A Coup Against Merit: The 236th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 236th 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 attack on merit that is revealed in the Olympics Opening Ceremony. We discuss also attacks on Christianity, corporate ESG scores, the relationship of “queer culture” to gay culture, and the memory-holing of what democrats used to think about both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Also: w...
That seems like a good idea because the things in the world are moving so quickly that we need to just get to what we've got because we don't know what's coming.
Indeed and we won't get to everything we've got nor will we fully explain it, but it is a it is a It is a great week for those into the Cartesian crisis.
How about that?
Holy moly.
Yeah, the thing is so difficult to parse.
Yeah, I'm wondering how do we know what's real?
Yeah, how do we know what's real?
And I was wondering about the following thing.
Fact checkers, obviously that's an impossible task in the way that it's been set out.
But fiction checkers might be the next big thing.
And what's the role?
The role is, oh, that thing didn't actually happen, right?
When AI is used to generate something compelling, uh, you need a fiction checker to tell you actually, you know, that creature doesn't exist.
These creatures don't do that.
That geological phenomenon is not known from earth.
Uh, so anyway, I'm wondering if the rise of the fiction checkers is coming.
Well, unfortunately, that will work for things in the physical, the corporeal world.
But the social landscape, and this is something we've been talking about for decades really, but since we've been doing this in the public eye and in our book and elsewhere, the social landscape is a dicier landscape in which to make your living and make your meaning precisely because it is gameable.
And because you cannot say, oh, that could never have happened in social space, because almost everything can actually happen in social space.
Oh, he would never have done that.
He might never have done that, and it's possible that he never did do that, but how can you prove that that thing never happened, or it never could have happened?
Especially when all of our perceptions come through the conduit of the internet, which allows for... I mean, not all of them.
There are a lot of us engaging in real spaces.
I agree, but I mean our collective perceptions of what passes for history.
Yeah.
You know, current events that become history, how much, you know, this is what Descartes feared.
And it's tough enough when you're trying to establish physical facts on which you base a model of something and you realize that you've taken somebody's word for the way some phenomenon behaves.
But when it's all coming through screens and those screens could mean anything, you know, and Essentially pixels can be arranged to convince you that something has taken place that simply didn't or edits can be made that lead you to misunderstand what the thing that did happen was.
There's every reason to doubt almost all of what you think you know unless it's been seen from many different angles and some of the people reporting it are real to you in a way that you can establish.
Exactly, exactly.
So, we're going to spend some time talking in this sphere, in the Cartesian crisis mass gaslighting sphere of mid-2024 today.
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Well My plan for today is to do a little bit of synthesis surrounding recent events.
Are you going to start with the synthesis or are we going to just kind of throw all the recent events into the pot first and then synthesize?
Well, what I was thinking of doing was looking at the Olympic Opening Ceremony with some of the tools that we have built up here on Dark Horse over the course of The last several years and seeing if we can't make more sense of it than has happened in the public sphere so far.
Okay.
Um, we did not watch it in, in real time.
I have not seen it.
I have seen just little clips here and there.
Um, so we can, we can start there if you like.
I have, um, I have a number of other little, little things to talk about.
Relative to what is happening in the world and what we are being told it means and such.
With regard to the Olympic Opening Ceremony, the question that I have, not having seen the whole, whatever it is, hours-long spectacle, is, was there anything in it that spoke to a traditional aesthetic or values at all?
Because there is so much that clearly doesn't, that caused a lot of people um, to react, uh, very badly.
And I think appropriately so.
Um, but I, but I don't know if that, if those things were interspersed with anything that was more classic.
I'm not sure it would change anything from my perspective.
I'm not, I, I, I am, I would like to know.
Uh, I think, I mean, I think it, it, it completes the story to know what else, what else was happening.
It does.
Although, um, where we will end up, I think is that you have deliberate provocations in here and.
And if those deliberate provocations were embedded in an otherwise marvelous opening ceremony full of all sorts of references to classical values and aesthetics, it would just, to me, suggest that there was a desire to cloak the intent And to the extent that the whole thing was avant-garde with these deliberate provocations, then it's easier to interpret.
It's harder to disguise that intent.
But I don't really think it changes it to embed these things in a ceremony that I don't think anyone on earth knew that they should be careful exposing children to.
I mean, I know you and I were in L.A.
when the Olympics were there in whatever year that would have been.
1984.
1984.
We were teenagers when the Olympics came to L.A.
Right, and it was a big deal.
1984?
I think it was 1984.
I was at the opening ceremony.
I don't know if you were.
No.
But anyway, the whole idea was this was this is a celebration this is this is your society's opportunity to impress the world to make a statement about where we are collectively obviously important things have happened at the olympic games shameful things have happened at the olympic games uh previously but anyway the opening ceremony is a place for the world to get together whether The Olympics are your kind of activity or not.
This is your showcase to put on your view of things and so to include these provocations, it deserves our analysis and we shouldn't get hung up too much on what else may have been there.
I guess I will say you said the opening ceremonies are a place for the world to come together, whether or not the Olympics is your kind of show or something or not.
And I guess I would argue that the Olympics Has something for everyone in a world in which we are acting like humans.
In a world in which there aren't people who live entirely in a social universe, sport is inherently human.
Yes, the competition is a beautiful part of it as well, but there's a lot at the Olympics that isn't inherent.
Maybe you don't feel like you really want to embrace the competitive aspect.
I don't know.
I don't know why you wouldn't, but just the sheer physicality.
What is the human body capable of?
There should be something there for absolutely every human being, and I think it is testament to how far we have moved away from, you know, you said avant-garde.
Like, I don't... As someone who studied, you know, French New Wave cinema of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and the avant-garde, and theater of the absurd, you know, a number of these movements from the 20th century, which I loved, and still do, What is happening now doesn't feel like any of that.
Yes, you could argue there was a slippery slope, that you start tweaking, you start breaking some of the expectations of the classic roles of literature or theatre or art or aesthetic, and soon enough everything will fall apart.
I don't think that's true.
It is what everyone does as humans if they are not simply following along Perfectly with what has gone before.
The conscious brain, as we have defined it in our book, is that which is shared and new, right?
As opposed to the cultural.
So, the objection to what we're seeing in the Olympic ceremonies and in so many other things that are happening now is not It's not an appeal to conservatism.
It's not even an appeal to the traditional, I would say.
It's an appeal to what we all understand to be true about beauty and truth.
Well, I want to go back and defend the possibility of not being into the Olympics because I am decidedly not into the Olympics and I haven't been for a very long time and it has nothing to do with not finding something very important and fundamentally human about sport.
It has to do with what the Olympics have done to that.
So, the Olympics... But your comment was, you should be able to join together in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, even if you're not in the Olympics.
I can't imagine why, if you think that the Olympics have become corrupted, why you would assume that the Opening Ceremony...
Well, I have two reasons that I'm not into the Olympics.
And it's not that I'm not into any event.
There are a few events that I find interesting.
But in general, I don't find the, you know, the millimeter, centimeter difference in the distance that two individuals can jump into a pit of sand compelling.
Whereas I find something like parkour, where somebody takes But there you're focused on the competitive aspect.
So I think that's why I separated it.
and demonstrates that something incredible is possible.
You know, from my perspective, one of these is just much more thought provoking and human than the other.
But there you're focused on the competitive aspect.
So I think that's why I separated it.
You can enjoy the physical prowess of humans without being into the fact that, OK, we have 8 billion people and the technology to discriminate at tiny fractions of a second.
And at that level, I don't care that much, right?
And the stories that we're told we must care about, maybe you do, maybe you don't, but still these people are amazing athletes to watch, whether or not it's the competitive part, which has been technologically rarefied, that is, is what you're so into.
Right.
It just, so one of my objections is that many of the things that take place at the Olympics You would need to be an expert to detect the distinctions, and I don't find that very compelling.
The other thing is what's happened with the Olympic Committee, the International Olympic Committee, which is a very corrupt body, I'm led to understand.
And the massive proliferation of the number of different sports, which is obviously catering to market forces that want more advertising time and, you know, niche desires rather than, you know, hey, basketball may not be exactly my thing, but it's a pretty cool sport.
And it's very interesting to watch, you know, teams compete in this thing.
I can understand it.
I can understand what I'm seeing.
So anyway, it's not my thing because the part of me that might like it has a lot of options to see things that I like better.
Um, but nonetheless, put up, put all that aside.
There is a question about why the A, why the opening ceremony in this case got the response that it did.
And there's also a question about what the intent was and how that intent could have made its way into this venue.
And so anyway, I wanted to just bring together some stuff that we've talked about and then try to make an argument for what happened and what it actually means.
The first thing I want to get at is, so again, I said that this is about synthesis and synthesis to me, I've thought a lot about it.
It's sort of what I feel like my job is scientifically.
I'm not a reductionist.
I'm not particularly an experimentalist.
But taking things that have been discovered and compiling them into a larger whole that then predicts things that we don't know.
That creates novel hypotheses that may prove out to be theories.
That's sort of what I feel my role is and the people that I learned from and respected greatly have that same bent.
So, the place I want to start first is this.
It occurred to me this week that there's always been something that bugs me about the idea of communism.
And the thing that bugs me about the idea of communism is that it is understood to have been effectively the invention of Marx.
And that has never sat quite right with me.
I feel like Marx invented communism in the same way the Nazis invented genocide, which is to say not at all.
What Marx did was describe a perennial process, what kids might call an evergreen process.
We obviously have to avoid that description because it's confusing in our context, but So let's start here.
You have a system that we call capitalism.
But capitalism isn't really an invention either.
Capitalism is a formalization of a process that nature created.
And that process happens because you get Collaboration that or exchange that creates wealth.
So if I make sledgehammers and you raise cattle, I can trade you a sledgehammer or two for some beef and we both get wealthier rather than me having only sledgehammers and you having only beef.
We get wealthier by the exchange.
Then you get the invention of currency, which means that I don't have to exchange sledgehammers for beef, I can exchange sledgehammers for currency, and then I can spend it on what I want.
That makes us even wealthier because it allows indirect exchanges that produce wealth.
And that process is natural, right?
Humans invented that all long before we had erudite descriptions of how these processes work.
The engaging in collaboration and exchange that creates wealth has made humanity vastly better off.
And it's a big part of what we are as a species.
But it has some flaws.
Creating wealth is not the only way to get rich.
There are other ways.
Corruption and especially rent-seeking.
So in rent-seeking, somebody might... Let's say that somebody uh punishes they pay somehow to punish those who might import sledgehammers uh into some radius and so they now sell the inferior sledgehammers that they make at a premium because their competitors are artificially driven out right they have not made us wealthier they've in fact resulted in people having
Crappy sledgehammers and paying too much for them and so the point is that these Capitalism creates the opportunity for a lot of cheating and so there is a problem in capitalism Which is a lot of what Marx focuses on what happens in these systems, and so there's a lot of resentment built up because you have two Sets of people on the downside of such a system.
One set of people are people who are not ready to take advantage of the opportunities and are effectively lazy.
And the other are people who have been betrayed by the system because they haven't been equipped very well to bring anything to the table.
And so this leads to what we have described as the team loser phenomenon.
Where you have a system in which ostensibly what you're supposed to do in order to make a living is you're supposed to bring value to us collectively.
You're supposed to enhance our collective wealth and then you get paid for it.
But a huge number of people discover Because they've been badly equipped for this system either for various reasons that they are not going to be able to get ahead that they're going to be on the losing end of the bargain that is driving people competitively to make us all wealthier.
Right?
If you get enough people who are in no position or not willing to enter the market and try to bring value, then they have an incentive at the point that they reach critical mass to attempt to overthrow that system and redistribute the wealth that it creates.
And so this is what I'm arguing that marks Discovered and described but didn't invent right that thing that hey The the people who don't want to compete or can't compete in a merit-based system Take up arms against it and they redistribute it which results in a system that can't produce anything So it you know, basically the pie shrinks
Radically as a result of these communist upheavals so To make a long story short.
My argument is going to be and maybe we should show Do you want to show a couple of the highlights of the opening ceremony?
Why don't we start with the feast?
East.
The blue guy.
Okay.
The blue guy.
OK, so here we have a.
So the audience cannot hear the sound.
Yeah, the audience cannot hear the sound.
I don't think it's necessary to.
It's some dippy French lyrics.
Yep.
That's what I remember.
Hard to interpret for those of us who speak French.
But in any case, what we have is a scene that has been the subject of great controversy, a scene in the background that looks to many people like it is the Last Supper.
The singer on the table who has been revealed from a silver platter has been argued to be Dionysus.
But in any case, This cannot help but find analogy to The Last Supper.
There's also an element, there's the character on the far left of the screen.
People have zoomed in and shown that one of his testicles appears to be hanging out.
This is a character who's whispering in the ear of a child at the banquet table.
All right, now do you want to show that?
the yeah the video the dancing video here okay so
So obviously that's really provocative stuff.
This is somebody tarted up like a woman.
It's obviously a man.
It's like literally somebody opting to be the bearded lady.
The lyrics are all about... Well, no.
Bearded ladies are ladies.
That's my point.
This is somebody opting into that trope.
This is a man opting into bearded lady territory.
I think it's a different trope.
All right.
There is... Let's put it this way.
To many of us, this is just simply repulsive.
Yeah.
I mean, this looks like high rent Pride Parade.
I mean, we talked last week about me having gone to the Pride Parade in Portland.
That looks just like higher production values.
Same thing.
Right.
And it's, you know, both the lyrics and the style of dance and the way this person has decided to dress up and the having over the top facial hair and all of this is it dares the viewer to be repelled.
Right.
If you if you are repelled by this, that's the implication is that something wrong with you.
So, okay, so why...
Is the opening ceremony containing these things?
And, um, what is their purpose?
And so I'm going to just lay out a, uh, a basic argument.
Now there are still mysteries to me here, right?
How did this happen?
What did the planning of this look like?
How conscious were the elements of it?
But I think the, the overarching, um, concern that I have is that we have watched a, um, And across the board attack on merit in civilization.
Every place that merit is supposed to exist, it has been attacked as suspect, which is perfectly in keeping with the description I made before about Team Loser rebelling against a system of meritocracy.
And again, I don't want to caricature this.
Team Loser could be taken as a caricature, but I'm not arguing that there aren't a great many people who have been betrayed by the system, poorly equipped to compete in a meritocracy.
And they may be absolutely correct that they were asked to do something to make a living and then miseducated for the point of view of taking advantage of those opportunities.
There are a lot of people who have a real gripe, but nonetheless, when they coalesce into an attack, they join with people who just don't want to contribute.
They'd much rather attack civilization.
So those two things, I believe, are fused together and they have taken up arms against merit across the board.
And the really frightening thing is how successful they have been at wielding game theory in order to pry merit out of all of the places where you would assume the market would protect it at all costs.
So, for example, the ESG movement has savagely attacked merit within the corporate structure so that corporations are now bending over backwards To be inclusive because ESG is for me, it's environmental, social and government.
So, the point is, oh, instead of the admittedly broken system in which shareholder value is everything, now that shareholder value exists in the context of a score about how good you are as a company, and how good you are is based on, it's the tyranny of metrics, right?
How inclusive were you, right?
How environmentally sustainable were you?
Well, never mind whether the environmental sustainability that you're using to make the case that you're good at this is actually valid.
The real point is just can I, you know, it's like a video game.
Can I, you know, get some points in this category?
So, okay, you've got this attack on merit.
It is covering absolutely everything, including things that you would never imagine it could get into, right?
It's destroying science.
Science is now not about merit.
We've got the major journals have been taken over by woke insanity.
The major journals, the universities themselves do not distinguish fact from fiction.
In fact, they will peddle fiction corporations.
So attack on merit across the board.
Okay.
That is the woke revolution.
But how the hell are you going to deal with the Olympics?
Right?
You're dealing with an environment that is built on detecting these tiny little differences in athletic capacity.
It is inherently about merit in a way that is so distilled.
How the fuck do you get an ESG score in there?
Right?
So it's like the last bastion of merit.
And we actually, I think, detected the canary in the coal mine a couple weeks ago when we, without even planning it, were talking about Caitlin Clark.
Caitlin Clark is the basketball player who is an absolute once-in-a-generation star in women's basketball.
And she's bringing a tremendous amount of tension and excitement to the game and making everybody in the league richer because suddenly people are watching women's basketball in a way that they have not watched women's basketball ever.
Right?
And yet she doesn't make the Olympic team.
What the hell was that about?
Right?
Well, if you look at the complaints about Caitlin Clark, what that was about was she's getting too much damn attention.
Why is she getting too much damn attention?
Because she's white and there's resentment about her being decidedly, intentionally non-political.
She just wants to play basketball.
Right.
So in a world of merit, somebody who's really good at basketball, who just wants to play basketball and happens not to be in some category that we can valorize, that's a problem.
So she doesn't make the team.
That was the canary in the coal mine here.
The Olympics is under attack because it is fundamentally about merit, whether it's your style of merit or not.
The fact is somebody jumps over a higher bar than the next closest person and they get a gold medal.
So, okay, the attack on merit.
How is it going to deal with the Olympics?
Well, one way is to breach the entrance criteria, effectively the same way our political sphere is broken by the gaming of the primaries, right?
The Olympics can be breached by affecting who gets to go, right?
If you can get some corrupt committee to exclude somebody who has a lot of merit and include people who don't have merit, or in this case we have several different things.
We have one, Caitlin Clark, who's not there and therefore is it really is the women's basketball competition at the Olympics even about merit if Caitlin Clark, the world's best woman basketball player, isn't present?
No.
And then we have the decision now to allow two people, males, to compete in women's boxing.
Is women's boxing about merit at this year's games?
Or is it about men beating up women dressed as women?
Right?
Again, merit is in the crosshairs.
And so now look... Well, it's, it's, um, you got the elite men's division and the mediocre men's division.
It's, you know, it's merit-based for mediocre men, and they'll just beat up on the best women, and they'll be able to... Yes, mediocre men beating up on the best women is such a direct attack on the whole concept of merit.
I mean, it's like a direct hit.
Yeah.
So, the overarching argument that I'm making is that what happened is the people who arranged the opening ceremonies I'm not in a mood to be nice to them in light of what they did.
Let's call them the Drama Kids.
The Drama Kids stayed- That's a little mean?
It's mean.
The Drama Kids!
These aren't all the drama kids, but these were definitely drama kids and they staged a coup against the athletes.
That's what this is.
This is a coup against athleticism.
And, you know, of course, the International Olympic Committee, which is, as I mentioned before, a decidedly corrupt organization.
Allowed this to happen.
So just in the same way that corporations are betraying their customers in order to win ESG points that maybe make them popular with their shareholders, something crazy has gone here.
The Olympic, the International Olympic Committee has enabled the drama kids to stage a coup against the athletes.
And what is it resulting in?
Well, one thing it is resulting in is calls to not pay attention to the Olympics, to turn them off.
And it is certainly resulting in the upstaging of the athletic competition, right?
So far, the most important thing that's happened at these Olympics is this opening ceremony, is the fact that the people who put it on were forced to pull the video of it down because it was creating too much controversy.
Forcing them to release what was not an apology, but what masqueraded as an apology, where they basically said, we're sorry if people were offended, which is not the same thing as admitting that they screwed up, which they clearly did.
They, on top of it all, because they picked a fight, and this is the part that I still don't quite understand.
They picked a fight with Christians specifically.
Right.
That Last Supper business, the white horse, the symbolic white horse, which I think is, uh, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Maybe I have that incorrect, but do you have the image of the white horse?
Um, but in any case, by picking a fight with Christians, they added a whole other dimension here.
Um, and so this is this very controversial, uh, white horse, uh, which is understood to be, uh, satanically connected.
There's also a, uh, Marie Antoinette, like a severed head singing in the opening ceremony.
Do we have that?
That's not... you were talking about attacking Christians.
Marie Antoinette isn't particularly... Agreed.
Well, I'm not sure that we knew that it was Marie Antoinette until that was later revealed.
No, that's clearly Marie Antoinette, I think.
The hair and the severed head.
Alright, so I will withdraw that observation.
But the whole rest of that bit there feels devilish.
Devilish, right.
And this is a trope we've seen again and again.
I can't exactly understand why.
I don't This is a part of the synthesis that is not built out yet.
I don't understand what the attraction of people who are acting out of this communist instinct to revolt against merit.
I can't remember a previous instance in history where that has come along with demonic symbolism.
Usually these people pretend to be They're so righteous and what they do is demonic, but they don't allude to those symbols.
Maybe I just don't know my history well.
Yeah, I mean, I think neither of us are particularly good historians, so we may well be missing important moments in history here.
But it is also not, I mean, I don't see anything in the Olympics here, but it's also coming along sort of culturally at the same moment.
That this part of the population that is the drama kids, if you will, but I feel like that's not really fair to a lot of drama kids, but those who are attacking merit, those who are interested in communism, and you know, again, the Pride Parade, I noted, there was a really earnest young guy handing out communist literature.
Those things are intermingled.
But you also have the confusion around what religion is, whether it has value, and which religions are worth honoring.
And so there is increasingly a I don't know, increasingly.
There is, on the woke left, a distrust of Christianity.
But I think that that sort of fits just with, haven't they been the ones in power?
It's white people, it's men, it's straight people, it's fit people, it's Christians.
Anything that has been in power, that has been functional, is something that we must dismantle.
So there's that piece of it.
But there's also this very odd embrace of Islam.
You know, at the same time that it's a group of people who would pretend that, you know, slut-shaming is one of the worst things that you can do, embrace of a religion that inherently creates a different class for women and shuts women behind literal veils.
And then, of course, how the left How the woke left is engaging with Judaism is a whole other story.
The three major monotheistic religions, there seems to be confusion on Judaism.
Widespread, easy, we know we hate white people, we know we hate men, we know we hate straight people, we know we hate Christians.
It's like, this is easy, we don't have to think about it, because thinking is hard.
It's like the barbification of Of the world as well.
Like, thinking is hard.
We'll give you a list of the people you can hate.
Here it is.
And over here, well, I'm less confused by, oh my god, why are they going after Christians?
It fits to me.
I don't understand why the embrace of Islam.
That's a strange piece of it, and I don't see it at the Olympic ceremony, so maybe it has no place in this discussion, but it fits less well for me.
Well, I understand the antagonism to Christians.
This looks to me like they're deliberately picking a fight, and I think it's one they're not wise to pick.
Well, but I mean, whatever is going on, and frankly, when I look at the woke revolutionaries, they do not strike me as game theory geniuses.
So they are marshalling a game theory that is incredibly powerful.
Is that because something is informing them?
Is it because this is a very ancient game theoretic dichotomy and they are acting out of an instinct?
So they have an instinct towards game theory that works?
I don't know.
But They nonetheless appear in this case to be deliberately picking a fight with Christians.
And one interpretation is that.
So first of all, I know, because we know a lot of Christians who talk about this, that there has been a surprising level of surrender in various denominations to this is true, this wokeness.
And so lots of churches effectively peddle this nonsense, too.
On the other hand, in recent times at least, Christians seem to be standing up.
And because they are standing up, and because this is ultimately about protecting children from evil, and because Christians who truly believe are not going to be intimidated because the game theory of Christianity creates a landscape where you have a choice between infinite terror and infinite good, and that trumps any earthly game theory that there might be.
Right.
So it may be that Christians are about to actually say enough and that this is the woke revolutionaries picking a fight because it's to their advantage to throw that punch.
Or it may be that there's something I don't see yet.
But I will say there's something very interesting In the denials that what many people saw as an obvious allusion to the Last Supper was in fact not the Last Supper because it was in fact the Feast of Dionysus.
To me this looks like, and do you want to put that up?
Sure.
That's the Feast of Dionysus, which some have argued is what was actually being depicted.
Right.
Now, I mean, it's definitely there's a long table with people behind it.
That's about all I see that's similar.
Well, I also saw a couple of truly excellent analyses, one of them by Matthias Desmet, which we will link and I recommend people read.
Matthias Desmet's point, if I hope I'm not conflating it with other excellent points that I read, but Matthias Says this was very definitely the Last Supper.
And the fact that it has an obvious allusion to the Feast of Dionysus doesn't change anything because the Feast of Dionysus image was painted after the Last Supper and is itself an allusion to that painting.
So anyway, I thought that was very interesting, which I absolutely didn't know.
But what I find most interesting about this is, A, you're not imagining it.
That was the Last Supper.
How do we know?
Because the star of the Last Supper privately was gloating.
And do you have that image?
You mean the star of the Olympics opening ceremony's version?
Yes.
Sorry.
I should have been clearer about that.
I don't feel like Jesus was gloating.
No, Jesus was not gloating.
In fact, I think you might be pissed.
But here we have an Instagram post from Barbara Butch is what she goes by.
OK.
And now, of course, you know, Knows what I don't know, but she says, Oh yes.
Oh yes.
The new gay Testament exclamation mark with a picture of the last supper, Leonardo da Vinci painting and this modern rendition of it at the opening ceremony.
So that to me is a slam dunk that.
We are not imagining that that was the Last Supper.
They were not caught off guard by the fact that people drew that inference when in fact they were trying to refer to the Feast of Dionysus.
But I also do believe that that Feast of Dionysus excuse didn't come out of nowhere.
This was designed as a Rorschach test.
This was designed so that if you wanted to see something benign and French avant-garde and tell people to, you know, don't get your knickers in a twist, you've got plenty to go on, right?
You anti-woke people are just, you know, your hair trigger.
You assume you know things.
Do you even know that there's a painting called The Feast of Dionysus, right?
So it's that thing.
There was another image, which I haven't seen anybody else mention, but there's a A giant, uh, golden steer's head.
I guess I didn't send Zach any images of this, but in one of the scenes, there's a giant steer's head made of gold.
Is that a golden calf?
Well, it's not a calf.
It's a full-grown cow, right?
So, you know, the point is it's a Rorschach test designed to create an argument between those who take the one message and those who take the other message.
So that feels very orchestrated to me.
That feels intentional that this was not only a provocation, but it was a provocation that had built in deniability.
Yeah.
I guess I'm stuck on a different layer here.
And maybe this is prompted by, again, having attended this Pride Parade in Portland a week and a half ago.
But as I wrote about Having watched that parade, there were very few elements that reminded me of what I remember of the LGB community, if you will, from the 70s, 80s, 90s.
And I do have a memory, I do have memories of the gay community from when we were growing up because my mother happened to have lots of gay male friends and they came to our house and I interacted with them.
And the gay male, no, the Portland Men's Gay Chorus, I probably have the order wrong, who sang at the parade in Portland, reminded me of them.
And they were talented, and they were, you know, they were handsome, and they were very gay.
And you know what they weren't?
They weren't trans, and they weren't queer.
So, um, the layer that I'm sort of stuck on here is that you're saying Rorschach test, um, you know, was that an attack on Christianity?
Um, or was it just, um, you know, gay pride?
Well, that didn't look like gay pride to me.
Yeah.
That looked like trans pride.
That's so, so not only The things that the religious right would have been upset about in the 90s, that you and I and many others like us said, you know, stand down, guys.
There is room for all of us, right?
What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms is not your business.
That is not what this movement is now.
It's not at all.
And there are many, many, you know, in the community, if you will, many gay men and lesbian women who have said over and over and over again, T has no place here.
T has no place in this movement.
It is a fundamentally different thing.
T meaning trans?
T meaning trans, yes.
Uh, and that's part of what I see here.
The, you know, the, the clips that you have shown me, um, that, uh, that appear to be over in sort of, um, sexual play territory from the Olympics opening ceremony, none of it reminds me of, um, of gay culture from 30 years ago, 40 years ago, or, or, You know, or longer.
It has become like a caricature.
So even it has been captured by this ever more niche thing that is, frankly, not just provocative, but legitimately offensive, even to many people whom the religious right of the 90s would have found abhorrent.
Yes.
And I think this is actually one of the really important threads here is that the game theory, again, is way more sophisticated than the participants appear to be.
And because of that, we have to how the hell did this aggressively anti-natal attack on merit capture
Capture and decapitate gay Right, it's really an attack on gay, and I can't remember somebody made this point beautifully this week And I can't remember who it was but the to the extent that this This movement is effectively commandeering oh It was it was Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's program
Trans movement is commandeering.
Maybe it was Joe.
I can't remember.
It was one of the two of them, but it's a good discussion.
The trans movement, the trans activist movement, is commandeering kids who have an ambivalent relationship with maturing sexually, many of whom would turn out to be gay in the end, And it is forcing them into this transition modality.
That couldn't possibly be more homophobic.
Right, and we know there's other evidence where trans was embraced in explicitly homophobic countries, Islamic countries like Iraq, because it allows parents to feel like, I've got a straight kid, they were just born in the wrong body, which is It's a part.
It is.
It is also a moment at which a... I haven't done the mathematical analysis.
I'm not even sure exactly how I would draw the borders in order to do the mathematical analysis correctly.
But the number of gay people who are at the head of the merit competition across many different disciplines is large.
Right.
Some of them, you know, are best journalists, are best thinkers.
So the point is, This is actually a moment at which all of the folks who have been dragged into this trans activism attack on merit need to actually understand that they're being used for purposes.
They're being used against their own long-term interests, the interests of their communities, and they need to stand up and rebel.
And maybe that's what's going on With Christianity too, is that this is the moment at which the amount of progress you're going to make decapitating churches is maybe at an end, and this is the point at which the resistors are actually going to stop being nice about it.
Let's see, there's another couple things I wanted to point out.
This Rorschach test thing is a feature of the modern... It's a feature of the Cartesian crisis that one needs to start looking for.
And I have a few examples.
I'm sure, you know, if you and I spend a half an hour, we could probably come up with a dozen more.
But a few examples of things that have had this nature to them.
Biden's, I would call it his red and blue speech.
The speech that if you zoomed in and you looked at Biden from one of the camera angles, he was an angry demagogue in front of a red background.
And if you zoomed out, there was plenty of blue and it didn't look that way.
I said at the time, these people are masters of stagecraft.
There's no way that was an accident.
They did that so that people would see two different speeches.
I would also argue, and this is a weird one, I do not know what to think about this.
Michael Yan pointed out, Michael Yan's position, and I hope I'm not going to misrepresent him, but his point is that they can't help themselves.
Whatever the antagonists to Western civilization are, they can't help themselves with respect to symbolism.
They keep telegraphing what they're up to.
And you showed Zach and me this Image that I now can't get out of my head of this auditorium recently built auditorium in the Vatican Zach do you have it?
Now I am not sure that I would have spotted that I probably would have, but I'm not certain since Michael introduced it with his conclusion.
I'm not sure I would have spotted it.
So what are you spotting?
What are you seeing?
It's a serpent.
I can't unsee the serpent now.
I might have, if I just glanced at that image, I might have thought, oh, that's a monstrosity of modern architecture.
But this looks, and it's very hard to imagine that anybody got to the stage of actually building this without realizing that, you know, if they weren't intending to telegraph a serpent where the tongue of the serpent is exactly where the Pope sits, that it would be misinterpreted that way.
So anyway, I don't know what to think about that.
Is that, is this another Rorschach test where, um, obviously one can say, well, it's not intentionally a serpent, stained glass, you know, windows are, you know, a staple of grand churches and, you know, yada, yada, yada.
Interesting.
I don't, I don't see it.
I think I see how you can see it.
I think I'm just too tied up in like what snakes are.
Actual snakes look like, yeah.
Um, but, but I, I think I, I think I see what you're talking about.
Well, it's interesting.
I mean, then I can't, I can't, I can't believe it.
Yeah.
I can't, I can't inhabit that, that mental space, which in turn tells you something about how these games are played and what, you know, why particular things don't work on particular people because they happen to be embedded in that space.
Right.
And, uh, and, and, and this is part of how we have, Collectively have a chance of sort of rising up above this, is whenever anyone is not gamed by a thing that is getting a bunch of people, they say, Emperor's naked.
That one's naked.
Nope, that one too.
Oh, you think that one's naked?
I don't see it.
Well, stand where I am.
Here, come over here and stand where I'm standing and take a look.
And yes, I don't know, I might be wrong about this one thing, but let's just keep adding the stuff that we're seeing and Collectively find that if those incidents are aggregated in a haphazard way, they do not data make, but they do make a kind of evidence.
Yes.
Because a collection of anecdotes is a kind of evidence, even though it's not data.
And that is what many of us are experiencing is a sense of Boy, is it coming fast and furious, and no, I don't know for sure that this particular thing was intentional, or this particular thing was intentional, or that thing even means anything like what I think it does, but boy, there are a lot of them.
Yeah, the sum total of it is implausible, even if any individual case might be accidental.
I also think the Rorschach Uh, phenomenon is a tell that when people who are masters of stagecraft, masters of architecture, convey something that two people will interpret in radically different ways and find each other harder to understand in the aftermath, right?
I can't believe that you saw, you know, the French have always been blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Oh, come on.
You know, haven't we been through this before?
Versus Oh, I don't know why the Olympics just staged an attack on Christianity.
That's weird, right?
I don't know why I'm suddenly seeing demonic imagery all over the place in conjunction with trans activism that just so happens to result in the sexual destruction of children, right?
So anyway, in a world, let's put it this way, let's start at the other end.
In a world where it is absolutely essential that the little people remain divided, this Rorschach stuff is tailor-made to accomplish that goal.
Well, certainly when you add in the algorithms such that some different groups of people will simply see totally different things from other groups of people.
And then, you know, the prediction might be that those particularly Rorschach-y images or events that can be naturally interpreted very differently from different perspectives or with different worldviews, those are the ones that the algorithm is going to reveal to everyone or to almost everyone.
You know, until the debate, the Trump-Biden debate, it seems like actually most people who are still registered Democrats really hadn't seen all of—any, not all—any of the examples of Biden not being able to complete sentences.
It really seems like they hadn't seen it, because you and I had conversations with people like, no, he's not just losing his shit, he's lost it.
He's not in command of his own self, much less the country.
And, you know, true, blue, smart, highly educated Democrats would say, oh, no, no, he's fine.
But what?
So we're simply seeing totally different things when there is no nuance, when there is no possible Rorschach explanation.
And then, I think, when you can go either way, and in fact, the different interpretations is part of how we get ourselves gamed, right?
When we can be pulled along because, oh, well, you're just saying the things that those alt-right people believe.
That makes you a fascist, you know that, right?
Right.
And in fact, that was it was like a vaccine had been delivered to true blue believers where, to the extent that those of us who were watching a obviously increasingly demented president were trying to raise the issue, there was already this sense of, yes, that's a right wing trope.
Those are fake.
Don't you know it?
And, um, So it did result in this kind of, those of us who have blue, no, not blue, liberal leanings, longstanding, and therefore have a lot of contact with people who are now rendered incapable of seeing the world because of their allegiance to that blue team, right, watched a kind of whiplash Right?
These people who had been assuring us that the guy was fine.
He's a little slower than he was, but he would be at that age.
He's got a great team.
There's nothing to worry about.
That group of people was asked to switch their position on a dime.
Right and they did but the point is it was really interesting to see that shift from the outside because on the one hand yep now we're now we're all on the same page with result with respect to the dementia but uh you didn't believe it five minutes ago but here's part of where the gaslighting comes in some of them are already pretending that they knew all along and maybe they did and they were lying to us
Either way, nothing in the mainstream media, nothing in the left-leaning media was acknowledging this at all.
So I want to share a few paragraphs from this piece that was published in New York Magazine four days ago, July 27, 2024.
This is in reference to his Oval Office speech in which he says, I'm not stepping down, I'll complete my term, but Harris is the nominee.
I want Harris to be the nominee for For 2024.
Carrie Howley, incidentally, the reason that I have access to this, I subscribed to New York in order to read that Huberman piece, that Huberman attack piece, depending on how you want to say it, which we discussed on Locals, and it turns out she is the author of that piece.
So this is the same person who wrote that.
I read just six paragraphs or so from this, the first two and then a few later on.
People don't survive to tell the tale of what it's like to live through senescence.
We can only look on from the outside, which most of us, most of the time, decline to do, though on July 24th, millions put themselves through the agony of watching a man flicker in and out of focus.
The performance was one of immense sustained effort.
It was impossible not to be aware of his corporeal form, the way his body had come a little loose from his mind.
What are his arms doing now?
And his eyeballs?
Should he blink?
As his hands with unbearable slowness clenched and unclenched, he said all the expected things.
Biden's words long ago ceased to matter.
If you had simply read the transcript of this speech, you would know less than if you'd spent that time communing with the moon.
I revere this office, he said, but the spaces weren't there between the words.
They fused.
Revere this office into a single statement.
It did not say, I revere this office.
It said, I got through this line.
I'm on to the next one.
You can breathe now.
He came back.
He faded.
He found a mostly natural way to point and say something about the economy.
His eyes were unnervingly fixed on the teleprompter as if the sight line were a string holding him erect.
That time and place is now, he said, tapped the table, swallowed audibly.
It was a little moment of vigor that made you wonder if he had overspent himself, borrowed too much from the future.
Doesn't that sound like what a lot of us were seeing months ago, right?
So here's a few more paragraphs from the same piece.
Sometimes when I am afraid, I read about a problem and find the fear dissipates with context.
This is not what happens if one learns more about a future Trump administration.
And yet the fear had been, for so long, abstract.
It was hard to find purchase.
Warnings about a darkness to come were delayed, misconstrued, literally garbled.
In late June, on stage with a felon and sexual assailant who would be king, Biden spoke a kind of poetry, severed from logic, sentences that led to unexpected places.
We finally beat Medicare.
This was the moment an inchoate anxiety found its shape.
It was channeled into yearning for a specific change.
Swap him out.
Dread sharpened into demand.
Millions of people ached openly for a new messenger.
I cannot remember in my lifetime being part of such a sustained communal longing.
Someone.
Anyone.
Please.
Two more.
Yeah.
Like a lot of people, I find myself affectionate toward a woman I had little use for 20 minutes ago.
The normal amount of excitement about Kamala Harris is the amount that was shown her in 2020 during a bloodless, procedurally banal primary.
Harris is a former prosecutor with cop energy, a little remote, and not, in Washington, particularly loved.
Oh, but the waiting.
The winter of peril.
The long season of despair.
To be greeted after all this time with a woman who could simply say, this fucking guy.
It was the waiting that produced the coconut, Venn diagram, one-handed egg-cracking reels, the 160,000 strong Zoom, the brat discourse, the hundred million dollars, the ear-splitting cheers in Milwaukee.
What is this history that is being written for us?
Yeah.
This is extraordinary.
It's not even really if I this is the first time I've encountered this.
Yeah.
Let's put it this way.
You've got a.
I'm going to be careful here because I take, as you also take, the idea of collective consciousness extremely seriously.
In a way that we have understood it as opposed to the original Jungian meaning, exactly.
At least not Jungian sensu stricta.
Right.
And this is collective consciousness, which you and I argue in our book is an essential component of how human beings move between niches.
Sorry, as opposed to Jung's collective unconsciousness.
But in any case, collective consciousness is a real phenomenon.
Now imagine that you have loosely defined the blue team and in this case I'm talking about the rank and file.
I'm not talking about the people who decide what's going to happen next and how it's going to be accomplished or modify algorithms or any of that stuff.
I'm talking about the consumers of the blue team worldview.
They were all somewhere.
They were all aware that we had a very old president.
They were delusional about his capacity to do the job that that office implies.
And that, I don't know whether it was planned to break, but I don't think so.
I think it broke of its own accord because the one thing that his handlers couldn't control was his advancing decrepitude.
It's a biological fact.
They don't know nearly enough about this process to do anything about it, even if they did know they couldn't do anything about it.
So, he got decrepit too fast for them to maintain the illusion, which meant they had to switch.
Okay, so now you've got millions, right?
Tens of millions of people who are harboring a false belief that is no longer going to be sustained.
And something is chosen about where they now have to go.
So now imagine tens of millions of people are about to make a migration from point A to point B without a path.
Right?
We know where they're going to end up and we know where they just came from, but these are tens of millions of idiosyncratic people with different backgrounds, different levels of exposure to elderly people losing their mental capacity.
Who knows what's going to happen?
What they need are a bunch of versions of that piece, written at different levels, delivered in different media, that are going to tell them, okay, here's how, here's your internal dialogue.
This is what it's going to sound like.
You knew all along.
Right.
There was something, something nagging at you, wasn't there?
He was, he was, he was non-composite as well.
He was.
And you know, all those things that you used to say, uh, jokingly to your friends about Kamala and how you didn't really think she was a serious person.
And do you know how now that kind of makes you feel awkward and icky because you're about to have to make the argument that this person should be the leader of the free world.
Here's how you're going to manage that trick.
Right.
And it's going to be delivered in a way, you know, frankly, I don't like or trust the author of that piece one bit.
But it's well done.
Oh, good writer.
You can imagine, because you and I know the subset of that group for whom that was written, you know, New York readers, we can see exactly how that thing would provide relief.
Because the point is, oh, the discomfort I feel about all the things I may once have thought or said about Kamala.
Right?
How am I going to reconcile that?
Because I'm about to be sitting with the people I said those things to, and they said stuff too.
And how are we going to look at each other and say, you know, how this person is the saving grace that we've been waiting for?
Well, we're all going to read this piece.
And in fact, maybe I'll even forward it to them.
Right?
Right.
And very similar pieces were written by the thousands to allow people to welcome back into the fold and into the Christmas celebrations their unvaccinated relatives who they assured were never going to be welcome again, right, during COVID.
It's exactly the same.
Right.
invitation to forget what you believed, forget the harms that you did unto others and pretend that it's all going to be okay because you're the one being gracious.
You're the one extending the branch and saying, oh, well, but we all know that Kamala is just awesome.
I didn't fall out of a coconut tree yesterday.
Right.
So it's like, it's like a, um, I don't even know what the right analogy is, but it's like a little narrative interlude about how we got from A to B that is going to be distributed to multiple different levels at multiple sophistications. .
And then we're going to forget all about it.
And in fact, already have.
That's one of the amazing things about this moment is, you know, to me, this caught me off guard.
Here's one I didn't get.
I thought that Kamala was so unpopular That she couldn't be made popular, that it couldn't be plausible that she was popular.
Even if you were in a position to cheat and create, you know, the numbers that made her popular, everybody was going to look at each other and say, really?
Yeah.
I don't, I, I, I still am not convinced she's going to end up being the nominee.
Yeah.
I'm not convinced either.
But, uh, it's, it's, this, this machine is remarkable.
This, this is, this is an extraordinarily remarkable machine, uh, that they, that they have running.
All right, so one more point before we move to the next phase here.
There's another Rorschach test that happened this week, and unfortunately I didn't forward it to Zach, although I'm not sure I'd be thrilled to show it anyway.
But Kamala had a rally.
Spectacularly well attended.
Right?
Like you see the the pictures zoomed out that would typically reveal that there was a very large crowd and then the bleachers were empty or whatever.
Wasn't like that.
This was a very well attended rally.
Maybe.
Again, with the Cartesian crisis, I just don't know.
Right, you just don't know.
Except that in this case... And we were invited to question people's assessments of crowds back in 2016, or in the inauguration of Trump in January of 2017, when he made claims and all the media said, that's bullshit, it wasn't this.
And from there on out, frankly, any claims of crowd size, I think, well, I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, look.
How would I know?
You're right.
I don't know that I saw what I saw, but I am always looking for the what happens when you zoom out.
Does it still look like a fully packed auditorium, right?
And in this case it was.
Okay.
Except that people left after, or many people seem to have left, that is at least the story, and there's some visual documentation, or seems to be, after the performance by Megan Thee Stallion.
Which was...
An amazing Rorschach test, right?
So, I don't know how much- It's a rally that starts with this artist, for lack of a better term, who I can only- I only recognize the name.
I don't know anything about who she is, but I imagine it's highly sexualized with overtones of violence and not very much creative insight.
Well, I mean, let us just first dispense with the obvious.
Megan Lee Stallion is a poor speller, at the very least.
Not usually.
It's not usually somewhere I would go, you know, glass houses, throwing stones and all.
But anyway, I mean, really not a good speller.
The look, there's a lot of music that ain't my thing.
And then I look at, you know, stuff that I do think is great.
And I say, could I make the argument that there's no real difference?
And it's just that my ear doesn't like this.
I'm too old to, but this is so Which careful people do with things like 12-tone scales, right?
For those of us who were raised in the West with octaves and such, many of us listen to music out of the far east that are using 12-tone scales, and it's harsh.
It's hard to listen to, and it is about a developmental environment in which we were not exposed to such things.
So there is precedent for making those sorts of arguments.
Not only is there precedent for it, but one of the things that is certainly true in art generally and music specifically is that the stuff that goes on to be foundational for the next round is offensive to the ears of those who grew up on the last round, right?
So I ain't arguing that the fact that it's offensive is an argument against it because You know, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven were all violating norms, right?
So anyway, it is what it is.
In this case, I don't think there's anything redeeming about this at all.
It's so vulgar and such an attack on Fundamental, I will just say fundamental sexual decency, right?
This is just the crassest version of sexuality imaginable, right?
Like, if it's crass, there's an effort to shoehorn it into these songs.
Specific, and you know, there's a formula here, an economic formula, which has existed forever.
One way to sell records, and I realize records don't exist anymore, but one way to sell records, or their equivalent, Is to put lyrics in them that when the kids sing them, their parents freak out, right?
If you do that, you sell records because now the kids, now this thing is forbidden and scandalous and edgy and anyway, so no doubt that's going on here.
But what really strikes me about this performance that seems to have attracted all of these people to Kamala Harris's rally is that I don't see any concern about it over on the blue side.
There is no way that 95% of the people who are now fans of Kamala Harris are comfortable with this view of sexuality, right?
Even if they're wrong, you would imagine that there would be a lot of hand-wringing on the blue side, and yet I see none.
Yeah.
So that's unnatural.
Something is just off.
Something is so good at telling people what they are supposed to freak out about and what they are not allowed to freak out about that that thing garners a predictable divide where it's only people Who are outside of the blue domain, who are troubled by this, and everybody inside the blue domain sees it as, well, this is what a modern rally is like.
And it's like, no, you don't believe that.
Yeah.
You know, not only does some part of you know better, most of you knows better, and yet the other part's in charge.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's actually, it's a good place to segue to just, I don't know, hopefully relatively brief, but a discussion I hope we're not spending from now until forever talking about politics, but this is... it's a weird week, hasn't it, Ben?
It's been weird.
So let's just talk about that word that's being... Oh, weird.
Yeah, that's being bandied about so much.
So I didn't get it to Zach in time, so we can't show you, but we'll post in the show notes, the supercut.
That Dave Rubin posted on Twitter of the original thing in which Kamala Harris says something to the effect of, yeah, I don't even have the quote here, but she says, you know, Vance is just weird, isn't he?
Right?
And then you've got so many talking heads in the media saying that Vance is weird and Trump is weird and Trump and Vance are weird and they're just weird and weird and weird and weird.
And I had a lot of responses to this.
One is, I actually thought that on the left, we liked being weird.
Like, I thought that was kind of part of our thing, right?
Keep Portland weird, keep Austin weird.
And being all of a type is not honorable.
Unless what the blue team is trying to get everyone to do is to fall in line and signal to everyone that anything that you do that is considered outside of this narrow band of acceptability, you know, call it the Overton window, call it whatever you want, we are going to start calling you names.
And after we call you names, if you don't get back in line, then it's probably going to get worse.
So, this is like fascist light.
She didn't just start by saying, he's kind of fascist, isn't he?
Because those are the words that were bandied about us at Evergreen and lots of people who have critiqued what is going on in what still feels like the former left.
Um, this was, this was a choice of a word that was, frankly, weird itself, because weird has been a word that, that we have embraced, uh, on, on the left.
I remember, um, well, you know, that, a bumper sticker I haven't seen for years, um, but was one that I, you know, that I had.
I don't think I put it on my car, because I didn't put bumper stickers on my car, but, uh, in high school, you know, why be normal?
Like, that's not the place to excel from, right?
That's not the aspirational thing, is knowing that you will be normal in some ways, but that the places where you will make an interesting difference in the world are the places where you aren't.
So the idea that the critique is that these people effectively aren't normal, because that's what weird is, is a very odd one.
Well, I want to add something at some point.
But then there's also the acronym WEIRD, which we played on with a piece of merch that is still available, Keep Portland WEIRD.
Because WEIRD, the all-caps acronym, stands for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic.
And that has referred in the past to, effectively, the countries that that describes, but also Japan, and maybe to some degree, Argentina and Brazil, and the countries of Europe.
And increasingly, most of these countries are missing one or more of those pieces.
And educated doesn't mean what it used to, because we're miseducating.
Most of these countries are still industrialized-ish, although most of the industrial base is moving offshore.
Rich?
Depends on how you measure it.
Our economy is booming, except groceries cost how much more than they used to, and we're being told the economy is great and interest rates are sky high.
And Democratic?
Well, not so much.
That acronym was formed in part to also indicate, I think, and maybe this wasn't the intention, but that basically you don't become a country with the strength and promise and productivity and creativity and in both science and art and everything else that is actually useful in the human domain.
Without being outside of the norms.
Without being weird.
This is something we should be aspiring to.
And so it strikes me as particularly telling, maybe.
This is the moment that the True Blue base is being assured that the other team is weird.
And that what you need to do, therefore, is to stay not weird.
Stay on the straight and narrow.
Do what we tell you to do.
Harris is your girl.
She's the one you're going to vote for, because even though you didn't know anything about her that was positive two weeks ago, now you're sure that she's the candidate for you.
I find it particularly shocking in light of the fact that queer is taken to be an unalloyed good.
Right?
It's a synonym.
And so years ago I asked on Twitter.
If Q was eliminated from LGBTQ, who would no longer be welcome?
Right.
I didn't get a single coherent answer because it's redundant.
If this is really about sexual orientation, then it doesn't add anything.
All it does is say, Undefined, not normal, is inherently good and part of this community.
So, to have the blue team embracing queer as if it is simply a good thing, at the same time they are attacking weird as simply suspect, tells you what's going on.
Like everything as far as I can tell about Kamala Harris, this is empty.
It is all about tone.
It is purely those people, aren't those people weird?
Those people are weird to us.
I'm not going to define the term.
I'm not going to say why that's bad, but obviously it is, right?
That's what they're saying.
And so that is, that is, that is childish.
I'm not going to take credit for this.
Somebody else used the term and forgive me, I can't remember who it was, but this is mean girl stuff.
That's what this is.
This is just simply, we are going to treat those people as pariahs because of ill-defined term that we all kind of know applies to them.
Right.
And this, by the way, from the same people who are responsible for things like what happened in the Olympic opening ceremonies.
Libs of TikTok reported this week on, you can show my screen here, the house bill out of Massachusetts that is acting to change, here, I'll make this a little bit bigger, change language with regard to parental rights.
Getting rid of a man and a woman and using persons instead.
Sorry about the scrolling here, guys.
Replacing the pronoun his with their.
Paternity with parentage.
Again, paternity with parentage.
Mother, no mother anymore.
Person who gave birth, not father, other parent.
So these are the normies, apparently.
Like, that's who's doing this, is the people who want to get rid of the word mother.
Okay, if I can have my screen back so I can find another example of the people who are calling Vance weird.
The people who are calling Vance weird are also, again, from New York Magazine.
Here on the sideline, J.D.
Vance says his wife has been subjected to racist attacks, but he stopped short of condemning them.
Yes, New York Magazine, you think that the father of biracial children doesn't condemn the racist attacks on the mother of those children whom he still loves?
What is actually happening?
That's just insane.
That's an incredible formulation.
That's an incredible formulation.
We have, oh, we have the rally of white dudes.
The white dudes for Harris.
Zoom call here.
So this is NBC News.
A star-studded tongue-in-cheek.
Yeah, sure it was.
A star-studded tongue-in-cheek fundraiser for progressive white men raised almost four million dollars for Vice President Kamala Harris.
It just goes on and on and on.
Over the nearly three and a half hour call, they said they sold more than 5,700 white dudes for Harris trucker caps.
Not the pointy ones, joked Ross Morales Rochetta, one of the organizers, referring to less PC gatherings of white dudes like the Ku Klux Klan.
Throughout American history, when white men organized, it was often with pointy hats on.
Yeah, I think that's when the Constitution was being written.
Those guys were wearing the pointy hats because they were all white men.
Where are we?
Like seriously.
As if the pointy white hat thing wasn't always fringe.
It was always fringe.
The rest of everyone knew that those people were hateful.
And the I'm not arguing there aren't places where it was concentrated, but from the point of view of the nation.
But the people who half-ish of the country are taking direction from as to what is weird are literally holding giant meetings that are segregated by sex and race.
Making jokes about how the only other times that has ever happened has been the Ku Klux Klan, and claiming that they're the good guys.
I'm sorry, a giant Zoom meeting of white guys talking about how awesome it is to be together supporting Kamala Harris.
That's the thing that's off, and I'm not going to use the word weird because I still honor that term as something that is interesting, but that's the thing that's off, just as off as it was what was going on at Evergreen eight years ago, which caused us to end up leaving the place.
This is national scale Evergreen style bullshit.
Yes, this is, as we said at the time, was going to happen.
It's going to get into everything.
But the amazing thing is you've got all of this Energy, white dudes for Kamala.
Based on what?
Yeah, we have we have nothing to go on in terms of what this we know this person sucks at managing the border if that's even her intent.
We have nothing to go on in terms of vision, right?
This is this is an empty suit of a particular color to which these people have allegiance.
In times past, people running for office at any sort of level above the very local have websites that have, yes, donate here, here's the appearances, but there's always a policy page.
You have argued compellingly that maybe we shouldn't be thinking about policy anyway, but for someone who's been in office, three offices that are important, to have Almost no record, at least that what she would stand by.
And to have nothing on record about what it is that she will stand for.
What is it that she believes?
What are in fact her values?
There's nothing on the Kamala Harris page about that at all.
It's how to donate.
That's it.
That's the extent of it.
So there's something about this.
Whether she ends up as the nominee or not, and I agree with you, that's a real question.
Sure feels like she is going to be at the moment, but There's also an argument to be made that this is running out the clock.
Yeah.
Right.
And that the idea is, oh, God, we didn't manage to maintain the facade that made Biden look reasonable in the eyes of the party.
So we were forced to abandon that early to the extent that we abandoned that early and didn't immediately fill in with some sort of placeholder.
The party would Obviously have the question of well, how are we exactly going to run a primary at this speed?
Yeah, right.
How do we this is supposedly a Democratic Republic?
How do the members of this party choose their new nominee so that that remains true?
And the answer is Rallying around Kamala Prevented that discussion from going.
Mm-hmm.
So whether it's a head fake or it's actually the new plan that takes the place of anything primary like is unclear but either way it is a
Top-level bizarre that the Enthusiasm for this person who hasn't said anything interesting ever Right that that is preceding the filling in of what this person represents and what they're you know What is the what is it that they are advocating for what values are they advocating?
Well, I mean, that's one way that I found that piece out of a New York magazine that I read part of so interesting, because she reveals that people have been successfully so terrified by the prospect of another Trump presidency, that at the point that they apparently all along knew, but were suddenly revealed to themselves that they couldn't have Biden anymore, they went looking for anything, and they were handed her on a platter, and they threw all of their hopes and dreams into her.
And so we know that this works.
It can probably work again.
You can't do it indefinitely.
You can't pull that bait and switch on people over and over and over again, at least on the same exact topic.
They're not going to be able to run through 10 possible nominees.
But that New York Magazine piece was honest in that it said, I didn't have time for this woman 20 minutes ago, and now all of my hopes are with her.
No, I think that's exactly it.
And, you know, back before, well...
Kamala was a nearly invisible VP.
And in fact, back to the point of Joe Biden as the candidate running for office, I was saying, look, there's not a single positive argument for this person.
This person is a influence peddler and was decrepit on running for office the first time for the first his first administration.
The argument for him is Donald Trump.
That's all they've got.
And so the idea, what's interesting here, I think you've solved the puzzle, which is, of course, it's bizarre that there wouldn't be any discussion of who Kamala is and why we should want her as president.
And there's all of this enthusiasm instead of that discussion, rather than a search for, is she the right person?
There's just a slotting her in.
The point is, the argument for her Actually isn't the slightest bit different than the argument for Biden.
It's a negative argument.
The argument is Donald Trump.
That's, and so it doesn't really matter who it is, right?
The only person for whom that argument wouldn't work is Donald Trump.
Right?
It can literally fit anyone.
It's true.
They could run Mike Pence against Donald Trump.
Anybody.
Anybody.
Related-ish, the last thing that we wanted to talk about today was that Seymour Hersh, famed journalist Seymour Hersh, who apparently has a very successful sub-stack, who knew?
You can show my screen here.
Wrote a piece that has a tremendous reveal in it.
You pointed this out to me, and this is a PDF, so it's got highlights, but I'll link to it.
It's behind a paywall, but it's worth it.
Leaving Las Vegas, this piece is called Inside the Last Tortured Days of the Biden Campaign, published on July 27, 2024.
And so he talks about—the whole thing is well worth reading—but he talks about having sat down with an official, an unnamed official, and having tried to figure out with that official what had happened that caused Biden to step down.
He says, Disclosed further details of Biden's trip to Las Vegas and his abrupt return home to Delaware.
I went over these reports this week with a senior official in Washington, who helped me fashion an account of a White House in complete disarray culminating in the President's withdrawal from the race.
None of what you read below comes from an official account by the White House.
On Sunday morning, the official told me, With the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, here's the deal.
We have Kamala's approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.
The amendment provides that when the president is determined by the vice president and others to be unfit to carry out the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall assume those duties.
There's more that I want to say about Kamala, but yeah.
This is the most, I mean, A, not surprising that this happened.
I think the chances that it happened are extremely high because of who Seymour Hersh is.
He is A, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
B, he's a very old guy.
Back before the prize was captured by rando wokesters.
Right.
So he is one of the, you know, preeminent journalists alive and he is at the very end of his career no matter what.
There's no way that somebody as good at reporting as Seymour Hersh is, who has accomplished as much as he has accomplished, would put his reputation at risk over a story like this if he didn't have it nailed to a fairly well.
So I believe the chances that this actually, unless Unless somebody decided to feed this to Seymour Hersh in order to blow him up and they managed to feed it on enough channels that it will work, which we will find out soon enough.
But I believe that this very likely happened.
It also explains what we saw on the outside pretty darn well.
What it means about where we are is mind-blowing, even if this is exactly the kind of things you expect from the blue team.
To have a vice president wield the 25th amendment as a threat To get a sitting president and nominee of his party, or would-be nominee of his party, to step out of the race without leaving the office.
The number of things wrong with this is shocking, and to do so in conjunction with a former president.
Either the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked because the sitting president is not fit for office, or the 25th Amendment does not need to be invoked because the sitting president is fit for office.
There is no — the 25th Amendment could be invoked because maybe you're not clear enough in your own head to know whether or not you're fit for office, but we're not actually going to invoke it.
We're just going to threaten you with it to make sure that you don't run for office again, but we're going to let you remain seated as effectively the leader of the free world, even though the threat was effective because you and others around you know that it possibly could be invoked?
What does that mean about the guy who is currently the president of the United States?
Right.
And what does it mean about the person who is apparently about to be the nominee of this party?
To me, it means if this happened, again, we don't know, but if this happened, she is guilty of a high crime or misdemeanor.
This is an impeachable offense to wield this constitutional amendment against a sitting president There's no way this person is fit for office if she actually did that and did not, you know, it's one thing if she said, Joe, I'm ready to invoke the 25th Amendment.
I don't want to do it.
The best thing for you to do is to step down, right?
The ability to give somebody the opportunity to save face so that they do not face being removed from office.
That wouldn't in my mind be a high crime or misdemeanor, but to have him step out of his role as nominee and remain in the office at the threat of the 25th Amendment is jaw-dropping.
Now, I do want to make one caveat.
A lot of people Over on the other side, argued... Which side is that?
Um, you know, the nominally red side, but I mean, you know, there are a lot of us on the outside of the blue team who thought this was shocking.
Yeah.
Um, we're not red team folks, but we're outside of the blue team.
So the other side being everybody who's not involved in, in team blue.
Um, a lot of people on that outside were saying this was a coup.
A soft coup.
Something.
I'm refraining from saying that for a very particular reason.
I don't think it was.
And the reason that I don't think it was is that I do not believe that this person is legitimately present.
Which one?
Biden?
Biden.
Now I'm not saying he's not my president.
That's not what I'm saying What I'm saying is the process has become so corrupt and has managed with stagecraft to keep a decrepit old man in this office Pretending to be president that so much of this is about managing the public's perception that to overthrow a figurehead who is not legitimately the president because the process has decided to parade him as if he were in order to shield whatever is really behind the scenes and
The point is, well, the coup happened whenever the behind-the-scenes thing took power, right?
It's not the figurehead.
What this was, was a palace coup.
This was very definitely a palace coup, right?
You've got a palace.
You're not supposed to have a palace.
This is a democratic republic.
The White House is a public place, right?
That is ours.
But somehow it's become a palace and you've got palace guards and you've got all of this behind the scenes shit that was supposed to be excluded.
The founders were deliberately, they were anti-monarchists.
We are not supposed to have something like a monarchy or an oligarchy.
And yet we do.
And so my point is, yeah, it has the form of a coup because it was an overthrow in some illegitimate thing that has inhabited this public space illegitimately.
And we don't know for how long and in what form.
Right?
This is one of the questions that, you know, I think there's a very strong argument to be made that there was a coup in 1963.
Has that coup been in charge ever since?
With the shooting of President Kennedy?
Yeah, the shooting of President Kennedy.
Something took power, and I do not believe it was Oswald acting alone.
I believe Oswald was the Patsy, as Oswald himself said before being murdered.
Has that thing been in power ever since?
I don't think so.
For one thing, I think the election of Donald Trump was totally off script, right?
That looked to me like an outbreak of democracy.
Is that the only outbreak of democracy since 1963?
I have no freaking idea.
But I do think something has power.
It does not have complete power.
It wins some, it loses some.
What happened inside the White House with this phone call was a matter of an internal power struggle from something illegitimate.
But we should refrain from thinking of it as a coup or a soft coup because Biden is himself.
This was the replacement of one puppet with another.
One more bit from Seymour Hersh's piece that I wanted to share, because we were talking about Harris before, which is that at the point that this phone call is purported to have happened, and it was understood that Harris would be getting the nod in the language, Here, uh, one possible drawback, I was told, this is harsh writing, was Harris's sometimes disdain for the work of the U.S.
intelligence community.
She is known not to be especially interested in the President's Daily Brief, a highly classified summary of current intelligence that is prepared overnight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and delivered by hand to the most vital offices in Washington, including the Vice Presidents.
The document, which includes Which includes signals intelligence.
I'm not sure what that means.
Yeah, it's a monitoring of communications.
Okay.
The document, which includes signals intelligence, is to be read by the addressee in the presence of the delivering intelligence officer.
I was told that Harris often showed little interest in reading the document and at some point asked the agency to stop delivering it to her.
Now, as a presidential candidate, she has been kept up to date on all significant intelligence matters.
So, if Harris does end up being the nominee, that's important information.
Now, I am struggling to remember.
I hope this is not a false memory, but I think I remember Donald Trump also being uninterested in that document.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
Now, I don't take it as straightforward one way or the other, because on the one hand, you've got An out of control intelligence apparatus, hostile to Donald Trump for sure, and delivering him a daily briefing.
Oh, here's what's going on in the world, sir.
Like he has his own personal Cartesian crisis.
Do I take this as evidence of what's going on in the world?
Do I take it as evidence of what's definitely not going on in the world?
Or is it going to be a mixture?
So I can't figure out which way is up.
Time being zero-sum and attention being limited at least, even if not quantifiable to the same degree, being forced to have your attention on someone's thing every day is a big ask.
Not only that, but, you know, the intelligence community being what it is, hostile to Donald Trump, among other things, the last thing you want is them to be able to give you a little test every day where they hand you a document, you read it in their presence, they're able to evaluate your reaction to it at some level, even just reading your facial expressions.
You wouldn't do that If you didn't trust the people handing you the document you wouldn't necessarily want to give them that access So what does that mean about Kamala?
Well, so I'd like to know if this is true since you started with I'm not sure if I'm remembering remembering this correctly Yeah, and I have no idea.
I don't I've never heard that before but And in fact when I first said something about this to Zach our producer sitting in the corner there He said, why does anyone get to tell the president or the vice president they have to read something every day?
So there is that question.
And if Harris were on record saying anything of note about anything, if it seemed like she had a spark of originality and purpose in her, it would be possible to see that as an act of agency.
And it's very easy to read it as an act of laziness instead, and perhaps that's not fair, but I admit that that is my read on it, not knowing anything about what has happened in the past with Trump or anyone else.
That's exactly what I'm getting at, and I don't know that, you know...
It's unfair in some sense to imagine that Donald Trump had a reason not to want to read these things because he didn't trust them and Kamala doesn't want to read them.
That's clearly a double standard.
She's not interested.
Right.
On the other hand, they're different human beings.
They're different human beings.
And, you know, we're out here among the little people, being little people, describing what we see.
And it, you know, doesn't have any consequence in the world unless people it resonates with people.
So I think we I think we are perfectly entitled to say, you know what, it would make sense for Donald Trump not to trust the thing.
And, uh, that same...
I don't know.
I think it would make some sense.
I'm not going to go there.
I'm not going to say, you know, and again, you've been acclaimed that you even you don't know is true.
So this is all predicated on something that we don't know is true.
But I am not prepared to say, even though I acknowledge that there are different reasons that one might not want to be forced to read in someone's presence, the thing that they had prepared every single day when your attention is Where you put your attention is more important than anything, and that is therefore even more important when you are the Vice President or the President of the United States.
But there will be different reasons for not wanting to do that, and intent does matter for some crimes.
Not that this was a crime, but that not knowing enough of the various stories, it is, I think, too easy to allege That the intent that would be likely over here is very different from the intent over here, and therefore it's kind of okay in one place and kind of not okay in the other.
Well, I mean, ultimately, Zach's point is right.
It is not in our Constitution that there are certain things that the president must read.
Therefore, in light of the fact that we are not in Kansas anymore, a president who decided they had a reason not to read these things would be within Within their rights and... Well, I mean, there's got to be, and I know nothing about how this actually works, but there has to be a constant need to edit the, okay, how many direct reports do you get?
I'd be like, just at the level of like a college president, you know, the number of people who you have to meet with all the time and who it's really necessary that they tell you the things.
Presumably, those things have to be edited, edited, edited all the time, because they will creep in, because that's what bureaucracy does.
So, it makes it perhaps even more important if there's just one.
Oh, it's the one.
That's the one that we all agree is necessary.
Is it one of eight?
I don't know.
Should it be zero of zero, and you basically have your trusted advisors around you who inform you of what they decide?
How should this go?
How should you be informed, if you are the actual president instead of perhaps just a figurehead, of what it is that you need to be informed of such that you can make the decisions that you need to make?
I don't know.
The problem is every single thing that you would want in that chain is not what it needs to be.
You might want an intelligence community that was actually interested in figuring out what was going on and updating you.
Still, there's no case in which you should have to digest what they provide you, but you should want it, right?
Time passes, 24 hours have happened, something has changed.
You want to know.
And, you know, let's take one example.
I saw a story last week about Chinese and Russian bombers having been intercepted by American military planes, fighters, I think, and Canadian in Alaska.
Near Alaska.
Didn't you mention this last week?
I definitely mentioned it on Twitter.
I don't remember if I mentioned it on the podcast, but in any case, that story, I saw a follow-up.
I wasn't sure about it.
In fact, I was concerned that it had been misrepresented, that the difference, the thing that really caught my attention, apparently the Russians are constantly testing us by sending up aircraft that either come near or across our airspace and they get intercepted.
The thing that really struck me was the Chinese and the Russians participating together in such a thing, which was not clear from the report, right?
Did American and Canadian jets intercept the Chinese and the Russians separately?
That means something very different than if the Chinese and the Russians are participating in a joint operation Right?
Turns out it's the joint operation that emerged today.
So anyway, I'm imagining that's the kind of thing that happens.
It could easily get missed by any human being who had a lot of stuff on their plate, and a president certainly would, and you would want somebody to say, by the way, this happened.
The Russians and the Chinese, you know, were intercepted by... were collaborating, etc.
So...
Yeah, I don't know how it's supposed to happen, but it would require a intelligence community that was not either independent of control by the other branches or by their part of the executive branch, by the other two branches of government and nonpartisan.
And we don't appear to have that.
I don't know that there is nonpartisan anymore.
Well, we're going to have to revive it.
We're going to have to bring patriotism back.
Get right on that.
That's a really depressing way to end.
Nope, we got to do it.
We got to rescue the West.
Do you want to say something about that before we close out?
Soon, but not yet.
We will be back next week, same time, same place.
We're not doing a Q&A this week, but you can find all of our past Q&As at Locals.
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And until we see you next time, unless you have something else to say?
Nope.
All right.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
