In this 199th 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 FCC’s plan to expand the scope of their reach to…everything, in the name of equity (of broadband access). We compare this move to that of the WHO, and also to what happened at Evergreen, and to pretty much all “equity” maneuvers ever. We discuss the spread of viral information on-line, and how...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 199, hard as that is to It is sometime mid-November.
It is sometime mid-November.
It is about as mid-November as November gets.
The Ides of November.
The what of November?
I'm guessing from your telling me that it's about as mid-November as you get that it must be the Ides of November.
The Ides of March is the middle of March?
I believe it's the 15th, isn't it?
Is that what that means?
Ides?
Well, see, now you're putting me on the spot, but I think so.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Maybe.
We'll find out, I'm sure.
So here we are, 199.
Our 200th episode will be the day before American Thanksgiving, so come back and see us then, but stay here now as long as you're here.
We're going to talk some about the FCC and the Internet today, about censorship, the administrative state, and more.
And more.
More.
And more.
Hear a little bit of fan mail at the end?
Nice.
Yeah.
So join us on Locals.
We're this watch party going on right now.
Join us at Rumble.
Join us anywhere you can find us, but we particularly appreciate you coming and finding us on Rumble and on Locals.
We're not going to be doing a Q&A today.
We will, I think, next week right before Thanksgiving, but lots more to say, which we will remind you of at the end, but for now let's just start off with the ads, get those out of the way, and start talking.
I will say that I'm going to read the first two of the three ads, and you're going to read the last one, but just a reminder that we choose our sponsors very carefully, so if you hear us talking about products or services when you see this green perimeter around the screen, which means that Yes, we are being paid for the ads.
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Excellent.
We're back to one word assessments.
Yes.
You know, there was a reason for the one-word assessments back then, and yeah.
Yeah, but you could even up it to like four at this point if you wanted to.
You've got full vocal range now.
I could even go five.
That is so very excellent.
Well, that's five.
I was counting syllables rather than words.
Yeah, yeah.
We're not counting syllables.
We don't have to resort to that sort of thing.
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I'll bring better dry bags next time.
It's sick.
All right.
But I am.
Next time, I'm bringing a better dry bag for the camera.
That was my one failed bit of planning on that.
Hardly something you can blame on Cruz for.
I don't blame them for it at all.
In fact, it is a testament to what a good adventure that was that I needed a better dry bag for the camera because we were constantly out there, in the wet, confronted with wildlife worth photographing.
It was great.
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All right.
So, tomorrow, November 15th, the FCC, the Federal communications commission, is going to vote to approve or reject a sweeping new plan for the Biden administration, a plan that if they vote to approve, would forever change the internet and privacy therein in the United States and presumably would have cascading effects elsewhere as well.
Absolutely devastating.
Absolutely devastating.
So, our friend Holly had a guest post on her substack, which links to a number of other things.
We'll put all of these links in our show notes.
But the place probably to start is that the current FCC Commissioner, Robert Carr, has come out strongly opposed to this plan.
And I want to just read a few highlighted sections from his statement dated November 6th, and then also go to the documents from the FCC itself from October 6th and October 25th, I believe, and then let's talk some.
So let's see, if you can just zoom back out on me for a minute, Zach.
I've got to find this stuff.
It's somehow not open.
Supposed to be.
Okay, here we go.
So this is office of statement again from November 6th from the Office of Commissioner Brennan Carr titled, Carr opposes President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all internet services and infrastructure in the U.S.
This unlawful power grab chooses central planning over free market capitalism.
So he begins by saying Democrats have been in charge of the FCC and administrative agencies for 12 of the last 16 years, and they have had lots of opportunity to make changes.
And the Biden administration has concluded that where we're at now has not done what needs to be done.
And with that, Carr agrees.
But of course, he's laying those failures at the Democrats' feet, which seems fair, at least given that amount of time thought about.
He says, among other things, what is this proposed plan going to do?
Text of the order, and I did find every single thing that he says is in the order in the original document, so I know this is accurate.
The text of the order expressly provides that the FCC would be empowered for the first time to regulate each and every ISPs, that's Internet Service Providers, network infrastructure deployment, network reliability, network upgrades, network maintenance, customer promises, equipment and installation.
Speeds, Capacity, Latency, Data Caps, Throttling, Pricing, Promotional Rates, Imposition of Late Fees, Opportunity for Equipment Rental, Installation Time, Contract Renewal Terms, Service Termination Terms, and Use of Customer Credit and Account History, and Mandatory Arbitration Clauses, Pricing, Deposits, Discounts, Customer Service, Language Options, Credit Checks, Marketing or Advertising, Contract Renewal, Upgrades, Account Termination, Transfer to Another Covered Entity, and Service Suspension.
And then in one of the best sentences I've read in a long time, he says, Kara says, as exhausting as it is to read that list, the FCC itself says it is not an exhaustive list.
Fantastic use of language there.
And it's even worse than that.
He says, the FCC reserves, and again, I do find this in the source documents, the FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both, quote, actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.
In other words, if you take any action as a ISP, you may be liable.
And if you do nothing, you may be liable.
There is no path to complying with this standardless regime.
And the draft FCC order says that, quote, We are not explicitly tasked with regulating entities outside the communications industry.
Parenthetical aside from Carr, a rare moment of regulatory humility.
But it then goes on to say that the FCC will do so in this case nonetheless.
Parenthetical aside, the moment passed.
The moment of regulatory humility has passed.
Quoting Carr again, Landlords are now covered.
Construction crews are now covered.
Marketing agencies are now covered.
Banks are now covered.
The government itself is now covered.
All newly regulated by the FCC and liable for any act or commission that the agency determines has an impermissible impact on a consumer's access to broadband.
Overreach much?
You wanted to add some things, I think.
Well, I just wanted to point out that, look, you're either going to be able to handle the contemplation that there might be something behind this beyond what you're supposed to see.
This is once again something designed to be so boring and, you know, technical and outside of your area of expertise that presumably somebody who's more qualified is on top of it.
If it's a three-letter agency, you know you want to ignore it.
Right, but there's going to be an obvious Motten-Bailey here.
There's going to be a very defensible explanation for why the FCC would want to be in charge of all of these things.
Obviously, the Internet has become essential to our daily activities, and the thought of it becoming unstable is truly frightening if you understand all of the various systems that depend on it, blah blah blah blah blah.
This isn't about instability.
Well.
This is about inequity and access.
Inequity and access.
Imagine.
It's not about internet instability.
Well, the question then is, is this about preventing inequity, and what the hell would that mean?
Oh, we have answers to that.
But the obvious point is it is going to be used to create inequity, which those of us who can see, you know, who can read not only between the lines, but the actual lines, can see coming a mile away, which will be denied up until the point that it is invoked.
At which point, where the hell are you going to discuss it?
Like in your backyard?
Well, this passed years ago, months ago.
Where were you then?
Well, we were here.
We were here.
And part of the reason we're here now is this is going to a vote tomorrow.
And so it is possible that actually getting the attention of your representatives, you know, the links that we'll put online, but really, if you if you go to Commissioner Carr's Twitter account, like there are there are easy places now where you can go and try to get the attention of your elected officials and say, this should not pass.
So I wanted to suggest a rubric.
It's such an obvious one.
You want to do that before we finish going through this?
Yeah, we might revisit it.
But the rubric is...
Anything that is being proposed could be run through the test of how would that have worked during recent episodes of history.
In other words, if you're looking at the WHO proposed treaty amendments, the question is, oh, how would COVID have gone had those amendments been in place already?
In this case, we have to ask the question about how would recent episodes of internet censorship have gone differently if the FCC had had these controls?
And the answer is, it's terrifying.
So anyway, that's going to be the new rubric.
Maybe we'll refine it a little bit.
Yes.
The very idea that the FCC wants the power to regulate things like the termination of accounts.
Really, whose account will they be terminating?
Is it going to be, I don't know, ours?
Right?
We won't be able to access the internet because we will be guilty of wrong-think?
Yeah.
No, and as, you know, the last bit that I read from The FCC grants that they're not explicitly tasked with regulating entities outside the communications industry, but they're going to do so because they feel like this is important enough that they're going to do so.
And so they're reaching into everything, potentially.
It's very much like the WHO, in fact.
It's very much like the proposed amendments to be voted on in May of 2024 to this, what was it, 2005 WHO document.
Which basically says, yeah, yes, technically, you know, health is in our name and all that, and we're a public health, you know, non-governmental body.
But really, if we say it's about public health, then it's in our domain.
And therefore, we are now saying that we can say, we might say, we are granting ourselves the ability to claim that anything is within the realm of public health.
And it's exactly the same move that's going on here.
Like anything that's outside of communications but might impact broadband access, well then that's our domain.
I would also point out that this very same thing was a precipitating event in the collapse of the Evergreen State College, where you may remember we once taught.
I do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Evergreen State College.
And do you remember, I've forgotten what the… What are you talking about?
What I'm talking about is those who have paid attention to that story may remember the famous canoe meeting in which the full absurdity of the campus went on display.
I actually brought, I raised the canoe meeting to a few people recently at some of the events that we've been at recently.
It was brought back to them, but it has faded from memory for those of us who weren't living the horror at the time, so you might want to replay it.
So the canoe meeting was an insane episode in which the architects of a new broad and draconian plan to revamp the entirety of the college to some unknown purpose was presented in what was called a forum, implying that we might be able to discuss it, Um...
In fact, they hadn't even presented it.
They claimed to have emailed all of us and I had to harangue the committee to actually email it to us so we could look at it.
Which we got the day before, the night before.
And it was absurd.
But in any case, the canoe meeting involved a ceremonial revelation of one little piece of the plan that then caused the administrators of the college and the members of the committee, what was the committee called?
I don't know.
There was a large hand-picked committee.
Don't look at the man behind the curtain committee.
That's the one.
They beckoned everyone to join a ceremonial canoe that was extremely... It would come to stretch across campus.
Yes.
As we went into the sea of equity together.
Anyway, it was an absurd spectacle, but the thing I wanted to point to was that the plan, in fact, involved them extending their reach beyond their charter.
Yes, exactly.
And extending their reach into things like hiring, which they were not charged with looking at.
But their point was, well, you're not saying hiring isn't important, are you?
So obviously, this is a place to increase our equity.
But what did they mean by that?
What they meant was, that you would not be able to hire anybody for any position, including chemistry, math, all sorts of computer science, without providing an equity justification, which meant that it wasn't possible to hire somebody who was just going to teach their discipline.
They had to all be activists.
Right.
No, and it wasn't what we had seen before, which was also not good.
It It wasn't, you need to write a statement describing how you will work towards equity in the classrooms where you teach.
No, this was, there shall be no positions hired that do not themselves involved the pursuit of equity, which means, of course, physics is dead and chemistry is dead and everything that isn't about this particular ideology is dead.
So equity is the largest Trojan horse of history at some level, I think.
It was used there.
It's exactly being used here because this is being called an equity plan.
That is the justification for this entire FCC thing, which if passed, again, like with the WHO referendum or memorandum or whatever it's called, … will redefine its charter, to use the language from Evergreen, to extend borderless to every possible horizon, such that it can reach into anything that it feels like reaching into.
It's a sophistry superweapon.
And the WHO explicitly in their revision document calls out equity.
We talked here about the fact that they reserve the right to redistribute the various technologies and know-how around the world to increase the equity of a response to a public health crisis.
Same.
Right.
that equity provides the perfect cloak.
So, you know, one might wonder whether or not somebody didn't have a clever idea a number of years ago that if you wanted to actually capture all of these structures and turn them to some non-public spirited purpose, that everybody...
Because it's ill-defined, and it allows you to reorganize anything based on a claim that something is inequitable.
And then as soon as you challenge it, the question is, well, what's wrong with you?
Are you a bigot?
Right.
You're in favor of equity, aren't you?
And this was one of their missteps, right?
Because it turns out equity doesn't mean what everyone assumes it means.
Equity and equality are not the same thing, and we've talked about that, but I think James Lindsay has gone most explicitly and farthest in terms of really laying that out in terms of the distinction between the two.
And while it would be hard for me to stand up to someone and say, no, I'm not in favor of equality, although there will be conditions under which I think that having equality as the highest or only goal is wrong, but equity, you know, everyone, once they hear what equity is, should be, must be, in fact, willing to say, yeah, I'm not in favor of equity.
Nope.
Actually wrong.
Not that that's not my highest value.
It's not a value at all.
I think that equity is wrongheaded.
Well, it is, as always, the result of the commandeering of terminology.
There was a point at which equity was a perfectly fine thing to be interested in until it got... I don't know if that's the case.
I do.
Equity obviously has a valid meaning when it is not being... So what's the definition that can be recovered?
What's the valid meaning that can be recovered?
There is no valid meaning that cannot be gamed in the hands of bad people.
The idea that it might make sense to reorganize something, you know, on a On a Ultimate team, for example, there was a constant process if the teams were very lopsided of redistributing certain players, right?
I guess I need to hear the definition of equity that's being—so, redistribution of talent to make competition more interesting does not—which, yes, I've certainly participated in such things, right?
Or, yeah, right.
Redistribution of talent to make competition more interesting when you're playing a pickup game and the point is the sport and the play and not that I'm going to win at all costs.
Fantastic, but I don't think that that is in service of equity.
But, you know, until I hear a definition of equity I can't give you a definition that can't be gamed, because that's exactly the reason they've settled on it, is that because it is not equality of opportunity, for example.
Equality of opportunity, we can say, are the opportunities really equal, right?
So the point is you don't, there's no wiggle room in there if you're actually doing the measurement.
The idea that equity, you know, if you had a A scenario in which a group of people was trapped in cold circumstances.
They were threatened by cold.
You could look for an equal distribution of blankets, where you could distribute them equitably in a way that vulnerability resulted in certain people ending up with more blankets.
Children who have a greater surface area, for example.
So there is a legitimate version of this.
Nobody wants to touch it now that we've seen what can be done with it.
That's a good example.
But anyway, I think what we're finding out is that something, whether it knew what it was doing on the front end when it commandeered that term, or it's just realized that the woke revolution has carved out a huge loophole in everything, is now using it for a power grab across public and private concerns, and it is resulting in
What is obviously, people will remember, we regularly invoke William Binney, who was with the NSA, who coined the phrase, the turnkey totalitarian state.
Turnkey totalitarian state are provisions that are erected around you without being active so you don't notice that it's a totalitarian state and then somebody turns the key.
This is the building of these things on the basis that there's some problem with the internet that needs to be rectified and of course the FCC is going to step in and do the job because they're just that committed to our being served well by, you know, internet stuff.
Yeah.
So, before I read Carr's statement, of which I'm going to read one more paragraph here, I went back and read the first draft from the FCC in October 6th document, and then I did not read in full, but I went through and read several parts of it.
A very, very lengthy October 25th document from the FCC, which is mostly what Carr is responding to here, and all the quotes here from that October 25th document, which again we'll link in the show notes.
Interestingly, the October 6th, the earlier document, is almost entirely or it very strongly leans on this equity justification for these sweeping reforms and for this vast overreach.
And it really doesn't come up much at all.
It's like it's already been accepted by the time we get to the document two, three weeks later.
And that is mostly what, you know, what I've been reading from so far.
But here we have in the penultimate paragraph of Carr's November 6th document, objecting to, strongly objecting to, this plan from the Biden administration.
He writes, after nearly two years and several rounds of comments, the FCC's draft order, and again this is the later, the larger October 25th draft order, Concludes that, quote, there was little or no evidence in the agency's record to even indicate that there has been any intentional discrimination in the broadband market within the meaning of the statute.
But instead of proceeding with forward-looking rules on that basis, the FCC, at President Biden's direction, reads an expansive and disfavored theory of liability into the law that exists nowhere in the statutory text.
Even in the absence of any evidence of intentional discrimination, the Biden plan states that the FCC can impose potentially unbounded liability if the agency finds that some act or even failure to act happened to result in a disparate impact based on the FCC's own judgment.
Reading this theory of liability into the law conflicts with the Supreme Court's civil rights precedent.
The FCC should not adopt it.
And then he says, look, there could be changes that would actually do some good, but this ain't them, and this can't go through.
I want to read just one page of that earlier document from the FCC, which addresses some of what he's talking about here, and then I'll have us talk.
So this is, you can show my screen here, before the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, D.C., again from, yes, October 6th.
So I'm just going to scroll down to page four here.
That's page three.
Page four, which is part two of this October 6th FCC document, the subtitle of which is, Digital Discrimination of Access Must Include Policies and Practices That Disparately Impact One or More Marginalized Groups' Access to Broadband Services.
The NPRM asks whether the Commission should define digital discrimination of access with reference to disparate impact, disparate treatment, or both.
Okay, so we've been here before.
This is a large part of where we were at Evergreen.
Impact, treatment, or both.
The NTIA urges the Commission to include both concepts in its definition of digital discrimination.
A broadband provider's practice or policy should be deemed discriminatory if it facially discriminates between or among groups, Or, disparately impacts marginalized groups notwithstanding the absence of any overtly disparate treatment.
The core concern in this area is the reality experienced by individuals and communities, including whether fast, reliable, and affordable high-speed internet services are made available to them on an equal footing with their counterparts.
While disparities in service could result from intentional discriminatory treatment based on the statute's protective characteristics, which should certainly be prohibited, they may more commonly result from business decisions and institutional behaviors that were set in motion without any discriminatory intent.
Indeed, ISPs and industry groups have been careful to point out that documented evidence of disparate treatment in this area is nearly non-existent.
Nevertheless, marginalized groups' access to and adoption of broadband internet service has historically lagged behind, sometimes well behind, that of other groups.
Thus, only a definition of digital discrimination that includes policies and practices that have disparate impacts can adequately protect less connected communities.
They're doing quite a bit of argumentational bait and switch there.
They say, because there is no evidence of disparate treatment, and yet we see differences, therefore we have to include disparate impacts in what we're including in what we get to have any say about, because otherwise we don't have any power at all.
So they've created the need for themselves by admitting probably to their despair that actually there's no evidence of disparate treatment.
Oops.
Like Verizon and T-Mobile and all the rest, they're not actually engaging in disparate treatment of people.
rich versus not, white versus black, you know, any of this.
Like there's no evidence of this.
But because there is no evidence of that, therefore we must include disparate outcomes.
Because otherwise, what are we to do?
What's a poor FCC to do?
I would also point out that Evergreen made this all so clear as well, because in that very same document, they outlined that they would not accept that the treatment of folks, they outlined that they would not accept that the treatment of folks, students, had been equal until everyone was equally capable Okay.
Of course, the only conceivable way to do that is to hobble people who, for whatever reason, even if it's past discrimination, have arrived at Evergreen With certain skills.
So anyway, the point is they're just declaring, it's like declaring a war on terror.
Right?
You can't, it doesn't end.
So this is declaring a need that can't possibly be met, and therefore a perpetual opportunity for meddling.
It reminds me too, and this is maybe going to seem a little farther afield, but it reminds me of the Google Memo.
It's not a thing.
The Google Memo dust up from summer of 2017, where James Damore, then an employee of Google, was invited by Google, along with many other managers, I don't remember what his job was exactly, software engineer managers, to consider why there might be the skewed sex ratio that there was among software engineers at Google.
And he put together a document, which I wrote about, and I was then on a panel with him.
And I assessed, you know what, I probably wouldn't have said some of the stuff the way he said it, but the science is sound, and he's right.
More to the point, more to this point, is You can't compare.
You can't say, ah, the sex ratio of Google software engineers needs to be the sex ratio of the population, because that's not actually the population from which you are pulling software engineers to be employed at Google.
Now, I don't have a perfect rubric for who you might be pulling software engineers at Google from, but perhaps a good proxy would be people earning degrees, either bachelor's or master's, in computer sciences in colleges in the years in which people are then being hired at Google.
So those are the stats that I looked at in advance of the panel that I was on with James and Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose in early 2018, I think.
And, huh, sure enough, Sure enough, the sex ratio of people earning degrees in computer science at both the bachelor's and master's level, and it held whether or not you did either of those, was exactly the same, about four to one, male to female, as the sex ratio of software engineers at Google.
Which tells you that even if there is discrimination, for which there is really very little evidence, but even if there is discrimination against female software engineers somewhere along the way, It's not at Google.
Google is hiring the sex ratio at exactly the ratio that the software engineers are being produced.
So the reason that comes up here is that the idea that the ISPs are going to be responsible for disparate outcomes when they have already been freed of the contention that they are engaging in disparate treatment is insane.
It's completely insane, and no, of course we should not all be responsible for disparate outcomes in systems which have all of this complexity.
And not that we shouldn't try to solve these problems, but the idea that you, you're providing the service, therefore you're responsible for any disparity in outcome, even though we've already demonstrated that you have done really what we could have hoped for you to have done.
I would also point out... I'm done.
That the idea, if you were going to pick one thing where there really was no remedy necessary, it might be broadband.
Right?
Who lacks a damn cell phone these days?
Who lacks broadband access to the internet?
Some homeless people have this, right?
This is like... And in what period of time did it become so universally distributed?
So, I don't know if I'm going to be able to find it, but there's actually a section in one of these frickin' FCC documents about storms.
And their point is... Which are inequitably distributed.
Right!
And their point kind of is, poor people live in places with bad weather.
And that may be true.
I'm not at all convinced that it is true, but that may be true.
In which case, the ISP has to deal with this?
The ISP is now responsible for... Well, the thing is so backward.
Look, okay, first of all, let's say that you had slightly slower access to the internet.
Yeah.
It's not the biggest tragedy.
In fact, there's an argument to be made it might even be good for you.
Well, as with so many things, COVID set us up for this, right?
So what we saw was, we're going to shut down schools to save people!
And then, you know, they sent all the kids home.
And of course, the cascading of the downstream effects of that are huge and dire.
But one of the things that we saw for sure was, oh, a lot of kids actually don't have anything at home.
You know, a computer, broadband, food, loving parents, a bed, like anything, right?
And so that is, I'm sure, part of what allowed this thing to happen, right?
But we know a lot of people don't have it.
It's like, yeah, okay, true.
Some number of people don't.
And those people are also missing all of these other things.
Okay, but even if that were the case, and I am not convinced that there is a crisis where people are lacking sufficient access to the internet.
I rather suspect the crisis is quite the opposite, but there are going to be some people.
Libraries do exist, too.
Library, yes, people have access, right?
You know, if you don't have access to the cell network, you probably can get access pretty cheaply to a Wi-Fi network.
There are libraries, so, and the harm of not having access, you know, I would like to see some all-cause mortality data on, you know, internet access, because it might be that it's just actually bad for you, and that the people who have the gift of not being connected to it actually are going to out-compete the rest of us, but Nonetheless, the idea that there is a crisis here that requires the FCC to take a broad view about its ability to terminate accounts.
Did you catch that?
Oh, yes.
Right?
The termination of accounts.
Yes.
Create equity by terminating accounts.
Interesting.
How are you going to create equity?
I mean, it's Harrison Bergeron all over again.
It's Harrison Bergeron all over again, right.
But the point is, OK, the point is some totally garbage irrationalization for some incredibly diabolical power grab on the basis of equity, which means that if you oppose it, you're a bigot.
It means that, you know, that last tiny little fraction of a percentage of people that really doesn't have a good option for access to the internet, right, you're against those people.
Yeah.
That's who you hate.
That's why you're concerned about the FCC's overreach, is you hate those last few people who aren't on the internet.
This is obviously just nuts, right?
And I would also point out that, once again, the whole idea of, you know, well, it's not really... there's no difference between An industry that's actually discriminating against people, which would obviously be something in need of a remedy, right?
And the impact is differential.
Therefore, it's just as bad as if somebody had discriminated against someone, right?
And we see this over and over and over again.
OK, well, there's no evidence of discrimination against women or black people or whatever.
But there's still historical stuff which is causing the problems, and therefore what?
Like, actually finish the sentence.
Because they never actually finish the sentence.
They kind of go like, it's really bad, right?
And no, we couldn't find any evidence of discrimination.
And yes, discrimination still exists.
But most of these stories, they start with this little parenthetical or footnote.
It's like, oh, there's no discrimination, actually.
But we've got a problem, and we deserve to have the power to solve it.
And boy, do we have some ideas for you.
One would have to read especially carefully to figure it out.
But I read this document before we came on air.
The response to it by Carr.
But I think I can read in there.
And it's always the same, right?
They carve out a justification that could be limited.
If you had some court that was actually looking in on these decisions on a regular basis, it could actually be limited in some way.
But the whole thing defines its power to declare what is a problem so broadly that, you know, you couldn't possibly be— Oh, but you're not being fair, because, you know, the Internet is an evolving thing, and it changes very fast, and they don't want to be limited by what we know today.
They just want to get ahead of it a little bit.
They just want to get ahead of you a little bit.
Well, they just want to get ahead of us a little bit is exactly what I'm concerned about, because I think what I read in there, if you think back, you know, again, let's apply COVID as the standard.
How would these powers have been used during COVID?
Well, one thing that we heard very frequently was that the impacts of COVID were disproportionately bad for people of color.
Which may actually be true on account of the fact of making vitamin D is more difficult if you have dark skin.
The remedy, however, would have been awareness of the vitamin D issue, supplementation of vitamin D, you know, those sorts of things.
Encouragement of going outside?
Right.
But what happens if under this new FCC rubric, The idea is, oh, medical mis-dis and mal-information is disproportionately harming communities of color and other oppressed people, therefore we're terminating your ISP access to the internet so you'll stop hurting these people.
It's like, well, that didn't happen, but it doesn't mean you can't claim it did.
So, you know, the number of diabolical scenarios... The powers would be granted to the FCC to do just that, if this passes.
Right.
The FCC and we also now have the, you know, the WHO will presumably at some point in the near future have these incredible draconian powers to declare a public health emergency and the way these things interface with each other.
So, if they both pass.
If the WHO's addendum passes in May and this FCC garbage passes tomorrow, and the WHO has defined public health as anything that they define as public health, and the FCC has defined equitable access to broadband as anything that they define as equitable access to broadband, Which means that we've got the entire universe being served by the WHO over here, and the entire universe being served by the FCC over here.
Presumably there will be a moment when they clash, when they actually both want to make some changes on the same thing, because everything is public health and everything is equitable access to broadband.
So what are you going to do when these two three-letter agencies actually butt heads with one another?
I am really not worried about that, because the assholes that are pushing this stuff are pushing both things simultaneously.
They are going to be in complete agreement with themselves about what it is that needs to be done to whom when, and yeah, I'm much more worried about, you know, what happens... You think I was worried?
I mean, not really, but I don't even think the potential No, I think it absolutely is a potential, actually, because just like you pointed out with regard to the Evergreen thing, you know, they appear to be, you know, like a ragtag group of misfits, right?
And it's, you know, it's this group, and it's this group, and it's this group, and they're all saying, like, we are marginalized, and we are underrepresented, and we are historically trodden upon, and therefore we come together.
And as that group starts to grow in power, the core members of that group start shunting other members out.
uh you know as as there are fewer and fewer of us out there out here to dissent uh the the big guys will begin to fight amongst themselves and sparks will fly Yeah, but I don't see... sparks will fly, but I don't see it happening between these two entities.
This is basically discretion hoarding, where the ability to override reason that might come from any place, whether it's from doctors or from bureaucrats or Academics or anything the ability to override anybody's judgment on anything is Being carved out and you know, we will find out what the emergency is.
So, you know, yeah, no doubt as whatever the game is that they're playing behind the scenes results in people being thrown out of the coalition, they will nonetheless end up in possession of all of the discretion that they've hoarded.
Yep.
Yeah, I found the stuff on Storms, but maybe it's not.
No, I want to hear about the Storms.
Um...
The inequitably distributed storms, which seems almost certain to be true.
This is again from the October 6th document from the FCC, not the most up-to-date one, and a much shorter one than the October 25th.
Variability and service quality might be due entirely to a storm's fortuitous path.
Or, alternatively, to the combination of that path and a provider's practices and policies with respect to network investments and upgrades.
If such practices and policies are facially neutral, for example, based on revenue opportunities in different areas, but lead to outages or limitations felt disproportionately based on revenue opportunities in different areas, but lead to outages or limitations felt disproportionately by marginalized communities, only a disparate impact framework will allow the Commission
Now to really interpret this you have to know what a disparate impact framework is, which sounds like probably something that the Commission will get to define out of view of the rest of us and then present to us.
And You know, by adopting such a framework, you know, to be decided on out of view, the Commission can help ensure that providers take proactive steps to mitigate the disparities caused by environmental and other external factors.
Ensure that providers take proactive steps to mitigate the disparities caused by environmental factors.
This is just strange.
Again, how?
What are they giving themselves the right to do?
environmental, or other factors truly preclude feasible provision of service, the commission both can and per the statute must account for those factors.
Again, how?
What are they giving themselves the right to do?
And then just one more here.
What the commission must not do is allow a provider to blame geography, bad weather, or other factors for a purported inability to provide adequate service to communities in need when the provider's own practices and policies also contributed to a given gap or disruption.
So, So at one level what I see here is them saying actually where it's really hard to access, like up in those hollers, you can't decide.
You ISP can't decide not to go there.
You can't decide just to do the flatlands where it's easy to run lines.
And really?
Like, I'm surprised at that, even.
And that's like the shallow end of this pool, that the providers – I mean, This is going to seem like it's out of nowhere, you will understand.
People who go to the jungle now, who aren't, even who are as we in our early days, you know, we're becoming tropical biologists, but we're going to jungles in Central America and in Madagascar, and we had the sense at first, like, oh, you know, rainforests are steep.
Like, rainforests aren't steep.
The rainforests that remain on this planet are steep because they were logged last.
Rainforests are on every kind of terrain where it's lowland and it's tropical and it's wet, right?
And, you know, and some other factors around soil and climate work in its favor.
But every place where there was rainforest that was flat, it got cut down.
Because of the hardwoods, because of agriculture, because of roads, because of development, because it's far easier for humans to move into flat places than into steep places.
So that is an historical truth from forever, that we take what's easy first.
And the idea that the ISPs are being required to uniformly blanket an area is interesting.
I don't actually know Precisely where I fall on this, but that is one of the things here that I at least thought, huh, I wonder to what degree that that is agreed upon.
Well, I mean, I see a couple things here.
On the one hand, you can imagine that to the extent that there are people who live somewhere so remote that the internet can't reach them, that there's an argument to be made that these people are hobbled in something essential to modern life.
I don't think that's what's going on here at all.
Yeah.
And again, I envy those people, as probably do most of us.
But I also wonder, in light of what we've learned about mass formation, if there is not some desire to ensure that everybody's plugged in, and they're gonna use an equity justification to make sure that they reach every last place so that there's nobody left to go, hey, the rest of you are all going crazy.
What's that about?
I would also point out this is all a little bit interesting in light of Starlink.
Yeah.
Right.
Starlink literally puts Internet broadband, Internet access on boats at sea.
Yeah, but it's not cheap.
Well, I'm not saying it's cheap, but I'm saying that if you wanted to make sure that people had access without creating a fourth branch of government, right, you could do it with technologies that are already available, inexpensively.
I don't see how that addresses this.
ISP through traditional means or through Starlink, the point that we are being told they're trying to make is equitable access.
And whatever they're actually up to, Starlink or cables into your home, it still takes something.
Well, no, not really.
I mean, that's the point about Starlink is that what you need is just power, and you can be anywhere.
But it's fantastically expensive.
It's not fantastically expensive, no.
We're talking about people who don't... Right, but my point is a small government program that decided to starlink remote locations could do this without creating draconian powers.
The draconian powers are obviously the point.
Well, that feels to me like a different point, because this is not the FCC claiming that they are now going to start providing internet to people.
Right, they're going to force providers to do it.
They're going to force providers to do it, including Starlink, right?
So if the government is saying, oh, actually, we're now going to take on And, you know, maybe because they know that people would get up in arms about the idea of, like, the government's providing internet to a bunch of people?
Like, how is that the government's job?
Where do we, in fact, live?
Like, what is that?
But, you know, Starlink is just another ISP here, I feel like.
Right, but the point is, the idea of locations so remote that they can't get internet access, which that document says, should there be such locations that it's not just difficult but impossible?
then they at least have to account for the causes that make it impossible.
Actually, nowhere is impossible.
So, to the degree that this is an actual concern, and that it would be good for people whose, you know, regional ISPs don't actually get to where they particularly live, perhaps there would be some good, some public good, in having those ISPs team up with Starlink for those particular potential customers.
Right, but my point is not about anything other than just as it was conspicuous when during Katrina the government forgot that it had helicopters, right?
That it had materials that could remedy the issues at a rapid rate.
It is interesting that we have a draconian bill with no end of opportunities for abuse at the same moment that we have a technological remedy that interrupts the primary justification for this.
Right?
Forcing ISPs across the board to serve communities equally is absurd in an era where this could be done very efficiently with a tiny program.
I'm not convinced.
I'm not convinced, because that requires a governmental-corporate alliance between Starlink and government, and then that would appear to be competing against the other ISPs.
I feel like you get into all sorts of legitimate regulatory problems by imagining that.
I guess I take the point that I hear you making that I think is quite reasonable here as actually to their point that we refuse to be precise about defining the scope of what we want to do because things are changing so fast.
Well, yes, if this document has been in process for two years, things have changed very fast out from under them.
Starlink is now actually out there and could resolve some of the problems that they themselves are claiming to want to solve by means that are somewhat older.
Yeah, I don't think they haven't noticed.
I think, I mean, if I can just point to one conspicuous thing here, the fact that they even mentioned banking in this document.
What the hell is that doing?
Where is it?
I don't remember banking in here.
I can't remember, but it was in one of the quotes that you had highlighted.
Not that document.
I'm working on it.
But in any case, the idea that they're somehow going to fix an equity problem through regulation of banking obviously strongly implies a willingness to engage in debanking.
And I think, frankly, this is about control of the Internet for purposes that are not stated.
It's got a justification that is provided.
Yeah, so the FCC doesn't mention banking.
This is Carr saying the unending scope of this document means that there are no limits.
And so the particular quote is, landlords are now covered, construction crews are now covered, marketing agencies are now covered, banks are now covered, the government itself is now covered, all newly regulated by the FCC.
So, you know, just to say it's not singled out by the FCC, but his point is, as far as I can tell from having read the original documents, not being an expert in this at all, and he is, he's right.
Yeah, well I think he is right, and I think this is about the control of the flow of information using a very thin justification of, you know, the government being obsessed with helping those small number of people who don't have broadband access, which is nonsense.
Okay, so, again, vote is tomorrow, so if people feel inspired to reach out to your elected officials and make your position known that expanding the scope of the FCC to include anything and everything is not in the interest of individuals or anyone but the people behind this, please do so.
Yes, they have automated tallies, so in all likelihood you can simply call your congresspeople and you can have your displeasure noted automatically.
It's not hard to do.
They're also in Carr's tweet, I believe, and the Washington Examiner's also been covering this.
There are ways to contact the FCC directly.
All right, so kind of related, you also want to talk about Well, I'm going to let you introduce it rather than use any keywords here.
Yeah.
My attention was called to a Michael Schellenberger piece.
It's a video in which he is looking at a 2021 video presentation by Rene Duresta on the Stanford Internet Observatory's activities.
It contains some narrative, how the projects that they are involved in came under their purview.
It's a very, it's not very long, but it's long, it's 40 minutes or so, and what Schellenberger does, I highly recommend that people watch or at least listen to the thing, what he does is he steps through Rene Duresta's presentation and he translates it as somebody who has been researching the censorship industrial complex.
That is a term that I believe our friend Brett Swanson is responsible for, but anyway, Schellenberger has brought it to much wider attention.
And so Renée d'Aresta, for those who don't know, has been a warrior of sorts against what she terms mystice and mal-information.
What she's really been is a warrior in favor of censorship who played a very diabolical role during Um, during the pandemic, I will say, um, I think my first awareness of her was from you, where you, uh, were absolutely alarmed at what you heard this person say, um, on, uh, Sam Harris's podcast.
Mm-hmm.
Back, uh, mid-2017.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she is an unrepentant Russiagator, and... Yeah, I was, I was alarmed.
You were alarmed, and I then listened to it, and it was like, my goodness.
A, this person is out of control, and B, Sam's buying it.
What is that?
I will say that it's not the only place that Sam has shown himself to be gullible.
Turns out now, as Schellenberger covers in the beginning of his video, she has connections to the CIA, which is not terribly surprising, but of course Stanford is ostensibly private, despite the fact that a huge fraction of its budget comes from The Election Integrity Partnership started in September 2020.
These things all become rather murky.
But I wanted to call attention to one particular segment of this longer video, which we're going to play.
And then I want to talk about what its implications are relative to things we've discussed here on Dark Horse many times.
The Election Integrity Partnership started in September 2020.
We had stakeholder types who could surface instances of concern.
Stakeholder types.
So government, civil society, platforms, media.
So these are the people that are going to be demanding the censorship.
Civil society and government flagged things that were emerging in their communities.
So they're spying on their neighbors.
Our own analysts did proactive detection as well.
We also spied on people.
We created tickets and an NKQ to track the evolution of incidents over time to see if false or misleading claims were gaining in reach or velocity.
That's the key here.
So it's important to understand that these guys are really not out to censor every last thing.
They don't need total control over the discourse, over the communications environment.
They're looking specifically to stop things that go viral.
They're looking to stop stuff that reaches a lot of people.
So that's her emphasis.
That's what Renee is constantly emphasizing here.
And in fact, it's such a main focus.
That the next version of this partnership is called the Virality Project and it's specifically focused on stopping viral narratives that result in vaccine hesitancy.
There were multiple tiers of analysis, ensuring that any particular incident or piece of content had several pairs of eyes on it.
And as analysis went on, we closed the loop with the reporting stakeholder to help ensure that they understood the dynamics of whatever had inspired their concern.
Now, sometimes these false and misleading narratives went nowhere.
People are wrong on the internet regularly, and it's not a cause for concern.
we don't worry about it when people when it doesn't go viral but okay um so i should say actually we have um met renee di resta at a conference um she's She sat down to breakfast with us and I would say, superficially speaking, I felt a thinly veiled disgust on her part.
I think she thinks she covers it better than she does.
But I do not have the sense of her welcoming other viewpoints.
I had the sense that we were not, we were displeasing to her.
But in any case.
That was back in 2019.
2019, yep.
What I wanted to call attention to is something that I have previously mentioned under the heading of surgical totalitarianism.
And my concern is that in the past, you know, if we think about the Stasi in East Germany, There was a kind of ubiquity of totalitarianism that was necessary to maintain control.
Everybody was ratting on everybody else because they were intimidated by the Stasi into doing it.
And so the point is it was no secret that this was happening.
It was very visible to everybody because everybody was feeling the pressure.
Surgical totalitarianism involves the selective application of totalitarian tactics only where it is necessary to prevent outcomes that are displeasurable to the powers that be.
And again, if we go back to the COVID pandemic and you think about what actually unfolded, I would say that a small number of channels, a small number of people, broke the public narrative which was being coerced into every mainstream outlet, was being coerced onto doctors, was being coerced into everything.
So it was just simply the water that we swam in.
A small number of us
Caused that narrative to come apart because we were able to get the information into a large enough number of minds that people could begin to see that safe and effective didn't mean safe and effective, that the useless repurposed drugs were actually apparently not useless, that the origin of the virus was likely not through the wet market, but was through the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That the application of these bizarre so-called vaccines was reckless, especially vaccinating into an active pandemic rather than in advance of its movement.
All of these things are places where the public became aware that what they were being told by officials was not accurate and in many cases was putting them in danger.
If we rerun the pandemic with the kinds of activities that Rene Diresta here is describing, and frankly even worse in the context of the FCC power grab that we've just discussed, if you could take 10 players off the map, Right?
If you simply reran the pandemic, but Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Joe Rogan, Matthias Desmet, you know, if you took 10 players off the map, including you and me, the pandemic unfolds totally differently, right?
The story never breaks.
People probably at this point will have just simply accepted But the reason that we can now all go back to life is that these marvelous vaccines have saved the day.
They will accept the phony data that suggests that, you know, they've probably been kept out of the hospital by these things.
And, you know, they would be inserted into the childhood vaccine schedule, and everybody would dutifully be getting their kids vaccinated with them, despite the fact that that never made the slightest bit of sense.
So, again, All you did was take out.
The 10 people who most impacted the public discourse in a way that went against the mainstream narrative, then you wouldn't have to mess with everybody else.
It doesn't matter that there would be people who were noticing things, people who had, you know, lost loved ones in the immediate aftermath of being vaccinated.
They would be, you know, shouted down by an angry public that didn't want conspiracy theories being circulated.
Right, the calamari clots that the morticians were finding would become just a rumor.
It's not hard to imagine.
That, you know, messing with 10 people would have been enough.
And the problem then is the idea that it had even happened would be effectively invisible, because anybody who said, hey, you have no idea what happened to us, why we were disappeared from the Internet at this moment.
I mean, all of the people you mentioned were messed with.
We did get messed with.
We just didn't get completely obliterated.
Right, the fact is we survived, we paid heavy cost, but the fact that we remained important nodes in the discussion... And staunch.
And staunch.
Did not give in to True-speak, or why can't I think of the writer Wellian term here?
New-speak.
New-speak, true-speak, yeah.
Yeah.
Did not continue to assess what we thought was, what the evidence suggested.
True for everyone you mentioned, and many more.
Right, and many more.
The list I've given is not complete.
There are lots of people who played an important role in that.
So I want to just rescue two terms.
on, I would say the prediction implied by the concept of surgical totalitarianism is now clearly true.
Renee DuResta is talking about surgical totalitarianism in terms designed to make it sound cuddly, but nonetheless, it's obviously a real thing.
She is well aware as a person who is a central node in the censorship industrial complex that it doesn't make sense to censor everybody who says stuff that violates the mainstream narrative, which is What you really just need to do is decapitate the emerging sense-making capacity, and then people are free to talk among themselves.
They can have whatever beliefs they like.
It just doesn't threaten power.
So that's one thing.
Surgical totalitarianism turns out to be true, right?
Rene Duresta just told you that it was.
The other thing I want to point to is the model of Goliath that we have talked about many times.
So just a refresher, Goliath is the force that opposes meaningful change.
Surgical totalitarianism is one mechanism whereby it will do that without being detectable to most people.
They won't know it's happened.
But what is the WHO treaty modifications, the FCC power grab?
What are all of these things?
Well, remember, Goliath is a composite of two things.
There are honest-to-goodness meetings between people.
The Stanford Internet Observatory and the Virality Project would be a little conspiracy to, you know, to shut down countervailing narratives.
So that's actual people who meet.
But then there's also a set of emergent properties, and emergent here is a synonym for evolved.
So the point is, Goliath is a hybrid of these two things.
People who actively conspire, and people who are simply responding to incentives, putting something into the world.
So it is an automatic evolved process.
The reason that we beat the narrative during COVID was that the evolved emergent part of Goliath is dumb.
As long as you've got him on territory, he doesn't understand.
Okay.
That's the reason it worked.
And I've used this example before, but Goliath did not know what a podcast was.
He didn't know why it should matter.
The idea that Joe Rogan, some, some fighter with a dirty man cave was going to... It's not dirty.
Well, the table is never cleaned.
Cluttered is not... Dude, you should know the distinction between cluttered and dirty.
I certainly do.
I'm sorry, Jo.
I disrespected the man cave and I... Don't disrespect the man cave.
Okay, but the point is, Goliath didn't know why anything Joe Rogan thought should make any damn difference to anyone.
And Goliath went after Joe Rogan and it didn't work.
Why didn't it work?
Right?
They mocked him as a know-nothing blah blah blah blah blah.
That should have been enough.
They had every mainstream channel.
They broadcast Joe Rogan's a fool and all of those things and nobody listened.
Right?
But here's the point.
He looks sick filter on him?
Yeah, he looks sick filter on CNN, right.
But the unfortunate punchline to the model of Goliath, which I'm going to argue is also apparently true, is that Goliath is a dummy who can't win on territory he doesn't understand.
Goliath now knows what a podcast is.
This is no longer territory he doesn't understand and he's on the move so that the next pandemic will not involve this play, right?
You can't run that play twice and expect it to work because the next time the FCC is going to come after you, they're going to debank you, you know, you'll have a You'll be on all digital currency, you'll be monitored, the WHO is going to declare you a public health menace, whatever it is, the architecture not to lose in the same way again is obviously on the march.
And, you know, obviously the right way to fight is to not let these things be turned into law, or I'm not even sure what the right term is in terms of the WHO, because it's above law at some level.
Not allowing these upgrades to be made to Goliath's model is the right way to do it.
Unfortunately, a apparent defect in human character where we can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and at the moment we're paying attention to the Middle East, and therefore the FCC and the WHO are going to be, you know, reflashed with brand new powers.
Designed to upend, you know, the small number of people who actually made a difference in the public narrative.
Refleshed.
Yeah.
It's just a little firmware update.
It's just a little firmware update.
You know, firmware update.
Don't your eyes just glaze over even hearing about it?
Can you just deal with it and give me back my functional thing?
Exactly.
Give me, right.
I'll check out the new features and moments later I'll be back to, you know, enjoying my Inequitable broadband access.
that I have irrespective of what color I might be or how oppressed my ancestors were because everybody's got it, right?
So anyway.
Inequitable broadband access.
That's the real pandemic.
Oh, good.
Yeah, that is the real pandemic.
It's a public health emergency.
It is.
Yes.
Time to dance.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, so that's that's more or less what I wanted to extract from that is just.
Oh, and I should also point out that the the video that Diresta does that Michael Schellenberger now steps us through and translates for us.
Like I said, it was 2021, an interesting moment in time.
For her to be focused on these things, and you can actually see she's discussing the transition between controlling narratives of election interference, unfair elections, and the switch into COVID.
These people are going to have a job no matter what the emergency is, because they're going to have to silence people who notice the discrepancies.
But it's clearly an insider video.
This was not a meant for the public video.
This was people who are all on board with the idea that censorship is awesome because guess who's going to be doing it?
It's us, right?
This is a video from them to them.
Gotta love censorship when you're the censors.
Gotta.
Most people do, right.
The Rawlsian veil of ignorance would suggest that they are missing the point, but they do seem to have a lot of power at the moment.
Yep.
So, there it is.
There it is.
Okay, so there was one other large set of topics or topic that you thought that you wanted to talk about this week.
Do you still, or do you want to save it?
I guess maybe we could do it quickly.
So, many of you will have seen that Barry Weiss delivered a speech at the Federalist Society.
As she points out at the beginning of that speech, that's an odd place for her to have ended up.
But nonetheless, she gave a talk, and it was a pretty interesting talk, actually.
But there's one part of it I wanted to focus on again because it relates to a model that Dark Horse viewers and listeners will be familiar with.
Do you want to play that clip?
You've got the clip.
But that's not the whole answer.
And that's because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom.
When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews.
It is never about Jews.
It is about everyone else.
It is about the society or the culture or the country where it is being allowed to proliferate.
Antisemitism is a warning system.
It is a sign that the society itself is breaking down.
That it is dying.
It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis.
One that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11th, educated people now respond to an act of savagery, not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.
All right, so I don't actually know whether Barry has seen any of our discussion on why economic contraction should be related to the outbreaks of antisemitism.
Doesn't really matter.
She points to the pattern.
That economic contraction does seem to lead to this, and so I like her framing, which is that, you know, anti-semitism isn't really about Jews.
It's about other people having a different relationship to Jews, an angry, distrustful one, and that that is a measure of the health of a society.
I think that's dead on accurate.
But she doesn't get to why that relationship exists, which we've talked about Here a number of times we've talked about lineage versus lineage competition and the fact that Jews living as a diaspora are effectively always vulnerable that because Jews have a
A history of existing in highly functional relationships with other societies where they are always a minority have a toolkit that works well in these contexts.
So that not only are they vulnerable because they are embedded in other societies, but they also often have resources.
So at the point of economic contraction, when leaders are struggling for a way to keep people from revolting over The reduction in the quality of their well-being, deciding on a target that has some resources, and the ability to create phony growth by purging those people is a perennial strategy.
And so Weiss's point here, that at a moment like this, where you're suddenly seeing an outbreak of anti-Semitism, it's telling you something about the health of your society.
That's a very significant and important point.
I had two other things I wanted to say.
Maybe it's just one important one, which is...
I still see a lot of claims by people that there is no uptick in anti-Semitism.
Still?
Yeah.
Post-October 7th?
Oh yeah.
From... wow.
Incredible people.
Now, I don't know exactly how they get there.
I think there are two ways.
One... So, okay, I haven't seen this.
My first thought is, no, it's always been there, you're just seeing it now.
That's the sophisticated way.
Right.
Right.
And there's an argument to be made.
I don't think this is accurate.
I think actually, for one thing, you know, it's sort of the far left naivete about the way cognitive development works.
Right, so forgive the weird connection here, but there's a way that those on the far left who are pushing a certain perspective on how we are all to interact want to take our defects and assume that if you've got them that they are just simply God-given.
Right?
Yeah, that's true.
They do.
And this, I mean, this is related to the focus on identity rather than meaning, which we've talked about before.
This move to like, oh, the most important thing I can do is figure out what my identity is.
Like, that can change.
Right, that can change.
You should want that to be able to change.
Why are you so focused on this as a permanent part of your personality?
That can change, and one of the ways that it does change is that when you want things that aren't okay, civilization has ways of letting you know, and then the fact that you don't get a reward down that pathway but a punishment causes you to evolve into a better person.
So I don't think it is true that the antisemitism was always there and you're just seeing it.
That's certainly true of some fraction of it, but there's an It is true, for instance, we know for sure that higher ed hides, cloaks, houses a lot of anti-Semitism, that if you are on the outside, if you went to college a long time ago, or if you didn't, it may shock you to learn that the following two things are both true.
That Jews are overrepresented on the faculty of universities and colleges compared to their representation of the population, and also that the anti-Semitism that is tolerated and that is spoken on campuses of higher education is way higher than you would hear in the public square, in the media.
Until post-October 7th, campuses were a place where you could reliably get anti-Semitic protests and have people be like, yeah, cool.
It's a strange inconsistency that has been true in higher ed, at least since we were in college in the early 90s.
Yep.
It's there.
So let's say that there's some fraction of it—I don't know what the fraction is—but there's some fraction of it that is uncovered by the fact that we are now, A, focused across civilization on things that involve Israel and therefore an implied implication across all Jews, but there is also the fact of some people who don't have these instincts are now hearing that anti-Semitic conversation taking place around them.
They're hearing the way it is done that allows you to stick on just this side of some line.
It's normalizing.
Right, it's normalizing, and as it normalizes, lots of people who wouldn't be trafficking in this stuff are experimenting with it, or, you know, if they were Experimenting with it before at some level, they're now experimenting it with it at a higher level.
So I don't think that is just an uncovering.
I think that that's actually a tremendous uptick in anti-semitism, and viewers of this podcast will also know that we were talking about this alarming uptick before October 7th.
You've been seeing it.
You've been seeing it for quite some time.
I've been seeing it and I will also just draw a connection for people who don't realize it.
The thing that brought me to public attention, me trying to reason with students about their view of equity and their view of me as a white guy, etc.
That instinct for me to talk to people who are across some divide is a long-standing one.
People may also be aware of the incident on Clubhouse where I was in a room and there was an eruption of racial tension.
I was just simply trying to participate in the conversation and I got challenged, in fact, because I'm Jewish.
They declared me not white but spicy white, whatever the hell that means.
Have they had Jewish food?
They have not had Jewish food, I think.
I do love some hamantaschen.
But anyway.
Latkes, apple bread.
There's some good food, but spicy it ain't.
Spicy it ain't.
So there is this uptick both in the visibility, the acceptability of anti-Semitism, but also the degree to which resentments that bubble up during an economic contraction are on people's minds.
It's just there.
And if you're not seeing it yet, it's because you're not in the right places.
So go take a look.
You'll find it.
It's there.
It comes in a bunch of different flavors.
On the other hand, there is also at this moment something that I think is historically unique on the other side, too.
The number of people who at this moment where there is this outbreak of overt anti-Semitism across civilization, there are an awful lot of people standing up and resisting it.
People who are not Jewish, who are saying this is unacceptable.
And, uh, you know, on the one hand, I...
I rather suspect that the period of relative calm in which Jews didn't have to worry so much about this, traveling most of the world, I think those days are probably over.
And I don't think we or our children are likely to live to see them restored.
That said, it's not history repeating itself.
It's a very different version of events with a number of well-positioned people who are not putting up with it, who are standing shoulder to shoulder with the Jews and their lives.
And so anyway, I don't know how this all works out.
I think it was It was insane to allow this to fester the way we did, and as always happens when you allow these things to fester, ultimately you pay a much higher price when they finally break out into the open.
But anyway, I am grateful to see lots of folks standing up against it and not putting up with it.
Well, I thought I'd show this thing that I've called a piece of fan mail, and it's really quite the opposite.
In the wake of you talking about this, this seems a little bit...
Wrong now, but I think it's actually appropriate.
You haven't seen it.
We actually get a ton of, don't show yet, we get a lot of great mail and packages and books and stuff from people, but a lot of great letters.
And we get, especially since we were traveling just now, me for three weeks, we just hear from so many people and it's very, very meaningful.
And I think there's been once for each of us that we were actually approached by a hater and had a public conflagration.
And we're not going to go into either of those right now, but literally once among hundreds, probably more than a thousand interactions in public at this point.
Um, and the ratio more or less holds in terms of what we receive, uh, virtually.
Um, but, um, and you know, we don't, we don't get hate to our, to our emails really, but reviews are anonymous and easy to make.
So I saw this review, uh, come through this week about the podcast.
Dangerously stupid.
This podcast kills people.
One star.
People have literally died because of the misinformation on vaccines and ivermectin spread by this podcast.
Apple needs to remove it.
Call Brett what you will.
Wow.
boss agent, Peter Thiel's puppet sociopath, Mossad agent.
- Wow. - What is absolutely clear is the man has an unwell mind and he wants to influence yours.
- Run. - Yeah.
So I just found that, I mean, honestly delightful at one level because it's so encapsulates the inanity.
Maybe this isn't even a real person, right?
Or it's a real person, but it's someone who's been paid to put this sort of thing out there on all of the people's platforms who are trying to speak truth.
They snuck in the little Zionist bit there, right?
Mossad agent.
Mossad agent, yeah, that's a good one.
I will point out there was an exchange on Twitter in which somebody had also said something incredibly stupid about me.
Gator, our friend.
Who is not, in fact, an animated crocodile.
We don't know that.
You do.
I do too.
Not animated, cartoon.
Cartoon, yeah.
But anyway, he pointed out that while the person writing this scathing declaration about me was obviously a moron, at least he spelled my name correctly.
To which Alexandros Marinos pointed out that that actually likely implied that it was a bot, and then on looking at the profile of the person, it was pretty clear it was not a real honest-to-goodness person.
This also contained a correct spelling of my name, thereby indicating that that may have been automated, having just copied my name from whatever it was that triggered the scaling review.
But anyway, it fits with both what we were talking about with regard to what Rene Dureste is up to, the kinds of things the FCC is trying to get its paws into with regard to the powers that it would grant itself, and then, of course, how is it that public displays of anti-Semitism become normalized, and under what circumstances do they do so?
Well, under precisely these circumstances.
It is, as Barry suggested, a symptom, and not that it doesn't feel very much like the entire point and the only point when you were experiencing it, but taking a step back and seeing it as a symptom of something larger and a predictable one at that is critical.
Yes, I would take a second point as well, which is, I think increasingly is a fair term to use.
Increasingly, Criticisms of me, which as you point out, are something we almost never encounter in person.
People are very nice even when they disagree.
It's very rare that we get challenged this way, but online of course it happens all the time.
Increasingly, there is a conspiratorial aspect to the accusations.
And I must say, I find it funny that conspiracies are so thin and so weird in some Oh, like Mossad agent Peter Thiel's puppet?
Well, Peter Thiel's puppet.
Okay, so my brother is and was associated with Peter Thiel.
That's not me.
I have met Peter Thiel and I have enjoyed talking with him.
I don't think he's very fond of my perspective.
It's certainly hard to imagine that he would be advancing it in the world.
And it has certainly been, I don't know how many years since the last time I spoke to him.
But anyway, it's an absurdity.
No, but I mean, it's the same thing.
Like, you know, you just you put things that many people find uncomfortable or despicable or vaguely icky next to one another.
And it causes them to go like, oh, I don't know.
I don't have time to look into it.
That, oh, I've heard, I've heard that that guy knows this other guy and I don't like either of them.
So enough said.
Well, my favorite of these is there is a conspiracy theory.
Honestly, I can't even.
Are you sure it's not a conspiracy hypothesis, Brett?
Oh no, this is a full-fledged conspiracy theory, unfalsifiable in fact, that somehow connects my family to the... Your natal family, not this family here.
Correct.
To the Robert Kennedy assassination.
Oh.
On the basis that my dad worked for Bobby Kennedy in the Justice Department, and I'm not sure how that... Yeah.
Working for, with, and on behalf of the man definitely means that you hate him.
Right, that's the leap.
And in fact, at one point I was going to see Bobby.
The younger?
Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr.
And yes, I was born a year after Bobby Kennedy Sr.
was killed.
But anyway, I introduced my dad to Bobby Kennedy Jr., and they talked about the fact that my dad had worked for Bobby's father.
And so anyway, the idea that any connection at all, any wisp of some ancient connection is going to be turned into some obviously conspiratorial something is obviously a bad instinct that people have.
Yeah, no it sure is.
I did, I don't want to spend much time on it and we're going to stop here very quickly, but I did want to say, come back to your point about the normalization of things in general.
So you were talking about the normalization of anti-Semitism and the
There's a dust-up that we didn't talk about at all online in the wake of the Genspect Conference, which I mentioned in our last live stream, which I've written about at Natural Selections, and it's a piece that I call The Public Fetish, and it's about autogynephilia at the Genspect Conference, and specifically a man who identifies himself as, and again with this focus on identity,
as an autogynophile, finds that clarifying as a way to understand what he is in life, which is to say someone who is a heterosexual male who has turned the focus of his attraction inward so that he wants to be attracted to himself as a woman.
He has written a 700-page book on the topic, which he handed me at the conference.
And the conference organizers, or rather the person manning, I want to say womaning, I'm not going to start doing this, but the person manning the Twitter account of John Speck.
Treading dangerously close to a very famous Monty Python routine.
Which one?
The Life of Brian, in which Loretta keeps Oh, no, that's that's different.
That's different.
Yeah, I'm not gonna start calling them like womanhole covers and stuff, but...
The person who mans the Twitter account is actually a woman, of course, at Genspect.
Not of course, but she is.
Anyway, the people, I'll say, I don't even know if it was the person I happen to know, behind the Twitter account posted a picture of Phil, the autogynephile, and a young woman who's a detransitioner, together, and said, you know, spotted here, and also Phil's got this book out.
And all hell broke loose, because according to some, and again, I encourage you to go take a look at what I've written and then you can also go online and find all sorts of stuff online on Twitter and such, but some people say, you know, what the hell?
Why would you contribute to platforming such a person with such delusions in a place especially where there are women and children and youth who are experiencing trauma associated with exactly this sort of delusion?
And then there are people who said, you know, this guy's not a creep, he's not a threat, he knows what he is, he doesn't think he's a woman, he doesn't use women's facilities, he is being honest and forthright, trying to understand what he is.
And I should say that at a conference where everyone else was dressed in, you know, conference clothes, here's a tall thin man wearing a, you know, blue velvet gown with long blue gloves.
You know, so there weren't any women dressed like that, and there weren't any other men dressed like that, and indeed no one was in any kind of like fancy outfit like that at all.
My argument in the piece that I wrote, in part, is no, there shouldn't be laws against this.
Just as there shouldn't be laws against speaking hatred about Jews.
But we do have norms, and norms do change, and norms should change.
But some of the societal norms that we have had for a long time are breaking down with regard to, over in the space I'm talking about now, with regard to when women can let down their guard and know that they're safe, and when they cannot.
And so at the same moment that we are being informed by the insane gender ideology that we must not trust our instincts, that we must, you know, if we see, if we walk into a women's bathroom and see a guy in there, We have to not just be okay with that, but celebrate it.
And if any part of our spine starts to tingle, or our hackles are raised, we don't trust that because that would be bigoted to do so.
And of course the truth is exactly the opposite.
Women have been relying on our intuition about whether or not the situation is safe forever, and it is what we must do.
And sometimes we will be wrong, but it is actually incumbent upon us to be wrong in the direction that keeps us more safe rather than less.
Not to treat the feelings of someone else with more priority than our potential safety.
That is actually our responsibility as individuals.
And I would say that, and I did say in this piece, that I don't feel like this particular individual, I met him, I talked with him, I did not, I didn't have any indication of creepiness at all.
I could be wrong, but say I'm right.
Still, The fact of walking around in explicitly hyper like weirdly feminine dress of which no one else is doing in a landscape where there are creeps and predators doing exactly that and using that to get access to women's spaces and using the fact that women are being told not to trust their intuitions and to stand down and to embrace the predator.
Even the non-creep who does that helps to normalize that and helps create an environment of less safety.
And so too does an ever greater environment in which people are kind of just like playing with ideas of anti-Semitism.
And this is not an argument to legislate against at all.
This is saying that actually, we have things besides laws that are social norms, and sometimes they need to change.
And sometimes they were actually doing something very important.
And as they start to decay, it is incumbent upon us to point it out and to say, actually, that thing, we were using that, that was necessary, that was a common good.
And it's our right to fight to get it back.
Yeah, it's actually, it's a Chestersons fence issue.
Yeah.
In which the inability to spell out exactly what the norm was doing does not mean that it was not doing something vital.
Right.
And so we are constantly, you know, It's hard to even describe what this person was doing wrong, right?
If a woman had showed up dressed wildly differently than everybody else, there would obviously be no issue.
There wouldn't have been a safety issue, but it would have been odd.
It would have been strange.
It would have been a choice that was being made to what?
To draw attention to yourself?
To, like, what?
Why?
And, you know, should you be allowed to do that?
I guess.
Should you be encouraged to do that?
Should we embrace you for doing that?
No.
Uh-uh.
No.
No, of course not.
But the point is we all have the, you know, except in the case where there is an enforced dress code, we all are granted a certain amount of leeway about how to interpret the environment and what the correct style of dress is.
And we all encounter people all the time who are out of phase with what we would do in their shoes.
And you don't want to live in a society where we do the opposite, where we regulate these things.
So that normal leeway finds itself wickedly abused by some, and abused but with no obvious ill intent by others, in the case of your autogynophile That, you know, you said you didn't find... He's not mine.
You and your conferences on a kind of file.
But the problem is the fact that you can't spell out exactly where the line is that he's over doesn't say that there wasn't a line and doesn't say that that line wasn't important.
Well, I mean, there's also... I mean, we could go on at some length here.
There's also a question.
So an autogynophile has said what he has said, and people are now interpreting what autogynophilia is in all of these ways.
And frankly, it is a mental condition, which is bizarre.
And it is...
Most of us do not display our sexual desires in public.
and And he could have this identity and keep it to himself.
But the idea that in order to have this identity fulfilled, He needs to have other people see it.
Makes it something that all the rest of us get to comment on and have distinct opinions about.
And furthermore, you know, so when he actually approached me, he started saying autogynephile, autoandrophile.
I'm like, autoandrophile?
Is that going to be like the symmetrical version where a woman who's He's a straight woman who sees herself as a man and that turns her on.
He's like, yes.
I'm like, I don't buy, like maybe occasionally, but insofar as I get the autogynephile thing at all, and I don't intuit it at all, but insofar as I get it, just like male and female homosexuality are radically different and come from different places, so too is the sense of like, actually, I should be the sex that I'm not going to come from very different places.
And I think that it's probably true that autogynephilia, to the extent it's a real thing, does explain some amount of male-to-female transness.
But I think it's going to be an extraordinarily rare thing over in female-to-male space.
And so it's this constant searching for symmetry, for not just equal treatment, but identical treatment.
And I would say that this absolutely applies over in fashion space as well.
Traditionally female dress, and I said this online as well, not in the piece, but I made some extended answers to Twitter questions about this piece.
Traditional female dress is impractical and silly, right?
And the fact is that it's been decades, a hundred years, like a long time now that it's been understood that women can adopt what has been traditionally male dress because women who aren't impractical and silly should be allowed to dress in ways that aren't impractical and silly as well, right?
And therefore, women dressing in ways that were traditionally male is almost never, like you have to stretch it to imagine like, oh, that's a sexual thing.
Yeah.
Oh, you're doing that because you're like, no, I just want to be able to move my legs and not risk exposing myself.
Like I want to be able to garden and bike and, you know, do all the things that actually men have always been able to do.
And women's fashion was another way that we were manifest as like decorative Ornaments, right?
So when men's and you know on a very hot day a skirt might be cooler and kilts exist and you know more feminine clothing exists flowy clothing exists for men and some men adopt it and it is clearly about responding to the environment but this particular like I see myself as a woman and therefore I'm going to dress in something that almost no modern woman would ever put on and certainly not in this circumstance
is inherently about regressive tropes of what it is to be, you know, it's like desiring to be that decorative object as opposed to understanding much about what the sexes actually are.
Well, I mean at the risk of going someplace that we've we've been here before here to me and forgive me if you if you said this in your piece, but The issue with this in particular person is actually weirdly one of consent because he is in this environment bringing people in on his own sexual fantasy and
The point is, well, this is a conference of people there to talk about ideas, and the thing that's wrong with it is that he's turning it into a sexual thing.
Nobody can tell him not to, but the point is the norm says, actually, that's not cool, right?
That's not acceptable behavior for what this environment is.
And the contrast I would draw I assume that neither Blair White nor Buck Angel were at the conference.
But had they been, my sense is that actually they would be in a position to shed an awful lot of light on things that others will have to speculate about.
And that because they have both been excellent at drawing these distinctions in a way that is totally protective of the rights of women and the rights of children.
And she does a very good job.
So anyway, my point is, you know, the fact that Blair looks like a woman and that Buck looks like a man, I don't think I don't think they would be crossing a line present, even though, you know, especially, you know, I guess in both their cases, they're sort of, you know, they've elaborated characteristics that are traditionally female and male.
So anyway, the question is, is it really the sexual aspect of this that puts it beyond the pale?
And, you know, the issue of consent is dicey because we don't typically police what's in people's minds.
Well, but I mean...
We do sometimes, right?
And I've said, intent actually does matter.
And so, again, putting on a skirt because it's really, really hot out is different from putting on a skirt because it turns you on to be seen in a skirt, or to see yourself in a skirt.
And if it's just to see yourself in a skirt, then fine, stay inside.
But if you're going out into public in it, then you have said that there is something performative about this, that you need eyes on you, and therefore those eyes cannot possibly have consented to you dragging your own fantasy world Into into their lives and it's it's a it's a different situation So intent matters consent matters.
We do like the various kinds of you know, manslaughter and murder are about intent Yeah, right.
So it's not that we never try to get into the minds of the people Oh, that's not what I'm saying.
Obviously intent matters with respect to Sexual desire.
We don't typically police the content of people's minds.
Now, I will argue that we actually make a mistake.
It's not that we should be policing the content of people's minds, but it's very different if we say, actually, certain fantasies aren't cool.
And to the extent that you're fantasizing about them, that's bad.
I think we should actually be doing that a lot more.
There's a lot of stuff that people are getting off on that is spilling over into the world that is not good.
And that's not the same thing as we want to know what you're fantasizing about and we want to police it.
But the idea that we should say, actually, you know what?
Some of this stuff is not healthy and you shouldn't be doing it.
And, you know, getting off on people looking at you cross-dressing at a conference that, you know, is an, I don't know exactly how to describe it, but an analytical space is, Well, and specifically a space where, you know, there were so many parents there whose children are suffering from the delusion at the moment and, you know, are in the process of perhaps rendering them infertile for life and, you know, just
are precisely in the middle of the chaos.
And I think Phil, the autogynephile whom we've been talking about, believes that he is helping such people by revealing that actually this condition explains many male-to-female trans people.
But I don't I guess there's a way in which, and I'm seeing this more and more and more, that people are reaching for diagnosis and once they have diagnosis they think they've got it.
God, if COVID didn't teach the world anything!
How many times does medicine and do psychologists and does everyone have to be just wrong before you start saying, you know what?
Just because you've got a label for the thing doesn't mean that that label is right, that everything that looks kind of like that goes into that label, or that once you have the label, you know what to do.
Because even if the category has been correctly described by, say, the DSM, and you really do fit that diagnosis, that still doesn't help you very much.
It's not a resolution.
I don't know why people land there.
I know why, I think.
And it is a oversimplification of biology it is an incorrect oversimplification of biology where once you've got a diagnosis it feels immutable a you're not responsible for it and b there's nothing you can do about it so who is society to tell you not to x y and z
and the answer is no the fact that you have a diagnosis doesn't mean it's not the result of you having or society having tolerated something in you that it should have discouraged right and And it doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do about it.
So I think the point is it's just, it's sloppy excuse making for stuff that, you know, A, Well, sloppy excuse making I don't think is fair.
I think that may be actually what's going on, but people...
People are, I think this goes back to this move from when we were coming of age, everyone was looking for meaning.
And now everyone is looking for identity.
And as part of, you need to know what you are, what your identity is.
There is a focus on diagnosis on, you know, what, what are the five things that describe you?
Right.
And, you know, certainly there's always been, there's always been some of that, but, uh,
I saw, and you know this is going to be a big can of worms and I don't think, maybe I'll just say it, maybe we come back to it, but I heard from a number of people, smart people, courageous, honest, honorable people, who really felt that they had unraveled, not like a lot of women, like I must have talked to like six different people who had the experience of, I thought I, women, I thought I was trans, but then it turns out I wasn't, I was autistic.
Autism, as we have talked about, is not one thing.
It can't possibly be that the kid banging his head on the wall in the corner who will never have language is the same thing as the high-functioning people on the spectrum whom we had in our classrooms and, you know, our, you know, Prevalent in, you know, higher reaches of all kinds of professional fields, right?
It's just like, why are we putting those in the same place?
But also, we're now hearing, well, it manifests very, very differently in men and women.
That may well be true, but maybe actually we're dealing with a whole lot of different things, and there's a whole lot of little clusters of things that happen because we are polluting our environment, And we're polluting your minds when you're growing up by putting you in front of screens, and by not letting you go outside, and by not enforcing social interaction without adults being intermediaries and solving all your problems for you.
And you've grown up confused and sheltered and hurting, and you're looking for a diagnosis to explain why you're confused and sheltered and hurting, and you are Brave and wise enough to have pulled yourself out of the tailspin that was trans, but you still want some diagnosis.
And the still want some diagnosis means that you're still buying the thing a little bit.
And I'm not saying that autism isn't real, or that this may not explain some of it, but it feels like you're still in the grip of being able to be told, ah, not that, but this.
And when you maybe come out of that, you're like, not that, but this.
And maybe actually really understanding all of the things that went into the developmental environment that made you who you are.
And back to your point, like, there's just a failure to recognize what humans are.
We've got the longest childhoods on the planet, and that's not a mistake.
This is when we become human, and we are collectively as a society fucking that up.
We are just messing with children so badly at every level.
No wonder people are hurting and confused and looking for a diagnosis.
But maybe a diagnosis won't help.
Maybe actually saying, you know what?
I'm a human being, and I'm me, an individual, and I'm either male or female, and other than that there's almost nothing that's binary in biology, And let's go!
Let's figure out how to make the most of this and make some meaning on this beautiful planet we have while we still have it.
Um, couple things.
One, I think this idea that you need a diagnosis to free you from a diagnosis is really important.
Yeah.
Um, I, I think that is a lot of what's going on.
And the, the problem is we don't have language for, uh, yeah, I thought I was trans and it turns out that's not true.
Well then what is true?
You know?
Well, the answer is most people who have, um, dysphoria, gender dysphoria, get over it.
Yeah.
So the point is that's a matter of development correcting itself.
And it's the obvious best path, right?
The idea of a life on pharmaceuticals downstream of surgeries that don't actually create the condition that you think you want, right?
They simulate it at best.
But the other thing, and I just want to unpack the piece that you were saying about our developmental periods, because I don't think this is where people just don't, they oversimplify the biology in a way that's very destructive.
The reason that we have the longest developmental periods of not only any creature on the planet, but any creature that has ever been on this planet, is because there is a very long period of time necessary to build up the structures of a highly functional adult human being.
On the one hand, that gives us our amazing flexibility.
The idea that you live a very different life than a Mayan farmer or astronomer priest is the result of the fact that you're not pre-programmed for your niche.
But, that's an awful lot of time for stuff to go wrong.
And the fact is, it going right is more or less dependent on an environment that looks a lot like the one that your ancestors lived in so that they know how to raise you and expose you to dangers at the right rate and all that.
And, you know, just look around you.
Look at your environment.
It doesn't look anything like any ancestor lived in, including your own parents, right?
It's that different, that quickly.
So, of course we're screwing people up and, you know, if we were going to fix one thing, right, to get to all the others, fixing it so that your childhood had a coherent relationship to the adult environment you were going to be in, so that you knew how to be an adult in it, would be the biggest bang-for-the-buck alteration we could make.
Absolutely.
One more point.
With regard to autism and people becoming very focused on, actually, that's what I am, that's what I have.
We began to see this when we were at Evergreen.
We began to have more and more students who would come to us and say, I'm Aspie, I'm on the spectrum.
And I began to see it and I could see it in some of these people and be like, yeah, I see what you're talking about, right?
Um, the one, one thing that makes me think, um, okay, um, maybe, maybe this is actually much more prevalent, uh, than I am thinking.
Like, maybe this isn't just a, like, hopping diagnosis to diagnosis thing is, as far as I know, and I'd like to hear it if I'm wrong, I don't think, uh, there is a proposed pharmaceutical solution.
I don't think that people with this diagnosis end up on drugs.
Uh, which means that the usual perverse financial incentives don't exist.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a good point.
I think, I think it's right.
And I do think autism has skyrocketed for whatever reason.
Right.
And I, you know, as you, as you said, it doesn't appear to be one thing.
It's hard to imagine how the banging your head on the wall thing is the same as the super high functioning tech geek thing.
Right.
Could be, could be like the relationship of Parkinson's to, uh, what is the name of the syndrome where you're totally a hundred percent paralyzed, shut in syndrome, locked in syndrome?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Um, you know, those things apparently do have a relationship.
Yeah.
Um, but, or it could be like, we think like schizophrenia, like, oh, that's a lot of different things that all just look like, oh, you're really crazy.
Um, but there's a number of things going on there.
Yeah.
Um, but anyway, uh, it could be that, Autistic people, because something is off, and because the high-functioning autistic folks can detect, maybe even are hypersensitive to how far off things are, that they're looking for some very big off thing.
And so they're very susceptible to the idea that, oh, you know what it is?
You were born in the wrong body.
It's like, oh my God, that would make sense of just how off things feel.
Right.
So they may be more susceptible to having made an error about identity in the first place.
You know, so landing on autism as an accurate diagnosis may actually be an endpoint after diagnoses of identity that were an error.
Actually, I'm gonna add one more thing here, which you will know the background of, but I am color deficient, in common parlance, colorblind, and I don't have... It's not standard red-green colorblindness.
It's a weird one.
Can I add a point from earlier today?
Sure.
Yes, I came in and I was literally wearing two gloves of different colors and denied that when I pointed it out.
Yeah.
Yes, I could not see that one of them was purple.
In fact, I must have bought purple gloves thinking that they were black.
And the one thing that I said was, you cannot go on air wearing those gloves.
I'm color deficient, which shifts everything in my world, I think, away from red, which causes everything to look very different to me.
Now, of course, it looks perfectly normal to me.
I'm sure I'd be freaked out by looking through your eyes.
You'd be freaked out you're looking through mine.
But by and large, most of the time, it doesn't make a huge impact on my life.
But I do discount my own sense of color, right?
I do not prioritize it because it is so likely to be off and I'm so used to it being off that I don't think... I deprioritize anything that depends on recognizing the color of something because the chances I've got it wrong are high.
If you're autistic, in a high-functioning sense, it is possible that you also discount your own sense of What you're like, right?
And so to the extent that there are people out there selling a story that, oh, I think you're born in the wrong body.
That may be more likely to persuade somebody who is discounting their own ability to perceive.
Accurately where they are in the world.
Yeah.
Um, I wonder about that.
No, I actually, I have, I have, I've seen that before, before these last few weeks.
I've seen that as something of parents saying, my child was definitely autistic.
My child was definitely, you know, not, Understanding all of the influences on them in the world and was minimizing some of them, at least consciously, and that made them more susceptible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I could easily see it.
To the trans thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, boy, that went a lot of places.
Yes, it did.
All right.
So we are not going to do a Q&A today.
We'll be back in eight days.
We'll be back the day before Thanksgiving for our 200th episode.
And I don't know what we'll talk about then.
Actually, I know one of the things we'll talk about then, but we'll save it for then.
All right.
Okay, so we haven't been as much on Locals lately, but Locals is going strong and we're gonna get back on there ourselves soon.
We encourage you to please, please join there.
There's been a chat watch party while we're doing the live streams for Rumble.
The guest episodes that Brett hosts come out on Rumble a day early.
I guess that doesn't help with Locals.
We do our private Q&A on Locals.
What's that?
They come out on Locals a day early?
Okay.
And we do our private Q&A, our monthly Q&A on Locals as well.
We have done some AMAs as well, so please join us there.
Check out my writing, including the piece we were just talking about, The Public Fetish, at naturalselections.substack.com.
We've got great merchandise at darkhorsestore.org, including you can get shirts that advertise the fact that you are currently eating Jake's Micro Pizza, and that is why you are not wearing a mask if you live in one of those places where masks are on the uptick, which is remarkable.
They are many places.
You want to get one of these shirts in time for the uptick that is undoubtedly headed your way.
Yeah, yeah.
So last year, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we did a gift episode, just an additional bonus episode.
I think we'll do that again, in which we then talked about some of the merchandise that we've got.
But it's all up there now.
We'll get a couple more pieces, a couple more things up before... A couple more slices.
A couple more slices.
Jake's Micropizza.
Jake's Micropizza.
Someone at the GenSpec Conference talked to me about Jake's Micropizza.
I was so pleased.
Look, the thing is, once you've tried it, you realize that you've been eating, you know, lackluster pizza your whole life.
You don't know that until you've tried it.
I mean, so, you know, maybe people should be careful about trying Jake's Micropizza because you never go back.
Addictive, yeah.
It is addictive.
For sure.
Yeah, it's not deep dish though.
Not yet.
They're still working on that.
Jake's micro deep dish pizza.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I don't know what else to say about that.
Okay, check out also our sponsors this week, which were Seed, Uncruise, and Mindbloom, I think is what that says?
Yes, that's what that says.
We're going to put links to everything we talked about here in the show notes, as always, and a reminder that we are supported by you, our audience, for which we are super, super grateful.
Bobcats and links.
It's spelled differently, as he damn well knows.
Why that matters.
If I could put links in the show notes, I'd keep it to myself.
You would?
Oh, totally.
I guess if I could put links in the show notes, I would keep it to myself.
Yes.
Yeah, I'll share the links, plural, and I'll keep the links singular to myself.
Excellent.
All right.
Please share, subscribe, like, all these things.
And we're putting clips out on Twitter now, so join the Dark Horse Twitter channel thing.
What is it called?
Dark Horse... What's a Twitter thing called?
It's on a channel.
It's a Dark Horse account.
There we go.
Now join that.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
