The Dangers of Conscientious Culture With Barrington Martin II & Corey Kilpack | OAP #79
Prior to co-authoring Be Less Dickish, Corey was David Coates’ client. Corey sat on David’s couch and spilled his guts. Their therapist and client relationship lasted for over seven years and was the basis for many of the therapy sessions that are described in the book.
Corey is the co-founder and president of Life Balance Technologies. In his past life he worked on a trawler in the Bering Sea and has been a missionary, investment banker, hedge fund manager, tinner, alcoholic, douchebag, dick, asshole, and pussy. He barely graduated with a degree in Business Management and Accounting from the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.
He is married to Kellee, and he is a dad, a grandpa, and just a regular fella who enjoys restoring old Lamborghini tractors with his family and friends.
Barrington Martin II received a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in African American/Black studies from Georgia University. His professional experience at the time of his Congressional race includes working as a paralegal at Parker, Hudson, Rainer, & Dobbs, as a freelance writer and writing tutor, and as a special educator for the Dekalb County School District. He is the Host of "The Barrington Report"
It is One American Podcast live with Barrington and Corey.
What's up, guys?
And my baby's green in the back.
Yeah, and any minute now my dogs will come running by here and bark.
So it's good to see you, man.
Good to see you, Barrington.
Good to see both of you.
This is uh actually excellent intro.
I kind of enjoyed that to be honest.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
Very well put together, brother.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate that a lot.
So you guys are both really interesting guests.
The challenge for me on this podcast is making sure that I don't just talk to one or the other of you the whole time because you guys both have such an interesting and diverse background.
Corey, love your book.
Barrington, I know that you are a political candidate.
You're also an author and a philosopher.
And so I'm really excited to hear what you guys both have to say.
And um, Corey, I'll I'll let you go ahead and kickstart it since you're the man that put this all all together.
So, first of all, thanks for having us.
You know, Barrington and I have been going back and forth, mostly in just messages, texts, and uh trading banter on Twitter.
And you know, we were going to do a group to get put a group together and do a call or a Twitter space and thought, man, you were the guy.
So that's kind of how we we reached out to you.
And and you know, you and I have been going back and forth for a few months as well.
So I appreciate you putting this together.
You know, what I found, and why Barrington and I have been getting along and talking about doing this is how many times we come into a situation or something is contemporary in the news, like today you got the Supreme Court justice, and we find ourselves looking at these situations from unique perspectives and how many similarities and dissimilarities we have.
And I think you know, Barrington has a great perspective on what it's like being a young man in the world.
And I just wrote this book about assholes, douchebags, pussies, and dicks, and have had fun like have had fun going back and forth with Barrington trying to figure out like what is the place, like is this a dick move or is this an asshole move?
And uh we're looking forward to uh really exploring this more on the call.
Awesome, man.
So Barrington, what's going on with you?
Man, um, you know, radio show, the Barrington Report.
Um writing some projects right now that's probably gonna be released at the end of the year, and uh ultimately um Chase.
I'm just really doing uh a continuously I would say analysis of the society and the world that we're existing in today because things don't seem right to me for one.
I feel like there's a lot of things going on at one time for two, and it seems, in my opinion, Corey and I were speaking about this earlier, and I'll just like give you an umbrella phrase to sum up our conversation.
Common sense has been lost on the entire United States of America.
I mean, like literal legitimate common sense, and what's ended up happening is that it is totally destroying truth, it is totally destroying the necessary tenets of the foundations that you know this country was built on, but it's mainly how how I feel humans are supposed to interact with one another, and I feel that we are on a crash course to hell for the most part.
And what I mean by that is a lot of the things that were once precious that were once pure won't be that way anymore, and it will all be because of the undoing of people using words like equality, inclusion, equity, and things of that nature.
I think that we have missed the mark.
I think that everyone has had probably the best intentions, but I think in a lot of ways, a lot of these movements have ended up being covert and pushing uh alternate agendas than the actual agenda that they have stated that they wanted to push.
Yeah.
And I think along those lines, a lot of what's happening too is we're saying, hey, based on this agenda, we expect people to be a certain way, or to accept certain terms, or to accept certain conditions.
And some of these conditions and terms are extreme.
And you see a guy like Barrington just throw his hands in the air and like, all right, I'm fucking done.
Like I'm like, I'm still participating, but I'm not accepting those terms and conditions.
And I think that has created a better dialogue in many places, but certainly it creates a lot of friction as well.
I was talking to my uh I was talking to my buddy last night uh on the phone.
He's a uh software engineer, and he was telling me about how coding works, and he's like, all right, so what you'll do is you'll write some code that's like one branch and you'll save it, you'll copy it, and you'll save it.
And then as you make modifications to it, you um you always have the fallback in case your changes mess the whole thing up, you can fall back to the copied file, and you do this on different branches for different features of software, and so you might have a bunch of branches that extend from this one central sort of core code.
He's like, we always called that core code the master, and now they're changing it to the main because the word master has you know negative connotations.
And he's like, he's like, I was talking to one of my coworkers about this, and he's like, my coworker told me like this is not gonna actually solve any problems of race that we call it the main instead of the master master now.
And my my buddy uh Andrew was like, Well, then why don't you just call it the master and refuse to call it the main?
And he's like, Well, because I want to if I call it the master, it conveys that I don't want to solve any race problems.
He's like, So the reason that all these people are are like playing along with stupid shit, like calling the master the main or you know, any number of other sort of like CRT-related stuff is because they're too scared of being uh um perceived as like not allies of racial equality or racial justice, and so they just play along, but it ends up being like this case scenario where like we've got like you know, uh I I can't even say, but we've got certain people participating in certain athletic events, and it's like, what the fuck?
It's because everybody's too scared to say anything.
Yeah, and this is like I wrote a whole book about this shit.
I I mean the book Be Less Dickish is exactly that.
I mean, you look at what is it to be a dick, and this is someone who's selfish and conscientious to an extreme, like you can be conscientious in a healthy way, you can be selfish in a healthy way, but that is a conscientiousness that is out of control, like beyond like if you can't call software code the master branch, you got a problem, right?
But you the I can't remember, was it your cousin?
Who's the who was telling you about this?
My buddy Andrew, yeah.
Your buddy Andrew, he's your cousin now.
I just made him your cousin.
Your buddy cousin Andrew's not wrong.
Like, is is this a fight?
And like I go back and forth with this a little bit with it, but Barrington too.
Like, am I gonna pick a fight with someone and say, God damn it, this is it?
End of the road, we are calling this branch in the software the master branch.
That's it.
I'm gonna die on this hill.
You're like, uh no, not that no, I'm not dying on this hill.
It's just like whatever, main branch, whatever.
But we're constantly conditioning people to like, yeah, you need to be over the top, ridiculous, conscientious about that and other things, and that's the part that's getting normalized.
Is like, all right, we'll go along with this one.
All right, because it's not worth dying, fighting over.
But the concept of being that petty and that ridiculous, that's the bigger problem.
Absolutely the bigger problem.
Totally agree.
But I feel like often this is the part that's missed, and this is why I've always prided myself on asking questions.
Why in the hell are you automatically reverting to race when we are speaking about a master code?
Case in point, like three years back, they said they were going to stop saying master bedroom.
You guys remember this?
Yeah, right.
Why in the hell is slavery the first thing that goes to your Mind when you're speaking about a master bedroom in real estate.
See, this is the problem that I'm having.
So, what in my mind is going on is that you are projecting, you are either one, projecting your own innermost thoughts off from other people, or two, you have been psychic psychologically brainwashed so efficiently by mainstream media, you cannot help but to think about race, racism, prejudices, everything under those umbrellas.
Anytime you hear a specific buzzword, like this is like on the level almost of MK Ultra to the point where when you hear a word or you hear a ding or you hear something, you automatically go, oh my God, racism, racism, I can't be racist.
That is psychotic.
Do you not understand how crazy that is?
And so again, these are this is not the masses doing this.
These are a very small amount of people.
However, like Corey was stating, because it would be totally futile to start a fight about that.
We will say, you know what?
It's whatever.
This is a word, no big deal.
But what we're starting to see is now you start to give people itch, they take them out.
I said this before on Twitter a long time ago.
The government in the media has gaslit America so badly that one time, once upon a time, years ago, America drew a line in the sand and said you will not cross this line, and the government and the media crossed it.
Then the government, then America said, you won't cross this line.
And the government and the media cross it.
Now, if you look from where we started, we have things like birthing person.
We have things like um I'm going to just go ahead and say this.
Born men cosplaying as women, but calling themselves biological females.
We have women, feminists now, feminists who are actually for the absolute takeover of men in women's sports under the guise of inclusivity.
Do you this is this is psychosis?
This is mass psychosis taking place and it continuously and exponentially gets worse day by day.
And because we want to be reasonable people, we won't say anything about this, but at some point in time, someone, group of people more so than anything else, has to speak up about this because this is getting to a dangerous arena, especially because the children are starting to be affected by this.
And once we give up the children, it's a done deal.
And and I think the point, I look at it as an individual basis.
Like, what are we being asked to do as individuals?
And what is the institution doing to us?
And I I go keep going back and forth, and I will in this conversation of the parallels between the two.
And what's happening and what Barrington is describing in all of these situations is someone is saying to us, if you want to have a connection with me, or if you want to participate with me, or if you want to have a connection or participate with this group, you have to accept these terms, these conditions.
And it may seem like a not a big deal, but everything that Barrington brought up, they're saying, all right, this is outrageous.
And we're asking you to accept it.
And if you don't, you're excluded, or you're an outcast, or we will call you names, or we will somehow deselect you, or something.
Like you basically you become separated because you don't accept the terms of having that connection or participating in that group.
And on an individual, in an individual basis, it hurts, and we call each other names and we say that person's being a dick.
You know, this person is saying, hey, look, if I don't accept the blame for causing his podcast to start late, and I don't accept that he was a victim, and it's my fault that this podcast started late, then I'm not gonna be able to your fault.
And we are no longer participating as a group until everyone accepts that I'm the victim and everyone else is to blame.
You know, when you treat something fascinating, go ahead, go ahead.
You finish your thought.
I'm sorry, I didn't know.
No, when you do that on a larger scale and start excluding groups, you then start asking that group to behave in a certain way.
And it again, it's like, all right, one little thing, you know, the master branch in your software code ain't gonna be the problem.
It's it's gonna lead to something else.
So you you guys both kind of combined made me think of something really interesting that I never thought of before.
Um I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand uh and uh and her philosophy.
I'm not like a hundred percent like an objectivist, I don't believe everything that she said like it's gospel, but I think that her books were her work, her work was incredibly provocative and powerful, and she resonated with a lot of truth, particularly the importance of the individual and the importance of the individual having self-esteem and not compromising their integrity for the sake of the mob, right?
And Corey, you brought up conscientiousness and how we have this hyper conscientiousness now.
And Barrington, you brought up how you brought the kids and how it's spreading to the kids, and if we lose the kids, you know, we're doomed.
And I think it's fascinating how American culture used to be about raising people to have self-esteem and it and strength, like just be a strong person, be a hardworking person, have self-esteem, right?
And now we're not focusing on helping people have self-esteem.
We're focusing on making everyone else cater to their low self-esteem, right?
So we're we're raising people to be conscientious instead of self-esteem, right?
So like if you told me, Chase, I think you're a stupid fuck, everything is wrong with you, XYZ or a Nazi, I would not give a fuck.
Like I wouldn't even like have to like pretend I didn't give a fuck.
I actually wouldn't give a fuck, right?
Because I have self-esteem because I was raised to have self-esteem.
Like this next generation, if like you, if you like look at somebody wrong, they're like, oh, is it because you know I'm a woman, or is it because they, you know, uh uh is it because of my race?
And it's like the the answer is to raise people to not give a fuck what everybody else thinks, not to make everybody so concerned with how everybody else feels all the time.
It's such a it's like the the least efficient way to solve the problem.
Chase, that was a that was a microaggression.
I think you need to go through some type of some type of training because these are microaggressions, and I didn't appreciate that you blame me for the podcast on the time.
Like I think that was a bit anti-black racism.
Don't know, but like do you see how ridiculous that is?
Yeah, ridiculous.
But I'm sorry, go ahead.
What's your thought?
No, that's it, man.
That's that's all I had to say.
No, but these are great examples.
And I would say you're talking about self-esteem and and then also being in an Ayn Rand book where you're talking like you're part of a big institution, right?
An industrial machine.
And you can break it down into very simple pieces.
There's a time and a place to be selfish.
That's your self-esteem.
Like you make yourself a priority.
Like it we have to make ourselves priorities from time to time, and that's not good or bad.
It's just the facts.
Being selfish is not a bad thing.
And at the same time, we have to be selfless.
Like there, I know Chase, I don't know if you you still have your kid, right?
You haven't selfishness, Ayn Rand.
Yeah, there you there you go.
You have it right there.
Like if you have a child, if you have a family member, Barrington, I've heard you talk about your father.
Like there's time and a place where you have to make other people a priority.
It might start in your family, your relationship, your job.
Like you don't get to go through life and make yourself the priority all the time.
Like sometimes you're the priority, sometimes you're not.
And this is not it's not a selfless act to help someone that you love.
In a sense, that's a selfish act too.
Like if my wife is sick, I want to help her.
I'm not like, oh, fuck, taking care of my wife today.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like to that point, Chase.
I think that in your in the case of your wife, that's a duty.
So to people that we to people that we love, and this is I'm going to pivot a little bit this conversation a little bit to what Corey's um talking about to his point.
Like, I think we've lost a sense of understanding duty.
I think we've lost a sense of being introspective.
Earlier, one of you guys spoke about um how the the, I would say the values or in my mind with the values of this country.
One of the biggest values of this country, no matter who you are, no matter where you're from, no matter your race, creed, or religion was resolve.
Instead of focusing on resolve and overcoming, I feel that now we we take pride, we wear our issues, our innermost issues on our on our shoulders with a badge of honor.
When essentially in the past, we took our issues, found solutions to get forward to get past those, so we so we will be able to help out others.
Now it seems that duty has been replaced by a false sense of virtue to where I don't necessarily have to be a good person, I can just appear as a good person.
If I put a hashtag or my favorite right now, a Ukrainian flag in my bio on social media, that means I'm with the call.
So you really can't judge me for anything, despite the fact that I could be a totally horrible person off the internet.
And so again, as these things begin to compound, you start to see a lot of these faux movements being revealed to be what they really are, which is not necessarily what they aim to be.
And I think that ultimately the more we become less introspective individuals and we become more collectivist and tribal, we are like basically undoing the nation from within.
And you can see this on a day-to-day basis, in my opinion.
I agree with all of this.
Like and it's profound.
I think you know, you look at the virtue signaling or the indication of caring, and you know, the not giving a fuck is the shameless approach.
The the signal of the virtue, whether it's okay, you know, I got vaccinated.
Look at this brand I got on my arm when I did it, like whatever it is.
Like, and you can look at masking, like there's so many examples where we say, hey, it's the signal that's more important than the actual amount of care that's applied or given.
Like putting a Ukraine flag in your bio, like, yeah, you care.
Are you changing the world?
You're not.
You putting the page.
Yeah, did you did you apply for the Legion?
Yeah, you didn't do shit.
You didn't sign up.
Yeah, you didn't play nothing.
They're literally begging you to go fight, go fight.
You can actually stand with Ukraine in Kiev right now.
Just go stand there.
And yet, like, do I have a problem with someone having a Ukraine flag?
Like, not really.
Like, go for it.
Like, it ain't gonna change anything else.
I just think ignorant, like that's my first thought.
Ignorance.
Yeah.
It's like, do you have all the facts?
I don't know.
Maybe you do.
I know I don't.
Like, I don't I there's no way of for me to have all the facts.
But again, it's more of this.
We have opportunities all the time to exploit to show how much we care without actually caring.
And it's just this extreme cycle that we go through.
Like, all right, you just got to be in the right group in the right club and care about the right things at the right times in the right way, and then we'll let you in.
What people do you think tweet thought tweet after a tragedy?
How many people you think tweet thoughts and prayers for so and so, thoughts and prayers for XYZ, and then they didn't even utter a single prayer.
It's like, did you pray though?
Like, yeah, and and you know, some of that shit's cool.
Like I remember the just we shard just sweet Charlie, you know, the after the Charlie Epto stuff, and there's things are like, yeah, I'm paying attention, and I don't agree with what happened, and I can I can say it, but man, we've taken it to a whole new level here.
But I think I look at what Barrington's saying too.
It's like once the virtue signal starts, and you know, we're using these icons and these flags as an example, but it there's all kinds of other examples we could come up with.
Once it starts, there again is another condition that people are putting, like, all right, this is where I stand.
And how what are you going to do to still participate?
You either agree with me because I've asked you to, you submit to my terms and you agree, you pretend you agree, imitate like someone who's on the same page as me, or you just get cut off.
Yeah, right.
We're we're imagining working for Facebook right now, and being aware that let's just I want to be careful how I frame this.
So I'm not a fan of Vladimir Putin by any means.
And I don't think that in every war there's a good guy and a bad guy.
I think sometimes there's two bad guys in a War, right?
However, based on my limited knowledge and the research that I've done, looking into this as carefully as I have the time to do, uh, as someone who's genuinely interested, um, it seems to me that regardless of what you think of him as a as a leader and as a person, that it's very plausible that he's actually doing what's best for his country if there's a legitimate NATO concern in Ukraine for him, right?
So imagine working for Facebook and having that perspective and seeing Facebook ban all this Russian content, shut everything down and be like, like, well, what about me?
Like, I work for you, and you're saying that this whole company supports this, you know, one side of this war.
And like, you know, I might only be 10% of the you know, only 10% of the company might agree with me, but like I just think it's I feel bad for the employees of these companies that feel differently than the than the corporate culture presents.
So Shay, she said something very, very interesting, and then I want to also bring this to light too, because this is never spoken about.
Everything you said about Putin was 1000% correct.
However, in stating the truth, you should not have to state how you feel about Vladimir Putin because the truth is the truth, right?
That's right.
So think about this.
Who else, who else in recent memory have we done this to for the last four years?
Easy.
Donald J. Trump, President Trump.
Anytime you you state a truth, an absolute 100% undoubted truth, you almost all the time have to follow up with, hey, hey, now, hey, I'm not I'm not a Trump supporter or whatever.
That's why I tell people I'm not a Trump supporter or a Trump hater.
But the truth is what it is.
And the fact that I have to state this in telling the truth, that something that stands on its own, something that you can't you can try to contend it, but if it's proven, it's proven, it lets me know that we have moved to a point in society to where if you don't accept the the constant opinion or the opinion that is accepted by the masses, you are you are definitely outcasting, like Corey was saying.
That's problematic because that's not American.
Being in America means that you can have whatever opinion that you want to have, but once the truth comes up, even if it's offensive, we can all accept it because it's the US isn't the truth.
You know what this reminds me of?
Do you remember it was like 10 years ago when Facebook was still cool?
And um there were there were all these, there were all these quotes going around.
It was you know, like people would do like an image of a celebrity with a quote, right?
And then sometimes they would go viral.
And there were all these Taylor Swift quotes that were going around going viral, and like thousands of people were liking them, resharing them, commenting, and some asshole took Hitler quotes and attributed them to Taylor Swift, like you know, benign quotes that had nothing to do with like race or you know, anti-Semitism, but like stuff that like you know, he said that was like you know, profound or inspiring, you know.
And it like it was like that, you know, it flipped it.
He's like, ah, you fucks.
That was a Hitler quote.
And the point I'm trying to make is you're like, yeah, you're right.
Like, like if Hitler says two plus two is four, it doesn't make it false because he's an asshole.
Right, right.
Like he's an evil bastard, but two plus two is fucking four, right?
And if Trump, if if if Trump is, you know, a corrupt, egomaniac, you know, whatever, it doesn't mean that he's wrong about China, right?
Or or or that he's wrong about Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden or whatever.
And so, yeah, it's so funny how we for some reason psychologically as a people are associating what people say with who people are.
And the truth is totally independent of any identity.
Correct.
And you know, it's not about this, Barrington.
I want to ask you this specifically.
Like, okay, okay.
You know, I'm sometimes I feel like I'm treading on eggshells asking these questions, but I'm gonna ask you like take the topic and what you're saying with Trump and what he did and what happened with the historically black colleges over that period of time.
Like there was a lot of progress made in education and with those colleges under Trump.
And yet, anytime it was brought up, it had that caveat attached to it.
Okay, it it was great for the school, but we hate Trump.
And it's almost to the point, like we can't say thank you.
Like, that's not allowed.
It's really ridiculous.
Like, I hate it, like I hate it.
And as again, we was talking about this earlier.
Like, these are the type of things that make a person like myself do not like do not want to associate with the group.
And what I mean by the group, like, it's almost in a sense of I feel like, oh, I don't even know before I can say this, like, I don't think races in America like have to feel that they have to go along with the collective thought process or ideology, because if they don't, they'll be they'll be looked at as a certain way.
Personally, I don't give a damn.
Well, you can think about me, whatever you want to think about me, because at the end of the day, I'm an individual, I'm my parents' child, and I know how I was raised to be.
And I feel like as long as I spread peace, love, and positivity to everyone I'm meeting, I'm fine.
But this notion that because I'm black or American black or African Americans mean people like to say that I automatically have to feel oppressed.
I automatically have to support this woman that's being um nominated for this position on the bench, even though she stated some a red flag to me today.
I have to just go along with so many things that do not make sense, but I have to do it because of this.
That's BS.
That's not fair.
That's not it's not right.
And all that does is pretty much pigeonhole me into this box that I don't want to be a part of because at the end of the day, I'm an individual.
I have so many deaths to me, to my to my personality, to what I think about all these things on a day-to-day basis.
And for you to tell me that I am an Uncle Tom, a coon, all these mean things you can say to me simply because I don't agree with you, and I have good reason not to agree with you, that's BS.
And it's hurtful, yes.
And and I would say this, it's meant to hurt.
Like that's what I want to make clear as we talk about this is when someone says to you that you're wrong or you're these things that they're accusing you of, they don't do it to change your mind, they do it to fucking hurt you.
Like the point of it is to hurt you, and it needs to you need to feel it.
That's the intent of these aggressive moves and these aggressive approaches and this propaganda that they're telling you.
When they call you names like that, it's supposed to hurt.
That's the fucking point.
Right.
And we've gotten to this place where somehow that's become normal.
Like that's fine.
Yeah.
And have you noticed that, like, and and Barrington, maybe you've you've had a different experience with this because I could be in an echo chamber or a bubble.
Um, but have you noticed that no one uses the word prejudice anymore?
Like the the meaning of the word prejudice is totally merged with racist, right?
So before, like, I'll give you an example.
I'm gonna throw my mother under the bus.
My mother is not a racist, she does not believe that the white race or any race is inherently superior or inferior, which is the original meaning of the term racism, right?
And she believes in equal rights, not necessarily equity.
You can't speak for their own equity, but she believes in equal rights for all races, obviously, like basic shit, right?
However, when I was a kid, if we were in a bad part of town and a black guy crossed the street while we were at a stoplight, she would lock her door, right?
And that is prejudice, right?
Because she's in an area, she doesn't know the person, but she's prejudging like a risk based off of where she is and what the person looks like, right?
She's not a racist, right?
And I think what we've done is whenever anyone is prejudiced, which is always gonna be the case, just because psychologically we or we we put people into categories and we organize things, it's just how we perceive the world and interpret it.
Whenever anyone is pre prejudiced and we immediately call them a racist, I don't know.
I just feel like that's that's that's that's actually not getting at what the real problem is.
Uh, and and and it perpetuates any sort of problem that might actually be by by misbranding it, uh, so that you can't really solve the real thing if you if you're attacking it for for the wrong reasons.
What do you think about that, Barrington?
Yeah, and I'm gonna let Barrington jump in, but I'm gonna take it to a whole new level before you do it, Barrington.
And that's this we've gotten to the point where not being prejudiced is the offense.
We're at this point where you must you have to be prejudiced, or else.
And then we've attached this racism to it.
But we're saying you must be prejudiced about these like the conditions in the life for a black family or anything else.
Like, there's no extent.
Well, prejudice about what it means to be white.
Like, oh, that person must be privileged.
Yeah, we gotta be prejudiced about what's happening in Ukraine and Russia.
Like, we don't get we're not allowed the time and the information to make a decision for ourselves, maybe have a different criteria.
Like prejudice is the new standard.
It's you get prejudice now on our terms and signal your your virtue our way.
And and the racism has just kind of been thrown in with it, but prejudice is gone as a pejorative, and now it's a condition for playing the game.
Okay.
So I'm trying to figure out take it every way, dude.
It's not cable, dude.
Okay.
Um racism as a word has been extremely watered down.
It's important for me to preface the rest of my rhetoric by stating that first.
The reason I say this is because now, as Corey stated, you're expected to be prejudice, meaning that you're expected to have a certain type of ideology or an understanding of a certain type of people.
Ultimately stating that the new truth is prejudice, the new truth.
What I mean by that is if you possess a skirt, a certain skin tone much lighter than mine or less mellow than I do, then based on the ideological standard in America right now, you have had to have some connection to slavery.
You have had to have some type of privileges that no other race or POCs or minorities have had.
Then on the flip side of that, someone like myself is expected to believe that about you.
And if I don't believe that about about you, then the other side of that prejudice comes in to which now I'm the bad guy as well.
I am supporting anti-black rhetoric, or I am, as they said, about um the new Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, I am a black face of white supremacy.
You you see how this is this is this honestly is ingenious because it's multi-layered, and there is no win-win situation for those who just want to tell the truth.
Because the truth of the matter is if you look up any type of history and statistically speaking, a lot of white people do not even have connections to slavery in America.
A lot of white people who have don't even have ancestors that own slaves, they come from poverty.
However, when it comes to race, especially race in America, what you tend to see is that black people were always subjugated, always.
Never never were free, never had any power.
Black people were always seen as um the the lesser, the lesser class.
And when you just peel back the layers and actually look at history, that was not the case at all.
You can find read about this through many of the writings of Carter G. Wilson, but I won't get off on a tangent.
So it's in a lot of respects, the word prejudice can't be used anymore, or it's not used as much because it's been replaced with with truth.
And this is why I I really, really, really dislike how we have totally bastardized and demonize um the actual definition of excuse me, the definitions of words.
We don't use words concretely the way we used to.
And in turns, we have totally like been flexible with their uses, and this has been a very dangerous thing.
This is why I state that, or this is why I hate when people say that oh, white people can't be can't be, I'm sorry, a black person can't be racist, a black person can only be prejudice.
What?
If you look up the the definition of racist, you will see that it's it's literally literally any type of hatred, prejudice towards any other race outside of your own, for lack of better words.
And so when we get into these uh social movements that has totally um changed away or made the definitional terms of words flexible, we are we are now on on dangerous grounds if we continue this way, because at the end of the day, what's what's happening that needs to be stated is that truth is being blurred, and once truth is blurred, that leads the way to chaos and anarchy, and our society is not built for that.
Yeah, I would say it a little succinctly is that surrendering to the facts is not an option in many cases, or it's not presented as an option is a better way to put it.
Dealing with facts is a healthy centered way to live.
Like we want the facts, we want to deal with the truth, and And what we're being asked to accept is rather than deal with the facts, we just want you to surrender to our story.
Or just give up or submit to our story is a better way.
We want you to accept our terms of victimization.
We'll tell you who's a victim and who's not.
We'll tell you why what you did to us is wrong.
We'll tell you why it's not our fault.
We'll tell us why you're a victim and why it's not your fault.
And your job here is to submit to our story and don't push back.
Can I ask you guys a question?
Because this you just you just um made me think about this because no one ever talks about this at all.
I personally feel like outside of the attack on women in women's sports outside of the attack of masculinity in all men that white men have it pretty hard, like on a image basis within our country, especially now more than ever.
When you see the messaging that you see on the news, the TV, um, TV networks, mainstream media that speaks about you guys as um pretty much the metaphorical boogeyman.
How does it make you feel?
Honestly, like I want to know like what what comes in your mind.
Um, Chase is you have a son or a daughter, gone her.
Okay.
Um when your daughter sees these images as she grows up, and she's gonna be reminded of you, your father, which is her grandfather, whoever else as a as a white man in her life, and she sees this.
How's that like make you feel when you know a lot of these statements and a lot of these ideologies are unfair?
Corey, I wanna I want to know you guys answer this to me.
Yeah, so that's a really good question.
Um, there's a couple of ways that I think about it.
First of all, I don't give a fuck what they say about me.
But it enrages me when they make the statements, not because I'm offended, but because I know that it empowers real institutions to enact real policies that have a real impact.
So it really pisses me off when I see someone lose their Patreon account, right?
Because of violating the terms of service.
And when I hear somebody on the news contribute to the narrative that contributes to those terms of services that contributes to those policies that someone loses their Patreon account and they were trying to provide for their family, that pisses me off.
So, from a self-esteem perspective, I don't care.
However, for my daughter from a self-esteem perspective, I do care because I have to be hyper intentional about raising this human being to have self-esteem.
And I have to constantly monitor how she's seeing things and perceiving she's only one now, so it doesn't matter yet, but she's you know gonna get to an age, and I have to make sure I'm gonna have to say, Hey, listen, I know what they just said, but I don't want you to ever feel bad.
You know, like the scene from the help, the famous scene from the movie the help.
You was kind, you was smart, you was important.
I'm gonna have to have that.
It's a good movie, actually.
I I really enjoyed it.
But there's a there's a touching moment where I think I think what happens is the black woman that is the nanny, the help, uh, is fired from working with this white family, and she gets on her knees and she says her last words to the little girl that she spent so many years with, and she says, You was kind, you're smart, you is important.
It's like a really touching thing because what she's conveying to the kid is you know, really what she someone else had conveyed to her, and she's actually gotten she's had this like actual racist experience, right?
Anyway, and so yeah, I'm concerned about it as a father because I don't want my daughter to um to ever doubt her value as a human being because of an immutable quality that she may have, or I don't want her to doubt my value as a human being because of my immutable qualities.
Okay, you know, I've made all my mistakes as a parent.
I'm I'm I have seven kids.
Nice, nice.
We we have grandkids now, so I'm an and look, I have the advantage of being a you know, a hairy, long-haired white dude who doesn't give a fuck.
And you know, I've owned my own businesses, I've been pretty autonomous for quite a period of time, and and you know what?
I grew up with a different experience.
Um you know, my dad who's passed away, He was not always a good character.
He was a raging alcoholic.
He was a mean dude.
He ran with an outlaw bikers and he made a lot of mistakes in his life.
And you know, there's some rough times.
I don't have a space to give a fuck anymore about what everyone thinks about me, especially based on the things that you're describing, Barrington, which are the same things people judge you on, which are shit that's out of my control.
Right.
Like I can't change the color of my skin.
I can't change the color of your skin.
Like, and I don't give a shit.
And but I'm with Chase on this one.
What I do care about is how are you expecting me to live and what are you doing for the experience of my kids and grandkids going forward based on these assumptions that you're making, not you specifically, but that are being made about us.
And you know, Chase and I like some people would call it a privilege, some people would call it all kinds of shit.
And the reality is we still have to do get up and every day, we still have to take care of our families, we still have to take care of our jobs, and we have to ignore some of the shit that's being said and and still move on.
I want to move a little bit though to the concept of self-esteem.
And we write about this.
Dave Coates is my co-author in the book.
We use the term self-care.
We don't use esteem much in because it's harder really to pinpoint what that is and how that's internalized.
But we use the concept of self-care.
And that basically is the centered application of selfishness, like you're taking care of yourself and conscientiousness.
You give a fuck.
And and you know, we can say, and Chase and I just did that we don't give a fuck about so many things, and certainly what other people are saying, but we have to care about something, or we would just be raging assholes.
And and that's what happens when you're selfish and you absolutely have no conscientiousness.
You just hurt people, and that's not good either.
So it's it's about having a balance in this.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
Um, one thing I do want to say though is there's a there's a way, there's a perception of selfishness that doesn't necessarily have to constitute being an asshole or a dick.
And I don't think this is incompatible with what what you've said or written.
Um, but a lot of people think of selfishness as someone who takes from others in order for their own self-gain.
And it doesn't necessarily it doesn't have to be that.
It's no it's it's really primarily the first step of selfishness is not allowing for something to be taken from you in order to help someone else's needs or some other group's needs, right?
It's not about taking for yourself, it's about uh almost like a you know uh um uh uh I don't know, keeping for yourself or or maintaining for yourself what is rightfully uh yours, I I think.
And and and the the further the point that I want to make is you know, if if you're selfish, if you're truly selfish, you you have to have integrity because selfish in the healthy sense of the term, um, because if I violate someone else's rights by say stealing from them,
that's a selfish act because it's thievery, but in the same sense, it's actually a sacrifice of myself because thievery is something that's against my values.
So even though it helps me on the surface and it's a selfish act, it's actually a self-betrayal because I have lived out of harmony or not in alignment with my own values.
I don't have integrity, right?
So I'm actually harming myself when I do something wrong to someone else.
So if you're a virtuous person, and I don't mean virtue in the sense of the term virtue signaling, I mean virtuous isn't like actual virtue.
If you're a virtuous person, you must be selfish and you must respect the rights and and integrity of others at the same time, you know, and and uh I think as our culture, we just think of selfish people as assholes, and I think it's it's an oversimplification of what it actually means to be selfish, but I don't know.
What do you guys think?
I agree.
Um I agree with all of that.
Corey, I want you to go back to something.
Um, go tell us because I think it's interesting, you don't use self-esteem, we use self-care in the dichotomy between self-care and selfishness.
Because essentially I think that being selfish in a lot of ways is healthy.
Um, because you can be you can be so selfless that it can hurt you.
And of course, you have to have moderation with anything.
However, I think that you know, as human beings, um, I will say on a base level, we all have a certain sense of self-preservation that we tend to lean into in specific situations when in when we were presented with external stimuli that we may not be comfortable with.
So when you say self-care, break that down for us essentially, because I went, I want to like speak on that more because I really believe now more so than ever.
We probably live in the most vain society collectively, but yet so many people have self-esteem issues.
I feel like in the same breath, which kind of sort of doesn't make sense.
Everyone gets on Instagram, everyone gets on social media, and basically uses it as a sense of self-advertisement, but yet we hear these statistics, these studies and these reports about people being depressed more so than now than ever, people feeling sad, suicide rates um continue to increase.
So, how does that correspond um where you slipped or converted self-esteem into self-care?
You guys have both kind of hit this in two different ways.
And I'm I'll uh this is gonna be fun.
First of all, self-care is the healthy application of making yourself a priority and applying conscientiousness, it's not extreme, it's balanced, and that is the core concept that we use in the book, particularly around self-care.
But I'm gonna identify it a little bit by going to the complete opposite to show you what that looks like.
And Chase hit on this when he was talking about authenticity, really.
The opposite of selfish behavior priority is selfless is to be selfless, and the opposite of being conscientious is to be shameless.
When you have a shameless person who is also selfless, you try to picture what this is, right?
And it is a douchebag, and it's counterintuitive because you think how can someone be a douchebag and be selfless when they have this.
Ever been to a feminist rally?
Yeah, when they when they have this uh you've got you've got all of these, you know, they're keeping a catalog of their conquests or whatever it is they're doing, they're showing off their new Tesla, like whatever it is that they douche out about.
How can you be selfless and be uh a douchebag?
And the react, and it comes down to what Chase was pointing out.
When you abandon your authentic, healthy and true self to wear some other costume, you are done.
You are you're not just not taking care of yourself, you are discarding yourself.
Right, you've become selfless to an extreme where you're trying to be and appear and present something entirely different, and instead of caring or being conscientious, now you're at a point where it's such an extreme act, you don't even give a fuck about your true self anymore.
You're at the shameless extreme.
You can't take care of yourself because you're too busy worrying about what someone thinks about your Instagram comments or your Twitter comments or your car.
And you have you have no control over how you feel about yourself if your self-esteem is 100% externalized.
So your days are like, oh, did they like did I get enough likes on this post?
Okay, I feel good now.
Oh, I didn't get enough likes on this post.
Now I feel like shit.
Because you've allowed you reverse mortgaged your fucking self-esteem, man.
So you're fucked.
You gave it all away.
You're like, all right, it's gone.
I'm not taking care of me, and I don't even care.
Like it doesn't matter.
I don't have no fucks to give.
All I care about is this image.
And and you talk about the feminist movement or and you know, I don't know enough about it to really comment.
But I think the point of that is basically there's all these girls.
Yeah, yeah, I get the the point, the point really is you enlisted you enlist in an army that's all gonna wear the same shirt, the same hat, say the same thing the same way.
Yeah, or yeah, there's another example.
That's my favorite one.
Yeah, that one's okay.
Yeah, the uh, but the the rally it it doesn't matter, right?
And and suddenly this is uh I look at what happened in the summer of 2020.
People were protesting, they didn't even know what the hell they were protesting about.
They're just like show up, be part of the crowd sometimes, and and these are examples where we're asked and expected to take our true authentic feelings and interests and just shit on them and throw them away for some other cause.
So that's the extreme opposite of self-care versus self-esteem.
To and but when you are taking care of yourself, you are a priority, and it is not out of control, it's not at the expense of other people, which is the point Chase was making.
And it is you're doing it because you have to become something that other people are interested in or you will die lonely.
Yeah, I agree with that, but I want to I want to pivot just a bit because I think sometimes I think sometimes being so you have to self-care is at the expense of other people, especially in a sense of reciprocity, right?
And I say this because sometimes, especially with a lot of good people, people especially who don't know how to say no, they continuously be used and used up, used up, and used up when they finally understand that they have nothing that's to give, they want to re put or replace, excuse me, the energy back into themselves.
The people who once so who once you know got from them or took from them, find it offensive when that person finally says, No, I gotta do this for myself.
And essentially, that may they those people make that person have to be the bad guy when they're not the bad guy, they have to do what they need to do for themselves.
And I think go ahead, Corey.
I know you want to say something, finish your thoughts because I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna derail this, so keep going.
But yeah, but the people get to a point where they say no, and they get people's the reaction on the other side is what the hell?
You've never done that before.
Yeah, you never done that before, and then it's like, oh, you're you're being selfish when essentially that person was being selfless this entire time, and it's benefiting you while it's also, but it also hurt them, so they had to be selfish to in order to regain that sense of self-preservation and whatever else positive you want to call it.
So, Barrington, you gotta finish my book, and I'll tell you a story about this.
So I got the book from David Coates, who was my therapist.
Can you believe that shit?
So I wrote a book with my therapist.
We actually had to we had to we actually had to start a company to share that the publication, so um, it was like there's a lot of stories behind that.
But one of the chapters and one of the archetypes is the pussy, and here I am.
I'm look at me, like I'm trying to relate to this guy and realizing wait, I did some of that, but we're writing about this character who is submissive and selfless, and it's chronic to an extreme.
And he that's called the male feminist.
Yeah, it there's many, there's a lot of reasons that applies, yeah.
So we have this, we have this character who like and he's in a relationship, but like and we use the example, like he can't even decide for himself when he should take a piss, like it's out of control what he will not do, and he will not say no, and he will not make a decision, and he always defers to someone else.
He's basically creating an imbalance in the power by giving the power away constantly, like it it never ends.
And he walks through his office and sees people, and somehow he's curious what he owes them.
Like he maybe he owes them a coffee.
Who the fuck knows?
But this is chronic when you become that submissive where you are selfless in everything you do, and we're at a point now where somehow it's being flipped around where yeah, this constant incessant selflessness is cool.
It ain't fucking cool.
Like can you imagine a scenario in which the Titanic is sinking and everyone is so selfish selfless that they refuse to get on a lifeboat?
Like, oh no, you no you, and like the whole meat by the whole boat's going down, they all die.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're all selfless, nobody would get off fucking boat.
Yeah, it's a it's a great metaphor.
Like, obviously, the whole world can't get by if everyone does this, and yet we're at this place where we're conditioning people and saying, Yeah, but we need like 98% of you to go along with that shit.
Like, we're we're conditioning people because hey, we want a whole bunch of them to be doing this all the time, and we're pushing them into this submissive role of like, hey, be really conscientious and care a lot.
You need to care until you're shaking you care so bad, but don't do anything for yourself, we'll take care of it for you.
Fuck.
Like animal, did you guys have to read Animal Farm when you were in school?
1984, Animal Farm, all of that.
I'm so happy we had to.
You remember the horse in Animal Farm.
Every time the system broke down another notch, he just said, I will work harder.
And then I think in the end he gives out and dies.
Correct.
And that's the that's the story.
That's the collectivist thing.
If you sacrifice yourself repeatedly to the group, it becomes a less and less efficient system, and you have to sacrifice yourself more and more, and eventually it collapses.
Correct, until there's no more, absolutely.
Yeah, until it ends, like you have a dysfunctional system.
Like you, and it feels like more and more we're sending this message out, especially to young boys now.
And like I know we have all these jokes anywhere with your participation trophy and everything else, where we're suddenly at this point where oh, if you're the winner, you're an asshole.
Yeah, like if you won, it's because you took something, you did something, you hurt everyone else who didn't win.
You're like, uh and and those participation trophies, by the way, they don't make they don't make kids feel better.
This is the bullshit thing.
So I was I was in chess club when I was in elementary school, and this is before participation trophies were actually a thing.
This is like 1998, and I went to this chess tournament and I got my ass just like totally kicked, right?
And uh they handed out like these pink ribbons to everyone, all the kids who like didn't place.
And I remember being so offended when they handed me one, they thought that they were like helping out, and like, hey, you know, you get a ribbon too, you know, so you don't feel left out.
But I was like, this is the fucking ribbon that means that you lost.
So like there's like a million of them all over the place.
Now everybody knows I'm a loser, right?
Doesn't actually make kids feel better.
Kids are smart, they see right through that shit.
Then no matter how many participation trophies you give them in little league, when they go play Call of Duty with their buddies at night, it is brutal.
And so they understand the concept of winners and losers.
Don't fuck with them, don't pretend it's not real.
Yeah, they're on to it.
That's one of my pet peeves, but I honestly feel like I feel like our society is softer, man.
Like I don't, I don't understand it.
Like, I had a I had someone tell me the other day that um comp like that there's no need for competition, and this is uh a grown adult man telling me this, and I was just amazed how heavily convicted he wasn't but actually believing this when essentially life itself and survival has to like competition surrounds all of us.
Like if we all had the same job, and we knew that whoever performed the best would have the has have the best reward, excuse me, that would make us all work harder to be the best.
That is essentially what competition is.
And we're stupid, we'd have a lottery for who marries who.
Like, oh, so anybody can marry my wife.
Like, no, I had to earn that, man.
You know what I mean?
Like, if there's no competition at all, just draw straws.
Shit, I got the fat one.
Right.
Like I just don't, I don't get it.
I don't I don't get the I don't get the mindset.
Like, I don't, I don't understand, like, I don't know when, but I can definitely like tell the overall aura of society has changed at some point in time from the point that I was cognizant of the the energy or the or the energy of society, rather, and now it's it's totally it's totally different.
Like, I don't know what happened, I don't know when happened, but it's just not the same.
It's like it's like like I was telling Corey um earlier, like I feel like we've we've regressed in a short amount of time.
All right, I have a different take on this.
Let's go.
I think that all of these conditions that you're describing.
I'm looking I put my name on the book.
I I said these are archetypes.
And the reason I picked that term is because I think these behaviors have existed for a long time.
And you guys brought up 1984 in Animal Farm.
And we brought up Ayn Rand.
Like there's so many examples where this behavior is laid out.
If you look at Shakespeare, fuck, watch the Sons of Anarchy, the writer for The Sons of Anarchy was married to Al Bundy's wife, or whatever the guy's name was who wrote that.
He's a big fan of Shakespeare.
You can go back and see these behaviors in Shakespeare.
Like this is not unique.
And I think what you're describing, Barrington, isn't that being a pussy is new, or that a bunch of dicks are telling you what to feel good and feel bad about.
I think what's happening that's alarming is how institutionalized and prevalent it's coming.
And it's coming at us in a way where we're saying it's actually better if you do it at this extreme.
Like we will like you more if you the more extreme you are in this place.
And I go back to the con the process of writing that chapter about the pussy.
Like I was shook up by it.
Like I was having a really hard time writing this.
And some of these stories are mine.
And I, you know, I'm processing this.
You guys have read part of the book, and so you know that like it's anecdotal too.
Like there's a story arc to the whole thing.
And this character, George is the name of the character, he's a pussy.
I would ask Dave, the professional therapist.
I'm like, uh, do you think we've gone too far?
Like, have we taken it too far?
Is it still plausible for a guy to be this much of a pussy and to be this submissive?
And Dave would say, uh, we're just scratching the surface.
Like from a clinical and professional level, he he was looking at it as I'm writing these stories, and he's like, we haven't even begun to really go into what the extreme looks like and how it cripples the individual.
And yet you go out and look on the news, check your Twitter, you're whatever you're looking at these days, you'll find examples where they're asking us and expecting more.
They want you to submit more, they want you to imitate more and become more selfless all the time, or they're not gonna like you.
Well, I think you guys are both right.
Like, I think that there have always been weak people, there have always been pussies.
Uh, but Barrington, I think you're right in the sense that I think there has been a rapid increase in that prevalence in our culture.
I think some of it has to be attributed to social media, but ultimately it seems to me that the difference between having a society, having a culture with weak people is different than having a culture of weakness, right?
So there were there were weak people in Rome at the peak of Rome.
Yes, but it was at the fall of Rome that the culture was weak, correct?
And so, and so I that that's what we really have to stake our ground on.
We have to say, listen, America hasn't been perfect, we've got a checkered past.
I acknowledge that, but fuck you.
If you're gonna shame me for being American, it despite all of the incredible virtues around Americanism, ideas of individualism, personal liberty, personal responsibility, hard work, commitment to family, honesty.
Like we didn't always live up to our own values.
I'm not saying that we're perfect, I don't worship the false idol of our culture, but we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
Just because we did one thing wrong doesn't mean the whole thing's trash.
And for you to say, oh, you know, fuck all your your your white supremacist ideals, this is all just part of the patriarchy.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Fuck you.
You're gonna literally burn the whole house down because there's a dead mouse in the wall in one of the rooms.
Like, don't do that.
Right.
That's true.
Yeah, and and fuck you if you need to burn it down if I disagree with you simply for disagreeing with you.
You're we're gonna burn this down.
Bullshit.
Like bullshit.
And you know, you talk about this example of having weak people.
There's always been weak people, and there always will be.
There will always be people that play a role.
And not everyone gets to be Michael Jordan.
You know, someone has to be Steve Kerr.
Right.
But the uh but you look at how we've done this as as a society, you look at that election with Joe Biden, and this whole campaign was I'm not an asshole or I'm not a piece of shit.
And yet we have a guy up there who's pretending to be president.
This is the mascot of a douchebag.
Like there is nothing left.
There is nothing left.
Like, are you are we sitting here saying like, oh, Joe Biden is selfish?
Like he may have done some selfish things, but that's not what we elected, and that's not what he ran on.
He ran as a selfless president.
He's a he's a selfless, soulless imitator.
He lives in the right house now.
He wears the right suits, and he's trying his best to say the right words.
But we have right now leadership, and we're saying like, hey, we're we're still America, but for now, we've got this guy in a costume.
And and yet I'm gonna they're probably shut us down.
Can we still go on YouTube, Chase, if we say the president's a douchebag?
But but this is really but this is really what's happening is we've normalized this kind of extreme behavior.
And again, go ahead, Barrington.
Hey man, I mean, I hear you, but hey, we at least we don't have any mean tweets, you know.
At least we have you know, somebody who is highly respected by the international community.
We have someone of such wonderful esteem, you know.
But you know, even though even though our country has like literally went to shit in the last, I don't know, 24 months, we can say that it has gone to shit with prestige and honor and niceness and all the wonderful things that that matters more than actual you know foreign policy than economics, um, and all the other things that keeps us afloat and keeps us, you know, worry-free and allows us to go to sleep peacefully at night.
None of that of what she said matters.
All that matters is hey man, he's a great guy.
We terrible, like terrible.
What this this is the mass hysteria and the mass psychosis is going on in our nation right now.
Where we are trading truth, we are trading results, we're trading in solutions for things that make us feel good, for things that make us sing kumbaya around the campfire.
No matter if the house is burning down, we can say that we are at peace with the with everything that's going on in this do being done in a nice way.
This is ridiculous, and this is what I'm saying, gentlemen.
If we continue on this route, because because I'm at the I'm at the point now where I can't even foresee what what's on the horizon anymore.
I know it's gonna be uh something very, very, very destructive, but I don't even know what to call it anymore because we have lost all like sense, it seems like as a collective within this nation.
A long time ago, we were honest as a collective.
If I didn't agree with you, if we had different ideological views, that was fine.
We will say that, hey guys, the sky is blue.
Yeah, you're right, the sky is blue.
I don't like you, but the sky is definitely blue.
Now it's like, hey man, the sky's blue.
I don't want to look up because I don't like you, and I don't care, even if it is blue, don't care.
I don't like you, I don't like what you stand for, and I don't like what you're saying.
What's is this is is this like the future of our nation?
Is this where we're going in regards to politics?
Because if so, we might as well throw the top win if that's the case, to be honest, and it's just is this like really ridiculous that we even have to have this conversation about the inability of the collective to be honest about what's really going on.
Because at this point, I don't know what the solution is.
I don't know because the cognitive dissonance has been so high, and I've I've never thought we would see it at this level in my lifetime.
But it's almost like people are so prideful that they don't even want to admit how wrong they've been in their choices of the last 24 months.
Yeah, I think the Hunter Biden laptop's a really good example.
The media obviously lied, saying that it was fake Russian disinformation.
The intelligence community that came together and the or the individuals within that community that came together and signed whatever letter stating that it was Russian disinformation lied.
The um uh corporate media lied about it, the the politicians lied.
Everybody lied about the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020 before the election.
And then the New York Times all of a sudden comes out and validates it and says, Oh no, but it's it's real.
And what do you hear from the left on this?
Crickets.
Not a word.
There's no acknowledgement, nothing, right?
And it and it's it's just like, all right, listen, like I understand how I understand how you can believe some things that that are reported, whatever.
But just ask yourself, and this the moment that I realized the media was lying was the night that Trump won in 2016.
I thought for sure, as someone who voted for him, I thought for sure he was gonna get his ass kicked because it's all the polls said for six months he was getting his ass kicked.
All the media said for six months was that he was losing, right?
He was changing campaign managers like three times.
It seemed like it was in shambles falling apart, and then he won and handsomely won in 2016.
Not the popular vote, but he handsomely won the electoral vote.
And at that moment, when he it was announced that he won, I was at a like an election party.
I was like, holy shit, like the extent of the lying is huge.
And since that moment, I have never trusted the media because I like to think that I'm at least trying not to have cognitive dissonance.
I'm sure that I fall short sometimes because I'm a human being.
Um, and you know, we all have our psychological needs, our mental health needs, and sometimes we like to convince ourselves into a corner about shit that we're more comfortable with.
I'm sure I fall victim of that sometimes, but I'm actually against cognitive dissonance and working on it, right?
And the fact that you you can see them lying about something so obvious, it's not it's not like just a hunch, like they they explicitly lied about Hunter's laptop, they explicitly lied about the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
I mean, this is documented, real, it is not QAnon bullshit conspiracy theory stuff.
They lied.
So why the fuck do you believe them about Russia versus Ukraine?
Or why do you believe them about vaccine efficacy?
Like I unquestioningly.
So like I understand if you believe them because you you know they said it and then you looked into it and you came to the conclusion that you agreed with them, right?
That's different, but you just fucking believe them on the surface after like they obviously lied to you about like everything else.
Like, come on, wake up.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt, man.
Like at that point, you're asking too much of me.
Like you're asking me to to meet you at an extreme, extreme place, and it's too much.
And that's reasonable to say that's that one's gone too far.
You know, it's funny, you talk about the um 2016 and and the polls and the information.
You know, going into the 2022 election, um, Richard Barris, the people's pundit guy, had Wisconsin as like a crapshoot, basically.
Oh, in 2020.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In 2020, gotcha.
Yeah, in 2020, Richard Barris had Wisconsin at his like toss-up for the most part.
And there were plenty of polls saying that there were, you know, Biden had a 17-point lead.
And so we didn't learn anything from this.
We didn't learn from you what it means, the credibility of the process and and what reactions you get out of it.
And you know, Barrington and I have too many conversations.
I can't remember if I'm repeating myself or not.
But when you do this to people, when you push them and you tease them and you needle them and you lie to them, all of these things are acting as triggers.
And you're constantly pushing someone to the go to an extreme.
You're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing.
And you know, Barrington describes in some of his writing how we're pushing entire communities, entire families, and we're doing it at a point where, hey, based on the color of your skin, we're pushing you this far.
We're asking you to get in line, Even though someone just said, if you don't know who you're voting for, you may not even be part of this group.
And we just keep doing it and doing it and doing it until we get an extreme reaction.
And then when the reaction happens, and it is extreme, we we get to there's someone playing the victim role.
And I I try to avoid metaphors and sports metaphors.
But it's like in if you had a sport where you allowed someone to break the rules a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and taunt and taunt and taunt.
And when they got punched in the mouth, you threw the yellow flag for the person punching them in the mouth.
And that's almost what we were trying to do with the media and these campaigns.
We're saying, hey, we're gonna stretch this as far as we can, and we're gonna we're going to abolish all forms of integrity in this process, but we don't want you to have a bad reaction to what we're doing.
And if you do, we're gonna we're gonna fuck you up.
And we even avoid that in telling the real story of what's really going on.
Like take Ukraine, for example.
Obviously, Ukraine is a fucking shit show.
Like you don't have to go back very far and see unrest within Ukraine.
You don't have to look very far to see what Barisma and other uh entities were doing over there.
You don't have to dig very deep to see who we were sending from the US to go over there and grift and wash their money and their laundering machines over there.
Like we know it was a shit show, and we know that we were involved, and we know that we had organizations over there as recently as what was disclosed about having the bioplants or or facilities or whatever it was they ended up disclosing in the Senate hearing, and all of this is going on, and what do you know when this is happening?
You're creating a fucking tinder box.
You are throwing Tinder and gasoline and Tinder and gasoline and more and more and more into this Ukraine situation, and then you start throwing commodities into it, and and the media is telling you a story about baked bread and cats or whatever the fuck they're making up.
But all of these conditions come into play until a guy named Putin, who is also a piece of shit, finally reacts.
And did he react in a reasonable way?
No, it was unreasonable.
Is he hurting people?
A lot of people.
Do I support him?
Absolutely not.
But do I have to sit here and then also say, oh, it's all the reaction we got from Putin that we need to talk about and just talk about kittens over here in Ukraine.
We have to ignore all of the conditions and the extremes that led up to that reaction.
Bullshit.
And this is exactly what we're like at a personal level, what we deal with in the book.
You try to get these reactions dialed in and create awareness through curiosity and experimentation to bring your response back to the middle.
But what the media is doing, as particularly in these key events, is saying, fuck your curiosity.
Take your curiosity and fuck off.
You're gonna get what we tell you to get.
And fuck your awareness.
You can fuck off with that too.
You're only gonna know what we want you to know.
And the only experiment you have left in this situation is to go crazy or submit.
And that and that's where we are with this process is we've taken awareness and curiosity about the facts and the reality of the situation, and said, not only are you not fucking entitled to this, but we're gonna hold it back from you,
and we're gonna fuck with you and call you names if you ask for the facts, or if you expect the facts, or if you refuse to fly the right flag on the right day based on the shit that we told you.
And and that is how we've institutionalized the extreme victimization and dickishness in the media, it's out of control.
Out of control.
I agree.
That was a long goddamn.
That was another one.
That was good.
That was good.
But you missed out one more part, one more important point that um we happen to discuss is how media's media has had one narrative all this time.
And now that the narrative has changed, specifically in regards to the pandemic.
Now, well, not even now, during this time, a lot of people were being deplatformed for saying things that are now true or now being told to be true.
And that just and it's like with this in mind, or with this the understanding that this is happening, I'm not quite gathering why many people aren't really opening their eyes, or at least asking questions.
It's almost as if you question the narrative, not outwardly, but to yourself, and you realize that in some respects that you've been bamboozled or a thought process you formerly once had now faulty,
it does something to someone internally that they don't want to face, it seems like almost as like your entire entire wall of truth that you built is now crumbling, but you don't want it to crumble to let it fall to actually rebuild a wall of honest truth of absolute truth, the truth that you can now find support on with facts and details.
You don't care about that.
No, you're gonna maintain this thought process and keep your your head in the hole like an ostrich as things get worse.
And that's the thing that I used to tell my friends all the time, because um a lot of these things, these issues with trend transgenderism and children and teaching kids about sexuality.
I told them this, I told them years ago that this is gonna happen.
I said this years ago, and you know what they said to me?
Why do you care?
It's none of your business.
It's none of your business, you have no concern over that.
But I always told them we live in a society.
What happens to the babies is my business.
I plan to have children one day, even if I don't have children now, the things that occur with the kids is going to manifest itself even worse when these children get to be adults.
Plus, who wants to just let bad shit happen to kids?
Fucking kids.
I tweeted yesterday, not even the mafia draws a line at kids.
They'll have you know family wars between the families, and they say no kids, though.
And everyone's like, No, yeah, definitely no kids.
But that's a fucking mafia.
These people cut heads off and leave them on fucking mattresses and shit, but they won't fuck with kids because they're better people than the fucking media.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah, I almost blew a gasket today over when I saw that video clip of that Supreme Court hearing or justice review when she was saying she was going light sentences for pedophiles.
Yeah, yeah.
And like the fact that you, oh, we need to decipher between um, you know, the worst type and what?
Well, is there is there a worse type of pedophile?
Yes, she was she was saying that it was worse to personally abuse a kid than it was to consume the content.
But what she forgot to understand was the fact that the kid in the content was abused, yeah.
Right, she's like, Are you watching video?
It's different from abusing kids.
Like, no, it's not that kid was just exploited for that person to watch the video.
Correct.
Yeah, like if we put her in the highest court after those comments, uh I'm more worried about that than almost anything I've seen in a long time.
Like at that point where you're basically turning the perpetrator into a victim and ignoring the true victim.
Like have we learned nothing from Victor Frankel?
Like, do we like is there do what's sacred anymore?
We're gonna take the true victim and discard what their defenseless experience was, and we're gonna turn the perpetrator into a victim.
Like I this is a bridge too far for me.
Like you're getting a pretty big fight out of me on this one.
Yes.
So but Barrington, you talk about the pandemic and people getting in line here.
And I think an example that we can give that was like part of the narrative was if you didn't get the jab, you didn't get a vaccine, you were somewhere between a serial killer and a serial killer can't be.
I don't know.
Yeah, you're on the spectrum between serial killer and serial killer were serial killer.
Whatever it was, you killed everyone, right?
And but part of that dialogue was that you had to do this to keep the hospitals from being overrun.
Right.
So they they created this story around this that you were doing something, even if you didn't want to, but hopefully you believed in it as a service to everyone else.
This wasn't for you, it was for everyone else.
Right.
And they're basically saying the priority here is not you.
We don't, in fact, we've given immunity to the creators of this shot.
So it like this isn't about you.
This is about the group.
This is about the pandemic or whatever it is, keeping the hospitals clear.
And there's something very good about being of service, even being in a group.
And we benefit from these kinds of people all the time.
Like my stepdad, my dad, like he is my dad, um, 33 years in a single police department.
Like he went to work in a service-oriented job for 33 straight years with the one department.
And people do this all the time.
Teachers do it.
And like there's so many places where service is a good thing.
And I think that was exploited.
It's like, all right, I will do my part, was turned into if you don't do it the way we want, we're gonna hit you over the head.
And I think that I hope this doesn't get and it's more than my thoughts.
I hope it doesn't get lost.
That being service-oriented is a good thing.
Being selfless and shameless about your service orientation or your willingness to be of service is a very good thing.
Right.
And the way it was exploited is a fucking bad thing.
And by exploiting what should be a natural, normal, healthy contribution, they've undermined actual real genuine, authentic service.
And I would make the case too, because I can rant on about a lot of shit for a long time.
They're doing the same thing with cops.
They're creating a narrative around a service industry and a service profession that is basically undermining what we really need, which is more cops who are trained better to do their job, and I would add thanked for it.
They should be compensated for it, and we should be thankful for what they do instead of just shitting on them all the time.
Like we're we're undermining something that we need, which is genuine and real service.
Oh man, um, you said you said a mouthful there because that's 100% true.
In regards to um both the pandemic and cops, in both of those, I will say scenarios of cops in the pandemic, that is, we've seen the media put forth information that was I would say they lied with facts, right?
So there is a fact that um a lot of hospitals were overrun.
But when you peel back the layers and figure out why that is, it it will tend to change your perspective on the whole scenario.
So why were hospitals overran?
Well, how many of regular ordinary American citizens have a um a regular regular doctor that they see on a day-to-day basis?
Not many.
So then those people went to the uh urgent care, they overfilled the urgent care, which sent them to the hospital.
Boom.
There's your problem right there.
Then when you get the situation with cops, the media just um perpetuate this narrative that a person that looks like myself should just be petrified when I leave my house because somebody with a badge is literally looking for the gun down me on a day-to-day basis when the stats show completely different case in point.
In 2020, um a study was done where in that study, eight out of ten blacks thought that out of eight hundred, eight out of ten thought that it was more likely for a young black man to be um gunned down by a cop than just be in a car accident.
So when you see statistics like that come out, and I'm I won't even go for further to say like what college educated whites taught thought that number was, it was like six out of ten, maybe seven out of ten.
But when you see people who are so-called educated, think about things like this where two different statistics were it's obvious to me at least, that someone will die at the hands of a car accident than a cop.
And when you see people have these belief systems, you can only attribute that our media is probably one of the most dangerous institutions in our land for perpetuating these narratives that somehow alter the behavior of common people.
And when you have these things that continuously take place, it shapes our society in this in this specific notion, and it gives us or it delivers these behaviors that are not progressive, and I hate how to use that word, or not progressive in the way we need to move on towards the future.
Like you said, Corey, cops shouldn't be demonized.
Yes, there are bad cops, but to automatically think that cops.
Yes, they're yeah, we know this.
We know this.
But to automatically look at all cops as like evildoers, when you doubt 911, you you want the help.
You want help, no matter if you believe in, no matter if you believe cops are bad or not, you want help.
And so to just have this attitudes or to create these attitudes we've had over the last couple of years over people within the service industry.
Oh my gosh, man.
That's what I'm saying.
Like, I don't know where we're going anymore.
I don't know.
This is worse, this is very worrisome.
Hey, so when we're talking about this, Barrington, I want to ask you some personal stuff.
Tell me what happened specifically with you since you ran for office and to get here.
Like, what were the tipping points?
Like what dominoes fell for you?
Oh man, um, well, it was I could tell you one was how the Democratic Party in my state treated me.
Um Democratic Party?
I wasn't, I wasn't a member, but the thing about it is I ran for Congress without talking to them because there's nothing in the constitution that states that I need to talk to a party about running for Congress.
I essentially, like if I I'm 20, I'm over 25.
I live in the state that I've run in.
You I mean you're not US citizen.
I have my qualifying fee.
I don't have to talk to anybody.
Um it's that simple.
And so it taught me a lot about politics, it taught me a lot about people, but it taught me like this is kind of sort of running like organized crime.
Like you didn't come and kiss the ring before you decided to go out and do this.
Okay, we got something for you.
Um, I started extensively reading Thomas Sowell.
That that probably was that probably was the biggest um change that occurred.
Um, and then I would probably say again, like I was um telling you this earlier, I was doing an assessment of my life and my life experiences versus what else on TV and what people said how I should feel.
And when things didn't correspond, me being the inquisitive person that I am, I began to ask questions.
And then that's when it hit me.
It hit me that probably up until I was around 26, 27, I've been holding on to a lot of um feelings that that weren't even mine.
I was just told I should feel this way because everybody else feel this way.
When I look around, I was raised with my father.
My father ruled with an iron fist.
So like I had nothing but discipline in my life all like since I was five years old.
My father taught me that everything is your fault at five years old.
No matter if something happened to you by chance, you put yourself to be in that situation.
You put yourself to be in that area where it happened to you.
And so over the course of time, I feel like I was battling these internal demons.
Like I feel this way, but they're telling me on the TV that because I look a certain way, then this person that looks the opposite way is gonna treat me a certain way.
When my life has not been like that at all.
Or if it has, I have it has not been as direct enough for me to automatically claim something is racist or someone was racist.
And so all of these things culminated until the last four or five years of my life, and I say, you know what?
Someone has to speak about the other side of the coin because you get tired, especially as a black person, to hear how oppressed you are, how life is so hard, how life is this, how life is that, when you literally live in the greatest country ever, as far as freedom is concerned.
And I don't think people understand what it really means to be free.
That you are so free that you literally can do whatever you want to do.
But the caveat about that is you have to be prepared for the consequences of your bad decisions.
And I feel like that's where we are at now in society to where people want to be free, but at the same time, people want to lean on the government and say, hey, if I mess up, you're supposed to be here for me.
No, that's not freedom.
That's not freedom at all.
Freedom is if you fuck up, hey, that's on you.
Figure it out.
Now we do live in a democratic republic where people represent us on Capitol Hill to make specific decisions for us based on how we vote.
Yes, we do have a representative government at the same time where there are supposed to be specific things in place because we all live in society.
Yes.
But our dependence is not supposed to be on this body on this institution at all.
Our dependence is supposed to be on the person you see in the mirror.
And ultimately, if you can't depend on the person you see in the mirror, then you're fucked.
Correct.
Yeah.
You're in deep shit.
Correct.
And it's it's it's and it's just like we've gone away from our foundational keys to life, i.e.
family.
Like, I don't believe that charity should come from the government.
It's a reason why family has always been important.
It's not, it shouldn't be we shouldn't take a collective stake in the bad decisions that I make and helping me out with those bad decisions.
That's what my family is for.
You guys have families to work about of your own.
Sure, it'll be nice if you all would chip in and help out, you know, with some of the bad decisions I made, but it's not your obligation.
So this this new age thought process that everyone is finding virtue.
Well, you know, there's unfortunate people, and we all need to chip in and we all need to help them out.
Guys, that's not realistic.
It's not.
So this, so it's been a combination of things, Corey, that that's got me up to this point.
I I maintain an open mind because I know that I don't know as half is what's out here in life.
And so I try to just learn and observe and just be okay with not knowing everything within the infinite um quote of knowledge, so to speak, because I'm not gonna know everything, but as long as I keep my mind open to just want to learn things, to want to understand people's and want to understand different perspectives, and I'll keep growing.
Because that's what it's all about at the end of the day.
Are you having fun with this?
Or is it like when you I see you on Twitter, you like you get in the action.
Is it fun for you?
Does it you feel like you're in a bit of a fight?
Um, okay, so Twitter is more so, I never talked about this before.
Twitter is more so um it's kind of sort of where I have I kind of do my own my own thought experiments on Twitter, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it totally makes sense.
It makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, so I so it's like I I try to, I try to see, I try to test the limits of the thoughts of people, right?
But my my passion, what I like most, I like talking to people like face to face, because there's nothing like feeling the energy of another person to where you say something and you know based on their body language, not even what they say, but based on their body language, it hits them in a way that it's like, oh my gosh, I never thought about that before.
Because what that does is in my mind, I think that we've gotten so close-minded as a collective, we are totally shut off of understanding people's perspectives.
And understanding perspectives allows us to get to a middle ground.
If I have a different ideological belief than than any of you, I'm willing to sit here, not necessarily impose my own thought processes upon you, but continuously ask you questions so I can understand.
And at some point in time, if I ask the right questions the Right way and to make you comfortable enough, you'll give me to understand why you feel a certain way.
You may not change my mind, but you'll give me better insight into understanding why you think the way you think.
And if I can at least understand why you think the way you think, then I can better communicate to you why I feel the way I feel.
And now what ends up happening is instead of us being at odds and being on opposite sides, we can come to the middle and say, you know what?
I see why you feel that way.
So how about this?
We don't do that anymore.
Yeah, that's a lost art.
It's that's a cool idea you have, Barrington.
We don't do it that way anymore.
We don't do it that way like I was listening.
I was I was looking at commentary of someone um the other day on Twitter, and these are people who are I won't say any names, but these are people who are like the thought leaders of our generation of our current day society.
And when they like um propose a rhetoric that states that we shouldn't talk to people, we shouldn't hear these people out and things that nature.
How do you expect to grow as a nation?
How do you expect to have some type of carotery as a nation when it is obvious now that we have a lot of outside enemies and outside forces looking forward to our demise?
How do you expect for us to come together when you don't simply want to listen and understand people and understand why they feel the way that they feel because it's a reason people think the way they think, it's a reason people go on throughout life and behave the way that they do, and if we don't understand it, at least try to understand it, we're gonna forever be at odds with each other and be in a stagnant position.
And my biggest belief is stagnancy is death.
If you don't move, you don't move forward or move it any type of way, you're treading water is the same as drowning.
Correct, Frank Underwood, House of Cards.
And I wanted to I wanted to ask you, or I just wanted to mention too, like just to put some some perspective on this, because the censorship thing is obviously happening in a in a formal way on big tech from government influence as well as you know corporate uh influence, and it also happens individually, right?
We choose who we censor in our lives, and uh, but but from an institutional standpoint throughout all of written history, when has censorship been done by the good guy, never working never, never, never.
You don't have to censor the truth because you only have to censor lies, first of all, and in the best censorship for a lie is the truth, because if everything's on the table, the truth always wins eventually.
Sometimes it's messy and it's hairy, and you have to fucking invade Normandy, right?
But ultimately, it pans out, right?
The truth comes out, and so but but but with censorship, it it's it's an it's imp it it makes that system less efficient, uh excuse me, less efficient, and truth is unable to censor falsehood when it's inadvertently or intentionally censored itself, and so it's you know ironic that they claim to be antagonistic toward misinformation, disinformation when really the best solution is just to let everybody have it out.
Let the boys fight in the schoolyard on Saturday at noon, you know.
Right, right, right.
But you think about what censorship really is, what's happening if it if this was happening in your family, right?
If you were trying to censor information for your child, you have this little girl, she's almost one.
Now you're like, all right, we're not gonna tell her anything until she's 17 and a half, right?
The process of applying censorship to someone is you are withholding the facts and you are depriving them of their own awareness, and their ability to say a fact, yes, and you're depriving them of their own curiosity, and you are depriving them of their own choice, and you're basically saying, like awareness is off the table, curious, like it's all gone, and we're at this point.
I'm gonna tell you what to fucking do, and you're gonna fucking do it.
I'm gonna tell you what to think and you're gonna fucking think it.
Like we have taken the basic concepts of communicating and negotiating and said, Yeah, we're gonna skip that and go directly to me getting what I want.
Right?
It's not sustainable.
Like you can't continue like this.
And people go and talk about how bad things are going to get.
Of course they're going to get bad if your process of negotiating and communicating is I'm going to push you until I get an extreme reaction.
And that's what the censorship is doing.
They're saying you're going to push and we're going to take away your choice and we're going to push and take away your awareness.
And we're going to push and we're going to deprive you again until the only thing left is the confrontation or the meet the reaction.
And what they're telling you is the virtuous response to what they're doing is what Barrington has described early in this process, which is I'm just going to give up.
I'm going to look and pretend I'm on board with all this.
I'm going to give you the look you want.
I'm going to submit to these conditions.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to push this to an extreme.
And one thing one thing I want to mention in light of that, the outcome of that, nope, nope, people don't know this, but I did the research.
And in 1933 or whatever year it was, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, there were 80 million people that lived in Germany.
Do you know how many of them were Nazis?
Two million.
One in 40 Germans was actually a Nazi.
No one else agreed.
Now later things changed.
I know that there were influences and there were there were all sorts of people that were anti-Semitic that weren't Nazis.
So I'm not saying that the problem was only the Nazis, right?
There was a cultural issue going on.
But people think that the Nazis was like 99% of all Germans were on board, and there were just a few people that were so overwhelmed, they were too scared to do anything.
And what happened was they fucked with the right people at the right times that nobody else responded appropriately to the to what was happening.
There's that famous quote, right?
First they came for the socialists, and I didn't I did not speak out because I was not a socialist, then they came for the whatever, right?
And then they came for me, and it was too late.
There was no one left, right?
And that's the thing, right?
And this is what this is what bothers me about a lot of people on on the right and the left is that they're all anti-cancel culture until cancel culture happens to them.
So a good example was Whoopi Goldberg, right?
She made that ignorant comment about the Holocaust not being about race.
It was controversial a couple of weeks ago.
And I saw so many people on the right that were like, fire her, censor her.
I'm like, no.
If you want to put her on TV, Whoopi Goldberg gets to keep her fucking job.
It's you get it like your cake and eat it too, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I was like that too.
Like, give her an eight-hour-a-day show.
Don't let her go off the air.
Like, right, right.
She'll just totally sabotage herself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Though I don't know what you guys think about that.
Oh, I hate censorship.
Oh my gosh.
Like, like I did.
This is the point.
This is the part where it frustrates me because it goes to show that the extreme left and the extreme right are not good at all in any type of way.
You can't, you can't find um any um solace in either side because they're too extremes.
You can't complain about censorship, and then when someone says something you don't like and you do the same thing the opposite side does, that's very contradictory.
This is why we have to, as a as a people, as individuals, even work to bring people back to the middle to the where the common sense is.
This is why, even when I ran, I I consider myself a common sense politician.
Why is that because we live in America?
Just because you say something I do not like does not mean I have the right to shut you up.
If anything, I want you to speak more.
Help speak more.
Because I need to understand what I need to understand your mind, your mindset and your perspective.
Again, everything's about understanding perspective.
And the more we see censorship, the more we see big tech doing the bidding of government.
Um, I knew the writing was in the wall when President Trump lost his Twitter account.
I knew that I knew the writing.
I knew when Alex Jones lost his.
Yeah, because I didn't know it was gonna go to the president, but I knew it was gonna come to the plebes, you know.
Yes, because at that point in time, what they what they stated without stating is that now, like if we can censor the president, what you think we can do with you?
Yeah, yeah.
But it's interesting what you just said because you said that we need to get back to a place of common sense.
And I think the reason that Thomas Payne's work, common sense, was so effective, was so effective, though, is because there were, you know, uh there was a large Segment of the population in the colonies that wanted to you know stay part of the king the kingdom, right?
And there was a large there was a significant substantial segment that wanted to um uh uh become independent, right?
And he wrote a book called common sense, and it worked.
It was enough to push people over the edge because regardless of whether you were for King George or you or you or you were for independence of the colonies, everybody in that culture agreed that common sense itself was a value, right?
Common sense makes sense.
We agree common sense is a good thing.
The problem we have now is that yeah, I agree with you.
We need to bring everybody back to common sense, but common sense itself is controversial.
The idea of common sense is racist or bigoted or whatever, or a part of the patriarchy, right?
And so they actually attack the principles themselves upon which we have to build in order to solve the problem.
They're not we're not even like necessarily have we're not having battles anymore on the top floor of the skyscraper trying to just like you know get another level of the sky, like the foundation is actually needs to be rebuilt until we can have some sort of cultural consensus, in my opinion, on basic values like I don't know,
honesty, liberty, common sense, uh objective reality versus uh you know the the postmodern subjective bullshit that's you know kind of all tied into this neo-Marxist uh horse horse shit, until we can like just agree, like listen, it's like reality is real, there is truth, there is falsehoods, and it's good for people to try to discover and believe and understand what is true and to deny what is false until we can agree on those basic principles.
Like, how am I supposed to change somebody's mind if they're like, oh, it's just a simulation, man?
Like so you you guys have both brought up you keep bringing up the similar things, which is that like Barrington's talking about the left and the right, and there's something in the middle or the a center or something we have to get to, and you're talking about common sense.
I wrote a book about common sense too.
It's called Be Less Dickish.
I just love you know, by the way, LaCroix, refreshing the plug again, but no, in seriousness, I did that just to get it because I can't write anything called common sense because I'm not like you saw it, it's awful.
It's I ride vulgar.
But the point in all of this, what you guys are describing, I don't think anyone in this conversation, and most of the conversations I'm in, are arguing that we have to have one of these right or left parties win over the other.
And we're not saying that one is perfect and the other one is not.
I don't get into these conversations and think, oh, if I'm bashing the left, that means I support the right, but I understand that people think that, even though it's not true.
And what you're describing, Chase, is that it's not just common sense that we all because you're not all gonna be sensical and you're not all gonna have the same things in common all the time, but we have to get to a point where the process is reasonable and fair.
And what we've done is taken this process and said, for the take the example of censorship and take the example of victimization that Barrington was talking about with races, and we've said, all right, we're gonna allow this extreme to carry on.
I go back to the beginning of our conversation.
We're gonna allow code writers to change the name of the master branch to bigger branch or whatever they changed it to.
We're saying, and yeah, main branch, and and I'm saying, fuck this shit.
Like it's this extreme in the process that is gonna prevent any side from prevailing.
And I don't have to go out there and beat the shit out of Mitch McConnell, he'll do it himself.
Like, I don't have to go out there and beat the shit out of Schumer, he'll do it himself.
And if I point out how they both are a pair of fuck ups, I don't have to defend one, I'm not defending one or the other.
But what I can say is when you both and both of these guys do it, go to the extreme and ask for my loyalty in an extreme way.
I can tell you to fuck off and bow out of the process, right?
And and that's where I think that the next move has to happen and where the real leaders are gonna come along.
I think Tulsi Gabbard, for example, is appealing to people because she comes yet, she and she can fire a gun.
So the she uh she doesn't she doesn't ask people, anyone, whether it's an interviewer, whether it's a voter or anyone else, to reach to these extremes to be on board with her.
You can be on her ride.
You can participate in her conversations without going fucking crazy.
Now, is that true for Nancy Pelosi?
Is that true for AOC?
Is that true for Elizabeth Warren?
No, you have to get fucking crazy to be on board with that.
Yeah.
And and I think instead of like just thinking what's censical and what's common, both of those are great attributes.
We have to get to a point where hey, we can just discard this insane process.
Because it's crazy.
It is the system beyond good and evil.
Yeah.
And and take the example from today and look at what Barrington was writing.
I'd look at what that um candidate for the Supreme Court, the nominee, whatever I don't know what you call them.
They still get voted on, so I'm guessing it's a nominee or whatever.
Yeah, they'll be nominated by the president, right?
What she said about the sentencing for child porn.
Like I do not have to accept that shit.
I do not have to.
And I can say to people outright, I do not have to be on board with a goddamn thing that any supreme court does if they tolerate that shit in their ranks.
If that's not a disqualifier for participating in the highest court, then there apparently are no disqualifiers and fuck them.
Now, does that mean I'm gonna burn down the whole fucking thing?
No, I'm not burning anything down.
But there's a part of the system that is so broken and so compromised that it doesn't include me at this point, and that's an example.
And if if we don't bring the make it less examples instead of more, we're gonna have a big problem.
Well, boys, we're coming up on two hours before we wrap up.
I do want um, I do want to give you guys each a chance.
We'll start with Barrington to just share with the audience who's made it this far into the episode.
Um, where where people can find you, follow you.
Okay, guys.
Um, you can find me on Twitter.
That is the most I do my damage outside of my radio show every Thursday, but Twitter is mostly where I cause a lot of trouble.
My um what's that?
My Twitter name is at underscore Barrington II again.
That is at underscore bearings I and every Thursday at 7.
I have the bearings report, 7 p.m. Eastern on ATO Talks Radio, which is on iHeartRadio.
So just go to iHeart, type in ATO Talks Radio, and boom.
Uh Thursdays at 7 o'clock.
Got a good show plan for you guys this week.
So um check me on all my socials, and I promise you you will love because I am very entertaining.
Very entertaining.
I'm excited.
I will I will be there.
All right, man.
What about you, Corey?
So you can find me at the website, it's a good place to get all of our stuff.
Don't forget to mention your book.
Well be less dickish.com.
And I am at Corey Kilpak on Twitter.
I'm not as busy as you guys, but we do uh definitely have fun going back and forth there.
This has been a lot of fun.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
We'll have to do it again.
I want I want to have you guys each on one at a time too.
Okay, thank you so much for for popping on the show.
Uh pleasure to be with you, and uh, we'll stay in touch, okay?
