In this 184th 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. In this episode we discuss RuPaul’s Drag Race, Barbie, and the deep state. How do drag and Barbie reveal similar confusions about sex and gender, feminism, and whether or not you’ve been red-pilled? Are drag queens women? Is Barbie? Then: an exploration of the meaning of the term “deep state,” its implications for rec...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 180-something. welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 180-something.
It's 184, of course.
Of course, that makes sense because the last one, 183.
So, sequentially speaking, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
I cannot tell you how many things are taking place in the world.
It is just rushing past and everything is in flux, and we are going to talk about several of the components of this today.
Indeed.
And I'm excited and full of trepidation.
Excited and full of trepidation.
Well, that does sound like 2023, doesn't it?
Yep, sure does.
Okay.
If you are watching on YouTube, consider coming over to Rumble.
And once on Rumble, if you want, consider joining the Locals Watch Party, which is where what used to be called the chat on YouTube and Odyssey and Rumble, that is now taking place there.
We have a moderator in-house at Locals, and I think it's going to be a good conversation there.
I have a slogan for it.
Go for it.
Who will watch the watch party?
Well, not me.
No, we can't.
I mean, you were juggling a lot of stuff, and so we can't, but... Our moderator will.
Who will watch the watch party?
Yeah.
Yeah, our moderator.
You didn't want an answer, but... No, I was just... It was a wink at my libertarian friends.
Yes.
Okay, so we've got two sort of broad, different topics today.
Neither of them explicitly scientific, but as always, everything that we talk about in our entire the world and the way that we interpret the world is informed with the evolutionary lens.
That is true, and it is also true, as we say in our book, that all true narratives must reconcile.
So these things are all part of one story, and we focus here and there, but yeah.
Yes, we do.
Okay, so join us after this livestream for a live Q&A, which will only be on Rumble, and you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We're moving the rest of the stuff to the end, although I'm going to be starting up the hour talking some about my piece published yesterday in Natural Selections.
You go, girl.
Yes.
You go, girl.
And what we will do today before we get right into that, though, is talk to you about our sponsors.
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I would just point out that there is a lost piece of history where Slim Jims and their hydrogenated vegetable oils, their brominated vegetable oils, which was first patented as a flame retardant, those Slim Jims were initially intended to be a beef cigarette, but it did not work because of the flame retardant.
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Which bees usually aren't, incidentally.
Mudwater's... are they?
I'm imagining the rabbis facing the bees around trying to bless them and certify them, and it seems unlikely.
It seems unlikely.
I'm going out on a limb there, but I think it's a safe one.
It's a pretty thick limb.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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So if it's hot where you are, and it probably is, Yes, and I would point out that the lion's mane mushrooms are now an affordable ingredient because they're no longer harvested from the lion's mane, which was an expensive and dangerous process.
to support the show, that's M-U-D-W-T-R.com.
Use code Dark Horse Pod for 15% off. - Yes, and I would point out that the lion's mane mushrooms are now an affordable ingredient 'cause they're no longer harvested from the lion's mane, which was an expensive and dangerous process.
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That's h-i-l-l-s-d-a-l-e.edu/darkhorse to register. hillsdale.edu/darkhorse. - So apparently I'm gonna start us off tonight.
Tonight.
Tonight.
It's tonight where some of you are, and where some of you are listening, which isn't a thing, but... It's tonight somewhere.
I'm going to start us off and I'm going to read some extended excerpts from a rather long piece that I published yesterday prompted by a piece that I intended to write without having any idea what I was going to write when I went to two events in Portland this last weekend.
And I will stop frequently and have us interact over them, but let me begin with just the very beginning of the piece so that we are all up to speed as to what I am talking about.
And if you would share my screen, Zach, when you have a chance, that would be great.
So this piece is called You Go Girl in Dragon and Pink.
Outside on a hot summer night, people are milling, waiting for the show to begin.
Young and old.
Black and white.
Middle-aged straight couples in clusters of gay men.
Attractive young people and unattractive young people.
People in various degrees of cosplay.
The fashion choices include pink, everything, rainbow shorts, and a certain amount of black leather.
The excitement is palpable.
People have been waiting for this for a very long time.
The next day, at a different venue, at a different show entirely, the only element missing is the black leather.
I went to both events as an anthropologist, stepping into parts of American culture with which I had no prior experience.
While anthropologists never want to call attention to their otherness, it is generally impossible to conceal the fact that you are other when you drop in from what might as well be outer space.
When I lived in Madagascar, where I was not anthropologist but biologist, I was the focus of endless attention.
Children followed me, the bravest among them racing up to touch my skin and my hair, even the shy ones pointing and shouting vaza as I walked down the street.
White person.
It wasn't cruel, and it wasn't dangerous.
They just had never seen anything like me before.
They wondered what I was, as it was obvious to them that I wasn't the same as what they were.
On a Saturday night in Portland, Oregon this week, I went to Keller Auditorium for the Work the World show put on by the juggernaut that is RuPaul's Drag Race.
Unlike an actual anthropologist, I had, intentionally, come entirely unprepared.
I had never seen, I have never seen, an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race.
I barely know what it is, don't really know the conceit, certainly don't know the players, and most definitely do not know the culture that has bubbled up around it.
I wanted to see the show without having heard anything in advance about what other people thought, and to see it as a standalone event.
The next day, I went to see Barbie.
The movie.
The similarities were striking.
So let me just give a tiny bit of backstory here.
That's, you know, that's a backstory explaining why I didn't know anything about really either of these universes before walking into them.
them, but I do not know what's happening on the screen at the moment.
Okay.
I'm going to start over.
The backstory is I love live theater and I was going to be finding myself in Portland for a couple of days.
And whenever I am going to be in a city at this point, I look for the live theater that's going to be out there.
And there was really nothing this time.
The only thing that I found in looking through the listings was RuPaul's Drag Race.
Work the world.
W-E-R-K.
Work the world.
And I looked at it and I clicked off of it and I looked at it again.
I thought, you know, That actually sounds like that could be research.
I have no idea, actually, what this is.
And I do suspect that the juggernaut, as I call it in the piece, that is RuPaul's Drag Race, helped bring in some of what we are experiencing in the world right now, including, as I talk about later in the piece, what seems to be an ever, ever graying boundary between drag and trance.
Which, of course, when drag was out there in the 60s and the 70s, we were assured it was a totally different thing.
So I bought the ticket, and it was with some apprehension that I, you know, forced myself to go.
I bought the ticket, I was going to go, I went alone.
Uh, and before I went, though, I thought because I, like everyone else who is not, uh, under a cultural rock at the moment, has just been blasted with the Barbie media blitz, right?
And I thought these two things might have a lot more in common than, uh, than I know.
So, without looking into anything more than what you're just exposed to walking around in the world with regard to Barbie, I went to the two things.
And what I write about here, of course, is the cultural anthropologists' sort of, you know, participant observation.
In this case, not really participant observation, but, you know, observation of culture is not your own.
But it also emerges from an ethos that we have talked about a lot, that we've written about, indeed, in a piece called Don't Look It Up.
So many years ago, we went to a conference at Colorado College on field studies and gave a talk and then wrote an article stemming from that talk about the virtues of ignorance, of naivete, and about the virtues, therefore, of field studies, especially field studies in places without a good cell connection or the internet, so that you can I have questions bubble up.
You can point out things like giant rocks in the middle of nowhere and say to students, where'd that come from?
What's that about?
What do you think?
What's going on?
And in, you know, in the last 20 years, of course, it's become second nature for almost everyone to go like, let me look at it.
Let me see.
I'm sure that someone has already asked that question and will have an answer.
But as we have written about as I say, extensively and talked about, there is often a lot more learning to happen if you go in relatively naive and let the experience happen to you, let the questions happen to you, without knowing much in advance.
So that was sort of the background for why I chose to attend both of these things without knowing much.
Can I add a little color there?
Please.
So one of the, this is a topic we've come at multiple different ways, Basically, at one level, reinventing the wheel has taken on a bad rap.
Reinventing the wheel suggests that you've wasted your time.
Whereas, in an educational context, the fact that something has already been settled by somebody actually provides an extra benefit.
And in the case of our primary example in Don't Look It Up, We have a debate that raged in geology over much of the 20th century, starting in 1922, finally being completed in 1978, where a renegade geologist named J. Harlan Bretz had argued that the mainstream understanding of the scablands of eastern Washington must be incorrect.
That he could see things about the evidence that were simply inconsistent with the idea that this had been formed over extremely long periods of time by gradual erosion like the Grand Canyon.
Now the point is you can show students the evidence that he saw without spending the many years he took to see it and then you can lead them to the exercise of thinking about what it might mean
And then you can talk about what is now known and the point is for a student in the matter in a matter of hours to be able to make some of the progress that took decades to be made in the real world and then not to have to say well we'll never know or it'll take years before we're gonna find out and to say well actually we can check your work right now because Since you didn't look it up, we now have your work and we can compare it to what geology did over many, many years.
And now you know a lot more about how to think.
Now you've experienced the process of working through evidence and going down paths that turned out not to be fruitful or not to be true.
And, you know, maybe hopefully actually did indeed replicate some of the thinking that has happened in the past.
You did, in fact, come close to reinventing, probably not the wheel, because that was a big one, but, you know, reinventing some smaller things that have happened.
And it, you know, it begins to unravel.
And, you know, this is explicitly about science, really, but it begins to unravel.
The lie that is textbooks, especially science textbooks, which present science as an unfailingly linear process.
And, you know, the scientific process, which is, you know, which is a cycle, not a line.
But even that suggests an order that always must happen.
And, you know, we are emphatic that you absolutely must have a hypothesis before you take data, else the numbers that you have are not actually data, because they haven't been
However, the scientific process in general, in which observation precedes hypothesis, precedes data collection, precedes analysis, precedes the dissemination of those results, precedes the generation of more hypotheses, repeat, repeat, repeat, has all sorts of branches off of it.
And it rarely goes smoothly like that.
Not only is it non-linear, but it puts the focus in the correct educational place.
The idea that education is a place where you accumulate facts that you will go on to wield, it was always pointless.
But it's especially pointless in an era where we have access to the facts for free.
You don't need somebody to show them to you.
They're now controversial.
But anyway, the point is, You're not in college to write papers that will matter.
The likelihood that you will is pretty low, right?
What you are in college to do is to learn how to think, and learning how to think by traversing some route that people have traversed before you that took a very long time, it is an accelerant, right?
You are learning the lessons that took them decades to learn in the course of hours.
What more could you want?
So reinventing the wheel is a special opportunity.
It is.
And I mean, I encourage, with regard to the cultural anthropology, I encourage everyone to do this.
You know, we have our friend Jordan Hall, actually, from before we were actively trying to, was adamant that you need to go into the media sources that you are certain Do not share your values, your beliefs, your preconceived ideas about what is happening in the world.
You need to do that, because that is the corrective to whatever the media that shares your bias will be giving you.
Yeah, actually, Eric recommended this to me as a kid.
In fact, I remember his examples precisely.
I was a very nature-oriented kid, and he said, you need to spend a little time reading Field and Stream, right?
You need to understand how this looks from a hunter's perspective.
And, you know, he was absolutely right.
You know, you do find out that the folks you think you don't agree with are not the caricatures you've been told they are.
Yeah, that's an interesting example.
That's not nearly as far afield as the political examples that Jordan was giving us, but it's absolutely true that if you are interested in conserving nature, it's hard to find a more adamant and informed bunch than those who spend hours, days, weeks in nature with a fishing rod or a rifle in their hand.
Who are feeding themselves and their families that way.
I have not actually figured out which pieces to read and which to skip.
So I'm going to do this little piece here.
So that's all sort of set up and then mostly I'm going to focus on the Barbie part of this.
Can you answer a question for me first though?
I may not be the only person with it or maybe I am.
Yeah.
As little as you knew about RuPaul's Drag Race, I may know even less.
Is it a television program?
I mean, I've heard the term RuPaul's Drag Race.
Yeah, I think it is probably correctly referred to as a reality TV show.
At least that's how I understand it now, having seen just basically the show.
Maybe I should just read this.
Everything has become a spectacle.
Before showtime at the Keller Auditorium, the music is intense, booming, distorted, at least this close to the stage in the shadow of massive speakers.
Beams of red light sweep over the crowd and the giant screen is digital drag dystopia on endless repeat.
Finally the show starts, a short high-energy dance number with a dozen drag queens, people wearing personas that are known by a large fraction of the audience.
That's the thing, like, It seemed like most of the audience knew all the drag queens who showed up.
So they'd been on past seasons.
I think there's like 14 or 15 seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race.
So they've been on past seasons.
They were favorites or not, I don't even know.
But people cheered when these people came out, when the drag queens came out.
They were clearly known by the audience.
These queens are famous, but they're famous in the way of all reality TV stars.
Famous for being famous and for some exaggerated aspects of their personalities.
The show is primarily a series of dance numbers, most with a single central drag queen plus six accessory dancers, two women and four men.
The accessory dancers are excellent at what they do and they work hard.
Hopefully the gig pays well.
Most modern dance doesn't, I think, involve quite so much twerking and writhing and grabbing of crotches.
Whenever a new act comes on stage, the audience screams in ecstasy like so many teenage girls.
Some of the drag queens have moves, to be sure.
A few of them are beautiful even, at least from this distance.
Asia, our host for the evening, is among them.
But the audience screams especially hard for the obese drag queens.
The obese drag queens have rolls of fat.
And when they jiggle their fat suggestively, the audience roars its approval.
When they grab their own crotches, they get more screams.
When they make suggestive movements with their tongues, more screams than one of them, improbably and impressively, does the splits.
The response is nearly ear-shattering.
Other than that one move, though, the obese drag queens demonstrate little in the way of skill.
And yet they are adored.
After intermission two amateur drag queens are brought on stage from the audience.
They are going to lip-sync for your life!
It's a competition which the audience will judge.
The first queen is polished and immaculately put together with tall black boots so elaborate that Asia comments on them approvingly.
He's a tall leggy Brazilian with long perfectly straight blonde hair.
He sort of he does this drag queen flip of the hair that I sort of think I associate with drag queens even though I'm not sure I've ever seen a drag show.
He's got perfectly straight long blonde hair and lip syncs well to a song he didn't know was coming.
He also knows how to move.
The second amateur drag queen they've pulled up on stage does not have the moves and mostly fails to lip sync at all while jiggling his bits.
He is also obese and what he has in addition to his fat is the presumption that people will love him.
He is right.
They do.
The audience overwhelmingly gives him the win.
Objectively, he wasn't nearly as good as the first guy, but that presumes that I understand what the game is.
Clearly, I do not.
The Obese Sandwich and Drag Queen does know the game, though, and plays it well.
Or rather, he works it.
He does it so well that I know his name, Charisma with a K, but do not know the name of the more skillful queen who lost.
The game, I guess, is about being something so loud and so brash that others will fall all over themselves to demonstrate their adoration of you.
Loudness and brashness and simply not being as you're expected to be is now sufficient to earn adulation, if you choose to claim that ground.
It's a way of telling the system off, without having to have any clarity about what the system is, or why you're angry at it in the first place.
Charisma with a K earns a solid you-go-girl vibe from the audience.
You-go-girl would seem to be a statement of female empowerment.
I'm not convinced.
It seems to me at best to be a celebration of that which is immutable, those things that you did not earn and did nothing to change.
At worst, it's a celebration of poor choices and unfortunate outcomes.
So, I don't know how you're looking at me.
It's a thoroughly disturbing picture that you paint.
And especially, I mean, I know that this is the subject of your essay, but it is especially disturbing in light of the preposterous conversation, the sophistry surrounding
Transness and even more so having this take place in Portland where everyone at least overtly is so thoroughly believing of these incredible claims.
So anyway... The newly elected governor of Portland.
No.
The newly elected governor of Oregon, Tina Kotak, I have seen, has just, I don't know if she has proposed or has managed to push through, I sincerely hope not, that children as young as 15 should be allowed to get trans-affirming health care without consent or knowledge of their parents.
So Tina Kotak never would have been elected without Portland.
The rest of the state doesn't buy into this crap.
Eugene, I guess.
But Oregon is a big western state with one massive city, and it's not even that massive, but one big city.
And the ethos, the statewide ethos, is becoming the Portland ethos.
And that fits very well with what seems to be happening in the audience at this at this Work the World show.
A complete abandonment of reality, I guess.
And the idea, and you know that wasn't the most surprising thing I saw, I'll get to that, but the idea that drag, which I've never liked the idea of, like, never.
Even though I love David Bowie, right?
And I'm remembering the movie Victor Victoria, must be from the early 80s with Julie Andrews playing a down on her luck act performer of some sort who, uh, I, I think the conceit of the film is she goes in drag to perform, but then she's in, then she furthermore puts on a female, um, she plays a man playing a woman.
Right.
Um, and, and it reveals this, you know, this onionness of, of human identity and personality and what you, what your eye thinks and what your brain thinks and what you can, you know, how, you know, to what degree does it matter?
Um, But there's never a confusion there, and Bowie was never confused about what the character actually These were conscious attempts to play on gender roles, take that term to be prior to the current battle over them.
These were conscious, nobody was trying to fool anybody.
And it's interesting, you know, the mind is strange in this regard.
So, I don't know how many, what percentage of straight men I speak for here, I'll speak for myself, but I would bet that this is largely resonant.
A woman wearing a man's shirt can be very sexy.
A woman wearing a mustache?
Horrifying.
Right?
It's like, why does the mind distinguish between these two things?
And so anyway, an intelligent person like David Bowie playing on these tropes is revealing things about your own construction.
And, you know, they're things worth knowing.
He never thought he actually was Ziggy Stardust.
Right.
It was a character.
Yeah, exactly.
Throughout history, and pre-history presumably, there will be intentional playing on tropes, which is very different than attempts to mislead.
And of course all of cinema, all of fiction, you know, is in some sense people, you know, you walk in there with a suspension of disbelief and you accept that these characters are Who they say they are.
Yeah, and I guess in some ways, your suspension of disbelief requires, like, you can't be asked to continually suspend your disbelief over and over and over and over again on multiple different topics, right?
The, you know, a fictional world that you want to immerse yourself in, that the filmmaker or the writer is asking you to immerse yourself in, is welcoming you into.
will only work if you suspend your disbelief sort of once.
It could be at a global level.
It couldn't be about everything, right?
But once.
Your brain can't continually be being called, repeatedly called to like, wait, what was that?
What's going on?
You can't be asked to increase the level of suspension repeatedly without breaking the illusion.
And I talk later in this film about, later in this piece about a film from 1974, a surrealist film from Boudwell called The Phantom of Liberty, And maybe I'll end up reading this whole thing, but in which, you know, a lot of European new wave cinema in the 60s, 70s was explicitly playing with social norms.
And great, but I think many of the thinkers in that era, and of course this is the same era that we get a lot of the originators of actual postmodernism, made the mistake of imagining that if some social norms are both culturally created and pass their sell-by date, then all social norms must be culturally created and pass their sell-by date.
And that's not true.
That is a false conclusion, and it may be fundamental to the whole error of postmodernism.
You can be right about some of these critiques, that language can help create social norms, and that the panopticon that we're living in is not good for most of us, right?
But that doesn't mean that your Insight applies universally to everything that humans have ever done.
And that's the world we're now living in.
So obese drag queens, like obese drag queens that don't appear to have any skill by the, you know, and I admit freely, I don't know what the game is.
I don't know You know, what they think they are doing, but to have two amateur queens get up on stage and have one of them look to me like, I remember drag queens looking, and he looks compelling.
And to have the audience overwhelmingly, through their votes with cheers at the end, vote for the guy who couldn't even lip-sync and that was what the game said it was to be about.
What is it then?
What is it that we are being asked to buy into?
The whole thing, and again I say this later in the piece, the whole thing feels like a dare.
Like, call me out on this.
Call me out.
And the fact is most of us who aren't into this aren't looking at all.
And then a lot of us who are looking at it are going like, wait, what did I miss?
No, no, no.
You know what?
Just like when I had students who didn't have much background in science, and I would insist that they were reading the primary literature, right?
But I didn't give them textbooks.
You're going to be reading the primary literature.
Well, I can't assess that.
You're going to learn how to.
And they come to me and say, just, I don't understand it.
And sometimes they didn't understand it because they didn't have the background.
Very often they didn't understand it because it was written terribly and was written to confuse.
Because a lot of the scientific literature, like a lot of the technical literature everywhere, is written by someone who has something to hide, doesn't really know what they're talking about, and doesn't really want to be called out on anything that is in what they are putting out there.
And so just, you know, giving students appropriate, not inappropriate, but appropriate confidence to say, actually, this conclusion here does not follow from the evidence that you have laid out.
And that's on you, not me.
That's a you problem, not a me problem.
This scientific paper is not good.
Like, I feel like that's the framing with which we should all be looking at things like, Why did the obese drag queen win?
Now, the stakes seem like they're lower here, but maybe not, because I feel like everywhere we're going now in society, we're being told, oh, yeah, yeah, A looks to you like it's better than B in every regard, but B is winning.
Like, what?
Why?
You've given me no evidence.
I mean, I think you're calling attention to exactly the right question, and it doesn't really matter that this is low stakes.
In fact, it could be zero stakes, because the real point is that it is diagnosing the audience.
That's the really important thing, okay?
And what I wrote down here is the game is, the game more broadly than RuPaul's Drag Race is, Is suspend your disbelief or else.
That's what we are being told.
But not just suspend your disbelief or else.
Suspend your disbelief and now another thing and another thing and another thing.
It's like the progressive stack meets suspend your disbelief and oh now it's uh now you gotta be disabled or else we don't love you.
Now you gotta you know now you gotta be obese or we don't love you.
Now whatever it is.
But I think this this this proves the point because when you go to a movie Right?
And when they cause, when they say, we are living in a magical realm and people cast spells and those spells have consequences for reasons we're not going to explain.
That's the level at which you suspend your disbelief.
And then they up the level of disbelief to something, you know, they invent a character to explain some error that they've made earlier in the story.
Right?
And the point is, well, now I just, I have fallen out of the belief that I create the disbelief state, which I had suspended.
Yes.
And you've broken the illusion.
You've broken character in the middle of the thing.
And I'm no longer on board.
So I don't know what it costs to go to a movie these days, but you've wasted my money.
Yeah.
Twelve, thirteen bucks.
Suspend your disbelief or else is about something else.
It's about safety, right?
You're going to suspend your disbelief.
This is a threat.
The threat is if you cannot suspend your disbelief about men turning into women, you're a problem and you're going to end up on the wrong end of this mob.
Right?
So, how do you explain an audience... And it's a bunch of men and women, Faze, who are gonna come at you.
Right.
So, how do you explain a Portland audience signing up to go see this thing and then voting for a much lesser, a much less compelling version To win a competition that is ostensibly about being more compelling.
What this is, is an opportunity to virtue signal.
I'm better at suspending my disbelief than you are.
And so the point is, it is the threat that they feel that is causing them to embrace the least compelling version to prove even in that case, oh, that looks like a woman to me.
I mean, it's also true that, and I did not, I did not talk in this piece about what I saw in the audience.
You know, there's a lot that I saw and I thought that did not end up here.
But as you might imagine, the crowd had some beautiful and compelling people in it, including, for instance, some guys who looked like they walked out of the Castro in the 1980s, like some just fabulous gay guys, really built, wearing like black leather and, you know, like could have been the village people, right?
Uh, but it also had the, you know, 2010s, 2020s version of this, the woke brigade, the, you know, the so-called queer community, if you will, which, by and large, these people do not look healthy, right?
It's, you know, people are, you know, very doughy, very pale, You know, lots of artificial color on their skin and their hair and such, and some elaborate costuming, which, you know, okay, but often not.
Just kind of dingy clothes and doughy, both affect and physique.
And at some level, I think that people have become convinced that to aspire is somehow shaming those who haven't done better.
And so by voting for the obviously less compelling, less skillful, and less attractive person, they are both affirming who they are and not, you know, fat shaming, beauty shaming,
You know, all of these things, which is actually just code for, uh, if you are fit and healthy and look good, you don't get to talk about it because I'm in charge now.
And I don't have health, I don't have beauty, I don't apparently, you know, often don't have much going on at all, but I've declared that I'm in charge and somehow a lot of people are buying into it.
Well, there's a generalized theme across multiple things that we have talked about in the last couple years.
You've got a population that is, by whatever mechanism, actually being sabotaged in its attempt to do what people used to do automatically.
Try to look good, try to be strong, to have virtuous characteristics, to be capable, to achieve things in the marketplace, you know.
Now, you can make all kinds of critiques about that system and how well it works, how fair it actually is, what you do about the fact that people are often hobbled through no fault of their own, but when you have a large fraction of the population that is, let's say, obese because of
Factors that they've never been able to identify, you know, impurities in their food, jobs that cause them to be sedentary, light regimes that cause them to misunderstand what part of the year they're in.
Who knows what the factors that contribute to such a thing might be?
But when you have people who know That there is no switch they can flip.
There's nothing they can do.
They are just simply in this state.
Then, of course, an attack on the idea of better and worse sounds appealing.
Wouldn't it be great if I just didn't feel awful, right?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not either or.
So, you know, you and I, to the chagrin of some mostly right-of-center people, correctly point out how much of the obesity epidemic is actually about conditions and parameters that happen to people when they are children and don't have any choice in the matter, and that it is very, very hard to fully undo those things.
may be impossible to fully undo those things.
However, you can begin making different choices now, and everyone should begin making different choices now, if they are unhealthy.
Oh, of course I'm not arguing against that.
But the problem is that that pattern that people should adopt is one that requires an extreme taste for delayed gratification, right?
There's no set of choices you can make today that are going to have you feeling substantially different by this evening, right?
So the point is, you're talking about changing patterns of behavior that over the course of years of dedication will result in improvement, and who knows how much.
Some people achieve great things in this way, but it's really, really difficult.
And so all I'm saying is that there's a siren song on the rocks, and the siren song says that, you know what, the whole set of notions that we grew up with, that some people are more beautiful than others, that some people achieve more because they're more capable than others, all of that was nonsense.
It was an excuse.
And the problem is that that's not total bullshit, right?
There's an awful lot of rent-seeking that makes people rich.
Did those people contribute more?
Is that why they're rich?
No, some of them not at all.
Some of them are rich and...
Some of them are explicitly and only parasitic.
Right, many of them are only parasitic.
Some of them actually did something that accounts for 15% of their extraordinary wealth and the rest of it was the result of rent-seeking.
That's not uncommon.
So the point is, for those who are not in a position to do anything to control their trajectory, they're basically planktonic.
They're drifting through the economy.
They're drifting through their busy lives.
Planktonic rent-seekers, that's right.
Well, they're not even in a position to seek rent, but the point is, for the person who is helpless because they just didn't, they weren't born into circumstances where they had the resources to do it, and they've been, you know, bombarded with chemicals that are misinforming them, and school didn't help, and all of this stuff, the idea that maybe it was all bullshit all along, there's an awful lot of bullshit, maybe it's just all bullshit, right?
That that is very appealing.
That actually fits, um, I don't think that fits with the next section, but we're going to come back to that.
Let me read the next section.
Sure.
You can show my screen here, and at the top is a picture of one of the drag queens who was at the show, Mistress Isabel Brooks.
This was the crowd favorite.
In Barbie Land 2, everything is spectacle.
It's a movie so pink, it caused a global shortage of pink paint.
As with Work the World, I am neither the intended audience nor familiar with the universe from which the confection emerges.
Once, when I was little, a well-intentioned family member, who was unaware that I had no interest in dolls, gave me a Barbie as a birthday present.
She had loved her Barbies and assumed that I would, too.
I put the box politely aside and never saw the thing again.
That said, much of the movie is entertaining and fun.
Not deep, but not dark, but then it doesn't pretend to be either.
Problem is, it sneaks in a whole lot of wrong, and people accepting wrong things because pop culture sold it to them with popcorn and a coke is part of how we got to the very dark place we are in today.
First, drag was sold to us as some sort of post-feminist fetish, and now, so is Barbie.
Barbie the Movie begins with a remake of the opening scene from Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Instead of a monolith paving the way for apes to become conscious space-traveling humans, we have Barbie as harbinger of a whole new world for girls.
I thought that Barbie's impossible measurements and laughably absurd list of achievements were demeaning to women, not aspirational, but the beginning of this movie would have me believe that I've got it wrong.
Apparently, Barbie is the feminist icon we've all been waiting for.
Mid-film, the Kens take control of Barbie Land and convince most of the Barbies to do the Kens' bidding.
Margot Robbie's appropriately gorgeous, stereotypical Barbie has her dream house stolen and turned into a mojo dojo casa house, a real bro palace.
Understandably, she falls into a funk, which manifests as lying face down on the floor, a few of her golden locks slightly out of place.
In answer to the question of why she is immune to the brainwashing that has turned the rest of the Barbies into Ken accessories, stereotypical Barbie moans, Either you're brainwashed or you're weird and ugly.
There is no in between.
Fantastic.
It's...
This does fit.
This isn't exactly where you ended with what you were riffing on, but this does fit with the The conclusion from many who have been betrayed, feel betrayed, and many of them have been betrayed by a world that did not offer up what it promised.
They, and this again is a point that I have made many times before, they find binaries where there aren't any and they reject the binaries, the few binaries that actually exist in the world, right?
Like male and female is a binary, sorry, it's not going anywhere.
But either you're brainwashed or you're weird and ugly, What a horrifying vision!
And, you know, this is stereotypical Barbie in a funk, and of course not looking weird or ugly at all.
She's got a few locks out of place, right?
So, you know, there is a bit of a spoof here, but Weird Barbie, played by Kate McKinnon, responds to that with something like, oh, don't I know it.
So you know we're thought we're simultaneously supposed to understand like oh this is a joke we know this isn't true but then also be told um by the character that we're kind of rooting for because she's she's the weird one whose kid in the real world has cut off her hair and put marker on her face um that you know she she knows some stuff about life and yeah it's true it's true stereotypical stereotypical barbie barbie you were brainwashed and now you're never gonna be again and uh and too bad for you
Well, I hate to say this because I don't like the world that it suggests, but the conservative trope about the ugliness of liberals, reflected in what Barbie says here,
Would fit rather well with the idea that we've been developing over the course of weeks that there is something about the hemorrhage of antipathy for success that we see on the blue team, right?
That the attack on those The reason that you end up on that team, what I'm not sure I'm happy I called team loser, but it does seem to be an accumulation of people who are rebelling against the idea of merit and success because they're not in shooting distance, right?
Okay, so I do see that, and it's unfortunate.
I don't like it either.
I think it's true, but, you know, there's at least one giant caveat here, which is that, at least as I have understood it in the past, and I don't know that it has changed, the conservative version of female beauty has been a An artifact.
It's been a fiction.
It's been highly made up, highly dysfunctional.
I mean, it's been a Barbie-like thing, right?
Like, you know, the conservative talk show hosts and such look like they wouldn't begin to know what to do with a screwdriver if you hand it to them.
Like, they just would have no idea.
And, you know, the heels, the nails, you know, makeup doesn't inherently impair your ability to do anything.
But, you know, everything about it is, you know, woman as accessory.
And in like now, I think you're right, there's so much embrace of Unhealthiness.
Yeah.
Of, you know, fat is beautiful.
You know, all of these things are just being embraced by Team Loser, if you will.
But there are plenty of beautiful women on the left who don't look like those conservative icons look because they, we, refuse, mostly, to put on heels and make our hands non-functional by having long nails.
Fragile.
That fragile, incompetent, you know, from fragile you get to and probably incompetent because how would you become competent if you were always dressed in a way that you couldn't possibly get anything done?
So you know, that's a giant caveat to a point that I think is basically true.
Well, so I want to flesh out this picture a little bit.
One thing, I disagree with you slightly on makeup is not, doesn't get in the way of doing things, for the following reason.
Well, it doesn't in the way of heels or long nails.
Right, it does not physically impede your ability to do things, but the time necessary to do makeup properly is hobbling.
Sure, there's opportunity cost.
And so, you know, let's just say that, you know, conspicuous consumption is what it is, that The meaning of long painted nails that are easily broken is absolutely transparent.
Right?
The point is, I do not, my value does not come from working with my hands.
And makeup, like the color on the nails, reveals if you have, you know, made an error and gone and done anything.
It's like, oh, my nail's chipped.
I must have, you know, done something physical in the world.
Right.
So anyway, that is what it is.
It comes from where it comes from.
And it doesn't have to mean the same thing in modern times.
But that is Where it obviously began yeah The funny thing or the tragic thing here is as we've discussed The West did really well actually freeing women to participate fully in the creative dynamic parts of civilization.
We succeeded in this really well, right?
You find women are, I don't know what the exact percentages are, but they've reached parity and in some cases exceeded it in graduate school, in medical school, in law school.
The point is women have gained the They have gained agency over how their time will be spent, and that is a major achievement in a short period of time.
Just asterisk.
Note that your examples, and they aren't the only examples to be had, but your examples all involved school.
And this, unfortunately, you know, this is a downstream effect that presumably the dudes in charge around the turn of the last century, from the 1800s to the 1900s, never imagined when it was, you know, women being shunted into sort of school teacher roles.
Like, well, now we have school that's really not particularly good for boys and men.
And here we are.
Well, look, I of course agree with all of that, but the basic point is, look, did we achieve perfection on the sex and gender front?
No.
But did we make shocking levels of gains in a shockingly short period of time?
We absolutely did.
And, you know, many of the, you know, let's take Megyn Kelly for an example.
Megyn Kelly is lovely.
She's wonderful.
She's wonderful.
She is high achieving, incredibly intelligent.
She does have that kind of, I don't know.
No, she's wonderful.
I'm not saying she's not wonderful.
What I'm saying is that the picture you painted of, you know, conservative anchor women, right?
All I'm saying is beauty standards over in that quadrant are simultaneously accurate in some sense with respect to human perceptions.
Of course, some of that is downstream of culture that sets those standards, but objectively beautiful people.
But, you know, Megyn Kelly is not asking to go back to the kitchen.
She is a high-achieving career woman and fighting fiercely on a stage that used to only include men.
I think the example of using anchors, which I raised first, is the wrong one.
Because anyone making a living in front of a camera is going to be made up.
And you can't see the heels, but you can kind of infer them.
Walking around the world, what is more often true of conservative young women versus liberal young women 20 years ago, 30 years ago, was that the conservative young women were more likely to be to be made up to look like dolls.
Right.
Right.
And even then, you know, now it's unfortunately increasingly true.
But even then, the conservatives are saying, ah, liberals are ugly.
It's like, no, we don't have makeup on.
What you're seeing is a farce.
What you're seeing is a mask.
Do you want a mask?
Or do you want a person?
Right.
But the question then with respect to the two events that you attended, I think, and I think I don't want to paint it too cleanly because it's obviously really broken in one way, but I see two failure modes, right?
One of these is the blue team failure mode in which, you know, sex and gender are the invention of something oppressive and we're going to play with every trope and What's more an ugly person is beautiful if we say so and we'll all cheer to prove that we accept this all of that the other is some You know Barbie is not You know, an ivory girl, she's not girl next door, right?
This is, in some ways, a conservative view of what feminine beauty is supposed to be, and in its own way, deeply troubling for that reason, because it does not include the achievements that women have made in participating in... Well, but that's not true.
Right, so, I mean, Mattel has been rebranding Barbies since the beginning, so, like, I mean, No, no, I understand that.
The achievements are part of the Barbie juggernaut now.
Right, of course they are.
But it's part of what makes the whole thing so demeaning, right?
It's like, you spend an hour this morning looking like that and you're a Nobel Prize winner?
Like, that's not a thing.
And you're how old and you're the president?
Like, it's just incoherent.
And it's kind of like, remember that doll?
Like, math is hard.
Was that a Barbie?
I don't remember if that was a Barbie.
I don't know.
But there was some kerfuffle, legitimate kerfuffle, where some doll company put out a doll that you could pull a string in her back, and the girl doll said, math is hard.
I'm like, oh, for fuck's sake.
Sorry.
But like, it's just reifying all of the things.
I agree.
It is achievement as affectation, which is offensive.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there's no question in my mind that what you saw at the RuPaul drag race thing was a, you know, imagine a bowling alley.
There are two gutters you can end up in.
One of them is the Portland dystopia where sex and gender is an invention of the patriarchy and we're un-inventing it because that's what's liberating and all of that.
And the other is something that is happening over in conservative space, which is a, in my opinion, ham-fisted defense of more traditional feminine tropes.
And the real point is, actually, neither of these things work.
Yep.
Nobody rational, I think, wants women back in the kitchen, right, taking a secondary role in civilization.
The gains we have made are not only really important from the point of view of women, but they've just been important to planet Earth.
But just as you were talking about, I think, last week with regard to what you were calling Nazi Twitter, you know, those voices, those people who do want women to be in the kitchen and nowhere else except the bedroom, are getting more and more vocal and, you know, more and more Well, that's the thing.
In the absence of a coherent, forward-looking program in which we acknowledge, hey, liberals were right about some stuff.
You know what they were right about?
That it was a really good idea for women to be liberated to do what women want to do.
On the other hand, there were aspects of this that didn't work, right?
The sexual revolution had massive unintended consequences that we are now suffering from.
And so we need some sort of new forward-looking mechanism for recovering the gains on what we did right and fixing what we did wrong and not going backward.
And the problem is in the absence of that vision, What you have is pick your dystopia, right?
Is it Barbie dystopia, or is it RuPaul dystopia?
And I don't think RuPaul is inherently dystopia.
RuPaul is old enough that RuPaul was traditional drag, which sure was never my thing either.
The point is, is there any harm, really, in guys dressing up as women and, you know, parading themselves in front of an audience?
I don't know, but I think the harm was... Well, I guess increasingly.
I do wonder.
How it is that we have arrived at a moment, a cultural moment, where it is universally understood that blackface is wrong.
Right.
And it is almost widely pushed that womanface is not just fine, but honorable.
Yep.
I increasingly do not see the difference.
Well, the problem here is that we have screwed up the blackface problem, right?
Because it is such a flashpoint, the point is a prohibition against all blackface is almost sensible.
Now it becomes not sensible when we talk about the character Roger in In Mad Men, who has to put on blackface to portray a prior world in which blackface was a thing.
But the problem is, minstrel show is inherently mocking of black people.
Right?
That's the reason that blackface has the connotation that it does.
Well, haven't you just been in a drag show, Brett?
I would say that drag show is inherently mocking of women.
That's the position I'm arriving at.
This is this I agree, but the point is even buried within the question of drag versus trans The problem is, we know trans people who adopt the demeanor of the other sex, and they do not do so disrespectfully.
And we know others who do so disrespectfully.
And that, I guess my point is, you can't make a rule based on whether or not somebody is respectful or not, because how would you be able to establish it one way or the other, which is why we get into these false binaries.
But there are at least two motivations there.
Let me read... I'm not going to end up reading the whole thing, but I've got two more sections.
Sure.
Let me read the first of the two sections.
While feminism is getting a facelift over in Barbie land, RuPaul's Drag Race is playing at the boundary between drag and trance.
These are men dressing as women, not men who think they are women, right?
Right?
Sometimes it's not particularly clear.
Some of the RuPaul drag queens, my scant post-event Googling revealed, have indeed come out as trans.
The distinction is whether the caricature of womanhood that they are creating and displaying is one that they feel like taking off at the end of the day.
Drag didn't used to be confused about this.
But Barbie the Movie seems perfectly happy to add to the confusion.
In Barbieland, woman is a costume to begin with.
Upon arriving in a meeting of Mattel executives, stereotypical Barbie despairs at the lack of women in the C-suite.
I'm a man with no power, offers the intern in attendance.
Does that make me a woman?
Well, no, Erin, it does not.
In both the drag and Barbie confections, the focus is on surface appearances and illusions.
The clothes, the makeup, the hair.
In Barbie land, many other things become fashion accessories as well.
The house, the job, the man.
And in both, womanhood itself is a costume, something to be taken on and off at will.
One of the Barbies in the film is played by a trans woman, and so the farce is complete.
I got the role because I fit the role, explains Hari Neff.
To be honest, I don't look much different in the movie than the Barbies that I had when I was a kid.
Barbie is an impossible fantasy.
Her phenotype obtainable only through a combination of obsessive focus on how you look and plastic surgery.
At least with drag, you don't need the surgery.
Yeah, I'm reminded, I mean, the whole world is so polluted by advertising, but I'm reminded of a Dove campaign from years ago in which they actually showed what it took to take a model and turn her into the thing that one sees in an advertisement.
And the answer was it actually is physically beyond the capacity of an earth woman to be what is often presented in advertising and it requires photoshop and the stretching of necks and the reproportioning of things to take even an attractive woman and uh you know an arms race has has unfolded and the problem you know somewhere next up anime Right.
Somewhere lost.
As soon as you can stretch bits.
Right.
As soon as it's an avatar and the point is, well, what are you really into?
It doesn't have to be connected to reality.
Right.
Right.
So.
You like that?
You want more of that?
We can give you more of that.
Now, again, the connection to market forces is very troubling to me, but the idea that Ivory Girl was a trope that was resonant enough that anybody our age knows what that means, right?
The girl next door, that these were things that were understood not to be in conflict with beauty, right?
This was a reduction in dedication to artificial beauty,
And an emphasis on natural beauty, and unfortunately in the world trapped between the two gutters of RuPaul's Drag Race and Barbie Land, what's lost is a future in which women are not hobbled for hours a day making sure they look just so, but they can in fact be human and do what humans do and it not be thought ugly.
OK, one more section.
But before we go there, I will say that I'm not reading a lot of this, including my analysis of the really unfortunate depiction of the relationships between the sexes in Barbie Land.
The stuff between the Barbies and the Kens is kind of diabolical, actually.
So please, please go and read that here.
But I feel like we've gone... Diabolical.
And it is the thing Uh, that I believe is most inconsistent with the idea that Barbieland is, in some sense, the conservative gutter, right?
The depiction of the relation between the sexes, as I understand it from you, I haven't seen the film, but is much more of the Post-modern, anything goes left then?
No, no, no, not at all.
It's either men rule or women rule, and you can keep having men and women fight over who's going to be.
You go Barbie land, Ken done Barbie land.
But what you absolutely cannot have is both sexes actually having power at the same time.
But isn't it anti-monogamy?
Doesn't it Yes, but that is not what you were just talking about.
No, it is.
I mean, uh… Anyway, it's… yes, there's… I don't think you quite have it right, because I think that this piece, this is… it feels very much like a unfortunate… it's like… it's the stupid left response to the stupid right, where the stupid right is like, men just need to be in charge 100% of the time, all the time, You see what happens when you let women start to get in charge.
And the stupid left is going like, oh, well, maybe Barbie was possible after all.
Maybe we can have a world in which there aren't even any male Supreme Court justices.
And those are our two options?
Since when are those our two options?
Anyway, I could read that part, but I think I'm not going to.
I'm just going to read one more section here.
You can go ahead and show my screen, just another little still from RuPaul's Drag Race.
Um, here we have, um, Asia, the host with, um, their back to the camera, um, attractive, tall, curvy, uh, and, uh, I have no idea how to pronounce this, Deja Sky, maybe?
Um, the other fan favorite, um, uh, another absurd looking sort of caricature of, I don't know, the Disney princess?
I don't even know what.
Costume changes are a large part of both shows, of course, not just between acts, but during acts.
It's magic meets fashion, trusting your eyes and watching them fail you as again and again something new shows up underneath what you thought was the base layer.
Humans as onions, the metaphor revealed through fashion.
In Work the World, occasional big black conical breastplates are reminiscent of 1980s Madonna.
The bouncing rolls of fat most definitely are not.
Everything is sexual.
Some of the sex is violent.
The misogyny is sometimes stark.
The word cunt, always spelled out rather than said as a word, is spat out several times.
Why?
Why does one drag queen ask another to look at your c-u-n-t?
Is it disturbing just for the sake of being disturbing?
Is this a dare?
When not telling someone else to look at the genitalia they patently do not have, the drag queens are all about bringing the attention back to themselves.
Look at me while I do nothing of note.
Look at me while I work it.
Look at me.
There are fantasy in Hollywood and Disney references throughout both of these concoctions.
Oddly, the Matrix is invoked in both.
On offer, Red Pill to wake up and have a challenging of difficult life, or Blue Pill to retain comfort and cluelessness.
Barbie, as we would expect, wants the Blue Pill.
She wants her high-heeled feet back after they've gone flat on her and for everything to go back to normal.
But she doesn't get what she wants, and she's better for it.
Red Pill for the win.
Work the World is constructed to reveal the hive mind of the audience and time and again the audience says it wants the red pill.
They are certain that they would choose to wake up to reality as ugly and uncomfortable as that might be.
This may be the most surprising part of the night for me.
Here is an audience so enmeshed in a fantasy scape that they are convinced not only that they are interested in being awake and in choosing reality over short-term pleasures, but that they have already awoken to reality.
This feels like it may be a critical key and the most important thing here, that I was surprised.
I mean, there's a lot of cultural references, presumably that I didn't get in RuPaul's Drag Race, but many that I did, and many, many in Barbie, from Hollywood history and from film history, many of which I think I did get.
And that's fun, that's good.
But the fact that The Matrix shows up in both places is fascinating.
And that it shows up in these confections, these concoctions, that are presenting a vision of the world that is so dystopian and so farcical and so awful.
And that in one of the cases, the audience has an ability to reveal what it is that they would choose if offered the choice of the matrix of the red pill versus the blue pill.
And the audience makes it clear that they think they've been red-pilled.
It's amazing.
Well, I mean, this is going to link us into the next phase of this discussion, but I'm in a losing battle.
For a very long period of time over the resurrection of the idea of Red Pill.
It is such an important idea that the fact that we are losing it to Andrew Tate and RuPaul and whoever else.
Barbie.
And Barbie.
It's a huge loss because, you know, as we've talked about previously, The Matrix is effectively Plato's Cave, right?
Remade in a modern form.
And Plato's Cave is a story that has to be represented regularly in order for people to understand the possibility of being beguiled by a fiction.
And there is a reality to be understood.
I mean, Plato's Cave, the essential feature of it is that the person who has seen the outside world is not welcomed by his compatriots in the cave he is killed, right?
The idea of an outside world that is actually real is so troubling that he is ended and We need this concept of red pill, and it does not belong to conservatives.
It does not belong to any of the constituencies that would adopt it.
It is not theirs.
It is our common property.
And I will say that the fact of the Wachowski brothers, now sisters, having produced the matrix, having given us the red pill, and now having confused the matter, is, uh, you know, it's like a knife to the heart, right?
Yeah.
And, um, I don't know what we do about it.
I guess we transition.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
It may be why it ends up there.
juice than water i i don't i'd forgotten that so maybe that it partially explains why it ends up but it may it may be why it ends up there um and then the the andrew tate version of this is so troubling also um
because andrew you know andrew tate is also not incorrect about a lot of what he observes about the world but he is apparently based on a tremendous amount of video that i've now seen of him saying in his own words you know instructing men how to view women and it's this it is this parasitic view of women that they must be dominated they must be abused
um that this is the natural order of things and it's just a it's a horrifying uh way of looking at it so So to have Him using red pill as his, you know, central metaphor is just very, very destructive.
So, look, we are living in something shockingly Matrix-like, and we do need people red-pilled.
And, you know, there's a lot of nuance that isn't in there.
I find myself talking to other people who see the world as we do and saying, don't forget, the most any of us is is half awake, right?
It's not that we've been red pilled and we see the world.
We don't yet know what we don't yet know.
And you and I keep discovering this, you know, as much as we are aware of all sorts of malfeasance and skullduggery, we keep discovering stuff that we didn't miss because we didn't see because you can't pay attention to it all at the same time.
So anyway, it's the red pill moment, and of course, if it's the red pill moment, and you are an entity that is protected by the blue pill, then trivializing the red pill by putting it in Barbie's mouth, or RuPaul's, and everybody embracing it because they're the cognizant, will turn it into nothing.
It makes the metaphor useless, and it means that we now are again You know, grasping for some way to convey to people that you haven't seen it yet because you're still inside the cave looking at the shadows on the wall.
Yeah.
The scene in Barbie where stereotypical Barbie is morose and doesn't know how to get her world back um and her her feet have literally fallen so instead of walking around like this uh she's she's got flat feet for the first time you know barbie dolls actually have the high heel feet you know this i guess they would have to but right
so um it's it's there's a suspension of disbelief that you can do to watch a good part of this movie and just be entertained right and um and And the acting is great and the production value is incredibly high, all of this.
But so she steps out of her shoes and her feet are still shaped like high-heeled.
And then one day they collapse.
And she's horrified and she shows the other Barbies.
They're like, oh my god, that's hideous.
What is wrong with your feet, right?
So she ends up several scenes later, I think, in front of Weird Barbie, you know, with the cut off hair and the marker on her face.
Weird Barbie is like, you're gonna have to go out into the real world, babe.
You're gonna have to just go out and find the girl who is putting thoughts of death in your head and flattening your feet.
But Weird Barbie comes at her with, you can have the stiletto or the Birkenstock.
And Barbie's like, I want the stiletto.
I definitely want the stiletto.
And Weird Barbie's like, no, sorry, that wasn't actually a choice.
You're being red pilled, girl.
So like, well, it works, right?
Like there's there's pieces in here that are actually like, I just it's not okay to be spoofing things and then keep your options open and also be in in the woke world or in what like it's not a spoof if you've kept all of your options open and when the audience decides what it thinks and what it wants then you're like yeah that's what I meant.
As a filmmaker, as the actors and actresses, as the people who put this together, you have to actually have a position that you stand by.
Because the fact that I can see some goodness here, I don't want to trust that, because the filmmakers haven't earned.
My trust sufficiently to be sure that that scene right there is actually more evocative of what they were trying to do than the bit where the Kens are mocked for actually caring about the Barbies.
So it is, we've all met the girl or young woman who uses the idea that she was kidding to cover, if she says something to see what reaction it gets and the reaction isn't good, then it was kidding.
Yeah.
Right?
And so, that is cheating.
That is cheating.
It's absolutely cheating.
You don't get to keep all of your options open.
Right.
You don't get to be like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to try this.
Oh, you like that?
Yeah, I'm going to bury that shit.
Right.
And just keep pushing forward with the thing.
Like, I was just doing trial balloons.
Like, yeah, but at the time, you came across as if you had a position, and it turns out you didn't.
This was audience-generated conclusion as opposed to you have come to an idea and you have put that idea in a creative form in front of us.
So it strikes me that the missing thing in the dichotomy between the stiletto and the Birkenstock is the sensible shoes, of course.
And my As you know, personally, I find high heels detract from attractiveness because they suggest a willingness to self-hobble, which I don't find attractive.
Yeah, there was an event we were going to a while back, and I was like, I think, I guess, fancy event, I think I need to get some heels.
You're like, no.
No, like, let's let's find some really nice boots.
Yes.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
I'm not against, you know, something sexy, but yeah.
And unless anyone gets some stupid idea about what that was, I was like, oh, thank God.
OK, I don't have to.
Right.
But, you know, if the sensible shoe fits, wear it.
Right.
And that's the missing thing.
You know, the ivory girl, girl next door, sensible shoes.
The point is.
And, you know, frankly, let's just go there.
All right, where are we going?
Same issue with huge boobs.
They're hobbling.
And it's one thing— Well, in some cases that's a choice, but generally, I mean, it wasn't until recently— No, huge boobs is in general a choice.
Some women have huge boobs.
Yep, that is true.
But I guess my point is for, you know, they are hobbling because they are mechanistically for something and the fact that they are mechanistically for something and have become an advertisement of fertility and therefore men are focused on them, which causes women in an arms race to go to surgeons to augment these things.
The point is actually Again, you're self-hobbling.
Yeah, for sure.
That's, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm alone in this, but it's not attractive to self-hobble, right?
Right.
I mean, I guess, you know, given who I ended up with, an enabled woman is obviously my type.
But a self-hobbling woman, you know, maybe you have to for your role in the world.
But if you don't, it just it just seems like an advertisement that you're not interested in accomplishing things, at least in certain realms.
Right.
No, I mean, it's, and this, this does play into the generally conservative, you know, trad tropes of, you know, this, these, these are your years, honey, like between the ages of 16 and 24 or whatever, like that's, that's when you got to do it.
So play it for all you got, because you're not gonna be worth anything later.
Yeah.
And so, you know, to the women who are playing into that, I would say, you do hope to live past 24, don't you?
Like, you do expect to be on this planet for a good long time.
And it's one thing to be beautiful and to say, you know what, I'm beautiful.
But it's quite another to say, that's the only thing that I'm going to invest in.
It's like, you know, it's like we've said to our boys, like, what you don't want is for high school to be the best part of your life.
Right?
Like you always want to be able to look ahead and say I'm still trying to get somewhere.
I'm still aspiring to something.
It strikes me.
The tragedy for women in an age in which achievement is more possible than it has ever been, where access has been opened up to the greatest extent, is that women have two kinds of potential power.
One of them is Uh, the result of physical attractiveness.
It peaks very, very young and then degrades.
And so that idea of like, well, if you're going to capitalize now's the time is about this kind of power, which is always coupled with somebody too young to know what to do with power.
Inherently.
Right.
Inherently.
Whereas the other kind of power for women comes through achievement and insight.
And that, of course, as with men, is going to grow over time as you come to understand the world better, come to accumulate skills, and all of this.
And the sexual obsession of Western civilization has caused one of these things to be emphasized as female power, and the other one to be ignored and marginalized, and the two of them to be mixed so that You know, we will actually do insane things like, you know, critique the looks of a highly achieving woman, you know, as a primary consideration.
So anyway, the point is that that trope about, you better get on it, is really about like a
Scholarship is the wrong word because scholarship is about learning but the idea that there for a beautiful woman there is a way to get a free ride through life and it involves capitalizing on that female beauty early in life as it peaks and finding someone who will carry you through to the finish line and that's not really what anybody should be telling women because there's this whole other thing which is really about you know okay you're a human being you've got a lifetime what can you achieve?
Right?
Yeah.
That's really what we should be emphasizing.
That's right.
We've been at this for a while.
Yes.
So I know you have a lot that you want to talk about.
I will try to be efficient about it.
Well, I'm just trying to hand the Sharpie over to you.
Thank you.
Yes, I did.
But now he knows he has it.
You have the talking Sharpie.
I have the talking Sharpie.
All right.
What I want to talk about is something I didn't get to last live stream, which is something I've noticed about the term Deep State, which is a term that I find tremendously important, right up there with something like Red Pill.
And what I noticed was starting in about somewhere in the neighborhood of 2016 that the term I understood, which I don't know when I learned the term Deep State but probably in college, that the term that I know
was suddenly being supplanted by a definition that not only did I not recognize it as correct, but that was actually destructive of our ability to talk about the deep state, which I believe that we have to.
And this had a lot, when it happened in 2016, it had a lot to do with Trump, of course, because Trump was all about talking about the deep state and its effect.
And mind you, the deep state is a hypothesis.
I think it's a very strong hypothesis.
But it is a hypothesis.
By its very nature, it is not something that we can investigate and establish its existence.
We have to infer its existence from the way history proceeds.
And one of the features of the deep state is that it obscures itself.
So it's a troubling problem.
But as soon as Trump started... So are you going to tell us what the hypothesis is?
Well, I'm going to tell you what the two styles of definition... Are they both hypotheses?
Well, that's a great question.
I would say one of them is a hypothesis, and the other has the same status, except that it is so certain to be true that it's effectively a tautology.
Okay.
So what you started hearing about in the late 80s, early 90s, what was known as the deep state is a hypothesis, and the newer incarnation Yeah, maybe so, but in a trivial way, because it must be true.
It can't help but be somewhat true.
Let's start with the second one first, because I'm going to argue that this is an illegitimate use of the term and we need some other term for it.
Mind you, many of the people that we like a great deal, people we think highly of their capacity to think, have embraced a definition You have a state, the United States, and the United States is ostensibly governed by democratic processes in which we elect and unelect people based on our sense that they will do our bidding once in power.
But there is a vast bureaucracy under them and you can't swap it out every time administrations change to the point is there a huge number of people who remain in their position in the State Department because they know how to do that thing and you can't start from scratch.
Every time you switch administrations.
So that vast bureaucratic network of people, the term, the first time I heard this abused, the point was, these are the people who keep the lights on.
Right?
That thing has power, because it is composed of people.
Those people have beliefs about what should be true, what shouldn't be true, and you can imagine that that vast bureaucracy, if it were, for example, unhappy with
A person or an administration that had just been elected could drag its heels and engage in bits of sabotage here and there and that the amount of power in that vast bureaucratic network that cannot be replaced is considerable and is a force of history that we cannot speak to directly because it's an emergent property.
Okay, so that's the, in my opinion, broken definition.
The correct definition... The broken definition, the new definition, the hypothesis, sure, but it must be true, and so it's not that interesting to talk about as if it's surprising.
Right, it has to be true, and... Why don't you call that a theory?
Why don't you say you're not a theorist?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
So anyway, I say it's a tautology because although we can't calibrate how big a force of history it could be, it could be a huge force of history, this bureaucratic inertia, or it could be a minor force of history, it could be anywhere in between, that it is some force of history is essentially certain.
So it is a hypothesis, but it is so close to being certain that we don't have to treat it as highly speculative.
The correct definition, I believe, and I now know from doing some research into the history of the term, is quite different.
It is effectively a cabal that exists behind the scenes, inside of the governance structure, which doesn't have to mean the official governance structure.
Maybe not employed by the government.
Right, and in fact it will undoubtedly have roles inside of official government, it will have roles outside of official government, and it takes a position on policy, but we cannot vote against it, we cannot evaluate it, we cannot, and this is I think the sine qua non.
It's inherently shadowy.
It is inherently a shadowy force, It does not abide to the consent of the governed.
We didn't decide to put it in power.
It is therefore a violation of the most sacred principle.
That's true of both?
Yes and no.
It's not really true of the bureaucracy, because the bureaucracy didn't elect itself.
We elected people.
They decided how to put the bureaucracy together, and their control over it may be less effective than we would like, but it's not that Any of the people in the bureaucracy can't be fired.
They can all be fired, right?
How do you fire the deep state?
You can't.
And I want to point to the thing that I would call the single... Because they don't have official jobs.
Right.
It's not an official entity.
It doesn't have a name.
It doesn't have an office.
So the point is, yes, there are people in the deep state who are undoubtedly in positions from which they could be fired, but you can't fire the deep state.
Why can't you fire the deep state?
Here's the sine qua non, the central element.
The thing that makes the deep state is a black budget.
What does that mean?
A black budget is a budget that is acquired through extra legal, extra constitutional means.
So let's just say the CIA has a budget.
That budget comes through the Congress.
The Congress has the power of the purse and the Congress could, in theory, decide to cut off the CIA.
However, we do know that, for example, the Once upon a time outlandish conspiracy theory that the CIA was trafficking drugs into the United States turns out to be well supported by evidence.
What do they do with those drugs?
Well, here's the thing.
If you're if you are a an entity that has powers to cross borders to engage in crime, frankly, in order to do your job right, you can't, you know, so the CIA has vast powers to act outside of The law ostensibly it is supposed to be acting outside of the United States, but nonetheless It has great powers that have been granted to it by the state and if it uses those powers
to generate funds that are not on the books, then the point is nobody can take those funds away.
And so... Nor do they need to be explained.
Right.
Neither can they disappear until they're spent, but nor do they need to be spent on anything that has gone through any sort of process and vetting.
Right.
So what I want to lay out is a model where Why the deep state seems to have come into existence and what it might mean that it seems to exist.
Again, it's a hypothesis, but it's one that I believe is well supported by evidence.
Did you, sorry, did you run into, when does the term emerge do you know?
You were hearing it in the late 80s first.
I was hearing it in the late 80s, and then in doing some research, I discovered some things I did not know about the history of the term.
There are insects on your paper.
There are insects on my paper.
There's nothing to do with the Deep State.
Yeah.
All right.
So the source here is a site called ThoughtCo, which I did not know.
Yeah, you want to show it?
And then... Yeah, ThoughtCo is hit and miss.
It's not perfect, but I think people can check whether or not they've done their homework properly.
But I think what I'm going to read is... I mean, if they didn't make it up entirely, which they won't have, It's a good first pass.
The concept of the Deep State, also called a state within a state or a shadow government, was first used in reference to political conditions in countries like Turkey and post-Soviet Russia.
During the 50s, an influential anti-democratic coalition within the Turkish political system called the Derin Devlet, literally the Deep State, allegedly dedicated itself to ousting communists from the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Ataturk after World War I.
Made up of elements within the Turkish military, security, judiciary branches, the Derlin Devlet worked to turn the Turkish people against its enemies, that is the enemies of the deep state, by staging false flag attacks and planned riots.
Ultimately, the Derlin Devlet was blamed for the deaths of thousands of people.
Wow.
So that's long after Ataturk, but in Ataturk's Turkey.
Yeah.
A. The deep state, if that is indeed the origin of the term, matches what I'm calling the, well supported by evidence, hypothesis of a cabal that seeks to wield power in spite of not having been elected, and not the vast bureaucracy that keeps the lights on, but probably also has a political perspective that in some way affects the way governance occurs.
Right.
Okay.
How does such a thing happen?
Well, first I want to... I don't like doing this, but I think it needs to be done.
I want to point out that there are processes which, to an honest broker inside of the intelligence community, inside of the establishment in many places, are absolutely frightening, right?
Processes like democracy.
Right?
Democracy, I mean, you know, the founders of the U.S.
were terrified by the ability of the mob to do rash things, and they worried about this in creating a democratic republic.
They worried about the tyranny of the majority in particular.
So democracy is understood to be a dangerous phenomenon because you can't predict what it's going to do.
And so you can certainly imagine that somebody, even somebody who ostensibly was public-minded, who was interested in protecting the citizenry might rightly fear that the people could go nuts and do some bad stuff.
And so democracy is a kind of a scary principle to establish because what will you do if it doesn't go well?
Likewise, science, right?
Scientists are annoying people.
They can come up with stuff you don't... So is everyone.
Yeah, but I mean, from the point of view of folks who are just trying to get stuff done, the idea that science can decide that, you know, what you've been doing in the world is actually dangerous to the public, Right?
What do you do if you create an industry and it's all going swimmingly and then suddenly somebody pipes up and says, hey, by the way, that process that you're engaged in is causing all of these harms.
Right?
That's a frightening risk to take.
Journalists.
Oh my god, you think scientists are annoying?
These people are incredible.
They just don't stop.
They're always digging into stuff.
They're always looking for dirt on people.
And lo and behold, you can find that whatever you did to make your business happen is suddenly on the front page of the New York Times.
Right?
So, that's a scary process.
Regulators, right?
Regulators could take some, you know, $100 million research project of yours that was targeted on finding some beautiful drug that was going to cure some disease, and they could decide that, you know, it's not safe to give to enough people to make it profitable.
That's going to be downstream of the science, hopefully.
One would hope, right?
So anyway, my point is there are lots of frightening processes out there that people who are interested in doing whatever it is that they are targeted on could understandably fear, right?
Democracy, journalism, science, regulators.
They could fear being taxed into oblivion.
They could Now, in the modern era, they could fear social media influencers, right?
Yes.
I mean, what happens if somebody starts broadcasting inconvenient truths from their man cave about your safe and effective vaccines, for example, right?
That could be a problem.
Not a man cave, I wasn't talking about us.
I was talking about someone else's man cave, but anyway, point is, look, You can imagine that people who are trying to do stuff in the market might have understandable fears about what process could come out of nowhere and upend whatever it is they've invested in.
And they might think, what can we do to hedge out that risk?
Right?
Yep.
That, I believe, is going to be the origin of this deep state impulse, which is not fundamentally American.
We see it in the context of, you know, Turkey and post-Soviet Russia.
Given what you just said, it's probably the time to mention that Rumble has collapsed, so we're still on YouTube and you should keep going, but in fact the whole site actually, it was just us for a little bit and now it collapsed.
Alright, well, Rumble has apparently collapsed.
That is interesting.
Seriously?
I wasn't gonna- given what you were talking about, I figured it was worth mentioning.
Is Local still working?
The chat's still up on Locals, but people have to watch on YouTube right now.
Wow.
Well, all of you who are listening, and more people do listen afterwards than watch, this should concern you not at all, but that's rather remarkable.
I've never seen Rumble.
Rumble has large triggers and it doesn't tend to collapse.
Yeah.
Well, in any case, what else is there to do but see the strangest things can leap up and get in the road of what you're trying to accomplish?
They don't seem that strange anymore.
Yeah, they don't seem that strange anymore, yeah.
Now, let's talk about what it means if we dichotomize the concept of deep state.
And mind you, I have a, uh, lexicographical rule?
Is that a word?
I don't know.
I don't... lexicograph... yeah.
I have a word about lexicon.
It's just a part of the... Lexicological?
Lexicological.
I don't think that's a word either.
What's that?
Lexigraphical.
Lexigraphical.
Alright.
That was your mother-in-law.
That was a team effort.
Yeah.
Okay.
The rule is this.
First of all, the reason for the rule is the following thing.
When you do independent work, when you think independently about some realm, You end up having to redefine terms.
It is required because if we use the definitions of terms that are generally available, they all have become blunt because people use them in many different ways.
And so every term is a blunt instrument.
And in order to do logical work properly, you have to sharpen the terms so that they mean something very precise.
And most people who do this forget that they've redefined them.
And then when they talk to each other, they sound like idiots.
They are unable to converse.
So my rule on interacting with people who have likely redefined terms for their own purposes is, look, I don't care if we use my definition or your definition, but I care that every single term we need is precisely defined and that there is a term for every single thing we need to talk about.
And we start by trying to establish a dictionary.
Right, and it takes weeks often to learn to understand what somebody means by the words that they're using.
I haven't seen you try to establish a dictionary so much as be insistent on stopping whenever a word is used that might have any complexity to it at all, and being like, okay, you use that word, and rather than sort of Princess Bride style, like, I don't think you know what that word means, like, how are you using that?
What do you think it means?
And so in this case, I'm going to say that the evidence that the term deep state actually comes from Turkey, And that it means something close to what I think the deep state means is a case in which that definition should prevail.
And the vast bureaucratic inertia that prevents things from changing as fast as the ballot box would have it change.
Vast bureaucratic inertia sounds pretty good.
Vast bureaucratic inertia something.
It needs a term and maybe that's a decent one.
But okay, so the sine qua non, just as the sine qua non of fascism is the fusion of corporate power and government power, the sine qua non of the deep state is the existence of a black budget that allows it to remain even when attempts to control it are imposed and allows it to continue over time.
Without us being able to assess what it's done, because we can't look at what it spent.
Yeah.
Okay, so to me, this question, let's talk again in the realm of hypothesis.
We have a battle that never resolves over what took place in 1963 in the United States, in Dealey Plaza.
A president was assassinated.
Nobody disputes this.
But what the meaning of that assassination was, we are battling over it, even if we don't realize it, right?
There is a battle over the narrow question, did Oswald act alone or was there some group involved in that assassination?
But what we don't typically talk about is the implication of that branch in the decision tree.
If Oswald acted alone, then it wasn't a coup because Oswald died days later at the hand of Jack Ruby.
So he wouldn't have taken power anyway, but he certainly didn't take power because he died.
So he did not commit an assassination to take power.
On the other hand, if something else assassinated Kennedy, then there is at least the possibility that there was a coup, that something killed him in order to take power.
And if that did happen, then the question is, what happened to it?
Does it still have power?
Did it lose power in a later election?
We don't know.
And we can't ask the question in a standard sense because it doesn't exist on the books.
Well, and did it lose power in a later election?
That question suggests that it would inherently, that some elections might cause a deep state entity to lose power, and I don't think it would be that clean.
Well, so again, we are now in the realm of speculation.
Yeah, and there are so many levers.
There's some structure, hypothetically.
Which is unknown to us, unseen by us, and the nature of the hierarchy within that structure is totally unperceived.
So what would cause it to lose power, change power, come to want a different thing?
Well, you know, let's put it this way.
An overt coup.
A military regiment goes rogue.
The likes of which we don't see here.
It's not an American style.
Lots of stories from modern Africa.
Sure.
So some junta takes over, they rule for a bit, and then some process happens and the junta is no longer in power.
I'm trying to remember exactly what the origin story for the Sandinistas, who were briefly in power in Nicaragua, was.
Yeah, actually, and some modern stories from Latin America, too, with a little bit more involved.
Loosely speaking, the Sandinistas defeated the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.
They ruled for a bit and were displaced by the UNO party, I believe.
Yeah, Violeta Chamorro.
Right.
With the help of the CIA.
Right.
Exactly.
In 1980s sometime.
Late 80s.
Yeah.
So okay, so that would be the way that something that had engaged in a coup could lose power later.
And there was a weird power sharing arrangement in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas actually remained in charge of the military.
In the aftermath of the Chamorro administration taking power.
So anyway, it was an interesting, interesting story.
But you know, such things are not, you know, Nicaragua still exists.
Although, I mean, just as an aside, when we were there in 1991, The totally justified anti-American sentiment was intense and we had we traveled through all of the countries of Central America except for Belize and El Salvador on that trip and only in Nicaragua did we feel like we are clearly not welcome here and we understand why and we're not going to spend a lot of time.
So 1963.
Yeah.
Was that an assassination with no coup, or was that a coup that we couldn't see because we didn't understand what had taken place?
And I will say, you know, oh my god, wild-eyed conspiracy theory!
Well, turns out that according to the site 538, Nate Silver's statistical site, only 33% of Americans, and this is a relatively recent survey, only 33% of Americans believe that Oswald acted alone.
So the idea that there was some sort of a conspiracy that involved Oswald plus at least one other person is widely shared.
Yeah.
And for good reason.
If you look at the evidence surrounding the Kennedy assassination, it is... Just like the ballistics.
Yes, how could Oswald shooting from where he was shooting have accomplished what he did accomplish?
It is not a easily answered question.
In fact, it's kind of an unanswerable question.
I would also say there is, you know, just to take one example, if you look at Dan Rather, who was given the exclusive right to view the Zapruder film, the Zapruder film, which we, I think, all kind of intuitively feel has been around since the assassination, but was actually held privately until relatively recently, Dan Rather reports exactly and correctly what he saw in that film.
Exactly and correctly?
Yes, he reports exactly and correctly about the trajectory of the President's head In the aftermath, which suggests that the bullet came from the depository, which is not what's reflected in the actual Zapruder film.
I think I just don't understand the semantics thing of what you're saying.
Dan Rather was given the exclusive right to talk about the Zapruder film.
What he says in his public report is exactly incorrect.
If you look at the Zapruder film and you look at what Dan Rather said about the Zapruder film, they are exactly incorrect.
So he is asked to comment publicly on the Zapruder film before anyone in the public can see it.
Right.
And he makes comments that once the Zapruder film is in the public realm, which it is now, you can see is exactly the opposite of what is actually happening.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so what Rather said supports the idea that the shot came from the book depository behind the President and what is on the film does not.
But anyway, so there's lots of strange evidence.
And then there's the strangest piece of evidence of all from the John Kennedy assassination, which is the Robert Kennedy Sr.
assassination.
If there was a coup in 1963, did it protect itself in 1968 by eliminating Robert Kennedy Sr.?
So anyway, there's good reason for Americans to wonder whether or not something took control and refused to relinquish it.
And that this is, you know, if that didn't happen, then our history looks like one thing.
And if we've been living under a regime that is not elected and decided to take power and not relinquish it, our history means something entirely different.
For 60 years.
Well, you know, I don't think Trump is part of it.
I think somehow Trump actually got himself elected.
And if that was in spite of the fact that a deep state existed and didn't want him To ascend to the office, then he outfoxed it, which is pretty interesting, and it would explain a lot of what has happened in the aftermath, right?
Oh my god, the deep state has lost its power, but of course, because it's a deep state, and the fact that a president is antagonistic to it doesn't mean that the president could shut it down, because it doesn't have a phone number, right?
So anyway, that would explain a lot of what we've seen there, and in any case, it's just simply something that we need to wrap our minds around.
Our history could mean one of two things depending upon what happened in 1963, and we don't know.
So that is a profound challenge.
It requires us to clarify our thinking around what the term Deep State Actually means, and I guess I would connect it to one other thread, an important thread that has bubbled up in the public conversation of late, which has to do with Biden family corruption, specifically surrounding Hunter and, you know,
The defense that has always been made is, well, that's Hunter, that's not Joe.
But much of what Hunter says suggests Joe is involved, and in fact there's evidence this week that Hunter put Joe on the phone.
In any case, there is the terrible stench of Of influence peddling with impunity by the Bidens.
Now, this is slightly galling to me because I was trying to call attention to that fact before Joe Biden was elected president.
I don't know how many times between my Twitter account, between interviews in various places, Dark Horse, or what was it called?
The campfires that Unity 2020 held.
The idea that the DNC was an influence peddling racket, that Joe Biden was a clear career influence peddler, that this put the country in great danger.
These were things in which I was trying to raise the alarm before we ever elected this guy president.
And the fact that we are now finally seeing tons and tons of evidence, I mean, okay, the evidence is interesting, but how could anybody be shocked by this?
This was obvious that this is what the man was, and as his decrepitude has advanced...
The failure of the blue team to react like this is in any way important actually suggests that they understand that the president is not really in power.
It doesn't matter that he's decrepit because something else controls the way the country functions in the first place.
I'm not sure what to do with all of that, but we do seem to be stuck in a place where something appears to be controlling our trajectory.
We have elections, but elections are not the same thing as democracy.
We are now faced with an appalling level of control over what we can discuss.
We are now watching people... Joe Mercola had his bank accounts suspended without explanation by Chase Bank.
He reports, Dr. Mercola, yeah.
Yeah, he reports that this has happened and, you know, between the insane overreach, punishing people who speak out of turn, the IRS showing up at Matt Taibbi's door in the immediate aftermath of Twitterfile's revelations,
The number of off-brand forms of control and coercion that are being used to prevent those who would still engage in journalism, those who would engage in science, those who would engage in medicine, any of these things, it's obvious that it's happening.
And what the connection between all these things is, admittedly, I don't know.
But it's obvious that we should be asking the question, especially, you know, in light of what we have discovered about, for example, the Five Eyes Alliance, which is an alliance between the United States, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia that effectively functions to allow
states to outsource violations of its own citizens' rights by having the intelligence agencies of other countries do the spying.
God, other than the fact that it's missing Canada, that's the greatest hits of bad COVID response countries.
I think it does have Canada. - Okay.
UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
That's like, that's the greatest hits right there.
That's the greatest hits.
Right.
And actually, so anyway, the point is, what is that thing?
Well, you know, intelligence agencies, you know, the FBI is limited by the Constitution.
The CIA is not limited by the Constitution because it's ostensibly supposed to be pointed outwards, outside of the United States.
But You know, you can trade effectively.
You can have somebody else spy on your citizens in a way you're not technically allowed to.
And if everybody pulls those resources, basically the constitutional protections don't exist.
But it sounds like you're opposed to convenience.
Well, OK, we're going to add convenience to recreation as things that I alone am opposed to, but... All right, I'm going to get off my... I mean, you cried that it makes it easier for them.
Yeah, it's an efficiency thing.
It saves money off their black budgets.
Alright, I think that's more or less what I wanted to outline.
Oh no, there was one other thing I wanted to add.
Is that 48 point font?
I'm sorry.
I'm stuck permanently.
I don't need glasses for distance.
I do need them for reading, and if I'm not going to be constantly putting them on, I need to have large font.
So I make no apologies.
I know.
I wouldn't have said that if I thought you were embarrassed by it.
Yeah.
All right.
So here's the final thing I want to point out.
We have a terrible corruption problem, right?
Those of us who have thought deeply about it call it capture for a reason, because it's not an adjustment to policy based on a certain amount of resources flowing in the wrong direction.
It is actually the commandeering of agencies and institutions and the repurposing of them, often in the exact inverse direction that they are supposed to be pointed.
Okay, so that's a terrible problem.
We've now seen it during COVID.
Not only did we do everything wrong, but we did everything the opposite of right, right?
Something was very interested in pharma coming out of that, you know, glowing, and it didn't really care that people were going to get maimed in the process.
All right, that's a terrible corruption problem.
Does anybody think that the fact that we have a pay-for-play political system has not been noticed by our enemies?
Why would our enemies not have noticed that in the United States, if you have enough resources, you can get policy that fits your special interest?
And if your special interest is that you're an enemy of the US and you want us, for example, Um, to, I don't know, feminize our military or something so they're less scary.
Uh, there's probably a price.
Right?
Given Biden family corruption, I think we have to ask the question, why are we fighting a proxy war in Ukraine?
Why are we risking nuclear war in Ukraine?
Is that because somebody thinks this is a good idea for the American public, or is it because something external has paid the price to get us to do it?
I don't know the answer to that question.
I don't pretend to, but I do think it is a question we have to ask.
In thinking about how to present this, I remembered, as you know, one of my favorite fiction books is Catch-22.
And I was reminded of a particular episode in Catch-22.
Almost all of the episodes in Catch-22 have happened in real life in a much less comedic form in the years since I've been aware of it.
But I was reminded of A particular episode in Catch-22 surrounding Milo Minderbinder.
And for those who haven't read the book, I just want to say Milo Minderbinder I think is the most interesting character in the whole book.
Milo Minderbinder starts out as a likable, ambitious patriot who attempts to do his job.
He is in charge of the commissary, I guess, providing food.
Oh, just food?
Yeah, I think he's providing food for the pilots in this World War II Air Force base.
And Milo initially provides wonderful food, because if he's going to provide food, why wouldn't he provide the best?
And so he does a spectacular job, and this brings him in contact with the market, right?
Because, of course, you have to source the ingredients to make the marvelous food for the pilots.
And so anyway, he At first makes normal contact with market forces and as the book progresses those market forces turn him from this likable, you know, ambitious guy with plenty of pluck and ingenuity.
But also underlying patriotism.
Underlying patriotism into a Hitlerian character, right?
Seamlessly.
And so in one case, which I I managed to find the text of Milo, who has produced something called the Syndicate.
The Syndicate does the trading that allows him to procure the supplies, but it becomes this business.
So in one of his, you know, in an early episode with the syndicate.
The syndicate has purchased a huge amount of Egyptian cotton, which turns out to have been a terrible... he can't unload the stuff, he can't trade it, he's just got warehouses full of stuff, and he wants to get rid of it.
And so he decides to try to feed it to the pilots, and of course it's... Cotton.
Yeah.
Inedible.
Turns out to be cotton.
So it didn't work.
Anyway, that's mild compared to what goes on later.
Later in the book, There's a case where Nately, one of the pilots, has died because he's bailed out of his plane and his parachute has been replaced by shares in the syndicate, which he discovers as he pulls the ripcord.
And Milo has a conversation with Yossarian about the fact of Nately's untimely death.
Milo says, Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian.
He had over 60 shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian says, what difference does that make?
He's dead.
Minderbinder says, well, then his family will get it.
Yossarian says, he didn't have time to have a family.
Milo says, then his parents will get it.
Yossarian says, they don't need it.
They're rich, Milo says.
Then they'll understand.
So anyway, he becomes this evil character.
In one of the episodes, Milo contracts with the Nazis to bomb his own base.
Right?
Now this is a mind-bending problem, because what Milo does is he reasons that the Germans are going to bomb the base.
Anyway.
Anyway.
They're going to do it, and people are going to get killed.
And Milo can bomb the base as a contractual matter.
And he can make sure that nobody gets hurt.
It's like we're going to do it for you.
Right.
And you're going to pay us.
Right.
And so.
We'll do your work for you.
Right.
And so my point is the market has a mind bending logic.
Not all of the logic is tolerable, right?
You can make a defense of Milo Minderbinder bombing his own base because the point is the base is gonna get bombed and nobody's gonna get killed this way.
It's a moral good.
Someone's gonna do it and I did it better.
Right.
And my point is The corruption that we see and the role that it plays in our history, which we will never fully understand, is such a thing.
Whatever market forces caused people to fear that democracy was going to upend good processes for no reason, I mean, and this does happen, right?
We see absolutely nonsensical stuff Warning stickers over everything, right?
If warning stickers actually save lives, then too many warning stickers kills people because you don't read warning stickers anymore, right?
So we see a proliferation of warning stickers that originally came from some honorable impulse but has just gotten out of control.
Warning stickers have been found by the state of California to cause cancer.
That would be good.
I bet they do if you eat enough of them.
But anyway, the point is, look, there are legitimate fears to have about democracy, journalism, science, right?
Good people can find themselves upended by people nitpicking them to death.
On the other hand, without the processes that are capable of nitpicking people to death, we are vulnerable to something else, which is the very stuff that the founders of this country feared, right?
Unbridled power in the hands of something like a monarch.
Descents into tyranny of all kinds.
And so, in any case, we're going to have to address the question of the deep state.
Does it exist?
What is it made of?
And how can we remove it so we can go back to the frightening prospect of democracy?
Let's figure it out.
All right.
That on the next episode of Darkness.
Oh, really?
Okay.
You promised big, man.
Yeah.
Okay, we're going to take a break and come back with a live Q&A.
All right.
We're going to probably make it brief because that was that we went on for a while.
We didn't break the whole internet, but we broke Rumble.
Apparently.
It's back mostly.
I don't even know what that means.
So check out Natural Selections, where I read from a lot of YouGoGirl this week, which I posted yesterday.
We've got DarkHorseStore.org, where you can get a variety of awesome merchandise printed right here in the United States by this lovely couple.
country.
We've got SIOP, Until Proven Otherwise, and Pfizer, The Breakthroughs Never Stop, various other things.
You can, of course, get a Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century anywhere that you can find books and signed copies are available at Darvils, which is right here in the San Juan Islands.
You can order them online.
And we've got our monthly private Q&A coming up this Sunday at 11 a.m.
The first time we're going to be in the United States, For one more month, we're going to be doing that at my Patreon.
And as soon, by the end of the day, the dog is groaning in the background, just like, not Patreon again.
I feel the same way about it since they threw Carl Benjamin on.
I know.
Well, the Labrador and the Carl Benjamin are on the same team, apparently.
With this Sunday at 11am Pacific, we're going to be doing our two-hour private Q&A.
You can join us there by coming to my Patreon, and before the end of the day I will have up there as well the ability for people to ask questions at the $11 tier for that private Q&A, and then we're going to be moving those conversations to local starting next month.
We haven't figured out all the details, but that will be happening there, and of course you can be watching the chat What else do we want to talk about?
Sneezing.
Dog sneezing.
in the watch party there.
What else do we wanna talk about?
Sneezing, dog sneezing, so many little distractions here.
Soon also at Locals, we're gonna have access to our great Discord community, Right now, you can get that through our Patreons, and we're not going to be shutting those down.
We're just going to be moving a bunch of the stuff into Locals.
But on the Discord, you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, unwind with virtual happy hours and karaoke.
Lots of great people there, so consider joining our Discord.
Oh, and the people on Discord send us a question every week, which is where we start our Q&As with, so that Rumble-exclusive Q&A that's going to be happening soon, assuming that Rumble stays up, will begin with a question from the Discord.
Once again, check out our wonderful sponsors this week, which were Paleo Valley, Mudwater, and Hillsdale College.
And remember that we are supported by you, our audience, so please subscribe, like, share, give a review anywhere that reviews are found.
I don't know, probably not, like, Craigslist.
But I guess there are a lot of places reviews are found that you probably won't find us, but anywhere you find us... Craigslist.
We'll see what we can get for it.
We're not selling the podcast, are we?
It is used.
Previously enjoyed.
Yes.
Alright, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
