The Culture War #52 The End Of Academia, How College Got Woke & Died w/Kristen Lacefield
Host:
Tim Pool
Guests:
Kristen Lacefield @colonelkurtz99 (X)
Shane Cashman @ShaneCashman (everywhere)
Producers:
Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X)
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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I have this debate quite a bit about where the culture war actually started.
And a lot of people say it started in universities.
I think the concepts and ideas that eventually became the post-modernist political faction certainly existed in universities to a great degree, perhaps more so than many other ideologies.
But I believe that As I've often argued, social media algorithms were what launched this into orbit, creating the political conflict we see today.
And the simple version of it is that it's rooted in what is safe for advertisers, what is socially acceptable, ultimately creating this massive wave almost overnight of cancel culture.
And we may be recovering from it to a certain degree now with Shane Gillis hosting SNL, with more and more comedians feeling comfortable saying very offensive things.
We've started to realize exactly what this is and become more resilient to it.
And maybe that'll change.
Or maybe, I don't know, with the way universities are cranking out new humans ready to join the workforce, it may actually create these ideas.
But I'll just give you the real quick version before we jump into all the meat and potatoes here.
Universities were bringing in young people, influenced by social media, and the customer is always right.
So when the professors tried pushing back, they got fired, they lost their jobs, they were put at risk, so they all started falling in line.
So I really do think social media algorithms were the big player in this, but I could be wrong.
So we're going to start off, we have a lot of things to talk about.
We're going to start off talking about what was going on in universities, getting what going broke, and then I really want to go through just like a general overhaul of like what we've seen in the culture war.
You know, which is a very much includes cancel culture, the Me Too movement, and now where we're currently at with AI and this Gemini stuff.
So we've got a couple of people hanging out.
Colonel Kurtz, do you want to introduce yourself first?
unidentified
Yes, so my name is Kristen Lasefield, but I go by Colonel Kurtz on my YouTube channel.
Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie.
And I was a professor for many years, a full-time lecturer at some different schools.
I did my PhD at the University of North Carolina.
And I've taught for a number of years, and finally just had enough, got out, and decided that YouTube and social media were a better place to educate people than the universities now.
See, and that plays into a lot of what my idea is about what's creating the culture war, is that everyone thinks it's universities, but I do kind of feel like in terms of social and cultural influence, universities are substantially less impactful than people realize.
Um, but I know there are many liberals who may end up watching this show, so for their sake, we'll just refer to you as Dr. Colonel Kurtz, because credentialism is very important to these individuals.
They want to know that someone has certified, an authority has declared you to be an expert.
I have a master's, which is useless, but I did pay for a $20 doctorate through the Universal Life Mysteries Ministries, and I'm also a reverend, and I'm ordained to do weddings, and I used to tell my students as I was quitting the college world, go get a $20 professor degree from this website and just water down the market, because it's useless.
Yeah, there was, I remember like 15 years ago, maybe longer, it was like 20 years ago.
Oh man, this is like 20 years ago.
I can't believe how old I am.
And I'm talking to my friends and they're all gonna go to college or whatever.
And then I was just like, at some point I was like, oh, I actually already have my bachelor's.
And they'd be like, you do?
And I'm like 19 or whatever.
And I was like, yeah.
And they're like, in what?
And I was like, nuclear physics.
And they would just be like, what?
Shut up, no, you don't have to ask me anything.
And then they would be like, I don't, I don't even know what to ask you.
And then I could just make things up.
But my point was not that I was literally lying to them that I had a degree, but I showed them these websites where you can buy any degree in anything you want.
They're just not quote unquote accredited.
And so you have a lot of people trying to get a degree because it means that somewhere someone has approved of you.
No, no, I get it.
If you want to be a doctor, you're not going to buy a fake degree.
If you want to be a lawyer, you got to pass the bar.
But for like, I don't know, literally anything else, music management.
Like this is the, this is the important thing people didn't understand about universities in today's day and age, especially with the internet, where this credentialist world is just, Doesn't mean anything anymore.
If you come to me and you say I have a degree in English or whatever, like you have a doctorate, what does that mean to me?
What can I do with that?
unidentified
You mean practically speaking, like occupationally?
Well, I mean, I think that, so, I have some degree of ambivalence about coming on here and saying, oh, you know, PhD is worthless, grad school is worthless, because I was able to spend a lot of time reading a lot of great literature and philosophy, and I had a lot of time to think about a lot of deeper stuff.
However, as you know, the problem is that there's a lot of political indoctrination now that's coming along with that, particularly in certain fields more oriented toward liberal arts and social sciences.
And also, it's a huge expenditure of time and money, whether we're talking about the students' money or the government's money, right?
The taxpayers' money.
And so I think that now with internet, you really can get as good or better of an education than you would get in school.
And I think indoctrination with the rise of wokeness and postmodernism is because of The death of this archaic institution.
So I hear this argument.
When I'm talking about, you know, I'm 18 and everyone's telling me it's time to go to college.
And I was like, okay, this is the thing to do, right?
And I remember after doing my research on it, cause the internet was available to me since I was a little kid.
I just, I remember going to my dad and being like, how about instead of spending all this money on college and, you know, taking out loans and stuff, you give me a couple of grand and I buy a guitar and an amp.
And I just start dedicating myself to building a music business.
And he was like, no.
He's like, you gotta go to college.
And my mom was like, you gotta go to college.
And my view was like, there's nothing I can learn there that I don't have access to on the internet.
And I guess for me, being 18 and my parents being in their mid to late thirties, their worldview was built upon, college will give you opportunity.
And my worldview was built upon, I know more than my friends who are in high school and going into college.
So I don't see the benefit of taking on debt and doing this.
I'm more interested in starting a business.
I think at this point, that's where, you know, I'm growing up and I'm seeing there's literally no point to go to college at all.
And so, to make my point, you know, try and stop ranting, right now, you go to college, what do you get?
There is a guy who tells you what for.
Well, I go on the internet, I got millions of people who can tell me what for.
I can look up a professor.
I can watch lectures for free.
I used to go on Google videos before YouTube.
I mean, YouTube was dominant, but Google videos had their own thing.
I would watch physics lectures.
I would come home from working at a smoothie joint, Jamba Juice, and then I would turn on a lecture on physics, and I'd watch a free lecture.
But I used to, if you haven't seen Sam Hides Ted Talk, you should.
The idea of college in its purest sense, I still wish could exist of like different kids from different areas showing up, sharing ideas.
I do miss the idea of being a professor in a classroom, teaching, whether it was journalism or fiction, poetry, and just sharing ideas with the idea of making art.
But then, the further I got into it, I don't know if you had the same experience, is like, every semester out of that 10 years, the cultural war would peak into the classroom.
The argument made to me as to the importance of the university is to bring young and curious minds together to expose them to better ideas.
Where you said, you know, Kristen, you were saying you got to read these books on philosophy.
I did all that.
And I was in the bag room at an airport underground reading a book on physics, near-death experiences, philosophy.
I didn't have to go to university for it.
I would just go online later and look at more reading materials, talk to people in chat rooms.
And so I think there are people who desperately want to hold on to that idea.
But as the usefulness of university begins to collapse with the rise of the Internet, the customer is always right.
And so when social media platforms like predominantly Facebook started Algorithmically promoting wokeness, we go back to the beginning of Facebook.
Let's go back to 2008.
What happens is, as Facebook got to the point of universal usage, I shouldn't say universal, but when it got to the saturation, where the average person had more than 300 friends and page likes, Facebook could no longer send them reverse chronological content.
So it used to be that if you followed your friend, whatever they posted would appear on your newsfeed, and then it would go reverse chronological.
After 300 people, it becomes impossible to see everything.
It moves too quickly.
So Facebook said, we have to keep things stable on the page for a certain amount of time, and we want to maximize the utility.
So if someone posts something nonsensical, people are going to get bored with that, and they're going to turn off Facebook.
So they created this algorithm that will show only what people like the most.
And what ends up happening?
How do you determine what someone likes?
Do they interact with it?
Do they share it?
Do they comment on it?
That's the simple thing Facebook decided.
What ends up happening is rage becomes the predominant motivator of the algorithm.
unidentified
It's more likely to get clicks and It is much more catalytic, yes, anger and rage for social media.
So Facebook starts promoting the most hate-filled, rage-filled content, which results in two parent trees, American and racial nationalism.
I shouldn't lump those together, but you had a very, like, more conservative, we love America, then you also had, actually, I should separate those.
You started getting a rise of white nationalism in response to the anti-racist, intersectional feminism and things like this.
Well, one of those things is not acceptable.
Advertisers will not advertise on what is perceived to be the enemy of social good.
So, let me slow down.
Let me go back.
The first thing that happens is police brutality videos.
It didn't really matter the race.
But people would click on it, they would share it, and that would generate more attention.
Facebook would share it more.
Imagine you're 8 years old in 2008, and you're now starting to go on the computer, or let's say you're 10, and you're going on Facebook.
You're not supposed to, they say you gotta be 13.
Your whole feed is nothing but black men being beaten by police.
Your whole world is built upon seeing nothing but this.
So young preteens and teenagers are on Facebook at this time.
That's the only thing they're seeing.
Then they start to get older, graduate high school, and they enter universities.
What happens?
They bring all of that into the university.
And then when you get these professors, this famous incident where Professor Nicholas Christakis was talking about Halloween costumes, and he said, you know, you should be able to wear whatever costume.
Cultural appropriation isn't that big a deal.
Students surrounded him screaming at him, saying that universities are supposed to be safe places where they're comfortable.
The university's response is the customer is always right.
We don't care about creating a place where people can learn.
We care about making money from a customer, and the customer wants a daycare center for 18-year-olds, and that's what we're going to give them.
unidentified
So I would agree with that to a certain extent, except that I think that there are a lot of students who, maybe not woke students at Harvard or Yale, but there are a lot of students in a lot of universities who are politically, they are not extremely leftist, or they're not woke, and they are actually having these views
More or less imposed on them or they're being indoctrinated by some of their professors and so I I liken it to a kind of a children-of-the-corn scenario where you have you know at some point you know you had a lot of these professors like when I was going through undergrad and grad school you had a number of professors actually who were introducing students to these more leftist or more woke perspectives but I don't think that a lot of them realized that That young people were going to take it.
We're going to take it seriously.
You know, it was almost like, like, I remember taking a course when we talked about gender.
It was a gender, gender and literature course.
And basically we were more or less indoctrinated in the idea that there's no such thing as a woman, you know, that gender is an artificial construct.
And this was, I think the professors kind of just felt like, oh, you know, we're just kind of like, it's a concept of fucking around here.
You know, we're just playing with ideas.
Nobody's really going to like really take this seriously.
And what happened is.
A number of young people did take it seriously, and then they graduated, they went into the workforce, or they themselves went into academia, or they went into Google, or wherever, and then they start initiating these really woke policies and woke perspectives.
Well, this is the debate I end up having with people who worked in universities.
I think everybody thinks they have the answer, so I certainly could be wrong.
No, no, it's interesting.
And we have people will say, this all started in insert my industry.
One guy's like, look, I'm a carpenter, and I'm telling you, this association was doing trade training, and they started bringing this stuff in, and that happened way before, and I'm like, everybody thinks it started where they were.
But here's what I think about the universities.
There were a lot of ideologies that float around universities.
Why is it that, as you mentioned, they start playing around with the idea of gender as a social construct?
How does that turn into something they actually agreed with?
There's a bunch of ideas that universities play around with.
Why did that one become dominant?
Advertiser friendly.
That's really it.
So your Facebook, you get advertisers buying on your platform.
When wokeness started to emerge, It started with intersectional feminism.
It started with systemic racism and things like this.
You got a pushback.
You got the rise of the alt-right.
And I mean like the literal alt-right.
Like people who are white nationalists.
And I'm not talking about people who are calling for violence or murder.
I'm saying these are people who would make channels saying that this country is a country for white Christians and we should secure our borders.
All of a sudden advertisers panic!
And they're like, we do not want our product associated with that because we're trying to sell to everyone in this country.
White people may be 70%, but we've got a market share over here for Asians, for Latinos.
We will not advertise on your platform if that's the case.
The reason why the gender stuff actually takes foot in these companies is because companies were scared of being outside social orthodoxy.
So you certainly had several different ideologies popping up, but we'll take a look at Twitter.
Activists will complain about certain things and if a white person complains about racism against white people, the advertisers laugh and say, we don't care about that.
But white liberals will absolutely Say, hey, you know, racism is bad or whatever.
So it starts very, very subtly, but as more and more issues arise where two people will go to Facebook and say, hey, I'm offended by this.
Okay, well, you're talking about white Christian conservatism.
You have no foothold in media.
This has no impact on our advertisers.
You're talking about police brutality, racism.
This is racist.
We have to overreact and panic.
So this ends up creating a monetary system of cancel culture rule sets on Twitter, where they claim we have to have special rules protecting trans people because of suicide rates.
And I asked Jack Dorsey this, I'm like, well, what about body dysmorphia?
What about anything else?
Like, you don't care.
And it's because only the things that offend advertisers, and the advertisers actually don't care either, they're only worried about what someone else thinks about them.
I think it's a lot of evil that hides behind this fake face of progress, you know, and it's not real progress, but I, you know, my take on it, like you say, you know, we all kind of think it starts where we came from, right?
We're, we're from the front lines of the war in the colleges.
Obviously I think the, the wars on all different front lines at the same time, but like I always connected to starting with, uh, this country started to say, we have to go to college.
A lot of people were told you got to go to college.
I was told that even, you know, that's not that long ago.
Uh, and I think the Marxist knew that, you know, and I, I really, I look at the weather underground and the domestic terrorists that they were avowed Marxist and they built bombs.
They killed people, went to jail.
And when those people were pardoned, many of them were pardoned by left-leaning politicians like Susan Rosenberg was pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office.
Look at who Cuomo pardon his last day in office uh violent terrorists who were Marxists they all became professors and I think they infiltrated these institutions to then spread this hate this hateful message this violent message uh to destroy America as a whole.
And then what did Susan Rosenberg do after a while?
She started the Thousand Currents platform, which then helped funnel the money for Black Lives Matter, Act Blue money, which then I see Black Lives Matter as the new evolved version, violent version of what the Weather Underground was.
But that's just one front line in this whole decay of society that we're in.
I'm talking about A non-violent guy who made a channel where he just talks about white rights or something, which certainly, you know, the corporate press will be like, that's the same thing.
Like, dude, a white dude in his house being like, I don't like affirmative action is very different from a guy with a tiki torch.
And so, but that's all banned.
If you were a guy who had a channel and you said, I am concerned about mass migration, banned.
If you were like, I'm concerned about liberal policies and how they're destroying the family, these were all in line with these people who believe the United States should be a white Christian nation.
Banned.
If they did not ban that, but they banned the Marxist professors, we would be having a culture war with white nationalists.
I think a lot of the Marxist stuff, even though there was pockets of real violence from those Weather Underground people and pockets of insanity between them, you know, in protests and whatnot over the years, it was mostly isolated to colleges and whatever small protests are doing.
But then Facebook and whatever algorithm you're on accelerated that.
So imagine this, imagine, you know, we had this period where like Ann Coulter tries to speak at Berkeley and then they come and they smash everything, Milo tries to speak, they're setting fires.
Imagine if social media banned Marxism, Marxist ideas, post-modernism, social justice, but they allowed more traditional family values.
What would happen is nobody would be seeing any conversation about Marxist ideas.
Ann Coulter would be getting prominent praise.
Her content would be number one on Facebook.
Everybody would see it.
They would be told this is good and right.
More importantly, young creators who want to make social media channels are thinking to themselves, if I want to get a million views, I better praise the family.
And they're like, don't the wrong.
Hey, if you oppose family values, you're going to get banned.
And then when Ann Coulter or Milo comes to speak at university, the police are going to be like, we can't let these people in.
They're going to smash things and destroy things.
Instead, what ends up happening is out of like you have this trend in society to make things more towards social justice because we don't like racism.
That's historically where we were going.
Ben Shapiro shows up to DePaul University and the police say, if you step foot on this property, we'll arrest you.
unidentified
Right.
But here's the thing for me, though.
Here's a question.
Why is it that the more rightward perspective was the one that became taboo or more persecuted or prohibited?
Why not the left?
And for me, I do trace it back to, you mentioned Weather Underground, What happened in academia, academia used to be a fairly conservative institution, you know, think about the professors with their pipes and the, you know, the tweed coats and so forth.
But what happened was the Vietnam War and you had the cultural revolution of the 60s.
And so there was a dramatic change.
in hiring preferences in academia and people and and there was this awareness of okay we need to shift with the culture and so you had um massive change in preferences for fields of study dissertations you know a hiring committee is going to say which dissertation is more politically interesting or useful or what have you and so then what happens is you get into an academia you get into a feedback and a loop
Where then those professors, the new professors that you hire, the liberal ones, then they hire people like themselves.
And so I think what we've gotten to, at least with academia, is you've gotten to a situation where these patterns now, these cycles have been occurring now for years and years and years, and so you just have more and more people of a leftist perspective being hired.
And so the question for me is, why is it, say at Facebook, Who decides that one perspective over another is not tolerable for advertisers?
I mean, do the advertisers really care, or is it that you have a lot of leftist people at Facebook or at these companies, for instance, who say, we don't tolerate this other perspective?
Why is it that when Elon Musk buys X, we see this dramatic shift in what is socially acceptable?
So even though the universities are worse than they've ever been, SNL just had Shane Gillis host, a guy they fired, what, five years ago, because he made jokes about Asian people.
Now he's hosting!
And I don't think that's only because Elon bought X, but Elon buys Twitter, turns it into X, unbans a bunch of people, and now you have active news conversation.
And I mean, TimCast is flourishing, new companies, more in line with a classically liberal, and I don't mean like politically liberal, but for the people listening, we're winning!
And a huge shift happened when Elon bought Twitter.
I think what happens is, you look at the adpocalypse on YouTube, Again, the Wall Street Journal, oh, PewDiePie said the N-word.
YouTube panics and builds a system to allow advertisers to control this because advertisers get scared.
It's a Mexican standard.
unidentified
But why?
What causes the advertisers to be scared of a more right-wing perspective but not a left one?
And I guess that's what I'm trying to get to is I think that there are a lot of people who came through the academic system who then got jobs at these companies and they're intolerant of certain perspectives.
However, I think more it's that Do you ever hear the story about, you know, how we ended up with the Civil Rights Act, civil rights legislation in this country?
Lyndon Johnson asked his workers to drive his dog back home because he was, you know, he's a president or whatever.
And they said, sir, we can't do that.
And he's like, well, why not?
You drive it back, right?
Can you bring my dog?
And they were like, when we drive through the South, we can't stop for gas.
And he was like, what do you mean?
Segregation.
We're not allowed.
These are black men.
They're like, we're not allowed to stop for gas.
We can't have a dog with us.
It's going to be hard enough for us to get food for ourselves.
And he was like, that's insane.
And so this was a huge catalyst.
So they say, I mean, maybe the story is, you know, apocryphal or whatever, but it's huge catalyst economics.
You have people who are like, look man, I don't care who you are.
I want your money.
And so certainly there were racist traditional values that existed in this country for a very long time.
Economics played a huge role in changing a lot of this.
We need to make money.
How do we make money?
We get more customers.
So right now, I love this.
There's a lot of people online who believe that there is an active effort to make the United States mixed race.
And I'm like, certainly those people do exist.
There are leftists who are like, we should race mix.
We just saw the Google Gemini thing where they got rid of white people.
That's true.
But you know, there's a really simple reason why the cereal commercial has a mixed race family in it.
It's like you got a black mom and a white dad and a mixed-race kid and people are like, why are they doing commercials like that?
It's because they're trying to make people think, I'm like, no, no, no.
It's because they're trying to reduce their budget so they can make one commercial that will sell cereal to a black family and a white family.
unidentified
No, for real.
You don't think it's as heavily politicized as we think?
You think it really is more of a monetary-based, revenue-based decision, really?
But like 10 years ago, we started seeing commercials of like a black guy with a white woman and they're buying a car.
I'm like, that's just a marketing guy being like, We can make two commercials, one targeting the black community, one targeting the white community.
Can we do both?
And then someone who's stupid goes, let's just have a black man and a white woman, and then, you know, we're showing that, you know, we were progressive.
But all it does, and this is true because I was reading data on this, it creates something that doesn't work for anybody.
So when people started saying, like I started seeing these things pop up, it was a big trend where they're like, look, they're trying to make these mixed race commercials to convince white people to sleep with not white people and all that.
And then I was like, you can actually listen to what some of these marketing guys said.
These are people in their late fifties.
They don't know anything about this cultural Marxism.
All they know is they were told to reduce the budget and to target a wider demographic.
How can you get more people involved?
What ended up happening is these commercials were found to be unappealing to white people and black people.
However, when Bud Light happened, I actually, I predicted it, I was like, Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney because the new millennial who just took over thought they were going to be progressive, and that's exactly what happened.
unidentified
But doesn't that then reinforce the argument that I'm making about that it actually is the younger generation heavily politicized driving these decisions?
So the millennials go, like, they're being fed this message through, like, the people running Facebook, Jack Dorsey running Twitter, he said free speech wing of the free speech party.
When X started, it was like, say whatever you want, you know, whatever.
Then when advertisers went, hey Jack, I don't want to run my toothpaste ad next to a guy saying the N-word over and over again, so we're pulling our ads.
The other problem is we keep redefining what's offensive.
So what was not offensive yesterday is now the next most offensive thing tomorrow.
And I think going back to your point about fear and advertisers too is like maybe the left, the amorphous word, They easily turn into a monolith and rage against whatever corporations, whereas the right doesn't really do that anymore.
They used to, kind of, because I think they kind of coalesced around getting Bill Maher cancelled all those years ago with his first show for the 9-11 commons.
It's like the right has a hard time coalescing these days because it's more of like a spectrum of actual individuals, although obviously there's People who are a monolith within these different subsects of the right, but the left really does coalesce around a big idea, and then lashes out, and then advertisers freak out.
And conservative Christians were angry and they said, this is demonic and satanic.
So the company, because this is, I don't know if Wizards owned it or who owned it when it first started, but they were like, okay, and they removed that.
You know what's funny is that the left created loopholes around that now because for those who couldn't see it when I read it, black is lowercase b.
And then in style guides, they change it so black, if you're talking about a person, is uppercase B. Yeah, it's hard to keep up with all of that.
But white is lowercase, W that is.
unidentified
Well, it's interesting that you bring up the fact that it used to be the more conservative side that was repressive and censoring, because I mean, I think about like, for instance, the Christian conservatives, you know, the 90s, Marilyn Manson, right?
And it's very hard to explain to the young generation now, What it was like in the 90s and how repressive it was and how there were these moves for government censorship of, you know, Time Warner and all of that.
Exactly.
And so that's one of the things that I try to explain.
I know we'll talk about it later, but about Marilyn Manson is to look back at Manson and what he was doing, you know, in the 90s or whatever.
It's very perplexing, I think, to a lot of people now.
What's all that about?
But he was actually a symbol of the fight against Repression and censorship.
It's just that now that repressiveness has moved to the left.
What happened from 2006 to 2012 where it was offensive in a music video to say God damned because the Christian conservatives had the moral authority in this country.
But even funnier than that is like, well, that is, that's not even funny, but like the degenerate left, they, that song is still censored like that on the radio.
But if you go over to like some hip hop stations, they censor some certain words, but there's ideas out there about twerking and grinding up on people and all this crazy stuff from like Ice Spice or Drake or even new Kanye lyrics that they let those go.
I remember being a kid in the late 80s, early 90s, and there was a comedy, a sitcom that my family watched.
And I remember that there was going to be a storyline in a particular episode about a guy in college having sex with his girlfriend.
And you weren't going to see anything.
It was just going to be a conversation.
But there was a PSA or a warning, basically kind of a trigger warning ahead of this, telling parents, you might not want your children watching this because there was going to be a reference to premarital sex.
It was like some Michael J. Fox family ties thing or whatever.
And I don't think that was good, but I'm just saying we've come so far from that.
Well, the only episode of Married with Children I actually liked was when Al Bundy was being, uh, I can't remember exactly what happened, but I think he's being harassed by some guy who's suing him, and he's doing everything right, but it doesn't matter, the machine's out to get him.
Finally, he punches the guy in the face.
And the next scene is him and Peggy happy together, which is rare for that show, fanning money where he says, I can't believe that worked.
I sued the guy for breaking my fist on his face.
Something like that.
And I'm like, this whole show was they hate themselves.
They hate their kids.
They hate their neighbors.
They hate, he hates his job.
He's a loser.
And no matter what happens, everything is miserable and bad.
And I'm like, I, look, Leave it to Beaver is certainly not a show I'd watch, but I'd watch it over America's children.
unidentified
It's kind of nihilistic.
Yeah, it's nihilistic in a way toward family and all kinds of institutions.
I think The Simpsons were a big component of moral degradation in this country.
And I love The Simpsons.
The first nine seasons, I can quote almost every episode.
Me, Seamus, Coghlan, and Richie Jackson will be quoting The Simpsons nonstop, and they're better at it than I am.
But think about the nature of the show.
It's not the worst family in the world, but Homer strangles his son, and his son's, you know, a deviant, and this is not the first, but it really is a shift towards dysfunctional family, painful, marriage sucks, or, you know, Homer and Marge love each other for sure, but you start getting into a lot more shows, and to be fair, like, Married with Children was around the same time.
It was the family dysfunctional thing we enjoyed watching, the suffering of others, losers, and I'm just like...
Man, I think we started building up a culture where we told people families got problems.
They're bad.
Here's bad things about them.
We started propping up characters who are like, like, you know, Homer's a weird character in that he's been to outer space, but he's a really, he's kind of a bad guy.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I've been rereading the Odyssey.
Written by Homer thinking about the Simpsons and the Simpsons in a way as degenerate as we might think it is into many degrees.
It's kind of like the Odyssey when especially when you talk about him being kind of a bad guy and or going to space on these great ridiculous trips because it's the Odyssey is also about family and falling apart and temptation and work and all that stuff and then and then real quick with Bundy.
I also think about the same stuff because they named him kind of after Ted Bundy.
I don't know if that's a fact, but I can't not think about Ted Bundy when watching this American Family Fall Apart with the same name.
The writers and their comedy, the jokes they came up with, and I lament the loss of it.
But much like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart is far from perfect.
Not the smartest guy in the world.
But he's a smart and he's a funny guy.
And so a lot of conservatives really don't like him because he was very dismissive of conservative arguments.
He was a liberal guy.
But he's legit funny.
I mean, so his show's back.
He's ragging on Joe Biden.
Democrats are losing their minds about it.
He continues to insult them.
And I appreciate it, despite the fact he also insults Tucker Carlson and Trump.
That's fine.
But what came after him?
When they tried to recreate Jon Stewart, they created the scumbaggery of John Oliver.
They created the really low-brow Jordan Klepper, Samantha Bee, just like some of the worst of the worst in terms of political ignorance, pulling clips out of context.
And so while The Simpsons certainly is masterfully done, the things that come after it are shows where the family is trash, where having a family is bad, where the father's a moron.
Look, I love The Simpsons, but Homer is a bad father, a bad character, and everyone loves it.
People take, you know, they believe that the underlying premise is always true.
So when the Simpsons mocks the nuclear power plant with a three-eyed fish, of course there's no three-eyed fish, but the underlying premise is nuclear power is killing you.
And think about how many people said, like younger people around our age during maybe pre-Trump said they got their news from the Daily Show.
A show that's built upon a deceptively edited reality.
unidentified
It's an interesting argument, debate in general, the effect of art.
And whether we're talking about high art or popular culture or what have you, because on the one hand, I will, to the death, I'll defend artistic freedom and I don't like censorship of any kind.
And at the same time, though, I get exasperated with people who say, well, it's just a TV show, you know, it doesn't have any effect.
It's like, no, you can't have it both ways.
If you're going to tell me that art is powerful and art is important, then you have to also understand that it also has negative effects as well.
And again, I'm not for censorship, you know, obviously, but I think, and I think these things are cyclical, you know, in the 80s.
There was a real return to more quote-unquote traditional values, conservatism, people were tired of all of the skyrocketing divorce rate of the 70s and you know you had Reaganism and all of that in the 80s and so I wonder too if what we saw with like the Simpsons and so forth was a kind of then like cycle back then to critiquing the family.
My line is where we start to abuse the innocent and children, but then people on the left would disagree with that being abuse because they think neutering children or putting them in drag is actually good for them.
You would think if Marilyn Manson or Dee Snider in the 80s was pre-Manson, but, like, if they were pole dancing on Satan, She would have a problem in the 80s, I would imagine.
Well, how come she's so quiet now?
I guess she just gave up and then no one really cares.
unidentified
And you know, my perspective also, I am more to the left than you guys are, I think.
I mean, certainly on abortion for one thing, but I'll say this.
I grew up in East Texas in a hyper-conservative environment.
I'm talking about my family, my church, and all of that.
There was certainly a lot of good that came from that.
I really felt like in a lot of ways it was a very problematically repressive environment and so I find myself getting concerned when I see from the right This real drive toward censorship or what I would say is a kind of like hyper focus on what should be personal, private morality.
And so I think that's one thing that sort of gives me pause.
Do I like the idea of like a kid drag show?
No, of course not.
But I've just seen the other side of things where, you know, the way that I grew up, the way that I was raised, I didn't like that either in a lot of ways.
And so I get really concerned when it seems like we're going from one side to the other.
Yes, there's so much censorship.
Uh, coming from, uh, the, the left in certain ways, politically on, you know, on, uh, social media and so forth before Elon took over.
But on the other hand, I didn't really like, you know, like Marilyn Manson and people like that had a point.
Like what was going, I felt like there were a lot of things that were going on in more conservative society that we're not calling out the hypocrisy of a lot of people in the conservative world or on the left because people forget Tipper Gore was on the left.
She sounds like a conservative because it was around the time that conservative media dominated.
Definitely up until, well, like we talk about When we talk about the fetus, to me, what's important is what degree of cognition is going on, what degree of pain awareness is going on.
I don't believe that just because something is going to be a human eventually, that that means that its interests or rights supersede that of a much more cognitively developed, full-grown woman.
Now, I understand that that's not a view that most conservatives agree with, but I believe that I'm comfortable with The first two trimesters, because up to that point, I don't think that we're talking about anything that's more advanced than the animals we kill to put meat on our plates.
Constitutional limitations on the right of individuals to... Individuals have inalienable rights and so the issue is For the most part, I think abortion is wrong.
I think it's something people should not do.
But there is a challenge in the authority of the government over a person and their constitutional rights.
The baby has constitutional rights.
The mother has constitutional rights.
What I would prefer is, if the baby can be saved, it should not be killed.
unidentified
So that's usually why... When you say baby, are you talking about a fetus?
Is that what we're talking about?
Yeah.
But you said up until the third trimester, you're okay with it being legal?
In the US, it's mostly like to the point of birth.
But my position is typically of a libertarian governmental limitations position, meaning I think abortion is wrong.
However, when you start looking at the nuances of how you'd handle abortion in the instance of a woman who was raped and her constitutional rights are being violated, simply put, the government can't mandate someone provide their body to another person.
I think if a woman chooses to have sex and gets pregnant, she has a moral responsibility for the thing that she chose to do.
If a woman is, without her consent, forcibly impregnated, the government cannot mandate she give her body to that other person.
And the argument... I've had this argument a million times with pro-lifers, so I'm not gonna... I don't want to start an argument.
We can move on from this.
My point is simply, like...
It's unfortunate, but constitutional limitations would, I believe, result in at least up to 12 to 16 weeks a woman have access to abortion without the government's intervention.
Which, you know, I think is a bad thing, morally, but I don't know that we want to empower a government to mandate a person give their body and blood to another person.
But I don't want to bring up the abortion thing again, which we're getting into.
My question was simply the perception of... Why did I think that?
unidentified
Yeah, I guess because there are a number of people that I know you're aligned with, generally speaking, who are very pro-life.
And so I just assumed, yeah, I assumed that you were anti-abortion, that you thought it should be illegal.
For me, again, it comes down to a very sort of non-religious, sort of cold-eyed view that we should be considering things, again, like cognition, sentience, pain perception, and I don't understand if we live in a world where we can slaughter animals for our food who have Much more cognition and pain sensitivity and are more advanced than fetuses, particularly up to a certain point, then it just doesn't make sense to me.
I assume I'm probably to the left of you on the issue.
Substantially.
Much further to the left than you.
Yeah, because my position is typically that I will sit back with my feet up and my hands behind my head as I watch the left abort and sterilize their children and excise themselves from the gene Well, you bring up it.
I know you're half joking, but this is an interesting point.
I wish it wasn't happening.
This is an interesting point, though.
I mean, there is an argument, and this drives some people crazy, but there is an argument to be made that, and it sounds eugenicist or whatever, but there's an argument to be made that most of the time, those fetuses that are getting aborted would not have been positive contributors to society.
I'm not talking about a leftist perspective.
I'm just talking about if we look at, generally speaking, you know, the people who are having abortions.
And in terms of, you know, poverty, in terms of people who are not responsible enough, you know, to manage their lives, what kinds of children in general are they gonna have?
I get it, but- We don't, I don't think it is moral To grab a group of people and be like, because statistically you are more likely to be bad people, we're going to excise all of you.
Well, but what is the poverty at times indicative of?
It's indicative of people who cannot manage their lives.
And so I'm saying that probably, generally speaking, statistically, people who were born in those situations, they're generally going to have worse outcomes.
But again, I'm not saying we should execute poor people, I'm just saying.
I just... Well, so look, look, I'm half kidding, but we can get away from the abortion debate and segue into the future here, because my argument typically is, no matter anyway you cut it, the future is conservative.
Uh, probably Muslim, but maybe Christian.
And the reason is, uh, Islam is, let's just call it more aggressive worldwide than the other Abrahamic religions.
Uh, they have substantially more children, and they're much more, when I say aggressive, they're very strict in their moral laws and their religion.
Christians have kids, but even in the United States, they still don't have that many.
Try not to have kids.
So if we just do the math on this one, if conservatives are only having one kid on average and liberals are having zero, in 20 years there's no liberals.
Now people say to me, yes, but they're indoctrinating kids in schools, and I'm like, and you're watching a culture war over that.
If the reality was the left just outright had indoctrination and we are all completely powerless to it, sure, maybe the argument would stand.
But that's not reality.
Conservatives are actually having, I think it's like, what is it, like 1.7 kids these days?
It's going down, which is bad.
But liberals are having like 0.4.
Like they're not having kids.
unidentified
And I know, I get these liberals will be like, liberals are having kids, I have kids.
And I'm like, dude, I'm just talking about the- That's stupid argument, yeah.
Yeah, your baby is a dog, not a person, so that doesn't count.
unidentified
The demographic argument, too, it is an interesting argument about, you know, population replacement, Western civilization, and all of that, and I totally get it.
But, you know, the other thing I guess I want to say is that, before we move on from abortion, is that I have just observed many situations in my personal life, people I've known, Where people who were pro-life, women who were pro-life, or men who were pro-life, and anti-abortion, when the situation hit home, they were willing to pay for an abortion, or they were willing to get an abortion.
In fact, I had a friend who was a pro-life activist, found out she was pregnant, waited until almost the sixth month, had an abortion, and then went right back to her pro-life activism.
Well, yeah, I want to give a shout out to Dickie Barrett, because it's one of the one of the most of all the things in my life that I can say, you know, I love this one.
It's in the top 10.
It's being a fan of the song, the impression that I get.
With the quote, with the bridge in the end where he says, I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested.
I'd like to think that if I was, I would pass.
Look at the test and think, there but for the grace go I, I'm not a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out.
And he wrote that in the 90s.
And then he stood up to the COVID vax mandates and got fired.
And I was like, Dickie is the man.
Dickie was tested and he passed.
And there are so many people that do not.
unidentified
Well, the COVID thing, that was a huge test in a lot of ways.
I think of a lot, including, well, I was just very surprised to see how many people We're perfectly willing to take a pretty much untested vaccine because of a virus with a, what, less than 1%?
Ian Crossland mentions the moment where the judge looks to the camera and then smiles and smirks.
These people, they have been psychopaths.
They have been totalitarians.
They have always been this way.
But now the camera is on them.
When they didn't have access to the PR machine, they were just sitting there angrily with the evil within them.
But now that they feel like they can jump up above the crowd because of the ubiquity of media, Judge Engron smiles and says, look what I'm doing, everybody.
Look at me, look, look at me.
Letitia James going to rallies and being on camera.
unidentified
I mean, and you know what?
I just want to say, About Letitia James.
I have been defending Andrew Cuomo on my channel against the Me Too allegations.
I don't want to get into that argument.
But no, I have defended him against, it was a bogus political hit job.
Against Cuomo, but it's interesting how many people that I've talked to who are Cuomo supporters, and they'll say well Yes, Cuomo was a hit job, but Trump.
But for those that don't know what happened is Google released their version of AI that can make images, and it was making black Nazis, Chinese female Nazis.
Because they programmed it to be diverse, and they did not want white people to be generated in images.
If you would ask it to make a white family, it would say, no, I can't do that.
A black family, yes, I can.
So when someone told it to make Nazi images, it started making black Nazis because it was diverse.
So now Google's shutting it down.
Grimes posted on X this, uh, I'm retracting my statements about the Gemini art disaster.
And I was thinking like, what, is Grimes really going to come out and defend this?
Grimes masterfully and succinctly, I shouldn't say succinctly, it's actually quite verbose, captured the essence of where we are today with the culture war with technology.
I want to read what she said.
She writes, I am retracting my statements about the Gemini art disaster.
It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional.
True gain-of-function art.
Art as a virus, unthinking, unintentional, and contagious.
Offensive to all, comforting to none.
So totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire, and humanity that it's accidentally a conceptual masterpiece.
A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism.
An unabashed simulacra of activism.
The shining star of corporate surrealism.
Extremely underrated genre, by the way.
The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience.
Not sure I've seen such a strong reaction to art in my life, spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, AI safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding collective trauma.
It's a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days.
Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn't human.
It's trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind about our intentions towards each other.
This is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.
Art for no one, by no one.
Art whose only audience is the collective pathos, incredible, worthy of the MoMA.
You know, I've talked about we were talking about the algorithm and manipulation and wokeness and all that stuff.
So, uh, Elsagate.
Are you familiar with Elsagate?
A controversy that warrants discussion whenever the opportunity.
When YouTube was advancing its algorithm and it wanted to compete with Netflix, it said videos that are over 10 minutes with a high retention time are what we will promote.
Who is the prime audience then for choosing this content?
Babies.
You know why?
Babies can't change the channel.
So if the algorithm says the content that gets watched the longest is the content we promote, when the mom put the iPad in front of the baby and pressed play, the baby's watched 100% of whatever they're given.
So whatever the algorithm fed them, the algorithm thought was good!
Because the baby's watched all of it.
So what happens then is, You end up with these videos where there's no speaking, because it doesn't matter, you don't need it.
Spider-Man, the Joker, and Elsa would be running around.
These videos are half an hour long, and the Joker is injecting a pregnant Elsa, and it started to break down into absurdity, where you ended up with videos.
This is really freaky.
When the algorithm kept promoting Spider-Man, the Joker, and Elsa, because that's what babies would watch, and so the most viewed boosted in the algorithm, Elsa, Spider-Man, and the Joker are popular prominent terms on YouTube because they're prominent characters.
It created an amalgam where you'd have a massively pregnant Elsa in stirrups where Spider-Man's the doctor and she's giving birth to the Joker or some weird psychotic nonsense.
That ultimately turned into AI-generated versions of this.
And it got real dark.
Eventually you had gore videos, murder, you had little kids drinking urine out of urinals because it was just getting crazier and crazier.
The algorithm was feeding itself videos because babies couldn't select for this stuff.
And it ended up with adults trying to exploit the algorithm and then intentionally creating content.
There were videos that had 15 million views of a guy injecting his young daughter with something in a syringe because the algorithm would promote it.
YouTube eventually intervened after the controversy bubbled up and started shutting all these videos down.
But when you create an algorithm and tell it to run wild, it eats its own refuse.
Twitter was a good example of that.
Jack Dorsey created a machine that exacerbated woke ideologies.
It gave a vehicle for it to run wild.
And he himself was sitting in the pipelines.
So when these ideas started becoming more and more powerful and prominent, That ideological refuse was funneling right into his throat and then into his brain and then he was putting it back into the code and the rule sets.
What we're seeing now with Google Gemini is the ultimate so far amalgamation of these people have been basically living in the sewers of ideology, where the stupidest, most insane, contradictory ideas are being shoveled down their throat.
My favorite example, Wemmickson and women with, and women.
unidentified
So- Is that how you pronounce it?
Wemmickson?
Wemmickson.
I didn't even know, I would see the X and I never knew how you pronounce it.
And they said, this is the inclusive word for all, you know, non-traditional women.
And then guess what happened?
It was offensive.
And a bunch of activists said, you don't need a new word for women because trans women are women.
So you've just become transphobic now.
So then they stopped using it.
So there was, it's, it's this weird contradictory state.
My favorite now is that Lucrid Cow, one of my favorites, Lucrid Kowski of We Are Change is a blonde haired, blue-eyed European And a person of color.
The Coalition for Communities of Color have determined that Slavic people, because they're oppressed peoples, are people of color, despite the fact they are white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed individuals.
Not in the literal sense, but what I explained 10 years ago was that AI will not make the Terminator, it will make corn country.
What's going to happen is, so here's the example I give.
The United States loves corn.
We subsidize corn.
We try to turn corn into fuel for our cars.
We extract corn syrup and then put an enzyme in it to make it sweeter by converting it to fructose, high fructose corn syrup.
So what'll happen?
If the AI were to actually look at the United States and try and make a determination about what it is humans want and want to be and what does it want to do, the future I envision is, Everyone's dressed like corn on the cob.
You go into the corn movie where you watch a video of just corn bouncing on the screen because the AI is going to feedback loop what it thinks you want.
And if humans invest so much in corn, the AI doesn't know the difference between corn for food, fuel, and for entertainment and culture.
And so, one by one, The algorithm will start feeding you.
And it's not literal, Korn.
My idea was it'll feed you nonsensical things until the culture consumes the refuse of AI and then turns into what the refuse has been portraying.
I feel like younger generations might reject AI though.
unidentified
It's just going to be so woven into the fabric of everything though.
I can tell you that as a former professor, I was teaching just several years ago and I'm sure now that they're all writing their papers with chat Oh no, it's better than this.
Lawyers keep getting caught with fake precedent citations.
It's nuts.
So I can't remember, there was some big story recently where some lawyer used ChatGPT to write up a legal argument and it created a fake citation and the judge caught him.
This was big news, it was recent.
And then I read a report that there's something like 800 instances so far where fake citations were created and the court caught them.
Like, these arguments are amazing because it'll be like, as referenced in, you know, Lasefield v. Cashman, 1983, you know, blah blah blah, the court's decided this, that, and otherwise, and blah blah blah, and it's fake precedent made up, and if the court doesn't catch that and review it...
So Dylan Mulvaney is a really great example of corn world.
When I tell you about corn world, where the computer tells you make corn music, make corn music videos, grow corn, corn's the only thing you want, you can understand the absurdity of that position.
Why would I dedicate my whole life to a corn, to a staple crop like that?
It makes no sense.
Because humans want it.
Take a look at Dylan Mulvaney.
Has anyone stopped to actually reflect upon?
And I know people have criticized the gender ideology stuff, but I'm like, really understand.
Someone who insults women gets surgery to try and look like a woman.
I don't believe Dylan Mulvaney is trans.
Dylan Mulvaney is getting surgery for the same reason Madonna or anyone else gets surgery.
unidentified
Are you thinking it's just an attention ploy, basically?
Because Dylan Mulvaney was doing shock comic insulting trans people and women.
The viral video of wearing hiking heels and running through the forest is shock offense content that pissed everybody off and got traction in the algorithm, which promoted the content.
Were it not for the TikTok algorithm, Dylan Mulvaney would not be getting surgery to try and look like a woman.
I think if you brought, if you showed the Dilma Rovani profile to anyone 10 years ago, they would go, there's no way our society would allow her to do this.
But the algorithm keeps feedback looping, and like Gemini, creating this psychotic, delusional world where people think this is normal.
It might break because of shows like this, because of people like us, maybe.
Or like Shane's saying, maybe it bifurcates into weird corn world people who are walking around going, beep, bop, boop.
There's no distinction by what you just described.
Yeah, that's not good, yeah.
There's no legal distinction.
unidentified
So you're saying basically that we are being through the technology, the algorithms, that we are being basically sort of herded into these pathological behaviors that are not in our interest at all, yeah.
It might sound crazy to some, but there are people like Obama when he was in office who hired people like Paul Ehrlich, you know, and these people write entire books on why we need to make the population lower, how we're going to do it by law, you know, if they had their chance.
Are you guys familiar with the Fallout video games?
So in the Fallout series, nuclear war happens, everybody goes into bunkers, and there's something called the forced evolutionary virus.
The idea was that if a nuclear war happens, we need to make humans resilient to radiation.
So we will create a virus that alters their genetic code of humans and makes them resilient.
Instead, it turned them into sterile, giant, mentally deficient, asexual creatures.
Like they were gender, like they had no gender.
It was like they were sterile.
And, uh, in one of the games, it might be the first one, there is an individual who becomes grotesquely mutated and becomes this ultra-powerful, ultra-intelligent being who decides, I'm going- the world's been wiped out by nuclear war, and you as the vault dweller who's emerged, seeing this world this way, in the end, there's a choice where it says, we can fight, or You can live your life exactly as you want, but we'll sterilize you.
Because you will not be a part of our future.
And you can choose that route.
Self-sterilization, and then you can live happy and do whatever you want.
So I wonder...
In this idea, what we're seeing now, the population bomb, the Malthusians, they believe there's too many people, they believe climate change.
Okay, how do you solve climate change?
You've tried legislation, you've tried television, people don't care.
So what do you do?
Goad them into self-sterilization, and those who choose to do it chose to do it, and it's not your fault if they choose to do it, they chose to do it.
And the people who are of strong mental will and fortitude will live their lives, resist, find ways, and survive.
And so you're creating a forced evolutionary pressure on the global population.
unidentified
Do you think that this is so... Are you saying that you think currently this is a big movement?
I don't see it.
Well, well, well... You're not talking about birth control, are you?
I just don't hear a lot of people in my normal life.
Yes, there are people, there are a lot of people I know who don't want more than one or two kids for personal reasons, but I wasn't aware that there was a really large social movement towards depopulation.
I can't bring kids into this world because of climate change or, you know, monetarily.
I had $200 to my name when we left the hospital with our first child.
You just have kids.
unidentified
Well, I hear people say things like maybe it's not the right time for us yet because we're not established enough or not, but I just... It's always the right time.
Even my extreme leftist professor friends, they might pay lip service to what you're talking about, but they still have the kids.
But I don't know, maybe you're right, and maybe it'll... Why are 16-year-old girls being put on birth control?
Well, I suppose because we generally don't want 16-year-olds to be having children unless they're in an established lifestyle, right?
Right, so what's happening in a society where instead of, and I'm not saying abstinence only education, but the question is, how do we become a society where we're like, sex good, babies bad?
unidentified
I'm just not sure that that still has really... I understand that you've got left-wing publications like New York Times and Activist, but I'm just not sure that really has actually... You may be right.
I'm just not sure that perspective is really filtered to normal people.
Like, even my professor friends are having kids, generally.
In fact, everything I've heard from everyone is that doctors immediately tell teenage girls, get on birth control.
Stay on birth control.
unidentified
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess it's the idea being that it's assumed that a large portion of teenagers, of horny teenagers, are going to be having sex, and so how to mitigate that.
16 I get, but, like, why are 18-year-olds, why are they not having families?
Why aren't they getting married?
unidentified
Well, everything is being delayed, though, and that's an interesting conversation to have.
Right, why?
I mean, and that gets over into me, too, the way that we're infantilizing young women now, the idea that if you are, even if you're a woman of age, say we're talking about an 18-year-old, I was just a child when we started dating in 18, 19, right?
It has been societally decided that women should be hormonally altered.
At the earliest time possible post-puberty?
unidentified
It's been decided, I think.
What I would say, though, is that up until several decades ago, we did not have access to that technology.
I think if you'd had women in the, you know, 1100s or whatever, who had had access to ways to not produce 15 kids, then you might have been having more people using it.
She's probably not going to be walking down the street by herself.
unidentified
I'm not saying that attitudes are exactly the same, but I'm just saying that I think that Look, if you look historically at women, you know, having 10, 11, 12, 13 kids or however many, I don't think that most women, given the option to do otherwise, would want to have that many kids.
I, well, but I think that people were having children for a range of reasons in the past, but part of it was that birth control, that there weren't as many birth control options, and also because people needed, you know, in agricultural societies, people to work the farms and so forth.
This, this may be apocryphal, may be legend, but my, my, I've heard, uh, Kurt, you might know this, in Sparta, the only way to get a headstone If you were a man, what's to die in war?
And if you're a woman, what's to die in childbirth?
We got to a point where there are so many humans, we do not, the risk of extinction is rooted in overproduction and ecological collapse and not population decimation.
But if you go back even a couple hundred years, the population of the United States at the time of the revolution was 5 million.
It was just like, the people... If you go back to when humanity actually faced real survival challenges, and maybe even not 200 years, because 5 million people is very unlikely to see an extinction event happen, but it could through, you know, plague or something.
The people who chose not to have kids ceased to exist.
And the people who chose to have children succeeded and had more and more families.
So the evolutionary pressure has always been on maximum amount of children.
If that was not the case, women would ovulate once a year or once every other year.
unidentified
I understand biology and I understand these, you're talking about large trends and so forth, but I just don't think that when a woman, whether we're talking about past or present, when a woman thinks about How many kids I want to produce that she's generally thinking about these larger like demographic or evolutionary concerns.
I think it's actually very personal thing and I think up until recently there just wasn't as much access to various methods of birth control whether we're talking hormonal or not.
And this is considered to be, like, academically true, that the washing machine, the microwave, the convection stove, these are the things that reduced the birth rate.
Because it used to be a function of, if we want to survive, we need a family.
It's about if you go back to the dawn of humanity and took two different couples and one woman said, you know, I just don't want to have that many kids.
Now that we've reached the Industrial Revolution, Women who don't want to have kids have no problem succeeding, surviving and thriving.
And that's built a culture of people who are like, I want to not, like, I don't want to have kids.
I want to live and party and adventure.
unidentified
I guess I just don't see necessarily outside of the demographic concerns or outside of these evolutionary concerns.
I don't see what the problem is.
And it's not just about partying.
I think it's a little, I mean, I think it's a little problematic to say the reason you wouldn't want to have kids is because you just want to have like... There's no problem.
I just don't think we should put on individual women's shoulders the burden for, you need to have this many kids so that the human race can proliferate.
So the pressure here is if you want to win, and you only care about winning, you would love to have a biological male compete against women.
If we create the technology to gestate humans in bags, for what reason would you have a woman?
And I'm not saying women are useless, I'm saying parents are going to make a decision when it comes to CRISPR.
Do you want a girl or a boy?
And there will be a desire for girls.
Girls are human beings.
I mean, people like boys, people like girls.
However, a lot of parents are going to start getting, the pressure's going to rise and they're going to say, well, it's a man's world, so if we're going to choose, let's have a boy.
unidentified
Well, you know, it's interesting, like in China, for instance, you probably are familiar with this.
Yes, for a long time, you had women, female children being aborted, fetuses or what have you.
Exactly.
But actually, what a lot of Chinese are discovering is that if you have a woman instead of a, if you have a girl instead of a boy, that girl's actually gonna take care of you in your older age much more than the boy will.
And so you're seeing, actually, I've seen articles about this in China, you're seeing more and more people saying, you know, hey, maybe I do want a girl instead of a boy, So I do want to clarify, I'm sure all the leftists are going to be like, I can't believe Tim Poole would say such a thing.
The China one-child policy, this is what I'm talking about.
When they said you can have one kid, they said, okay, kill all the girls.
And they were throwing baby girls in dumpsters and horrifying things.
So when it comes down to a simple mathematical equation where the left believes this, and so the left shouldn't argue on this one, that it's a patriarchy and that society gives men the benefits, fine.
Then if we take away, if we create the ability to produce life, then you will see based on your own beliefs in the patriarchy, the patriarchy will prefer to have male babies.
That's just it.
Make more males.
They're expendable.
They can lift heavy things up in pickle jars.
They win at sports.
And we saw this already in China.
When it came down to you could have one kid, what do you do?
They started getting rid of the girls.
And so seeing that, I'm like, I think this will happen everywhere.
I think people would absolutely start doing this.
And you talk about being taken care of in your old age.
Sorry, I got a robot for that now.
unidentified
Well, but that same argument about the robot, that could also apply to, that also then factors into whether men are more desirable than women, because increasingly the physical differences between men are going to mean less and less in terms of, you know, like for instance, self-defense or something.
You have a gun.
It doesn't really matter if you're a man or a woman, unless you're gonna get into hand-to-hand combat.
So I guess what I'm saying is... It doesn't matter.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that because technology is evolving the way it is, I'm not sure that this preference that you would have had in China for male boys who can go out in the fields or whatever and do more than women, I'm not sure that's gonna be as Much of a consideration, but you might be right.
I have honestly have not given much thought to this idea of the eradication of the female sex.
You're not going to get a coach being like, I'm gonna make my team worse, but you're looking at these women's sports and they're like, sure, well, we have no problem bringing on a male.
And then you got this video where a six foot tall bearded male slams a teenage girl to the ground and injures her, so they forfeit the game.
Conservatives I get because they're not going to play this game with artificial wombs and stuff.
But liberals are under the impression that it is a patriarchy.
That men control everything.
That men will have it easier.
That men are less likely to get in trouble.
So when they're going to their CRISPR doctor to determine the genetics of the baby they will create in their artificial womb, why would they decide to have a female if they genuinely believe life is harder for females?
When they're saying things like, I can't have a kid because climate change, they're going to say, if I have a kid, I want to give that kid the best opportunities and the best life, so we should have a white boy.
unidentified
Unless the conditions in society have evolved through technology to the point where it's no longer as clear why there should be a sex preference, I guess.
So at the very least, it's a bit hyperbolic to say eradication, but there will be a heavy preference towards males.
And you will end up with potentially women being like demigods in terms of political stature.
If you get a generation of the world that did what China did with the one child policy, and you end up with for every four men, there's one woman, those women will have a large amount of political power.
However, there's also the opposite.
So, in the game Fallout, which I absolutely love, there's each vault they built for the survivors of the nuclear war.
They actually were experiments.
Do you ever read this?
You should absolutely look at this.
You'd love it.
So, fearing nuclear war, Vault-Tec builds vaults all over the country.
However, there's a fear that just putting people in an underground vault for 30 years doesn't actually help them survive.
So each of them should be an experiment to maximize the potential of the humans who emerge from them.
In Vault 69, literally the name of it, there is 99 men and one woman.
That was the experiment.
What would happen?
And then there's Vault 68, which is 99 women and one man.
And so I forgot how they wrote, how it plays out, but there were two general ideas.
You could create a... If there's one woman and 99 men, that woman may become the queen.
Depending on how the men behave.
Or, she could become the slave to 99 men.
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, there's one of my favorite sci-fi novels by Stephen Baxter.
It's called Evolution.
I don't know if you've ever read it.
It's one of the classics of the last 20 years.
But anyway, he looks at different possibilities for human evolution.
And anyway, one of the scenarios in this novel that he looks at is where you have all of these men and somehow, through circumstances, you have one woman.
And she becomes very much aware of the fact that she is now prey in a way.
And so she ends up running away because she doesn't want to be the sex slave to all of these men.
It's certainly not a concept I came up with, but if you have a tribe of, let's say 200 people, 100 men and 100 women, and if something happens, a disaster, and 99 women die, that tribe is done.
Even though all the men are still alive and there's one, it doesn't matter.
But if it's the other way around, 100 women and 99 men die, that society has- That's a very happy man.
Perhaps men have a higher chance of being better at many of these jobs, but on average, women can handle farming and all the basic stuff for survival, but they can also create life.
It's also, you know, for instance, the prohibition against female sexual activity before marriage that was largely more or less upheld until recently.
This is something that I know a lot of feminists have have railed against, and I understand it, but at the same time, it makes sense if you're thinking about a society that was like pre-paternity testing and pre-government safety net and all of that.
But I think that A media that increasingly celebrates victimhood, so there's a lot of currency that one can get, just like Evan Rachel Wood and Amber Heard, who both wanted to build activist careers and credentials on the backs of these false allegations against Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson.
You also have the infantilization of women we mentioned earlier, the notion that a woman of 18, 19 is now just a child, when in the past she would have Been married or well on her way to marriage having multiple kids running a household and so forth.
I see it's directly connected to Marxism and it's like Tim was saying it's a power play and you know, you look at Evan Rachel Wood.
She came out for those who don't know she accused Manson of impropriety and she came out and said that her abuser was Manson the day after Trump was elected and Clearly a very political move.
unidentified
And she admitted it was because of that, too.
She said, because Trump's been elected, I'm going to tell you now who my abuser was.
And he's an easy target, because he looks a certain way.
He said a bunch of things that a lot of people say are wild, but he's always been the victim, oddly enough, in the media.
So I think it was a power play for her, because she saw, like you said, victimhood as a status, and that he was a step in her way up into being the victim princess, all the way up to creating laws.
Which is what Marxists want to do to subvert what we have going on today in America, which is like a court of law that you could hopefully trust, which obviously has got flaws.
But she used her Manson abuse as a way to go to Congress and to the California state, pass new law, change laws.
And also her girlfriend at the time, Emma Gore, was an activist.
Ilma Gore, I like to say, was the very first Jussie Smollett, because she claimed to be punched or something by some Trump supporter.
unidentified
She told this ridiculous story to the media, and this was prior to what Evan Rachel Wood claimed, but she claimed that she, so she did, she painted this work of art, it's her most famous work of art, and it's Trump with a micropenis.
And she claims, I guess, that she's just so well known for that work of art that some random Trump supporters kidnapped her and drove her around in a van and punched her.
Yeah, but she was pre-Smollett, but didn't get the credit that Smollett got.
So I think she's bitter.
This is why her and Evan Rachel Wood, I think teamed up on Manson.
unidentified
Yeah, and so she started dating Evan Rachel Wood, and it was kind of a perfect storm where the two of them concocted this plan to not only falsely accuse Manson, but to recruit other former girlfriends and female acquaintances of Manson.
To also make accusations that one of them has now recanted, Ashley Morgan Smithline, one of the main accusers, she was on the cover of People Magazine talking about what a monster Manson was.
Well, she recanted an illegal declaration, said that it was a hoax, and she lied, and she was pressured into this by Evan Rachel Wood, and also promised that she was going to have high exposure, and it was going to restart her modeling career, and all of that, which didn't happen.
So, And the other thing people don't understand is that Manson's former assistant, a woman named Ashley Walters, this was his personal assistant, she gave all of his social media and email information, passwords, logins, his phone information, contacts, everything, she gave all of this to Evan Rachel Wood and Ilma Gore So they could recruit more women to join this scam.
And so what's crazy about the Manson situation is that it really is Johnny Depp and Amber Heard times 10 because as much media plays the Amber Heard allegations got and as horrible as they were for Johnny Depp, This is really, what Evan Rachel Wood did, it is really on a whole other level.
You see the government working in tandem with this victim, this fake victim, like Evan Rachel Wood, to create the laws, to get him swatted, lose all his jobs.
I mean, there's people who would still defend Amber Heard, but no, if you look at the evidence, it is very clear that this is a hoax.
And, you know, Evan Rachel Wood, she forged, she and Ilma Gore, they forged an FBI letter.
They faked an FBI letter and put the name of an agent, a real agent, on this in order to Well, this is a whole other story, but Evan Rachel Wood was withholding her child from Jamie Bell, the father of her child, and she kidnapped the kid and went to Tennessee against Jamie Bell's wishes and ended up losing custody because of this.
But she devised this fake FBI letter to try to explain to Jamie Bell and the court why she needed to run away with the kid, because she was afraid for her life, you know, in LA.
But the media has such a, the media works in tandem with the activists and with the government, you know?
So it's like they've created an alternate reality where Manson is the bad guy, no matter what, he's a caricature and people buy into it.
And is an angel.
unidentified
Exactly.
And the media are not interested, as you know, Tim, they're not interested in the counter-narrative.
And so there are a lot of people, for example, who are not aware of the fact that Manson's ex-wife, Dita Von Teese, and his ex-fiancee, Rose McGowan, have both come out publicly and said, this man is not an abuser.
And so there's actually a great counter-narrative in Manson's favor, but the media, they're just not interested in promoting that.
The humans are the means of production, like in Maoist China.
They destroy all art, language.
You now work for the state.
And if you don't, you'll get struggle sessioned into oblivion.
Me Too is a form of a struggle session.
So when I say it's a tendril, it's like, that's just one way to destroy modern society or the West in particular.
Me Too became that struggle session or like, you know, they would have, they would have, Mal would have dissenters, their heads chopped off in the town square while making children watch as they sang the national anthem.
So we haven't really gotten to that point yet, but these struggle sessions, these Me Too sessions that happen online where you're kind of digitally stoned are that to a degree.
You lose your whole livelihood no matter who you are, no matter how big it is.
I think Marxism is a seed of the Me Too stuff, just like how BLM was, and they said they're Marxist.
The two ladies who started BLM were like, we are Marxist.
So that's what this is, you know?
And I think it's just out of control.
I'm not saying everyone involved in the Me Too stuff or Amber Heard are like thinking we're Marxists, but they are, they just don't realize it.
That's the problem too with with a lot of me to claims.
I mean, I don't know enough about Lauer to to say either way on him, but but It's a he said, she said most of the time, and so unfortunately society has just decided, or the media have decided, that when it's a he said, she said, then we believe women.
I mean, you were talking about Vice, you know, they're in the pits now and good riddance to them, but they just came out with a documentary Once again, trying to promote the idea that not only that Johnny Depp was guilty, but also that Johnny Depp's followers know that he hit Amber and don't care because she deserved it.
And let me just say, I think also that that is why it's so difficult for so many men, celebrity men who are caught in the crossfires, the crosshairs of this.
It's so difficult for them to defend themselves because they do have some shady stuff in their background.
I don't mean shady like abuse, but I just mean, you know, rock stars, movie stars, what have you.
And to me, it really reminds me of The Crucible.
You know, if you read The Crucible, The Hero of the Crucible, John Proctor, he waits until it's too late to challenge the court.
He waits until it's too late to act because he knows that he has an extramarital affair in his background and he lives in a Puritan society and he doesn't want that exposed.
And I think that someone like Marilyn Manson, for instance, I know that he's fighting back in the courts But it is very difficult for him to fight back publicly because he does he has had that rock star lifestyle and I know he's got shady stuff in his past again not abused or whatever but I think that these men are almost no pun intended kind of neutered in a way in that they can't fully fight back me because Because you have to be like pure as the driven snow these days to make it.
You cover this a lot, like you've done Depp and Cuomo and Manson.
Do you see it, Me Too stuff, kind of the hysteria dying down now?
Even though they're still trying to go after death after you know, I feel like I feel like there are two worlds right now.
unidentified
There's the world of normal people and then there's the media heavily politicized world.
I think that normal people are hip to this bullshit now, and I think that more and more people.
Understand that believe women believe all women is a very problematic ideology and believe in the presumption of innocence and are sick of me, too The problem is though and it's like you were talking about with advertisers someone like Marilyn Manson for instance the position he's in or others is that These corporations these record labels, whatever we're talking about They're scared to death of any hint of scandal when it comes to anything like assault or rape or abuse And so there's a lag I think what's going on is there's a lag
There's a lag going on between the normal people who I think have caught on and the media and the corporate world and these institutions that have still not changed.
The other thing when I think about the Marxist seed of Me Too is that a lot of the people, and it's not all of them, but a lot of the people we're talking about now are dissenters.
And dissent is like the highest form of sin to a Marxist, right?
Like speaking out against their institution, you know?
But like, it doesn't have to be all saying the same thing against it, but they've all kind of proven that they can't be controlled because Cuomo wasn't the progressive left that New York wanted.
Manson is obviously... I would consider that Tier 2.
Even Manson, I guess you could say, is an apostate because they keep redefining what it means to be a leftist or a Marxist.
They've moved so far left that anything now is far right to them and they can just think, As a monolith, they would think, if you're not with us, then you must be far right, and you must be taken out.
Well, it was false, but what she was alleging was just basically that he was a bad boyfriend.
The only thing that she alleged that was serious against Chris Hardwick, his ex-girlfriend, was that, and I'm quoting, that she had let him sexually assault her one night.
Like, the story for Aziz Ansari was that they went on a date.
He said, I want to come back to my place.
They hung out, fooled around a little bit.
And he was like, well, you know, it was fine.
And she was into all of it.
And then she was like, I did not enjoy that night.
And then she's like, therefore it's rape.
unidentified
Well, and what came out in that story as well is that she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she, at a certain point in the night, she realized, oh, this is just gonna be a celebrity hookup.
And she didn't like that.
Well, you know what?
If you don't like it, you leave.
But she kept hanging around, hoping that he would change his mind.
And she got mad that she got turned down and then she started carrying around a mattress, like, this is the mattress I was on when I got raped.
And then she filmed a video, an art performance.
People are evil, dude.
You know, when I was younger, I didn't believe in evil.
I just thought everybody had different competing interests, but evil exists.
There are people who will stab you in the back for a cheeseburger.
Literally.
Yeah, right.
I mean that literally.
Yeah.
There's stories here every day, and if you really watch, guy got shot in the chest because he wouldn't give his cell phone to a guy.
It's like, you really murdered him over a cell phone?
And there are people you know.
That you think are your friends, and that you love and trust, when given the chance, will try to destroy you for fun.
This is a harsh reality of this industry.
There was a guy, I basically, I would say I just about, I don't wanna say I bawled my eyes out, but I cried when a good friend of mine, for no reason, betrayed me out of the blue and gave private stuff that, like a good friend of mine for years, one day decided he wanted to join the mob and just attacked me for no reason, because it made him feel good.
I'd be like, hey, I'm going to be in town, you around?
Like, let's go hang out.
And then as soon as the opportunity arose, he was like, I will destroy this man.
Evil, evil.
unidentified
And the thing with Me Too, I think, that's additionally problematic is that it has given women, these false accusers, it has given them this convenient illusion that they're actually working for the good.
And I think that there's a lot of I'll give you an example.
So there is a musician named William Control and he's not as well known as Manson, but he achieved, you know, some success and he had a number of women, exes of his, former partners come out and meet to him.
Well, I had one of them come on my channel and because her Conscience had been bothering her and she was ready to recant so she came on my channel and she recanted and she Announced that she had flat-out lied and she explained her motivations and what she said was That when he dumped her when she found out she wasn't the only one or whatever She was obviously very upset and that people around her were telling her.
Well, he used you he manipulated you and so then it kind of gave her this cushion to think oh Well, these negative feelings that I have toward him, maybe it is more than just feeling upset that I was dumped or cheated on or whatever.
Maybe this really was abuse.
And so the abuse label is now being used as an umbrella for all kinds of behavior.
I think that connects to what Tim is saying, too, of evil people.
I love C.S.
Lewis and the Screwtape Letters.
It's about demons, talking about how you infiltrate the brain of someone to get them away from God.
And a friend, or someone you thought was a friend, You fall apart for whatever reason.
And then that mob that was on the periphery of that friendship starts whispering in the ears, like, you know, just like you're saying with the relationship, Oh, it's just this and that.
And then that creates the evil urges and the jealousy that bubbles up.
Have you guys ever seen the viral video where a man and a woman are walking down the street in a crowded area, and the woman is punching the guy and screaming at him and calling him stupid and a moron, and the reactions of the people are laughter?
Then they walk down the same street later, and the guy is shoving the woman, not hitting her as hard, and screaming at her, and a bunch of dudes run up and shove him and start yelling at him?
This is part of the evolutionary psychology of, if women die, society fails.
It creates a circumstance in which female abusers are given a free pass under the assumption you must protect women.
This is why I think all this is happening on purpose.
I'm not saying everyone in the Me Too or in the colleges are like activated agents for Marxism, but I do think there is a seed of destruction for Western society.
And it's attacking the family.
unidentified
It's not good for us for men and women to distrust each other.
And I think, and also I think that if you have never been through this, if you've never been falsely accused, or if you've never been close to someone who, who is, I think a lot of people, it's just, they think, well, where there's smoke, there's fire.
So like in Marilyn Manson's case, the fact that he had multiple women accusing him, it just creates this sort of like fog of like, well, you know, maybe she did do this with the FBI letter or she lied about this or whatever.
But we know, we know, look at that guy, there's stuff there.
And so people don't care when really what they should understand is that these guys are the canaries in the coal mine.
I get letters, emails, messages from people all the time, normal people who are now experiencing this in their corporate jobs, who are getting Me Too'd out of their jobs, or who are, you know, what have you.
And so, It's not, I think bringing this home, we need to try to bring this home to people and let them understand that it's not just some celebrity that you might not care about, but actually this stuff filters down into the culture.
I mean, I gotta be honest, like, if I had a business that, I don't know, sold t-shirts during like all this period, and someone was like, why don't you post your black box or whatever, I'd say, oh my bad, give me a second, and then I would post like a green one.
I mean, maybe if you call it MAGA month, they won't do it.
Freedom Month.
unidentified
It is interesting to me that I feel like it is becoming more acceptable to like Trump openly and to not be closeted.
I mean y'all might say well in our circles it always was and I get that but I do think that there and maybe it's just people really just hate Joe Biden but it does seem like Trump is gaining some steam and It's funny though, because I see that.
I see Trump getting more support from people who are supposedly on the left, but in the right-leaning world, there's also people who are so DeSantis, who hate Trump.
They're so pro-Vivek, and they say Trump's worthless.
The right is just fractured with so much, which is a good thing with individuals, actual individuals.
For someone like Rappaport, it's in the same bubble.
Basically, he lives in this world where he hears it, it must be true, but he knows about Israel.
So when this October 7th thing happens, and he knows about it, and then he starts seeing what's being said, he goes, hey, wait a minute, you're lying to me, dude!
And then he starts to look at everything else, and was like, bro, they were lying to me the whole time.
unidentified
Well, and it seems like the migrant thing is a big thing for Rappaport too, because it's hitting close to home.
He lives in New York or whatever, and he sees what's happening with illegal immigration and all of that.
And so once it starts to hit home, then there can be some eyes open.
So once you tell people about that and you can find in whatever friends or family you have the things that will Enlighten them, you know, I think that does open a door for people but it's like yeah, right So you could talk someone will say no Trump did this Trump did that and then Kevin O'Leary is a great example He's going what this fraud trial Trump didn't do anything wrong.
