In this 193rd 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 the middle-ground scramble by the mainstream media to defeat those who would think for themselves by inventing slurs like “conspiracy theorist influencer” and “reactionary trap.” Harper’s says that “insurgency” is threatening the Democratic Party. The Atlantic invokes a world in which “mistakes do...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 193.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hine.
I am still recovering from what was a very unpleasant case of COVID, which I am hoping to stave off the coughs that are dogging me even almost a couple weeks out here.
I will just say, because obviously this is relevant for people who've been following our trajectory, I did take hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin when I got sick with COVID.
It's been a long time since you've been on ivermectin prophylactically.
A long time.
It just was unsustainable because, I mean, in addition to it not being good for you to be on any drug permanently, they made it very hard to get and so one had to judge your ability to respond to a case of COVID rather than Prevent one.
So I wasn't on it prophylactically, but I did take it.
It did not save me from a very unpleasant case.
I think it probably did radically shorten that case.
It was literally two very bad days, and then what I have left over Is I think just the damage when you get sick with a virus it invades cells those cells then get attacked and destroyed by your immune system and so It leaves wounds and we call those wounds lesions.
So anyway, I believe I just have lesions in my lungs that are taking And let me say that everyone knows themselves best, and everyone will have some part of their body that will tend to get affected, right, with illness.
Like, oh, you know, your brother gets this, you get this.
I tend to have things go to your lungs, presumably related to early damage that was from asthma that was attributed to seasonal allergies and no doubt wheat, a much later in life discovery.
And it's unclear why those existed at all, given that there is no reason to think that our ancestors pre, say, Industrial Revolution were experiencing such um, such absurd lifelong effects.
Right.
Um, but you know, when, when you get sick, it's your lungs that get hit.
And this is a disease that is particularly apt to go to your lungs.
And so, uh, I think you're dealing with, um, these lingering after effects, possibly a secondary infection.
Yeah.
Um, let me just say the, uh, I, I do have seasonal allergies.
I don't think they strongly contributed to my lung sensitivity, but I do have lung sensitivity that comes from literally decades of what was more or less a constant state of inflammation that I now know was the result of my consuming wheat, which is something I am exquisitely sensitive to.
So anyway, that does put me in a situation where as long as I'm in good shape, things are fine, but it's very easy for me to be knocked into a spiral where inflammation causes more inflammation, and it's hard to get out of.
Indeed.
Okay, so today we are going to We're going to talk about the mainstream media a little bit, and about some safe and effective treatments that exist out there, or so we are told.
Oh, let's see, medical gaslighting.
That's another topic of conversation for today, medical gaslighting.
Brought to you by Pfizer, I kid you not.
That's a very efficient description of a very powerful force in the universe.
Yes, indeed.
But we so we are coming to you from Rumble and we encourage you to come join us there and join the watch party on Locals.
We'll also have a private Q&A on Locals tomorrow and lots lots we've been doing some impromptu AMAs on Locals.
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Get smarter.
It's way cool.
Pretty cool.
No, it's way cool.
What doesn't it help with?
I think pretty much everything.
I don't know, maybe not swimming.
No, I bet you even swimming.
I don't know why I came up with that.
Yeah.
I feel like it probably helps with everything.
It does help with everything.
But you've got to apply it carefully, right?
So, smarter doesn't mean constantly being in the conscious mind.
Oh, totally.
Right?
No.
So, you need to, smarter means figuring out when to move stuff up or into the cultural layer to use the framework that we introduce in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and let things go.
Yeah.
Let your unconscious mind lead the way when you're doing something like, for instance, swimming, if you're a very good swimmer, or playing a sport, or, gosh, especially physical activities that are somewhat complex in terms of what you need to do.
See, that's wisdom, which is pretty damn smart.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I feel like you're conflating some things, but okay.
Okay.
But productively, I mean, that's kind of what we do.
Okay, so...
Sorry, I just feel that I just, you know, it's the triggering of the feelings that maybe you've married the wrong person that I hate to... You feel like you've married the wrong person?
No, no, I feel like I'm triggering those feelings in you.
I have no idea what's happening.
Okay, I'm trying to help you.
I'm trying to protect you from doing a lot of talking and I'd rather you just talk.
No, no, I'm gonna allow you to help me.
Let's just see how that goes.
Um...
This has been a very weird, well, era, right?
But it feels like things are ramping up.
And at least in the U.S., this could easily be attributable to the presidential election that's still, you know, 14 months away, but no, 13 months away at this point still.
But it feels like the middle ground scramble, which we have talked about a lot, is re-upping, reconfiguring.
Those who might have been chosen to be in, you know, the Anointed Ones are shifting slightly, and there are new people who are sort of ascending, while again those who have insisted on saying, actually just because you have the degree, just because you have the authority, the job, the credential, the platform, Does not mean that you are right, because you're going to have to give us some insight into how it is that you came to the conclusions that you came to.
And instead we're seeing almost every place in the mainstream media is just doubling down on their absurdity.
And I guess we wanted to pick three such platforms this week to talk about just a little bit.
Can I introduce one thing there that I think people it's very hard to understand what actually goes on in American politics, but here's a hint that will explain why even 14 months out from a presidential election.
It feels like.
Somebody put LSD in the water.
The way the American electoral system works, the useful choices have to be eliminated from the ballot in the primary.
That's how the trick is done.
And so the idea that we're 14 months out is actually not an accurate representation because the game is being actively played because at the moment there are some real threats that are on the map still.
And the primaries begin early in 2024.
Right, and so whatever is being arranged is being arranged so that the tripping and the falling and the no longer being a viable candidate will be long since done at the point that the general election really ramps up.
Now I will point out whatever else you think of Trump.
Trump proved that the general election is not completely fixed.
Right?
By fixed, I don't necessarily mean ballot stuffing, but I mean whatever the level of control is that one needs to guarantee an outcome.
He got in, even though the power players in the Republican Party didn't want him in.
He played them.
Yeah.
And I've said it many, many times.
I mean it.
I am not a fan of Trump.
I don't believe that a guy with that temperament belongs in that office.
He did the country a huge favor in proving that that last step, at least when he accomplished this, was not fully locked up.
And so that also makes the primaries much more interesting because If one can escape through the primaries in a viable position, it means that there is at least something to be discussed as to what will happen in the general election.
So, anyway, I am expecting things to go absolutely haywire over the next 14 months, and I'm not expecting it to be a slow ramp-up, because I know a large fraction of the game is much earlier than we tend to think.
Yes, no, that's absolutely right, and that fits very well with the cover of Harper's this month.
You can show my screen here, Zach.
Harper's magazine, one of what has been one of the great magazines in the United States, Harper's, Craving a Choice, Insurgency and its Threat to the Democratic Party, and they have pictures of Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy, and Cornel West.
As if they are the threat to the Democratic Party.
And of course, they are no threat to the Democratic Party.
The threat to the Democratic Party is the Democratic Party itself.
The Democrats have gone off the rails and are not making any sense at all.
Can I add something?
Sure.
If that cover, go back to the COVERS Act.
If that cover, instead of saying insurgency and its threat to the Democratic Party, said insurgency and its threat to the DNC, then this would actually be an accurate cover, because that's really the game.
And this is another place where people need to be very careful to think through some subtle distinctions.
The Democratic Party is a couple things.
It's a power structure.
Largely, I don't even know that it's housed in the DNC, but the DNC is the visible piece of it.
And then there's the rank-and-file, and those are two different things.
And the problem, the reason that these folks are a threat to the DNC is that they actually do resonate with a large piece of the rank-and-file, which the DNC is trying to undo.
Using Harper's to portray them as a threat to the Democratic Party, it inverts reality and it basically synonymizes the DNC's interests with that of the rank-and-file, which is the opposite of the truth.
The DNC is a cabal that conspires to prevent the Democratic Party from serving the interests of the Democratic Party voters and the citizenry of the country.
Yeah, now I sort of imagine a You know, avatar of the DNC coming to the voters and saying, well, but you're a you're a Democrat, aren't you?
You have to vote for us.
You're a Democrat, aren't you?
To which all awake Democratic or formerly Democratic voters should say, well, it's not me who's changed.
You're no longer a Democrat.
You're no longer acting in the way that we were told.
The Democratic Party was acting.
Now, to what extent has that been going on all along?
When did things start to change?
These are important questions, but certainly at this point, craving a choice, insurgency, and its threat to the DNC, as you say, is a more accurate description.
So I just, I want to read, you know, I've just got the hard copy here because, you know, we still, we still subscribe to Harper's and The Atlantic and The New York Times, and in part it's important to see what these, you know, Bastions of what were once journalism still have to say, and in part it's, I guess, nostalgia, honestly.
Here we go.
From the cover story of this craving a choice insurgency and its threat to the Democratic Party in the October 2023 edition of Harper's, the establishment response has been predictably unwelcoming.
Williamson, who you'll remember ran last time as well, was ubiquitously derided during the 2020 campaign as kooky and all but loopy, sneers that have followed her into her second run.
She nurses bitter feelings of her treatment as an outsider intruding in a professional politician's playing field, especially during the 2020 Democratic debates.
Every time I saw Amy Klobuchar, I don't know if that's how you pronounce her name, I think that's right.
Okay.
Every time I saw Amy Klobuchar, this is Williamson talking, she would say to me, are you having fun?
That was all she ever said, Williamson told me.
Every time I saw Pete Buttigieg, is that how you pronounce his name?
Okay.
I only ever read these names.
I never listen.
Every time I see, I saw Pete Buttigieg, he said, are you having fun yet?
I didn't realize how much like high school the whole thing would be.
Williamson says.
Okay, so that's something on Williamson here, pointing out that she was treated as the weird kid who didn't really belong there, and some of the rest of the contenders in 2020, anyway, acted like mean girls.
Later in this article, Uh, this is with regard to Kennedy, but it is his vociferous denunciation of the pharmaceutical industry that has evoked the most fevered response among Democratic Party stalwarts.
An onslaught replete with characterizations of him as crazy and unhinged.
Kennedy's platform is replete with disparate positions, such as pledges on the core progressive issue to support environmental protections, a deference to the Second Amendment, and a demand that the southern border be made impervious.
So, just take for a moment the idea that these are disparate positions.
These are disparate positions if you hold that the only Non-disparate position is to abide by the platform set up over here by the Democrats or the platform set up over here by the Republicans.
In which case, sure, supporting environmental protections would seem to be the thing that the left, that the Democrats have claimed as their own, but there are plenty of people interested in protecting the environment on the right.
They just aren't interested in doing it the same way as those on the left.
Deference to the Second Amendment, again, seems to be something established as what people on the right care about, but there are plenty of people on the left who understand that it is an important part of our Constitution.
And a demand that the southern border be made impervious.
I remember when everyone understood that if there are going to be nation-states in the world, there are going to be borders.
So that doesn't—yes, that has become polarizing.
It has become political.
But the idea that these are inherently disparate positions is ludicrous.
Right.
In fact, I don't know how much people are paying attention to what's going on the southern border, but it is so paradoxical and it reveals the farce that our system of governance has become to have effectively an unchecked flood of people carrying who knows what across our southern border while we still pretend at other borders and even at the checkpoints on the southern border
To be a nation in which we are very careful about who and what we allow in.
So this is some kind of theater.
Yes.
Have you flown in or come in over land or by boat to the United States at any point in the last 10 years?
Any time since 9-11 really, but even before that.
We pretend to be extraordinarily careful.
Yeah, and it just, there's no logical sense to be made of it because the chances that those who have ill intent towards us, the chances that they will notice that whatever it is that they wish to bring in or whoever it is that they wish to bring in could be spirited across the southern border and then taken by bus to the interior.
of the country, the chances that they will notice that is 100%.
So what are we doing?
And I would just finally say, what I do not hear discussed at all in that context is what it says about Trump and his wall, right?
I've heard people mention the wall and say, well, they were tunneling under it with sophisticated technology.
I believe that's true.
Maybe a wall is insufficient, but it certainly seemed... It was ineffective is quite different from the hue and cry over it's racist and barbaric.
Well, ineffective, you know, I would rather have a wall that somebody has figured out how to go under, where all I have to do is figure out where somebody's invested $100,000 or half a million dollars to go under the wall.
That's going to be a lot easier to plug the leaks in that system than one where you literally have no barrier, you have People who are supposed to be enforcing the law at the border who are actually facilitating the flow.
So anyway, there's a part of me that sees the stupidity over on the blue team as having understood that Trump was the enemy.
Any thought he had was the inverse of true.
That's right.
What is the opposite of a wall?
Except for vaccines.
Well, that's a whole different topic, but if the idea is, well, because Trump said wall, wall is obviously the inverse of the right answer, therefore the right answer is a funnel.
Right.
That should be Biden's campaign slogan, build the funnel.
Build the funnel.
Right.
It couldn't conceivably make less sense.
And the idea that we are having some sort of a debate about, well, is there really an invasion going on on the southern border?
And, you know, you know, Elon Musk has to go down there and wear a cowboy hat and investigate it himself in order... What now?
Musk went to the border.
Okay.
Um, he went to the border and he talked to, um, to border patrol agents.
To see for himself.
Yeah.
Okay.
And because he's Elon Musk, he can.
Right.
Most of us would not be able to go in and be like, and border patrol, talk to me.
No, he, he was able to do it because he was Elon, but you know, um, we've had invites, we've had no availability, but it's not hard apparently to go observe this.
We also have greater access than most people.
True.
Um, but anyway, something Totally bizarre.
That is a complete indictment of whatever it is that's allowed.
I mean, you know, if it was incompetence in the executive branch that was allowing this to happen, that would in and of itself be an indicator that these people cannot be left in office.
If it was incompetence.
And it obviously isn't.
It's obviously orders.
Yeah.
So what the hell is that?
What the hell is that?
Okay, two more things from this Atlantic cover—sorry, Harper's cover story from October 2023, in which they blame the failure of the Democratic Party on Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr., and Cornel West.
Nevertheless, the bulk of Kennedy's positions fit the mold of what used to pass for a liberal Democrat.
Assailing corporate power, the military-industrial complex, foreign wars, and censorship.
Positions implicitly abandoned by an administration that is committed to the Ukraine war and increased military spending.
Sounds like the Harpers of Yore, doesn't it?
Why are liberals now in support of war, he lamented to the Wall Street Journal?
Why are they suddenly in support of censorship?
Why are liberals suddenly putting faith, ultimate faith, in pharmaceutical companies who have always been great villains in the liberal zeitgeist?
Fantastic.
Yes.
But these questions are going to remain unanswered.
So, kudos, tiny bit, to Harper's for putting that paragraph in here.
But isn't it time for all of the people who insist that they are Democrats now because they've always been Democrats to wake up to the fact that that word no longer means what it used to mean?
And that supporting what is currently leading the Democratic Party means supporting, you know, almost entirely the opposite of what you thought you were supporting in times past.
And it's not that this sort of thing hasn't happened before.
Of course, political parties change dramatically.
And presumably, most people don't know at the time that it is happening, because it's useful for the parties to hold on to the voters that they had before.
Really?
A ceiling corporate power, the military-industrial complex, foreign wars, and censorship?
That's what the Democratic Party supposedly stood for, and it stands for none of these things now.
So, the irony here is that this is very simply explained by an obvious hypothesis, which is CAPTCHA.
Yeah.
That something has taken control of the Democratic Party.
But, Brett, CAPTCHA sounds like conspiracy.
Sure does.
You don't think people were colluding, do you?
Uh, it's hard to imagine that people could ever collude.
I know.
But, if we can take that one leap and imagine that people may sometimes collude.
Which is to say, talking about things that other people don't want them talking about?
Is that basically what collusion is?
Um, yes.
To, uh, to agree to participate in an attempt to accomplish something while cloaking the fact that that is being attempted.
How dare they.
Um, if that is even such a thing.
I don't even know if it's possible.
I mean, baboons maybe, but probably not humans.
But anyway, I mean, look, okay, you got the Democratic Party.
It has now taken up arms against every value that it held Uh, when you and I were, were kids.
Yeah.
Right?
All of those things are now enemy values, and what is fueling its continued power is effectively allegiance Nostalgia, allegiance to a color, the fact that people have been trained to watch... I like blue.
Right.
Blue feels like a breath of fresh air.
Red feels like the enemy.
Voters who have that view, who look at the New York Times and think of it as a pretty good source of information, they look at the font, they look at the presentation, right?
The Atlantic... Makes me feel like I'm in good hands.
Right, all of these things are positions that historically meant something, but if something were to be captured, and you know, I'm getting sick, I need a better analogy than this because this one's getting old, but There is a dog.
It has a nature.
It's your family dog.
It's lovely.
It rolls over and gets its belly scratched.
One day, it gets rabies.
Everything that you think about your dog needs to go out the window.
That's not your dog anymore.
It's been commandeered by something that is deadly.
And what we have is a party.
It has not always been a good party.
It was a party of racism and Jim Crow, right?
But it has also historically been a party of working people, a party that advocated for their interests.
And that was a natural winner, right?
How could it not be?
That party has now adopted positions that are absolutely hostile to the well-being of almost all American citizens.
Capture is the obvious explanation for it, and the reason that that does not instantly cause people to recoil has to do with habit and nostalgia and loyalty to something that existed in the past for which there is no evidence in the present. - And it also, it's not an actionable conclusion.
It leaves people feeling hopeless.
And I do feel like, um, I am sensing a greater, ever greater sense, um, again, of hopelessness.
You know, there have been, there have been moments and movements in the last three and a half years now in which there was hope.
And, you know, I think, I think the moment that seemed highest to me was during the, Trucker's Convoy in Canada in early 2022 this would have been.
The desire to sweep it all under the rug and to pretend that the people who were being duplicitous, cruel, authoritarian, Sometimes evil.
We're not doing that.
Maybe they were misled.
Maybe it turns out they were wrong.
Maybe not.
And they're certainly not going to continue following the orders of some of those people now, because now they can see.
But these are the people we need to trust going forward because, well, they really know what's good for you and they care about you.
I think there are a lot of people now, and I feel it too, who are losing hope again.
Who are losing hope in the face of the just endless onslaught of banality and of lies.
Lies cloaked as this is the God's honest truth.
If you can say that like that, if you can just lie about the fact that you are lying and then everything else that comes out of your mouth is a string of misdirection and actual lies, what do we do?
Like how do we find our way?
And I know you have something to say to that but let me just one last thing from this article at the very end.
The claim that The claim of what the existential crises confronting American society are, is, and so this comes in the form of, hence in the 2024 general election, we won't confront the actual existential crisis that we need to be confronting, which are racism, chronic diseases, militarization, war, and the threat thereof.
Now, I am not going to make the claim that racism, chronic diseases, militarization, war, and the threat thereof aren't real threats.
But the idea that those are the existential threats to the Republic at this point, to the American people, when what you see is people losing hope because their government has been captured and is incapable of doing right by them, the actual existential threats to us are not on this list.
They're not here.
Well, I would like to respond to all of that.
Yeah.
The existential threat is capture.
Right.
Period.
The end.
And the reason that capture is an existential threat is because what we have in the West is a self-correcting system.
And that means that it doesn't almost matter where we are.
If the system is intact and it is allowed to self-correct, we can avoid all of the other threats.
We can't reduce the risk to zero, but we can reduce it as much as possible by, you know, Using the tools we have to engage in good governance.
And the problem is when somebody has an interest in you not doing that, and they capture the mechanisms that would allow you to do it, you are steering towards a goal you don't even know.
And so it is capture, it is the DNC is not the only Agent of capture, but nonetheless it is the threat to our well-being and it is an existential threat But I wanted to return to your point about it's not actionable once you realize that the the Democratic Party has been captured It doesn't feel actionable to people right which I think is a dead wrong and
And B, it does tie in with your point about hope.
Now, I have said in other contexts that there is a social problem when trying to engage people who are interested in the problems that you face.
And the issue is this, let's say we just gather a group of people who are interested in threats to the environment, and listen you conservatives, I did not say climate change.
There are threats to the environment, there are very serious ones.
You might gather people together, you might talk to them about those threats, but you have a problem, because in having gathered people together around a topic of interest, you will have gathered a room full of people Many of whom are motivated by fear.
Fear that terrible things are happening and that we must confront them.
The other part of that room is motivated by hope.
The idea that there's something clear to do.
Let's get going.
Let's do the thing that makes things better.
And the problem is, neither of these groups is wrong.
They're just structured motivationally differently.
But if you try to talk to that room, you try to talk to the people who are motivated by fear, You will disempower those who are motivated by hope.
And if you talk to those who are motivated by hope, you will demotivate those who are motivated by fear.
And if you try to talk to them as if they are one thing, you will muddle the message so it doesn't mean anything.
And that's a problem.
We just all have to recognize that these are cognitive structures that we have to confront in figuring out how to move forward.
Now, If we level up from there, the important thing to recognize is the peril of this moment could hardly be greater.
Really everything is on the table, including a potentially a nuclear exchange that we might bumble our way into as a result of corruption that has us fueling a nebulous conflict in Ukraine.
So the peril here couldn't be greater, but the opportunity is similarly great and this is effectively inherent to what we call the adaptive landscape metaphor.
In order to go from a low peak, a peak in which you've only attained a certain fraction of what's possible, to a higher peak, you have to go through an adaptive valley.
And what that means is that it is inherent that you will pass through a perilous, frightening time in order to get to a better time.
There's no guarantee, however, that if you confront it, you do get to the other side.
So we have to now say, well, what is available to us?
What is in front of us that actually results in the terrifying realities of the moment being substantially better two years from now?
Right?
And there are things on the table that do that.
But we have to be very careful.
Apologies.
Not to allow those things to be squandered or derailed.
And we must also know that because the core issue here is not confusion but capture, That it is certain, it is 100% certain that those things that have the potential to make things better two years from now are going to be targeted intensely.
The intent is going to be to make them stumble or to eliminate them from the map in one way or another, to make them untouchable.
Whatever has to be done in order to make sure that the things that could lead us to a better outcome do not manage to do that, that is going to occur and we have to be ready for it in real time.
So I think one of the ways that people can talk past one another, and that I think to some degree we are talking past one another right now, because you said you think that my claim that people are feeling hopeless and that the hopelessness doesn't feel actionable, that what they're experiencing doesn't feel actionable, you said that that's dead wrong.
Um, and, I mean, I don't, I think it can't be dead wrong.
I know that people are experiencing this.
So, you know, my claim isn't, it's not actionable.
My claim is people are feeling that it's not actionable.
I agree with that.
But, um, put aside that for the moment.
When I hear, when I hear you talk the way you just were talking, I hear reason for hope but I still see, I still hear very little ways, very few routes for individuals to do anything.
And I think, we had friends visiting a couple weeks ago with their new baby and one of the things, a straight couple, one of the things that she said to me and his cousins, I'm not going to use their names here, It was just the three of us and the baby were taking a walk in one of the beautiful places here on the islands.
The baby wasn't walking.
And she says to me, you know, often when he and I disagree, it turns out that we're just talking past one another and that I have been thinking about individual level actions and he's been thinking about population level actions.
And I think that there is a gendered component to that.
I think that on average, women are more likely to think to the like, what can I do?
What is best for my children?
What is best for my family?
And men, on average, are more likely to be thinking at the sort of larger societal level.
And this is consistent with research that is quite good that I wouldn't be able to pull up right at the moment.
That has been done on, in general, sort of when you're talking about, you know, the forest and the trees, gist versus detail, that across a lot of domains, and this is neuro research, women are on average better at details and men are on average better at gist.
And this is, you know, again, a statistical argument and says nothing about what you yourself might be awesome at.
But consider when you are having disagreements, and this is very insightful on the part of This new mother with this, you know, beautiful, you know, new family, thinking about the ways that the two adults, the husband and the wife, sometimes struggle to understand what the hell the other one is going on about.
And I think it's this different level of analysis.
It's a different level of approach.
And so when I hear you saying what you were just saying, I still have the sense of like, yes, but what can people do?
Because I You know, and I'm not, and I think that you are responding, but you're responding at the sort of like, we can do this thing, but individuals are still feeling like helpless and hopeless because they don't know what they can do.
Again, I don't, I'm not disagreeing that that's how people feel, and I'm not saying that I don't understand why that seems to be the calculus.
On the other hand, the problem Is that the answer of what people can do is a tremendous amount, but it is not of the style that they are used to thinking of as meaningful action, right?
It is not.
If you say, you know, we really just got to go get this shed built, you know, what's the first thing I get to do?
Well, I'm going to go out there and level the site, okay?
It's not that kind of action.
Here, all of the stuff that we have talked about.
About the ASH experiment, the Milgram experiment, all of the things that we have learned about mass formation.
They should feed... They should feed into a model.
And that model should tell you that actually there's going to be a major shift in our consciousness over the next 14 months.
And in fact there's going to be a battle over it that is already taking place.
You were reading from a weapon in that battle.
Yes.
We will shift our minds.
We will come to believe things that we did not believe.
The struggle is... And we'll forget that we ever believed anything different, some of us.
Right.
And in fact one of the things that you can do is you can look back on Commentary from even two years ago, right?
Even our own commentary from two years ago is jarring because it reveals what we did understand and what we didn't understand.
So just realizing how quickly the mindset of the entire West is changing is both frightening and an indicator of how much power there is in doing a few simple things.
You and I have talked about modeling your doubts, confessing them to people whose position you don't know.
Why does that matter?
Well, it matters, A, because you'll learn a ton about what people actually think that you will not learn from censusing what they publicly say.
But two, it matters because in modeling the willingness to say, I am not on board with this conclusion, You enable others who are somewhere in that neighborhood debating where they fall out, what they believe, and what they are willing to say.
You are modeling that that is survivable, and hopefully you're modeling that it's attractive.
Right?
I like the person who says, you know what?
I heard them say that, and then I thought, that can't be true because... Survivable, attractive, and they're not the only one who has doubts.
Right.
That I think is a critical piece as well, and that doesn't...
I don't think that piece of it, that piece of people psychology looms at all for you, and I don't think it looms nearly as large for me as it does for most people.
But that for many people, we know that most people are not willing to be the first to disagree with what appears to be unanimity, with what appears to be consensus.
And these are of course, we didn't hear unanimous so much, but we heard Over and over and over again, the drumbeat during COVID was consensus, consensus science, follow the science, this is what you do because this is what we know, we know, this is it, it's universal.
And with that drumbeat, for you, especially if you understand that you're not expert particularly in whatever it is that you're being told, you think, oh boy, I don't know.
You keep that to yourself.
Almost everyone keeps that to themselves.
Now I do think, and this is a reason for hope, is that the internet, as much as there has been an assault on us and others in terms of trying to silence us and demonetize and shadowban and all of the things that have been done, Boy are there a lot of people out here.
There are a lot of people who are saying, yep that did happen to me and still I didn't accept the shot.
I didn't go along with it.
I didn't put up a don't hurt me wall on my business.
I didn't do the thing and hey I survived.
I went through the looking glass.
I'm on the other side and I'm still standing and once more I have my health and my integrity intact.
Like that's the thing.
Right, and it has material implications.
The willingness, you know, when the vaccine campaign started, the idea of opposing something called a vaccine was so anathema to such a large percentage of the population That it seemed impossible, but saying, actually, let us look at the science here, right?
Does the science match what we are being told?
Oh, no, it's not a match at all.
It doesn't tell you what's true, but it does tell you, I have a license to slow down and think very, very carefully about what's being said, because I know that at face value, it's just wrong.
Then the story becomes, yes, yes, yes, we didn't tell you exactly the whole truth because really the people are stupid.
I mean, that's the message, right?
The people are stupid.
They can't handle the truth.
They wouldn't understand the truth.
We had to put this gloss on it.
We're like, well, you know what your gloss?
Your gloss went 180 degrees what the data actually said to the degree that you were even willing to share your data with us.
Right.
Your gloss isn't a gloss at the point that it's a lie, a flat-out opposite lie.
Not only is it a lie, it is a lie that actually has a physical manifestation, a hypodermic needle that carries a toxic mixture of substances that we now, I mean, it's incredible what turns out to have been in these things, never mind what was in them that we knew about that was horrifying enough, but what actually turned out to be in them was a disaster.
So the point is, people who woke up early, the earlier you woke up, The less times that hypodermic needle penetrated your skin and injected that stuff into you, people are now, understandably, feeling frightened for how many doses they took and relieved at how many they didn't take.
So the point is, it's not an abstraction.
Right?
These are concrete things that have implications for your health, among other things.
When we are looking at a 14 month time horizon in which until the general election until the general election in which, look, I don't know, maybe the degree of control has moved on in the last four years far more than I know.
Or the last seven years.
But I believe there's still a horse race here.
And I believe that they will do everything in their power to prevent that horse race from happening.
And what can you do amounts to think about the emergent fact of our collective understanding of what is taking place.
We have proven that over the course of months to years, We can actually break a narrative designed to harm us, and we can wake people up in large enough numbers that we can derail that thing.
Now the question is, this is going to be different, but it's going to be the same style of interaction.
You want to be early amongst the people who understand what's actually taking place, that understands which reflexes of yours are being used to steer you into self-harm, so that you can stop them.
A reflex is not fate.
It's a predisposition.
And to recognize what is going to be stolen from us here, and how to prevent it, you can play a very important role, the same role that you have played in breaking the narrative that was fed to us over public health and COVID.
And that is not small.
It is abstract.
That's the problem.
The problem is it is not level the site to build the shed.
It is... Well, but you gave an actionable answer, which is one that we've given before, which is share your doubts in whatever form it seems possible, however vaguely, however specifically it seems possible, with those you meet.
At the, you know, at the coffee drive-thru, when you're picking up your dry cleaning.
With, you know, do people have paperboys anymore?
I don't know.
But, you know, with people, maybe just strangers at first, with whom you don't think that you will have iterated interactions, but then start with the people with whom you might have iterated interactions.
And And go from there.
We don't have these experiences as much, not living in a city anymore, but it was always remarkable how many people sort of lit up and became relieved at the point that it was possibly became clear that they were allowed.
That they were being allowed by the person on the other side of the interaction to share their doubts.
And once people start to realize that many, many, many people among us share doubts about the directions that things are going and the authorities proclaiming that things are under control and you don't need to worry your pretty little heads about it, the more hope we will have and it will be justified.
Yeah, actually, I think this is right, and I would say to make it even more actionable.
Much of what matters takes place online, so I'm not saying don't do this stuff online, but it is vitally important.
It's tough online because there's so much garbage now.
There's so many things that you can interact with that patently aren't human.
Right.
All I'm saying is if we abandon online because it's a very dangerous landscape, we lose.
So we can't do that.
Right.
It does not mean that the key thing for you to do is not to establish trust offline with, it's not going to be a ton of people, but enough people that as things go increasingly crazy, you can look somebody in the eye and say, is this making sense to you?
Here's why I don't think it's true.
Right?
If you can do that with people offline, you are, I won't say immune, but resistant to being steered.
No, I think that's right.
I actually had this experience a bit this week.
It wasn't online.
It was, you know, with a new acquaintance friend who I met in the street and she said, you know, I got this, I have this newsletter, this epidemiologist that I really like and what she just said, I'm just, I think it makes sense, but can you look at it?
And I did, and it made no sense to me.
And, you know, I clicked through on a bunch of the links in the newsletter, and none of them went to the sources that she claimed they went to.
They went to CDC recommendations instead of actual science.
And, you know, it was just another one of these things saying, no matter what, if you're feeling sick, you need to get your booster.
That was the message.
And at first I thought, oh, I don't know.
I'm a little surprised that this That this felt like something that I might respond to positively at all.
But that doesn't matter.
Let me figure out exactly why this feels wrong to me and give as precise a response as I can.
And I did.
And the response came back, thank you so much.
It's so hard to know what to think for people who aren't, and I don't remember exactly what the examples were, epidemiologists, vaccinologists, virologists, public health people.
And I thought, boy, but this is such a smart, accomplished person.
And all of us, all of us need to be assessing as opposed to taking from on high.
Someone with the, you know, the public health degree, ah, I'm saying that you should do this.
Okay, but why are you saying it?
It's written in the language, in the style.
It's written in the style of science.
So not only do they have the degrees and the right words and the platforms that we are accustomed to thinking of as bringing us the unvarnished truth about public health, But increasingly, it's hiding really successfully behind all of the usual things that scientists do.
And almost all of them turn out to be Potemkin papers.
And sometimes you can't tell.
Most people aren't posting their data for us to directly look at, but just the citations.
Every single time now, and there's a bunch more of these that I was running into today, I don't think that claim is right.
And you go and look at the citation that they give to back up the claim, and it's just not there.
There's no there there.
So, is no one else checking?
At some level, I'm just shocked at the level to which, for instance, the safe and effective claim is just being regurgitated and regurgitated and regurgitated, and there's no new research that's saying it is.
Presumably.
There's no research saying it is, because there can't be.
And so these people are relying on claims from, I kid you not, we're going to get there maybe later today, from like February 2021.
Ah, they're safe and effective.
Are you kidding?
Most people hadn't even been vaccinated at that point.
How would you know?
So there's a very clear point, logically speaking, about how to address this.
And I'm concerned about making this point because I know exactly how it will be misused.
So I want to forestall the misuse before I tell you what the point is.
The misuse is going to involve the battle over the analysis of the quality of evidence In different studies.
Right.
Okay, so in a meta-analysis looking at a study and saying this is low-quality evidence versus this is high-quality evidence does not mean what those words sound like they imply.
These things have been studied and in the case of well-done studies, that is studies that were properly conducted, low-quality studies and high-quality studies reach the same conclusion.
It does not change what they discover.
Right, it may leave larger error bars, but it does not change the conclusion.
So that is the place where we have to be very careful not to apply what I'm about to say.
The public is convinced in a bizarre way that quantity is a strong indicator of accuracy.
In other words, the number of places that you read a particular conclusion is an indicator that that conclusion is likely to be right.
And this is nonsense for a couple reasons.
Most importantly, if you Have a wrong conclusion that because your corporation sells us something or other, you need that wrong conclusion to be widely distributed amongst doctors, let's say.
You can produce evidence that will capture attention and spread and appear to be many people reaching a conclusion when in fact they've done no analysis whatsoever.
A single study that is independent of that corrupting apparatus will likely reach the right conclusion.
And so you may have a sea of people saying X and the truth may be Y and the truth may exist only in that paper.
But what you absolutely need to do is figure out whether or not that sea of things is a bunch of people repeating conclusions that they've heard and have not established for themselves.
Whether there is a perverse incentive etc.
And so, here's the punchline of the analysis.
It is better to process less of what you encounter when you have no idea which stuff is polluted by perverse incentives.
Processing very little data is not a fatal problem.
In fact, it may be the only way to see clearly.
If what you process is all valid, it was all properly done.
But you fail to process most stuff that you can't assess whether it was properly done, you will reach a robust conclusion.
It won't have what amounts to the statistical power of that huge sea of wrong things, but that statistical power is misleading.
It's pulling you in the wrong direction.
Right.
The trick, of course, is figuring out what to read and what not to.
Right.
Of course.
Of course.
Which, then the problem is that is unsayable.
Right?
What people think, including most people with advanced degrees, what they think is that the job of a scientist is to look at the data.
What does that mean?
Look at the papers on that topic and process it and figure out, well, what explains it?
No, I'm sorry, that does not work where you have corruption.
The job is not to take the sum total of everything that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal on a topic and make it all make sense because corruption derails that.
And honestly, I mean, it's, it's a strange conclusion that we've that we, you know, science, the science community has come to that is wrong.
Because, you know, what is historically, I don't know how far back this goes, but I think if you were to ask a scientist publishing in the 1950s, What is the purpose of literature review?
It is to give you a sense of what is currently believed on the topic and what has been done.
And then when you come to write your paper, if this is a topic on which you are doing original research, the literature review appears as reflected in that paper in two places.
Primarily, it's in the introduction by way of setting up what the issue is, what we think we know, what has been done already, and what the opportunity is for new research.
And then the literature review can also come up in the discussion, but largely it comes up in the discussion by way of this new research either is coincident with or goes to falsify the previous understanding about this topic.
The literature review is not the conclusion.
And so, you know, review papers are trying to do that, to say, okay, what is it that we, what is the state of the art, as it were?
What is the state of the science?
But the whole point is, what are you doing?
What are you adding?
And maybe what you're adding is actually a falsification of everything that came before.
You know, that's not the common thing.
That's not the most, that's not the most regular thing, but it certainly happens.
And it may actually, you know, provide a nuance that then allows other people to go, well, wait, maybe the truth is actually over there, and this is kind of close enough that this looks like the truth, but it's not there.
None of these reasons to do a literature review, which I have done plenty of, ever suggest that what you're doing is trying to figure out from that literature review, based on consensus, based on averages, what is true.
The idea of, statistically speaking, most of the papers say this, and therefore the truth must lie somewhere therein.
No.
Yeah.
The problem is the rules, the formal rules of academia make it impossible to behave as one logically should in an environment as polluted as this one.
Yeah.
So let's suppose that you have an author And you've done deep dives on a couple of their pieces of work and you've discovered what amounts to fraud.
Right.
Okay.
Papers haven't been retracted.
Now my thought, let's take Bulwer, for example.
Who?
Bulwer, who is one of the primary corruptors of the science around ivermectin.
Um, if I see a paper on some topic with Bulware as an author, I'm not processing it.
Can I say that?
No.
Wait, this person?
You're not processing material produced by this person?
Are you saying they're incapable of doing a proper study?
No, I'm not saying anything of the kind.
What I'm saying is I've twice seen evidence of this person doing something that constitutes an inversion of correct science.
So, I'm not processing their work, because I don't know anything about whether there's any information in it, or how I would figure that out.
Right?
What is the scientific language for, here's a literature review on this topic, excluding work that involved bulware.
There is no way to say that academically.
So the point is, it's game over.
No, in fact, this is used often by those By those who would have you ignore innovative work, and I'm losing the names, I've lost the names of the people, but there are a few doctors early in the AIDS crisis who were saying, you know, actually, I think, I think this virus is involved, but it may not be the only thing causal.
And I think we need to be thinking about, you know, these, these other possible causal factors.
And, uh, it became, they became such pariahs that all you had to do was mention their names and it's like, okay, you don't need to pay any attention to that research.
So this is like, as with all tools, they can be used in order to help you, um, do better in the world, understand the world better and make it a better place and the inverse as well.
Yep.
The problem is power is power, and rules are gameable, and scientific rules are especially gameable because, effectively, science is done on the honor system.
And anyway, we're kind of far afield from from where we started, but the Ability to process selectively.
You have to do it in a way that is unbiased.
If you're going to process only things that match your pre-existing belief, then you're just going to reinforce it.
That's scientifically invalid.
But if you're going to be very cautious and not process information that you have no reason to suspect is accurate in a place where there's a lot of inaccurate information, then actually you protect.
If you limit yourself to processing only those things which you have reason to believe are reliable, You will get a lower power, higher quality conclusion from it, and it is really the only way to keep one's clarity.
No, that is an approach that you take that other people I know take.
That's not what I do.
But then I have an easier time processing high amounts of visual text.
So, I mean, I think there are going to be different approaches valid for different kinds of processing styles and techniques.
And, you know, knowing what is out there also has value.
I think we are now talking vast each other.
If you've got pharma spending who knows how many million dollars to pollute a small quadrant of literature... I don't need to spend a lot of time with pharma-funded studies.
That's what I'm saying, though, is if you are trying to deal with a conclusion that involves topics in which pharma has taken an interest, how do you deal with the vast quantity of wrong
This is what the conflicts of interest statements are supposed to be about in the papers, and we know very often that authors either don't even declare them or pretend that the very real conflicts that they have, because they've been getting funding from exactly the organizations that sort of stand to profit if they come up with one answer and not another, just aren't conflicts at all.
So, you know, at every level, it's very, very difficult to know what you're looking at.
It's the honor system in a system with no honor.
Let's just, I think we're going to save a bunch of what we're going to do today for next time, but I did want to talk a tiny bit about The Atlantic this month, and then you want to talk about The New York Times, right?
So we talked about Harper's, the October 2023 cover, Craving a Choice, Insurgency, and its Threat to the Democratic Party.
The Atlantic, you can show my screen briefly here, Zach, has an It's October 2023 issue, a book review by Helen Lewis.
From feminist to right-wing conspiracist, what Naomi Wolf's odyssey can teach us about seeing patterns where they don't exist.
Yeah.
So, I'm going to, again, just read a little bit from this truly remarkable article, which is, again, it's a book review of Naomi Klein, who was Naomi Klein's new book called Doppelganger, in which she apparently is
I've not read the book, I've read the book review, basically talking about how strange and it seems like how awful it is that people can't seem to tell her apart from Naomi Wolf, who we can all understand as readers of Harper's, must be a right-wing conspiracist nutjob.
The Atlantic, I keep on getting it wrong, must be a right-wing conspiracy nutjob, right?
Well, no, but here we go.
If the intelligentsia wouldn't lionize Wolf, then the Bannonite right would.
She could enter a world where mistakes don't matter, no one feels shame, and fact-checkers are derided as finger-wagging elitists.
These people don't disappear just because we can no longer see them, Klein reminds any fellow leftists who might be enthusiastic about public humiliation as a weapon against the right.
Denied access to the mainstream media, the ostracized will be welcomed on One America News Network and Newsmax, or social media sites such as Rumble, Getter, Gab, Truth Social, and Elon Musk's new all-crazy, all-the-time reincarnation of Twitter as X. On podcasts, the entire heterodox space revels in just asking questions, and then not caring about the peer-reviewed answers.
By escaping to what Klein calls the mirror world, Wolf might have lost cultural capital, but she has not lost an audience.
Klein notes that this world is particularly hospitable to those who can blend personal and social grievances into an appealing populist message.
I am despised by the pointy heads just as you are.
She ventures a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like this.
Narcissism, grandiosity, plus social media addiction, plus midlife crisis, plus public shaming, equals right-wing meltdown.
She is inclined to downplay, quote, that bit of math, though, and feels uncomfortable putting Wolf on the couch.
Nonetheless, I, this is Helen Lewis talking now, am struck by how narcissism, in the ubiquitous lay sense of the term, is key to understanding conspiracy theorist influences and their followers.
If you feel disrespected and overlooked in everyday life, then being flattered with the idea that you're a special person with secret knowledge must be appealing.
This is amazing.
You wanted to interject or you want me to read the book?
No.
So a couple more bits from this article, which is decrying the so-called descent of Naomi Wolf into right-wing conspiracy land, which, no.
A book by Naomi Klein called Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World.
To explore this ambitious agenda, the book ranges widely and sometimes tangentially.
At one point, Klein finds herself listening to Hours of War Room, hosted by a man who has built a dark empire of profitable half-truths.
Why does Klein find Bannon so compelling?
Here, Doppelganger takes a startling turn.
The answer is that, quite simply, game recognizes game.
Klein's cohort on the left attacks big pharma profits, worries about surveillance capitalism, and sees Davos and the G7 as a cozy cabal exploiting the poor.
Shades of that Harper's article, right?
Like, just a brief moment of illumination, of self-recognition.
Well, no, no.
It's not even that.
What it is is a description of reality set up to be portrayed as an illusion.
Understandably, she hears other Naomi talk with Bannon about vaccine manufacturers' profits, rail against big tech's power to control us, and make the case that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has untold secret power.
And she can't help noting some underlying similarities.
When Bannon criticizes MSNBC and CNN for running shows sponsored by Pfizer, telling his audience that this is evidence of rule by the wealthy for the wealthy against you, Klein writes, It strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky, or Chris Smalls, the Amazon labor union leader known for his eat the rich jacket, or for that matter, me.
One last thing from this article.
Klein successfully makes the case that the American left is more tethered to reality than the right, not because it is composed of smarter or better people, but because it has not lost touch with the mechanisms, such as scientific peer review and media pluralism, that acts as a check on our worst instance.
So, So this is, as the Harper's article, just a mash-up of I think glimmers of insight where even the people most certain that the thing hasn't changed and that they are still on the right side of history and that they always have been, they always will be, no matter what they are being told about how much they have to betray what their values were just yesterday.
But it can't see it.
It's just like it's coming up against a hard surface over and over and over again.
It can't see it.
And Naomi Wolf, who we'll talk again a little bit about, I guess, next time, has made errors, as we all have.
But she is not what is being portrayed here.
And she is repeatedly standing up for the values that she has been standing up for her entire career.
Um, I want people to focus on what you're calling glimmers of insight, because I really don't think that they are what you're seeing them as.
Okay.
First of all, I don't know what Helen Lewis is, but this is not our first encounter with her.
People who watched our course will remember that she came after me on an interview with Barry Weiss, and she, I wish we had it, but she
She effectively launched into some analysis in which she said, well, you can say to Brett Weinstein, and then she got mealy-mouthed and said a bunch of words that didn't quite fit together, as if what she had just done was laid out a very clear case against, I think it was the effectiveness of Ira McDonough.
And then the next sentence was like, but he simply does not get it.
Right?
Now there was no content in it, but the point was this was girl talk.
This was two sophisticated women of the world having a discussion in which they say, look, you can say truth to Brett Weinstein and he just simply cannot recognize it.
So my point is this is a tactical person.
This is a person who is attempting to elevate certain people's stars.
I wasn't suggesting that Helen Lewis was having a glimmer of insight here.
I was suggesting that Naomi Klein was having a glimmer of insight.
That was a quote from Naomi Klein, or maybe not a quote, but a paraphrase of what is in Klein's book, in which Klein is saying, huh, actually this reminds me very much of Well, Noam Chomsky and me, frankly.
So I want to still have hope for some of the people who have been standing up historically for the same things that now the people like us who are being reviled as right-wing conspiracy theorists are standing up for.
So look, I agree and I hold out that hope, but not much.
You probably remember that Naomi Klein spoke at Evergreen days before it melted down.
I do.
And I went to it.
I do.
Such a weird world.
Yeah, it's such a weird world.
But, you know, as far as I know, she did not at any point discuss the horrors of what had taken apart this campus that she had just been at and had apparently affinity for.
She should have been horrified and she was not at least publicly horrified.
Yeah So I'm I'm concerned optics weren't good.
I I want to appreciate Naomi Klein, but I'm on alert and my sense is that she is captured by something and this something is Powerful and what I believe that she is doing and Helen Lewis is quoting is It is tactical.
And the tactic is, look, there's part of every liberal, every Democrat that's saying, wait, are we sure Pharma's on our team?
Because I keep being told to embrace what Pharma's up to.
How long has that been going on for?
Are we sure that we support this war?
Because that doesn't remind me of us, right?
They're doing this all the time, right?
Right, right.
So the point is, that's normal.
Normal is like, hey wait a minute, five minutes ago we were the party that didn't like racism and now we're being told it's the only solution to the problems we've got.
Are we sure?
Have we checked that?
Right?
So that's...
I did.
Every Democrat that's still got their mind is going through that.
So what do you need?
Well, that is a very beautiful magazine, right?
It has long been a lovely magazine, the kind of magazine that when it arrived at your house you thought, that's great, I wonder what lovely things are going to be in there for the next two weeks.
I might be flipping through that thing and I might find wonderful things that you and I will quote to each other over breakfast, who knows, right?
That's what it was.
Before the rabies.
The rabies?
Breakfast before rabies.
- Right.
- Breakfast before rabies.
- Breakfast before, yeah, exactly.
But here's the point.
Okay.
- Yeah.
- What are you gonna do?
You've got literally a hundred million people wondering what the fuck is going on that they're suddenly embracing all of the stuff that they used to dislike.
How do you shut that up?
That doesn't sound entirely wrong.
Yeah.
Right.
So what do you do?
Oh, well, you use the, um, the thing that used to be the Atlantic.
To broadcast an internal conversation, where it's like, isn't it crazy that I used to be anti-war?
I used to think pharma was the problem, right?
But now the sophisticated blah blah blah is, we're way moved on from that.
Helen Lewis, Naomi Klein, blah blah blah.
So the point is, this is a mechanism for getting a tension that naturally cannot help but arise in the mind of a voter.
To resolve in a particular direction by basically stepping them through the process of forgetting.
Well, and I think actually, again, I think one piece of this that you're missing is the, see, other smart people think like you do.
Others of my people are also questioning this, but they're still on the side of right.
They've been staunch.
They aren't leaving the party.
They are not changing.
They're still doing what the party tells them to do.
They're still pro-war and pro-pharma and pro-corporate profits and, you know, anti the little people because that's what we Democrats stand for.
It's like, wait, wait, wait, what did you say?
No, no, no.
They're still on the right side of history.
Just remember that and carry on.
Wait, in fact, this is now coming together, I think.
There is a process, right?
An emergent process.
Exactly the one we were talking about in our discussion of where hope comes from.
That if you actually model your doubts for somebody, that you can create trust and a willingness for them to confess their doubts.
You can free yourself from whatever this control apparatus is.
Well, the antidote to that Is to turn that conversation, instead of something that you actually produce and participate in, into a consumer good.
We're going to have that conversation in front of you.
It's here in the Atlantic, right?
You're having a debate in your mind.
There's a part of you that's like, wait, I can't believe we're now the people who like pharma, right?
And we're going to show you how somebody who you respect, somebody, you know, lovely, who's been there all along, right?
How she resolves that.
So you don't have to worry about it, honey.
Right?
And it is that, and I believe this, you know, at the end of the day, I don't think we're ever going to get a complete analysis of how this happened, but I do think this is fifth generation warfare shit, where the problem is that all of the people who don't understand that they have been targeted, they have not been specifically targeted, but what has happened is they have been successfully modeled, and people who have become expert in nudging, right?
are doing it and they are doing it through everything that you would look to to figure out how to think more clearly.
They're going to nudge the population off the cliff like so many bison.
Right.
But of course, you know, the Atlantic, you know, look, the Atlantic speaks to the exact tension that they pretend to resolve in that set of paragraphs.
Right?
I don't think they pretend to resolve it, but I think what they do is they leave the reader with a sense of, well, okay, the best among us, Naomi Klein has recognized that there's a slight conundrum, but she's still decided this, therefore I can put my fears to rest.
That's it.
It's the smarter people than me thing, which is one of those phrases that I know you and I both detest, right?
It is one of these phrases that does a ton of heavy lifting and it's nonsense.
The idea that smarter people than you, boy, You ought to go hang out with some of those smarter people because some of them are dumb as can be, yeah.
So yes, I do think it's fifth generation warfare.
I do think the Atlantic... Can I ask, what are the... do you know what the first four generations are?
I just, I've not heard the fifth generation before.
I don't know, I'm borrowing a phrase and I should be more expert in knowing exactly what those generations are.
But anyway, I do believe that this is a highly sophisticated psychological nudge tactic in which you don't realize that just because they aren't thinking of you by name doesn't mean that you don't exist in their model and they haven't figured out what sources you pay attention to and how you read them and what you think about them and how they're going to use them to get you to arrive at a pseudo-smart conclusion that will cause you to do self-harm.
Yep.
Okay, so we've got Harper's going after Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr., and Cornel West, The Atlantic going after Naomi Wolf, and The New York Times went after you.
Yeah, it sure did.
Yeah.
Yeah, it did in the form of a piece by Yasha Monk.
Now, Yasha Monk is somebody that I've never met him in person as far as I know.
But I do know him a little bit.
I was involved in a back-channel conversation with a lot of interesting people, and so I would have said he and I were friendly.
And so anyway, he's... How to argue against identity politics without turning into a reactionary.
Would you like to read the first few paragraphs?
I really, really would.
In the spring of 2017, a senior administrator at Evergreen State College in Washington announced that she expected white students and faculty members to stay off campus for a day.
The so-called Day of Absence, she explained, was intended to build community around identity.
One professor publicly pushed back against this idea, as he wrote to the administrator, on a college campus, one's right to speak, or to be, must never be based on skin color.
He would, he announced, remain on campus.
What followed was a bizarre gauntlet.
Though the day of absence was officially voluntary, the professor's refusal to take part painted a target on his back.
Protesters disrupted one of his classes, intimidating his students and accusing him of being a racist.
The campus police, he said, encouraged him to keep away for his own safety.
Within a few months, he quit his job, reinventing himself as a public intellectual for the internet age.
In his early media appearances, the professor, Brett Weinstein, described himself as a leftist.
But over time, he drifted away from his political roots, embracing ever more outlandish conspiracy theories.
Of late, he has insinuated that the September 11 attacks were an inside job, and called for health officials who recommended that children be vaccinated against COVID to face prosecution modeled on the Nuremberg trials.
Okay.
One more sentence.
Mr. Weinstein, in short, has fallen into the reactionary trap.
Ooh, that doesn't sound good.
No.
Yeah.
So, first of all, let me just say that Yasha Monk is a lot of things.
Apparently, he's involved in the Council on Foreign Relations.
He's a regular at the Atlantic.
He's associated with Johns Hopkins, which I will get to in a second.
Yeah, okay, let's show Mike Ben's tweet, in which Mike Ben notices that Yasha Monk has gone after me.
He says, classic example here of everything I talk about, a hit piece on Brett Weinstein for conspiracies, in quotes, etc., essentially arguing to censor him.
Who's it by?
Not some pink-haired, I can't remember.
Ambigendered, Ibram X. Kendi-ite.
Counsel on Foreign Relations, Johns Hopkins, Atlantic, Foreign Policy, blob.
Blob, okay.
So, Yasha is doing a job here.
I find this despicable, and I will tell you that I find Yasha despicable, and the reason for that is what happened when I contacted him and asked him to correct the error in those paragraphs that you just read.
He expressed relief that I was being civil.
He fully expected me to be very angry at him for what he did.
And I asked him to correct this thing, and he came back and he said, I'm not going to correct it because I believe it is accurate.
Um, and I said, it is not accurate.
And I explained to him why.
Are you going to explain to us why?
I will.
Okay.
Um, and he ghosted me.
So what I find duplicitous here is that what he is effectively saying is this was not personal.
In fact, he expressed an interest that although we differ on a lot of things, in the future we might find alignment, right?
After he has described me as effectively the type specimen of something he calls the reactionary trap, he falsely portrays me as no longer being Yep.
a liberal as I claim, never explains why that is, blames it on conspiracy theories.
And then he comes up with two examples.
Now the two examples, he says that I claim that 9/11 was an inside job, which I did not-- - Insinuated that the September 11 attacks were inside job.
Right.
And the second thing is he says that I believe that there should be some sort of Nuremberg trial for people who sought to inoculate children, healthy children, with the COVID vaccines.
Now, on the second count, I'm definitely there.
I believe that these things cannot be justified for kids and the people who are in a position to know how dangerous that is and are still recommending them.
Are actually involved in a crime against humanity.
So we don't disagree on that.
I certainly disagree that that makes me anything other than a liberal.
But in the case of the 9-11 attacks, he reveals something that I think is extremely important.
And the link.
Right.
The link that he gives is this tweet of yours.
The evidence for your insinuation.
Right, the evidence, yes.
So if you click through on his link.
I've got it, Zach.
So why don't you put it up.
This is you from September 11th, 2023.
Them.
The Conspiracy.
You want to read it?
You want me to read it?
Okay.
This is them speaking.
The conspiracy theorists are wrong about 9-11.
This is me speaking.
Whoa.
So then what do you believe?
Them.
The 9-11 Commission.
Me.
How is that not a conspiracy theory?
Them.
Yeah, okay, but you know what I mean.
Me.
Actually, I doubt either of us do.
Now my point there is that the idea that conspiracy theory is a useful way to dismiss some explanation of 9-11 is preposterous since all of the explanations for 9-11 are conspiracy theories.
That does not say one way or the other what I think happened.
So he then digs deeper.
Do you want to show his other tweet?
The breakdown of what you said?
The one that cites the podcast with Jeremy Riss and You got to make it bigger.
Michael Shermer.
Yeah, Michael Shermer and Jeremy Riss.
Okay, Yasha Monk.
Why don't you do it?
Yeah, go ahead.
So this is Yasha Monk responding to me saying that I did not insinuate that 9-11 was an inside job.
Alright, Yasha says, is this you, Brett?
Video below highlights from transcript included here.
Brett Weinstein, quote, I see patterns of anomalies that refuse to dissipate on inspection.
Michael Shermer, to me that the theory that this was an inside job by the Bush administration is a distraction from the real issue.
Weinstein, but some of the anomalies aren't little things to God on earth, because people are looking at every detail.
Shermer, like what?
Well, it's a cliché at this point, but the way Building 7 falls doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, it does.
I think so.
And you know who also knows?
The insurance companies that had to pay the claims off.
They investigated this.
uh, end of that string.
Other things Weinstein says later in this conversation, those cell phone calls have never made much sense to me.
The making of phone calls in 2001 from a plane, uh, calls that did not frustratingly drop almost instantly does not add up.
If, and then Yasha again, if all of this isn't insinuating that people who believe 9-11 was an inside job may be right, I don't know what would be.
Okay.
So Yasha is involved in a trick, and I'm going to point out just how dangerous that trick is.
And I don't know that Yasha knows that he's doing this.
I think he's just carrying water, and I will explain the purpose of it in a second.
But the point is, if you express Surprise, doubt, concern over any detail of a story, then you are on the other team.
There are two teams.
One team is called Team Inside Job, and the other team is called Not a Conspiracy Theory.
There are two teams, only two teams, there shall ever only be two teams.
And join a team, Brett.
No, no, not join a team.
Not join a team at all.
You've indicated that you're not on our team, therefore you're on the other team.
You're on the other team.
I have a right to drag you over the claim that this is an inside job because you expressed doubt about the official version.
Now this does not add up and in fact if you'll put that tweet back up and show the tweet that you responded to that he was responding to me over with that.
One second.
Okay, I say.
No, Yasha, you are logically incompetent.
If I say I don't believe the magic bullet, there must have been a second gunman.
Have I insinuated that the CIA killed Kennedy?
Obviously not.
To say the 9-11 Commission advanced a conspiracy theory is a simple statement of fact.
So, he is frustrated.
He feels entitled to do this to me because I have expressed doubt about details of the 9-11 Commission's explanation.
Now, will you put up that Isaac Asimov quote that I sent you?
Uh, yes.
Electricity.
Electricity.
This is a very important No, no, don't worry about it.
This is a very important quote.
It comes from Isaac Asimov, and it is one that is near and dear to me.
I've quoted it many times.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not eureka, but that's funny.
Now what Asimov means here, he says it very cleverly, but what he means is that the way we make progress is we look at things that don't add up.
It's always the things that don't add up that cause you to discover important things.
Now I would like you to compare this deep insight of Isaac Asimov's with Yasha Monk's apparent position.
His point is, as soon as you notice anything that doesn't add up, you're automatically on a team and we are now entitled to hold you responsible for the worst excesses, the biggest errors, the most embarrassing episodes from that team.
Yep.
That is obviously not only logically incorrect, but would be devastating to our progress as a species if we are not allowed, if you're going to turn logical analysis into teams, and you are going to force people onto the other team as soon as they say, hey, I'm not fully on board with X, right?
You are ending scientific progress.
OK, so that's the analysis.
And mind you, another friend of Yasha's jumped into the fray, actually went to the podcast in which I talked to Jeremy Riss and Michael Shermer and put together a little edit that supposedly catches me dead to rights.
And in fact, they zoom in on my shaking my head just slightly as Jeremy Riss reveals that Paul Bremer That Paul Bremer both didn't happen to be in the building when it was one of the main towers when it went down but then went on television that evening blamed Osama bin Laden and then became the the occupation governor in Iraq.
An interesting set of facts.
Now I don't take those facts to be meaningful in and of themselves.
So are you saying that We are obligated to notice nothing out of step with the mainstream story.
We are obligated to notice nothing at all lest we be shunted into the other team.
That is the new rule, and I will point out, notice this, this is the same rule that applied to vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Oh, right, anti-vaxxers, all the way down.
Right, the point is, and notice also, and this was in that piece that you just read, the idea that just asking questions is now an embarrassment, right?
Oh, we've caught you, you're using that excuse, you're just asking questions.
Well, how exactly would you have us arrive at any useful conclusion without tripping over your trap over asking questions?
Right?
Asking questions is what we do.
Even if the answer is... I mean, it's remarkable.
I remember, I think it was Sam Harris who started being like, he's just asking questions.
Like, we actually never say that.
That's not a phrase that we use ever.
Right, because it doesn't need a defense.
Exactly.
In what world are the people who are refusing to ask questions the heroes?
Right.
What world is that?
And if one team has it so dead to rights, how did they get there without asking questions?
And so quickly.
Right.
And so cleanly.
Right.
And we're being so smart about it.
I must say, I loved Jimmy Dore's bit.
It's an adjacent bit, but Jimmy Dore has a beautiful riff on doing your own research, which he points out used to be called reading.
That's right.
So this is the same thing.
What they want to do, and again fifth generation warfare, they want to demonize the very things that might set you free, which is doing enough of your own research, that is to say reading, asking proper questions, noticing anomalies, even if the answer is that the 9-11 Commission's report, which I will point out, Max Cleland quit the 9-11 Commission saying it was a cover-up.
A member of the 9-11 Commission quit saying that the Bush administration was covering up.
That's... you don't need any license to question the 9-11 Commission, but the fact that somebody who was on it reached that conclusion and stormed off is license then again.
So the fact is they want... Why don't you just follow orders?
Well, Anne, why don't I abide— I mean, it's remarkable, really.
Like, the piece is set up, the New York Times piece, the op-ed.
It's like, here's a guy who demonstrated that he won't actually follow moral orders.
And we didn't even make any orders here.
It was just understood that if you're going to be a good Democrat, you've got to follow the orders, which is that we don't even have to say because it's so understood what they are.
And you're now a bad person because you did not follow the implied stuff.
It was really easy for a number of the pseudo-heterodox types to get behind you and me and others, like, oh yeah, that was obvious because it was so explicitly racist what they were doing at Evergreen.
But really?
That interest in heterodoxy was real, Shel.
The guy who is portraying me as the example of what you should not become, right?
That guy is privately relieved that I'm actually not that mad at him.
And there's hope for us, you know, finding alignment in the future.
The point is, this is, this is tactical again.
And I want to point out what the use of the tactic is, why it's showing up here and now.
Are you a dangerous reactionary or are you not?
I am not.
No, I'm talking from inside the space of someone who would hope that he can still be friends.
Right.
To him, am I a dangerous reactionary or not, is exactly the right question.
And the answer is, of course I'm not.
Right.
I know this.
I was not actually asking you that question.
Forgive me.
Okay, so why do this?
Here's the problem.
The New York Times Atlantic Cabal.
Carpers.
I think Harper's is in trouble.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
I certainly look at the Atlantic is at the epicenter of some new thing, right?
That has interest in the world.
It shapes positions.
It controls minds.
It's the very, it's the epicenter of the location that, that Sam Harris is coming from.
Now it has a problem.
Woke.
is a big loser and we're still we're right there at that uh 14 months 13 13 months left okay they have to distance themselves from woke yeah with regard to that the general election is what that will be deciding in the general it's going to be devastating so there's a big pivot on and here's the problem and you named it at the beginning of this it's middle ground ground scramble stuff because what happens
What happens if now you admit that actually, you know, in spite of all the ink that was spilled in the New York Times over wokeness, right, and the glory of it, you have to admit that that was wrong?
Oh shit.
Who do you have to go talk to now?
Yes.
Yeah.
This is exactly what you would have to do.
So, okay, don't panic people.
How are we going to deal with this?
How are we not going to empower the people who tried to warn you not to do that woke shit because it was going to devastate Western civilization, which it is now doing?
How are you going to pivot away without empowering those people?
Well, you have to specially demonize them, right?
It's called the reactionary trap.
That's the reason.
You don't have to talk to those people.
They weren't really right, right?
They sort of, you know, it's more Sam Harrison-ism, right?
Right for the wrong reasons.
Every clock will be correct a couple times a day.
Right.
Some bumbling professor, he kind of happened to get it right and that was sort of cool, but then, wow, you know.
You know how it is with those professors from state schools.
They're not really the sharpest tools in the shed.
So, you know, they fall into something, the reactionary trap, right?
Where they think it's actually some sort of violation of the Nuremberg Code to inject children with mRNA vaccines.
For a disease that they're not susceptible to.
Yeah.
And you know what else they believe?
9-11 was an inside job.
I can prove it.
Here he says the physics of Building 7 falling down wasn't a match for what was seen.
Okay.
Thanks, Yasha.
That's good logic.
I think you should really quickly clarify, because it's clear to me exactly what you're saying, but I don't think everyone will get your difference between the terms inside job and, for example, cover up, or I don't know what happened, but it doesn't seem like it happens.
Okay, yeah, that's fair.
My point is, there are lots of things about the story that we were presented by the 9-11 Commission that do not appear to add up.
I do not know what that means, right?
I certainly take Michael Shermer's, what I believe is a good faith response to this, much more seriously than Yasha Monk's cynical one.
But the fact is, I don't know why Building 7 falls down the way it does, but I do know that if the idea is that there was a fire that burned all day in Building 7, which apparently there was, and it somehow weakened the structure enough to bring it down.
In fact, I said to Michael Shermer, let's just grant that there was something stored in there that caused it to be fatally compromised by fire.
It doesn't fall down straight like that.
Something gives first.
It leans over.
It twists.
Some part of it collapses.
Some other part of it remains standing.
Now, is it possible that there is an explanation which does simply connect office fires to that collapse?
Maybe.
I'm open to that.
What I'm not open to is pretending that the physics that we all learned in high school and college is a match for fire bringing down a building in that way.
I don't know what I'm looking at.
What I'm looking at is an anomaly that is worth exploring.
So anyway...
I believe that's what I have to say.
I just want people to pay attention to the tactical nature of these attacks.
The purpose is to make sure that we don't empower the people who, you know, Do they really want to pay the price of talking about the criminality of the vaccination campaign over mRNA because they now have to admit that they were wrong about wokeness?
No.
So they're going to find a way to pivot away from wokeness without empowering anybody who got it right because they don't want to empower people who believe things that they don't want to face.
Yeah.
It's only going to get stupider from here.
Like worse, more creative tactics, I think, will continue to come our way, meaning like at all of us.
And I guess I would just return briefly to our discussion about hope and engaging with people, both strangers and not.
In ways that suggest, insinuate even if you will, a lack of being fully on board with what you are being told you must believe or else you're not a good person.
Because really almost whatever it is, you know not entirely, but almost whatever it is, if you're being told you must believe Yes, half the country believes Y, but you must believe X or else you're not a good person.
There's a very good chance that what is being done is an attempt to control you, as opposed to an attempt to have you be fully realized as a voting citizen of a republic.
Um, and I would point out, actually, uh, quite some time ago we did an episode in which we talked about the buzz saws that were erected so that somebody who stepped out of line could be shoved into them.
I actually just went back to that, uh, today and I was reminded that that was one of the episodes that YouTube, um, cut, disappeared, and, uh, demon- and demonetized us over and that was the end of our revenue from YouTube.
I did not remember that.
But in any case, the argument was that there were certain traps where, you know, if you deviated from an official protected narrative like vaccines are inherently safe and effective, So let me, I literally went back there today, and I didn't realize it was the episode called Dodging the Buzzsaw.
It was episode 82.
It's still available on Odyssey and presumably on Rumble.
I think all of our back episodes are, nope.
Okay, so it's on Odyssey.
It's not on YouTube.
And one of the things we talked about in there was the interchange that I had.
With our then 15 year old son's pediatrician and this was less than a week after the EUA had been granted to give the mRNA vaccines to I think it was like 12 to 17 year olds.
I don't remember the younger bracket but and we happen to be taking Toby then 15 in for his just annual physical to
for camp, and this doctor really hard-balled me in front of Toby, basically telling me, insinuating again, but now worse than that, saying that I was a bad mother and was putting him at risk, and furthermore that he needed to be allowed to make his own decisions when I said, no, he's not getting an mRNA vaccination, he doesn't need it.
So I invited this doctor to have a private conversation with our son.
I said, I'm happy to leave.
He rejected that possibility and we certainly never went back there.
But I know that a lot of people have had experiences like that with people in positions of power who say to them, if you don't do what I want, you are a bad person and I'm going to hurt you for it.
And as much as possible, we all need to stand up to that.
That is 100% true.
Just a little background on what that episode was that got pulled.
I think it's actually perfect because the point is the difference between having to make that case as a mother defending your son Then versus now is all the difference in the world because what they keep doing is Overplaying their hands on this these industrial strength tactics and so the fact is Conspiracy theorists does not carry the sting that it once did because everybody has noticed.
Oh my god.
There's a lot of collusion going on and So, you know, the question isn't, is that person a conspiracy theorist?
The question is really, are they any good at it?
Are they good at sorting the wheat from the chaff?
Right?
Likewise, anti-vaxxer.
What does that even mean?
Yeah.
Right?
They used to, the slightest hesitancy And they would call you an anti-vaxxer.
Well, if you don't have the slightest hesitancy at this point, you're just not paying attention.
Yeah.
Right?
So they are burning these things.
And that means that our ability to have a conversation in which you're not being shoved into the buzzsaw because the buzzsaw isn't even turned on anymore.
Right?
Well, no, they're generating more and more terms because they're burning the old ones.
Well, right, but the point is, okay, so now they're... It's a reactionary trap.
The reactionary trap is a new one.
They are now demonizing asking questions.
They're demonizing doing your own research, right?
These people are obviously out-of-control maniacs, and we can safely ignore it when they tell you that asking questions is probably a sign that you're not very smart.
Right?
Really.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes, we can.
All right.
I think we're there.
I think we'll talk about more on safe and effective next time.
More on safe and effective.
It's two words, but we're good.
No, it suggests a fork of the brand, right?
You've got safe and effective, and you've got moron safe and effective, right?
Is it actually safe and effective, or is it only safe and effective if you're a moron?
All right, we will be back on Wednesday.
We'll be back in not very long, and tomorrow we're going to do a private Q&A on Locals, so seriously join us there.
That'll be at 11 a.m.
Pacific, two hours.
We've got the link to ask questions is up there as well.
Check out Natural Selections, where I write most weeks and post essays about all sorts of things.
What else?
Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is still out there doing well.
It's about to be published in Czech.
Did I mention that already?
And we're going to go to Prague for the book launch.
That's going to be fun.
Discord server is up and running and great, and you also continue to have very good conversations at your Patreon.
We have our sponsors this week.
Once more, we're Mudwater, Paleo Valley, and Hillsdale College, all of whom we encourage you to go check out if any of those products are up your alley, as it were.
And just a reminder that we are supported by you.
We really appreciate you watching, you chatting in the Watch Party on Locals, sharing, talking with people about what you're hearing, what you disagree with, what you agree with, all of that.
And just a reminder to please join us on Rumble and Locals if you can.
Yeah, it really helps.
Yeah, it does.
So until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
