The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 435. This Is One of the Biggest Medical Malpractice Scandals in History | Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with bestselling author and journalist Michael Shellenberger to discuss the shocking revelations now being published in the WPATH Files. Michael Shellenberger is a climate activist, journalist, and bestselling author. He has covered climate for over 30 years, as well as AI, emergent technologies, the Twitter Files, and most recently, the WPATH files.  - Links - 2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/    For Michael Shellenberger: On X https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1764799914918490287?s=20 On Substack https://substack.com/@shellenberger The WPATH Files Official Document https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files 

Hello everybody! I'm talking today with journalist and author Michael Schellenberger. Michael wrote Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, and also San Francisco. There's a new book coming out called Pathocracy. It won't launch until next year. But I'm talking to him today about something more specific and more controversial, I suppose. And that's his recent release of the so-called WPATH files. Now WPATH is the arguably an association, but certainly not professional and also an organization that has like nothing to do whatsoever with health.

And so we walked through his release of about 170 pages of material, documenting the activities of this group. It's important because this association has issued the guidelines upon which the more established medical, psychological, psychiatric communities have predicated their analysis of the gender dysphoria phenomenon. It's a way of thinking about it, and from whom they've taken advice about proceeding with this absolutely atrocious sterilization and butchery that the medical community and the counseling community have become complicit in, in what?

Complicit in criminally propagating. How about that? Right. So we're, we're going to discuss all that and we're going to see what happens as a consequence. So come on board for the ride. You were instrumental in the release of the so-called WPATH files very recently. And you keep dumping catastrophes into the public sphere. Yeah.

Yeah. Who knew that would be your role? But you seem to be playing it very effectively. So why don't you tell us what's, clue is in, man. Take us from the talk. Well, sure. So this is the organization in question is called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and it's

called WPATH. And it's an organization I hadn't heard of until a source or sources gave me about 170 pages of the internal files from the discussion boards of WPATH, along with about a 90-minute video of WPATH leaders and members talking about some of the problems they were encountering. And so what you're seeing in these files, and I encourage people to read the files themselves, there's really no substitute for confronting the evidence directly,

what you see are conversations about how to treat or mistreat, I think I would say, people who are experiencing gender distress as ages as young as 10 years old, 14 years old. There's a discussion of a 13-year-old adolescent with developmental delays. There's a conversation about whether to perform genital surgeries on somebody that's suffering from symptoms like schizophrenia and maybe homeless. Concerns expressed about whether that person would build a care for their wound, supposedly a neo-vagina.

Sorry to get right into it right away, but this is the material we're discussing. There's a lot of conversations about the problems they have in getting kids and adolescents and their parents to understand that these procedures will result in sterilization and likely a loss of sexual function. The picture that this organization, WPATH, had presented to the world and to the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics,

the Endocrine Society, every major medical organization was a picture of real professionalism grounded in the best available science and evidence. They have something called standards of care, which are ostensibly guidelines for proper medical care for people suffering from so-called gender dysphoria, gender distress. And they're in their eighth version of that, so they call it standards of care

eight or SOC eight. Based on their public presentation, you would think that this is a serious scientific and professional body. It is not. When you read these documents, what you see is a lot of spitballing, a lot of people making things up. You don't see a lot of

references to what's in the standards of care. But even if you did, you would learn that what's in the standards of care is effectively pseudoscience. There is no evidence base to support these radical interventions which is puberty blockers, standards of care is effectively pseudoscience. There is no evidence base to support these radical interventions, which is puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, meaning testosterone for females and estrogen for males, and then surgeries, both they euphemistically refer to as top

and bottom surgeries, and people can understand that's what we're talking about breast elimination, double mastectomies for girls as young as 13, 14, 15 years old, and genital surgeries, which are, of course, irreversible, including on adolescents. It's extremely shocking to read these conversations. There's so much to unpack in them. I think there's a kind of horror to it that for people like me that have tried to stay away from this for a long time, I've certainly heard you talk about it and seen you write about it. I'd read Abigail Shrier's book. But honestly, my psychological reaction until I was confronted with these files and asked

to effectively bring them into the world was of denial. I just didn't really think that these things were going on at the scale at which they're occurring. I thought maybe people were exaggerating what's happening. These files put to rest any doubts anybody should have that what is happening is one of the greatest medical mistreatment scandals in human history, in recorded human history. It might be the worst. It's certainly up there with lobotomies. It's up there with the Tuskegee experiments. It's way worse than both of those.

I think you may be right. It's so bad. And so there's a lot to unpack, but anyway, that's an overview of it. It's 170 pages, the video. Oh, the one final thing I'll say, Jordan, is just that it also shows without shadow of a doubt that they themselves, the people that are performing these mistreatments, are aware that they are not getting what's called informed consent. This is as important

as do no harm. So, they are acknowledging that the kids and the parents don't understand that. And then they just sort of throw up their hands and they say, well, yeah, we don't really know how to solve this problem. At no point in the video does anybody say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. It's a truly, just from the, you know, there's a basic horror to it, but then at the intellectual level,

you can't help but be slightly fascinated by these people. What is wrong with them that they're so in the grip of an ideology that they're so in the grip of an ideology that they're doing these mistreatments and never questioning, effectively never questioning that perhaps they shouldn't be doing them at all? Yep. Okay, so let's walk through that, right through everything you said. So we're going to start with the professional association. OK, so it turns out, apparently, that all you have to do to become a professional association

that other professional associations can rely on is to call yourself a professional association. And the way you finesse that, if you aren't actually a professional association, which means you're not a group of scientists and you're not qualified to be doing what you're doing, is to proclaim as loudly as you can that you're operating on behalf of someone who's oppressed. Because then it becomes a moral crime to question anything you say. And so that means if you're an absolute bloody narcissistic piker who's also incompetent, the best way to clamber yourself to the top of a hierarchy that would otherwise be unattainable is to lie about who you are and what you're doing. So great.

So that's a wonderful invitation to the willfully blind narcissistic psychopaths. Okay. So that accounts for WPATH. And then with regards to the medical associations and the psychological associations who've gone along with this in the most despicable, imaginable way, well, they can point to the fact that they consulted the true experts. And who more to know than those with lived experience in the area, right? So, great, we've got all sorts of excuses at hand. Okay, so that's appalling on the

professional side. And what it really is, is the invasion of, what would you say, domains of specialization that once required effort by parasites who use ideology to game the system. So great. Now, that's the American Psychological Association, that's the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and it's certainly WPATH. Inexcusable. I've never seen anything like this. I'm absolutely appalled and ashamed of my therapist colleagues, for example, of not being rioting in the streets because of this. That brings us to the next issue in your progression, because then you describe gender distress. Okay, so let's think about that. Two words, gender and distress. Okay. Right. Distress is indistinguishable from two things, generalized negative emotion and absence of positive emotion.

Okay, so that's the core for depression and anxiety, and it's the core set of symptoms for virtually every form of pathology that comes to the attention, not only of psychologists, but also of medical professions. Right? So, distress is a very, very large bin. And what you do if you're a credible diagnostician is you assume to begin with that the more generalized diagnosis applies, depression and anxiety, and then you further specify that as necessary. Understanding that a lot of what you might attribute to the more specialized problem is actually a manifestation of the more general problem. Right?

Because one question is, is well what the hell is the difference between gender distress and anxiety and depression? And the answer is mostly nothing. Mostly nothing. And so maybe there's something left over that's specific to something like body dysmorphia, but probably not. And you need pretty solid proof that there is something in addition.

And then, see, that's another part of the sleight of hand because you might say, well, people with gender dysphoria are more likely to commit suicide. It's like, no, depressed and anxious people are more likely to commit suicide. You have to demonstrate that there's an additional utility in your diagnostic label. And that turns out to be extremely difficult. But we're way past all that.

Okay, so now then we have the additional lie, so we've mucked up the notion of distress. Now we've appended another lie to it. Some of this distress is attributable to confusion about gender. There's no difference about confusion between confusion about gender and confusion about identity. Right? Those are the same thing. And everybody who seeks psychological treatment has confusion about identity. That's why they seek treatment. So you can't just take all that and rename it gender and think that you can get away with it, although apparently you can.

So that's appalling on the conceptual side. It's inexcusable. There's no reason whatsoever that any psychologist or physician who's been trained remotely in the mental health sciences should ever fall for that, even for a second, no matter what, but they did. Okay, next, next, and this is the progression that you laid out. Okay, so now we have gender distress as

delineated by a pack of professionals who aren't professional and who aren't a pack and are certainly not a professional association. And what do they recommend? They don't recommend the minimal necessary intervention. So the clinical literature six years ago was absolutely clear with regard to the small number of cases of gender dysphoria that emerged in early childhood. Very rare. One in 3,000. Very rare.

Leave them the hell alone. Right. Till they're 18. Yeah. Most of them turn out to be gay. And 90% of them, and the existence of that final 10% is highly debatable, accept the physical reality of their embodiment.

Right, so the rule is don't do anything stupid. Now, the man who established that, who was the, what's it, Ken Zucker, right, he ran the best journal that dealt with childhood gender dysphoria for years up in Toronto. That was his recommendation for treatment, and the bloody radicals ran him out of business 10 years ago, right. That's when all this idiocy started up in Toronto,

which bloody well figures. Okay, so now you're not supposed to do anything. Right? Just wait. Bad treatment is worse than no treatment. Okay? But no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do the opposite. We're going to take the most extreme possible imaginable surgical intervention. And then we're going to combine that with the most extreme possible imaginable hormonal intervention. And then we're going to recommend that and we're going to tell people that if they don't listen, their children are going to die, right?

They're going to commit suicide, which is a complete bloody lie. There was never a bit of evidence for that. Not even bad evidence. It was just a lie. And then, and then, top it all off, we're going to offer this absolutely cataclysmic treatment with unimaginably dire consequences

to people who don't even understand and can't understand what they're agreeing to. Right, then we're gonna promise them that's how they'll find their true self, right? Right, so that's where we're at. Right. It's so sickening. It's so sickening that, well, and let's close with your final point. You said, you'd heard a little bit from Abigail Shrier. You heard a little bit from me. There's been some other people screeching and bitching about this in the background.

Like I knew this was coming back in 2016. I could see it just absolutely clearly. I knew it was going to affect young women primarily because that's the historical part for the course. But you said, you know, you're a pretty astute guy and you're actually also pretty open to the revelation of uncomfortable material. But you said that even you were enticed into, well, into what exactly?

Like what did you think of what's Abigail? Okay, why? Why? Why do you think? I mean, I should say, I mean, it wasn't totally, it's gradual. But I mean, and I think it's important to talk about, because I think if we want to figure out how to end this, we do have to figure out how to get through to people. And I've been certainly talking about this with my friends and family who are very

progressive for a couple of years now. And the most recent argument was last summer with, I don't want to say who, but people that I'm close to. And they also engage in a kind of denial that this was in any way widespread. Because I think that when I was describing a particular detransitioner who I'd gotten to know, in whose case I've talked a little bit about. And I think because if you accept that this mistreatment is widespread, it is so damning. It is such an indictment. It's not just,

it's an indictment of the entire what they call the chain of trust, from the pseudo-scientists to the practitioners to the associations to the news media, psychologists, psychiatrists, the institutions, every, the institutions, every institution. Sargeant. Pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, pharmaceutical companies. The indictment is so serious and it goes right in your, I'm very excited to talk to you about it all, Jordan, because I think that it really goes to just the rotting away of the core restraints the society used to impose, the guardrails, the gatekeeping. And I want to clarify one thing, by the way, which is that in the files, they don't talk about gender distress. That's more neutral language that some of the people in the gender critical movement use. They just think they're all trans.

If you are someone that expresses confusion about your gender identity, the assumption is that you are trans. And it clearly comes right out of the gay rights movement where there was a sense in which, and this is I think what's been so at the heart of a lot of it for how liberals accepted it, was that I think a lot of us accepted

gay relationships and same-sex relationships and the innateness of them. So when it came to trans, it basically was just the application of this rule of innateness onto trans. There was never a question that there was a misdiagnosis and a mistreatment. Two separate things, by the way,

misdiagnosis and mistreatment. Then when it just runs away and it's like, you know, the front page, you know, cover of Time Magazine and it's all the, everybody's talking about, this is the new form of liberation. And then you had, as you were saying, there's different characters, right? There's the psychopaths and the narcissists who are the bullies and they're sort of, the narcissists are mesmerizing people, the psychopaths are bullying people, and then all of the nice guys, all of the kind liberals, the compassionate, caring liberals, cave in.

And they kind of go, I can't deal with it. So that, I'm talking about the journalists, the medical associations, the other doctors, it is just- The Democrats. The Democrats, the liberals, I mean, it is just an absolutely shocking cowardice, dogma, psychopathologies. You know, you look at the people that are really- Don't forget sadism. Don't forget sadism. Yeah. I mean, it's just- That's a fun addition.

You know, we're going to write, I mean, there's, there's, there are going to be, there will be books written about this episode. I mean, I don't want to race ahead to looking back. I, pardon me, that may be my coping mechanism. This all has to be stopped. I mean, this is, I will say, you probably will probably get to it, but you, one week after we released the WPATH files, Britain's National Health Service came out and finally banned puberty blockers in all of its clinics.

The Times of London then came out the next day. This is a center left newspaper. They called this quack medicine in the lead editorial. They called for expanding the ban. They are worried as we should be that puberty blockers are still going to be prescribed in private clinics. But you could see with the WPATH files, the NHS decision, a huge opening where finally people that had, I think, including me, that had been sort of quiet on this, maybe a little bit like unsure, is this my role to speak out on this, finally going, no, this is

absolutely bonkers and has to be stopped. This is a, yeah, maybe the greatest medical mistreatment scandal of the last, you know, 100 years, 200 years, I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to identify a worse one. It's hard to identify a worse one. It's like unit seven, what was it, unit 713, the Japanese, that's Japanese medical experiments on the Chinese, when they invaded, that's the worst,

that's the worst of the horrors that I've ever familiarized myself with. This is at that level. And that's really something. It's because the nitty gritty of the details of this are so shocking that you can't believe it's true. You just can't believe it's true. One other final detail.

The picture is, oh yeah, we're doing all the science. The people will, in these conversations, the doctors will say, well, I don't know. I mean, we haven't seen anybody really come in to complain with us, at least the people we followed up with over the few weeks after the surgeries. There's like, not only is there no serious study or follow-up of the victims of these mistreatments,

they're not interested. It's a complete abdication of responsibility by everybody involved. Nobody even chimed in and said, hey, maybe we should follow up with these people. What about the person that had tumors on their liver? Maybe we should find that person. We did not see this anywhere in the files.

Like, nobody piped up and tried to take responsibility. It was a complete abdication of responsibility. It's just this kind of mania that we have. We're going to mess with people's bodies and then we don't care what happens afterwards. It's almost like they're getting a hedonic pleasure from it and then they're done with it. Well, sadists are overrepresented among surgeons. That's known clinically. And I mean, you know, every... I'll contextualize that. Every profession attracts a range of temperamental talents that have, as associations, their temperamental temptations, right?

So there's more narcissists among movie stars and politicians and media people, obviously. Well, there's more sadists among those who cut up people for a living, right? That doesn't mean they're all that way. Certainly it doesn't mean that at all. That is not at all the point. Well, and we haven't even talked about

one of the absolute bloody horrors of this, which is the fact that it's unbelievably profitable. You know, I saw a projection. This was three years ago. Some idiot consultant company came up with a 130-page PDF showing the trans industry as its growth projections for the next seven years. Right? And this like marketing speak, it's like, well, it's going to go from a few hundred

million to something, you know, something approximating 1.3 billion in the next seven years. Get in well, the getting's good. You know, and every bloody butcher that can't make a living as a genuine physician and surgeon can easily turn their attention to producing like pseudo penises out of cut off flesh. It's so sickening. But again, I wanna concentrate on your response because it's very interesting to me

because look, I've watched Canadians become selectively blind in Canada over the last 10 years. And I can understand why, I really can't. It's like, here's the situation in Canada. For 150 years, every single one of our major institutions was middle of the road and reliable. The United Church, that's kind of the mainstream Protestant organization in Canada, or the Catholics if you're French Canadian.

You know, they had their problems, but they weren't completely pathologized. Let's put it that way. You could rely on them. Same with the news media, same with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, even though it was a crown corporation. You could basically trust them. Same with the universities,

same with the education system. It's not like it was top rate, but it wasn't riddled with pathology. And this is a terrible thing for someone with a conservative bent to indicate. It's like, well, none of that's true anymore. The federal liberals subsidized the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to the tune of $1.4 billion a year for no customers.

But that's where everybody over 50 gets their news. It's like I told my mother a year ago, everything the CBC tells you is a lie. And she said, well, where am I supposed to get my news? Which is a really good question. Right? So, so you imagine the conundrum that faces people. It's like all the institutions, you have two choices. Either those like me who are screaming about this are like right wing conspiratorial lunatics, or all those things you thought you could trust like the hierarchy you just described in the medical community, you can't trust that anymore.

Well, yes. Well, first of all, extraordinary extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So even if you were just using a rule of thumb, you'd you'd screen out the the people who are, you know, crying in the wilderness, so to speak. And this is even worse. But yeah, but I'm very curious about it in relationship to you, because like, you've already, you investigated the Twitter files, for example. You've already seen this happen, but you said that even in your case, what do you think it was that made you initially resistant to believing that this might be the case.

It's just too short. I mean, I think it's interesting. I was thinking about your work. You talk in some of your earlier work was about kind of finding yourself disoriented or thrown into a sense of chaos after these foundational things you had counted on or believed in. And I still had that around some sense of the medical system. I still had some confidence in the medical system before really getting into this.

And I think that was part of what was a barrier. I mean, I read Abigail Shrier's book twice. I spoke to her on the phone multiple times. I think she grew a little frustrated with me because I think there was a sense among some gender critical folks of like, where are the men? I don't mean, I mean, I don't want to overly gender it, but there was a sense in which it's disproportionately women that have been raising the alarm about this.

You're one of the, you know, you and some of the other folks at Daily Wire are the exception, I think. But I think she was a little annoyed with me, which is like, why is it taking so long? We did publish a few articles on it, then we got the WPATH files. But there's that sense of like, you know, look, if this is really what it appears to be, and now we have the evidence overwhelming that it is, in the WPATH files, you have everything you need

to know that this is just as awful as it appears to be. If that's true, then you cannot trust the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, you cannot trust the health insurance companies, you cannot trust the hospitals, you cannot trust the doctors. It means that this, the fancy word for this, of course, is iatrogenesis. That's when the medical system makes people sick. It's an old phenomenon. There's a wonderful book about it. Fourth leading cause of death. Fourth leading cause of death. And that was before, that was before, that was when it was functioning. Right? We have no idea what its contribution to death is now,

especially in the aftermath of the vaccine compulsion. Right? We have no idea. We may never find out. Maybe we will, but we might not. Yeah, it's really, okay, so fine. So your explanation is... I mean, well, because part of it is also I want to be, I want to respect local knowledge. And so, I know that the people that call themselves environment, I knew that people that were calling themselves environmental NGOs weren't really saving the environment. Like, that was my life's work for 20 years. I then discovered the same thing on homelessness. These are not people that are trying to end homelessness. They're trying to enable addiction

and prevent the proper medical care of people with psychiatric disorders and serious mental illness. You then get to this, and it's such a grotesque perversion of the promise of healthcare, and a perversion, as you were saying before, of the lesbian, gay rights and bisexual movement,

they're literally destroying the bodies of people that if you left them alone, most of them would grow up to be gay, lesbian, bisexual. So you should see the gay rights movement be the first out there to express outrage. But of course they were the first to get co-opted by it. You know, the corruption of it, it starts with the people that would have been the first line of defense.

If you had said, there's going to be an effort to completely undermine the reproductive capacity and sexual function of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents, you would have said, well, no, the lesbian, gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents, you would have said, well, no, the lesbian, gay, bisexual movement would never allow that. No, they just, they are part of it. It is the LGBT movement. They facilitated it. Yeah. So it's such a-

Okay, let's zero in on that. Yeah. Because we might as well go where, you know- Yeah, for sure. Angels fear to trend. Okay, so let me, let me contextualize this first. Yeah. Or can I contextualize? I have a lot of thoughts on this too. I'm excited to get into this.

All right. So one of the things we wrestled with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that I put together that you came, you mentioned it earlier, that we had our first conference in October is we have a family policy. Okay. And we had a lot of scraps about that. And part of the reason for that was there was a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons was we had a number of people who were gay who were in our advisory group and we were very happy to have them. But our sense was that the long-term relationship-oriented heterosexual couple is the bedrock for the communal enterprise, and that can't be replaced. Okay, and so then we argued about that a lot.

And part of the reason we argued about that was because that relationship is honored in the breach more often by most people than it's honored in the, what would you say, in the celebration. So like in my own family, for example, there's plenty of people, my own immediate and extended family. I suppose the divorce rate in my extended family is approximately the same as the national divorce rate. I don't imagine it's any different. And so, you know, there's plenty of single mothers, there's plenty of divorced people, there's plenty of people who have affairs, there's plenty of gay people, there's plenty of single people. So there

might be even a majority of those people, you know, if you looked at it cross-sectionally. And so what does that mean? Does it mean that you destroy the ideal upon which community itself is founded? It's like, no, I don't think so. I think you have to live with the tension between the ideal and the exception. And it's something like you establish the core and then there's a zone of tolerance for the margin.

And not only tolerance, appreciation for the experimentation that could take place on the margin. But then you have the demand now to put the margin in the center. And my sense of that was, well, that's fine, except now the margin of the margin will come forth. And if they're not frightening enough, then the fringe of the margin of the margin will come forth.

And if you're not frightened then, that's because you're not paying attention. And like, this is a big problem. And so I want to delve into this. It's such a core problem because you said yourself, and this was part of your resistance, I think, if I've got this right, is that we had this movement of liberalization of the concept, of the conception of coupling and family that really, let's say, unrolled from the 1960s to the 1980s. And it culminated in the almost universal acceptance,

I would say, of, let's say, gay marriage. And that was an attempt to bring homosexuality, and I would say mostly on the male side, because I don't really believe in lesbians, by the way. But I think the evidence that male homosexuality is like a permanent part of the human condition and biologically predicated, I think it's quite strong. Now, why that is, is a very difficult question.

But in any case, we all agreed that we could expand the conception of the core to include those relationships. And over time, even the more conservative people more or less came aboard, I would say. But then we got this morph, and you said the thing that's so bloody perverse about it. It's like, in a way, here's an argument, and I'm not making this a canonical argument. We reconfigured the norm and the ideal, but that invited something even more marginal to make itself manifest.

And then you said yourself that that new marginal identity was then conceptualized in the same civil rights oriented terms. And the consequence of that, this is what's so cool and so horrible. The consequence of that wasn't further degeneration of the nuclear family. The consequence of that was that the first people on the firing block were the gay community. Because as you said, if the conservatives had conspired to produce a catastrophe that

was aimed more horribly at the gay community, they couldn't have done worse than this. Yeah. It's beyond comprehension, right? It's truly beyond comprehension. Yeah, I think that's right. So what do you think that, now first of all,

is the tension between the lesbian and gay rights movement and its extension into this trans domain, was that part of what motivated your psychological resistance? And then also, what do you think about how this unfolded? What do you make of that? Well, so I think, so yeah, so I mean, first of all, I am, I'm from the left. I've, I'm obviously much more, I've abandoned a lot of those radical left views, but I'm still very high on

openness in terms of personality trait. If a biological male wants to dress up as a woman and go out in public dressed up as a woman, my first instinct is, I'm fine with that. It's a free country, you should be able to do that. I'm using this case in particular because you may like it's a free country, you should be able to do that. And then, and so, and I think this is an, I'm using this case in particular, because you may know that there are two psychologists

who have done a lot of work studying the people that call themselves trans women. We might say trans identified males, or, you know, you say trans women, it's fine, but there's two psychologists, Ray Blanchard and, oh my gosh, now I'm blanking on the second one. Basically, two psychologists had done the research on these men and they've identified them.

They say that what it is, it's autogynephilia. Yeah, that's Blanchard's word. The world they've invented. Blanchard, right? So it's- Nobody disputed that, by the way. Five years ago, every mainstream clinician who was educated understood this, right? That transsexualism was an autogynephilic condition, right? And it primarily affected men, or primarily manifested by men, and it often was fully realized, let's say, in their 30s and 40s,

although there might be a history of such behavior. Like the psychoanalysts had a whole well-developed theory, which I think is one that's very, like the theory there in part, the deep theory, the one that I thought was most appropriate, was that these were often men who, and this goes along with the openness idea, who had constrained the development of their personality in the stereotypically masculine direction too much.

They'd put a more open temperament into a too tight box. And what was happening was that the impulse to have them develop the cross-sex proclivities that might have expanded their personality, that was all suppressed and it emerged in a warped and sexualized manner and they started to play out in the world what they should have been manifesting as a psychological transformation. That's a Jungian take. It's a great take. So the play that autogynephilia is a form of sexualized play in relationship

to identity transformation. And I think that's right. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's great. I think that's what Blanchard said. It's great on you. And by the way, the other psychologist is Michael Bailey, and he wrote a book on it. So it's really these two characters, these two psychologists. What was Bailey's book?

I think it was something like The Man Who... Would Be Queen? Yeah, that sounds right. The Man Who Would Be Queen. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I know Blanchard's work and that work too. Yeah. So, yeah, so they come out with this theory of autogynophilia, which is defined as the

attraction to oneself as a woman, or it's having the fantasy of oneself as a woman. It's a sexual fantasy of oneself as a woman. And this was pretty well supported. These two psychologists really did a lot of work on it. And then some of the auto-gynophilic men started going after Bailey, I think in particular. And Blanchard actually talked about having survivor's guilt because he felt like he had helped develop the concept,

but Bailey took the brunt of the attacks. And it was trying to get him fired, and they were harassing him, and they were doxing him, and it was very to get him fired and they were harassing him and they were doxing him and it was very, very shocking treatment. And they basically, I think they both came to a conclusion, at least Bailey did, that they were undermining the fantasy. Oh, absolutely. And these autogynephilic men were attacking them for undermining the fantasy.

Now, well, look, Michael, what happens is, okay, well, you can see this with these absolutely abhorrent displays of narcissistic fetishism online. You get these men who are dressed up as women, but who couldn't pass as a woman for anyone within like 200 yards of them. But their fantasy, see, they idealize themselves in their fantasy play as a sexually attractive woman, because what the hell good is the sexual fantasy without that? And then that is undermined by any evidence whatsoever that what they're making manifest as imagination is tantamount to a delusion. And so they get narcissistically outraged, just like a two-year-old or a three-year-old

who's disrupted in their fantasy play. It's like, well, you know, you're not really a woman. It's like, well, what do you mean I'm not really a woman? The entire fantasy is predicated on the notion that not only am I a woman, but I'm a beautiful, hyper-feminine woman. I'm the best of all possible women. And the fact that you would dare to oppose that, there's two interpretations. Either I'm delusional beyond belief or you're cruel. Well, it's easy to figure out which one of those they're going to take.

And then they go and bully everybody around them. And they use, I mean, honestly, I just think it's psychopathic. Like the tactics they're using, showing no regard for others, engaging in very high risk behavior. And so you look at these folks and these people are the leaders. They're the ones that are the president of WPATH.

They are the surgeon, Marcy Bowers, who's the president of WPATH. Oh are the surgeon, Marcy Bowers, who's the president of WPATH. Oh yeah, she's fun. She's real fun. She, who operated, who blocked the puberty of jazz Jennings, did a botched surgery, a botched genital surgery on jazz. There's video of Marcy in the- And we publicized that for like tens of millions of dollars

to the entire, what, the entire low level IQ TV watching community and glamorized it, and glamorized it, and sacrificed Jazz Jennings in the process. And what would you say, brought his stunningly narcissistic mother into exactly the kind of spotlight that her cluster B personality demanded. Right. And her child was a small price to pay for that.

Right. It's so shocking. So basically you have a situation where when you piece it all together, you have a situation of powerful narcissistic and psychopathic men who in order to fulfill their sexual fantasies are needing to construct the idea and then the reality of trans children. And this is where the, it really- That's how they get out of the moral conundrum, Michael. Because so sure, because this is a typical psychopathic narcissist move. I'm like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? and specialness, because I was that sort of special person, and the absolute pathology of anyone who got in the way, which was basically the entire world, the entire patriarchy, everyone that knew them. Right, right. It's so narcissistic that it beggars belief. It beggars belief.

Right. So my understanding, and you're obviously the expert, my understanding is that psychopathic narcissists, the psychopathy is in service of the narcissism. And so if being an autogynophile is a kind of narcissism, the psychopathy then is that you will, you don't care about the feelings of others and you'll engage in highly risky behaviors in order to service your narcissism. That that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, well, service. Well, and we should, we could qualify that even further because I think

it's useful to do so. So what's the difference between a mature person and an immature person? Okay, so well first of all hope that we can all agree that there is a difference between like a toddler and a responsible adult. You know, because otherwise why would we grow up? Okay, so what characterizes a toddler? Well, a toddler is characterized by possession by a sequence of whims. Okay, so why is that counterproductive?

Well, because the toddler wants what he wants right now no matter what. Okay, so what does that mean, no matter what? It means no matter what it costs his future self, and no matter what it costs other people. Okay, so why is that bad? Well, if you betray your future self, you die, and if you can't get along with other people, then, well, then you die.

You can't engage in reciprocal altruism, for example. So what you try to do when you socialize children is that you extend their purview so that as their cortex integrates, they're able to regulate their impulsive whim in accordance with their future self and with other people, right? So that's like the definition of maturity.

Yep. And that, okay, so. You're perfectly describing and explaining one of the things in the files that we see over and over again, and you also see it in the Jazz Jane Show, which is it's a complete focus by the gender quacks to service somebody's needs right now without any sense of what the consequences will be in the future. On the video, one of the people literally says, well, we just want to provide that care and comfort right now. Well, but you're talking about lifelong sterility and loss of sexual function and you're actually concerned. And then similarly, you see this Dr. Marcy Bowers who's operating on Jazz Jennings,

obsessed with doing surgical procedures, having an argument while conducting the surgery in the operating room, having an argument with her colleague who's telling her that she doesn't need to remove what she's calling a stark issue. She says, no, I hate it, I hate it. You can see her, she's just really, really, she's like, I gotta get rid of that because

it's gotta look this right way. They're playing, I mean, to really get into it, they're playing God. They're trying to play God. And of course, the problem is they're not gods. And so, they, but it's like, it's like, they're just, there's a sense in which you read this, they're just, yeah, they're like toddlers. They're just wrecking things. They're just, yeah, they're like toddlers. They're just wrecking things. They just don't care.

And there's no sense of the future. You pointed to something, since we're going down the rabbit hole, that even works. Yeah, let's go. I would say, well, look, there's a lot of things going on underneath this. And one of them is the devouring mother.

Okay, so what's a devouring mother? Okay, let's define that technically. Now Freud intuited that the Oedipal situation was at the root of much psychopathology. Now he over-sexualized that. That was a mistake, but the core insight was brilliant, and here's the insight. Okay, so human infants are born in an incredibly underdeveloped state. There's a couple of reasons for that, but the fundamental reason is that our brains are so big that in order for us to be born through a functional female pelvis, we had

to be born in a fetal stage. That's why our heads are compressive. It's a compromise. Now, the cost that we pay for that is the unbelievable vulnerability of human infants. Okay, now the cost the mothers pay for that is that the neonate is so dependent that they need 100% care. Okay, so that means that the impetus of agreeableness, that personality trait, in combination with negative emotion.

That's the two feminine personality traits, high negative emotion and high agreeableness. The purest expression of that is, give the suffering infant what it needs right now, no matter what. Right, okay, and that's perfectly legitimate for six months. For an infant. Well, for six months.

For six months. It's the right attitude. Now, okay, so then, so, and it's a very, very powerful instinct. It's the maternal instinct upon which the human species depends. Okay. The question is, what happens when that pathologizes? Okay. So what does it look like when that pathologizes? Okay, so what does it look like when it pathologizes? Well, the first is

You treat a one-year-old like a six-month-old Or you treat a five-year-old like a six-month-old you just give in to whatever they want right now Well, that means that you start to interfere with their development. That's where the devouring mother comes in, right? Okay, and so and that's very very bad. That's how the devouring mother comes in. Right, okay. And so, and that's very, very bad. That's how you make useless, entitled, narcissistic, privileged, dependent, and terrified children, right? Who also hate their parents, right? So that's a very bad idea. Okay, but here's something even worse than that, which no one will talk about and which no one will contend with.

That maternal instinct is hyper-powerful, and it's the defining characteristic of femininity. The question that our culture is facing now is, what happens when women enter into the political arena and that instinct doesn't find its proper place. And the answer is, as far as I can tell, is that childless women infantilize everything. Yep. Yeah, well, God, Michael, if that's true, we are in serious trouble. Like, you know, because we know the most woke disciplines, for example, in the universities are the ones with the highest percentage of women. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming women and because I think men have abdicated the responsibility on that front as well.

And I'm also not unhappy that we've been able to determine how to capitalize on the broad intellectual abilities of women in the broader, in the broader civilizational scheme of things, let's say. That's not my point. My point is that we don't know what sort of political psychopathologies will be specific to females, and we bloody well know now. And part of that's that, that infantilization of everything. And then there's another associated issue, which is women are also very good, let's say, at spotting predators. which is women are also very good, let's say, at spotting predators. Okay, if you have an infant and you misidentify a predator, you know, you call something a predator that isn't,

whatever, you protect your baby, it's not a problem. It's kind of hard on the misidentified predator. Right, and so part of that cluster B proclivity of the psychopathological woman to cry wolf continually and profit thereby is also a manifestation of that maternal instinct. It's right. You oppose me, you must be a predator. And if you're, this is the terrible thing about the devouring mother pathology is if you're a predator, no punishment is too harsh for you.

Right? No quarter. Right? Why would you give quarters to something that wants to eat your child? Right? It's like no quarter. And so that's another problem that we have that we have no idea what to do with. So... Well, yeah, I was going to just say a couple of thoughts about that. I mean, I think that... So first of all, yeah, I mean, I think that, so first of all, yeah, I mean, you look at Jazz Jennings' mom, that's absolutely how she's, but then you look at her dad, and Jazz's dad, here they are, the surgery's botched. I just watched some of the video from it. The surgery's botched, and the dad's kind of like,

well, yeah, it didn't quite go like we thought it was. When I talked to the parents of the detransitioners and the desisters, the desisters, of course, are the parents that got there, that saved their kids before real danger was done. What they say is they go, often the dad was finally like, I don't want to do this. The dad had to step in and say no and perform that role that traditionally I'm not saying every case. That's what dads do. That's the role of dads. That's what dads are supposed to do. They're supposed to be like, no, that didn't happen. But then also just to pull back even further and you go, what is this really about? Look what they're doing. They're blocking puberty. Puberty is a fundamental human right. Growing up is a

fundamental human right. They're depriving people of the right to be an adult. That's what the witch in Snow White does. That's so interesting. It's a standard form of female pathology, which is, that's how you eliminate competitors. Ugh. Right? Right? Yeah, no kidding. No kidding.

It's really bad. Well, you know the story of Snow White is that she's the most beautiful, which means she's fecund and she's at her peak, but the next generation is coming and she's going to be supplanted. And so instead of accepting that gracefully and making the transition to grandmother, which is what she should do. She attempts to prolong her youthful adulthood beyond its acceptable point, and she does that by sacrificing the up-and-coming next feminine generation. Exactly, exactly.

So she poisons Snow White. Yeah, yeah. She's the witch that lives in the forest and has always lived in the forest. Yes, yes, it's- So the witch is in power. It's brutal, man. It's so shocking about it is that the witch is in power across all these institutions and the men are completely simped out.

I don't know how to describe it. The men have abdicated their authority, abdicated their responsibility, the core responsibility of the father at a minimum. All these dads are focused on playing with their kids. Protect your kids. Protect your kids from these deeply creepy doctors that are trying to prey on your child. I mean, I couldn't, it's so, it gets to the spiritual stuff too, I think, because I watched the Barbara Walters special

on Jazz Jennings before they performed this horrible surgery on her. Barbara Walters opens that special. Barbara Walters, like the trusted face of the news media, right, I mean, she's like, Walter Cronkite is dead, but Barbara Walters is still there. Someone like my parents, my family would rely on. She gets up and she goes,

beautiful little girl born into the wrong body. I mean, I look at, I've been working on nihilism and the ways in which nihilism is the, I mean, when you are sterilizing your children, when you are depriving them sexual function, when you are denying them puberty, it's nihilism. I mean, you're just saying no to life.

You're negating life. You're negating your own immortality project. That's how most, a lot of people feel like their lives have meaning that goes on by having kids and then grandkids. So the hard nihilism of it and underneath it is a kind of hedonism of the immediate pleasure of exercising your power over other people's bodies or your body. I think that nihilism is at the heart of this. I just look at it and I go, this is, I mean, nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, in the classical sense, is just a kind of rejection of reality for some alternative

world. Yeah, well, you remember Nietzsche, Nietzsche concentrated, see, he didn't stop with nihilism, right? He pursued that into resentment, which is the, like, so I would say your concentration on nihilism is insufficiently pessimistic. Because nihilism is a step on the way to resentment. And resentment, man, if you're looking for a cardinal sin, resentment is a contender. It's a contender for what's at the bottom.

Resentment, arrogance, and deceit. Those make one evil triad. While we were talking about power. The reason I brought up the infants to begin with is because there's this unholy relationship between power and hedonism, because I will turn to power to gratify my hedonism, because I don't have to otherwise.

Like if I can invite you to play along with me and you want to, well, I don't need to use power. The only time I need power is when I want you to do something that you don't want to do. And worse than that, I want you to do something that isn't going to be good for you in the medium to long run, that's also not going to be good for me. You know, because one of the things I've been looking into, for example, is the personality structure of short-term maters. So like human beings are a pair bonding species that invest heavily in their offspring. But within the human realm, there are like temperamental long-term maters and let's say

temperamental short-term maters. And you might say, well, who are the one night stand crowd? So these are the hedonists. Well, we know what their personality characteristics are because it's been studied. Narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, and that wasn't enough. So after studying those three for seven or eight years, the relevant psychologist added sadism because that's where it ends up. And so you get this unholy dynamic of part of that is the inevitable dynamic between hedonism and force.

Is that if you're going to pursue short-term hedonistic ends, then force will enter into it. I just rewatched Cabaret. Remember Cabaret? Oh, sure. It's so bloody brilliant because you see this Cabaret where all the transsexuals are, by the way, and Lisa Minnelli, who's the cluster B wannabe actress narcissist, and they're dancing away madly, having their hedonistic orgy, and the Nazis are in the audience.

And it's so interesting. Joel Gray does a lovely job of this because the hedonists are, they're in a dance with the Nazis, you know? And I think both of them know it. Yeah. And we're doing the same thing. We're doing the same thing now. We are doing exactly the same thing now.

I mean, this is where I was headed to. I mean, this is how you get totalitarianism. You know, it's, if you believe the, if you read political ponerology, this really interesting book on the psychology of totalitarianism, he argues that totalitarianism is defined by the narcissist and the psychopaths taking over every major institution in society and emerging from the bottom up. The narcissist, there's powers exercised, I think, in those two ways. The psychopath,

it's through raw power, it's through bullying, being domineering, trying to get people canceled, trying to get people fired, you know, harassment. The narcissist, this is, I'm borrowing from the Poneurology book, it's, I think, last name is pronounced, Lobeszewski, he argues that the narcissist are spellbinders., so they're casting a spell. I mean, speaking of the witch, right, there's a spell cast. And so, I've been, really, we wrote, I mean, I think there's like a trance that has come over, it comes over individuals, it's cast by these really charismatic trans leaders, and they sort of mesmerize, hypnotize, put people in a sort of particular state.

Seduce, seduce, yes, definitely. Yeah, and then everybody, their brainwave, our brainwaves get to some level or whatever. And then anybody who veers outside of it and goes, wait a second, this doesn't seem right. Then they're there with the bully to keep them in line and make an example of them and scapegoat them in order to create this culture of fear and conformity.

So, and we see it in the files. I mean, the files themselves are so chilling. Like if you were just a scholar of totalitarianism, you know, everybody spends, we spend so much time talking about, you know, those studies that were done in the 50s, the electroshock studies or the prison Stanford experiments, read these files. You want to see what totalitarianism

looks like. Somebody says, hey, maybe we should take a minute and think about whether or not to give drugs and surgery to somebody that has multiple personalities or that's been missing some of these. Yeah, no, we'll just get consent from each personality. That's right. The alters. Oh my god. Oh my god. And so then somebody goes maybe Why don't we take or why don't we have like it and why don't we actually maybe Pause about or think about it and then there's somebody in the room in the chat room or the message board saying oh how dare you Gatekeep how dare you create barriers to providing this healthcare just because they happen to have multiple personalities?

I mean, it is so crazy. You kind of can't even believe that it's actually happening. Like, if you were to make a Hollywood movie out of the WPATH files, I think you would be like, this is not realistic. Like, this would not be able to occur in today's society. And yet here we are, it's not just occurring. Now you know firsthand why the Germans didn't wake up in the late 1930s.

Yeah. It's because they couldn't believe it. They literally could. Now, first of all, they didn't want to believe it. And they put their heads in the sand. You know, but it was, but they also couldn't believe it. There's no way, there's no way that can be happening. And you can understand why. Well, and I was there.

I was there. I mean, I was there like a year or two ago, being like, this can't be true because if it were true, then we are already living. Someone would do something about it. Yeah, or somebody would do something about it, or yeah. Or it would mean that we're living in a totalitarian society already.

It would mean that the medical institutions, that it's like a horror, it's like that thing in the horror movie. You get to the middle of the horror movie and you discover everybody's brain has been taken over by the aliens or there, it's actually a secret brain swapping exercise. There's some horror in the middle of it. And then you have to figure out how to get out of it, you know, which is, I think, where we are now. So that's what we're on to. Well, okay, okay. So let's approach that in two directions. Okay, so now one of the things you pointed out, so the manifestation of the narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian sadist is different in men than women. Okay, so in men, it tends to be more, get the hell out of my way or I will definitely hurt you. Like it's really in your face. With women, it's much more subtle.

It's much more behind the scenes. They're much more manipulative and the proclivity of the female antisocial type is to reputation savage into gossip. And now there's a big, so tell me what you think about this. So first, it's very difficult to fight against that. So like women can't fight other women who do that. It's very hard for them to do that. But men also can't fight because the thing is,

if I figure out that you're a psychopath and you're interacting with me and you're manipulating me, I can actually punch you. And there's a high likelihood of that if you push it. Right, and that's one of the things that regulate social interaction between men. It's like, don't push your luck, not too far. But that wave is barred 100% for women against women,

or virtually 100%, and even more so against men. And so men, I believe that men have abdicated their responsibility to say no. But I have a certain sympathy because for example, I've had clients who were unfortunate enough to take up residence, for example, with a woman with cluster B psychopathology. And it was like their lives were over.

Those women would light themselves on fire to singe them. And they had no defenses. And if they did ever raise a hand in defense of any sort, then the cluster B type would call the authorities, lie about what had happened, invite a knight in shining armor to save her in tears, which is really effective as she also happens to be attractive.

And that guy was done. He was done. His life was over. Right. Right. Yeah, his little dried up corpse was being sucked dry by the psychopathic woman on the side of the road. And that was it. So that's a big problem. And so that's another... Go ahead. No, no, sorry. No, I was going to say, I mean, I think...

It seems like we're turning a little bit to how do we handle this? I think that one of the things that Lobaczewski describes in the Ponerology book, and of course, it's just a theory because he couldn't prove it. By the way, he lived through Nazism and communism. He opens the book describing a really lousy academic being appointed as the president of his university in Poland. And the guy was just a psychopath, like that's how he made it to that position. And what Lobajewski's argument is, is he says- That could never happen, Michael.

No, I know you're reading it being like, oh, I think we're there. Yeah, no kidding. We're definitely there. We're definitely there. So you kind of go, so he argues very persuasively, I think, that it's not enough to condemn. It's not enough to say this gender mistreatment is bad, it's pseudoscience, it's hurting people. We should definitely do that. But you have to actually do what you're doing, I think. And what I'm realizing I need to do, which is you have to describe the psychopathology quite specifically. You have to describe it psychopathology quite specifically. You have to describe it.

You must, and so in that sense, everybody says, oh, I don't want to get into the, are they autogynophiles or whatever. Under Lobajewski's view, he says you must describe the psychopathologies of the leaders. You must distinguish between the narcissist, the psychopaths, the psychopathic narcissists. You must describe, I think he would probably go by extension, you must say these are autogynophiles, these are not actually women, these are people that think they're women and they get angry at you, and the reason they're angry at you is because you deny their fantasy, and you must deny their fantasy because their fantasy is driving such a huge amount of this, and then you must also say to the people around them.

It's perfect narcissistic fantasy, isn't it? Because they are literally in love with themselves. Like literally. That's the fantasy is that my alter ego is the perfect mate. They're so narcissistic that they transform themselves into their own sexual partner. Right. You don't get any more narcissistic than that and you think about that these guys who? cross-dress in their 40s

And then they they have like three kids and then they decide to go full woman and it's like well I don't know if you notice buddy, but you got a wife and kids This isn't about you anymore who gives a goddamn about your sexual gratification Like that why does that enter? Well, everyone should be able to do what they want. It's like not, how about not the narcissistic psychopaths? Like Will Thomas, for example. Yeah, well, no, exactly.

That's what I was gonna go to. I mean, you may know there's this evidence that certain kinds of pornography, I don't really wanna get into it, but appear to be creating autogynephilia in men at younger ages and those are the men that are then entering women's sports with a sense of entitlement that they should be allowed to compete in their sports because they insist that they're women.

Victimized women even. Victimized women. Yes, oppressed. So much the better. Yeah, oppressed. The ultimate. I'm the ultimate and an oppressed woman. Plus, I'm very sexually attractive.

Yes. What a deal. Yeah. And so I think you have to describe that for what it is. You have to be honest. You have to tell the truth. Again, we come back to the key is actually telling the truth. And then I think you also have to then look at everybody else

and go, you're behaving like a coward. You have got to stop. You're the head of the American Medical Association. You're the head of the American, you're the head of the endocrine society. Be the head, be the president of it, which means you must have courage or step down and allow somebody with the courage. Try saying no, you son of a bitch.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I think it has to be like, we have, I think we have to go, unfortunately, and it's going to take some time. I don't think there's any substitute between going institution by institution in the society, explaining what's going on, challenging these leaders. And it's really simple. American Medical Association, you can end with, stop with the pseudoscience and cowardice or

stop being respected by anybody as the American Medical Association. Those are your two choices. Like, this can't continue. I mean, Jordan, on the AMA website, they still say that gender medicine prevents suicide. That piece of pseudoscience is still on the website despite multiple studies showing quite the opposite. So I do think that those are the, for me, I look at how do you get, how does this end?

Okay, so let's delve into that a bit more. Okay, so there's a, so this has been infuriating me for quite a long time, right? Like I knew, I knew in 2016, when Bill C-16 came out in Canada, that mandated pronoun use, I went to the Senate and I said, you are going to cause an epidemic among young women. This is what's going to happen. And the senators of course knew better

and just asked me why I was such a mean man and why I was making such a mountain out of a molehill, right? It's like, well, it's because I can see exactly what's going to happen. And I can actually see why you're doing it. You bloody virtue signalers. Right. You hypocrites. We're so compassionate.

It's like, oh, I'll love my son no matter what. And how am I going to demonstrate that? Well, I'll castrate and mutilate him and turn him into a monster and I'll still love him. That's how wonderful I am. Right? Jesus, man, it's no wonder people can't admit that that sort of thing exists because that's so goddamn dark that it puts almost everything else to shame. You just can't believe that could happen. It happens. Right. And a fair bit. Right. So, there are plenty of mothers who will hoist their child's severed body parts up on a flag to signal their maternal virtue. Right. Brutal. It's unbelievable. It's child sacrifice. It's child sacrifice, right?

It is unbelievable. That's for sure. That's exactly what it is. Yes. It's child sacrifice to the demon of pride. That's what it is and it's bad. Okay, so then I think, well, you know, what do we do? Do we have like a truth and reconciliation like hug fast? I don't think so. I think we put the people who've done this in prison. I mean that. Like, I think anybody who's transitioned a minor

should be, they should lose their license. This includes the counselors. They should lose their license and they should be put in prison. There's no excuse for it. And so I'm afraid that we're gonna do- Yeah, well, we'd have to change the laws first. Yeah, well, right.

You have to change the laws. I mean, I think if you go stepwise, Jordan, I would say let's go institution by institution. And I mean, medical, sports, you know, LBG- Riley Gaines is trying to do that on the sports side. Riley's doing it, yeah. And she's gonna succeed. She's gonna succeed.

I mean, look, I will say, I think the public is really with us. They're already with us and they don't even understand. Cause I think most of, a lot of the public's in denial. But I would say we gotta go institution by institution and then yeah, the laws have to change. I mean, the Republican states and the United States are already changing.

We have to complete that and then we're gonna have to go into the democratic states and explain what's really going on and change the laws in those states. I mean, I think it's a lot harder for my liberal friends and family to justify this medical mistreatment when the National Health Service of Britain says that they're no longer going to do it. I think it's a lot easier for them to, because they're all partisan Democrats, I think it's

a lot easier for them to dismiss what's been happening in Republican states because they're just so partisan. But the British National Health Service is different. You know, the times of London is different. Because they did it, they've done it in the Netherlands, they've done it in Scandinavian countries, right? They've pulled back quite, quite, and the Netherlands example is particularly apropos because that's where that bloody Dutch, so-called Dutch protocol of gender

affirming care came from, right? So for the Dutch to reverse that, and they're quite left leaning, and so for them to reverse that, well, I understand it's not as signal a reversal as we saw in the UK. And the fact that the Times actually wrote an article and published it was also definitely worthy of note.

But it's going to, like the problem is, is that the rot that's generating this thing, the problem is again, is that horrible as this is, it's merely the worst, it's the worst symptom of an underlying systemic problem. And it's even hard to characterize this systemic problem. Well, so here's part of a reflection of that. You tell me what you think about this.

So the Democrat, the demographic slice that's most supportive of the Democrats is childless women under 30. Right, right. So, but that's... Now, forget the bloody politics. We go down to the biological, psychological and the biological level. Like, there's a reason for that. Like the policies that the Democrats have devised, which are variants of the victim-victimizer narrative, play very well into a misapplied maternal instinct. Because the maternal instinct is find the infant and protect it. It's like, well, I don't have an infant. Well, do you have a dog? No. Well, I don't have a dog either. Well, how about the oppressed?

Oh yeah, I've got the oppressed. Right, exactly. And so now the oppressed are infants. They can do no wrong. Now all we have to do is find the oppressor. This has turned out to be, by the way, quite hard on the Jews, as we're seeing. Right. Right, right.

Because if we're going to play oppressor-oppression or victimizer-victim, and we do that by classifying disproportionate representation in the upper strata of hierarchies as evidence of oppression and victimization, then the Jews win that contest. Right. Right, well right, and this is not much different, by the way, than what happened in Austria and in Nazi Germany. This is a very old story. Like, I went through, for example, I went through the story of Exodus in great detail recently. And the reason the Egyptians enslaved the Jews is because they're disproportionately successful minority. Right. So, this has been going on for a very long time. Yeah.

So, what do you, so it seems like if I agree with your assessment, so what do you think then, how would you describe the way forward? It seems like you have to find some secular way to affirm that everybody's born into the right body, you know, that there's biological differences, that everybody has the right to puberty, that nobody shall be denied the right to puberty. But I think you're right, the nihilism, until we address it with some life-affirming human, of pro-human vision, and I know you're, I'm a person of faith, you're a person of faith, but I recognize also I'm in a secular society.

So, I mean, how do you answer the question of how do you make this case for a pro-human, life-affirming vision in a society that's so secular and so nihilist? I don't think there is a secular reform. Okay. I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment. Mm-hmm. is a secular reform. I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment. I think the secular experiment has collapsed. I think it's collapsed because it's technically wrong. The book I've just published, or will publish in November, the one I'm touring about is

the book is We Who Rest With God, and I make an elaborate case for this. I think the evidence now, this is the scientific evidence, by the way, the evidence is overwhelming that we see the world through a structure of value. And the description of a structure of value, the description of the structure of value of a person is a story. That's what a story is. So when you go to a movie and you watch someone characterized, what you're seeing is the embodiment of their value structure.

And you want to see that because you need a value structure to orient yourself in the world. That's what makes you pay attention to one thing rather than another. Because attention itself is value predicated. And the monotheistic hypothesis is that all values unify at the pinnacle and that people should orient themselves towards that. And I think that's, I think there's every reason to assume that that's exactly right. I also think it's irreplaceable. What do you say? How do you, so you and I have a lot of mutual friends that are, that self-describe as atheists. Yeah. Our friend Steve Pinker,

I have, you know, a lot of my supporters are atheists, Michael Shermer. So there's obviously some, and they're not nihilists, right? And they're very pragmatic and very sensible. So do you just sort of think, well, they're a minority of folks that are not overwhelmed by the nihilism of life and they have a way to affirm it despite their atheism?

Or do you feel like, what do you, how do you reconcile? I mean, how are they managing it? Well, I guess it's both, it's not just a personal question. I also think I'm asking a political question, which is it seems like if we need to get a majority on our side on these issues, and you're in a secularizing society, how do you build those alliances?

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I mean, what I'm trying to do is to tell a better story. And you know, that has a certain impact. And that's the right way to do it because I think the right way forward is always, it's always invitation. The right way forward is always, it's always invitation. The right way forward is invitation. And so if you can't tell a better story, then you don't win the contest.

What's the best story? Well, look, the leftist story is one of power, right? Look, the post-modernists discovered that we see the world through a structure of value, which is partly why they've been able to kind of scuttle the scientific enterprise, because raw empiricism doesn't work. This is partly why the Enlightenment has to come to an end. You cannot orient yourself with knowledge of the facts. And the reason for that is that there's an infinite number of facts. You have to organize the facts. And as soon as you organize them, you're in a value hierarchy.

So the postmodernists figured that out, which is why, and it's so interesting because most of them were literary critics, right? They were critics of story. They knew there was something key to the story. Well, the problem with the postmodernists wasn't that they got that right, and that was a major accomplishment, but they leaped immediately to the assumption, because of their Marxism, they leaped immediately to the assumption that the fundamental story was one of power. Mm-hmm. Right. And you can understand why that's an attractive story. It's easy to understand.

You can understand every human dynamic in relationship to power. Plus, when interpersonal dynamics, marriage, business, society, when they become corrupt, they do become corrupt in the direction of power. So it's a powerful diagnostic observation. But it's wrong. So you might say, well, if the story isn't one of power, what's the story? And I know what the story is. The story is one of voluntary sacrifice. That's the story. And the Christian mythos got that exactly right, as far as I can tell. And so the reason for that is that community itself is a sacrificial operation. To become a member of a community, you sacrifice yourself.

That's the definition of community. Now, you might be able to sacrifice yourself in a manner that benefits you and everyone else. Right? That would be the highest form of self-sacrifice. That's what God calls Abraham to do when God calls Abraham to adventure. He offers him a sacrificial path forward that would be optimally beneficial to him and to everyone else. And so there's an equation in that story of the call to the adventure of sacrificial transformation and the simultaneous establishment of social harmony. And I think that's right. And that's not power. And I think the country that got that most right is being the United States.

Right? It's that people have their responsibility. It's, it's, it's, they bear that responsibility. That's a sacri- they work. Because work is sacrifice. It's the sacrifice of the present to the future. So it's voluntary self-sacrifice is the right basis for community. And the image of the crucifixion is that. That's why it's on the altar. That's why it's at the center of the church. That's why the church is the center of the community.

That's all dramatized. And it's right. And it's the antithesis of the claim that power unites. Now what it means that that's right, that shades off into the ineffable. Like, there's no, there's no, I don't know, like, human beings are communal animals. What does that mean metaphysically or theologically? Well, you know, that's where human knowledge meets its limit. You can't say in the final analysis.

And Jordan, how do you, how And Jordan, what's the difference? So Jazz Jennings' mom, she sacrificed her son for something. How was it to God? What's the difference of, yeah, exactly. So what is the difference between that sacrifice that they're doing? They're sacrificing others for themselves, I guess, you would say, rather than sacrificing some part of themselves for others.

Oh, it's worse than that. No, it's worse than that. No, first of all, that's a very astute question. And second, you're not pessimistic enough in your analysis. So, because it's not that they're exactly sacrificing, say, their children to themselves. It's that they're sacrificing their children to the narrowest of their whims and their demand for prideful power. Right. So it's mythologically speaking, it's a Luciferian sacrifice. And then, see, because you might say, well, they're gaining.

It's like, wait a minute. Who are you talking about exactly? It's not exactly obvious that Jazz Jennings' mother gained, not in some comprehensive analysis. I mean, a more comprehensive analysis would mean that she couldn't have possibly failed on every front more spectacularly. So what did she get out of it?

That isn't the right question. The right question is, what did the worst impulses within her garner from the situation? Right, and so she subjected herself to her own narcissistic, hedonistic whim and allied herself with the spirit of pride and power. Right, and then performed the requisite sacrifice. And we're doing that everywhere. It's brutal. And the deeper you look into it, the worse it... It's no wonder people don't want to look. That's not surprising. Yeah. So, the Enlightenment is arguably a secularized version of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That's the argument that Tom Holland makes and Dominion and Nietzsche made it, others make it. Is there a secularized version of the story you're describing that would appeal to our friends Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer? We'll see how they respond to this book. You know, I think the answer to that is yes. And the reason I think that is because I think that the intuition that has possessed Western civilization in many forms for thousands of years is that truth in its highest form is a unity. And so I think we'll find that there's no distinction between the religious and the scientific enterprise if they're both properly understood. And I actually think, I really believe this, I think we're on that cusp. I mean, partly because, for example,

the great neuroscientist that I've talked to over the last year, I asked, what's his name? Oh man, now I'm going to freak out. That's Sapolsky. Yeah, no, it wasn't Sapolsky, although I did talk to Sapolsky. He's developed an entropy theory of anxiety. His name will come to me. Anyways, he's the world's most cited neuroscientist at the moment, and he's really quite the genius. And I asked him, this is an odd question, I said, is every object perception a micro

narrative? And he said, yes. Now, you know, it's not easy to understand what that means, but what it means is that the sense data that the empiricists confused with the raw stuff of matter presents itself in its isolated elements as a story. Like a drinking glass is a prop in a play. It's not an object. Right? It's not a dead material object. It's a prop in a play.

It has, that's like a platonic ideal, right? It's very similar to the notion of platonic ideal. And that means that what presents, what presents itself to us in the form of apprehensible objects, so that's the sense data, it's all micro-narrative. It's all within a coherent story, or an incoherent story sometimes, because you can be fragmented.

But there's no getting away from the story. And the great neuroscientists, look, this discovery's emerged in four different areas. The AI people know it, which is why they started training AI systems in a completely different way. They're not rule-based, right? They're value-based. And now they're very much like human beings because they were trained to identify value.

That's exactly how they were trained. The robotics engineers figured this out. The psychologists who were studying perception figured this out, and the postmodernists figured it out. So four different scientific disciplines simultaneously converged on the realization that even sense data presents itself as value. You don't derive value from the underlying data.

That's wrong. It's backwards. And so, I would say, this is another elaboration of that to some degree. The biblical library is the repository of the value structure through which we see the world. That's literally the case. Now, you could argue maybe that's for the worse.

It's like, no, I don't think so. But you could make that argument. But I don't think you can escape from that conclusion. I can't see how. I've tried to escape from it. I haven't been able to. And so, the idea is sort of, I mean, this is very profound stuff because I think if you kind of go, yeah, we have this civilization that was oriented towards God as a source of value. God dies, people stop believing in God, meaning people stop believing in God. Power and sex arise as alternatives.

And we turn ourselves, and we fantasize of ourselves as gods. Yeah. Now, our atheists and secular friends, Michael Shermer and Steve Pinker, if I were to try to channel them, I think they would say, I believe also in being in service to higher values. They would say things like family, community, rationality, enlightenment. And so, I guess one question is whether, because I've been playing with this idea that really where we need to get, we can build a political majority to prevent these atrocities from continuing is around the idea of civilization.

But I think what you're saying is that that's not good enough. That the civilization has to be in service of something even larger than the civilization itself. Look, here's the problem with the perspective that Pinker and Shermer might adopt. So let's say family, justice, truth, beauty. Okay, why? Why those? Well, because they all share something.

They all share something good. They all partake in the good. Okay, this is a definition. The good they partake in is God. It's a definition. So it's partake in is God. It's a definition. So it's not the summum bonum exactly. It's a slightly different twist on that. It's that the ultimate unity of the spirit that is good is the good that makes it self-manifest in all good things. Right, and you see that's a different way of concept now. Pinker and Shermer might say, well, that's not a spirit and you can't have a relationship with it. Right? Because that would be the next object.

Okay, there's a higher good, but it's impersonal and you can't have a relationship with it. I would say, I think that's a demolishable argument too, because the fundamental mode of human apprehension is relationship. Like at the highest level of being, we're a personality, we exist in relationship. So now you might say just because there's human beings doesn't mean there's a spirit with whom we can establish a relationship. And the first thing I would say is that's not absolutely crystal clear. So you know, don't get the card ahead of the horse. But I also think you can make a very credible case that the proper way of conceptualizing the manner in which we interact, do and should interact with the highest good, is in covenantal relationship. I think that's how people do it. I mean, so, and I think that's the defining

characteristic of the relationship between man and the transcendent. And so, I'll give you an example of that, just a quick example. So, you know, Pinker works. Well, why? Well, when he's working, he's sacrificing the pleasures of the present for the future and maybe even for the community. Okay, why? Well, because it's a contractual understanding. His understanding is that he exists in relationship with something, and if he makes the proper sacrifices, there will be a commensurate return on that offering. Right. So, you see, what happens in the biblical stories is that you get the idea of sacrifice established very early.

There's no difference between that and work. And you might say that the spirit that guarantees the fruits of your labor is God. That's another way of thinking. These are definitions, right? This is the problem with the Enlightenment mentality is that God was conceptualized. First of all, religion was conceptualized as a scientific theory, which it isn't. And then God was conceptualized as a caricature of the ineffable and dismissed. It's like, no, none of that's accurate.

It's not the right starting point. It's the wrong mode of inquiry. See, the Jews, like the Greeks, the Jews posited that at the highest level of value there was a unity. That's the monotheistic hypothesis. And the alternative is, well, there's nothing. Well, that's not helpful. Or that it's fragmented, and that's also not helpful.

So you can't escape from the value hierarchy. You can't escape from the problem of its potential unity. And then you can have a debate about the characterization of that unity. And that's useful, but you're going to find out that the proper characterization is relationship. So here's a way of thinking about it. God, let's say you have a loving relationship with your wife. It's like, well, what you actually have is a relationship with the highest spirit within her.

That's actually the way the relationship lays itself out if it's proper. And the relationship is actually something transcendent within you relating directly to something transcendent within her. And any genuine conversation is a manifestation of that as well. And that points to a transcendent reality. It's the reality that makes communication itself. That's the logos, man. That's exactly what that is.

That's even how it's conceptualized. It's not just a reality. It's the reality upon which all other realities are predicated, including the scientific. And I think we're at a point where if you look very carefully at the converging evidence, there is no other viable conclusion. Yeah. I mean, well, Jordan, I mean, do you worry that, I mean, you clearly don't think it's enough for there to be agreement on these core values. In other words, if you go family, truth, beauty, progress, you don't think that's enough.

You think there needs to be convergence on a higher value than those. But don't you worry that that's going to alienate allies and reduce the size of the coalition that we need in order to resist totalitarianism? I think the problem with the fundamentalists and the conservatives is that they shake their stick and they hit the rocks with their rod to make the water come forward. Well that stops you from entering the promised land. So what's the way forwards? You invite.

No, I think there's a way of formulating this story that is purely invitational. It's like, and the proper offering would be this way of looking at things is so much richer than any of the alternatives that like the problem is, is you got to hoist your cross, right? You got to bear your responsibility. That's the price. But I think that's an illusory price in some sense, because you're going to sacrifice everything you have to something. That's the nature of life.

You're going to exhaust your life in the service of something. It might be a multitude of things. So the sacrificial part, you don't get to choose that. You get to choose in service of what? Well, they would say, I think if you were to say, I think we would have a broad, I mean, I'm trying to, I feel like we have to resist totalitarianism. And so I'm trying to figure out how do you get to a majority? It seems to me, family truth, beauty, care, all these values that we have, that they are, they are where

I think we can attract a lot of people. I think we get to God, faith, and I think we start to lose people. Look, we've been having that problem with this ARC enterprise, right? Because we have six core domains that are very similar to the ones that you just laid out, right? Core values, right? And we've been arguing back and forth consistently, continually, about how much you leave the divine unity that is the source of those things, so to speak, implicit versus explicit.

And the answer is, we don't know, right? We don't know. But we certainly, I certainly do understand, I believe, that you don't insist upon it or use force. That's where you get the totalitarian alliance between the religious spirit, so to speak, and the totalitarian state. That's the sort of things that people like Dawkins object to, right? And rightly so. But look, like, well, one example. See, I don't know how anybody can dispute the idea

that the ground of community is sacrifice, is self-sacrifice. Like, that's, right? I mean, obviously, when you mature, you give up the narrow whims of a hedonistic two-year-old for the broader... Right, so, okay, so then you might settle... On that, I think we would get... I think you would get Pinker and...

I mean, I don't know, but I think you would get Pinker and, I mean, I don't know, but I think we would get Pinker and Shermer on that. Well then you might ask, well then you'd say, well, okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that that's the case. Well then you might ask yourself as a historian or even as a biologist, imagine that human beings came to that explicit realization, at least in part, that the core to the eternal community is voluntary self-sacrifice. How best should that be represented so it was memorable, at hand for everyone, regardless of intellect, and transmissible down the generations?

I'd say, well, you didn't code it in a story. Right. And then you might say, well, is that story true? And the right answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by true. Right? Because you don't get to play, see, that's the thing is at the level of religious inquiry, you don't get to play that game anymore. Because when you say, does God exist, let's say, the right rejoinder is, what's your definition

of exist? Oh, well, that's obvious. It's like, no, that's where your unconscious religious presuppositions are making themselves manifest. And so your question is really, I'm a materialist and I believe that there are tables. Is God a table? It's like, okay, have it your way. No. God's not a table. Are you satisfied?

Well, you know, what kind of useful discussion is that? That's not useful. It goes nowhere. It's just, it's completely the wrong level of it. It's like, what color is a musical note? It's like, what color is a musical note? It's not help. That's not a helpful question. And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment because the dichotomy between rationality and the religious is, it's a false dichotomy. We've got it conceptualized wrong.

We didn't understand. It was something we didn't understand, something profound. And I'm very interested in seeing what, you know, I brought some of these ideas forward to some of the more atheistic types, the enlightenment types that I talk to, you know, and sometimes I'll hit a sticking point where I just can't discuss the ideas any further. But generally, as long as I proceed on the scientific side, there's no dispute at all. Right.

There's going to be some more bitter pills to swallow, I'm afraid, but that's life. Well, you've helped me. I think this is very interesting because I've been playing with how do you create some framework that you can build a proper majority to resist the totalitarianism or overcome it. And I've been coming to a lot of, you know, an affirmation of the human. If you're pro-human, then you're pro-civilization. If you're pro-civilization, you need cheap energy, law and order, meritocracy. If you want that civilization to be liberal democratic, then you need free speech, free and fair elections, and equal justice under the law. I'm not sure where the gender medicine one fits into that. I've been playing with that because I can kind of come up with six core pillars of liberal democratic civilization.

I'm not sure any of those six actually protect kids and vulnerable adults in the ways that they clearly need to be protected from the- Be fruitful and multiply is not a bad axiom. There is no civilization if you don't protect puberty and protect the right of people to grow up. Well, there's also a reason, there's also a reason that the image of mother and child is sacred. And it wasn't just sacred to the Christians, right?

I mean, there are images of ISIS and Horus dating back to Egyptian times that are essentially indistinguishable from Mary and Christ. The same idea was being put forward. And the reason for that is that if the image of mother and child is not sacred, then society decays. What you get, you're either going to have the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ or you're going to have the Whore of Babylon. Those are your options.

Right, right, right. And we've got plenty Whore of Babylon, right? Plenty, right? Right, right. And we've got plenty Whore of Babylon, right? Plenty of it. And more all the time, right? More than a mouthful, you might say. Right? More than a surfeit. Yes. I think this is great because you're actually giving me the seventh pillar of civilization, which is really the right to continue the human... The obligation even. The obligation, yeah.

The obligation, right? That's, well, that's even, you know, people say, well, why should I bring a child into a world such as this? It's like, well, that's your sacrificial duty. You know, the world will tear my child apart. It's like, yeah, that's right. That's exactly right, you know? That's what, so there's this, there's a statue in St. Peter's of the paeida, right, which is Mary with her broken son in her arms.

Well, that's motherhood. Like, that's not the infant anymore. It's like, yes, your child will be broken by the world. Right, right, definitely. Well, do you make that a sacred necessity? Well, that's Mary's decision. Her decision is, I have faith in the essential structure of being and becoming. I will bring a child into the world, right, with all its horror. And then I'll launch him so that he can pursue his redemptive mission, which is what you do to a child if you love them. It's like, go out there and pick up the challenges, man.

Push yourself out against the world, right? And so the Freudians knew this. They said this a century ago, the good mother fails. What was the mother that they advocated? Devouring, devouring mother. Oh. The good mother fails. Yeah, brutal.

That's the sacrificial gesture of the eternal feminine. That's what it is. Yeah. And that's, it's a sacred image because there's no replacement for it. Right. Right. You know, so, look, maybe I'll send you a copy of this manuscript and you can tell me what you think, man. Oh, I can't wait to read it, Jordan. I'm delighted to make the delight of it. Kick the hell out of it if you can, because I've been like trying to break it apart with hammer and tongs, you know, and I'm not putting forward any argument that I can, that I can

break. So... Well, I think we're in a real emergency at this point. I mean, I feel that, you know, that you look at what's happening and you see basic attack on human development in the form of gender pseudoscience and medical mistreatment, an attack on our energy systems in the form of Malthusian anti-humanism, and a basic war on meritocracy, on law and order, on the basis of civilization. So it's coming a lot faster and a lot more powerful

than I think many of us realized. I think that's also, Michael, I think that's why the archetypal structures are becoming obvious because it's happening so fast that the lines are becoming starker, right? This has always happened. This has always been happening, but it's happening way faster now, right?

And so it's like, oh, you can see the metaphysical characters behind the scenes, right? Much more clearly, yeah. And it's not a pretty picture. This is why people turn away. And I can understand, but that it's not... Look, when the Israelites get all clamory in the desert for the last time in the story of Exodus,

they're all bitching and whining because, oh, they're not in the lovely tyranny and all they have to eat is manna. It's like, it's real rough and they run out of water. So they go to Moses and bitch and squawk about it and they're complaining and clamoring away and God gets sick of them and so he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in there to bite them.

This is the sort of thing that God does that makes people like Dawkins hate him, right? It's like, what sort of God would throw in the snakes? It's like, lose faith and see how many snakes appear there, boys and girls. So anyways, in come the snakes and the Israelites repent because of the snakes. And they asked Moses to go to God and call them off. And Moses said, okay. And so he has a chat with God. And he says, you know, do you want to call off the snakes? And God says, yeah, I don't think so, but I'll make you a different deal. You make a brazen serpent, make a pole and put a serpent on it and get everyone to come and look at it.

And if they look at it, if they look at what's poisonous, they'll be immune from it. Right? That's the symbol of Asclepius, by the way. Right? The universal physician. Right! So what's the antidote to pathology and totalitarianism? It's like, and despair. It's like, look upon that which poisons you. Right, in faith. Yes. Right, right.

Yeah, that's right. Exactly, exactly. That is right, man. That is right. I was reading Ivan Illich's book, Medical Nemesis, which is about iatrogenesis, the way the medical system makes people sick. And he really makes a big point of stop looking to the medical, stop looking to fix the medical system so that it stops poisoning you. You have to build the internal resources,

the internal ability to withstand the pain and suffering that is life. Okay, okay, so we'll, okay. That's the only, that's the only solution to it. Well, let's, let's close this with this. So one of the things we talked about right at the beginning was your initial resistance to even delve into this domain. And you said why. It's like, who wants to look at that? And the answer is no one, but you did. So let's ask two questions then. Why did you? What drove you to do that and to overcome your resistance? And what has been the consequence for you, right?

Because that's the end of the story. You looked on the snake that no one wants to look at and it's certainly poisonous. So the question is, you know, why? What drove you to do that? What voice did you hearken to that invited you on that adventure? Let's say. And then what's the consequence for you of doing this? It's such a great question, Jordan. I mean, it's so funny because when you say, what was the, I had this call to do something on it that I refused. I mean, I saw it happening and I refused the call. And then, of course, it was, you know, in the classic hero's journey narrative, I finally felt compelled because this person or persons who gave me the files, I knew that nobody else would be able to bring them into the world in the way that we could do it.

You may know that we wrote a, or I didn't write, I had my colleagues wrote a 70 page report to accompany the files. We had attempted to do it journalistically. It was too much, too complex. So we spent eight months working on this report. The consequences, I'm afraid that they're only starting. I mean, I've never, look, I've been taken on the CIA, the FBI, been writing about Jeffrey Epstein. None of it worries me.

None of that scared me. These people, and look, I'm not so scared of them, but I'm also... I think the people that are involved in this, which is frankly a cult, a child sacrifice, an castration cult, if we're just being perfectly honest, as an objective description of it, they're very dangerous. They're violent, they're aggressive, they attack. So I've taken my own personal security. I won't say what, but I'm taking measures to protect my personal security at this point.

Do you regret it? Not for a minute, no, of course not. Why not? Because that's surprising. Like, you know, you just said there's a most dangerous opponent that you've probably faced. And I believe that, by the way. I believe there's a most dangerous opponent that you've probably faced. By far. And I believe that, by the way. I believe that's to be the case, yes.

And a very well-organized one, too. The only YouTube videos I've had taken down have been the ones that touched on the transition. On this. Right, right. Well, we'll see if this one, we'll see what happens with this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We will see. We will see. Okay, so you're putting yourself in danger, so why don't you regret it? You will see. We'll see.

Okay, so you're putting yourself in danger, so why don't you regret it? Well this is, it comes back to this thing we were just talking about, right? It's like, if you're not going to take some amount, and I don't want to overstate it either, but if you're not going to be willing to take on some amount of sacrifice on something like this, then what good are you? Like, what is the point? That's right. You're not really a man, right?

That's right. You're not really a father. Yes. That's right. You're just not a... Like, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I had said no to this. You're the slave of psychopaths. That's what you are. That's right. That's right. I would be a...

That's right. Voiceless, braying slave of psychopaths. That's right. Right. Right. That's exactly right. And now I get in a position where like, we're not going to be afraid of them. We're going to overcome them. And we're going to figure out how to do that. I have a lot of, I do have faith, I think I am, I do tend towards optimism. So, but I think this is, this part, Jardon, this is a helpful conversation because I do think being able to describe what's happening

in very specific psychological terms, I think is one of the keys to overcoming the totalitarianism that we're facing at different places in different parts of society simultaneously. Yep, yep, definitely. Well, you got to get the diagnosis right before you can prescribe the cure, right? That's right.

Yep, yep. All right, man. Well, it's gonna be a crazy year. Buckle right. Right. Yep. Yep. All right, man. Well, it's going to be a crazy year. Buckle up. Yes. Yep. Yeah. Well, congratulations, man. Good work. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you for the conversation. I always learn so much when I talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. It was great to talk to you, man. All right. So for everybody watching and listening, well, that was a trip. I think you might agree with that. Thank you very much for your time and attention. And, you know, there's plenty to digest in that. Thank you to The Daily Wire for facilitating this conversation and the film crew here in

Savannah. That's where I am today. And all of you who are watching, many of you know I'm going to talk to Michael for another half an hour on The Daily wire side. Not exactly sure where we'll go with that, but, um, join us and throw some support their way because they're what's allowing these sorts of conversations to move forward. And so thanks Michael, very interesting. Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for having me.