Pride and Shamelessness: The 235th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 235th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the lack of transparency from the Secret Service about the assassination attempt on Trump, as revealed in part during this week’s Congressional hearing. Using Colin Ray’s “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” we analyze why information is being withheld from the public. Then: Portla...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
It is the two hundred and... Good start.
Fortieth?
I got the two hundred this time.
In the last several I've gone with one hundred for some reason.
Two thirty-five.
Two thirty-five.
Okay, two thirty-five.
Well, clearly no need to discuss the primeness of that one.
No there isn't.
You are.
Dr. Bret Weinstein.
I am Dr. Bret Weinstein.
And wow, I totally parsed that incorrectly.
There's no need to talk about that one.
You are.
It sounded like a joke.
But yes, I am Dr. Bret Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
It is now.
We are here.
One third of the way through summer.
The official narrow version of the definition of summer.
Am I correct about that?
Yeah, more than a little more than that.
It feels like more.
It does feel like more.
But that's good.
We got more summer coming.
We have a lot more summer coming.
And who knows what summer and everything else is going to feel like.
Now that we're getting like five years of history in a day.
Yeah, exactly.
So we've got two broad topics today.
We're going to talk about Portland Pride and we're going to talk about the Secret Service and sticking to one story.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
We want to thank all of our supporters on Locals and encourage you to join us today.
There's a watch party going on right now as we live stream, and there's lots of great content there, including all of our Q&As.
We don't have a Q&A today, but we do a couple times a month, and that's where you can find us.
So you go to Rumble, and how do you find us on Locals, Zachary?
It's darkhorse.locals.com, right?
Darkhorse.locals.com.
Find us there.
So we'll talk about various other ways you can find us at the end, but as usual, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour and then no other ads throughout.
Throughout the show, this week's sponsors are Caraway, which is brand new to us, Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, which was brand new to us last week, and Seed, which has been with us for a while.
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So without further ado, our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-tox... Excuse me.
Yeah, I would just back up a word.
I was busy inhaling toxic bakeware, I guess.
Yeah, but you're over that now.
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We haven't talked much explicitly on Dark Horse about the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
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Yes.
I've never thought of myself as a spotter.
Kitchen spotter.
I think that's a new concept.
Yeah, yeah.
Usually it's Toby, because this is one of his favorite foods, so when I'm making this, he tends to be hovering, waiting for it to be ready.
Right.
But yeah, kitchen spotter.
He's an able spotter, but yeah.
He's an able spotter.
Kitchen spotter.
Yeah.
You know, it's amazing how much... Actually, I didn't actually measure it.
This may be the bigger one, even.
Is the larger cast iron skillet 12-inch, or is it in fact a 13- or 14-inch skillet?
Anyway, it's the larger of the standard...
Cast iron skillets, uh, large cast iron skillets.
And, um, holding it like this, it's not... There's a lot of iron in it.
It's, it's, it's made of iron.
Iron.
As it turns out.
Actually, the stuff we use, all of that iron came from, uh, supernovas.
Yep.
Just gonna say.
Yeah.
Well, there you have it.
All right.
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When we tasted... Oh, I didn't fix this from last time.
Okay.
I remember how I ran into this problem last time.
I'd moved paragraphs around, and I haven't yet introduced the guy, and here I am mentioning him as if we already know him.
Do you need a spotter?
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No, I was going to help you wing it if you talked yourself into it.
That's wingman.
That's different.
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Olive oil hunter?
Yes, the olive oil hunter.
I'm going to suggest that we change that to Olive Whisper.
It's not ours to change.
You can ask AJ.
I'm going to suggest that we change that to Olive Whisper.
It's not ours to change.
We can suggest.
You can ask TJ.
All right.
You go find him.
I just think, you know, Hunter, is that the right metaphor?
Whisperer.
You know, it works.
I don't know.
I think, I mean, if you could see, if you could go real macro on the olives as he approaches, you might find them quaking in their little stem boots.
All right.
I see it.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe he is a hunter.
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It just felt like that That was a lot of repetition, but it's on there.
It's on there.
So, seed is awesome.
It's good for your colon.
But your read prompted me to think about other kinds of colons.
Why do we call a period on top of a comma a semicolon?
It's actually more of a stop.
It should be called a comma colon.
There's nothing half about it.
Yeah, I agree with you.
And speaking of... So Zach objects.
He's not going to object on camera.
And as long as we have half punctuation marks, there's a punctuation mark in English that absolutely 100% demands a half version.
Ooh.
Is it the, what is it?
Is it the question mark?
Is it the bang?
No, you're close.
Ah, yes.
Exclamation point.
Yes.
Right?
Because there are times if somebody has done something and you want to express gratitude, if you say thank you with a period or no punctuation at all, it seems like you're underwhelmed.
And if you put an exclamation mark on it, you seem like an idiot.
Yeah, and I think the way this is going is that iteration, if you're actually really excited, you have to use more than one.
Right, but that kind of inflation, it leads nowhere fast.
I know, the punctuation inflation.
It's one of the scourges of our times.
It is maybe the central scourge.
It's possibly how we ended up here.
The original Scourge.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mispronounced that, didn't I?
Scourge, not Scourge.
Scourge is a better pronunciation.
I think Scourge is the standard, but I don't know.
Yeah, mispronunciation is another Scourge of our time.
Given how things are going, we should probably find out how it's pronounced because we're going to need it.
I think it's Scourge.
All right.
But it's spelled Scourge.
It is?
Oh, I don't know that.
Yeah.
No, you wouldn't.
No, I wouldn't.
No, I wouldn't.
Yeah, the reading thing is, uh, every time I do it and it works, I feel like, you know, it's not a miracle, but it's... Are you pleased with yourself?
It's pretty remarkable.
I mean, it is kind of remarkable, right?
The, uh, weird arrangements of lines on a page that cause you to... to vibrate the air in ways that convey meaning to people.
I mean, it's...
See, most of us when we read aren't also vibrating the air.
Yeah, well, but okay, fair enough, fair enough.
It's the reading out loud where the errors really come through, so that doesn't happen.
Yeah, because I always forgive myself.
If I'm reading to myself, the error, I forgive myself and I go back and I fix it.
But, you know, it's a live fire exercise when reading out loud.
But I digress.
So we got two disparate things this week, both indicative of scourges of the moment.
I think we should start, if it's all right by you, with the events unfolding around the Trump near assassination and the hearings that have been taking place in Congress, etc.
Okay, I have no idea what's been going on, so you're just gonna... Yep, you have been traveling, and you have not seen some of this, so I don't know... I haven't seen any of it.
Hopefully... Blissfully unaware.
Yes, well, that's about to come to an abrupt halt.
So let's talk a little bit about the hearings involving Kimberly Cheadle who was the head of the Secret Service until she resigned yesterday in the aftermath of her bizarre hearing in front of the house.
So she was called to testify and her testimony was basically she stonewalled on all sorts of issues, really everything factual.
She didn't want to give any information at all.
And it raises all kinds of questions.
What were they asking her?
Basic stuff like, you know.
Things for which it's not obviously a security breach to reveal what's going on.
Well, let's put it this way.
There's no security.
We've got an investigation that involves a shooter that is understood to be the assassin who used a ladder to ascend a building, fired some...
Bullets out of a AR-15.
There are lots of just basic questions that, yes, if we found out that the answer wasn't what we had thought early, could be amended.
But there's no reason, you know, to to carefully guard the information about the latter that he used, right?
I mean, why?
Right.
So what we have is the appearance of the head of the Secret Service.
Behaving in the way that a defendant behaves under the questioning of a prosecutor and That is I would just argue perfectly inappropriate because this is actually a public servant and we have I just want to zoom out for a second before we get to the particulars of what she said and why it's so strange and
We have a situation where the Secret Service is in charge of protecting the contenders, the competitors of the Chief Executive, the President, for his office.
So, the Chief Executive is in charge of the Executive Branch, the Secret Service is inside of the Department of Homeland Security, which is inside the Executive Branch, and it is in charge of protecting the competitors of the chief executive.
So that already opens the possibility, maybe not in this circumstance, but in some future circumstance, where the person who inhabits the office could abuse their authority over an agency charged with protecting their competitors so that their competitors weren't well protected.
And in fact, we have seen some rather conspicuous failures here.
Bobby Kennedy Jr.
has asked for Secret Service detail to protect him as he's running for the presidency, and that has now been granted in the aftermath of this assassination attempt on President Trump, but It was not granted.
Secretary Mayorkas denied Bobby Kennedy that protection.
Secretary Mayorkas being the head of the Department of Homeland Security and Kimberly Cheetham's boss.
It seems to me you just said two different things.
It has been granted and it has not been granted.
You're talking about a temporal change?
It had been refused and it has now been granted under pressure and scrutiny.
And I will just remind people, as we discussed last week, the protection of candidates for the presidency actually became policy after the successful assassination of Robert Kennedy Sr.
at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, after he had won the California primary and was the leading contender for the presidency.
Presumptive nominee.
Yeah.
So there's this all has a history to it.
And anyway, so the possibility there was no Department of Homeland Security in 1968.
But as things exist currently, the chief executive is in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of the Department of the Secret Service.
And if the Secret Service fails in its mission to protect somebody who investigates, It's the FBI, which is not in the Department of Homeland Security, but it is in the Justice Department, which is also an executive department.
So there is the risk that if somebody were to abuse their power that it actually poses a direct threat to our entire system of government.
If an executive can tamper with an election by leaving his competitors vulnerable then obviously that is something extra constitutional and outside of the system envisioned by our founders.
So we have every right to worry that such a thing might have happened and And to have the evidence of what has taken place so that we can be certain that no such abuse of power did take place.
And in that light, it is very jarring to watch the person who is at least nominally in charge of the Secret Service stonewalling the Congress.
So we have a check and balance.
What's a check on the executive branch?
Congress is a check on the executive branch.
The Congress wants to know what happened that allowed a shooter to get a shot at President Trump, and the head of the Secret Service is stonewalling them in broad daylight.
And that ought to raise all of our alarm.
I will argue that the head of the Secret Service is actually behaving as a heat shield.
That she is taking the heat in order that we can't find out what happened.
And there are two reasons that you might find
Stonewalling here neither of them acceptable one of them is to Prevent the discovery of Embarrassing lapses in security, but it is absolutely our obligation to find those embarrassing lapses of security if that's all it was Also, then the question of whether or not there is some collusion inside of these things and collusion could mean anything It could mean a foreign government had gotten access it could mean
That something domestic had decided to use these powers for illegitimate reasons.
So anyway, that's all.
It is actually our obligation as citizens to be asking these questions.
It is the obligation of the Congress to try to get to the bottom of it.
And it is shocking to watch an official like Kimberly Cheadle stonewall them on the most basic issues.
Now, the reason I raise it, all of that is probably clear, but I wanted to explore one possible explanation for what we saw, because it has pretty serious implications.
There are facts which many of us have been asking for that there is no reason to obscure them.
For example, how many shell casings were found either on the roof next to Crook's body or Having fallen off the roof nearby.
This should be an easily ascertained number.
It's not a question that is in any way subjective or requires any kind of technical analysis.
It's just simply some integer number.
And one could imagine a circumstance in which somehow, despite the intense interest in this crime scene, some shell casing got overlooked and was found later.
And then we could ask ourselves the question whether the story of it being found later made sense or not.
But in general, there's no reason to obscure this piece of information.
And yet, until yesterday, when Senator Ron Johnson Revealed that the number turns out to be I believe eight.
We didn't know nobody would tell us how many shell casings there were So actually Would you that was one of the questions that Cheadle was asked before the house and she refused to answer?
Yeah She did and I want to show you can you Chris Martinson's tweet on this issue?
So Chris Martinson here has tweeted a video that emerged yesterday.
This is body cam video of Can you scroll it up a little bit?
Yeah.
This is body cam footage from somebody who was on the roof the day of the assassination.
You can see the blood has dripped down the roof.
The body when it is shown in this body cam footage is blurred out.
But what Chris Martinson points out is that actually there are no bullet casings on this roof as far as we can tell.
Now, I don't know whether or not they're there and we can't see them, we're overlooking them.
I mean, to be fair, that roof is clearly far too steep a pitch for any Secret Service man to stand on and therefore the shell casings presumably long since rolled off and into an abyss from which they will never be found.
Right.
The slope of that roof really is something else.
Clearly something else.
Yeah.
If you were to go up there and somebody, if you were, if you were, uh, you know, a leather shoe type and somebody had really thoroughly, uh, leather sole and somebody had, oh, you're wearing leather, wearing leather soles in the rain on that roof, you would want to be a little careful.
But, um, But anyway, yeah, here we've got a bunch of people casually standing around on this roof.
This guy's got a hand in his pocket and he's wearing a tie.
He's not having a problem with the slope.
But, so I want to go through a little bit of the logic here.
There should be shell casings on that roof.
I can't think of a reason that they should have been removed, but if they were removed you would imagine that the locations that they had been would be clearly marked so that as the investigation goes forward one can recreate The circumstance of any shell casings.
It is not likely, in fact it is highly unlikely, that those shell casings left the roof of their own accord.
For one thing, as Chris Martinson points out, these shell casings are tapered, and what one would expect if you threw something that was slightly conical in shape onto that roof, it would roll a little bit, but it would roll up against the standing seams of that metal roof, and they would be sitting there, and you would see them.
So it's possible there's some explanation for this, but there's something weird about the absence of the shell casings up there, and Even more strange is the unwillingness to talk to us about the number.
That is a number that we could know now and it would... But you said we do know now.
Oh, we know now through Senator Johnson.
So anyway, I wanted to actually, there's an argument that I am trying to make, but it's hard for people to grasp it for some reason.
And the argument is that there's a very clear reason why you would withhold a basic fact like that, that should be easy to convey, that would show obvious transparency at some level.
And that is because Well, I'm going to use the song, the Colin Ray song, That's My Story, and I'm sticking to it to elucidate the point.
So you all will remember that very catchy and wonderful song.
I'm struggling a little bit with what I think is grass pollen, but I will attempt to present a little bit of it, and then we'll talk about how that song might have been different.
So, Colin Ray sings, I came in as the sun came up.
She glared at me over her coffee cup.
She said, where you been?
So I thought real hard and said, I fell asleep in that hammock in the yard.
She said, you don't know it, boy, but you just blew it.
And I said, well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Then there's a certain amount of the chorus and he sings, I got that deer in the headlight look.
She read my face like the cover of a book and said, don't expect me to believe all that static.
Cause just last week I threw that hammock in the attic.
My skin got so thin you could see right through it.
And I stuttered, well that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
All right.
And then, you know, to complete this, the song continues.
You know, there comes a time when a wise man knows that the best thing he can do is just look her in the eye and beg for mercy and face the bitter truth.
Well, honey, me and the boys, we played cards all night.
There wasn't no hanky-panky, not a woman in sight.
I know I should have called, and baby, I'm real sorry.
But get a cellular phone, and you won't have to worry.
You know how much I love you, and darling, I'm ready to prove it.
And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
So, this song is a presentation of a situation in which a guy tells a story It is falsified by a simple factual claim and he is forced to revise that story.
Now, do we think that the story that he revises it to is actually the truth?
That is exactly the right question.
Having lied, and you know I will point out there are various possibilities here.
It's possible that his, I don't know if it's his girlfriend or his wife, but the woman that he is trying to placate here has been very cunning and
She suspects the story is wrong and she claims to have removed the hammock but hasn't but more likely she did remove the hammock and he finds himself caught in a lie where there is no escape and having now lied his other story whether it's true or not is suspect so I bring this up because
If they tell us simple, basic, factual information like how many shell casings were on the roof, then later on if it turns out that there is evidence of More shooting than is reflected by what was found on the roof then we know what we're looking for.
Whereas if one holds back that information then the story that is ultimately told can be made consistent with the evidence that has been found and in this case there will be lots of it because there were There's cameras everywhere, there's recordings, official and otherwise, so the amount of evidence is going to be large.
So you would expect somebody who was hiding something to want to not release any information at all so they knew what they were trying to explain in the end.
And that ought to have us profoundly alarmed.
That's a hypothesis that one reason to stonewall us on even the basic facts like the number of shell casings is about protecting the optionality for whatever story they will ultimately tell about this because they have something to hide.
Keep the degrees of freedom high.
Keep the degrees of freedom maximum.
And I would just point out this, you know, this is a weird special case of This is just an integer question, right?
It's a simple number, and there's nothing complex about it.
There's no analysis or interpretation required.
I mean, you could give it an integer number, as you say, and then say, but of course, some may have disappeared.
Some may have rolled off this incredibly steep road.
Right.
I mean, you can hedge But still, the number is the number.
Right.
That's one of the reasons that so much science defaults to the quantitative and the reductionist and the metrics, even when you're dealing with complex systems that aren't actually ready to be explained through quantitative means yet, because they can be noted.
And what's noted over here, they look exactly the same over there.
And so the replication is much easier when you're talking about something quantifiable.
Yep.
And in this case, we also don't have the mechanism to replicate.
Let's say that we had some number of shell casings.
Let's say that she had coughed up the number eight.
And then there's a question about, well, We have a location of the shooter.
If we had the weapon type, then we could come up with a maximum radius.
If we had a weapon type and an ammunition type, we could come up with a maximum radius that those things might have been injected.
And we could then, actually, people often say you can't prove a negative.
I often wonder about this claim, because I think there are negatives that you can prove.
Like, um, you know, There is no hippopotamus in this glass of water and I think you could prove that by going through this glass of water carefully with a comb fine enough to find even the smallest hippopotamus.
Seems like a lot of work though.
Yeah, I mean I'm not saying I want to prove that right right, but if you did could be done with a big enough grant ah see now it gets interesting, but Okay, so it seems to me that if you had an ejection radius of the shell cartridges from a known weapon you could say
The maximum distance they could have landed on the roof is whatever it would be and you could say therefore the number of places where if you know the wind was blowing and it rolled down the roof from wherever it landed would be in this radius and you could Good, and they certainly have gone through that entire thing with a fine-tooth comb, finding any shell casings.
You know, could there be one left over from somebody having shot a weapon there, you know, three years earlier?
Maybe, but then that would come out in the wash.
So anyway, the point is, okay, reserving optionality in order to tell a story that isn't falsified later.
And I want to point out a few historical things, a couple historical things, and then I want to point to something that Kimberly Cheadle said in the hearing.
Well, just to repeat what you said in a slightly different language.
You're saying, reserving optionality, keeping the degrees of freedom maximum, in order to not—what you said was, to tell a story that isn't falsified later.
To tell a story that is unfalsifiable, actually.
Which is an even stronger version of the statement, I think.
Right.
This serves the narrative machine that creates stories that later, when you get epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle, as long as you didn't tell something that was unfalsifiable, where there was a prediction, you'd be like, nope, that is inherently contradictory with what we've already been told.
Therefore, something is amiss here.
Some number of people will continue to go like, well, yeah, I know that seems unlikely, but okay, let's just keep going.
Right, so to your earlier point about the Colin Rae song and do we trust his ultimate story that he was playing cards with his friends.
Well, imagine that the story, imagine that the song played out where he looks at her over her coffee cup and she starts out by saying, where have you been?
I know you weren't sleeping in the backyard in the hammock because I threw it in the attic last week.
Okay.
Then he doesn't tell her he was sleeping in the hammock.
He says, me and the boys played cards all night, right?
This is when savvy, savvy interlocutors and sociopaths tend to work by curtailing the information that they share with others.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
And so I guess that's the upshot of the whole thing is, wow, is this person throwing off the hallmarks of having something major to hide?
Right.
And the question is, does incompetence cover it?
No, incompetence is clear.
Right.
There's no covering that at this point.
So actually, something more nefarious may well be what's behind it.
And a lot of the evidence that is emerging suggests There's some doubt about shooter's identity.
There's doubt about the number of shooters.
There's, there's doubt about many different things.
The, uh, law enforcement appears to have had a clear view of the roof where Crooks is supposed to have been shooting from, from the building where they were stationed.
Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to worry about, but let's, um, let's look.
So a couple of things, the two historical things I wanted to introduce was one, 1963, the JFK assassination in Dealey Plaza.
The awkward situation of the magic bullet.
Yeah, you want to show this image?
So, in order for Oswald to be the lone shooter, a single bullet has to have traversed an improbable trajectory.
What is the source on this?
I don't.
Frankly, I didn't bother.
The magic bullet is so thoroughly discussed in so many different places that I just picked up a diagram.
So, the idea is if optionality had been reserved, then potentially a second bullet could explain the series of wounds somehow.
So you're saying that what happened in 1963 that is different from what is happening now that perhaps Secret Service has learned from was claiming early on that there was only one bullet required a remarkable trajectory that causes many of us, I actually thought it was the vast majority of Americans but I don't know anymore, to have long since concluded the Warren Commission didn't get it right.
Right.
The Warren Commission didn't get it right.
And I think, I don't know if it's the vast majority, but I think the majority of Americans do question the Warren Commission.
And I think we have recently gotten evidence that, in fact, the pristine bullet was delivered to the stretcher from the vehicle.
It was not found on the stretcher naturally, as had been the story.
So that turns out that all of the skepticism over the magic bullet does point to something.
But in any case, Yeah, and it's not the Secret Service necessarily that would have learned this lesson, but whatever it is that Some of us believe staged a coup in 1963 and who knows to what degree that coup ever lifted, right?
Are we still living downstream of something that controls access to power that took power on that day or not?
We don't know.
But in any case, yeah, learn something.
That's the point.
Learn something.
Now the second place where one might have learned something, learned this very same lesson about reserving optionality, Is the RFK assassination in 1968.
So the RFK assassination in 1968 took place at the Ambassador Hotel, which is someplace I knew actually from childhood.
It wasn't terribly far from where I grew up.
It's now gone.
The hotel has been removed.
But there was plenty of evidence in that shooting of multiple shooters as well.
And that evidence came in multiple forms.
Most conspicuously was the Bullet holes in various objects like the door frame.
Amazingly enough, so because 1968 is the place where Secret Service protection of candidates is first granted in the aftermath of this event, it was actually the LAPD that was the investigatory body here.
But, as I understand the story, the doorframe that would allow further analysis of what actually took place was destroyed By the LAPD.
So, in any case, if you don't want to be in the embarrassing situation of having to destroy evidence that is historical, or tell improbable stories about ballistics, then keeping your cards close to your chest would be the obvious thing to do.
Now these people have... Yeah, you don't follow, is it Colin Ray?
Yeah.
And tell a story right away and stick to it.
You avoid telling a story as long as possible.
Yeah, you avoid telling a story until you know what is known.
So that is despicable and it does not have any place here at all.
Any patriot should want to get to the bottom of this.
I don't care what you think about Trump.
It is especially irrelevant, right?
The point is we all depend on the Secret Service to defend all of the people who are in office and contenders for the office.
That is how democracy works.
And if you eliminate that, then the answer is, oh, well, now we live in mob world.
So you want to show the little clip of Kimberly Cheadle facing questioning, I think, from Kim Jordan?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What was erroneously reported?
You said to Mr. Grothman's question, you said something was erroneously reported.
What are you referring to?
I'm referring to... His question was in the context of the shooter using a ladder to get on the building.
What was erroneously reported?
Because you won't tell us anything, but you'll tell us something that wasn't reported accurately?
I'm saying, sir, that there have been a number of reports that are out there that have been speculation.
And until we have the actual facts, I don't want to report anything that would contradict speculation that has been out there.
Thank you.
My way of thinking now, of course, people say awkward things that don't mean anything sometimes.
But what she really just said was that she is withholding factual information, right?
She says she's doing it because they're still collecting facts, but there's facts they've got.
They know how many shell casings they've found on the roof.
They know all about this ladder.
What she effectively confesses there is that they are withholding that information so they don't contradict speculation that is being made in public.
That's literally what she said.
I haven't seen the whole thing.
I don't know where that was in it.
I don't know.
Obviously, both sides were tense and presumably argumentative.
It's I suspect she's not pleased to have used the word speculation there at the final time.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure she regrets the entire statement.
And, you know, of course, let's just put it this way.
The hypothesis that they are retaining optionality so that they ultimately tell a story that can't be falsified predicts implicitly that that is the style of thinking.
We don't want to contradict speculation that is out there until the facts are in.
One overarching feeling I'm having listening to you talk about this, which is, again, just being hip deep, shoulder deep, almost nose deep in the Cartesian crisis.
So, you know, the thing that We're going to talk about later in this episode.
My direct observations of ending up surprised to find myself watching the Portland Pride Parade matches what we've talked about with regard to how one deals with a Cretaceous crisis.
Knowing still that your senses are biased and they can betray you as well, but relying on your own eye, ear, nose, whatever witness observations, Having trained yourself to observe as much as possible without interpretation until you know what you're seeing, and then, you know, observing a lot, and then later going back to it, and if we were actually doing animal behavior, then doing the interpretation and formulating hypotheses, and then going back and doing more observation.
But observing directly, or, so my rubric has been, if I haven't seen it directly, or it doesn't come from one of the very, very few people, in the world who I trust to be very honest with themselves and that number the number of people on that list at the moment is you know less than five five four five um who say yes I saw this myself I don't know I don't know if it's true.
So I'm not saying that that piece of testimony isn't true because, you know, whatever it is, it is whatever it is.
I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but presumably that testimony happened because they're two sides and they would, you know, one or the other would say, no, that's not what happened.
We had lots of witnesses and all of this.
But there are so many opportunities for Crisis actors to be shifting what is actually happening here in some way and what you're trying to do is get to the bottom of it.
But part of my reticence to engage is there's too many opportunities for us to be speaking about things that we have not been allowed enough information to assess independently or to know if we're doing so accurately.
Okay, so I think this is a really important point.
There is terrible peril to try to wade into the discussion of what happened because there is certain to be low quality information, there's certain to be phony stories circulated, Um, you know, I put out a video yesterday arguing that, uh, advancing a hypothesis that I actually do believe is... A friend of mine told me that she had seen it, but I haven't seen it.
You haven't seen it?
Yes.
So, I put out a video, a little 10 minute video, in which I argued that several events The bizarre total absence of Joe Biden from the public sphere in the aftermath of his apparently leaving the presidential race, that that one interpretation is that it functions as a kind of bait.
And indeed, people were speculating wildly that he was in hospice care, that he was already dead.
And he is apparently addressing the the country from the Oval Office tonight.
So, the problem is the peril is 100% real.
We are all going to end up embarrassed by having thought something was evidence that turns out not to have been.
And maybe that's the point.
The problem is, this is going to be one of a million places in the Cartesian crisis where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Obviously, if we're going to have a democratic republic, consent of the governed has to function and you can't have people driving you out of talking about what may have happened because your certainty is so low because you've been denied all the evidence and you're just, you know, Well, low certainty cannot become acceptance of the mainstream narrative.
And it's easy for it to become de facto acceptance of the mainstream narrative.
Because if you're not engaging at all, you're like, I don't know, I guess someone I've heard something in the background and I'm not paying any attention.
So it's probably that.
So you do have to actively defend yourself against You have to actively make a choice to say across a whole swath of things about which normal people would just say, yes, of course, that's true, and that's true, and that's true.
You have to be willing to say, I actually don't know.
I'm not informed about this.
I do not know.
Oh, come on.
I haven't looked into it.
I don't know.
Yes, I also think this is the moment at which the, what has I'm sure seemed like a clunky toolkit to many people, comes into full use.
The idea that the correct way to deal with hypotheses of collusion, what the CIA decided to demonize as conspiracy theories, is with the theoretical science toolkit, right?
Observe, hypothesis, predict, test, right?
The Baconian, Popperian tradition of hypothesis, prediction, test, repeat.
Yep, exactly.
So that toolkit is the only thing you can use in the Cartesian crisis because the peril of just trying to logic your way through it without a method is going to result in you running aground again and again and again to mix in the 37th metaphor today.
But I did want to point to a couple things as long as we're in this neighborhood.
I don't know what to make of these things.
I am not a finance guy.
So the landscape is one of objects that I don't understand as well as people who work with this stuff.
But there were a couple of indications of anomalous short positions taken relative to Truth Social, that is Trump's social network, right before his assassination.
And then there was one with CrowdStrike, the computer company that was responsible for the huge debacle that brought airlines to a standstill.
Those short positions in advance of the episodes could be nothing.
The part that I'm hesitant about, that I don't know enough to speak about, is how anomalous were those short positions?
One could go back and say, did somebody short this thing in advance of an assassination?
And the answer could be yes, but it could be oh yeah, people are shorting that thing all the time, right?
So you have to have some threshold for how anomalous a short position has to be.
People are shorting that thing all the time, or in that sector of... I don't know what the language should be.
In that sector, it's not the economy, but like in that sector of things that you could short.
It's always, there's always something or eight things that are being periodically shorted in a remarkable amount that looked at in isolation appears unusual.
How unusual is this?
And so until we know how unusual is this, it's Very hard to know what kind of story to begin to tell yourself going forward.
Right.
But we do need the people who know that, who have both the scientific toolkit to look at the vast quantity of evidence and say, OK, well, what does the landscape of shorts look like?
And to figure out whether or not something noteworthy actually did happen and whether the evidence is what it appears to be.
There was the claim with the major short position before the would-be Trump assassination That it was a clerical error.
I don't know enough about this landscape to know how conceivable that is Well, I mean you haven't provided any references so I can't I can't write I can't check on anything.
I'm just telling you One we've got a hypothesis on the table that somebody operates something that we have called the time-traveling money printer time-traveling money printer is a mechanism for
Those with foreknowledge of historical events, and foreknowledge does not have to come before the event, it can come before the public becomes aware of an event, as appears to have happened with the COVID so-called pandemic, which the public learned about on the at the dawning of the new year 2020, but in fact COVID was apparently circulating in the Wuhan Games and All of that year during the previous year.
Um, but time traveling money printer is a hypothesis that people are using the delay in the public's awareness of events, uh, or foreknowledge of events to print money as if they had a time machine.
Short positions are a place to test that.
Somebody who understands short positions has to test that, just the same way you and I can make an argument about what genes you would expect to find in a particular creature if it really was related to some other creature, but you and I don't have the lab background to actually wield the technical tools to look into the genomes.
So this is the same thing.
We need people with those tools to look for Um, or anomalies and figure out how to detect one that is really significant enough to be, um, noteworthy.
But the other, other thing I wanted to say is some people will have seen a clip of me at the at Liberty Fest, uh, talking about the deep state.
And so I was on a panel and we had a discussion about the two definitions of deep state that people use.
And I've argued, we've talked about here, the fact that there really need to be two different terms because the deep state as an unelected body that wields power over the governmental structure versus the vast bureaucracy that can't turn over because it's just simply impractical.
Both of these are powerful and important things.
One of them is dead certain to exist, the vast bureaucratic network.
And the other one is speculation.
But in any case, it occurred to me that the thing one needs to say is the sin qua non of a deep state that is not the vast bureaucratic network, but is actually a type of collusion used to garner and hold but is actually a type of collusion used to garner and hold on to power outside of the The sine qua non of that thing is a black budget.
A black budget is a budget that is not on the books.
So just take hypothetically if we were talking about the CIA being involved in the deep state or some component of the CIA being involved in the deep state.
The above board parts of the CIA are under the control of Congress.
Congress allocates money and it can take it away.
On the other hand, if the CIA finds a way to generate money of its own, then that is not under control of Congress.
It's outside the Constitution.
So that black budget question is a significant one.
And so one of the questions that we have to ask here is if people are shorting things in advance in a way that's sufficiently anomalous that it should cause us Suspicion that one thing is is that the?
Hallmark of something that has escaped the control of the Constitution the vast bureaucratic network that some people sometimes call the deep state But we have called the shallow state or you have called it The permanent state something like that I That thing is under the control of Congress, right?
The vast network of bureaucrats don't have a budget of their own.
So the point is they are, they are not, they have not escaped the system.
They may be unanticipated by the founders, but they are the system and they are subject to its controls.
It's the stuff that is not subject to it that we need to be most concerned about.
So anyway, I don't know what to do.
I'm hoping that people who are sophisticated about the question of stock options and how you would generate money with the time-traveling money printer will take this question very seriously and we'll see if they end up catching some people with their shorts up.
I thought it was all right.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
I guess I'm troubled generally by the fact that claims such as this, not that I've ever heard a claim exactly like this before, never come, never arrive, at least at first, and almost never end up having show up the relevant comparison population.
So it is meaningless to say there were a bunch of, or there was a massive short on Trump's social media something in advance of the assassination attempt.
Amazing, right?
Oh my god.
But it's meaningless absent the comparison data set, right?
And why do we never, almost never, and again, I don't know how to generate that data set.
I have no idea.
So people throw these claims out into the universe.
If they know that thing, then they know how to generate the relevant comparison data set.
Then they do.
So why does it never come with the full analysis?
I know it takes longer.
It's, you know, there's a little bit of interpretation, maybe a lot of interpretation there in terms of like, what would the relevant comparator population be?
But absent it, we should not, we should not make interpretations.
We should not come to conclusions about what it means, because we simply do not have enough information.
That sounds like this banal cliche, like, oh, we've got to wait for more information to come.
It's like, no.
All you've done is said, this is true.
Okay, but you have no idea what it means yet, because you have not—you don't have any idea what it means yet, or you do when you're withholding it from us, but what you gave to us means that we can not possibly have any idea what it means.
And this is going to sound like a non sequitur, but one of the many things that I insisted on with my students was in those classes, which was every upper division science program, they had to do literature review.
They had to do library research as part of their, hopefully, empirical research projects that they were doing, or in some cases, no empirical research projects.
And no one is born or mostly even graduates from high school knowing how you reference things or why you reference things.
And I came to realize pretty quickly in teaching students under what conditions, how, why, why are these, you know, there has to be some standards and some of the standards are just like it had to be some standard.
So here it is in terms of format.
The format doesn't matter, right?
But in terms of like, under what conditions do you tell me?
How do you know that?
You tell me, how do you know that every single time that it is not something that is common knowledge?
Well, what's common knowledge?
What counts as common knowledge?
On that point, you have to know your audience, and we will sometimes disagree about whether or not that's actually common knowledge.
I mean, this is one of the problems we're having over in sex and gender space.
The frickin' trans rights activist is like, well, where's the research paper that says that sex is binary?
God, people, that's just true.
And for me to say that makes me sound like an unscientific authoritarian.
That's just true.
Well, there are some things that have been so broadly understood for so long that no one did the research because what would it even look like to do so, right?
But the many more things actually warrant a citation.
And the other reason The other big reason that you cite when, so the first reason is you cite when you're making a claim that comes from a particular place so that the person reading it can go back and look and see, did they actually say that?
Is this being misinterpreted by the person who's citing them?
Did the original research, was it any good?
You know, often there's a problem somewhere in the line of evidence.
Very often.
And we know this.
We know this from p-hacking.
We know this from replication crisis.
We know this from everything.
That it's not that science is the problem, but no one is doing it right.
But the other reason to cite every time—and we're talking about writing now rather than speaking, because you can do this in speaking—is If you are good at it, and you don't cite the things that are common knowledge, and you do cite the things for which you're making claims that are based on someone else's thought or research, then when you don't cite an extraordinary claim, your audience knows that that's coming from you.
and that that way we can we can begin to have a clear line of oh that guy me too but like that guy comes up with a lot of amazing ideas i can tell because either he's always being cited in these places or in the you know in the careful analysis that he's done here he attributes this idea to this guy and this idea to this guy and there's all this stuff at the end that he's not citing and it's not that he's bad at this it's that those are his original ideas
Yep.
Agree.
And once again, it's a question of building out this toolkit into a realm where people don't typically think of it, right?
We don't, we don't typically, you know, this seems more like a, you know, a police procedural than a science story, but all of these things are ultimately science stories.
What you're talking about with the The Trump assassination attempt right and you know, so you say it's all I mean He used science everywhere, right?
Of course in the least you to as we all know, you know those things show up should hope so Yeah, yeah, they're supposed to yeah but the idea is that What's lacking, your initial critique about not knowing what the landscape of short positions looks like so that you can detect whether or not this is really a noteworthy event or not, is the lack of a control.
And so one of the hallmarks of Yeah, I don't think you're looking for control.
is that every place that you might want to establish that something is or isn't anomalous by a control, the control is somehow absent.
So we've talked about-- - Yeah, I don't think you're looking for control.
That's just not the word I would use in this case, but it's at least a closely related concept. - Well, let's put it this way.
You could use short positions against Truth Social when no assassination followed as a control for... You see what I'm saying?
You could define a control by which to test the hypothesis that the shorts in advance of the Trump assassination on Truth Social were anomalous.
Exactly.
And so if I go back to the beginning of what you just described there, We have a shocking lack of those kinds of controls for all sorts of questions that we would love the answer to.
This is one of the reasons that I absolutely would not touch the question of the patents that were claimed to be smoking guns with respect to COVID vaccines from before COVID was known.
And the answer is, I'm not saying that's not a smoking gun, but I don't know, because I don't know how... Hatton-Davis is a Byzantine giant mess, and who knows how many applications and accepted and rejected, all of this.
And I don't know, you know, I don't know how broad these applications are.
We know people were working on coronaviruses.
Is it anomalous that, you know, are these things smoking guns, or is, you know, are a lot of people smoking in a gun shop, right?
It's like, you can't tell, right?
So the It worked all right.
It wasn't the best analogy I've ever come up with, but you know, it's all right.
But the conspicuous absence of the tools and institutions that you would want in order to make sense of the world and make sure that crazy stuff wasn't afoot is stunning.
Among those things are the comparisons that you would make in order to figure out whether something is or is not evidence in, uh, in some story that matters.
So.
I mean, the reason I objected at first to your use of the word control, maybe because you then said, okay, but you, you know, you could, you could test the hypothesis this way by having a control.
And the reason perhaps that people don't do that is precisely because then their choice of control will get attacked and then that will be used to destroy the conclusion.
So I was thinking sort of more broadly rather than as a test of the hypothesis, like, I don't necessarily want you to provide me the results of your test of your hypothesis in which you have chosen not just what you think the pattern is, but also the control, even though that's what we do in science all the time.
I would like a broader sense of what the landscape looks like.
And what the landscape looks like, I can't use that then to run my own hypothesis test, because I don't have the skills to go in and collect the exactly relevant data to use as the control.
But what the landscape looks like provides you a sort of, it's weaving in between the quantitative and the narrative part of science that tells you, You know what?
Shorts of this size, absent other events, shorts of this size on properties of this type happen with this kind of regularity.
And I don't know all the things that I want to know here, but I know that I want to know something about the landscape.
And the claim as it exists is landscape-free.
It's context-free.
Well, I think we've actually, over the course of the last couple discussions, found something important.
There's a bunch, the toolkit is science, but there's two versions of it.
There's the laboratory version where we've got enough control over the environment to run an experiment in which only one thing varies, right?
You bring a different approach when you have laboratory control over something rather than trying to control it in a different space.
And so, There are lots of places where we, as scientists, speak about logical analogs to something borrowed from the rigorous hyper-controlled environment of laboratories and statistical tests.
And we found this last time we spoke with null hypothesis and what you and I concluded was that actually null hypothesis is closely connected to something that we recognize from logic space but it's actually inappropriately applied to something like an assassination attempt where there are lots of possible explanations and walking into it we don't know which one to expect so none of them have the presumption
In a landscape of complexity, the presumption of nothing happened is often not correct.
Right.
Especially when... There is no pattern.
Nothing happened.
Like I don't know what the trope is called, but the, you know...
Okay, this person said X, which seems to exonerate them, but of course they would have said it if they were guilty also, so it's not evidence, right?
So the idea that, you know, it looks like a single shooter, yeah, but it would.
So it would, one way or another, right?
Single shooter will make it look like a single shooter, and multiple shooters trying to get away with it would too.
We can begin to think about how compellingly, you know, how much it looks like, you know, how compelling that is.
But, uh, but the, it looks like a single shooter is not in and of itself evidence because that is a prediction of both hypotheses on the table.
Right.
So we both hypotheses broadly, like one shooter, everything else.
Yep.
So what we need is logical controls rather than statistical controls.
We need a logical baseline assumption that isn't a null hypothesis in a formal sense.
And I don't know how we build out that toolkit, but I think it's probably worth our while because the Cartesian crisis ain't going anywhere.
No.
In fact, I came up with a kind of a slogan for it.
Good.
You ready?
No.
Yes.
Cartesian crisis.
The writing is on the wall.
Or is it?
Hmm.
Beep, right?
Yeah.
So that's not the cave wall you're talking about.
No, there are a couple of walls running around in our lexicon.
Yeah, there are.
That's good.
I like it.
I like it.
Is that what you got?
Yep.
All right.
Let's talk about Pride then.
Okay.
Yeah.
Wait, I thought Pride Month was over.
Yeah.
So did I. And it is.
But.
But.
So I was in Portland this week, as you know.
And on Sunday, so one of the ways that I like to work, and one of the reasons that I miss Portland and really being in a city at all, is that I put my computer in a backpack on my back and I find a place where I'm going to be able to walk some miles, and there are lots of good coffee shops.
And I walk, and I get myself a nice brevet cappuccino, and I write for a little while, and then I walk some more, and I get myself another cappuccino, and I write for a while, and it goes on and on.
And, you know, sometimes I'll stop in a park if the weather is nice.
I was sitting in one such coffee shop on Sunday knowing that my afternoon I had plans to go hang out with a bunch of TERFs, some of whom I already knew, some of whom I did not yet know, at a park by the Sandy River, a place I'd never been before.
So I was trying to get some running done in the morning and had a nice conversation with a guy who appreciates what we do.
Just as he left, there was a group that came in, including one woman decked, you know, head to tail.
I'm gonna go with head to tail.
Taking a snout vent length?
In rainbows.
Like, I think she had nine different rainbows on her at various, in various sorts.
And I thought, that's odd.
A person like that should be put in prison.
Mmm, that's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I'm curious, and I'm sitting at a big table, and they're sitting next to me, so I'm eavesdropping, which is totally appropriate, because they're having this loud conversation right next to me, and I'm writing.
And they talk with excitement about, you know, they're going to go soon.
I'm like, where are they going?
There's a Pride parade now, like a few blocks from me?
Oh, well, I guess I'll go.
So, I ended up at the Portland Pride Parade on Sunday of this week, and I wrote about it in my substack.
And I think, because we haven't really talked about it yet, and most of our audience won't have read what I wrote yet, I'm going to read what I wrote aloud.
And as background, I'm going to have Zach show the live stream that one of the local TV channels put up.
I mean, it's almost three hour parade.
We're not going to do that to you.
I'm just going to have that in the background with the sound off for as long as it takes me to read the piece and then have us discuss it along with a few other things.
It does.
I'm still, I felt a kind of relief as Pride Month came to an end and it's possible, Portland being Portland, that there's just too much pride to get it all in one month.
Is that?
You're going to be thrilled to find that my very second paragraph addresses this issue.
It does?
Yes.
Okay.
I feel like I deserve a little warning.
Are they going to get all of their pride in before the fall?
I doubt it.
There's a lot to be proud of, Brent.
I just think it typically goes before the fall.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so I've picked a spot for Zach to start showing the video from SoundOff, just so that you get some of the senses of what it felt like to be there.
I will say, and then I'm going to show you just a tiny bit of video that I took with SoundOn.
Afterwards.
It was not, and as I say in the piece, it was, there was a fair bit of recorded music, but there was very little live music.
And it just, it was not, you know, the air was sort of festive, I guess.
But it did not make a person want to dance.
How about that?
So you're not missing much by missing out on the sound.
So if you want to go ahead and start showing, I'm going to read this.
My piece is called A Don't Hurt Me Parade in Portland, Now with Less Parental Oversight.
The most Portland thing of all at this week's Pride Parade was the guy in the assless denim overalls.
It was the epitome of a queer Pacific Northwest mashup.
Portland's Pride Parade was in July this year because, while in the entire known universe all of June has been designated Pride Month, Pride Northwest, out of sheer politeness and to, quote, avoid overlapping with other significant cultural events in the Rose City, end quote, moved their signature parade to July.
In fact, they moved the 10th annual Portland Trans Pride March into July as well.
And last year, the Pride Parade was in July, too.
Funny that.
Is this evidence of Pride Northwest being polite or greedy?
Greedy for more attention, more bandwidth from the citizens of Portland, more money from their corporate sponsors?
I'm going with greedy.
Needy, greedy, and shameless.
Pride insists on its countercultural cred while being generic and predictable, a majority of the time.
The prevailing aesthetic at the parade was, of course, rainbow.
Rainbow backpacks and bags, shirts and skirts and pants, sneakers and belts and bows and hats.
No item is too small for a rainbow.
The parade itself was uninspired.
No floats, precious little live music, and few elaborate costumes, except, of course, for the drag queens and the men who think they're women and the men engaging in public kink, on which more later.
Mostly it was a bunch of corporations and community organizations signaling their allegiance to the cause.
Behind the scenes, allegiance was shown with financial contributions.
At the parade... Hold on a second.
Do you have this on, like, fast?
This seems really fast to me.
No.
I feel like it's moving much faster.
Okay.
Okay.
Maybe my computer was on slow because we're going through a lot faster than... Okay, I'll get back to the read.
At the parade, allegiance constitute people Behind the scenes, Allegiance was shown with financial contributions.
At the parade, Allegiance constituted people co-branded with rainbows and their corporate logos walking, and trucks co-branded with rainbows and their corporate logos driving.
Branded rainbowed trucks and branded rainbowed people sticking it to the establishment.
Who precisely is sticking it to the establishment by marching in the parade?
Banks and credit unions showed their pride, from Bank of America to U.S.
Bank.
Delta and Alaska Air were there, as were Marriott, Macy's, and Daimler Truck.
Safeway Albertsons brought a truck with a drag queen.
Adidas was handing out discount cards to the employee store.
Even the Department of Fish and Wildlife felt a need to represent.
Pride in the wild, said their banner, while their truck proclaimed, Lamprey are older than dinosaurs.
True, but irrelevant to the theme of the day.
That said, Lamprey appear to be pentachromats.
Do you know that?
No, I don't know.
Yeah, Lamprey appear to be pentachromats, able to see color in greater detail than we can, so they might have some aesthetic advice for the rainbow crowd.
The crowd seemed appreciative of all the corporate backing.
I heard several attendees murmuring their approval.
Look, on-point credit union is here.
That's so great.
Oh, Doc Martens.
Awesome.
Oh, Nordstrom.
From print shops to pet hospitals to general contractors, no sector of the economy seemed to be missing.
Unions marched in the parade alongside utility companies, as well as the United States Postal Service.
Representatives from Portland State University marched, as did Oregon Health Sciences University.
As for that matter did many healthcare organizations, Kaiser Permanente, Providence, and Randall Children's Hospital among them.
A children's hospital.
Speaking of which, Kindercare was also there!
Kindercare offers daycare for children ages 6 weeks through kindergarten, as well as after-school care for the olders.
I'll give them this, they know their audience.
There were many small children in attendance, standing on the parade route, waving flags, being pushed in strollers through the crowd.
They too were bedecked in rainbows.
Most of the corporate sponsors handed out swag.
Little flags, lollipops, bottles of bubbles.
I went to Pride and all I got was a lousy keychain that says, Vote Love.
I don't even know who made it or who they want me to vote for.
I suspect that my idea of voting love and theirs will be radically different.
During the summer of 2020, when madness was allowed to run wild in many American cities and achieve fever pitch in Portland, many storefronts erected what I dubbed Don't Hurt Me walls.
In an often fruitless effort to be spared the vandalism that erupted every night in some parts of the city, store owners would publicize their fealty to the cause.
Black Lives Matter posters were nearly ubiquitous.
More niche messaging included Amplify Melanated Voices and Defund and Demilitarize and Dismantle Police.
In his 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel wrote of a fictional greengrocer who posts a flyer in his window that reads, Workers of the World Unite.
Havel asks, Why does he do it?
What is he trying to communicate to the world?
Havel answers his own question, I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do.
I behave in the manner expected of me.
I can be dependent upon and am beyond reproach.
I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.
Pride Northwest, the organization that organizes this parade that we're watching here, has effectively compelled a large fraction of the companies that do business in the city to ante up if they hope to be left in peace.
Pride Northwest has turned the businesses of Portland into Havel's hapless greengrocer.
They have created a Don't Hurt Me Parade.
In some ways, the parade seemed like Latin American Carnival, but with little of the creativity or authenticity.
There were surprises for the eyes around every corner, but it was pretty much all of a type.
There was the guy in skivvies who thought he was a woman.
Actually, there were several of those.
There were people wearing COVID-era masks, because respiratory viruses are an existential threat to people outdoors, but cross-sex hormones and surgical mutilation for people too young to vote is a birthright.
There was a guy wearing a peacock tail and skirt, another in royal purple regalia complete with crown, and several people in stripy knee socks.
Some people waved Palestinian flags, and one woman carried a Dykes for Palestine sign.
Queer pagans unite, read another sign.
Another, if you're reading this, you're gay.
The Portland Trans Femmes were there, carrying a banner directing interested parties to their Discord server.
And a very earnest young man was handing out flyers for the Class Struggle Action Network, which, according to their literature, advocates for such things as, quote, eliminating pay differentials based on category and eradicating the capitalist profit system.
They're going to be about as successful as the men who think they can magically turn into women.
Americans... No, sorry.
One thing I didn't see at Pride were zombies.
The zombies of Portland, and of many American cities now, are the walking dead.
Their eyes blank, their bodies twisted and hunched, eager for their next fix.
Fentanyl leaves husks of people lying in the street, pants around their ankles.
It leaves people hanging at the passenger side of rusty cars, crumpled at the curb.
And it leaves the most functional of its victims vacant but ambulatory.
There were no zombies at Pride.
Pride takes its victims a different way entirely.
One of the entities in the parade was Portland Pets and Handlers.
Listed cryptically in the official parade contingent lineup as PDX Paw, this group comprised doe-ey men in dog masks and tails or dressed as other unspecified pets, prancing and holding their hands up when their wrists limp in weak imitation of paws.
Some among the attendees were also wearing leather dog masks or tails, or even more suited up than that.
One of the handlers wore a gauzy white skirt and held the reins of the pet, who was dressed scantily in leather and had a bit in his mouth.
Because that's what pets like.
When the pets and handlers group came through, I was standing behind a couple of moms and their preschool-aged children.
One of the girls was asking to go.
Kids get antsy, after all.
But her mother insisted they stay.
Look, the mom pointed at the paw group as it approached.
Little girl seemed, by her body language, dubious.
Then curious, finally riveted.
Once the leather straps and bare skin and dog masks and reins and bits and tails were in front of her, she could not look away.
Both mothers laughed, apparently delighted, as bondage-dressed middle-aged men gyrated feet from their daughters.
It was, after all, a beautiful day, and they were out with their children enjoying the view.
What's not to be delighted about?
Portland Gay Men's Choir was also at the parade.
Their voices are beautiful.
They, along with a smattering of parade attendees, looked like gay men from an earlier time.
Fit and trim, mustachioed or clean-shaven, and uniformly good-looking, these men also seemed to be under no illusion about who and what they were.
They were fabulous.
They seemed to come from an era in which gay men and lesbians were striving for acceptance, to live their lives unaccosted and have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.
In L.A., in the 1970s and 80s, where and when I grew up, my mother had several artist friends who were gay.
David and Richard were the ones who became most familiar in our home.
In those days, they couldn't get married, but they were loyal to one another.
Family lore suggests that before they came to our house the first time, my little brother, inquisitive and socially fearless, had some questions about what it meant that two men were in love with one another.
But he kept the questions to himself until they arrived.
Maybe four years old, my brother marched up to David before he'd even received his first drink and asked in a clear and ringing voice, Do you have a penis?
My mother was bortified, but our guests were not.
David laughed.
Yes, young man, I do have a penis, he answered my brother.
And that was it.
My brother had asked a simple question and received a simple answer.
There was nothing predatory in the answer, no desire to instruct a child in the ways of homosexuality, or indeed in the ways of sexuality of any sort.
If there had been, of course, my parents would never again have invited those guests into our home, because protecting children is one of the crucial roles of parents.
Or at least it used to be.
So you can take that off now if you like.
Ah, profoundly disturbing.
I think you hit the nail on the head and it left me with many different observations and threads and I hardly even know where to start.
But I want to start somewhere odd and I think I'm gonna regret doing it because Once upon a time, there was a religious sect called the Shakers.
We're all familiar with the Shakers because Shaker furniture is fantastic and it's still sought after.
It became a style.
But the Shakers were a religious order that forbid sexual reproduction.
And so basically their plan was to recruit from, uh, Orphans, effectively.
That society abandons people, and by creating a community for those people, they would be brought in on something, but they would not produce more Shakers through reproduction.
There are no more Shakers, as far as I know.
I think they're completely gone.
That happened in our lifetime, the last.
Shakers died off.
This is a distortion of that much more laudable, I don't know if it's a proposal or what it was, but that mechanism for being, which did some good for the world.
It took people who had been abandoned by society and brought them in on something.
Incidentally, I think shakers take their name of the vigorous dancing that they ended up having to do in order not to be involved in sex.
So it was like an alternative to sex.
I think that's correct.
Alternative vibratory behavior.
Yeah, alternative vibratory behavior.
There you go.
But there is a question about cults in which reproduction is not a thing.
And something causes them to be contagious.
And I think you are honing in on the game theory that is driving the accumulation of power and resources into a collection of people who are not, they're rallying around their dysfunction.
And they are demanding that that dysfunction be treated as functional and by creating a credible threat to corporations and businesses, they are actually
Garnering resources have created something like a welfare program Right a well a private welfare program or the idea is hey if you're willing to embrace this political perspective then the corporations of Portland in this case and Well, they have already agreed to take care of a certain number of people.
And if they don't take care of enough of them, then they are subject to punishment.
So they will.
So, you know, just as we are finding from, for example, Elon Musk's firing of a huge fraction of the Twitter workforce and the platform not collapsing, that there were a lot of people whose jobs weren't necessary to the functioning of the platform.
That's presumably true across many, many businesses.
So the question is, how can a group commandeer those salaries, for example?
Well, it can force corporations to proclaim fealty to this orthodoxy, and then to prove it by employing people.
And I guess the point is the claims are insane and the harms are obvious.
We're actually legitimizing a kind of blurring of distinctions between public and private behavior, right?
Like the idea is these people are so oppressed that they have to be hypersexual in public and then we're blurring a distinction between adult stuff and kid stuff.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think the lowest hanging fruit here is stop saying this is family friendly.
Yeah.
That's the lowest hanging fruit.
Then you, then you of course have the problem of like, well, it's in a public space and you really can't bring your kids here.
Well, if you're, if you're giving them a permit to do this thing that is patently not for children, then, you know, you figure out whether or not they get to have that permit and this space is off limits to children for the day or don't give them the permit.
That's the next step.
But this is not family friendly.
It didn't, Drag shows in the 70s were understood that they were not family friendly.
Yep.
Right?
I do not believe, and I never went to pride parades or drag shows.
I went to my first drag show last summer in Portland, actually, the RuPaul's Drag Race thing, which I wrote about in counterpoint to Barbie, the movie.
But neither pride parades, I believe, nor drag shows used to be Open to children, much less understood to be a place where children were encouraged to come.
And you can see in that live stream that we showed in the background while I was reading the piece, how many children were there.
And that was just one vantage point.
I engaged this by moving around a lot, and I stood in a lot of different places, and that vantage point that this live stream was coming from was not unique.
There were kids in the parade, And there were kids lining the streets because it's a parade.
Of course you take kids to a parade.
Not this one.
Well, I mean, it does.
The problem is it is parasitizing a pathway.
So the oppression of homosexuals was profound.
Yes.
The rebellion against it was necessary to end that phase.
And so the whole thing has been predicated on this is you're just still prejudiced against these people and 20 years from now you will view them the way you view gay folks.
Right.
And it's really not true.
But I mean, I guess the thing that is most disturbing here, I think is the, you've got sexuality that doesn't belong in public coupled with this pet stuff.
So show my screen here, Zach.
This is a little girl.
Looking at one of these so-called pets who's, I think he's got a bodysuit on.
He's not naked.
And then he's got bondage gear over the bodysuit.
He's got something connected to his cock, I think.
I can't quite tell in this picture.
And he's got a bit in his mouth.
He's got blinders on.
And this little, this is the little girl who was at first not interested and then curious and then riveted.
How do you look away from that?
So you can take it off.
There's a, there's a thing I try to convey to people.
One of the things that just never lands, which is, and you and I talk a lot about development and the way it is really the missing element in almost all discussions about humans and evolution, right?
Development and how it progresses is how you become a functional adult human, right?
Sexual development is like this, except that the observation that children are in a position to make is heavily edited by adults, as it should be.
Yes.
So in a sense, what you were watching in that parade, And I know that this is also a trope.
So I say it with awareness of that.
But this is recruiting for the next generation of freaky broken people who don't, who are ungovernable.
Right?
In this sense.
We all in society, and I'm not talking about polite society.
I'm just talking about decent society.
We have an agreement about sexuality and kids.
They don't mix.
Right?
And these people are taking advantage of a claim of oppression in order to deliberately violate that boundary.
And they are doing so in a way that cannot help but affect the kids who see it.
Because they are in a normal process of developing their sexual persona that will emerge in adulthood.
And what they see And that's bad when it's porn, straight, gay or otherwise.
Yep.
And it's bad when it's people in dog masks and assless chaffs.
Yep.
Right?
We are misprogramming those very kids.
Precisely.
We are exactly that.
And a lot of what you just said actually reminds me of one more thing I wanted to read was just the final footnote in my piece.
Because I couldn't figure out where it belonged in the main piece.
The men who think they are women, and the people literally parading their kinks, are yelling about being their authentic selves.
But delusion and kink being publicly exhibited seems less authentic than exhibitionist.
What passes for authentic at Pride feels, by turns, generic and corporate—see, paper rainbow Kroger-branded crowns, worn by many in the crowd—and like fetish that has no place in public.
Some will argue that exhibitionism is them being their authentic self.
But civilization does not mean tolerance for every single urge that people have.
Indeed, one of the roles of society is to rein in some of those urges.
Universal tolerance is anarchy.
Universal tolerance is anarchy.
Tolerate.
Tolerance.
This is one of the words that the LGBTQIA++++ people love to throw around, right?
That we must be tolerant.
And they are borrowing.
They are borrowing from the actual gay rights movement from decades earlier.
And To some degree from the civil rights movement as well, but especially from the gay rights movement.
We tolerate of alternative lifestyles if they do not impact you and have no ability to spread out, have no ability or desire to spread out into the rest of society.
Tolerance.
With limits.
Universal tolerance is anarchy.
That is just what it is.
And so if you really think that tolerance is the answer without limits, then what you are doing is advocating for anarchy, and you are not on the side of those of us who want civilization and want to live in a democratic republic.
You're not.
So I want to just correct one term.
Okay.
I agree with what you said, and I'm sure you'll agree with this.
They're not borrowing.
They're stealing.
It feels like borrowing.
What did I say?
You said they are borrowing some of the language of the beliefs of the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement.
And the problem is that they are actually denying those same claims to people who have a legitimate right to them.
Right?
So the point is, you know, unless you're queer, there's something suspect about the gay part.
My mom's friends, David and Richard, were free to do whatever they wanted in their home.
They were not the only couple that we knew and about whom I would say that.
And we know now many, many people who are downstream of the efficacy of the gay rights movement to create greater tolerance.
Not universal tolerance.
I like your point about universal tolerance is anarchy.
And it's not the anarchy that the anarchists want.
It's actual chaos.
It's lawlessness.
Yeah.
And it is also...
Process of development is naturally one in which a creature does not know what's viable and what works and what they get positive feedback for gets augmented.
And so by carving out an insane landscape of public kink, you are You are abusing these very children, just showing it to them.
You are causing the way their minds will develop to be altered in a way that they will not help.
They will not be able to help but being party to this.
And that is...
Well, it's just simply unacceptable.
It's a kind of, you know, it's child abuse.
It really is.
And the fact that there's a threat here in which if you don't, oh, you're not going to the parade?
Well, I wonder, you know, what's wrong with you?
And actually, Monty Python typically are the ones that have nailed this stuff decades in advance.
But in this case, it's Seinfeld with the episode where Kramer He's marching in the anti-AIDS march but he doesn't want to wear the ribbon.
And an over-the-top crew of, I think, Puerto Rican... Ribbon-wearing.
Ribbon-wearing marchers chase him down, and he's last seen being pulled off a ladder as he's trying to escape with his life.
Unribboned.
Right, unribboned.
Because he was suspect for, you know, drawing any line whatsoever.
It's a don't-hurt-me ribbon.
Yeah, it's a don't hurt me ribbon.
And I guess the other point I would make is the game of, well, you're intolerant if you call me out for this kink in public.
Yeah.
And so if I accept that so that I don't get hurt, then the point is, okay, how about this one?
Right?
And the point is, it just keeps marching further and further.
And what you're looking at in this pride parade is like it marched out of June.
Yeah, exactly.
No, totally.
Didn't want to compete with other cultural events.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
And then it's going to march further and further.
The dog mask thing really gets me because if you didn't know that there was a kink that involved these masks, and you just saw one and you thought, well, that's a craftsmanship.
Totally.
Yeah.
No, I was, I was close to some of the people wearing them.
Nice mask.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, then you realize, oh, wait a second.
This is about sex where you think you're a dog.
I mean, and then you want to put that in front of a kid and, you know, how are you going to explain that to them?
Yeah.
Right.
It's hard enough to explain to an adult.
Right.
It's bizarre.
Right.
If you told me this 20 years ago, I'd be like, wait, what?
These people are parading that in public, huh?
You know?
So, yeah, you can't explain.
Well, on the sidelines, earnest young men hand out communist literature.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
No, it all just makes total sense.
But I guess the point is, look, this actually is...
When you are a parent, you have to make rules.
You have to limit what your kids do or they become monsters.
Your kids are actually wired.
They want you to lay down correct limits and they want to have, they want those limits to be well thought out.
And yes, they will test you and figure out where those limits are.
But the point is they want to be proper adults.
That's in their interest as much as yours.
They want the rules.
And if you fail to lay down the rules.
You don't ask children to tell you how to parent them.
That's not how parenting works.
Right.
That's not how parenting works.
What do you want, honey?
Do you want to go to the parade?
No.
Which is exactly how it is, as you've pointed out a hundred times with the, uh, you know, I think I'm a girl.
Well, yesterday you said you were a dinosaur, right?
Right.
And so at some level, look, I now know so many libertarians that I admire.
I just, lovely people.
There's not a one of them who has kids who would advocate for libertarian parenting where it's just like, well, you know, Free for all.
Let them do what they want, right?
Libertarianism and anarchy are different.
Right, and so the point is, look, you've got people Who are ratcheting up their demands into the ever more ridiculous and obscene, literally obscene.
And they are waiting for you to tell them to stop.
And you're too much of a coward to tell.
Like that's, that's what's going on here.
Portland, you have to tell these people to stop because you know what?
It is a supposed to be a family friendly city.
You've got kids there.
And if you don't tell them to stop, you are party to abusing those children.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, I love Portland.
I really still love Portland so much.
And I walked out of there, I had to walk back to my Airbnb, which is a couple miles away, through a series of neighborhoods, some commercial districts and residential neighborhoods, in which it looked like the Portland that I love.
Latike, it was a Sunday.
It was not a beautiful day.
It had been very hot the day before, so there were people out, but they weren't sort of erupting in festivity as at the parade or as the previous day.
Walking through the Portland outside of the sphere of the influence of that parade felt right, except for the zombies.
You know, I did see the description that I include in the piece about uh guy parked car with the passenger side door open when the guy bent over crumpled half out of the car lying on the curb i saw that not not that day but i saw that on this trip and there do seem there's there's the the homeless encampments seem to be being cleaned up to some degree um but there's more of the walking dead uh and um i in fact i had to
I ended up at a downtown 24-hour mini-mart at 4 a.m.
on Saturday morning because the smoke alarm at my Airbnb was going off and I had to get a replacement battery.
I couldn't figure it out.
It was insane.
And there was no parking right there, so I had to park about a block and a half away, and I could see it, and four zombies between me and the minimart.
And they're not safe.
They're not safe to themselves, and they're not safe to other people, because there's almost no functionality left.
So that does not make for a wonderful city, either.
The laying down of limits.
And actually, the fentanyl zombies, it's the same thing.
Like, universal tolerance!
How about no?
Yeah.
How about stop it?
We're not going to be tolerant.
And I mean, we reported on this back when we lived in Portland that, um, when, um, I always forget what it's called, the, like the injectable that recovers people from Narcan.
Yeah.
I mean, there are a few of them, but, um, the, either the Oregon or Portland state health board were like, now everyone needs to carry Narcan so you can save people when you run into them.
No, that's not where the responsibility lies.
Yeah.
No.
No, it's the same error across the board, right?
You know, DAs that won't prosecute people for committing crimes.
The whole thing is a culture, a self-reproducing culture of absurd permissiveness.
And, you know, if you're like allergic to saying no, then you don't belong in charge of anything where citizens are going to be involved, especially children.
Right.
Right.
Saying no is how civilization works.
And it's not because saying no, you know, is a good in and of itself, but saying no is the way to avoid all of the harms that we have to prevent.
So this is going to seem like a kind of a non-second, or at least to the audience at first, but you will remember that in the summer of 2004, when Zach was a tiny baby, a couple months old, we had driven from Olympia, where we lived down in western Washington, to Idaho for a wedding.
One of our students was getting married.
And on the way back west, we took the 20, which is a beautiful highway that goes through the North Cascades.
And we stopped in, I don't know, one of those towns like Winthrop or Twisp or something.
And it was a hot, beautiful summer day.
Two of us, you know, college professors and our tiny baby.
And we were there at some probably like early, mid, late afternoon time when not a lot of stuff was open and we were hungry, hadn't eaten all day.
And there was just one place open.
It was like a saloon or something.
And, but it was a pub, a saloon, one of these like Western themed towns.
So I'm going to call it a saloon.
And we went in to get some food.
They're like, no, no, no.
Over 21 only.
He doesn't drink.
He's all on milk.
He drinks, but then he spits up.
It's not what you think.
And they would not let us in.
So we finally were like, I was like, you go in and order us food and I'll sit outside with the baby who's not a frickin' threat to your liquor license.
I promise you, you can cart him.
So somehow we went from that in 2004 to, yeah, let's bring the little ones to the kink show.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, probably same thing would happen to you now if you tried to, right?
And so it's like, because you can reduce, there's a metric, you can reduce it.
I know what the law says.
I know that if someone came in and saw the baby, like, when is the line?
Is, you know, four too old?
Like, okay, Well, but it's literally a babe in arms, you know, somehow it's just, I mean, all of this, it's double standards all the way down.
But the idea that we still have a very sober process for crossing the border, it's, you know, it's airtight unless you decide to cross in certain places.
You're talking about the literal border.
I'm talking about the literal border.
And the point is, it's like, okay.
If you can just walk across it over there, then what are we pretending to do over here?
Like, what is that?
It doesn't even make sense, right?
Yeah, it's like Cartesian Crisis meets Universal Cosplay.
It is, but it's like, who is permitted to break these rules?
And I remember saying this when the courthouse in Portland was under nightly attack.
Right.
And it was like, oh, attacking the courthouse is now perfectly okay.
But I bet you if I did it, it wouldn't be.
Right?
I bet the same old normal rules apply.
The DA is not going to cut me loose.
Or at the wrong time of day.
No, they wait until dusk every night.
Yeah, well, that's how you know, yeah, who the people who are licensed to attack the court are if they're nocturnal.
The time window.
Yeah.
Gotta get the time window.
Time window.
But, you know, I mean, I don't know.
Double standards.
I'm not sure exactly what they're the hallmark of, but they are the hallmark of some sort of deeply unfair, totally unlevel playing field.
They are the hallmark of skullduggery and cheating.
Yeah.
I actually want to I forgot that I have like just a tiny like a 13 second video taken with my phone so the music sounds tinny but there was there was a little bit of live music at this parade that was actually great.
So there was a samba group.
I love samba.
There's a song group and there was a group called the Vaqueros.
And just just show this.
So the woman who was dancing by side just ran in from the crowd and she then brought in a bunch of her friends and just some Latino woman Yeah.
Likes the music and like, okay.
So, you know, the audience behind them was ridiculous, but.
I've got to say that disturbs me a little bit.
And I, I hope I'm not about to, uh, trip over stuff by stereotyping here, but I have the sense just looking at that little clip you just showed.
One of these guys.
It has a pride flag draped over shoulders.
Right.
There's nothing else about what I saw in that display that has anything to do with pride.
Yeah.
So I sort of have the sense that Latinos who in general are very sensible about family.
That was in corporate though.
I don't think I don't think they were selling anything.
Oh, I don't think it was corporate.
I think my guess is, you know, one thing that was authentic music.
So these are probably recent immigrants.
And if this is what's going on in Portland, and they've moved to Portland, and it's like, well, okay, let's join the parade.
Let's show that we're part of it too.
And how tragic is that, that this ridiculous movement Is going to speak for any of us about what American culture is, right?
This is garbage.
This is, we're going to look back on this and be ashamed.
And you know, it's not good to have this be what we showed to children.
And it's not good to have this be the face we showed to the world.
It's really upsetting, frankly.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
I hear you.
So that's it, Secret Service and Pride.
Topics in this, the era of the Cartesian crisis.
Secret Service and Pride.
It's pride and shamelessness.
It is.
Yeah, it is pride and shamelessness.
I mean, that's I start the piece by saying that they're they're shameless.
Needy, greedy and shameless.
Oh, yeah.
There you go.
Actually, I was talking about the Secret Service.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That too.
There's actually one more little thing.
It's not coming up on the... Yeah, I'll hold it.
I got some more little nuggets in the footnotes, but you can go and read the piece and find the footnotes.
I'm gonna do that.
Alright.
We... That's us.
You and me.
Yes.
And Zach.
Him too.
And the dog in the corner.
All the dogs.
We'll be back.
Next week, same time, same place, 11.30am Pacific.
We encourage you to find our schedule and upcoming events at darkhorsepodcast.org website.
We've got some merch.
Oh, hell yeah.
Here's one.
Welcome to Complex Systems.
We've got lots of other good stuff, and the link to the store is at the website, darkhorsepodcast.org.
You also find there a way to get to Natural Selections, my substack, which is where I wrote the piece that I read today.
We've got both of our Patreons there.
We've got Locals there, which we encourage you to go to.
I think you're going to... I'm going to have you start putting some of those awesome videos that you've been making onto Locals.
I mean, you have done some of that.
Some of your reporting, you and Zach's reporting out of the Panamanian border early this year were on Locals only.
There's still content that's only there.
And actually, that will at some point not be timely anymore, but right now there is redoubled interest in the border because apparently Biden made Harris the border czar or something back in the day, and she didn't do a great job.
No.
She did not do a great job.
Well, it depends what her job was.
She didn't do a good job relative to what the job is supposed to be.
Yeah.
But you and Zach, along with the handful of people that you were there with, really did an amazing job reporting on what is actually happening at the Panamanian border.
And that's on Locals.
Lots of other great stuff to find on Locals as well.
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That was Carraway, Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, and Seed.
And know that we appreciate you.
We appreciate you liking, subscribing, sharing what we're doing.
Saying no to children when they're doing things they shouldn't.
We appreciate you saying no to children when they need to be said no to.
Yes, and even more so saying no to adults when they need somebody to say no to.
Yeah, more important than saying no to drugs, frankly.
Some drugs.
Say no to fentanyl.
Say no to fentanyl.
Say no to anything that's refined.
Yeah.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
