The Megyn Kelly Show - The Rise Of The Illiberal Left, with Christina Hoff Sommers, Desh Amila, and Curt Jaimungal | Ep. 137

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Christina Hoff Sommers, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Desh Amila and Curt Jaimungal, the filmmakers behind the documentary "Better Left Unsaid," to talk about the rise of the illiberal left, how the illiberal left changed feminism, our culture of therapy and safetyism, self-censorship, "fainting couch feminism," fighting back against cultural censorship in Big Tech and on college campuses, how the tolerant left and tolerant right can unite, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have a great show for you today. I'm really excited about the discussion you're about to hear. We're going to talk about the rise of the illiberal left, how it happened, what it looks like, and what we can do to stop it. And I think all of our guests today are of the left, at least two out of three. I asked two out of the three. And so these are people who are left-leaning, who are objecting to the craziness that's taken over our country and the Democratic Party and our our cultural institutions. And so we're going to get into how we got here and exactly how it's manifested. First,

with Christina Hoff Summers, who I've long admired. She's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative think tank, but she's a Democrat. But she calls herself a feminist, but she says she's a she's a freedom feminist. She's an equity feminist, meaning she's not against men and she's not about infantilizing women. So you'll hear from her first. And we're going to get into Simone Biles. That's how we'll kick it off. I'll have little talking points for you on that. And then we're going to be joined by two guys who have just put out a film not long ago called Better Left Unsaid. You've got to watch this movie. You'll see Coleman Hughes. You'll see Steven Pinker. You'll see Douglas Murray. You'll see Noam Chomsky. All sorts of deep thinkers

on how we arrived here. And they really get into sort of the extreme left, how it's taken over, and its historical roots in Marxism, Leninism, socialism, communism, and how those experiments worked out. They kind of show you. And it's parallels to what we're going through right now. We're going to be joined by Kurt Jaimungal. He's the director and host of this movie. And Desh Amala, who is the producer. He's a pal of Coleman's. And these guys have gotten tons of pushback from big tech on trying to get the good word out about this film. So we are happy to help them here. You guys need to check it out. Better left unsaid.

And we'll give you all the deets on how you can find it. But first, before we get to Christina, this. I want to begin today with Simone Biles. I've been thinking a lot about how I feel on this, and I didn't want to knee-jerk defend her because I've long been her fan. I interviewed her while I was at NBC. Nor did I want to pile on just because when the mainstream narrative is so strongly in one direction, I tend to get suspicious. Is she a pathetic quitter or a heroic trailblazing mental health warrior? Or are both of these narratives wrong? We've seen some extreme reactions to her decision to quit the team competition and then

the individual all around at the Tokyo Olympics. Charlie Kirk called her a selfish sociopath. That's bullshit. Come on. But what she did this week was not heroic either, in my view. First of all, she is clearly struggling. Unlike with Naomi Osaka, there is zero reason to doubt Simone's word. Remember, Osaka only landed on the I have social anxiety excuse for refusing to do press conferences after she had been condemned by her fellow players, the Grand Slam tournaments, and by pundits chastising her for equating her annoyance at reporters' questions to actual mental health struggles. Her sister gave up the truth when she posted on Facebook and then later deleted

that Naomi doesn't suffer from depression or mental health problems. She just didn't like the negative questions about her game. Then came the blowback and then suddenly Naomi went with, I have crippling social anxiety that makes me want to avoid the press. Obviously a fig leaf to patch up her growing PR missteps. But the media was so excited that a diverse woman on the world stage was leaning into alleged mental health problems that all conversation was shut down and only one narrative was then allowed. All praise Queen Naomi. Her dishonesty was soon made clear by the multiple magazine covers she posed for and interviews she gave both before and after her so-called press anxiety crisis. Not to mention the Netflix documentary about her life that we

now know she orchestrated. And let's not forget the release of her Barbie. Competing in Tokyo on behalf of her native country, Japan, Osaka went on to lose to the 42nd seed and she went home without a medal. But let's get back to Simone. How did she explain her decision? Well, her message was a bit all over the place, and that is in part why I think she's getting criticized. She said it was tough being, quote, head star of the Olympics. I mean, Simone wears a goat on her leotard, clearly embracing the idea that she is, in fact, the greatest of all time, which she is. But expectations were set accordingly.

Then she blew it on the vault, essentially relegating her team to, at best, second place. And she, the team captain, refused to finish the competition. She explained she was not having as much fun as she wanted at the Games, that she had wanted this competition to be, quote, for myself and not, quote, to please other people, which, not surprisingly, made some other people feel unimportant to Simone, namely some of her countrymen who sent her to represent America, not to compete for herself. But she also said her head wasn't in the right place and that she had realized this is not worth getting hurt. She said she wanted to walk out of that arena, not be carried out on a stretcher, which has happened to others before. Young gymnasts have been paralyzed, leading to death when things go wrong in that sport. Who the hell are we to say,

do that life-threatening routine anyway? This isn't tennis or a press conference that an athlete is expected to attend. This is high-flying aerial vaults and backward flips on balance beams and jumps that defy gravity on the floor routines. Moreover, Simone Biles has earned our deference to her in making these decisions. Remember, in gymnastics, there's Simone and then there is everyone else. No one even comes close. Her daring feats on the vault are so extraordinary, judges struggle to even understand how to rate them. Silver is like gold to the gymnasts competing against her because they know she's in a league of her own.

So when she says, this time, I couldn't, we should believe her and accept her decision to say, it wasn't safe for me today. And you know what? We're forgetting something. There is a history here. Simone Biles has been abused by this damn sport and the leaders of it for years. She was a victim of the evil team doctor Larry Nassar, a serial child molester who hurt Simone for years along with so many of her friends and teammates.

She said publicly that one of the reasons she came back to compete this year, at, I guess it's considered old in gymnastics, age 24, was that she thought officials would brush the abuse story to the side if a survivor were not on the floor. She was out there for a lot of complicated reasons, and she was in the very setting that led to her serial abuse in the first place. Is it any wonder that she wasn't really in the right headspace? So Simone Biles deserves our full support. But supporting her does not mean one needs to celebrate this development. It's sad. It's a valley in the highs and lows story of an incredible athlete's life. The superhuman Simone, as it turns out, is human after all, as Juliette Huddy said the other day. And on this

particular day, she faltered. A huge, huge part of sports, especially at this level, is mental grit. She's had it her whole career. Let's not forget she won those four gold medals in Rio back in 2016, weeks before the Nassar story broke. She's the best there's ever been in a sport in which female athletes' health and well-being has been notoriously worth nothing to those in charge. The Washington Post had a story out just today outlining how terribly USA Gymnastics officials have allegedly behaved towards Simone and the other Nassar victims. It's worse than we knew. Covering up for Nassar, dodging the athlete's demands for information ever since. All of which helps explain why on this one day, the GOAT couldn't win. She deserves our understanding, our empathy, and our thanks to her for a lifetime of making us proud of the stars and stripes on her uniform.

And we can and should be saying, next time, Simone, we hope there will be a next time. You'll get them then. But that does not mean we have to celebrate this as empowering, which is where the media seems to be going. She put her mental health first, say those arguing that this is a trailblazing moment. Well, yes, she did. But one can understand how the American people who put her on that team so she could compete and win don't feel like celebrating this particular moment. Deadspin called this, quote, the most impressive move of Simone's career.

The most impressive? No. But that comment is indicative of a larger issue in our society right now where we seem to want to cheer on any surrender to upset. Outside of Simone, this is what we're doing lately. Whereas we used to celebrate toughing it out. Take the military, for example. We can't have our Navy SEALs putting mental health first instead of jumping into the helicopters to go kill bad guys. Our frontline medical workers don't have that luxury when they walk into COVID-infested hospitals and nursing homes to take care of the sick and dying. Bailing on a commitment in order to put one's mental health

first may indeed be necessary and something which one's mom will applaud. But the folks who are counting on you to do your job do not need to feel that way. They are allowed to feel a bit sad and disappointed, and they will clap as you walk off after a bad fault, but they don't have to clap when you quit or, in this case, because you quit. We don't need to support our young female athletes by celebrating their surrender to self-doubt or upset. We seem to want to lionize people's retreat from emotional challenges these days. Those who say I can't get lifted onto a pedestal because they said I can't. Is that the example we want to set for young girls in particular?

Can't we get to the point where we no longer shame women for self-doubt, for being emotional, or for having a rough time mentally, while not deifying them when they give in to those feelings. Simone Biles is as tough as they come. She can handle some disappointment from the fans. As a world-class athlete, no doubt she expected it. She's also entitled to our empathy. For the hell she and too many other American gymnasts have been put through at the hands of those who were supposed to be protecting them. For now, I think the message should be, we are rooting for you, Simone, and the porch light remains on for your inevitable comeback. Joining me now, Christina Hoff Summers. Christina, I'm so glad you're here. You're the

perfect person to discuss this with. And I'd love to get your thoughts on, on Simone Biles. I agree with your analysis. I thought, uh, there, there is a difference between what happened with Simone Biles and with Naomi. And she is an athlete of such brilliance and her past feats are enough to earn her a place in a permanent pantheon and she's human. So it would seem quite appropriate to defer to her judgment and move on. What's annoying is more the reaction in the media with this fixation on safetyism. And they keep pointing out how dangerous the sport is. Of course, it's dangerous. We know that. Most of us couldn't come near to doing these things. And yet, it's almost as if the mood is that people shouldn't be doing these things. And I don't get, well, I do, because it's a fixation. I wrote a book

called One Nation Under Therapy with the psychiatrist Sally Sattel. And here we are, a therapeutic culture. And that's the narrative favored by many in the prestige media. All right. So why are we doing that, right? Why in any day past, we would have said, oh, gosh, I love Simone Biles. So bummed to see that happen to her. You know, I hope she comes back for the individual. Why did we go to, yes, the most historic, best, bravest moment of her career? Well, we are deeply into this culture of therapy where the road to salvation is therapeutic self-understanding. Now, as Sally, my psychiatrist, co-author, and I wrote, there's nothing wrong with psychiatric self-understanding, but it's limited in terms of the world that it opens to you because safety and cautiousness and there's also spectacle and, and pursuing greatness. And we admire that as well, but that,

all of those ideals seem to be falling away for many and all they, they want life to be like a permanent therapy session. And they're desperate for, I guess, some kind of role model of safety ism and, and a therapist. I doubt that Simone wants to be that there's no evidence that's going to happen. But there we are. I know. Well, she said she was inspired by Naomi Osaka, which I was like, oh boy. I mean, if I were Naomi, I wouldn't be too pleased to hear that because I wouldn't want Simone Biles bailing from the Olympics on my shoulders, especially because I don't believe Naomi's.

I think Naomi got there as a PR cover as opposed to Simone, who I believe is wrestling with something. Right. And and also, I do think this is very bad for young women. We have the idea this wouldn't be happening if it were a male athlete. And so there is a tendency to use a different standard. Let's bracket the particular case of Simone Bile and its particularities, which I'm, like you, quite empathetic. But overall, the culture right now with this, I think we've seen a kind of feminization. And if you were to generalize about sex differences, women do tend to be more cautious and more fearful. There's psychological studies, you ask people like, would you go up in the space shuttle? And far more men than women say yes. Men take more risks, just physically than women. And from the earliest age, boys are more likely than girls to end up in the emergency room having done crazy things.

But you can have a culture that is too extremely male and martial and aggressive and violent and people dying and so forth, obviously bad. But I think there's another extreme where you can become so obsessed with safety and caution and hyper-protectionist, overly cosseted. And I see us moving in that direction, even with the response to recently, with the recent policies on the COVID vaccine,

where we're erring on the side of maximum safety without considering the other values that may be sacrificed. It's so true. And I read a lot when they write like this about women, and race is a factor too. It's not just women, it's Black women from Simone Biles to Naomi to Meghan Markle, you know, that historically society's been notoriously unforgiving of them and held them to an impossible standard. And that that indeed may be true. And especially when it comes to expressing weakness or, you know, that that women aren't allowed to shed a tear because we're known as hysterics. You know what I mean? We're fighting back against this typical way we've been portrayed publicly. And I get all that. I get all that. But I just happen to think the solution to this is not to then celebrate any meltdown, any failure, any implosion on the vault during the Olympics.

The solution, in my view, is let's just hold everybody to the same standard. She messes up in the vault, you feel disappointed, you root her on, forward we go. There doesn't need to be this, oh, look at the delicate little baby who somehow, like, she's the toughest among us. She's already competed after having been a sexual assault victim repeatedly by that pervert Dr. Nassar. She has nothing to prove. I don't understand why we have to, like, to me, I worry because we're showing our daughters, if you feel any sort of hesitation, any sort of vulnerability, any sort of a weakness, you will be praised for surrendering to it. Yes. And what worries me too is they're encouraged to focus on their emotions. And there's pretty good research that there are a lot

of benefits to being stoical. And if you are too obsessed with your emotions, I saw one study that looked at a cross section of adolescent girls and boys and asked them, how do you feel when you talk about your problems? How do you feel when you share your troubles with another person, with your parent, with a counselor? And almost all the girls said they felt better. And the boys, the number one answer was they thought it was weird and it didn't make them feel better. And people said, oh, this puts the boys in danger.

They're not in touch with their emotions. They don't talk about their feelings. They're not self-aware. But it turned out the girls have far more depression. And the researcher, Amanda Rose, thought that it's possible that a certain amount of stoicism is conducive to well-being and happiness. And if you become obsessively, an obsessive ruminator, that, that may be what depression is, is just obsessive focus, you can't escape the focus on the self. And there may be just something protective in male stoicism. And she, this researcher in her team concluded that

we have to reconsider this idea that always sharing emotions, always being in touch with your feelings, being a feeling centered society may actually be detrimental to wellbeing. Can I tell you, this resonates with me because I have found, I used to believe, talk about your feelings all day long. I did. And the more adversity I suffered in my life, the more I realized it was helpful to me to process it when it happened, you know, try to put it in a box and understand what had gone down. And I'm not averse to crying and, you know, showing emotion. And I think part of the beauty of women is our, is that we're a more emotional and we can be a softer place to fall. And that's, that's great. That's one of the reasons we're so attractive, I think. Um, however, sort of, I believe in

cognitive behavioral therapy is essentially where i'm going where it doesn't make sense to obsess on it you it's there it happened if you can move it off to the side and focus on something else especially during the trauma that's not repressing it that's not letting it kill you that's getting past it and that has worked really well for me. I am such a proponent of cognitive behavioral therapy because it's problem solving. It shakes it and says, well, okay, you have some bad psychological habits. You're catastrophizing and you're oversimplifying and you're engaging in your paranoia and just be more reasonable with yourself. And a good cognitive therapist, I wrote this a long time ago. I'm not promoting that book. It was before

its time, unfortunately, because we really weren't quite there the way we are today. I remember I went on Comedy Central and was talking about the book and they just were looking at me like I was crazy that teachers, you know, at the time they weren't using red pens because that was thought to be powerful to students' feelings. And I remember John Stewart said, what do they do? Like put potpourri on the papers and things that they weren't doing that. But he, Stewart just thought this couldn't really be happening, that we were obsessed with feelings and that, you know, the Girl Scouts were giving awards for candle therapy. I don't know, strange things were going on.

Tug of War was becoming tug of peace for kids, you know, everything to tone down and make the environment more reassuring and safe. That was what we talked about in that book. But now it's all sort of come, it's coming into being, it's coming to reality. Yes. I was saying the other day, I just feel like all of this messaging is part of the wussification of America where we're, you know, the, the messaging we've gotten, the ads to recruit

people into the army are now about how diverse, you know, the, the woman had two moms and it's like, okay, that's nice, but it's not relevant to whether you can perform in the army. And we whenever a public figure expresses any sort of a struggle or a weakness, I mean, we lionize them. And I understand we want to make people who are struggling with mental health issues or what have you feel not alone. I like that. And I believe in that. I believe in that because for too long, no one ever did it. And so you'd feel like, oh, my God, I'm the only one who has this completely effed up family or background or, you know, my own issues. So I like that. But it seems like we've tipped it too far in the other direction to where now the messaging is the more screwed up you are, the farther you will go. I know. And we're we're not being reasonable with children.

I mean, we're so afraid that the girls will get eating disorders, which are terrible things. But on the other hand, because we're so afraid we're not being truthful to them about the dangers of obesity. And there's now this sort of, sort of fat acceptance movement. I get it up to a point,

but if you look at the data, it's pretty clear that you're better off, you know, doing what you can to stay in a reasonable shape. And I'm finding that there's just, they're going overboard to indulge every young woman and be reassuring. And by the way, I should add that the mental health movement in our book, I meant to say this before, we strongly supported for those who are in distress, cognitive behavioral therapy. It has one of the best records of success, but not to just become obsessively an obsessive ruminator.

And, you know, it's probably good to cultivate. What do you make of the point I was trying to make about hardship versus mental health troubles? Like, I just feel like mental health is now being used as a catch all for any sort of mental struggle. If you talk to personnel in our universities, they are claiming that a high percentage now of college freshmen come to them with mental disorders. And it used to be they always had a school psychologist. Well, now they have to have teams of psychologists because there's so many kids under duress. And I have to wonder if they've been brought up to

think that any adversity is, it means, you know, any, when you're feeling bad about something, that that's a catastrophe and it must be addressed. And there has to be, you have to go to an authority to fix it. And it's almost as if we haven't given them resources just to cope with the daily, the ups and downs of everyday life. Yeah, that's called being human. A lot of people feel sad, feel anxious, worry, you know, that that's normal. And even if you do it a lot, it's normal. It doesn't mean you have a mental disorder.

And I don't, I just feel like mental health could be used to cover just about anything. We, I don't want us to see us swing so far in the other direction that we use it to get out of anything tough. You know, it's just a pass, a free pass to get out of doing tough things. You know, I look at our military and I do look at those frontline workers who have been through hell this year that they'd never show up for work if we allowed that. Right. Well, and the other thing is I don't want it.

And of course we don't, we don't want to, and of course, we don't, we don't want it to sound like we are saying that people shouldn't seek therapy. Of course they should. And in fact, I worry about young men who have mental, serious mental health disorders, because I think they are underserved by the, uh, the psychological, the psychology profession. It's very much catered to the therapy needs of women. And there are some in, well, it was largely in Australia where they became aware that young men were just sort of outside. They're not getting the mental health treatments. Some of them badly need it.

And they came up with some solutions. I don't know if they're working, but in this country, it's not acknowledged as a problem. In fact, the therapeutic communities kind of carried away with a political agenda in which you could send a young man to a psychiatrist and she talked to him about toxic masculinity or male supremacy or patriarchy. Can you imagine? Up next, we're going to get into the medical community now apologizing for using the term pregnant women. Barry Weiss and Katie Herzog had an exclusive on this.

It was great. And we'll talk to Christina about that right after this. I'm in therapy. I've been in therapy for a long time. I love my, my therapist and he is non-woke. So that's good. That works for me, but he does tell me stories about what he sees in the hospital, about how he's the one who first told me, you're not allowed to say this, this patient is a 42 year old female. You can't, you cannot assume gender based on the breasts and the appearance of the person sitting there and the fact that, you know, she's got female sex organs. No. And we saw this just this week where Barry Weiss, who's got this great sub stack column, had Katie Herzog write in it. Both women have been on the show and Katie was writing about what's happening in the medical community right now. And she revealed that even

in the medical community right now, there's blowback for doctors denying biological sex. So professors, she caught one on a tape, somebody gave it to her, apologizing for saying male and female and writing about how the students are, are policing the teachers, um, because activism has taken over medicine. And the one example they gave in particular, Christina was, um, here's a professor at the university of California. This is a quote from a tape that Katie got. He says, I don't want you to think that I'm in any way trying to imply anything. And if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it. Again, I'm very sorry for what I did.

It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is to be offensive. I mean, the worst thing. Okay. And then he, the offense that he committed using the term pregnant women. I know you're not supposed to say breastfeeding.

The word, the preferred word is chest feeding. It's so absurd that it's hard to believe. And I'm having a hard time imagining these. I've been to universities all my life. And the professors in the medical school always struck me as being very sober, no nonsense, empirically based scientists. And they seem totally unprepared to deal with this wave of fanaticism that's just, you know, sort of sweeping over the culture. And they're caving and it it's probably just a small coterie of little fanatics little red guards in the in the first year class or that's what i imagine and they're giving into them right this

is very bad and and medicine doesn't i mean already the cdc is losing some credibility, the medical community. And then they do something like this, which is going to make them a laughingstock. I don't get how in trying to be supportive of a very small community, the transgender community, very small numbers wise, you've got to take away from all women, from all girls. We can no longer be pregnant women. We can no longer breastfeed term. You're not even allowed to say mother in, in, in, in, in administrative regulations and rules that the Biden administration is passing right now. They've gotten rid of those terms because they find the term mother offensive. And that's what loses support for transgender people, right? It's like, if you feel you feel like you somehow find the term mother offensive, then I'm going to fight you.

Then I'm going to fight. So I feel like the approach is boneheaded. No, I agree with you. I've for a long time been supportive of people who are genuinely transgender. And I think it's an authentic human rights issue. And that movement has legitimacy of course but there are many who have glommed on to it I don't think I mean I think that uh they're probably a lot is particularly young women who are mentally unstable and they are

moving towards this because they maybe they get interested in it from being online or from friends. And there are far more girls now saying they're trans than ever before. And in ways which suggest that it's a contagion of some kind of hysteria. No signs of being trans at any point prior to the 16-year-old awkwardness. Exactly. Or it may just be girls who are gay and you can be a lesbian and, but you don't undergo treatments to become masculinized. That's again, a very, very small group of people, but it's being mainstreamed.

And as you say, it's become an occasion for just being coercive and authoritarian towards the public. And this is not going to help the cause. It's infuriating to people. So I've heard and I've heard transgender people say this as well. I mean, they're 100 percent. I was trying to make the point. This is their activists. It's not them. Trans

activists are just pains in the ass. I mean, really, they're, they're so loud and obnoxious. And I'm convinced they do not represent trans people who are reasonable and just want to be loved and supported. But tell me, let's talk about the feminist role in all of this, because this is a field in which you've found yourself for a long, long time. I love it. You know, you talk about yourself as a young woman saying, Okay, I'm a feminist. And then you kind of looked into the background. You were like, well, this is pretty Marxist in its approach and it's pretty demonizing of men. And I'm not sure this label works for me. And you did battle with the feminists of the time. But I love that you've kind of come full circle with them. You may find yourself in the same camp as the old radical

feminists who are kind of pushing back against some of the stuff we're talking about. So talk to me about feminism and how you view it and how your own journey has gone. I have always been a feminist. My mother was a feminist. My grandmother was a suffragist. And I was surprised as a grad student in philosophy and then as a professor for many years that my colleagues in philosophy, in feminist philosophy, and some of the radical feminists in the university, held views that were sort of shockingly extreme and just gratuitously angry and denigrating to men, even to women. They didn't like what they called the gender system. So whereas I was a feminist that wanted to achieve equality with men, their goal was to overthrow what they called the sex-gender system. And they thought it was all just an artifact of culture and could be taken apart, taken down, and we were all just sort of gender-neutral beings.

Well, it turns out that's not true. There's no evidence, good evidence is true. The preponderance of evidence suggests that there are differences between men and women. There are some people for whom the stereotypes of sex don't hold true. But for many of us, they are true. Women do tend to be, as I said before, a little more cautious and aware of danger and more risk averse. But also more nurturing and higher emotional intelligence, better reading skills.

Women are better students overall and better rule followers. Boys tend to be more rule breaking. And as I said, there are exceptions. I'm talking about the rules. Well, my colleagues in feminist philosophy would not accept any of this. There are some that don't even accept that men are stronger than women. They think that's an artifact of culture. So I started tangling with them. And it has gone full circle because there were the radical feminists and they would at least come out and fight. A lot of feminists just didn't like debate. They thought it was too contentious and they wouldn't debate me. The radical feminists would, but I've become friends with them because they don't like many aspects of the trans activist movement. And they have been so

viciously targeted by trans activists. And they are called TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists. That's a term of denigration. And they've been heroically, they've been courageous coming out and saying, so I admire them for that. I disagree with them with many things, but I like the spirit. And so now the women I used to debate,

I don't agree with them. I don't, I think they're very hostile. They think a lot of very negative, they hold a lot of negative views about men. And I think I disagree with them to this day, but overall I I'm in their court right now. And one of the problems with, I don't know if it's feminism or a misguided attempt to lift up young women is how unfair the process can be to men. You know, that's, it's one of the things, one of the reasons I don't call myself a feminist and it's exemplified in what's happening on college campuses right now with the lack of due process for men who get

accused for lack of a better term again, in, in the, in the me too movement, you know, they get accused of sexual assault or some sort of sexual misbehavior. And thanks to Obama, we have we had almost no due process rights for men on campus. Trump and Betsy DeVos put them back in place. And now Biden is trying to undo it all and return us to a day and age in which men, if you if you got accused, you were done. You you were convicted. They lowered the standard to just a preponderance of the evidence for you to be found guilty. It's just 51% likely. They got rid of your right to cross-examine your accuser, that you didn't have a right to a lawyer in the proceedings. It was usually a kangaroo court staffed with people who are victims' rights advocates. So the duck is stacked for these young

men and they're fighting right now to go back to it. And I think if that's feminism, if that's what it means to be, you know, a strong feminist woman standing up for other women, I don't want that. I, I don't want that to come to the expense of due process and boys and men. No. And as a, as a classical equality feminist, I never wanted that. And I'm horrified that in the name of feminism, we now see these illiberal policies. What's been going on for many years in feminism, but we see it certainly all over the universities and increasingly in the workplace of these authoritarian censorship of an extreme kind where, you know, a man will know anybody can get in trouble for just a slightly, you know, mildly risque joke. All sorts of policing the environment for the slightest hint of sexism. And we're just becoming less free.

And I don't see how that helps women. I don't see how that helps anyone. But it's the bidding of a radical group that has been there all along in the universities. And a lot that I see that's happening, people say, where did this, this, this, you know, wokeness come from? A lot of it came from the schools, the schools of education that have been teaching this for years and years, and they don't believe in intellectual diversity. So they don't hire professors that might have a different point of view. So it's pretty much, you know, a one party system in increasingly in schools of education, but now throughout many universities, but even in the younger grades, because the schools of

ed are teaching the teachers. And so in the classrooms, the kids are getting a steady diet of this sort of far left view of the world. And it's distorted and empirically unfounded. But if you challenge it, the kids have been taught to see you as a male, you're supporting male supremacy and patriarchy or toxic masculinity. I tried to stop it. And I had great allies. I had Camille Paglia and Katie Royce. The ACLU was there at the time. You had people, Wendy Kaminer. And we were fighting it. And I thought we won. But then something happened. And now,

you know, the ACLU has gone over to, there seem to be hardline feminists. Yeah, that's right. There aren't that sympathetic to free speech and due process. Two steps backwards. So, and you're, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're a Democrat. That's the thing. I've always been, I come from a very liberal family. My parents were so liberal, they left California and moved to Vermont at a certain point, much after I grew up. But we lived in Topanga Canyon and sort of a hippie socialist family. And it's in my DNA. And I'm a self-hating Democrat. But don't you think, I mean, you tell me, but I hear all the time, I feel like the country's going through something.

And in particular, people on the left are going through something. People who are lifelong Democrats are starting to realize, I don't know what I am anymore. You know, the Ronald Reagan line, because he used to be a Democrat. I didn't leave the party. The party left me. It just seems like the party's changing dramatically. The Republicans had a big change with Trump. It's like, wait a minute, what do we we don't care about spending anymore. We don't really the messaging on trade changed isolationism. And I feel like something's happening on the left right now where there's there's a cleaving between that the far left and the center left. Well, also when I was growing up, uh, humor, uh, was on sort of seemed to be something the left liked and it was like conservative grouches that wanted censorship

and conservative grouches that, you know, wanted to stop people's fun. And, and people who are liberal seem to be you know just kinder and wanting policies that um giving people a break giving people a chance i just associated that with a kind of liberal spirit but right now i see so much cruelty i don't think that the majority of people on the left are cruel and i can tell you my my parents, they've passed away, but they were the kindest, loveliest people. But that spirit of liberalism that they had, and it was what I thought the left was supposed to be about, it's been replaced by something that's full of censoring scolds and people that want to do away with basic rights.

And it's become unrecognizable. And I think the left has a problem with it. Maybe it's just there are some very cruel people in this opportunistically have taken advantage and everyone else is frightened now. But this has to change because it's just, it's extinguishing a spirit of humanity and kindness and forgiveness. I mean, in this cancel culture, there's no forgiveness. You are, even for the smallest infraction, I've seen people destroyed. And going back to what you were talking about, the due process, I have met young men who've been caught up in this, and unfairly and wrongly accused. It is life-annihilating. One day they're happy sophomores at Tufts University or something, and the next day at home, shamed, and no one will

talk to them. And when you hear what happened, even when you, I've heard cases where both sides agree on the facts, the idea that he's called a rapist is absurd because now, well, I hope we don't go back to that. But before the changes under Betsy DeVos in the Trump administration, before those changes, if two young people had sex and there was alcohol, he could be called a rapist. And I once debated a professor at the University of Virginia. And I asked her, I said, well, what if two people, a boy and a girl are drunk, and they both report it?

Could you say they raped each other? And she said, yes. And I just found this whole thing ridiculous. Sex, while under the influence has been known to happen, even on, you know, honeymoons, people imbibe. But there's this idea that if a young woman has alcohol, she is incapable of consenting. I can agree if she's just blacked out drunk or something, of course, a reasonable person without that. But boys have been convicted when, you know, they both had, you know, a couple of margaritas. It's the same thing. So that's back to what we were saying before. There's no reason to treat us like we're these delicate wilting flowers

who can't bear the consequences of our own decisions. That's not equality. That's treating us like we're on a pedestal. That we have to be protected from male vulgarity. I call this fainting couch feminism. It's not a feminism I recognize. It's hyper puritanical. When feminism was supposed to overthrow that kind of puritanism. It's also authoritarian. It's coercive and it's unkind. I don't recognize feminism without mercy. And it's it can be very vicious. And we've seen it. And it makes women, women that, and I've seen this happen with students. You bring in a young woman who is, you know, curious and full of excitement. And

she takes one of these hardline gender studies courses and becomes paranoid and angry at men and angry at the world. And, you know, and they encourage rage and, you know, these extreme emotions. I just think it's psychologically unhealthy. And I think we are dealing with the results of, you know, by now, many, you know, a few decades of this kind of teaching. And again, most college students don't come out bitter and enraged and politicized, but many of them do. And I think it's especially a problem that are more elite schools. And then they take these, these, these twisted ideas with them into the workplace. And we all thought, oh, when they get to the workplace, reality will kick in and they'll have to change.

No, they're changing the workplace and making it an impossible sort of censorious place where people are honestly afraid to say anything. No, it's terrifying. It's terrifying because, you know, I get asked a lot. You probably get this too from women, you know, how are you so strong, right? How are you so strong? They see public battles I've had with, you know, powerful people and they say, how do you hold yourself? And I say the truth, which is I went through a lot and then I just kept getting up and getting out of bed and doing my job again. You know, like you, you just don't surrender to it. It actually doesn't take that much.

Just keep forging forward. Just, just keep going. And now we're at this place where it's like, no, I, I have to control everybody else's behavior. I have to stop the behavior in the, in the first instance, which is not realistic. We can't control everybody's behavior. Bad things are going to happen, difficult things. And when it happens, then I need to lean into my victimhood and look for other people to feel sorry for me in order to feel like I matter. Well, that's BS.

Those people will abandon you just as soon as you take the wrong position. Why don't you just figure out how you can convince yourself you matter and subject yourself to tough challenges so you know in your heart how strong you are. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And one thing that I found when I started taking a stand, and believe me, I wasn't brave. I did it. I just thought I should do it.

I didn't realize that I was going to be vilified and called all sorts of names. I was surprised. And I was, frankly frankly a little distressed and I lost friends, especially when in early on when I was challenging some of the hardline feminists in my field, I lost some friendships, but you enter a new world with people with whom you can speak freely. And who wants to practice this sort of preference falsification and self-censorship? And it's just exhausting. And especially when now you want to say something that's completely reasonable. And I think most of my positions on feminism are not only effective, but compassionate. I don't think that the radical view has proved that it's a more benevolent way to see the world. Some people say, oh, right now we're just undergoing a big revolution and a new generation is taking over and they have

better ideas. This is what progress looks like. I don't think it's what progress looks like. When I've seen real progress in the past, it was liberating and it brought joy. And this is people are shutting down and people are being punished. And it feels like we're going to look back at this moment the way we look at McCarthyism. Yes, you're so right. That's such a good point about there's no joy to this movement. It's alienating and small and vindictive and mean. No one feels good at the end of this. This is not empowerment. In a nutshell, it boils down to, you know, I've said this before, but my daughter was talking about this T-shirt. I have two sons and a daughter. Girls rule, boys drool.

And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's that's not empowerment for girls. Right. Like as somebody who married a man and made two more, I understand that the key to lifting my daughter up is not to put my boys down. And I heard somebody say once that the answer to this problem we're having right now with feminism and otherwise is parents of both boys and girls. And I, that's one of the reasons why I almost feel like the answer to like the cop problem and the, the, you know, with violence against black men is black male cops or black female cops, you know, like people who can

understand and be empathetic to both arguments, but not far left activists who want to shame everybody out of any pushback or any sort of opinion. So can you tell me though, because I watched you, you did a tour with Roxanne Gay, who is a more, I don't know, traditional feminist. I don't know, a radical feminist. I'm not sure what we call her. I don't know what you call it. So you debated her. And it was nuts to me because it devolved to people calling you a white supremacist. It was like, wait, what? I think she called me that. It was this debate in Australia. And when the organizer Desha Milla asked me, I said, well, he's coming on next, by the way, he's my next guest on this show,

but keep going. Oh, give him my regards. I'm so fond of him. He's a wonderful young man. And he had this, he was this idealist. He thought, oh, we'll bring two feminists from different schools because she's a little more of a, like, I guess, critical feminist, a radical feminist. And I'm more moderate and you would debate and you know we'd come to some understanding we didn't come to an understanding she wouldn't even look me in the eye and then she behaved like uh such a diva she didn't she

decided she didn't like dash as the moderator because he asked her some hard questions and she just thought that was out of line and so she insisted that we had two debates. One was in Sydney and one in Melbourne. And she insisted at the Melbourne debate that we get a different moderator and she was going to choose her. And then the reason he did it, he wanted to have the video to distribute and she wanted no videos released and threatened lawsuits. And it was absolutely insane. It was just gratuitous theatrics. But what I found most interesting is that she did to me what radicals claim that oppressors do to them. She completely denied my humanity, otherized me. She just wouldn't even look at me. I was just, it was such a, it was ridiculous and distressing that she had so much hatred towards another person whom she didn't know. And I don't know why she agreed to debate because we could never really have an exchange.

She just sort of dismissed me out of hand. And then the audience, two thirds were her fans. So every time I spoke, they would jeer and hiss. And then she would speak and she'd get riotous applause. So it was not a fun experience. And this fall, I speak on campuses a lot and I expect I'll be visiting campuses, but things have become so charged and people are so full of hate. Like when I debated the radical feminists in the past, we had heated debates, but it wasn't hatred. There was just

excitement and disagreement. Sometimes we'd go out for drinks. Nobody goes out for drinks anymore, but the adversary, you know, you're there to to fight a war, I guess. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. This is so interesting because I've experienced this just in my in my job. And you've been out there leading this this whole fight in a lot of ways for women for many, many years. But it's to me, it's distressing. But have you ever hated people? They hate me. They really. And I see them on Twitter sometimes talking, you know, wishing I would die. And I just am not aware of ever thinking that way about other people, even people I disagree with. You know, I really would love to to to to vanquish them in an argument.

I don't want them to get hit by a car. They they want that. They talk about that. Now, of course, these are Twitter but and roxanne talked a little bit you know she would she was just so full of of um hatred and there's i don't think a politics of rage and hatred is going to take us anywhere except down and everywhere where these these hardline policies this these censorious policies based on radical race theory or radical feminist theory, every time they're tried out, they destroy. They tear institutions apart.

They don't make them better, kinder, stronger, more effective, they weaken them. Just look at what happened. I think it was a great warning what happened with the women's march. All these women from all across the political spectrum came out. Huge Women's March. Where is it now?

You know what happened? It was intersectional, and they began attacking each other. The Jewish women were pushed out, and then a kind of radical feminist group came in that somehow were allied with Louis Farrakhan. I figured that out. He's the biggest sexist and homophobe you can imagine. It was twisted and perverse what happened to the leadership of the Women's March. But I've seen that happen. It's happening in university departments. I think some version of it is this toxic philosophy is happening in our elite institutions and they weren't prepared to fight it. They weren't prepared to fight the anger, the rage, the, just the, the, the fanaticism of not seeing, not seeing nuance, not seeing details.

And everything is seen through that intersexual lens. I mean, if you, you know, very well, and I've experienced this many times, if you deign to criticize a woman, a black woman, uh, you know, forget it immediately, no matter what you're criticizing, you could say, you know, I think she got that math problem wrong. They'll go to the race place and the gender place. And if sexuality or, or, you know, gender identity is, is relevant to, they'll go there too. So you just have to be prepared for them to bring these things in, even if they have absolutely nothing. And the, and the people who are trying to lecture everybody on, on how to speak and how to feel and how to be empathetic and how to be an ally to your point. I'll just, this is just an example that happened to me last week, but I was critical of Naomi Osaka. I don't believe her claims and I'm entitled to that belief as a journalist and a lawyer who's trained for a living and detecting deception. Um, there,

somebody got reported on Twitter for threatening to, I think it was slip my throat, something, some sort of manner of murdering me having to do with my throat. Okay. So I'm supposed to listen to you about how the appropriate way is to speak and respect others? I don't think so, right? To your point of otherizing and just attacking in a way that feels disturbing. It is disturbing. Well, the intersexual activists do to others what they claim has been done to them. Nobody's doing it to them.

And that's the fallacyacy is they are claiming this dire they live in this world with their dire oppression and they and many of them are among the most privileged people i would ever hope to meet and uh you know the educated at the most elite institutions and wealthy and you know all of the the benefits and yet they look at us and claim that, and carry out this demonization, that it is not happening to them. They don't have a history of being oppressed in that way, the elites at least that I know, and yet they don't seem to have that self-awareness. I don't know how this happened. I really don't. It must be something. I honestly, as a philosopher, most of my career, I believed that if you really could marshal the right evidence and good

arguments, you would change people's minds. But it's harder to change minds than I thought. So I don't know what's going to be effective, but I do worry there's a contagion of hysteria. And I think we need something stronger than logic, but I'm worry there's a contagion of hysteria. And I don't, I think we need something stronger than logic, but I'm not sure what it is. I don't want to be coercive, but I don't want them to take over. This is the perfect segue into, into Dash, who's up next in his film. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Better Left Unsaid, but it is about how we got here. And it's the best look I've seen yet on how we got here. So thank you for everything. Thank you for the great talk and your wisdom and fighting the good fight for so long

in such a brave way and for the perfect transition. Christina Haas-Sommers, big, big fan. Thank you, Megan. Up next, we're going to be joined by the two guys behind the film Better Left Unsaid, Kurt Jai Mungal and Desh Amala. These two guys have tried to figure out how we got here. They've looked at the history behind it, the rise of the movement. And as I was saying with Christina, the cleaving of sort of the center left

from the extreme left and how that's left us here, how the rest of us are now supposed to deal with this because they've taken over these cultural institutions that we all have to deal with, universities, big tech, medicine, you name it uh so you'll find it fascinating and these guys are interesting you don't want to miss it it's up in one minute uh first a quick ad and then curtain dash i'm very excited to talk about this movie i just watched the whole thing i made my husband watch it too i said to him what the highest praise I can give a film, which is it made me feel the way the movie

No Safe Spaces made me feel, which is just sort of gripped and immobile in my seat watching it. And what an amazing forensic deep dive into how we got to this crazy place in not just our country here in the United States, in Canada, where you guys are. I know, Adesh, I think you're from Australia. So, I mean, it's happening all over the globe. And this is the first deep dive I've seen into how we got here. So can we just start with this? As I see it, this taps into something I've been saying all along to my friends on the right. Stop dividing this battle into left and right. This is not a left and right battle. This is about woke and unwoke, reason and unreason.

I think rationality and irrationality. And you seem to be tapping into that because you're talking about the rise of the extreme left. You talk about the extreme right too, but the extreme left is a relatively new phenomenon the way it's fighting this battle. And so how did you begin? Let me ask you that, Desh, as the producer of the film, how did you begin to deconstruct what they are doing? Well, when you say they're doing, I see this as somebody who's on the political left on almost every issue. This is my people. And when I started seeing people around me policing their words

and sort of being scared of talking about certain subject matter, I first started noticing it in 2014. And then the rhetoric got louder and louder with regards to certain subject matter. And people started throwing words around like civil war and what's going to happen to the Western civilization if this happened this way or Trump is the next Hitler, all of that. And I was like, this sounds pretty insane. See, I come from Sri Lanka originally, and I was born during the civil war. And I witnessed what a real civil war is. And I know exactly the literal meaning of some of those words. So I've always had this worry because the freedoms that's been given to me in the West, I cherish them. Absolutely. I know what can happen to journalists or people who are

interested in subjects that a government's not interested in people knowing, you know, talking about. If that happens, you will disappear. And so I first made a film called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And after that, I've been wanting to make a film about political extremism, not necessarily pinpointing the very early stages of making the film. Uh, and I was like, this is definitely what I wanted to be speaking at this point in our history. So that's how I got into this film. You know, Kurt, you do a great job, by the way, on camera, you're the star of the film, our narrator, you walk us through everything and you do a great job of it. You're obviously very smart. Your math background showed. I was paying very close attention to make sure I understood everything you said.

But you do walk us through the history of Lenin and Marxism and communism and talk about how these young people who look at that as some sort of an ideal and even some BLM activists, like the statement they put out about what's happening in Cuba. And, you know, this idealistic version of communism, socialism, and so on, kind of stops, it stops examining that, that ideology very early into any time it's ever been tried, for a reason. Can you talk about that? Sure. When I was approaching the film, like you mentioned, it's true. I have a training in math and physics. And so my approach was an analytical and precise one, or as exact as I could be. I tried to derive what are the motivations for the

extreme left, as well as also delineate what constitutes the extreme left, because there's disagreements there. Some people call them the radical left and so on. I tried to do that from a historical perspective with communism, as well as some philosophical roots with social constructionism and post-modernism and so on, other buzzwords that are now becoming familiar. And they refuse to learn from the past. It's like, we have lots of examples of this being absolutely disastrous. Why are you leaning into this ideology as a solution to only about how it is a minefield for, quote, cis men, meaning guys who are who see themselves as guys who have no gender confusion whatsoever, but how the professors who now in so many instances have these crazy intolerant views can tweet out things like I'm pro white genocide with absolutely no blowback. It's fine. That kind of messaging is fine. You can call the entire white race, white nationalists.

You will not be penalized. You will probably get tenure. And this is the environment that the guys and whites and everybody's walking into now. It explains a lot of what we're what we're seeing when they get out of school. It's funny lot of what we're what we're seeing when they get out of school. It's funny because I'm a first generation immigrant and you would think that what I'm saying would hold some weight to the extreme left because they count that as a factor in your favor. But because I'm so against the extreme left, I might as I'm what's considered to be white supremacist adjacent, even though I'm apolitical. I don't consider myself to be part of the right or the left. Right. But you're not allowed to be. You apolitical. I don't consider myself to be part of the right or the

left. Right. But you're not allowed to be. You make that point. And I love that point because I am a registered independent. But you can't be. They won't. They don't care. They don't care if you're a liberal. You know, I have friends who are lifelong flaming liberals. That's how they describe themselves. And they still get kicked out of the club because you have to buy into the entire ideology. You have to reject biology. You have to accept all the tenants of BLM and so on. Um, otherwise you're not in the club. So I do wonder, you know, you tell me Kurt, whether those people need to realize, don't bother, don't bother trying, just figure out what you actually believe because there's no, there's no membership in the politically correct club unless you sign on to all of it.

Yeah. It's, it's a shame because what happens is you're so excoriated. If you don't believe in, let's say the 10, if you don't believe in all 10 of their tenants, then, then what happens is because the larger media system, I know there's Fox news, which has a right bent to it, but the larger media system generally has a left-leaning bent to it and is politically correct. And so then they censure you. And who embraces you is the center right or the extreme left, me, which breeds a bit of bitterness in you toward your prior team, the left. And then the left or the extreme left, they're spearheaded by the extreme left. So it seems like it's the left in general. The left will then say, the extreme left will say that you're a member of the extreme right, just because you disagree with them.

Right. Well, and it is funny, I've noticed this before that the people who get it the worst tend to be people who are, let's say, on the center left or even center right. They'll get it worse than people who are established far left or far right. Like they don't get as mad at somebody like a Sean Hannity, you know, a host on Fox News who's very conservative. And we all know that as they would at even somebody like me or somebody like you, more center right or center left people who they think should be listening to them and who they see as smart and able to articulate a view that might be appealing to the very folks they're trying to convince. So you tell me, because I

want to talk about in particular how hard this is for people to navigate. You know, it can happen on college campuses to anybody who doesn't sign on, but it can also happen well beyond that. And the example you use in the film with Douglas Murray, who I idolize, I just love Douglas Murray, he's so brilliant. He talks about David Cameron of the UK and how there was absolutely zero empathy for David Cameron's loss of his son

because of David's skin color. Here's a soundbite from your film. The Guardian says in its editorial that David Cameron, the setbacks he had in his life were not real setbacks because of his privilege. And they included the fact that his first son died. And they said even that, him sitting at the deathbed of his own son, wasn't as bad as it would be for other people because he had privilege. You end up judging the extent to which a father has the right to mourn his child

because you're playing a privilege game. So you tell me, Desh, whether there's any reasoning with people who see the world like that, because this is an ongoing debate we were having. Do you try to reason with folks who subscribe to this ideology or just try to defeat them? Well, that example is gut-wrenching, obviously. When the world is presented through the binary lens that you are fighting ultimate evil, you present the other side as Darth Vader. It's collateral damage. But I do generally think, although it sounds as completely

that kind of thinking, groups like that, there is no redemptive quality. I do believe in our ability to reason with people. It might take a while, but I do think there is a way out. Example would be how people were talking especially on the left, about Islam and whether it had anything to do with what was happening in the world. Some wouldn't even want to make the connection that 9-11 and an ideology had any connection. It took almost, I would say, two decades before people started accepting it. But that was because the attempts of people like Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz they will see eventually have to, because there is no sustainable way forward for a movement to really stick to their guns like this example, because the cruelty of that way of thinking is obvious.

But if we keep pointing it out, I'm hoping that people will change them. And I think there is redemptive qualities. Well, and on that front, the example that you touch in the film when it comes to gender and this this guy, John Money of Hopkins, is so telling. I've heard of this before, but I never heard it laid out the way you guys did in the film. Can you tell us, Kurt, about John Money of Hopkins and what happened with his experiment in 1967 and how it's it's held up by people who are telling us we should let our kids determine their gender and that it's not related to their biological sex. And they hold this up as an example of why that's true, and they don't reveal the ending. Yep. So in 1967, which I'm going to go by your quotation because I actually forgot, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, John Money was a proponent of gender fluidity. So something which means that you can, that's a child's gender or a person's gender, because it's predicated on what they are

when they're younger, is socialized into them. So what we can do is we can do a standard twin example. So those are considered textbook best cases, although the best cases are when twins are raised separately. But anyway, there were twins who, one of which had a botched circumcision and the parents wanted to know, how do I raise my child ordinarily, make them not have psychological issues? And then John Money, well, they reached out to John Money and John Money said, okay, how about we raise one child? I believe his name was Brandon. We raise him as a her, call her Brenda, give her, her, she pronouns. And even when they were young, let's reenact some sexual positions on the children, which is, well, you can think what you like about that when they're right.

All right. When they're late, basically tweens, the preteens and tweens with their clothes on. But still, so it reinforces you're the brother, you're the male example. And then you, Brenda, you're the female. Brenda had many psychological issues as well as the brother. And Brenda eventually ended up realizing what happened because it was so young that Brenda had forgotten. And then switching Brenda's name back to Brandon, I believe, or back to a male gender. And then years later, killing himself. And it's no longer touted as a success story.

It was touted. And what's happened is that the citations of what are pro gender fluidity and so on reference, what references the original study or references, what references, what references. And even nowadays there was a modern study. I think I referenced one for the past from the past two years, which said that, well, it's still an example of a success story because Brenda didn't self-express this gender change. So that means that you can't force someone into a gender change and you must believe someone when they, as a child say that they're of a different gender. You know, but that that's kind of happening right now. We're seeing all these parents take a child's innocent remark about,

I want to wear a dress for a little boy, which lots of little boys say, and it doesn't mean anything about being transgender and then start pushing them into a new gender, which I do think is abusive that, that you we've gotten to this very strange, almost intolerant place when it comes to gender roles, uh, which go, which turns everything we used to know on its head, right? We used to not say, Oh, if a little boy likes pink, that means he's a girl. We used to say,'s just that, you know, that's to don't be such a gender. I don't know. Don't don't put kids into unnecessary gender roles. Right. Boys can like pink and girls can like trucks. When I was 10 or or sorry, when I was seven, I remember my mom saying, do you want to marry someone when you grow up?

And I remember saying, I want to marry my sister. So if I was to be taken seriously, they're like, OK, yes, you should marry your sister by the extreme way. Or I want to marry you, mom. Right, exactly. That's that's still where I want my voice to be. But the big reveal will come one day. But I want to pick up on something you said, because I do think that's a great point in the film where you sort of say, what about me? You know, I'm an immigrant. I have brown skin. Am I higher up in the social hierarchy

where I get to have opinions that, you know, the white cisgender men might not have on college campuses? And here's how you put it in the film. I thought, well, what about me? I'm an immigrant. Don't my views count? And it turns out they do if I subscribe to the precepts of the extreme left. But if I don't, then I'm a racist and self-loathing immigrant who acts and speaks white and makes a documentary that justifies white supremacy. And by doing so, denies the lived experience of the truly oppressed. I love that because that's exactly right. Your views, sure. All of your status as a man, an immigrant with brown skin, that will definitely count for

you if you subscribe to their worldview. Otherwise, you need to take a seat and be quiet. Right. Man, when I hear that, I forgot how the film was because I haven't seen it in years. It's pretty articulate. Yeah. Well, I mean, it really brings it home. And you tell me, Desh, because you guys taking on these issues so head on has not been all that well received by, for example, the big tech world, which I understand has given you some trouble about trying to advertise the film. Yeah, this has been unusually challenging. With another independent film under my belt, I had a pretty good idea how to get the film out using the digital channels available. But we could not get a single ad running.

We couldn't even pay to get this film in front of people. Facebook prevented, basically locked every single account that tried to run an ad. So we couldn't put a single ad. Google stopped all of our ads and they labeled our ads hateful and range of other strange titles reasons. Twitter didn't let our ads run. YouTube eventually let a teaser run. But again, the reach was very minimal. And even our organic posts were, you could clearly see the algorithm is doing something to minimize the reach.

We were extremely lucky because the likes of Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinkers actually liked the movie and they amplified. But it has been incredibly challenging to get the movie out because every usual avenue. I actually want to reveal something I haven't really publicly acknowledged. The PR firm we had for this film, the same PR firm that helped us get Islam and the Future of Tolerance to a large audience, said yes to the film because the two founders loved it.

And then we pretty much signed agreements and everything. And just before we were ready to go out, I get an email saying, hey, the team has seen the movie and they're very uncomfortable by the subject matter and everything you're talking about. We are pulling out. So that was a huge blow for us because we had, you know, big reliance on those guys because they, you know, they're pretty big agency. And I called them and I said, Hey, I thought you two love the movie. And they said, we, we still stand by our statement. It's just our team feels otherwise. This is so crazy. So, so did you wind up getting anybody to help you with PR? No.

Then I spoke to so many agencies. The initial call is always warm and nice, and we eventually send them a copied watch, and then we get ghosted. Even if they like the film, we are in an environment that you don't want to publicly acknowledge. I have a famous journalist, a scientist who absolutely loved the movie, who would personally message me and say, mate, love the movie, but please don't tell anyone that I told you that. We actually released a number of those comments with anonymizing their names, because it's crazy the sheer number of people that have personally messaged us,

famous comedians, et cetera, but wouldn't say publicly. Yeah, no, we've seen this. I was just talking about this. You are not allowed to have certain opinions right now. And unless we start fighting back against that and expressing our unpopular quote unquote, unpopular opinions, we're, we're all going to be silenced. And what you find when you speak out with your quote unquote, unpopular opinion is that it's not as unpopular as you think. Millions of people share your views, but they don't have the liberty to express them. They fear getting fired. They fear getting ostracized. We just about we just interviewed a guy last week

who was talking about life in Cuba and how if you say something against, you know, the government there, you could find out that your apartment lease is no longer in effect, right? You no longer have a place to live. It's not quite that extreme here, but we're going down that path. I mean, people are losing their livelihoods for, quote, wrong thing. So that's why the film is so important that I don't understand. And it actually isn't controversial at all. I mean, it really isn't. It doesn't it doesn't take issue with the left. It takes issue with the extreme left and the extreme right. Right. And that's the irony of the whole situation isn't it uh the irony of the situation is that people uh judge uh the movie by the people who are involved and they make assumptions

uh and and by a trailer if you really watch it if you go go through the painstaking detail we've gone through here to explain what we're talking about, you can have a philosophical argument of your disliking or disagreement, but that's the point. We're not trying to tell people that you have to agree with what we are saying. We're simply presenting a certain set of philosophical and intellectual arguments that we haven't seen, and that involves the political far left. And that's an unusual thing. And we are realizing the way people are pushing back is the exact point we are making. Hey, somehow we've come to a place that you can't talk about it. Just similar to what you said, Megan, about in Cuba, in Sri Lanka, when I was

growing up in Sri Lanka, it was one of the worst places for a journalist. We used to have the white van syndrome. A journalist would say something or a person would say something, and literally two days later, a van will arrive. And that was the last we've seen or heard of that person. My dad was involved in politics, and there was about five years of my life. He wasn't in my life. I thought he had another life or something, but I recently found out it was because of his political beliefs. People wanted to make him disappear. So he went into hiding. So we don't want to live in a... The problem is in the West, people are too comfortable. In the West, we have this extraordinary ability to say what we want to say, do what we want to do, for the most part,

within the Enlightenment values and the rules and laws that we've agreed to, and still have a life and the state doesn't get to take things away or murder you, your family. That doesn't happen. So West's own success is paradoxically becoming its enemy. Through this ability to speak freely, people are then trying to find the villain. And the left, because of the Marxist way of thinking, just you need to find the other. And even the slightest inkling of this person could be a fascist, right?

So that then gives them credence to fight as hard as one could. And that's why the language is so important. And that's why, you know, words have become violent now. So the point I really wanted to make is that is far removed from actual violence and actually what a state can do. And for me personally, just living through in a state through a civil war, what really happens is far worse than what people realize. Thanks for staying with us this far. The end of the episode and who's coming up on our next show is right after this quick break. The movie ends on a note of now what? Like, how do we solve it?

And it's a philosophical point that seems to be asking, is there a role for faith? You talk about myth, religion. Is there a way we sort of keep, I don't know, old faith alive as opposed to this new religion of wokeness and square it and, and square it with science and go forward with rationality and logic and reason on all things that we used to accept real truth before quote postmodernism came along. And I was really thinking about that. I mean, I, I don't know because we've talked a lot on this show about whether chasing religion out of the public square has, has been really detrimental. It's that that that void is

getting filled by things like wokeness. And we were better off when we had, you know, faith in whatever your particular religion was, but God and a higher power and subjugation of the self. So what do you think? I mean, what do you think is the solution, Kurt? Right. You mentioned that at the end of the movie, it ends not with a statement, which I hoped it would. I was trying to come to a firm conclusion and an action, call to action, but I couldn't come up with one. I came up with the question, which is what is the modern religion? And the reason why I say that, even though many people listening may identify with atheism or at least as true modern religion, or any religion,

as being dogmatic and ancient superstition. The reason I say that is that there seems to be this need, a spiritual need. Also, when we talk about, see me and Desh disagree here. Desh would say what we need is dialogue above all else. But for me, what I would say is for you to want dialogue, you have to value dialogue. And you also have to value something in common, which is that through truthful dialogue, you'll come to something salubrious or nourishing. And that's not exactly, it's not exactly rational. It's something pre-rational. So I don't agree that logic and rationality are the way and even reason though, depends on how one uses the word reason. I don't agree that that's the way forward. i think there's something before that because you have to

value those and then the question is well how do you how do you engender that in a large society i i don't know i don't know and to just say well well, go to church. Well, it's not first, it's not as if every church member is a holder of these values. And second, it's not as if the modern person can go to church. They're based in fundamental ontological claims that God exists and so on. That doesn't ring true for many people. We're not at that stage. And Richard Feynman even said this, that this is the exigent moral problem of our day, which is how do we retain this spiritual nature, this benign and beatific nature and not while we're modern people? I don't know. That's what's so poignant about the movie. It leaves you with that question, right? How, how do we fill this void that everybody's trying to fill and, and still sit, stay fact-based as we, those of us who are not considered woke tend to be, we still tend to follow logic, reason, believe there's real truth. There's knowable fact. Um, it, look, it raises a lot of questions. And,

but what I love is that it really does give you a forensic look at how we got here. And I will tell you that my audience asked me that all the time, you know, like spend some time talking about how we got here. How did they do this? It's not all about what happened on college campuses. It's more widespread than that. And if you look back historically, you'll really see where the roots of this movement are and how pernicious they are. You guys are brilliant. You did a great job with this. And if people want to watch the movie, is it, what should they do? They go to the website now, since you know, you're not getting any love from, from Google and everybody else. What, tell us exactly how we can find it. Yes. Uh, the, the movie is available on iTunes and Google play and voodoo.

Uh, but you can also go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com. And I want to take this opportunity to say thank you for giving us this opportunity to speak. And I'm sure a lot of people will discover the film because of this conversation. As independent filmmakers, this is amazing. So thank you. This will reach people. I really appreciate that. It's my honor. And truly, I would not have put you on if I didn't love the film because I, you know,

I have an ongoing relationship with my audience. I can't mislead. I won't even take an advertiser that don't, I don't really believe in the product. So I really want them to check it out. I think it's riveting and it's emotional at times it's gripping it. Some of the footage is disturbing, but in an important way. So you can sort of see the outcome of let's say, you know, Lennon's ideas. Um, but it's worth your time. Well worth your time. That's only an hour and a half. So it's not some huge three hour Epic. It's an hour and a half and you'll learn something and you'll feel something. And what more do you want out of a day? May I say one more statement? Yeah. The reason why to visit the website instead of buying from Vudu or Google or iTunes is not only does more of the money actually go to the filmmakers, but

because you get access to the director's cut, which has 30 minutes of extra footage, particularly in chapter four, where I talk about a potential solution right now. I said that the answer is, I don't know, but what I've come up with as to how can we share the same myth is to embody the myth of, of truth telling that is to not lie, to try your hardest at every instant, to not deceive every single instance, whether that's you're returning a package to Amazon and you, and you lie about the reason because you just simply want to return or whether it's, whether it's out of politeness, every act of deceit perverts the world.

And then it comes back in a concrete sense to influence you. They have ramifications and they replicate each lie replicates, replicates, replicates. And then something I didn't pursue in the film because there wasn't enough time is the, is pursuing love and loving thy enemy. One of the stories in the Bible that most resonates to me is Jesus was getting taken away. See, some people want to say, yeah, you should stand up against the extreme left. And what they mean is to go in the streets and almost violently stand up to them. But what happened was Jesus was being taken away and about to be tortured. And he knew he was.

So this goes back to ancient myths and taking inspiration from. And he knew this and he still submitted himself to it. And then Peter, his friend, cut off the ear of his enemy, cut off the ear of the handler who was going to torture Jesus or take him away to be tortured. And Jesus said, don't do that and took the ear and healed his enemy. Not only does he love, not only love thy enemy, heal thy enemy. So living in a loving manner, loving thy enemy, even though you dislike them and, and not lying, which is distinct from telling the truth. I put an emphasis on not lying. I think that's the path forward. Do that in one's private life. And that has wide, wide, wide reaching societal implications.

I love it. It's well said and it's good advice. And whether it solves the problems or not, it's good advice. Guys, thanks again. Thank you so much. Thank you. Don't miss the show on Monday. Have a great weekend, but don't miss the show on Monday because we've got Sean Parnell, decorated officer and Senate candidate in Pennsylvania. He's got a great, great story and great perspective on life. We're looking forward to that. Have a great weekend. In the meantime, before I let you go, please go to Apple and give us a review.

We hit 20,000. Yay. That's actually really good for a show that's only been on the air for less than a year. So we're proud of our reviews and our ratings. We'd love a five-star rating from you. But while you're on there, give us a review because I have read all 20,000 of them and counting, and I would love to see you take us up to 21,000. Maybe we could do it this weekend. Get on there. Let us know what you think, And we'll see you Monday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures. you