View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens114:e View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 114th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we talk about Truckers for Freedom, the movement and protest of “passionate, patriotic and peaceful” people who are standing, in Ottawa, against mandates and for freedom. We discuss the ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 114.
Am I correct about that, Dr. Hang?
It is 114.
It is the 114th live stream.
And I don't think we should kid them.
Everything is haywire.
Yeah.
If you've ever baled your own hay, you know what that means.
It's not good.
It's crazy.
But we're going to get through this together.
So welcome.
Yeah.
Indeed, welcome.
We're going to talk, we're going to continue to talk as we began to talk last week about the, it goes by a number of names, the Truckers Convoy, Truckers for Freedom, the protests that are happening in Ottawa and across Canada, in fact.
And a few other things, but that at least is where we're going to start today.
Let's get through the announcements and logistics first, and then jump right in.
If you are watching on YouTube, the chat is live on Odyssey.
You can go there.
You can ask questions for the Q&A that will be live after we are done with this first hour at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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In fact, we never do get to all of the questions, but we get to as many of them as we can.
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It helps us do what we're doing here.
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And I have come to begin to recommend that you go over to Natural Selections, my sub stack, naturalselections.substack.com, where you can become a free subscriber and get what is usually a weekly essay into your inbox and then paying subscribers get an audio read by me.
This week I posted six different times, four guest posts, two of which got a little subsumed by the rest, but they are extraordinary as well.
Two of them were by a paramedic in Wyoming, Jordan Hayes, who has written exemption letters to request exemptions from the vaccine mandates that are being handed down, for which he may lose his job.
So I encourage you to read To read both of those, and then the other two guest posts are from Canada, and I'm going to read a little bit from both of them today.
They are extraordinary and heartbreaking both, so I will encourage everyone to read them both in their entirety, but we'll read some from both today.
Before that though, We want to thank our sponsors, as always.
Your support on Patreon and your support of our sponsors are both helping us do what we do, and we are grateful for all of them.
We are, as we've said many times, very choosy about our sponsors.
Our fabulous ad broker says that we reject more than we accept, and he loves it, and he accepts that this is part of why we are actually able to to do what we do, that we actually do not advertise for any products or companies that we do not stand behind.
So without further ado, we have as usual three sponsors this week.
Starting with Vivo Barefoot, our first sponsor.
Shoes made for feet.
Most shoes are made for someone's idea of what feet should be and be constrained by, and usually that someone doesn't actually know feet or what they can do.
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Foot.
Yeah, foot.
It's not really a word.
Foot function.
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Yeah, and are contributing to a health crisis, one in which people move less than they might, in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
So Vivo, wow, I'm just going to get all the O's kind of Canadian today, okay?
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I don't know what that was.
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All right, in light of our somewhat Canadian-themed podcast today, Vivo Barefoot, I am offering up a slogan to them, Vivo Barefoot, go out in a boot.
I don't know.
All right.
I love their hiking boots, too.
Yeah.
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That is p-u-b-l-i-c Pollinate a plant, sustain a bee.
All right, that's not that great a slogan, but you know, it's a place to start.
I may have mumbled.
Yeah, you know, it happens.
It's been quite a week.
We have been watching with such hope and joy what is happening in Canada at the same time that we watch the media coverage of what is happening in Canada.
And frankly, the silence is better than the coverage when it happens because it is so So the opposite of what's actually going on.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that, but I actually I want to start with a little bit from Mila's story, I think is the is the place to start.
I shed a lot of tears this week and I don't cry much, as you know, and I'm going to try to do this without doing so.
When I posted the second thing that I'm going to read from, a letter from a Dark Horse fan named Dan, the mother of this beautiful young woman, Mila,
wrote in the comments, I believe that's when I first heard of her, that she and her husband had been out on the streets as the convoy passed last Friday, I guess eight days ago now, and passing out flyers, just single-page flyers, about their daughter, who is gone now, who died of suicide.
She was an extraordinary young woman who was nowhere close to the edge before the COVID lockdowns, and as she says in the flyer that she handed out to the truckers as they passed through their small town in Ontario, I sent letters to the Prime Minister, the Ontario Premier, to the federal and provincial health ministers,
You can actually show my screen here, Zach, if you want.
This is again Tara, the mother of Mila speaking, or writing to the truckers.
"This is not just about our child, it is about Canada's children.
Thank you for what you were doing.
It matters." So I say here, just in the preamble to what Tara then wrote, and which she allowed me to post on Bachelor Selections this week, "Our children need their world back." We have stolen some things that we can never return.
And Mila, as you will learn, again I encourage you to go and to read this and to spread it widely.
There are a lot of people who need to know that this is one of the This is one of the true human tragedies that has resulted from the policies that have been so insane.
She was deeply loved and will be forever missed by the many people who knew her.
The truckers and their supporters and friends are doing this for all of us, and we thank them, and we thank you, the truckers, who are listening.
And we encourage you, as we will throughout this livestream today, to hold the line.
And we see that you're doing that.
Okay, so if I may have my screen back just for a moment, Zach, while I find just a brief excerpt from this to read.
Here, from Tara, mother of Mila, and you can show my screen if you want, Zach, you don't need to, but my inclination, again, this is reading a mother's grieving words, I guess eight months after her youngest daughter's death.
My inclination is to spend all of my time sharing stories of our beloved Mila with you.
I'd like to tell you about her homeschooling years when we would wake up at 0600 hours in the morning to notes from her telling us that she was in the forest with her beau, looking for adventures.
Or about the novels she wrote about wolves and barn cats when she was only nine years old.
I would love to share a coffee or two and tell you about the 98% average she maintained throughout high school and the peer tutoring she offered to those who struggled.
Maybe I could play you a recording of her jazzy saxophone number or show you the video of her playing her ukulele in a hammock with two barn cats snoozing on her lap.
Her barn cats would sit outside our door, waiting for her to leave the house so they could follow her wherever she went, moving in great calico tumbleweeds behind her.
As much as I want to stay there in those memories of my beloved, and for those of you watching, there she is on screen at 17 with her ukulele.
As much as I want to stay there in those memories of my beloved, I need to crawl out and do this part now.
The part where I tell you the story of Mila's death and the events that precipitated it.
The part where, in the rubble of my life, I muster what I can to share with you our pain in hopes that there is something here that might make a chrome of difference.
Mila, illuminated and mysterious, was a creature beyond this time.
She wanted to be a midwife and she would have been a glorious one.
When COVID hit, our part of the world, Ontario, Canada, imposed some of the most draconian and aggressive measures of anywhere in the world.
A couple of weeks to flatten the curve, right?
Initially, like almost everywhere and everyone, we obliged.
Schools were closed.
It was near the end of Mila's grade 11 year then.
There were no classes online at that time.
A mad scramble ensued to get these kids some sort of education.
Eventually, schools tentatively opened for some.
We had the option of keeping her home or sending her in.
She insisted on going.
For the next few months and into the fall of her graduating year, schools opened.
Then schools closed.
Then schools opened.
Her friend group shrunk considerably.
Most parents abided by the no socializing rule.
There was really nowhere for them to go anyway.
Theaters, live music, restaurants, and even places like bowling and the roller rink were closed.
Instead, the dwindling friend group that Mila was a part of had random clandestine meetups in a friend's frigid barn or someone's basement.
I want you to read this entire essay, but I'm going to read the last two paragraphs.
Here.
On the evening of May 10th, 2021, I had a dream that an angel stood before me.
Her outstretched arms were empty and her water-soaked wings dripped a puddle around her feet.
Her head was bowed.
I failed.
That was her message.
We were awoken by the police knocking on our door.
Our Mila, strong and true, had died of suicide.
And Taras shared with me also this line drawing by an artist local to them that is being used as the inspiration for the stone carver for Mila's headstone.
This young woman was nowhere close.
to the end of her rope before any of this happened.
And these parents see the Trucker's Convoy as the inspired, patriotic, peaceful, and passionate movement that it is.
And it is being portrayed As hateful, as the white supremacist, as racist, as misogynistic by a media and governmental apparatus that clearly does not have our interests in mind.
Yeah, so first of all I should say this story is unbelievable and Absolutely heartbreaking in the sense that the death of any young person is a tragedy.
There's the potential ahead of any young person and the loss of it is appalling.
But in this particular person's case, this was an extremely well-adjusted girl who had a tremendous amount to live for and
I think the thing that is so hard to accept is how much damage was done in a short time by a society that I'm beginning to realize, and really this has been what my week has been characterized by, the recognition
That you can tell how Dangerously broken our society is by the number of different ways in which you can see that we are absolutely failing children and the story contains not one but several of these and they combine and Their combined effect is you know to have robbed the world of somebody that I have no doubt would have been an utterly extraordinary adult
And it is, you know, on the one hand it's a wake-up call, right?
Because the point is the very definition of what a society is.
It's not a generation.
A society has to go on in order to be legitimate.
There's no construction you could put together that wouldn't continue, that would be valid, right?
No matter what it did in the short term.
Ours doesn't really do anything right in the short term.
Not anymore.
And it is also setting itself up to cease to exist because it no longer regards children as fundamental and important.
And in any case, we're going to have to think through how we confront this.
You know, what we have here is the evidence of the failure.
We don't have a recipe for fixing it.
But I believe you're absolutely right.
In, you know, somehow this story of Mila and the story of the truckers, they both are and aren't the same story.
Right.
Right.
But the misportrayal of the truckers, I mean, first of all, on the one hand, That's all you need to know, right?
You've got people, working class people who were months ago heralded as heroes of the pandemic for keeping the goods on the shelves.
These people are now being demonized and being demonized so transparently.
If you just simply do any of your own work, you can find out who these people are.
In fact, I'm sure you're going to.
Talk about it, but you know, there's a couple of journalists who are walking around at random.
What this does is it allows you to find out the truth of the convoy by following somebody around.
I happened to catch a bit of the stream this morning where he ran into people on the other side who were protesting the convoy.
He didn't run it.
So this is Viva Frey, V-I-V-A-F-R-E-I YouTube channel.
He's, I think he's a lawyer out of Quebec and he's been going to Ottawa to the protests and just, you know, doing live streams and I highly recommend it.
His Today just ended right before we started, actually, just by coincidence.
But yeah, he heard that there were going to be counter-protesters there today, and he sought them out.
He sought them out, he actively sought them out, and most of them refused to talk to him.
And those who did were using, you know, pat rhetoric and accusations that aren't true, claims, claims of violence, claims, claims such as we have heard over and over and over again.
But the people who were actually walking around there, both who are portraying it through live streams and other And we hear from many private people who aren't out there, you know, publicizing what they're seeing.
They're seeing none of this.
And you know, are there, excuse me, are there agent provocateurs on the ground?
Occasionally?
Very few?
Maybe?
But they're not even seeing those.
Well, but, okay.
I want to go back and deal with the agent provocateur problem because it seems to me, right?
Let's say there are Confederate flags as bizarre as that is in Canada, right?
Or swastikas or whatever.
Right.
It can't you cannot live in to the extent that we understand that protest is an important process.
Right.
This is written into the American constitutional DNA to the extent that we understand that that process is important.
The idea that all you have to do to shut it down is transport into it something vile, capture an image where the vile thing is present with the other thing, and then the point is, well, the other thing is no longer valid because you wouldn't want to be near a Confederate flag, would you?
Essentially what you're doing is you're handing power, the ability to shut down critique, if you do that.
So we can't do that.
Not only that, but the – I mean, hypocrisy is not anything close to a strong enough word for what is going on here.
Compare – I hope someone does this formally.
I did not spend the time to compile the comparisons of the footage and the coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests that here in Portland nightly became riots for months.
The media coverage of this was that it was mostly peaceful, there was actual destruction of property all the time, including actual I was going to say actual statues, like that matters.
This only matters because one of the few things that has been said that has any accuracy with regard to pushback against what is happening in Ottawa is that there was desecration of statues.
And as far as I've seen, the desecration of statues involves having put flowers on a statue.
I saw a sign.
So, compare that to the toppling of statues, the beheading of statues, you know, fake fornication with the head of statues during the protests of 2020.
What could possibly explain the complete inversion of the truth in both of these cases?
In both of these cases.
Yeah, I mean, and I agree.
I, you know...
I'm pretty good with language.
I know there's supposed to be a term for what this is.
It's not even the complete fictionalization of what's taking place.
It is the exact inverse of what is taking place.
Exactly.
In both of these cases.
We're like 18 months later and it's the exact opposite.
What is happening on the ground is the exact opposite of what is being portrayed in the media.
And some number of people are nodding along going, I guess it's true, because I saw it on the screen.
Because the person who I've come to trust because I see them on my screen all the time is saying it to me, therefore it must be true.
So I had a very good discussion with one of my Patreon groups this morning and this is functioning as a reality check in sort of the way the Dark Horse is functioning for a reality check for many people.
This group of folks lives all over the world actually and you know we get to check in with what you're seeing, what I'm seeing and You know, I actually was a little bit thrown this morning by the fact that what you and I are seeing about this convoy is not necessarily even what people who agree with us on the substance of COVID are seeing.
So, how is that the case?
But the point I want to bring out of that conversation Is the question of what role a suspension of disbelief is playing in what's happening and how much of this effectively requires the viewer to willingly accept the fiction in order not to confront the reality.
And I'm seeing evidence of this All over the place, really.
So I don't know what to do about it, but the fictionalization that is taking place is, and I almost never use this word, but it's evil, right?
This is our civilization attacking itself by blinding people to the actual facts of their Their existence.
But part of what is going on is that there are incentives driving people to accept the fictions, because if they looked even just slightly outside of the screen, they would understand that what they were being sold was nonsense, right?
That, you know, this is anything but a violent racist protest, right?
Yeah.
So it's hard, of course, to know what people do and do not think, what people are and are not seeing.
And I had wanted to go right into Dan's letter, but I think actually, given where we've been here, talking a little bit about what the mainstream media specifically has said and done and what we're actually seeing on the ground.
Don't show my screen here, Zach, but here's – this is just out of a little country newspaper in Ontario from a city councillor, and it's exactly in keeping with What is in the larger outlets?
The sad humor of it all.
A relatively small percentage of people who have concerns about vaccines are being used by well-organized white supremacists who want to break up the country, probably funded by big oil money, although we don't know because so many donations are anonymous, and who would happily take away the freedom of the vast majority who want to go to work, visit family, go to school, and go out for dinner and a show without increased infection risk.
This is fundamentally an issue of how we keep our communities safe.
It is not about freedom for the few to engage in antisocial behavior, but the freedom for most people to go about their regular lives without undue fear.
We make these decisions every day when we create laws.
We have used vaccine mandates successfully for many decades as one way to keep society safe.
Actually, it's not humorous.
White supremacists see the KKK cross and many depictions praising the truck convoy are hijacking the vaccine debate for profoundly self-interested reasons.
It is destructive to the country and people's rights to safety.
I'm gonna leave the guy's name off of that because I don't need to start a pile-on, but there's so much wrong with that, and this is an elected official.
Well, it's one of two things.
It has to be one of two things.
That is either a window into somebody's utterly profound delusion or it is gaslighting.
It is attempting to convince you of the inverse of reality such that your own view of reality will look insane.
The idea that the people out in, like, whatever it was, like negative six degree weather today and throughout the week are out there trying to take away the freedom of others.
Oh, the selfishness of those people cheering on working class truckers.
Probably funded by big oil money.
Oh, probably.
So by the way, this was written before GoFundMe took down, you know, the GoFundMe for the truckers for freedom.
That movement had already collected more than 10 million Canadian dollars, and something around a million or so had been dispersed, and then due to claims that appear to be completely false, and their reference to standard, you know, sort of the small print that they can make mean whatever they want to, decided not to disperse any more money.
Yesterday they were saying that you had to actually go in and request your money back, or they would distribute it to some other organizations, and today they are saying that they're actually going to refund the money to people without you having to make their request.
That's so big of them.
The idea that this is white supremacist, that this is funded by big oil, that this is about people trying to tamp down others' freedoms, that this, you know, that it's white supremacist, the KKK, or any of this.
Just go and look at any of these videos that are out there, and I will read later from, or actually maybe I should read now from, and this is all out of order from what I had in mind.
Here we are.
You can show my screen, Zach.
This is from a piece called A Night with the Untouchables.
I'll just read the first and the last paragraphs.
And again, I'll link to everything in the show notes.
I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest.
They are literally camped out below my bedroom window.
My new neighbors moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay.
I've read a lot about what my new neighbors are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada.
Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hate mongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters.
I have a perfect view down Kent Street, the absolute ground zero of the convoy.
In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs.
But mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns.
At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their newfound companionship.
There is no honking at night.
What I haven't noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada's news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are.
So last night I decided to do just that.
I introduced myself to my new neighbours.
This is not someone, and he then talks about the people he meets, and this is not someone who I think was particularly favorable to or inspired by this movement.
He lives there, and he wanted to go meet them because it was clear to him.
Though what he was seeing out his window without even having talked to them was a mismatch for what he was hearing on the news.
And he tells his story, and he tells the story of the people he's met, and it's amazing!
And so I'm just going to finish the last paragraph.
As I finally made my way back home after talking to dozens of truckers into the night, I realized I met someone from every province except Prince Edward Island.
They all have a deep love for this country.
They believe in it.
They believe in Canadians.
These are the people that Canada relies on to build its infrastructure, deliver its goods, and fill the ranks of its military in times of war.
The overwhelming concern they have is that the vaccine mandates are creating an untouchable class of Canadians.
They didn't make highfalutin arguments from Plato's Republic, Locke's Treatises, or Baguio's Uh, interpretation of Westminster parliamentary systems.
Instead, they see their government willing to push a class of people outside the boundaries of society, deny them a livelihood, and deny them full membership in the most welcoming country in the world.
And they said, enough.
Last night, I learned my new neighbors are not a monstrous, faceless, occupying mob.
They are our moral conscience reminding us, with every blow of their horns, what we should have never forgotten.
We are not a country that makes an untouchable class out of our citizens.
So I'm reminded of this.
I think I've talked about this once before on a live stream, but I think it's worth revisiting.
There's a moment in the movie The Truman Show.
Truman is beginning to figure out that the world is being constructed around him for the purpose of misleading him so that he will, you know, do for the cameras what is necessary for the Truman Show to be successful.
And as he begins to get wise to this, there's a moment where he takes his wife, an actress hired to play his wife, but he doesn't know it, into the car.
And he starts behaving erratically.
And the point is the entire premise of the Truman Show depends on the fact that he is predictable enough that they can construct reality ahead of him before he gets there.
And so he's driving around this roundabout like a maniac because the point is nobody knows what road he's going to take out of there.
And so the people Who make the Truman Show happen are freaking out because he's not doing what he needs to do.
And the point is that behavior is necessary, right?
You're being told that these people are X. You need to behave unpredictably and go find out if they are X. And if they're not, what does that tell you about the Truman Show you're living in?
Yeah.
Right?
That's the place we are.
And so this is really the question.
If people are suspending their own disbelief and buying this bullshit, All they need to do is just flip that one bit.
Right?
You don't need to revamp your whole way of viewing the world.
What you need to do is flip that one bit and say, I am no longer going to do my part in accepting this story.
I'm just going to spot check it.
Yeah.
I'm going to see whether the story adds up.
And when you find out that every place you spot check it, it breaks through.
It's rice paper thin.
Right?
Then the point is okay.
What would have to be true for that to be right?
Right?
If every news channel is either not reporting the story, Or reporting it upside down.
What does that tell me about what those news channels are?
What does it tell me about what else is on them?
Right?
Right.
That's what we have to do.
Yes.
And, you know, you blazed through the GoFundMe issue.
The deeper one digs there, the crazier this is.
Yep.
This is a $10 million campaign.
This organization, this business, functions for this purpose.
And this majorly successful campaign, the business itself, has rejected it.
What kind of insanity is that?
That's cannibalizing their own business, but even worse than that.
Right?
GoFundMe was perfectly happy with the suspension of the rule of law in the CHOP in Seattle, right?
They allowed that to be funded.
They even heralded it, right?
So the point is, this is a completely arbitrary political business seeming to function as just a, you know, a conduit to deliver a service.
Oh, well, I guess I'm going to disagree strongly with the word arbitrary there.
It is precisely not arbitrary.
It is directional.
The message is clear.
It is ideological.
It is ideological.
It is not arbitrary.
And And there's no place to go for most of the services that we now imagine that we have as citizens of the world, really, if you don't conform to the opinion of the ideology that is running all of these platforms.
So, I have a little experiment planned with respect to this because I'm so infuriated by, you know, seeing this business take up arms against some fraction of its users for an ideological purpose that is obviously despicable and insane when they did not stand up for us when, you know, the law was being suspended in the Pacific Northwest.
Like, what the hell are these people standing for?
So, anyway, here's my little experiment.
My sense is, A, GoFundMe realized something after they did this.
The despicable move to steal that money and deliver it to charities that they felt were acceptable, as they were slandering... It's not clear to me that they were going to make the decision, but... No, I don't think they were going to make the decision, but the point is it was going to be the list of places that they find legitimate, whereas they were declaring the convoy illegitimate, which is clearly not their right, nor anything they have expertise in.
And obviously, they fucked it up because, you know, they're buying a false story about what this convoy is.
But okay, so here's the point.
A, something spoke back to them very loudly, and the reversal that you and I both noticed that they went through today, where they went from, we will distribute this money to others, to, oh, actually, we're going to refund it to everybody because holy hell, we just You know, reveal the morally bankrupt nature of our business and suddenly our user base is in revolt against us, right?
We have to go further, right?
Yes.
They have to watch their life as a business flash before their eyes so that this does not happen again.
So that every business that contemplates this remembers what happened to GoFundMe when they pulled this asinine bullshit in the middle of a global emergency.
So, here's my proposal.
And I don't know if this is going to work, but I would like it to.
I think we need to learn to wield the tools at our disposal.
And one of the tools at our disposal, as much as it seems frivolous, is the trending hashtag system of Twitter.
And so what I'm going to suggest is that we attempt to get our anger to register through Twitter in a way that we can see it reflected.
Right?
And what I've done is I've Put together an annoyed tweet.
An annoyed tweet?
It's an annoyed tweet.
And my tweet responds to their revision of their policy where they tell us that no, in fact, they are going to refund the money because, oh, go away.
Right?
That thing.
And I've said, sure, sure.
You're just simplifying the process, which is the excuse they deployed for why they were changing course.
The hashtag is go truck yourself.
Alright, so what I want to do is I'm going to tweet this out.
Those of you who are interested in participating in this experiment, which is I hope a lot of you, you can feel free to support that tweet.
Retweet it, but what I really want you to do is use the hashtag go truck yourself with all of the words capitalized and come up with something that you can say.
Mind you, there are truck emojis if you need them.
You can make a little convoy if you'd like.
But anyway, I think GoTruckYourself is a theme that GoFundMe should hear loud and clear from those of us who are paying attention.
So I'm tweeting it right now.
Excellent.
GoTruckYourself.
There is apparently GiveSendGo.com, which is maybe, maybe not a Christian site that is sort of a GoFundMe with a Christian slant.
Where www.gibsongo.com slash freedomconvoy2022 is supposed to be accepting donations now, but every time I go there, ah, now it's now it's up.
So Zach, if you just show my screen briefly.
Half the time I go there, I get an error, and sometimes it shows that it's up, and whenever I have tried to donate, it doesn't let me.
So, you know, I think it's not, I think it doesn't have enough bandwidth, something, I don't, yeah.
But if you donated before on the GoFundMe site, or if you didn't, but you think this is an honorable thing, I believe that this site is If you can get through is all right.
So I want to be a little careful because who knows, you know I don't I assume the site is on the up-and-up, but I know nothing about it.
Can I have my screen, please?
Thank you but one thing if you're looking for something you could tweet with that hashtag a link to that site would allow GoFundMe to understand that their business was going to people who are more honorable than they are and Would give people some way that is useful to address this.
I would also point out that You know, there's certain words.
That are absolutely necessary to describe what we're doing, and we've gotten the inverse words because so much of what we think comes through this inverse filter, right?
So I started using, and I may have picked it up from someone else, but I started using the word dissident for those of us who have been vocally disagreeing about COVID science and public policy.
That word is now caught on, and I think it matters because to understand that you are joining the category of dissidents, you are not, you know, You are not forced to accept the epithets.
Well, that tablet article that I read briefly from last week is titled The Dissidents as well, so it's being used.
It's definitely now the widely used term, and the dissidents themselves use it, which is good.
But I would point out, The whole portrayal of this convoy, everything I have seen, has not used the term civil disobedience.
Right?
The whole point is... I've seen it.
You've seen it.
A little bit.
I haven't seen it much.
I haven't seen it at all, so it isn't being used much, is what I'm guessing.
And I think the point is...
Civil disobedience is inherently about violating rules, right?
That is its nature.
We understand that this is sometimes necessary, and we can argue about whether it is necessary in this case, but the idea that there is no, that, you know, because this is disruptive, That there is something wrong with that.
No, it has to be disruptive, because you know what else was disruptive?
These mandates, which actually don't make any sense.
So actually that's, um, unless you were going somewhere, that's, that's a really excellent segue, um, to in a minute, Zach, I'm going to have you show that video that I asked you to clip.
But first I want to say, I'm not going to show these because I didn't prepare which, but we have, you know, there's lots happening in Canadian politics at the moment.
Not only is Trudeau MIA.
But the Conservative Party has thrown out its leadership and they've got a new interim leader of the Conservative Party, Candace Bergen, and there's a piece of footage of her, which I will link to in the show notes, in which she proclaims that the people protesting are passionate, patriotic, and peaceful, which is rather an honest description of certainly what I've seen.
And we also have a speech from Brian Peckford, which again I will link to.
He was one of the framers of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was penned in 1981.
So for, you know, for Americans listening, it's analogous to the American Bill of Rights, which was ratified back in 1791, but Canadian's version happened in 1981, rather more recently.
Of all the first ministers who worked on the Canadian document, the Charter, only one remains alive today, and that's Peckford.
He is appalled at the Covid-era violations of personal freedoms and... Sorry, I'm distracted by our cat who's showed up.
He is appalled.
He is being very active in standing up against them, and he's also former Premier of Newfoundland.
And in the speech that I will link to, he says, among many other important things, as an individual, you come first.
The groups that you form with come second.
So this is critical, and this is exactly framed in the Canadian Charter.
Which again is analogous to our our Bill of Rights here in the United States.
And then a third inspirational speech that I watched this week, and there were many more than that, but is from a Corporal Bulford.
And it is, I believe, it is his resignation speech from the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, where he has been a Mountie for about 15 years.
And I guess, Zach, if you could show just that 40 seconds or so of this speech now.
So I'd like to read my oath of office that I took 15 years ago.
I, Daniel Balford, solemnly swear that I will faithfully, diligently, and impartially execute and perform the duties required of me as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
And will well and truly obey and perform all lawful orders and instructions that I receive as such without fear, favor, or affection of or toward any person, so help me God.
I cannot be compliant or complicit with federal policies and provincial regulations that I sincerely believe to be unlawful by every measure.
I cannot be compliant or complicit with federal policies and provincial regulations that I sincerely believe to be unlawful by every measure.
These are the sorts of people that we are losing from public service.
At the same time that we have the Prime Minister of Canada Still, Trudeau retweeting this.
Zach, if you will.
An inclusive military is a strong military.
Glad that members of our Canadian forces are now able to choose from a more inclusive list of military ranks.
Let's keep working to build an institution where everyone feels welcome.
This is in the middle of this week, while there are While Ottawa is in the middle of the most massive peaceful protest that I can remember ever seeing, Trudeau is retweeting, and the Military Personnel Command of Canada is tweeting, the Canadian Armed Forces modernizes military ranks in French, where you get to choose whether or not you want to be identified by a masculine rank or a feminine rank, depending on how you're feeling that day, presumably.
So this is who is being encouraged to remain in the service of the state.
Whereas Corporal Bulford, Bulford, I think, I hope I got that right.
At least the second time you said it that way.
Who goes back and assesses what it is that his oath of office requires of him and understands, and I think correctly, that he cannot comply with the orders that are being handed down to him that he cannot comply with the orders that are being handed down to him because and And Zach, please give me my screen back.
I want to make a couple points about this.
First of all, I think, was it Corporal Bulford?
Yes.
What he did is extremely courageous and he made good use of the opportunity to make his point.
But I want to make a more general point about the process by which all of the people who are supposed to be protecting us are being sorted between the compliant and the refuseniks.
And the point is, Draconian mandates that you must comply with or leave leave a force of people who comply The idea that this was always going to come down to immoral orders, right?
That's the thing about authoritarianism is eventually it delivers the immoral orders and the question is do you understand Nuremberg?
Do you understand that you must not comply?
And leaving is not necessarily the right way not to comply, because if it leaves behind a force that is compliant from which all of the people who think for themselves have been purged, then we have a new problem.
Now, I don't know how to deal with this, obviously the military can throw you out if it wants, right?
As can any police force, but...
Well, I don't know what happens with unions and the like, but nonetheless, the idea that we are going to exit these positions rather than use our position in order to reject those immoral orders, right?
In other words, a police officer who is given an immoral order to arrest somebody who is engaged in civil disobedience cannot comply.
And that is what we should do.
That is the most powerful thing we can do with our positions, is resist and just simply not engage in it.
And, you know, I think we saw this, for example, with the tow truck drivers who refused to tow away the rigs of the convoy when they were ordered to by police.
I don't know this story.
What I understand is that there was resistance to doing it and I think the thing is we need to start thinking in these terms.
You're talking this week in Ottawa?
Yes, beginning of the week.
I think we are not recognizing the strategic genius of these draconian mandates that you either comply with or you're out.
The point is to leave a force that does not think, that contains nobody who thinks, that contains nobody who has that resistance within them.
And if everything, if everything that wears a uniform is suddenly going to be filtered in this way, then you know what happens next, right?
We know what that looks like.
Inclusive of those who buy batshit gender ideology and exclusive of those who disobey unlawful orders doesn't sound like a group of people who are capable of defending freedom or justice, frankly.
Right, and it happens at every level.
We've also, in our own Congress in this country, we've seen almost all of the voices that you might be inclined to listen to as honorable have exited because the role of being there has been made.
We've seen it in our classrooms where the most dedicated teachers have, not 100%, but in large measure been forced to leave because they have to do things in the classroom that they know have nothing to do with education and are actually counterproductive to it.
And, you know, it's a positive feedback that we have to be, we should properly be frightened of.
And let me just, I mean, we could dump on the duplicitous Ken doll all day, of course, but I think we're not going to.
It's too easy a target.
But which is the epithet you gave him, Prime Minister Trudeau, last week, and it seems apt.
I have yet to see the pushback that makes sense against that as a As a name for him, um, let me just say that one of the things, one of the other things that he did on social media this week while he's in hiding because he's scared of truckers, uh, was this tweet.
And you can just show it while I'm reading it, Zach, and then, and then, and then take off my screen again, please, quickly.
Today in the House, this was February 1st, today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we've seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.
Together, let's keep working to make Canada More inclusive.
So courageous.
When we speak of the duplicitous Kendall, we should always use the term, with all due respect.
And the amount of respect due is zero.
He's not due any respect.
Incidentally, just as long as we're here.
Chris Martinson tweeted a video that has Trudeau's lofty, insane words overlaid over images of the protest.
Oh yeah, this is a good one.
It's beautiful.
I was going to link that here in the show notes.
I didn't know that Chris had tweeted it, but it's making the rounds for sure.
Yeah, it's really, really good.
So just, I'm sorry I interrupted you, but this is actual footage of the protest.
People dancing in the streets, people cleaning up garbage, people putting honorable signs up and being actually inclusive.
Hey, you know what?
With the sound off on the people and Trudeau's sycophantic, hypocritical, nasty and divisive words over the top.
Yeah, it's quite the juxtaposition, let's put it that way.
So, I will want to read some from Dan's letter, but it looks like you have some place to go first, perhaps.
Well, I have a couple of things that I wanted to cover.
One of them is, I just wanted to note the existence of what I think, it can't be a totally new form, but something I've now seen three times in the space of a week or two, and I wanted to call attention to it.
There were three instances where Something emerged online as if some person had made a terrible gaffe, right?
And the three instances were Whoopi Goldberg, which some people will say, but she did make a terrible gaffe.
Actually, people will say that for all three of these things.
Whoopi Goldberg's statement about the Nazis.
There's Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's program where they talk about the terminology Black and white and the fact that it is chromatically bizarre Okay, and the third one is Robert F. Kennedy jr.
Speech at the March in which he talks about Anne Frank In all three of these cases, these people took tremendous flack and... So I think you have not explained the third one for those who don't already know what the story is.
The RFK one?
Yeah.
RFK gave a speech at the march.
In which he said something that actually I think I've said here on Dark Horse or pretty close to it, which was that there is a distinction between the tyranny that we are seeing presently and all previous examples.
That I had been prepared, I'm speaking now for me, I had been prepared from childhood for the fact that it could happen anywhere.
Don't kid yourself it can't happen here because it can.
What I was not prepared for at all was that there would be nowhere to go, right?
that was always written into those stories, was that it happens and you don't wanna be slow to recognize it because one of the things you might have to do is run.
And I have been noticing now for much of, you know, at least the second half of COVID, that the places that I would have thought to run, you can't go there.
In fact, some of the worst places, right?
Including Israel, right?
But Canada's giving us all hope again.
Well, Canada is now telling both sides of this story, right?
We're seeing a rebellion against the draconian stuff, but they've been ahead of the curve with respect to the draconian stuff.
So anyway, the point is, in all three of these cases, here's what I saw.
So again, this is Whoopi Goldberg on The View talking about the Holocaust, right?
And this is Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan talking about the naming of races by black and white, as if those are really descriptive of skin color.
And you have RFK talking about this being different from past horrors, and specifically invoking the Holocaust.
And Frank and her temporarily successful Resistance by hiding and Von Trapps escaping over the Alps and things.
Did he invoke the Von Trapps?
Yeah.
Well, he didn't invoke them by name, but he talked about there were things that, you know, not everybody was able to get out, obviously, but people did find ways to escape.
Right.
That was his point.
And you can like it or you could not like it.
But here's what I saw.
And actually there is a precedent, you know, which Eric has talked about, which is the Dean Scream.
All right, so the Deans scream, Howard Dean running for president at the end of a defeat, a night in which a primary where he is defeated is giving a pep rally to his supporters and he says, and we're going to go to, and he lists a bunch of states and his voice is hoarse and he lets out some kind of a screechy
something or other and it was a total nothing but it actually ended his presidential bid because it was circulated by The the late night comedy programs as if it had been this terribly embarrassing thing Anyway, here's my point about these three instances We can go back and forth about the details of what Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson said what would be Goldberg said what Robert F. Kennedy jr.
said, and we can talk about their merits.
But specifying exactly what they said that was so very terrible is not really doable.
In fact, I haven't heard it described anywhere, right?
Trevor Noah mocked Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan And his point, and I don't think there's anything wrong with his point, his point was what they're saying is so obvious, why are they even talking about it, right?
Whereas CNN absolutely slandered Jordan Peterson.
It's great to be at two simultaneous places in the pushback that are mutually incompatible.
That's so dumb.
You're racist for saying it.
That's so obvious.
Why are you saying it?
You can't have it both ways, guys.
And the CNN version.
I hope I'm going to get this right.
Who is talking to Michael Eric Dyson, I hope I have the person right, who is somebody that Jordan Peterson had a famous debate with not too terribly long ago.
Yep.
Skewered him.
Jordan Peterson is describing Michael Eric Dyson having called Jordan Peterson an angry white man.
Yep.
Inverts this and reports it as if Jordan Peterson has called Michael Eric Dyson an angry white man or something like that.
It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
I mean, that doesn't even... Michael Eric Dyson is not a white man.
That's exactly why it would be a crazy... I hope this is true.
I believe he even showed the clip and then did it.
It's incredible.
We should link it in the show notes.
But anyway, here's my point.
I know, it's so unbelievable that it sounds like I must have it wrong, right?
Yes.
Well, let's hope I do, but it's pretty crazy.
But anyway, here's my point about what happened.
In all three of these cases, somebody treads on sacred ground.
They talk about some topic that they maybe don't have license to talk about.
Why do Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson get to talk about, you know, dark skin?
Why does Whoopi Goldberg get to talk about Nazis and Jews?
Why does Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
get to talk about, you know, Nazi tyranny?
Nazis and Jews.
Right.
Okay, so the point is all these people don't have automatic standing because they're not members of this group.
They talk about stuff, and actually all of these people talk about it apparently not worried, right?
And then somebody's like, there must be something wrong in there.
I'm going to broadcast it as if they've said something so self-evidently wrong that they have just jeopardized their entire standing.
We'll see if somebody can find out what that wrong thing is, right?
We'll put it out into the world as if it's terrible, and then we'll see whether anybody can formulate the complaint credibly, right?
And the point is actually, even in Whoopi Goldberg's case, Right?
Where what she says sounds offensive.
She says, you know, the Nazis were not engaged in racism because the Jews that they were persecuting were of the same race.
Now, I don't subscribe to her perspective, but it's not that she said anything about it was okay.
She's just has some definition of race that involves this being within rather than between.
And the fact is it's tone deaf, but it's not evidence that she
Well, it seems to me, actually, that the thing that ties the three examples that you've brought up together is that the attempt to cancel the speakers on the basis of these supposed errors has been, in large part, due to the technique used is, you're not a member of the group you're talking about, therefore even talking about it is unacceptable.
And, you know, this is a pretty modern, I think, but it feels like a very modern thing, you know, and of course, you know, we experienced some of this at Evergreen as well, like you're not allowed To think about, have any opinion about, say anything about anything with which you do not have direct personal experience.
Furthermore, you need to bow down to the, you know, individual anecdotal lived experience of anyone who does as soon as they tell you anything that they believe to be true about anything about that group.
And, you know, this is of course incoherent at every single level.
And that's not to say that individual stories aren't powerful.
Of course they are.
Or that anecdote can't sway people.
Or that what it is that you have experienced doesn't give you a particular perspective that those who have not lived in your skin cannot experience the same way.
But that isn't part of what we are as humans.
That is part of what we do.
We have theory of mind.
We have empathy.
We have the ability to say, hey, try my shoes on for a while.
Try living as I do.
Try looking through my eyes.
Here, let me help you.
And this modern thing is, I'm going to force you not to look through your eyes to tell this story, and I'm going to bludgeon you with the idea that my eyes exist and I have a story to tell, but I'm not even going to tell you that because I'm exhausted or some bullshit like that.
You know, it's entirely incoherent at every level, and you know what it is?
It's mean.
Wow.
It is deeply, deeply mean at many of the individual levels, and of course, it is powerful.
It is a powerful way to shut people down.
Right.
And that is the thing.
It is about power.
There are really two versions of civilization that we could be pursuing.
One was the one that until, you know, a few years ago, we all thought we were pursuing.
At least all the decent people did.
Which is a society in which, you know, your background doesn't dictate your opportunities.
Period.
Right?
You know, the colorblind has become a bad word because people have misportrayed it as a, you know, a kind of, you know, pretentious claim that you can't see color rather than it plays no role in a courtroom or a classroom.
You know, it is nothing more than a phenotypic marker.
It's like conflating men and women are equal under the law with men and women are the same.
It's the same conflation.
It's the same conflation.
And so the point is, You've got the world in which these things no longer dictate your opportunities, right?
That's really the liberal dream.
That's why conservatives are now defending liberal gains, is that we all, you know, liberals were right about this.
Liberals kind of won this fight 30 years ago.
They did, and now they've abandoned it, and the conservatives are defending it.
And there's something beautiful in the conservatives defending it.
I mean, maybe conservatives are always defending the gains of past liberals, and that's part of the confusion here.
It seems, actually, now that you say it that way, that that would have to be the case.
It really has to be the case.
It would have to be the case.
But in any case, the alternative world is one in which we apportion special rights.
Here's a word that you can use that they can't use, right?
That's a little privilege for you.
And the point is, do you really think you're going to fix the world by apportioning privileges?
Does that sound good to anybody?
Obviously it's insane.
It's not stable.
The right world is the one in which, you know, yeah, you're never perfectly going to get there, but the one in which we approach as well as possible a place in which none of the things that have hobbled any of our ancestors still matter, right?
You really do, you know, is meritocracy good?
Yes.
Do we have one?
No, not quite.
But merit plays a role, right?
What you want is a system in which- Do we want to increase the role of merit and decrease the role of chance and luck?
Yes, we do.
It is that exactly.
We want a system in which merit plays as large a role as possible.
And then we all know what it is we're supposed to do, which is be meritorious, right?
Bring good things to the world.
Help others bring good things into the world, right?
Those are the things we should be fostering rather than a system You know, it's plainly insane on its face that you're going to reapportion privileges in any way that could correct for anything in any permanent sense, right?
That's a forever game of chaos, right?
It couldn't be done even in principle.
Yes.
So, like that.
Like that indeed.
I've got three things I want to do before we sign off.
Maybe let's start with reading a little bit from Dan's letter, which I again posted on Natural Selections.
Let me give you a little background on on this.
This is Verbatim, the text of a letter that Dan Arkand, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, just wrote to me on my Patreon actually, having just joined and wanting to share a number of things after our last live stream in which we talked about the convoy as it was rolling in.
And he uh I have since received many more words from him and they're all all amazing and you know for both both in the case of Dan here and Tara who is um the mother of Mila um we have been in more contact since and um I am just I am so
Grateful and hopeful that these are some of the people who are in part leading the charge, who are standing up and saying, you know, not in my name, and are working in their own way to hold the line.
So let's see.
I wanted to... since Zach is on my screen now, I have to figure out where... yeah.
Can you just give that back to me for a moment so I can find my notes?
Um, okay.
So again, like with Mila's story, I encourage you to read this whole thing, um, but this, um, you can... God, I keep on forgetting because I'm talking at the same time.
The Narrative of the Truckers.
Okay, so you can give me that back now, Zach, or you can give it to them again.
The Calvary Rolled In, An Aligning for a Common Purpose.
Um, oh boy.
Here we go.
The Narrative of the Truckers.
This is just a piece of this letter.
The Narrative of the Truckers was beautiful and tragic.
The same people who we all believed had taken an enormous risk to their lives in early 2020 to feed the country during peak COVID hysteria were now being fired for doing exactly what they were called heroes for last year.
It made no sense.
Now they, the forlorn heroes, the Western Canadian cowboys, were going to ride into town and slay the dragon and all for us.
It was almost too good to be true, but they were exactly the heroes we needed and not a moment too early.
I still can't believe how close we were just last week to collapsing under the weight of our own despair.
And just like that, the media turned its attention from the resistor next door onto them.
They were vilified.
This was the second galvanizing moment.
The stories went, they weren't heroes after all.
They were every ist you could imagine.
There were only twelve of them.
No, maybe a hundred tops.
They weren't coming.
The highways were closed.
They were dragoons and thieves coming to rape your daughters in the night.
No, seriously, this was written.
At every twist and turn, we secretly questioned their resolve in the face of this ruthless onslaught.
Until yesterday.
Just like you would expect in a movie, the crowds emerged on our highways and byways and it became clear that despite the best efforts of the naysayers and mainstream press, Canadians would ignore the strange stories and cast their lot with the convoy, betting against the narrative.
We waited for hours, our toes freezing, sharing gloves and stories of friends and family members being ridiculed, silenced, and pushed out of society.
The vaxxed and unvaxxed, working and unemployed, families and single people popped up with homemade posters and Canadian flags.
Fear had given way to hope.
We were not alone.
And after five hours of delays, the cavalry appeared down the highway with flashing lights and blasting foghorns.
They rolled in and rolled and rolled, literally thousands of trucks and truckers and vans and cars with flags and wagons and messages of hope from across the country with Bible verses of Jericho and Truck Trudeau flags.
For nine hours straight.
We immersed ourselves in the electric and timeless moment.
It kept on rolling.
We were transported into the biggest, cheerleading, flag-waving, poster-shaking party you could ever want to be at.
We shared moment after moment with our heroes and with each other.
The names melted away.
We were all very, very real.
We screamed and cried and hugged strangers.
We filled each other's cups and promised without words we will not go gently into the night.
It was understood implicitly that we had each other's backs and we were completely aligned for our common purpose, our freedom.
This is only the beginning of this moment.
It is not nearly over, but there is no going back.
I feel deeply that Canadians, led by our cavalry, were dragged across the Rubicon today.
I so hope he's right.
I so hope he's right.
Well, this does raise a question.
I think it's very hard to know where to even stand for an objective view of how effective this is.
But I will say, I'm watching Uh, some scary reversals of progress, but I actually take from them the inverse of the message that one might, right?
Things like Italy doing more?
Well, no, I mean, it's delicate because he's a good friend, but I'm watching Joe forced to second guess himself a little bit.
Joe Rogan.
Yeah.
I really want him not to second-guess himself, because I think the point is, the reason that the pressure has come to him the way it has, is that he is actually over the target, and this is the expected flack.
And the point is, we are, I believe, much closer to a victory.
And by victory, what I mean is a general revelation of how much we have been misled about.
We are much closer to that than we think.
And that is why things look bleak at the moment and the trucker convoy is worthy of this level of slander because it is so dangerous to the narrative and the fact that people coming to the roads to see them and supporting them is the evidence of what it really is.
I guess the point is the worse the slander gets The stronger the evidence that you are actually making a difference that power cannot tolerate.
And I guess I would ask, as long as we're attempting to figure out what our power actually looks like, it is worth in light of what Joe Rogan has done and how far he has brought us in terms of Revealing the narrative to a huge audience or revealing the falseness of that narrative.
I would also ask people I've been Trying to get people to realize this is a human being He does incredible things But you know, he's also it's it's impossible to to endure this level of slander and not have it get to you and you know, he's got You know, some rules.
He doesn't look at comments online and things like this to immunize himself.
But there's only so insulated you can be when the world is saying terrible things about you at a decibel level that's just, you know, your windows don't keep it out.
And anyway, so I would ask people.
I mean, even the toy poodle royals are coming after him.
I think I don't know about the Toy Poodle Royals.
Oh, whatever they are.
Harry and Meghan.
Oh, right.
Oh, okay.
They're 30 seconds, 30 minutes of dogs.
Okay, sorry.
I was wondering, because it seems like he would be good with dogs.
Especially Toy Poodles.
I mean, yeah.
Right.
But anyway.
Hashtag thanks Joe Rogan, with all the words capitalized, has trended.
I think I started it, but it trended a number of times over the last couple of weeks and I believe it needs to keep doing that and hopefully We do not want to fall short, just shy of the target because suddenly the resistance was so strong that we thought it might be an infinite distance away.
That's not where we are.
That's not where we are.
The narrative has crumbled because it is not high quality and because the evidence caught up to it.
Yeah.
You know, let me just say this phrase.
I don't even know exactly how it's invoked, but the idea that, you know, when you're getting the most flack, it's indicator that you're right over the target, has always struck me as a little...
A little not right, because obviously there are a lot of ways that you can be getting flack that don't necessarily, you know, metaphorically, you can be getting a lot of pushback when you're just wrong, for instance.
Or when you're over some target that isn't the one that you think it is, perhaps.
But in this case, I would say absolutely.
Absolutely is the, and it's far beyond, yeah, this is a lot of flack and it's going on for a long time.
Is he right over the target?
Yeah, he's right over the target.
And they've switched topics, too, as of today.
I was just going to say, like, it's not even one target.
It's like, you know, they're throwing all the flack at him, and it's in different flavors, and I don't even know how to do the metaphor.
The flack over the target thing.
Flack doesn't come in flavors, does it?
Yes.
Lead.
Right.
The point is not that all flack indicates target.
It's that the flack you are getting is flack over the target.
Right, but that means that you can't take getting flack as evidence that you are over the target.
Right.
No, of course.
Of course.
That's all.
An honorable person will recognize that difference.
But the point is, in this case, this is flack over the target.
What is the target?
It is the COVID narrative and it's bankruptcy morally and analytically.
And humanly.
On every front.
And, you know, let's put it this way.
Anybody who thinks Joe Rogan is a racist either doesn't know the first thing about the man or is an idiot.
Right, but I didn't know that that's what they had switched to.
But I mean, focusing on that is the same mistake as focusing on They Called You a Racist at Evergreen.
It was never what it was about, right?
And that's not what this is about.
They'll do anything.
And in fact, You know, as Evergreen unfolded on us, and we saw our careers stripped away in all of this, I remember saying, oh my god, like, there was one story, and that was a lie, and it's been revealed as a lie, and now it's a different story, and it's also a lie, but it hasn't been revealed yet.
Oh, they switched to a different one.
It was like, one, two, three, four, they just kept on choosing another one because none of them held.
And I think, you know, we can hope, and we must assume, and we must do everything we can to make sure it is true that.
The same thing happens with Joe Rogan.
It's so much more important in every regard.
Right.
The attempts to deplatform, to cancel, to destroy, cannot be allowed to succeed.
This is exactly, exactly what I'm getting at.
And believe me, it is in part a hard won set of insights because of what you and I went through.
We've been slandered and we've seen what that looks like from the inside as things that are nonsense are said about you and stories are inverted to make you look a particular way.
And I just think... And he, I mean, indeed, he invited you on so early.
Very early.
- For the first week. - And I remember meeting him when he was in the hospital.
He was in LA still at that point and meeting him in his studio and our boys met him as well.
And he was so honorable, such a good man, so just courageous and stalwart and wise and smart and human and compassionate and all the things we have known him to be ever since.
He is, and what people don't get, because he's a larger-than-life figure, is that he's also exactly life-size, and that that means that we have an obligation.
If we want somebody to do the job that he is doing, then we have to defend it, right?
We have to defend it, even if it's not obvious that our position allows it.
I mean, for you and me, I guess it is because we have
platform of a certain size but but the point is what you do in all of these conversations where the slanders are being deployed matters and anyway Thanks Joe Rogan Hashtag thanks Joe Rogan would be great if it trended now in light of this nonsense and really every time they hurl garbage at him in order to shut down his honorable and successful exploration of
One last thing before we stop here for the week and we'll come back for those watching live with our Q&A.
We received a letter this week, a handwritten letter.
It's wonderful.
We received a fair bit of mail, and this letter has nothing to do with COVID, but it has a lot to do with grief.
The letter writer is Didrik.
He says, I'm 29 years old.
I asked him if I could read some of this.
I'm 29 years old from Oslo, Norway.
Currently I'm doing a PhD in biotechnology where I study biological phosphorus removal in wastewater.
He proceeds to talk about his extraordinary family and the death of his little sister a year ago, and the experience of going through the grief of it and the grieving, and despite having a very tight-knit family and a medical system that he was actually proud of and felt extraordinarily well treated by.
I mean, how many of us would be lucky enough to have both of those things?
At the end of life for someone we love deeply, but he he talks of not of having been able to spend time with the body of his loved one, of his sister, but not enough, and was brought back to this when he reports, I guess it was Episode 91.
I read an excerpt from Chapter 8 of our book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, on grief, and one of the things that we say in there is, spend time with the body of your loved one after they die.
He says, I had some with my sister and I wish I had more.
So all of this is just an amazing story to have been thinking about this week as I have been dwelling on grief, on the impossible loss of your own child, and thinking about what else we are all grieving right now.
even those of us who are lucky enough not to have lost a child, but who have lost, all of us have lost some things these last two years.
And he says, Then everything had to move on, just like it must have done for all time.
But it doesn't go back to normal, because there is no going back.
Things went forward to normal.
I've been thinking about this phrase, going forward to normal.
There's been a lot said about the new normal, the old normal, what is going to be normal, and it's never occurred to me to talk about going forward to normal.
But we are the people who will create our own future, and we have to create the normal that is acceptable to have in the world.
Things will go forward to the normal that That we make.
Well uh if I might I've been saying as you know from the beginning of the pandemic it will never go back to normal.
I've known that from the beginning.
This completes it though and it's not that it will go forward to normal.
It will go forward to normal if we If we do this right, if we learn the lesson of this and we extrapolate from it correctly and we do what we must do, it will go forward to normal.
If we fail in that, it will continue this way and we will go from one not normal situation to the next not normal situation and eventually we won't make it out.
Right.
So I think forward to normal is exactly the correct objective.
You almost invoked the Hopi saying, we are the ones we've been waiting for, that one also belongs here.
Right.
And you know, let us, I think we should put everything into going forward to normal because there really, it's going to be a short ride if we do not accomplish that.
That really, it nicely encapsulates that we have to go somewhere that we cannot describe from here, but it must be because the alternative is unthinkable.
That's right.
All right.
Rather than go through all of the things that I usually go through at the end, I would like to strongly encourage people to go to naturalselections.substack.com and find specifically those two pieces.
I have to figure out what they're called.
Hold on.
The Cavalry Rolled In, written by Dan and Mila's story, written by Tara, and read them and, you know, comment if you like and like them, but share them.
I think that they have the capacity to people's minds about some of what they think they're seeing, or to affirm our shared humanity. - I will say, as I said on Twitter,
read Mila's story in particular somewhere you can cry, because read Mila's story in particular somewhere you can cry, because it's almost impossible not to be profoundly affected by it, and you should let yourself be profoundly affected by it.
Anyway, it's an utterly extraordinary, I don't even want to say piece, the story is utterly extraordinary and totally heartbreaking.
I do hope people So be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
