don't know if they do their monsters. This idea that you are going to minimize the harm caused by Evil criminals who steal children's lives ruin their lives forever And you're just gonna call them a minor attracted person and try to say that it's an identity To what for what reason to what end Like why would you want to do that?

I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear. You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, drag queen story hour. You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts. These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children.

That's like, should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language, like you're talking about euphemisms, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion. But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, ah, actually no, this is kind of uncomfortable. And like, I wouldn't want to do that. Well, not only that.

Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children? No. No, not a million years. That's like the thing you'd want to avoid, like most in life. There's no reason to talk to them about that. Exactly.

There's no reason. They're not interested in it. They're little kids. And also. They're not interested, it's the adults that are interested. So the question is, why? Why are adults so interested in this? What is the ideological goal, the personal goal?

And I find it- It's influence. They're influencing children because like all groups, as much as people hate to hear this, everyone wants you to join their group. It is a natural human instinct. The idea that that would not apply to gender identity, that that would not apply to sexual orientation is crazy. It applies to phones.

It applies to like people have Android phones, like dude, just switch over. Look, you can use the S Pen, dude, you can switch over. Look at my AI features, dude, you don't need a high message. You know, it's with everything. And if you don't need a high message. It's with everything. And if you don't think that happens with sexuality or with gender, you're out of your mind. It's a natural human characteristic. Why would it be absent there when it's present in literally everything?

People use Windows computers, shit on people use Apple computers. You should just try Windows, man. There's so much more variety They want you to join. Yeah, they want you to bolt that want you to be a part of their church They want you to be moving to their neighborhood. I'm guilty of it, too I got a bunch of people to move to Austin for sure. It's like it's a thing that people do Yeah, it's a thing that people do especially if they found something. That's awesome, but this idea that a guy With fucking heavy makeup on dressed like a tart like if that was a woman I'd be like what's wrong with that lady

Yeah, that's she's not dressing like a teacher. Yeah, this is crazy. What is she doing? Why is she dressed like that? Is that a costume? Is she in a play? Yeah, she's not a play. Okay cut Yeah, let's pump the brakes on this one. That fucking lady's gotta be insane. Does she have any kids? Well, actually she doesn't even have a vagina. You know, she's got a penis. What? Hold the fuck on. Now we're getting to a whole other level of this. What are we doing here? What's going on? But that opinion is completely normal, completely mainstream, held by virtually everyone. Yes. But people are silent about it. Right. Because they've been stigmatized into believing if you offer any criticism of the ideology of gender theory or the practice You are somehow a bigot. You're somehow

Homophobic, you're right. You're far right extremist and you're locked in with KKK You're lumped in with like storm front people. This is a 90% opinion. Yeah, and so You know what I think is so important is To stop playing the game. Yeah, you know what? I'm gonna tell the truth and I'm gonna take the slings and arrows Because I know that the public opinion is on my side and people fear speaking out, but they need Representation and that to me is the name of the game. Well, you are really good at explaining everything that's happening and really good at like laying it out in a very easy to understand pattern, like where it first was introduced into the

education system, the blind spots that people have towards how Marxism works, even especially like during the time of the 1960s and the 70s when a lot of this stuff was gaining momentum in the United States because of the anti-war movement. They were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags. They're completely ignoring what happened in Cuba. They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship. Always. There's no evidence of it ever not leading to that. It's like the idea of like, you know, I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don't think I'm gonna die of rabies.

I'm just gonna get bit by- fucking rabies kills everybody! It's like one lady who didn't die of rabies because of a very novel treatment where they have to put her into a medically induced coma Because rabies is such an old disease and it's such an aggressive disease that your immune system can fight it off But it can't keep up with it and eventually the rabies wins and it always wins So by putting her in a medically induced coma, I don't know what about the biological process of it But it's somehow or another, shorted out her body to the point where it had the resources to effectively battle the rabies.

Because she was just completely immobile and medically induced coma. So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies. Oh, so with this applied, this Marxism. I mean, Marxism will put your whole society at best in a medically induced coma, and at worst you get starvation,

gulags, mass suppression, and so on. Well it kills the society, is what the point is. The point is the best case scenario is that you somehow through a medically induced coma fucking survive it. There's no improvement. No. You're probably wrecked for the rest of your life.

I mean, it's probably such a horrific disease that everything's compromised after that. When I was in my 20s, I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union, Socialist Republic, so Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and Mongolia and other countries that had been ruled by the Soviets. And what happened, and I think there is, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way

here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest. It generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest. And so when you travel through those countries, it is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be. It's these Soviet block housing. It has enormous rates of alcoholism. You see people strewn on the road, freezing to death in the winters. There's no economic productivity.

There's no culture. The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs. And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions. They've been totally annihilated as far as their economic possibilities, but you still have three, four, five million people. And it's what happens when your society is devoured by ideology. And so the ideology that we're seeing in American institutions is of course different,

we're blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history, but it's functionally the same. And to your point, in the late 80s or late 60s and early 70s, you had true Marxist-Leninist radicals, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, the Weather Underground. And if you look at their literature, their propaganda materials from that time, and you compare it to what's happening in, let's say, Buffalo Public Schools, their BLM curriculum. I actually did this. I looked at the Black Panther Party pamphlets they were selling to

FOMENT Revolution and the Buffalo Public Schools curriculum. You know, it's like pretty close. The ideas are the same. Of course, they're softened. They use the nice language about DEI or what have you. But, you know, we should take ideas seriously. And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies. And it's a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating kids.

And that's why you're seeing kids today that grow up with this version of the society and reality that we live in that so doesn't jive with people that are older than them, who didn't grow up in that system, who are like, what are you talking about? Like it's not that bad. Like the things you're seeing are insane. You're freaking out over almost nothing and not paying attention to the important things. There's important things going on in this world, but it's not microaggressions. It's not that Google shouldn't show images of white men when you pump in the AI and ask

who the founding fathers are. They wouldn't even... Did you see what they did with Nazis? Did they make multiracial Nazis? Multiracial Nazis. They had an Asian woman Nazi. It's inclusive. Yeah, I guess. It's fucking bananas. It's bananas.

It's literally like a movie. It's a Mike Judge movie. It's idiocracy. It's a very strange thing where logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and and and challenging young minds have completely abandoned that task and are now Wholesale focused on promoting this Ideology that must be adhered to and none of these people exist that are teaching these things

and none of these people exist that are teaching these things, none of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of university world. These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated and then they indoctrinate more and educate more and they stay in this system and they're not out there in the world.

They're just not. They don't speak for us. But they don't speak for us. They don't agree with us. And yet they're ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very vocabulary that we use. Used to be that you'd have a quirky, tweeted out, you know, Marxist professor who would be smoking a pipe in an Ivy League school and you could say, well, that's fine.

The kids go to Princeton and they get two years with the Marxist whack job and then they get out in the real world. The problem is that that ideology that was confined to a relatively small part of society, where it was tolerated because it added some kind of diversity of experience or ideas, has now extended to institutions that really do matter. And so the question is, if you're sending your kids to school, the majority of the parents don't like what's being taught and it's being taught anyway, what kind of system do we live in?

Is that democratic governance? Is that the representation of the people? If we're paying for it, we're sending our kids through it, but we don't have a stake in and the control of the values that are being formed in those institutions. I think it's a very serious question. It's not trivial to say we're kind of beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints that make a democratic form of government meaningful.

When the bureaucracy rules and it's pushing ideology against the will of the majority of the people, we're in a kind of scary position in our country. And it seems like it's willing participation by the masses as well because they feel like they're a part of change. They feel like they're a part of imposing. They feel like they're a part of imposing these ideas on the rest of the world and the rest of the world is going to have to catch up and they will be the ones that were correct because they were on the right side all along and it's very strange to watch it play out because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point. It's very disheartening.

Like you see it with DAs, like there's an issue going on right now in Austin where they have this progressive, Soros funded DA who's just letting everybody out of jail. Like what'd you do? Rape people, let them out of jail. Murder someone, let them out of jail. It's fucking bananas.

This idea that someone- Microaggression, straight to prison. And they're talking about the dropping crime, but it's because crime's not reported in a lot of places now. Because the crime went up so high and they defunded the police. It's like in Austin they need, they're 500 cops down and the morale is down because of the defund the police and because cops, like there was, I think there were, I believe there was 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the black lives matter protests 17 of those cases I think have been dropped I don't know I'm sure if

that find what at the here I'll send you an article you could tell me if that it's in Barry Weiss is a substack today or her her newspaper sure but this is a real problem where you see the results playing out. You see that they're negative. And you mean kudos to Oregon for correcting course. But you see it playing out with crime and with prisons. And here's my number one beef with this. All this effort to do that.

All this effort to let people out of jail no cash bail what about reform what about putting all that effort in the reforming people how come that doesn't exist what about funding reform inside the prisons what about going to all these impoverished drug-ridden gang-ridden communities and doing some good how come there's no effort there if If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress. You don't want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual

criminals, and just let them lose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone's anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever. That's not the solution. It's very unfortunate those people in that situation where they are habitual criminals. And I'm sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that without doubt, right? But the solution's not let them out. The solution is stop that from happening in the future.

And there's no effort whatsoever put on that. There's no conscious thought of like, how do we get at the beginning of this? Yeah, and that's an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex. There are so many contributing factors, but I actually don't think it's totally necessary to do that. You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate,

here are the ones that we don't tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences. And so what we're seeing in El Salvador, which of course is ongoing, it's fraught with potential problems, but what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%. It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate. Now it's per capita, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.

The lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes. And so it's not that you have to have a kind of soul searching and endless kind of naval gazing and philosophizing. It's simply to say, you know, people who are a direct threat to others that commit violent crimes that maybe have 20, 30, 40, 100 convictions in their criminal history, you know, cannot participate in society without limits. And it's something that people have been scared

to talk about, but I think that that is ending because when people start to feel a sense of danger in their daily lives, they're gonna start to break through some of those taboos and to say, hey, wait a minute, yeah, they're letting people out of jail who are violent criminals doesn't seem to be working. And I think we're there, even in Seattle,

they elected a Republican city attorney, they elected a moderate city council, a moderate mayor. And the big cities, especially the West Coast cities, are waking up to this citizen rage. These are the most prosperous cities in the history of the world, but they can't keep the streets clean. They can't keep people safe.

Well, they can when G.G. and Ping comes to town. That's right, yeah. Oh, wow, that's that one. That dude is so wild, because what he does is so blatant. Like the Panera Bread thing. The Panera Bread thing. The Panera Bread thing's amazing.

You almost have to respect it. You almost have to respect it. You almost have to respect it. It's so brazen. It's like... Explain it to people. Wait, hold up. Yeah, the Panera Bread. So it's like you're gonna raise the minimum wage

for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour, except for Panera Bread, because the Panera Bread guy is his friend and donor. But the way around that to make it don't look that obvious is places with bakeries That's not what is the I mean why why a specific way of cooking there is no Justification there's no rational justification for it And and so it's almost like oh what says Panera is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all on

February 28th Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California's fast food minimum wage law after all on February 28th Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California's AB 1 2 2 8 law a law that raises minimum wage for fast food workers from 16 to 20 dollars an hour starting 81 So why is that? How is it not exempted the hell of a fact check? I didn't know that yeah, but they were saying that it was Bakery's were exempt. So what is exempt? But they were saying that it was bakeries were exempt. So what is exempt? It said okay Governor Gavin Newsom told Los Angeles Times Panera would not be exempt from the law the spokesperson also did not acclaim the Blueburg piece Which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell as a standalone

Sell it as a standalone item calling the report absurd So it is it a fake story? Or is it something that they- They might have- Custodon and corrected course quickly. Custodon and corrected course quickly, yeah. Yeah. Roll up to the top.

So where's the initial report? Let's find the initial report. Because why would Bloomberg spread bullshit? Bloomberg is a financial paper, right? Yeah, that's right. That's not something... I don't think it would be... Yeah.

You really can't do that if you're running a financial paper. It's not like the New York Times. The New York Times can say Israel bombed the hospital and 500 people were killed and put on the front page, even if it's not true. And everybody just assumes it's true because it's the New York Times. But they can kind of get away with that. Yeah, and then they still exist But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses are doing or attacks laws That seems insane how Panera bread ducked California's new $20 minimum wage This is Bloomberg governor pushed for a carve-out that's perplex industry industry observers and benefited a donor. So how do we know that this is true? Do we have to subscribe? The dreaded paywall.

Okay, no worries. We'll subscribe. We owe you Bloomberg. But there must be something to it. And it's so hard with that guy, because when you just look at the way he praised Biden, I would never run against him. A man of character. You know, like, I'm old school. It's God. It's like he's playing someone in a movie that's a crazy person. It's like that's how, that's how like a really good actor would play a complete crazy person who's

insincere enough that smart people recognize it, but that like really dull-minded, blue no matter who people like he's a winner. That guy, he's got my vote, I'll tell you what, he can win. He can win this for us. But the problem is is that that's not wrong. I mean Gavin Newsom is a fearsome political talent and his willingness to do or say anything and do it with a straight face, with that sincere voice and that cool, swoopy hair. I mean-

I love that he keeps getting busted too. I love that he got busted during the pandemic, eating inside with no mask on. He's just fucking- The shamelessness on that guy is like, it's like a laboratory specimen. It's actually, is an interesting guy and a fascinating person in that way. Not a fan, I disagree with him politically, but I don't think he should be underestimated because those of us who can see through it, I think are actually a pretty small number

of people. Well, I think you're probably right, and I think there's also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team. That's what I think. I think they barely care who the president is, and I think that's obvious with Obama. Excuse me, with Biden. Not with Obama at all. The opposite with Obama. Yeah.

Obama was like the best example of what we have to offer, but Biden is without doubt anyone can beat him. If you were just comparing competence, you know, someone who you would trust talking, someone who you would trust to go meet foreign dignitaries, there's zero, he has, no one he's gonna beat. He's not gonna be a single living politician, but since he's a top of top of this team that people are

like this team is our team no matter what like we're all in I'm a fucking 49ers fan for life yeah that's what these people are doing yeah and they literally don't care they'll gaslight you into a coma you see that piece that someone wrote the other day how his age is his superpower did you see that shit I didn't see that Panera exempted from California's minimum wage hike thanked a nuisome link. Okay, and this is snopes. What does snopes say? I'm explaining what the article was and then I'll skip to the paragraph for a talk. Do they do they debunk it? No, I didn't get through all the article with six. It is explaining what Okay, the confusion exception let okay Here's according to California State law set to a take effect April 1st 2024 a restaurant chain with more than 60

Locations nascent wide that produces for sale bread as a standalone menu item does not count as fast food The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Blueburg article published February 28th reporting that, the fast, casual chain Panera Bread has dodged an upcoming minimum wage increase for fast food workers in California at $20 an hour. The article connected the Bread Exemption to billionaire Greg Flynn, a frequent donor to California Governor Gavin Newsom's political campaigns who owns more than two dozen Panera bread locations in the state. In a statement of Snopes, however, Newsome Spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection

played a role in the law and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Panera. The governor never met with Flynn about this bill and the story is absurd, Stack said. Well, they don't have to meet. They could talk on the phone. Our legal team has reviewed and it appears that Panera is not exempt from the law. Whoops. The legal team reviewed it after they, so there is an exemption. Right, right. So that's where I was going to get to this.

Okay. So how would they not be exempt? The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills. The exemption, as we mentioned above, is real and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food. However, Newsom's office said illegal analysis determined Panera, like other chain bakeries, does not fall under the exemption because it mixes the dough offsite instead of fully producing bread on the premises of its retail locations. Oh my God.

Interesting. But that my God. Interesting. But that makes sense. That makes sense because it's like Subway, right? Subway doesn't make the dough either. That's right. Why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill? Is the baker's lobby that powerful?

The opposite. Yeah. Well, the baker's are the ones who'd be lobbying for more money. That's what I mean. Yeah. The actual bakers. Yeah. So, I mean, but even look at Snopes.

Snopes has done a fact check on my work that actually got debunked. Politifact has done it. Washington Post. Well, the history of Snopes is wild. Is wild. But a lot of these fact check sites, they've actually had to retract claims against me where they say, oh, you know, Chris Rufon is reporting said X, Y, and Z, it's not true. And then I provide them the documentation, the evidence, I raise a stink about it.

And then they reverse course. And a lot of these, like, that's such a mess of facts. And who did they reach out to verify? Governor Newsom's office. Right, he said it's absurd. Yeah. Of course he's going to say it's absurd because he got in trouble for it. So, but I think the point about Biden

that you were making is really instructive because Biden is like the weekend at Bernie's president. I mean, it's like they wheel him around and so what you get a glimpse of is the Democratic Party machine. What are their priorities? What are they gonna put on the teleprompter? What is the staff level gonna decide is important? And then they kind of wheelbiden

out there to kind of stammer for a couple minutes, say the talking points and get out. And so we're seeing what's important to the party as a movement. The opposite is Trump. Trump is, you know, a unique individual figure. the party is following him. Look, these are the two models that we have, and increasingly the voters are saying, we want to have a rematch. What do you think? It is interesting that he's so frail that he's transparent, right? And he's so transparent to the point where the White House press secretary accidentally tweeted as him from her account. You saw that, right? Which is wonderful. I love when that happens. Because like, thank you. I was wondering, and now I know, you know? I was really confused. I kind of had a

feeling it was you, you know? And is there ever been a worse White House Press Secretary? It's how did she get that job? She's so bad at convincing people. There's, there's a bunch of like hard core, ideologically driven left-wing pundits that are on YouTube that could do a way better job. And they would be fucking psycho about it. They would be psycho about it. And the left would be like, yeah. Like she's not the one. Like she's fucking terrible at it. She gets called out for stuff all the time. She gets set up for stuff all the time. Like Peter Ducey's always setting her up He talks to her, but he's amazing. He's so good. It'll provide a little bit of this, but then what about that?

Yeah, and you know she's just awful at it and and she's only really challenged by one person right in the briefing room And still manages to bungle it on the daily Well, it's just there's so much madness that she has to like cover up. It's what, and look, this is again a kind of brass tax way of talking about it, but it's what happens when you put identity over competence. Yeah. Everyone knows like explicitly and then when you hire someone, it's a big celebration of all the different intersectional identities the candidate has.

Yeah. You know, this is our first, you know, black female, I don't different intersectional identities the candidate has. Yeah. You know, this is our first, you know, black female, I don't know, LGBTQ, not really sure. Yeah. And so the problem with that though is when you're not making a decision based on competence, merit, excellence, you're buying into it at the front end on that different hierarchy of decision making, but then on the back end, you can't do anything about it. You say, well, you elevated this person for identity.

You can't fire that person because of incompetence. Unless they steal women's clothes from the airport. Yeah, exactly. Unless they get a little sideways. That guy was my favorite. But the Harvard story is this exact phenomenon. And after the 10-7 attack, Harvard kind of reveals the ideology in the institution.

And then another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents. We were the ones who broke the plagiarism story. But just for people that aren't aware, so this can be standalone, what Christopher's referring to is that the president of Harvard and the president of MIT and Penn, they all had this meeting where they were grilled by who, which was the congress? Stefanik.

Yes. Who grilled them about using anti-Jewish hate, and is that hate speech to say death to the Jews and their answer was essentially if it's Actionable yeah, then it's hate. It was the most bonkers yeah bizarre Mental gymnastics and also with that one woman from Penn done in the most condescending way Oh, yeah, it's like she is so accustomed to being the boss so accustomed to people like Custom to being the boss so accustomed to people like Accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world that she doesn't realize how fucking insane what she's saying is yeah I mean the question was if if students were

Calling for the genocide of Jews would that violate Harvard's policy? Yes, and the answer from Claudine gay, the former president, was it depends on the context. It's like, I mean, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people in the center left, suddenly became clear. And so this caused all sorts of chaos predictably. You have donors dropping out, you have alumni furious, and then a little birdie sent another reporter and me a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized

dozens of passages in her PhD thesis. And so in this context of this big fight, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict. And so published it, obviously it causes a huge firestorm, but the question is the same. It's to say to Harvard, okay, DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now. That's clear.

But your motto for the last, you know, three, four hundred years has been veritas, truth. And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one. You either choose DEI or you choose truth. Which one are you going to sacrifice? And I think as a country, the reason that story drove so much attention is because that's where we are politically, that's where we are on policy, that's where companies find themselves. Where are we going? What are our values?

And we have this competing set of values. And for me, as someone who, look, I'm unabashed, I'm a political person. I try to drive political change. I think framing the question clearly so that people really understand what's at stake is just the beginning part of the process of getting sanity back. Yeah, and I think people are waking up. Jamie, why don't you shut your mic off because Carl's snoring up a storm over there. Carl.

I thought you were talking, I was here. Yeah. Yeah. Geez, Carl, is that boring? Yeah. Carl gets bored quick. He's only four months old. But the curious thing to me was that most people, until they saw those videos, weren't aware of how far it had gone, and then they're like, okay, now I kind of get it.

And there's been a very, very big reaction since then of people realizing how insane everything has gotten. I think that this is something that came up, like when Jordan Peterson first started doing my show, which was I think, when was Jordan's first appearance? Was it 2015? 2016? Somewhere around then, when I had seen his story and seen these videos of him being interviewed explaining to people, you don't understand, if you impose this legislation

that makes it a hate crime to not use someone's preferred gender pronouns, this is not going to stop there. It's going to keep going and going and going and going and you can't let it happen. And he's right. And back then, but back then the pushback was so fascinating because people were like, why are you having this guy on your show to talk about this thing that's happening only in these obscure universities? It's never going to go anywhere. But now you look at it eight years later and it's fucking everywhere.

It's everywhere. Dude, so one of the things that I do, I'm a trustee at a public university in Florida, New College of Florida. Governor DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to take over this university, replace all of the leadership, and then turn it into a classical liberal arts university. It's in Sarasota, it's a beautiful campus, the tuition is less than $7,000, And we want to turn it into a place where conservative families can send their kids and feel like they're getting a good education. But when we did this, what we did is we came in, we replaced the leadership, we abolished the DEI department, we terminated

the gender studies program, and then we said, you know, we're not going to comply with these ridiculous pronoun rules. And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me. So I'm currently under investigation by the federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to call this woman by Zeezer pronouns. Zeezer. Not, you know, okay, trans, okay, man, woman, okay. We're refusing to call this woman by Z-Zur pronouns. Z-Zur. Not, you know, okay, trans, okay, man, woman, okay, whatever. Z-Zur.

And it's like, oh. By the way, federal indictment, imagine, imagine for even just refusing to call this person he, her, people have always been rude. Are we gonna like legislate against rudeness? And we're gonna say that like if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan, can I get them arrested and locked in a cage because they're being rude to me because they're calling me a girl? If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that's where it's going.

That's where they'd like it to go. And look, I have to spin up lawyers. Thankfully, the university is handling it. But I mean, this is not trivial. And the, what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great, what he brought up illustrates this point. If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything. It's a simple sales technique. You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them to kind

of cash up, and then you work them up the chain to a bigger purchase or a bigger commitment or a bigger ideology. It's how cults work. Yeah. And so, like, I learned this as a kid. My father's Italian from Italy, and we went to Rome to the Vatican. This sales guy, it's like everything about sales and persuasion I learned, like 10 years old, watching this guy, he came up, he said, oh, you know, sir, it's a beautiful day. I had a new grandchild that was born.

Let me give you this beautiful St. Christopher Medal or St. Joseph Medal to celebrate this. And as soon as you take it, you know you're hooked because he's gonna sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever. And so this is the ante. You know, once you put in the ante, you're playing the hand. And so this stuff is like, it's rage bait for the right. It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives, you know, some kind of momentum.

Ratings. Ratings. But what it's not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback. Legal, administrative, policy, and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes. But I'm very concerned because these are just these gambits where they make, and once they stick, then you're in. It's very hard to roll back. Look at the military. You have all of these men masquerading as women that are now suddenly elevated in the military hierarchy. This is not trivial. We're the most powerful military in the world. We maintain, you know,

kind of international peace. And it's like, now the highest concern is trans? No. I don't think that this is how we should be making decisions. And I don't think that we should be submitting to the original lie. You should never submit to the original lie, because if you do, you can never successfully push back again. It's certainly odd that they're pushing that. This is where I get so confused, because if I really want to go full tin foil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was a foreign country, I would be promoting this as much as possible in any way I could. I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.

I would be funding universities to continue insane policies. I'd be teaching them the kind of things that they taught people where that woman, do you remember, you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley and he was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods? And she is actually laughing. Why she, I just want to point out, I just want to point out, what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence. Like what? I think she was a Stanford law professor.

She was somewhere, might've been Berkeley. But it was whatever it was, it was like, what did you just say? What did you just say? And why did you say it that way? You think you're so accustomed to being in your bubble that you don't recognize how gross it is when you giggle before you say something. I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to

violence. Some men can have periods. But this is the dominant culture in HR departments, K through 12 schools, universities, government bureaucracies. That is the social game that has been established. And so, when we took over New College of Florida, it was the most left-leaning university. It's basically the evergreen,

it was the evergreen state of Florida. It was the student population was more than 50% trans, queer, and non-binary. More than 50%. More than 50%. Well, that's the odds of that. In terms of the normal account when they do, if they get a random group of 100 human beings in the country. There's a bit of a disparity there.

Especially because non-binary is fake. It's not a thing. Right. This doesn't exist. You can be non-binary. Maybe I am. You am you can be just you just say it you just say it I knew a dude who just to say it these date only girls That was his that was his strategy. Yeah, it's like it's like a con. It's a con You're a part of the male feminist your LBG TE exactly. It's little cuttlefish. Yeah, you know it is like

It's a strategy. A hundred percent. And it works maybe at the initial, but there are negative consequences. Yeah, there's flaws. There's flaws. And then once women figure out what you're doing, they don't respect you anymore. But what happens, so we go to the university and, you know, we're the new bosses, the governor gives us a mandate to do significant changes and reforms. And I remember I took some of my guys, we kind of landed on campus the first time,

student protests, death threats, SWAT team mobilized to protect us. And I remember meeting with the old administrators, and walking in and these are people that are just wagging their finger in my faces, in my face rather, fingers in my face, they're saying, oh, you can't do this. You're opening up the community to violence.

You're at this, blah, blah. You can't host a talk on campus because all these, all this same stuff you're talking about. And then I think like, all of you are about to get fired. Do you not understand the situation that you're in? Your finger wagging is not going to work anymore. The governor is tough as nails, he told us before we took over. If you're not driving massive negative headlines, if you're not getting flak, you're not doing your job. I'll back you up 100% going and make the change. But what I realize

in that moment is that the people who have created little nests of power with this ideology have never been challenged. No one in a meeting says, actually, this is a stupid idea. We should get back to business. And so for me, it was this remarkable realization that we've created this social and psychological pattern within our institutions where they're like fragile, brittle, unhinged, because the most passive aggressive, the most ideological, the most kind of nagging person ends up winning. And if we're going to have better institutions, we have to have people, men and women, that go in and just say, no, no more bullshit, no more games, no more ideology.

We have a serious job to do. We're going to get it done. And if you don't join the mission, you're out. Pink slip. You know? And so that's kind of what we did. You saw the same thing at Twitter when Elon took over Twitter. These are the hard decisions that we haven't made in a long time that I think are desperately needed?

I think so too. And I think that what they're doing by allowing this culture where every anxiety gets justified and amplified, you're just creating more anxious people. You're creating more fucked up kids. You're turning the whole world into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend. And you have to amend it through DEI and you have to amend it through equality of outcome and you have to amend it through tax the rich and like the whole thing behind it is just

so unhinged. And how many of those people, if they had gone to a place where they were met with intellectual challenges by motivated professors who are not ideologically driven, who could have taught them important things about life, that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way. We're not preparing people for that, because the people that are preparing the people have never done that. And it's a giant part of the problem. It's like someone teaching you how to do a thing that they don't do.

Yeah. Unless they're teaching... That's why I say about drag queens. Unless they're teaching you how to be a drag queen, I'm not interested. No, but that's what they're doing. I mean, they're... Yeah, they're doing that sort of. For sure it's a modeling thing.

The drag queen comes in with a position of status, prestige, admiration. Right, that's a misquandia. It's presented as this amazing life path. And even the drag queen theorists, if you read their academic papers, which is not everyone's cup of tea, but I've made the sacrifice,

they say very clearly, and very clearly, they say, we are training kids to move into the queer ideology, the ideology of queer theory, the academic discipline, but also for other ways of knowing, creating a, you know, one of the phrases they use is a site of queer pleasure. And it's like they're not hiding the ideology that's driving this, if you dig far enough. And they really say, they say we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family because that's oppressive. Having a mother and a father in a kind of nuclear household environment is a form of racism, transphobia, whatever, all of the different kind of social ills you could imagine.

And so we have people that have no sense of responsibility. We've inherited some good and some bad. You're born into the world in a tragic state of being. Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad. I think on the whole, our history, our tradition, is on net very positive, very good. Still problems to solve, that's a kind of universal human nature. But what we're training kids to believe is that everything behind them is evil. All of the structures that have provided a sense of discipline and meaning and purpose

should be demolished and they should be replaced by ideological communities. I mean, that to me is evident in the outcomes. We're creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids that have been deprived of all these structures that could actually help them along. I've seen that across the board in my reporting, in my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life. And so we have to start first by,

I mean, assessing your own situation. What do I do with my kids? And a lot of people are asking that question right now. I don't know about you, but when I grew up, if you were a upper middle class, professional class household, your parents bought a house in a nice neighborhood, enrolled you in public cave kindergarten, and you kind of went up, it was set it and forget it.

That's over. Parents are finally starting to say, hey, wait a minute, I actually have to look into this. I want to be careful and considerate about where I'm sending my kids and what kind of life I'm raising them to live. Yes, and There's not a lot of good options. That's what gets confusing and for a lot of my friends whose kids are about to go to high school And about to go to college, you know, they're making these next steps and towards adulthood It's it's it's really scary to them because they're like, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.

They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, caught up in momentum, and not realize that you're not contributing to any good. You're just fucking things up worse. And that none of this unhoused or home-free or whatever you want to call it, that's not helping anybody. All this language, all this verbi it. That's not helping anybody all this language all this verbage

it's not helping anybody and You you have to fucking work hard to get by in this world and it's important It's it's an important fact facet of being a human being you you have to learn what your capabilities are you have to learn How to push yourself you have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable You have to learn how to push yourself. You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable. You have to learn that. And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it. If we protect kids every step of the way from any sort of difficult thing at all, lower

math scores because too many people aren't graduating. So this must be racist. Let's lower the scores. Let's just pass people. Fuck it. We don't want to be bad people Let's just pass people instead of teaching them. It's hard to learn shit. It's hard. It takes work That's the whole reason why it's so impressive when someone is really well read like wow that guy put in the work

Yeah, it's really impressive when someone knows a lot of stuff It's really impressive when someone's really good at something well Why is it impressive? Because we know it's fucking hard to do. It's that simple. If you want to develop human beings that have potential and can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you've got to teach them how to work hard. That's part of the process. It's unavoidable. And if you don't have that facet, if you don't have that as a core tenet of how you view the world, you're fucking up 100%. There's no way you're gonna get everything

out of life without hard work. It's just, you'll be anxious, you'll be depressed, you'll feel lost, you won't feel like you accomplished anything, you all feel like it's been handed to you You'd be a trust fund baby. You'll be fucked It's not good for you. You have to work hard and so you have to overcome Including emotional harm you have to go through bullshit You have to go through bad friendships and bad relationships and bad co-workers and bad employers You have to go through that. It's part of the process.

It's how you become a human being. And you can't protect people every goddamn step of the way. We're just going to create a bunch of grown-up babies who are screaming in the street, stop oil now, blocking the highway with signs painted with oil, wearing sneakers made with oil. Every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil. It's insanity. And this is what we've got.

And people, look, I'm in that world of words, ideas, publication. It's a pretty easy life in some ways, right? You know, you're doing reading, you're doing writing, you're doing media. But I have a lot of friends that live in my small town that do actual hard work. They're working in the oil business. They're working on commercial plumbing. They're working in actual real things that we depend on, but we take for granted. Those things are actually hard. Super fucking hard.

They're super hard. It takes a ton of dedication, a ton of skill. And it's the reason that those of us who are privileged enough, in the real sense of the word, can do what we do. We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world. And so I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these, oh, ban oil. Ban oil? Our whole society collapses instantly. Yeah.

Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds. And so it's like, we've created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings. These are people that don't know what it means to be human. They're just kind of symbols of ideology. They're like, you look at those videos and you're like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions. These are kind of puppets as part of some agendas,

part of some mimetic ideology. That is nihilistic at its heart. And that's where I think we're going. If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color, you know, you have no sense of values. And that's what we all want at the, we all operate on a sense of values, whether it's conscious or unconscious.

And when you try to wipe away all, all, all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal, you're dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know north from south, they know up from down. And so with my own kids, that's what I'm trying to do is protect them to the extent that's necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to the extent that's necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to fight. Because life is a fight, life is a struggle, they're going to confront very difficult things as they grow up. And then at some point, you hope that you prepare them enough.

Yeah. And when you're looking at the difference between the world of today and the world of just 20 years ago, the change is so quick. There's never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly. What year was it? Was it 2020 that we had the highest jump in murder ever? The same year we had the defund the police. That's scary.

That's scary because that's the opposite of where we expect. If you look at like Pinker's work on violence over time, you see that societies are trending in a very positive direction. At least we were, until 2020. And that this one change, just because it was just one year, but that one year was just three years ago, kids. Okay? Another thing like that could do that again, especially when you're dealing with even more people who are released out into the world with these radical ideas, especially the people that are inclined to believe that violence is a necessary aspect of change.

And these are ironically the same people that don't want anybody to be armed. It's all so wild. It's so wild because if you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, you would have a president who's not there, you would have a society that is run by fucking maniacs in the educational institutions that when Antifa commits violence, somehow it's mostly peaceful, but yet when anyone else does it, especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you could throw at it. Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you could say. It's everything wrong with the world.

Like, this is a recipe for a civil war. It's a recipe for chaos. It's a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that's around us. If you just go from what happened so quickly in 2020, it's not hard to imagine if you could bring yourself back to the time in 2020 to think this is never coming back and it's going to be like this forever and it's going to get way worse because if it can get like this where people could just smash into stores and loot, that's what I started seeing. That's one of the things that got me out of California. I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything.

By the way, all white kids. And I saw- Or down in Santa Monica or something? It was in Woodland Hills. And I saw there was a target there that got targeted too, that they lit like a dumpster on fire and pushed up against the door. There was a lot of shit that people weren't getting caught for.

And it was like right after the George Floyd riots, so the cop cars burning on the highway were an image burning everyone's mind still. And I was like, oh, I know how this movie plays out. I'm getting the fuck out of here. Like that was my first thought. I was like, I need to know how this movie plays out. I'm getting the fuck out of here. Like, that was my first thought. I was like, I need to figure out how to get out of here. Like, this is, I can't stay.

Cause this is only gonna get worse. And if you don't get out now, and you're gonna wish you got out when something happens to someone you love, we gotta get the fuck out of here. This is bad. And it's not hard to imagine that our society, given the current situation,, given the current situation and given the current influences, it's going in that direction.

And if I was in another country, I'd be fucking pumped. I was looking at, what's that lady's name, Rachel, whatever it is, the admiral, first female admiral? Adam Rachel Levine. Yeah, Adam. Wonderful, hilarious. And this other one that was some recent trans military person who was saying, you know, Sir or Madam Rachel Levine. Yeah, Madam. Wonderful, hilarious. And this other one that was some recent

trans military person was saying we should all put our pronouns in all of our emails, even if it's obvious. Like shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. How come something that used to be considered a mental illness just 10 years ago. Is now at a precedent? Now it's a valuable asset?

Now it's an important part of our community? Now it's not? If you found out someone was suicidal, would you want them in charge of the nukes? You wouldn't, right? Well, just on paper, the amount of trans people that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else. Like, isn't it something insane, like 40%? It's something crazy like that. What are you doing?

Are we ignoring facts and statistics? If you know that someone is a bipolar schizophrenic and you got them working on a gun range, she'd say, hey, Harry, we just pulled your file, and you fucking fly off the handle and you have 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager. Give me that gun, you motherfucker. Get out of here. You can't work anymore. It's like putting Kanye in charge of like an air wing and the Air Force or something. It's just, wow, I don't know about that. Yeah. It's just nuts where we have decided that, listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria. I've met many people that I truly believe they have somewhere in there, they are a woman

and they got stuck in a man's body and I think that's real and I think that's always happened. But, but, when you make that more powerful than just being a normal person, more preferable than just being a normal person, subject to less scrutiny than being a normal person, just a regular, like, I'm not saying you should discriminate against trans people. I think you should just let everybody be whatever the fuck they are. But don't tell me that I'm supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play. Say if you're a biological male inmate and you decide that you're a woman and you want to transition to women's prisons, which in California 47 men have done. Don't tell me that just because you're trans, like I'm supposed to abandon that. Like I'm supposed to ignore that sex offenders could just walk into a

women's locker room with an erection and everyone's supposed to ignore that. Like what do you do? Now you are fucking up the acceptance of trans people. Cause you're saying that trans people are gonna come along with all these sex offenders, which is not really true. There's a lot of the trans people that aren't sex offenders. They're just trans. These other people are taking advantage of this fucking massive loophole that you've left in here and you're victimizing female professional athletes,

female college athletes, you're jeopardizing scholarships for those athletes, you're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women and there's no consideration for that at all. Yeah, and look at this kind of sorority house, I think it's probably the best example of this phenomenon where you have some, you know, six-two male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women in a sorority house somewhere. And look, obviously, you know, this guy's a pervert. That full stop, that is a kind of patently obvious thing, right? Well, he's certainly exploiting it. They're

manipulating it. You should certainly consider the possibility that he's a pervert. I think it's at the minimum a big bright red flag that is waving in your face. But the question is an institutional question. You know, the fathers of these young girls, the deans of the universities, the university presidents, it's like, hey, wait a minute, like accommodate this person, try to talk to this person, figure out what the deal is,

assess whether it actually is kind of a real threat or not, figure out some alternate arrangement for this person. But especially if the young women are telling you, we don't want this, we're uncomfortable with this, we don't like this, get this person out. It's a failure on our social institutions that we haven't developed any kind of method for solving this problem. Well, it also shows our oppression hierarchy that we have always protected women from sexual

predators unless that sexual predator identifies as a group that has a social hierarchy above Biological women which is a trans woman and that's where we're at. Yeah, and it just shows that this is cult thinking We're in a cult. This is the doctrine that could have been created in the top of a mountain by a wizard It's nonsense. It's fucking nonsense and somehow or another It is the norm in a lot of universities and it's fucking nonsense. And somehow or another, it is the norm in a lot of universities. And it's fucking crazy. And these women that have to deal with this shit, that's... It's fucking nuts that people aren't insanely outraged.

And that it's not stopped immediately. People are scared. That's the common denominator to all of these things. But the problem is the rebound of that is equally horrific, because the rebound of that is that people have enough. And then when people have enough and they find out there's this biological male that's being housed in this women's sorority and this biological man, maybe he does something to one of those women, that person, there's gonna be vigilante justice,

and that's the last thing you want. We want to avoid that by having sensible policies now, and head off these problems before they balloon into something that is unmanageable. And so, but you know. If it's not already. Again, people are scared to speak out. You talk to folks that are, you know,

I used to have this idea that, oh, you oh, there's a concept of fuck you money. Once you have a certain net worth, you're untouchable, you're immune to social consequences, you can do whatever you want. That's not even true. I talk to a lot of folks of considerable means and not all of them, but many of them are also scared because there's status and prestige concerns, family concerns, business concerns. And so it really is up and down the line. People are scared to speak.

They're scared to tell the truth. And because there are real social consequences for doing so. Well, there's real consequences across the board. It's not just social. There's economic consequences. There's consequences in terms of your own personal safety. There's a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating.

And it's so strange for me for, you know, I'm 56 years old, I was born in 1967. I lived in a different world. And I grew up in a world with no internet. And so to watch this world change the way and to be a part of the internet now and to have existed in both worlds is a very fascinating contrast because I get to see, how old are you? 39. So you don't know shit?

You don't know shit about the pre-internet days? I didn't get a cell phone till my senior year in high school Oh, you poor baby, but you had a computer at home though, huh? Yeah, yeah, and it was attached to the internet It was attached to like a well. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's something yeah the kids today like the 20 year olds They don't know jack shit about no internet. They're crazy. They have full 5g everywhere They exist and they're always on they're always on they're always on, they're always on, they're always on. They also know where everybody's location is because they use SnapMap, they're all SnapMap in each other.

So they know, like, oh my God, she told me she was gonna go to Becky's house, she's over at Debbie's house. Like, you know, like, it's like surveillance of your friends, yeah. It's fucking nuts, man. Could you imagine? It's also, it gets you very accustomed

to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face. And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they're not just the educators. They're also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic and the amount of influence that you can have if you can get people to adhere to these things, you can get them to do something really stupid,

like submit to a social credit score system, which you would attach to a centralized digital currency. Now you've got communism and it's like that. It's very quick. And just like people self-centered on Twitter and self-centered on YouTube before Elon Musk and self-censored on YouTube because they don't want to get demonetized, people start doing that in regular society. They will do that because you don't want your social credit score system to drop. And it could be something as simple as not using Zezer.

Not using Zezer and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using Zezer, not using Zezer and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using Zezer and now you are being tried for discrimination. And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted. And now all of a sudden you've got a real Soviet Union-style gulag situation in 2029, the United States of America, with Admiral Levine as our first female president. Yeah. Yeah, that could be our first female president. But we're not far from there right now. I mean, the absurdity of the ACLU filing a complaint, and now the Department of Education

Civil Rights Division following up, for refusing to use Zezer pronouns. I mean, it's like it is what it is. This is something we're already here. And so the first step is to intimidate, right? It's an intimidation mechanism. You got to defend yourself. You got to get a lawyer. You have to spend time on it.

Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents. And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the end's power. And I spent a year living in Western China when I was a documentary filmmaker. And this is like where the Uighurs are. The Uighurs are the Muslim minority population

of China's West and they're ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country. So I'm observing what they were doing over time, and it gets to be a centralized control over your identity. They wouldn't allow Uyghur men to wear mustaches, like trivial things that are the beginning, but then it's like very serious kind of regulation of thought and opinion. And so it's propaganda that is backed up by force. That's really all that we're talking about.

And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form, propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state. And we have to push at every opportunity. And look, I'm a conservative. I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals because we're cobbling together the only viable counter movement. You can't solve this by culture alone.

You have to get in the arena of politics. You have to change the law, and you have to replace institutions that are broken with new institutions. It's an uphill fight. There's not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal, but what I've been trying to do, whether it's with Harvard or Critical Race Theory or DEI, all of these stories that I've broken and campaigns that I've run, is at least turn people on to the idea that something is deeply wrong, put a name and a face to it, and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems. And if we don't, we lose the great promise.

We were promised liberty and equality. Those are the two fundamentals. You don't see – people don't even have an understanding of what that means anymore. And so we have to recover intellectually what has been erased from our discourse. And then we have to fight in the arena of actual political power. We have to take action. We have to change laws. We have to reform bureaucracies. We have to lead institutions. We have to change laws. We have to reform bureaucracies. We have to lead institutions. And so every day that I wake up, it's like, that's what I'm doing. What wins are we putting up on the board? Because unless we're having substantial

wins in all these little areas, that social credit system that you're talking about, it's just a matter of time. Oh. When you look at the current political landscape, particularly these trials, how disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents? Because to me, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another either put them in jail or make them seem like complete total criminals in a way that would, for the casual, for the person who's not reading deep into the headlines, for the casual Democrat that

sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened where he got fined $365 million. The casuals, I've seen people argue that you know, that, you know, fraud is fraud and this, that and he's a fucking fraud. And then I saw Kevin O'Leary explain it from Shark Tank. He was saying, this is what every real estate developer does. They say, my building's worth $400 million. And then someone comes along from the bank and they say, no, it's worth $300 million. We'll give you a loan on $300 million or whatever it is, whatever the number.

It's negotiation. But also, real estate pricing in general is a strange thing to say that's fraud because people overvalue their property all the time. I mean, it's a standard thing that people do. When someone has a house and it's worth $700,000, they start to decide to list it as $900,000. And the real estate person says, well, you know, it's really pushing it. And guys, that's what I want. I think it's worth $900,000. Like, people have always done weird shit like that. And then when you have this leftist judge that says that Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million, like then you just showed all your silly hands. You showed your hand, because that's

a crazy thing to say in a place that has the most expensive real estate on earth. Yeah. And the Mar-a-Lago property is not worth $18 million. I mean, that's absurd. Isn't it like 18 acres? Yeah, it's huge. It covers both sides of the little, you know, key or whatever you call it, the little island. But the bigger question is the question that was first raised by the presidency of Richard Nixon that is now coming to fruition with the presidency and the kind of ex-presidency of Donald Trump. We have a democratic system that favors Trump in the sense that he won in 2016. He's winning the primary right now for

Republicans in 2024. But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him. And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim. They essentially say, we want to keep him off the ballot. We want to put him in prison. We want to bankrupt him so he can't become the president, even if the people support him. We want to deprive the people of making the decision. So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts. I mean the cases are bogus. And so what your question that we're raising is who actually rules in this country?

Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government? Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power? What they can say even to Donald Trump, I mean Donald Trump has been one of the most famous people in the world for decades. He's enormously wealthy. He's already been the president of the United States. He's a powerful person. And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we've built up.

And so as someone who I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, I did vote for him for 2020. I'll absolutely vote for him now in 2024. It is a contest of how we think of our democratic system. And I'm of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy. And this is a contest where Democrats are saying, essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy. Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages in that sentence. We have to destroy

democracy as we've traditionally known it, electing a president through a vote of the people, in order to save democracy, which is ruled by expert opinion, ruled by the bureaucracy, and essentially left-wing hegemony, left-wing domination over institutions. And as someone who tries to maximize whatever I can do to push forward on these issues politically, it's not lost on me that if they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, you know, we're all table stakes relatively. And they're going to have no hesitation, because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, that's when dissent becomes a crime. And we've already seen that. I reported on the gender ideology in schools

and worked with some of the parent groups that were trying to mobilize and they all got put on an FBI list. We know this for sure, FBI counter-terrorism list that was specifically for parent, school board protesters. So if you participate in the democratic process, we'll turn you into a criminal. I hate that with every fiber of my being and whatever threats come my way, whatever lawsuits, whatever investigations come my way, it's worth it. Take me to prison.

Fine. Let's do this, because we have to actually confront these questions head on. We need to have people that have enough courage to actually, courage without risk is not courage. What you're saying is not hyperbole. These are facts. These are documented facts. And again, because it's a person like Donald Trump, you get people thinking, like if you could stop Hitler,

by any means necessary, wouldn't you stop Hitler? And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go, this is our modern Hitler. Do you see what Whippy Goldberg said? What'd she say? Whippy Goldberg said that Biden could arrest all the Republicans and put them in jail. You just need to see how unhinged this kind of thinking is.

Well, you know what Joe Biden could do? Joe Biden, you have to see it. Because it's so crazy on television. Find that, no, Jamie. Because it's so bo so but this look at a scenario where the Supreme Court says yes He has that he has all those rights. He is immune from everything. You know what Joe Biden could do since he is Presently president what? He could throw every Republican in jail. Yeah. I mean, he could.

Actually, no. This is not a good thing. What this means is he could do anything. That's not what it means at all. Yeah, no. But the fact that she says that so confidently, like, if you're willing to let Donald Trump use presidential immunity, that means Joe Biden could just go crazy and arrest all the Republicans. Because that's

what that means. No, that's not what that means, even a little bit. Yeah. Like you just add a whole bunch of stuff to what that means. I mean, in fairness though, I mean, the view has to be, you know, if you average out the view hosts among the dumbest people on television. And it's like they say the thing that people are thinking but they say it very directly so they expose whatever truth but... I don't think some of them are dumb. You don't think so? No, I think Sunny Hosen's dumb. You think it's deliberate? I think she's ideologically

driven and they have blinds, blinders on for sure. I don't think Sonny's dumb, but Whoopi is certainly not the brightest person. And what she just said just doesn't make any sense. It's just like so silly to say. It's not a well thought out. It's like if you had an idea for a premise and you're like it was totally baked and half baked and you went on stage with it and just fucking,

it's nothing there. Just go for it, yeah. Yeah, it's nothing there. Sometimes comics do that for fun. The other question is then, is that representative of a big constituency? I think probably yes. Well, a lot of people-

MSNBC viewers are probably also thinking how are we gonna- I don't even think the MSNBC viewers, I think they're a little bit more sophisticated than that. This is like low information, blue no matter who, like older housewives who are mad at the world. That's the appeal that Whoopi Goldberg has. Does Whoopi have children?

No idea. It's interesting too, like really politically motivated older women who don't have children. It's, they're very specific. You can kind of guess the way they think I Would like to see like what the stats are on Older post menopausal Women with no children and how they lean politically. Yeah college educated. Yeah My fans being male

Yeah, exactly. It's like Ocean blue. I mean, the depths of that. Yeah. And because the women that I know that are Republican, they're almost all moms. It's kind of wild. Well, there's a lot of young, like, hot Republican women that are social influencers now too, which is hilarious. Yeah.

It's fun. It's fun to see like these trends. You see them in things where people realize, oh, this is the past of success. I'm going to be a black Trump supporter. Totally. They just run with it. Yeah, you see a little bit of that but I feel like With a lot of moms that I know that were like hippies They were like and then they had kids and they're like fuck this like immediately like a buddy of mine's mom who was like Super fucking left wing, full on

leftist, she had kids and then the riots and COVID and all the chaos. She's like, fuck this. I get red pilled so many of those folks. They're just not talking about it. They don't talk about it outwardly because they're real uncomfortable with being ostracized and being yelled at, with groups of their old friends that are single, that still live in Los Angeles. Especially if you're certain ideological hubs, like fucking Silver Lake, there's these spots where you can't escape.

Dude, I lived in Topanga Canyon for a year. Oh boy, that's a good one. Yeah, that's a hub. I went to look at a house in the Panic Canyon, and the house had a tennis court. It was this beautiful house with a tennis court. I went, wow, that's really cool. So we're going through the house,

and we're checking out the kitchen and all this stuff. And then the neighbor just drops in, and she goes, if you buy this house, you're gonna let us use the tennis court, right? I go, what? She goes, the community uses the tennis court. I go, the community uses the tennis court that's in my fucking backyard if I buy this house I have to agree that like maybe I can't play tennis because you're playing tennis What the fuck are you talking about?

I gotta sign up on the list man But she like got in my face with like beads on and shit, you know like the whole deal like that But she didn't say it like, are you going? Like this is the community as traditionally allowed. Like we're like a really close knit group. You're going to love living here. Yeah. Really nice people.

But one thing I want to tell you is like, we all like to get together and play tennis back there. Do you think that would be okay if you bought this house? That would be a different conversation. Yeah. I'd be like, maybe I like this lady. Maybe look, Alice is out there playing tennis. Maybe we're friends, and maybe it's cool.

Like if I live next door to my buddy, and he was over there playing tennis, I'd be like, what's going on, man? What are you doing? What's happening? It'd be fun. It'd be like a cool thing to have your friends playing tennis in your yard.

Maybe this would be fun, but you're going to let us use the community's gonna use your tennis court, right? The eyes wide open. What if I get to use yours? Can I use your kitchen? Yeah, exactly. The fuck are you talking about, lady? Exactly, how am I gonna go your tennis court, right? The eyes wide open. Where do I get to use yours? Can I use your kitchen? The fuck are you talking about, lady? Exactly, how do I go fishing in your backyard? What are you saying?

What are you saying? It's a wild place, though, because it's like a time capsule. There's some old-timey hippies that I get along with. It's like, I love those people. I grew up around those people. Unless they want to use your tennis court. Yeah, yeah, but then it's like, oh, yeah. Can't use my tennis court.

I lived next to a guy. This guy, white dude from Georgia, went by like an Indian spiritual name. Oh nice. And he was, and this dude was, he set up a business called Live Water. So he was like repelling down like mountain sides, gathering like water and then selling it to all the rich,

like housewives down in the palisades. It was like living water. That was his- I'm waiting for the scam. Was there a scam? Oh yeah, the scam is like it's completely dangerous, right? But you know, he's like a well-meaning guy and then I mean he would walk around like he was a duplex we shared and I mean he would walk around just like no pants on, just totally

naked. Really? Yeah, he's like, what's up man? Just talking to you like it's just a normal conversation. Naked. Yeah. Normal conversation. And it's like, oh, good to see you, Mukande. Were you single at the time? I was single at the time. And he has a girlfriend there. They were making like nut butters and selling this raw water, you know, that's what they were doing. And they were like, yeah, you want to come to a tea ceremony tonight? It's like, yeah, I'll check that out, man. We'll go to tea ceremony.

And there was like a peaceful, hippied out California culture that was fine. Yeah. But the second you're like, yeah, now we want drag queens in schools. You're a bad person because your ancestors came from Europe. And by the way, we want to destroy the whole society. That's when I'm like, I'm going to tap out and now we're going to fight about it. Well, you know how you know that this is an ideologically driven thing that you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the gaze against

groomers movement. Because they attack those people, mercilessly. It's like, no, we are just homosexual men and we don't think that indoctrinating children, the way you're doing is right. It's not right. Like what you're doing is fucked up. Now it's supposed to be teaching kids about blowjobs when they're six. They don't need to know about sucking dick when they're six.

That's nuts. And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornograph- and then here's the thing. This one drove me bananas when they said the don't say gay. That it's a don't say gay law. And everybody kept repeating it. All these liberals that I know kept repeating it, says the don't say gay law. Nowhere in that law does it say don't say gay right?

That's not what it's about. It's about introduced and it's a very specific age group. It's about introducing sexually explicit Books to kids that are a certain age and they're calling it the don't say gay law and I'm gonna say it I'm gonna say gay gay gay. Yeah, wow You deserve a prize Again older women no kids. Yeah, wow. Yay! You deserve a prize. Again, older women, no kids, liberal, right? But that's not what the law said.

And, but for low information, viewers of the view, or listeners of MSNBC, and the people that kept repeating that, that don't say gay law over and over, they're like, wow, do you hear what they're doing in Florida? You can't say gay in school. Imagine being a gay kid, and you're in that that class and you can't even say you're gay. That's fucking nuts. Like, hey pal, we're talking about seven-year-olds.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's, yeah. And I did a bunch of reporting and the stuff that they're doing is like insane. It's not just, oh, teaching kids about sex, okay, fine, obviously they have to know certain biological realities that sooner or later we all figure out. But it was like artificial penis packers. That was a story I did. They were teaching like Chicago public school kids and middle school how to wear fake penis. Well in all fairness.

And then setting them up with the hormone clinics. But if they don't teach them that, who's going to teach them? That's right. The older guy down the street who runs by the hormone clinics. But if they don't teach them that, who's going to teach them? That's right. The older guy down the street who runs by in the van. Yeah. Come on in, I've got lessons. But it's like, I worked a lot on the policy in Florida and what it boils down to in Florida is a pretty simple thing.

There's been such a politicization and radicalization of gender theory in schools. The governor wisely just said, you know what? Let's just take that off the table. Let's focus on reading, writing, and math. Let's focus on a good civics curriculum so that we have real citizens that we're graduating from our public K through 12 schools. And then let's let families, churches, and private society determine for themselves what

they would like to teach their kids about these controversial issues, just take it off the table. No instruction on gender ideology, no instruction on, of course, the explicit kind of sexual materials beyond some reasonable, you know, considerations. And this to me is fair. You can't teach religion in schools, you know. They delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families, you know.

And so unless we want to have an all out fight all the time over these issues, like why is it even necessary? It's not. I have kids. Yeah, it's not necessary. I don't feel like a need for the school to teach them about these things. It's like we teach them at home, we talk about them, they naturally kind of learn and develop. And so I think that it is very wise to just say let's take it off the table, let's delegate

this back to people in their personal lives. That seems like a solution that everyone should agree with. Completely logical, unless you're dedicated to indoctrinating people into your movement. What is the don't say gay law? Let's be specific about that, just in case anybody tries to call us on this. So it was initially no teaching on gender identity and sexual orientation in K through three. Which is super reasonable.

It is super reasonable. And then it caused this massive uproar. And the legislator said, all right, we're just going to double down. Now it's K through 12. They're saying no gender identity, no sexual orientation, no explicit kind of pornographic materials in K through 12.

We're taking it totally off the table. And look, there is a reasonable argument to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it, maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there's more latitude. I'm like, okay, that's a reasonable consideration. But it's also eminently reasonable to just say, we're taking it all off the table. And just teach people. And just teach people what they need to know to be successful in life.

I'm sorry, but I had good teachers growing up. I had quite a few that I remember. I have a science teacher from seventh grade that to this day I think about fondly. He was a brilliant man and he taught me about wonder. I think about that guy. I've also had a gang of fucking morons who taught me, and I don't want that gang of morons teaching my children

about biological sex or gender or homosexuality or heterosexuality or oral sex or anal sex. I don't want to, nothing. No thank you. I don't want you teaching them anything about any of those things. I don't want you telling them that you're a Z-Zer. I don't want you pretending that you're a Foxkin.

I don't want any of that shit. If you're teaching history, I want you to teach what happened in 1943. I want you to teach math. This is how you count. This is how you divide. This is algebra. This is what you're supposed to be doing. That's what you're hired for. If you're a drag queen and you're not teaching how to be a drag queen, eh, that's

it. Exactly. That's what it means. If somebody wants to take drag queen courses, all for you. But I don't think you should be reading stories to little kids. It just seems fucking... It's one more factor that kid has to deal with totally yeah For what reason for what reason and and so inclusiveness That's bullshit. It's bullshit. It's bullshit Because it's not inclusive of many other perspectives traditional perspective or religious perspective of general kind of conservative perspective

Also, how much are you screening these drag queens? Well, not enough. Yeah. What is the odds that someone who's a man who likes to dress in drag has other problems? I mean, I'm not accusing all of them of having other problems. I'm sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women's clothes. Have at it.

Totally. Have a good time. However, there's a possibility that you might be a kanky freak. There's a real possibility if you're putting fake eyelashes on and 10 inch heels and you're calling yourself Miss Wanda and you're wearing fishnets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down,

or whatever they do, it's a possibility you might be out of your fucking mind. And if you're doing a drag show at a bar in the Castro, and that's a kind of subculture where they're all adults, they're all opting in, have a good time, knock yourself out, yeah, like totally fine. But it's like bringing that into the public schools with government funding, with other people's kids,

that's when I think reasonable people say no. Yeah, reasonable people should say no, and the people that don't say no think that they're going to be attacked for being bigoted if they do. But there's so many people that are like on the fence and scared and don't know what to do, and their kids are coming home with these wacky ideas, and they're like, what the fuck do I do? What do I do? And if you try to go to the school board meetings, you get labeled a domestic terrorist? This is insanity. You're just enforcing indoctrination and you're

just making sure that I comply. And that is a slippery slope, kids, because you might be getting your way right now doing this and you might think that you should be able to get your way. But what if someone else gets into office? What if there's a war? What if there's chaos? What if we have a military dictatorship? You've already established the rules. No one's going to give you those laws back. You've already set it so that the state and the government and the institutions can dictate

personal behavior and how people are allowed to communicate. If you've done that, you've fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control. And if you pay any attention to donors, you've fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control. And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize that the same donors don't need to both people. So what have you done? You've empowered the deep state to control your lives and make it easier to steal your money. Yeah. And the economics of it is also perilous, right? All of these systems are functionally insolvent, right?

University system, our federal budget. Federal budget, wild. It's just crazy. You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term. And so, look, as a political person, what I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have.

That's how it works. And so when there's the kind of hamas attacks and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy or it's the capture of K through 12 schools and the gender ideologies is going radical, you know, all of these problems also provide opportunities for correction, for reforms, for decentralizing some of these institutions. And I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society. You have this confrontation between Trump and Biden, but really between Trump and the entire state apparatus that's trying to jail him and prevent him from running for president.

You have a military budget and a federal budget more broadly that is running, you know, a trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. You have a K through, or rather a higher education system that is now, I think 1.6, 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt that the government has absorbed that's ready to blow up at any time. The 2020 was a wake-up call for many people. The next wake-up call is going to be 2020 100 times over. And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives that are listening should be figuring out what to do, how to best position themselves to be successful for

their families, for their careers, for whatever they're working on. And those of us who want to see deeper changes, you know, we're all preparing, we're all getting ready to say when the house of cards falls over and it's revealed that none of this is sustainable, the fundamentals of our country, institutional, financial, political cannot hold and they can't be covered over with ideology for anymore. We have to have responsible civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again. And I think that it may not be this election cycle, it may not be in a year, it may not be in two years, but by any vector, if you talk to people who really know, we're heading

towards a big shift. And I hope that we can emerge on the other side, just freeing ourselves from a lot of this ideological capture that I think is hurting people and hurting our country. I couldn't agree more. And just leave people the fuck alone and stop using this as a vector of control because that's what they're doing. And it's also- There's a problem with that though. The ideology, leave me alone, the kind of philosophical statement is correct. I believe in it. It's a kind of civic, Republican ideal. It's been the American way is give people the maximum autonomy to their lives, delegate to

civil society as much as you can. But we don't live in that world anymore. We have a massive federal bureaucracy. We have these huge institutions that control the culture. And so if you're arguing to be left alone, you're always going to be run over by people who don't want to leave you alone. The solution is not to then, you know, assume it and impose your vision, but you at least have to have people who are willing to fight the public fight because, you know, most people want to be left alone. They deserve that. But we need to have a leadership class, a kind of counter-elite capable of taking over these institutions that can then adopt the policies and administer the centralized institutions

to protect the average person. The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what's happening and fight the good fight. But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty to provide protection for the average person. The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions. Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and offering a plausible vision

for how that could be accomplished? I think very few people are thinking those terms and to me that's a shame. Well, it's also a shame that people that have these ideas are not willing to run for office because running for office is such a shit show. And you see what happens when anyone runs for office. It's just these attacks are merciless and ruthless. And it's all in your character and your past. And we saw it with Kavanaugh.

You see, you saw it with Joe Biden. You see it with everybody. You've been through it? Yeah, everybody's been through it. But obviously, I'm not running for office. But when they're trying to attack you and they're trying to do that, that discourages so many people that would be great leaders. But it's also now been accepted as a part of the political process.

But it's always been part of the political process. Yes. You go back to the history of the founding of the country, you can read Jefferson's letters and he's bitching about the press, slandering his character, like for decades. He's writing, he's still bitter about things that happened when he was dying in the early 1800s. He's still bitter about like some slanderous journalist who was impugning his character 30 years prior. And so, look, I've been through it to a certain extent.

You've been through it. That's the price. That's the price of admission. And so I think rather than lamenting the fact that it's this way, we need people and I certainly adopt this attitude and I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this. Remember COVID, they were calling him all sorts of names. They fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way. And as conservatives, I've estimated that we take somewhere between 100 to one and 1,000 to

one negative to positive stories in the press. That's just the ratio that we have to live with, 100 to one negative to positive. But what he taught me, and I think it's a valuable lesson for more people to understand, is he's saying, look, the people are smarter than the press. And so when we're fighting, when we're raising the issues, when we're getting attacked, when we're driving forward something that's the right thing to do, you'll be rewarded by the people later.

And so he won a very narrow election his first time. He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with history curriculum, whatever it is. The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20-point victory, unprecedented. And to me, that's a sign that when you take ownership, when you take courage, when you take the hits, and when you do the right thing, people are smart enough to sift through the lies, the propaganda, the suppression, the censorship, and reward you. I've certainly seen that in my own experience, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with people screaming at my kids, intimidating things.

You have to say, you have to make prudent decisions, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you can, you know, not get wiped off the board. But then once you get past that, what I found, when you get past that initial barrage, when you get through the gauntlet, you feel freedom. You feel this incredible sense of you've survived, you've gotten to the other side, and now people can't hurt you because they've tried, they've failed, and now you have the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom to do what you want, the freedom to chart your own path.

But until you get through that barrage, I don't think that you're free at all. And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige are sometimes desperately holding on to that. They want to protect it as much as they can. But I think what happens is they become, they go through life and they get to a point where they'll finally speak out if this happens, if that happens, if the cost is lower. You end up kind of wasting away your life and your opportunities. And so my goal, and for the past year especially, is to radicalize America's elites, to show them the problems that our country is facing,

and to summon them to courageous action to fix it. Because as we get people who have something to lose, when they start talking, people listen. And so I live on a small farm in rural Washington state. There's only so much I can do personally. But certainly with the book that I wrote, with the articles that I'm doing, with the media engagement that I'm trying to drive. What I found is that the attitude among America's elites, finance, tech, entertainment,

have changed dramatically in the last few years. And we just have to get them over that hump so that they're saying the things that they tell you in private and tell me in private, when you have those conversations, I would just recommend just say, hey, what about saying that publicly? People don't want to lose their jobs. But these are people who are, you know, they don't have jobs. They're titans of finance. They're people in prestigious positions. They're kind of university professors with tenure protections.

People are scared. They really are. They're scared of repercussions. How do we get them to cross over that fear? We have to make it less fearful. We have to make it more common. And I think these conversations happen and more of them happen and more people listen to them and it changes people's perspective and they realize that

this is kind of dangerous and that there's real urgency involved here. This could really go sideways for us. And there's a lot of factors that are trying to force it into going sideways and not all of them are domestic. There's a lot going on with social media influence that's 100% manufactured. There's manufactured arguments, manufactured dissent. There's a lot of manufactured conflict that happens online that we have documented very clearly. It's coming from Russian troll farms. It's coming from various different Eastern Bloc countries. It's coming from China. It's coming from all troll farms, it's coming from various different Eastern Bloc countries,

it's coming from China, it's coming from all over the place. It has an effect on us, whether we like it or not, and it certainly has an effect on young people. It certainly has an effect on self-censorship, it certainly has an effect on stifling dissent. It has an impact. They attack people, and they attack people with thousands of trolls. They know what they're doing doing and it's very effective. And if you pay attention to your comments, you're going to get run over by it.

And it's... Yeah, you had never read the comments. Can't read them. Can't read them. Some of them are nonsense. I read comments on other people's stuff sometimes when someone writes something controversial and I'll just go, that seems crazy to say. Let me go to that person.

And that's a, you know, A, B, Z, 2, 2, 2, 1, 5, 6. That's a fake person. It's a fake person that got a Twitter profile. And now there's just- It's like a guy in an Eastern Bloc country with 1,000 phones that he's kind of- It might not even be that anymore. I believe it's probably AI.

I mean, with the ubiquitous use of chat GPT and all these different things, you could easily attack a tweet in a progressive fashion and you could give it parameters of how to attack it and what to say. And you could distribute that en masse, give me 45 different versions of this attack and they'll give you 45 different versions of it. I think that's probably true, but I think that in my opinion, I think we overestimate the potential influence of kind

of foreign operators. Foreign operators don't know the language of American ideologies. You don't think that's easy to learn? No. I think it's actually a little difficult to learn because even if you look at kind of Chinese, kind of CCTV, which is the national Chinese broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they're actually trying to push, it's like awful. Have you seen the movies? It's like not persuasive at all. Have you seen the movies? kind of CCTV, which is the national Chinese broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they're actually trying to push, it's like awful.

It's like not persuasive at all. Have you seen the movies? The movies are amazing. The movies are amazing, yeah. And those are commercial enterprises. But I actually think it puts the real kind of villains off the hook. It's not them, it's really us. It's the people who run our institutions domestically, who set policy for YouTube and other platforms.

That's probably the bigger factor. I think it's a bigger factor. Because if you can have people organically talking about things, which you do on Twitter, and when you see the things that are happening on Twitter, so a lot of it's very distasteful. You'll see some very racially charged, frankly racist arguments about things, just openly discussed. People agreeing with them openly and it's like, whoa, lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that and it's just like, man, but the opportunity for other people

to successfully counter those statements exists too. The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid. You know, take into consideration that, take into consideration this, you don't know about that, you don't know about this. What you're saying is nonsense. And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring

in favor of blocking hate speech. The problem with blocking hate speech is, you block the potential condemnation of hate speech. The problem with blocking hate speech is you block the potential condemnation of hate speech. You block the potential intellectual battle between morons, I believe stupid shit, and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb. And this is all good for the viewer. This is all good for people, the young minds and the people that are easily influenced and the people that are on the fence and the people that hadn't taken into consideration this perspective or that perspective.

That's what free speech is supposed to be all about. The answer to bad speech has always been better speech. It's always been the case. But when you got people that will ban your account, if you use a person's name that they used to have when they were a man but now they're a woman so you dead name them so you made up this thing at the same time when you have the fucking Taliban on Twitter you're insane you're an insane person and Elon has done a service for the entire human race by

purchasing that platform. And I do not say that lightly. I do not say that flippantly. Him purchasing Twitter is one of the most important things that's ever happened to us in terms of pushback, in terms of just recognizing like this is insane to tell people that they have to abide by your insanely rigid ideology that doesn't make sense. It's not logical. And if they don't, they can no longer participate in the discussion.

They're removed from the town square. That's bonkers. I remember even, you know, Andrew Tate, who I think is like obviously very self-evidently a bad person. I don't think that he's a good model for young men. But I remember he didn't call for terrorist violence. He didn't say anything extremely racist, I don't think, that I saw at least. And I remember just it was like one day he's nuked from every online platform simultaneously. Yeah.

And I say, what, you don't have to like the guy, you don't have to agree with the guy. But the fact that all of these companies can set off a little cascade where you can disappear someone from the internet overnight. Oh, Milo Unopolis. Milo Unopolis was the first one. Yeah, they really silenced him. That guy was a powerful voice. And he was nuked from the discourse. Also in real life, very nice. In real life, hilarious, very smart, very nice. Every time I met him, he was cool. He was playing a character and I think

there's a lot of drugs involved as well. Yeah, but he was certainly playing a character that had good points Yeah, he was playing this character that was this like right-wing gay guy who liked to talk about sex and drugs And I was like this guy's fascinating But they decided that he was problematic and they fucking erased him they memory hold him That guy was on Bill Maher and Bill Maher compared him to Christopher Hitchens. Remember that? Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, and then he got attacked by some other guy on the show, told him, fuck you.

And there was a lot of fuck you with that guy. There's a lot of drama. But that's what he liked. He liked that. And he was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere. And I think they erased him particularly. The first part was his criticism of Ghostbusters and Then he was

criticizing the new all-female cast of Ghostbusters Saying how sexist it is and every man's a moron and the women saved the day and how ridiculous it is and Then he got into it with Leslie Jones. So Leslie Jones and him got into it And I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones. What was it exactly? I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was something racist or something gross or something unflattering, something.

And people were tweeting it at her and they were blaming him and Then they got rid of him. He's gone. Did they just say oh, it's mobilizing harassment or something. Oh, that was that's I'm I can't believe I forgot this. It's what started is him Justifying himself being sexually molested by older men when he was young and he was saying on my show But he was the predator. He on my show that he was the predator he was trust me I was the predator he was the seducing yeah you know first of all anybody doesn't think that my own unambulance is gay as I their fucking mind like that you think that's a choice that's not a choice that dude's fucking gay okay baked in by the universe he is yeah that is like the

prime example that I always throw in the face of people who it's usually for religious reasons who are unwilling to Accept biological reality like here's some biological reality for you. You want to know this the first video ever captured of humpback whales mating was just recently Filmed and they're both male nice was just recently filmed, and they're both male. Nice. So the first evidence that we have of humpback whales engaging in sexual intercourse is gay sex.

Humpback, huh? Yeah, they had to go real. Listen, humpbacks are mammals, humpbacks are intelligent, humpbacks likely are gay. There's probably, if they exist in us Why would they not exist in other intelligent mammals that are on earth with us like dolphins? I'm sure there's gay dolphins. There's probably gay workers. It's probably normal. It's probably there's a percentage in Every population that's gay who gives a fuck

the point is that like that guy's gay, right? And he claims that he was the predator and everyone's like, oh my god, he's normalizing pedophilia. If he had just tried that today, it would have been a minor attracted person. He would be celebrated. I mean, he'd be... Oh, but this guy was minor attracted and I was a minor and it was fine. He needs to come back as a drag queen. But he would say like now, like literally in the amount of time from him being canceled to today, that statement is not nearly as controversial.

Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah. And look, you don't have to agree or disagree with the statement. That's irrelevant. It's something that is within the bounds. Look, if you're calling for the Harvard example, the genocide of all Jews around the world,

you should be banned from social media platforms. That is a prudent limit that I think we can all agree on. But on more nuanced issues or more... I mean, even if you take it at face value, I think he's probably going for shock value. 100%, but also he was telling an anecdotal story about how, it was on another podcast that I believe he said this, that it plays a very important role in young gay men to have an older gay mentor.

I have no fucking dog in this race. I don't, you know, I don't know. But I do know that I feel very differently about a sexual predator that's a man that targets girls. Like if I found out that a football coach was targeting young 14 and 15 year old girls, I would be furious. If I found out a hot teacher, usually from Florida, with a push up bra,

was banging all the high school football kids I'm laughing is a little different. I think it's funny. Yeah, you know why because I think those kids are gonna be fine They're gonna be legends Zack Alvin acts out a fucking amazing joke one of them died his friends high-fived him to death I Think that's Zach. But this is because people want to pretend that there's no difference between men and women. Right.

That's all it is. It's like everyone wants to pretend that's true. It's obviously not true. And of course, the football coach who's like a pervert going against the young girls, that's a totally different scenario. It is a different scenario, but also the lady who's blown all the high school football kids also shouldn't be a teacher. Yeah, yeah.

You have to get her out there. Fire immediately. Yeah. Get rid of her. She should be doing porn or something. Yeah. But the point is, it's like, if he's talking about his life, that, and saying that this was his choice and that he wanted this, that the

issue is not with him. The issue is with the man who did that to him. Right? Right? So he's not, he's literally talking about his own personal experience. That memory hold them. It's not, he's saying, he's not saying, hey, I should be able to go to high schools and pick up 14-year-olds because they want it. Okay. Yeah. Now we're talking a different thing. We're talking about a guy who's Hey, I should be able to go to high schools and pick up 14-year-olds because they want it. Okay. Yeah now We're talking a different thing. We're talking about a guy who's advocating pedophilia, right? This is different. We're taught he's he was merely talking about his own life and that's how Rabbit everybody was to get rid of him and it was at that point effective

And I think that became a problem because once it became effective, then they became emboldened. It's like the Alex Jones argument when people say, yeah, bad Alex Jones. And everyone's like, hey, hey, hey, this is a fucking very slippery slope. Because if you want to ban everybody who's made disinformation and put it out publicly, how's Rachel Madhouse still on? How's she still on? Everybody's seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine. That's insanity. The government, I mean. Yeah. How are they still on? Everybody's seen that video of her talking about the COVID vaccine. That's insanity.

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

If you say that Operation Northwoods was a document drawn up and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was going to attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans to start a war and you say that on your show, people will go, you're a fucking crazy person. How are you allowing these? No, no, no. You have to be able to have someone come on and say, hey, actually, this is true. And then you realize like, oh, wait a minute,

some conspiracies are real. And if you silence this one guy that calls out all of them, because he fucked up on one, you're also limiting his ability to call out the ones that are legitimate. And you're talking about a guy who's doing this all day long, every day. That's all he does. All he does is looking-

And he's out there. I mean, he's an out there personality. He's out there. That's why he's fun. But he's out there talking about the World Economic Forum. I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it again. He told me about Jeffrey Epstein over a decade before anybody was in the news. He was telling me that there was this operation and they take these guys, five pro five public figures and a lot of politicians and they compromise them with young girls. It's like, what on an island?

What is this fucking ABC after school movie? That's crazy, that sounds nuts. And then now everybody knows it's true. And there's been a ton of those from him infiltrating Bohemian Grove and catching these fucking wackos and heads of state burning in effigy in front of an owl god. Like what the fuck, that's real? The video he did with John Ronson in the 90s.

So it's like all of this stuff at a certain point in time needs to be out there. And people need to find out what's real and what's not real. What's real. And the only way to find out what's real is not to silence everybody who says something that's incorrect. It's to let people talk it out. So when someone gets on there and says, the earth's hollow and there's fucking aliens inside shooting laser beams, let's like talk to geologists and have them explain to you

that they would be boiling in lava. Like they don't live in the center of the earth. We know what the earth's made out of we know all the planets This is how we know this is why we know the earth is round because every fucking body of mass as it's spinning around it Could be it takes on that fucking form all the planets every one of them. This one's not unique There's also an element of this is part of American folklore. Yes, if you believe that the world is flat, it's obviously false Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous crazy thing to believe and yet having a group of you know Flat Earthers in our broader society provided that they're not like given power over, you know the NASA or something

adds texture and Rick richness to our, even if they're totally wrong. And so what we're having is we're trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds. It actually ends up breaking this great proliferation of culture, some of it which is good, some of bad, some of it's crazy, some of it's insightful. But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue. It's not really even about censorship. It's about power and the distribution of power. If you stack up all of the people who have been kind of nuked from orbit online on the

right and then on the left, you have a graph that looks about like this. And so you have to then say, well, why is that? Who's making the decisions? How are decisions being made? And who are they going after? What views are they trying to suppress? And so again, getting it out of the realm of the abstract debate and into the realm of a political analysis

gets us to this uncomfortable point. This was happening during Trump. Trump was president and this was still happening. And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it. And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, more quirky people, more people that are way out there, my old naked neighbor in Topanga, like, let the guy speak. Agreed. If he believes that we have to have live water and it's like the average person is not going

to be persuaded and the view is not correct, but the broader culture suffers when everyone is fearing that if they step outside of the box that they're going to get crushed. And conservatives, you know, we get all worked up about it because, look, every political faction has their fringe. We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition. But you have to figure out what's, you know, harmful and what's relatively harmless. And a lot of these folk beliefs and superstitions, if you take them not to condemn people as stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but you actually talk to people and try to get a sense of why do you believe this, it's usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness

and even the WEF kind of thinking, they want to believe that there's someone out there that is calling the shots, that is the problem that is controlling the society, because they feel that just by identifying a single point, they have a sense of understanding, a sense of power. I actually don't think that that's the case. I think it's misleading. I don't think it's the right way to look at it. But I try to also forgive people to say people are entitled to their superstitions.

We all have superstitions. And we want a society where superstitions are eradicated. But you actually end up getting rid of a lot of the texture and a lot of the variety of culture when you try to have a hygienic treatment of culture. You treat culture like a disease, like a Petri dish culture. You treat culture like a disease, like a Petri dish culture. And look, I think like, go as far out as you want, like go wild with it.

You know, be respectful of all the rules, you know, maintain some core commitments, but you know, I'm always fascinated with those characters. I lived in Topanga, I lived in Berkeley, like you meet these people all over. You've lived in these kind of places. Yeah, I have. For the 99 times out of 100, they're harmless. They should just be tolerated and respected. Well, I think it's an important part of how I grew up. I lived in San Francisco from

age 7 to 11, and we lived in a super gay neighborhood. Our down stories, stairs neighbor used to, these gay guys that would get stoned with my aunt and they would play bongos naked. Because she could play bongos naked with these gay guys. They didn't give a fuck about her. They were just into playing bongos naked. They would just get really high. And it was the anti-war movement days. And so I lived around that and then I moved to Florida, to Gainesville, which is very conservative. It was really interesting to watch like I've talked about this before but I had this friend who was Cuban His name is candy and his dad was like super homophobic and he was so mad He slammed the paper down on the table. He's like these fags want to get married and I was like what I

Was like, what do you care? That's so weird. They're just playing the bongos. It was so weird when he said it. I was like, what? I was like, what do you care? Like, that's so weird. They're just playing the bongos. It was so weird when he said it. I was like, what? I mean, I remember very clearly, I was 11 at the time, and I was just blown away. I'm like, do you not know any gay people? This is crazy. Like, what do you care? Like, if you're not gay, why do you care if they get married? But I didn't say it because I was 11. I was like, ooh, I just wanted to be quiet. But it burned in my head that I had gone from San Francisco in the 1970s, which was like this very open-minded, hippie-dominated culture of music and art. And then all of

a sudden I was in Gainesville, Florida. And I was around this guy. I was angry that gay people wanted to get married. I think the question, if you look at the cultural left of San Francisco at that time, I think it's always a question of proportion. You can have a successful, interesting, functioning society where you have a portion of people who are the, you know, getting stoned and banging the bongos. Okay, fine. The problem is though that when it becomes out of proportion, when that ideology, that kind of elimination of prohibition or limits

or constraints becomes the dominant policymaking regime. That works when it's a counterculture. Right. Right. The kind of left wing, and look, I come from the left. I was a radical leftist. I was a Gramscian Marxist. You know, so I know that world intimately. What made you take a turn? You know, I wanted to get into politics. My political formation was from my father's side.

Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists. And so that was like my political upbringing. I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and seeing like the books on their shelf. And I was like, oh, I have this beautiful collection of bound books. And I talked to my aunt and I say, oh, what is this? What is this book? And it's like, oh, this is the collected works of Lenin. You know, like not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.

And so that was my political formation. I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics. The first thing that really kind of disillusioned me was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man. It's not to uplift the downtrodden, it's about maintaining their own status and prestige with the institutions. It's like a McKinsey consultant kind of worldview with the trappings of the left. It's the Harvard student who's wearing the Palestinian keffiye, who then goes on to become an investment

banker. And it's like, to me, it was so phony. I mean, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit. The second thing that really changed me, I spent five years, well first I traveled around the world making documentaries. I saw how Marxist and Communist governments actually work out in practice, not great. And then I made a film for PBS of all places, looking at three of America's poorest cities.

And my, by then kind of center left views, which was, oh, you know, the great society, you know, public welfare programs, trying to help people. When you actually see how those programs manifest in the South Side of Memphis, South Side of Youngstown, South Side of Stockton, California, the poorest places in the country, you realize that many of those ideals that are presented to you as care, compassion, concern, equality, you know, reparations for our racial past are at best cynical and at worst deeply destructive to the people that they're supposed to help. And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about

people's lives and then how politics affects them. And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster, even if rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good. And then the final change was in the run-up and then after 2020. I mean, 2020 radicalized me because you realized how profound this cultural capture is and you realized that the consequences are no longer abstract,

they're no longer just destroying, you know, poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state. But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes. This is something that wants total domination. And so I got canceled out of my documentary career. Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution. And then it's like I'm out, kind of funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast distribution, and then it's like I'm out, kind of, launching to the wilderness, like, all right, well, that career is done, what do I do next? And then say, all right, well, let's get into politics,

let's use some of the skills that I've developed as a filmmaker. I'm not a traditional conservative, like I'm not a college Republican, I don't own a bow tie. Do you have a bow tie? I think you have to have a bow tie. But if you're a gay guy, you can have a bow tie and be super left. That's true. There's nuance to it. But what I realize is that the conservative principles are sometimes expressed awkwardly,

are sometimes articulated poorly, but there's some deep truths that need to be resurrected and recovered for us to be successful again. And so I threw in my lot with people that I would never have imagined being friends and allies and colleagues with growing up. It's like this huge shift politically. And I think it's been helpful because if you know how your political opponents think, you have a huge advantage. And the left kind of elite, academic leftists in the United States have no idea what conservatives think.

They have zero curiosity about it. And so that affords us a kind of advantage because they don't know how we think, how we operate, what our principles are. They just assume the worst. So I kind of wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and saying, in odd way, you're fighting for people that are actually voiceless. The left is the dominant voice of the country, of all of our institutions, of all of our tech companies.

The voice that really is voiceless are the people who are supposedly the oppressors. You have this book that just came out, White Rural Rage, you know, bullshit. You know, rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly. And so I just try to think in those terms always. And I've taken over some of the tactics

of the left, some of the maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful. You know, just this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige, they give all this rhetoric about helping the oppressed, the underprivileged, the whatever is the kind of term of the day, but they're actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status. I find that a betrayal of true left principles. And I don't think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal up close and personal and really want to fight against, I want to destroy that.

I want to take all of those people who are selling a bill of goods to the people who are struggling in this country under these principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it's just about having a tenured position, having a feather-bedded job, being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone but themselves. I think that that is... It's such a betrayal of the principles of the left but really the principles of the country. And I think the way you're explaining it, particularly in the desire to have a richness of culture and not have rigid rules and to have the openness to have basically anybody, just be who you are, but recognize that being captured by this

ideology that supposedly supports you, it's doing it for its own means. It's doing it for a very specific purpose, and it's not doing it to support you it's using these ideas and principles as Camouflage to sneak in through your defenses and it's dangerous and it's creepy and it's weird How effective it is and that's why I'm really happy that you're out there And I'm really happy that you can lay it down So articulately and express, especially coming from your background of being a guy who grew up that way, grew up leftist, to be able to

express it. I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I'm happy that you're out there. I appreciate that. Yeah, and likewise, I mean, what I think is so special about what you do is that you're talking about culture and politics, society, business, for people who aren't in that bubble. I operate in a political bubble every day.

But what you've built, and I think it's a testament to the possibilities of the internet, you don't have to be an ABC, NBC, CBS, talking head. You don't have to have the massive studio lights and the eight layers of makeup. You're doing something that's real and people have really responded to that. And I think that it's a reflection of something that we need more of. We have an artificial culture that is trying to take over. Yeah, propped up by corporations. Exactly.

And the people that are talking about these things aren't even necessarily interested in these things. And that also resonates with the people that listen and watch. I don't have people on that I don't want to talk to. I just have people on that I'm only interested in talking to. And if you can do that and you're actually interested, that's contagious. And these principles that we're talking about and this thing that you're, the way you're laying it out, it's important for people even to consider themselves leftists to just consider what you're saying.

Because it's for you too. It's for everybody that we can't let this happen. It's for all ideas. It's for gay people, straight people, trans people, white people, black people, Asians. It's for everybody. The reason the founding fathers of this country set all these checks and balances in place is because they didn't want anyone to get total complete control over the people. And that's what's happening right now. And if you don't wake up to it and you think it's okay because your side is winning, you're actually anti-American. That's right. And it creates this winner take all danger.

And I don't wanna see either side have that complete control because that's either side. That's not what we want, that's not good in the country. We need to have a healthy left and a healthy right. Yeah, and healthy is the right perspective. There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right, and There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warmhearted people that are on the right. And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warmhearted people that are on the left. And because they have this idea in their head that they're on the good side and these people

are on the bad side, you don't consider that these are just human beings that think about things differently than you. And that is the only way we're all going to get along, is if we realize they're just human beings that think about things differently and we should be able to engage with those people peacefully. It used to be you could sit down with a conservative person or you could sit down with a liberal person and you might not agree with them, but you could have a friendly discussion and it doesn't have to be a hate-filled attack on your very humanity because you don't think X or Y.

It's just like that's not good for anybody. People don't even want to debate. I don't know if you've come across it, but 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this culture of debate. Left and right got together. They hashed it out. I've challenged people to debates. People try to set up debates and it's like we don't even talk, even in a confrontational way, conflict of visions.

It's like everyone in their corner, everyone's trying to make the play. And I think that's too bad. I think we need more, actually more friction is good. The more public friction, engagement, debate will get to that point where it's like, all right, we're up on stage debating, but then we go to the green room and we can talk about kids, music, sports, whatever it is. Everything. And just be a nice person.

It's not that hard to do. It's not that hard to do. It's rewarding. It's good for everybody. Christopher, I appreciate you, man. Thank you very much for being here and being so articulate about this. It's very enjoyable to listen to you. You're on top of it and I think you make some great points.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate you. Alright, tell everybody you're social and all that jazz where they can... Sure, yeah. You can follow me on Twitter at realchrisrufo. I have a sub-stack. It's christenforrufo.com. And I have a New York Times bestselling book,

America's Cultural Revolution, that tells the history of the radical lefts, long march through the institutions, available everywhere. All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Bye, everybody.