The Case for Trump: The 249th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 249th 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 upcoming election, and how important it is to vote. The Democratic Party has created a two-tiered system in the Courts and in federal agencies; they have inverted basic values, including equal protection under the law, the role of families, informed consent, individual sovereignty, ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 249, was it?
Yes.
249.
There you go.
Which is, of course, not prime.
Yep, that's right.
It's factors being.
It's factors being 3 and 83, making it a colossal prime.
That's what mathematicians call this kind of prime.
Did you read my notes?
No.
No.
Did you read the notes of our friend who sent that to you after I had already put into my notes?
Thank you, Holly.
No, I... But you just made up colossal prime.
No, I didn't.
That's what mathematicians call it.
No, they don't.
Yes, they do.
The good ones.
Yeah, the egghead ones call it like a super prime or something.
And why is that?
But the cooler, hipper mathematicians call it a colossal prime.
Why?
Because all the factors are themselves prime.
Yes.
Yes.
Now, when I asked Siri about so-called Super Primes.
Siri.
I know.
Well, I was driving.
There was no other way to look it up.
So I asked Siri to look it up.
You could have asked the dog with whom you were driving.
I did.
You could have asked her to drive.
Okay, now this has gotten weird, but I asked Siri and Siri said something that has perplexed me.
I have not yet checked into it.
Siri said something like a super prime, which the cool mathematicians call a colossal prime.
A super prime is a prime in which all the factors are prime and exist in the sequence of known primes.
And that sounded redundant to me.
Yeah, I don't know what that means.
Yeah, I don't either.
I guess the idea is that because there are an indefinite number of primes, presumably an infinite number of primes, that there are primes that we don't yet know about, and they may be factors of even larger primes, and so the fact that we haven't identified something means that a superprime requires that we know that its factors are prime?
I don't know.
I mean, if you don't know that its factors are prime, then you probably don't know that it is prime.
Yes, that by definition, and yet, and yet.
One of many reasons not to go to Siri.
I would agree.
Well, again, driving.
Again, ask the dog.
All right, next time.
Yes.
Alright, here we are, 249.
Livestream 249.
October 23rd, 2024.
Less than two weeks until the federal election in the United States.
And, you know, state and county and local and all that too.
This is going to be our last livestream before that election.
So, you know, you're going to be talking about this today.
Yes.
Make sure you get out and vote.
I will say that a few times.
Yes, we will say that a few times.
Yeah, make sure you get out and vote.
Check out Locals.
We did another Q&A this weekend.
It's up on Locals.
We always have fun there.
And Watch Party's going on now.
And everything else we want to tell you about where to find us and see our schedule and everything, we'll move to the end.
But as always, we start with our sponsors, whom we have vetted carefully.
You can be sure that if we are reading an ad at the beginning of the show here, which we do Uh, when there's that green perimeter around the screen, uh, that we truly, um, truly and actually vouch for these products and man, it's three great ones this week.
They always are, but I'm particularly excited about, about these.
Our first sponsor this week is Vanman.
We absolutely adore Vanman's products and we are certain that you will too.
And I forgot to bring my props.
I may go get Vanman props while you're reading your ad at the end.
Um, What?
Yeah, well, I mean, if the camera's on me, you could do that.
Nobody would even know what had happened.
Well, exactly.
But why am I showing them, you know, after all the ads are over instead of during the ad?
I don't know.
Because I failed to ask the dog to drive.
Exactly.
Yes.
Okay.
Our first sponsor this week is Van Man.
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A compelling ad for Vanman could just be a read of the complete ingredient list in each of their products, honestly.
For instance, hopefully you don't need sunscreen often, but when you do, here's what's in Vanman's sunscreen.
I don't know what the cocoa powder is doing in there, but I approve.
But that's a complete list of ingredients.
Cocoa powder, not butter.
Yep, that's what it says.
All right.
Yep.
The product of the Vanman company is, so that's their sunscreen, and I don't have time to read the complete ingredient list for all of their products, but they have it on their website, and they're all like that.
They're all incredible, simple, understandable, and awesome.
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The product that the Vanman company is probably best known for is tallow and honey balm, and it surpasses even our very high expectations.
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It is out of this world.
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It's got, and here is another ingredient list, tallow from 100% grass-fed bison.
Bison are fairly lean, so their fat is particularly nutrient-dense.
Manuka honey, which has considerable antibacterial properties.
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Their lip balm has no seed oils, of course, but that's a surprisingly rare find these days, so maybe you're needing to put lip balm on your lips because you're putting the stuff on it that's causing your lips to burn.
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Now, is there a reference in there on the claim that bison are leaner?
I did not.
I did not chase that one down.
Because I have an alternative hypothesis for what's going on there that does not involve them being leaner.
So the claim is that their fat is particularly nutrient-dense, and the hypothesis built into the claim is because bison are, and it's not phrased this way, but because bison are fairly lean, their fat is particularly nutrient-dense.
That's an implied hypothesis.
You are saying, we are taking on faith for the moment that their fat is particularly nutrient-dense.
No, no, it's that bison are leaner.
And my alternative hypothesis is that because bison are more dangerous, people tell them they're leaner just to stay on their good side.
Okay, so this has nothing to do with the project at all.
No, I mean, it's tangentially related.
Yeah.
Very tangentially.
Oh, you look great in those pants.
Exactly.
Except bison don't wear pants, so this would be the natural go-to claim.
Yeah, you have to find something else besides complimenting them on their fashion choices.
Totally.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Although they do look pretty cool, you know.
They do look very cool.
Or above it.
Yeah.
And I gotta say, this bison tallow and honey balm that Van Man makes, amazing.
So good.
All right.
Well...
It's not your turn.
You were about to start.
My script suggests otherwise.
Yeah, but it's lying to you.
Oh, okay.
But I didn't jump the gun for no reason.
It told me that I should jump the gun, and we are now...
We'll pivot.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
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Now it's your turn.
Yes, it is my turn at this point.
Our third and final sponsor, he ad-libbed, is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
We love these guys and their olive oils so very much.
Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
Really, it has all sorts of health benefits that we could mention, from being heart healthy to helping prevent Alzheimer's to being high in antioxidants.
But unless you...
But you've been living on this planet, so you know these things well.
Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets.
It's used in everything.
If you've ever had excellent fresh olive oil, you may wonder...
No, that's not what it says on the paper, and Heather isn't here to mock me for messing it up, but it says...
Wait, did I miss an opportunity?
Yes, I misread something, as is my want.
Want, right.
Okay.
Just suddenly sounded, why would it be a want?
I figured it was, but I wasn't going to guess.
All right.
If you have never, it says on the paper, had excellent fresh-pressed olive oil, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
Fresh-pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of T.J. Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter.
He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door, and the entire ingredient list is in the name.
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
It's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil.
That's what's in it.
I was just, you know, trying to keep continuity between the various products.
Yeah, and just fact-checking yourself.
Yes.
Right.
No, I'm pretty sure that's all that's in it.
When we first tasted TJ's farm fresh oils, we couldn't believe how delicious they were.
We were sent three varietals with noticeably different flavors, and we used each of them in the usual ways.
In a light dressing, on a caprese salad, marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting.
And we have never been disappointed.
We just got another three bottles, all different, all extraordinary.
I, this is Heather speaking now, drizzled just a little on one of the season's final heirloom tomatoes last night, added a few flakes of coarse sea salt and a sprinkle of apple cider vinegar.
Wow, says Heather.
So good.
You had it too.
Right, but you wrote the script.
Yeah, but did you not think it was amazing?
No, I did, but there's a limit to the on-the-fly editing.
You enjoy a good end-of-season heirloom tomato with amazing fresh olive oil.
Absolutely, and some flaky salt.
It's perfect.
And what about that orange olive oil cake?
Even the recipe was sent by Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
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Awesome.
Take that.
So I should have brought props for all of this.
So you don't get props for not bringing props.
I don't get props for bringing props except for VanBand, which these are still unopened.
So this is the usual size tub.
This is the bison tallow and honey balm, and it is so, so, so good.
But these cute little guys, these are the new travel sizes, which I just ordered some up because we're about to be traveling.
You're traveling, sure.
And they're metal, so there's no plastic here.
And they're cute, adorable, tiny sizes.
And this stuff goes such a long way.
This is going to be plenty for, you know, unless you're going for months, that's going to be plenty.
So I've got one here of tallow balm, tallow and honey balm, and one of the deodorant, which they're just fantastic.
TSA won't even blink.
Yeah, they won't.
Don't tempt fate.
All right.
Did you want to start?
I suppose I could start.
And I've set myself a task that I admit when I sat down to flesh it out turned out to be a never-ending task.
So I'm going to try to limit it.
But what I wanted to do in our last live stream before the upcoming election...
Was do my best as a lifelong liberal, as a annoyed Democrat, to make the case for why two things.
One, why it is very important that you vote.
I will make the case that you should not vote third party, though I would in many elections make the case that third party would be the way to go.
I don't believe that 2024 is such a year.
And I will also make the case for why voting for Trump would be the right thing to do.
I would say the overarching case is the vote.
That's the basics.
So anyway, in making the case for Trump, there are several different elements.
There's a case regarding her opponent.
No, his opponent, Trump's opponent, who happens to be Kamala Harris, as many will have heard.
And the case for voting against Kamala Harris is shockingly strong in its own right.
It is not a highly elaborate case, but the small number of things that one can actually say in this domain are quite damning.
And I just wanted to run through them.
The first is...
that she is in no small way an insult to the electorate, that the record on which she might run turns out to be so thin, her accomplishments are effectively non-existent,
And I could imagine, barely, somebody who did not have a list of accomplishments but who had some sort of significant vision for the country, but she offers no vision and no track record that might justify a vote for her.
And in lieu of that, what we are handed are demographic parameters, which are not an argument for the quality of a leader of any sort.
And so I think it is actually a finger in the eye of voters that this person has been nominated by this party.
And it's not like the party...
Somehow fell in love with her and nominated her because of her winning personality.
In fact, when she has run, she has not been popular at all.
So the party literally installed this person on the ticket, and that is an insult to all of us.
That, in and of itself, is disqualifying.
There's a second argument in the case of Kamala Harris, though, which I find equally disqualifying, and I don't hear it described very much.
But if we are to believe Seymour Hersh, and I think we have every reason to believe Seymour Hersh.
This is an old-school journalist with a long career of spectacular successes and recognition who has no reason to risk that legacy over a false story.
And his story...
tells us that what happened at the point when Kamala, just before Kamala became the nominee, is that Kamala participated in a political maneuver to force Joe Biden from the race.
And in the aftermath of that, so the threat was used of the 25th Amendment, the president would be forced from office if he did not elect to step down from his role on the Democratic ticket.
And then, having stepped out of the race, Kamala Harris did not, as vice president, then use the 25th Amendment to eliminate him from the office, leaving a president who was decrepit enough for that threat to function.
And that's far from the only piece of evidence that we have that he's decrepit enough that he should not be in the office.
But she left him in the office, leaving not only Americans in jeopardy, having a leader who is incapable of performing this role well, But leaving the entire world in jeopardy because, of course, what we have seen in the aftermath of that move is we have seen the United States acting in a way that is belligerent in Ukraine towards our old Cold War foe Russia.
And so something is behaving recklessly with nuclear weapons.
And it is doing so in Joe Biden's name.
Every person on earth has a stake in us not playing dangerous nuclear games.
And Kamala Harris has left this situation as it was, even though she actually has the power to usher the president out of the office on the basis that he is not capable of discharging his duties.
Just to show your receipts here.
We did talk about this several live streams ago in Livestream 236, but here is Seymour Hersh's reporting that you are referring to.
Leaving Las Vegas inside the last tortured days of the Biden campaign.
And this is exactly the PDF of his sub stack that we showed in Livestream 236.
And I'll just go down.
We, you know, we again shared this before.
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.
Assuming that is true, and it has been a couple months since that came out, and no one has challenged that claim, then either the 25th Amendment is legitimately capable of being invoked and therefore needs to be invoked, or it can't be invoked, in which case it would be an idle threat.
So, if it was in fact put out as a threat and then Biden is allowed to remain in office, presumably because the electorate being able to see six months of Kamala in office would be the death knell for her candidacy, that itself is a betrayal of the Constitution that Kamala was part and parcel of.
Yes, she swore an oath to it, and she is derelict of duty with respect to that oath.
And I would just point out, this would be terrifying enough if this was a calm moment in world history.
But you have the Chinese activating their military, presumably In some kind of preparation or wanting to appear preparing to attack Taiwan.
You have a hot war in Ukraine in which we are somehow backing a threat inside the borders of Russia, a profoundly nuclear state.
We have war in the Middle East in which threatens to ratchet up into a war between Israel and Iran.
This is not a moment when you can have somebody who is not in full possession of their faculties in that office, and Kamala Harris has left a demented man in that position, and something else is acting in his stead.
Either that or maybe these moves are as dumb as they look because you've got a senile person deciding what we're supposed to be doing.
There's no way this is tolerable.
It is absolutely disqualifying in and of itself.
Okay, so you have two things that disqualify Kamala as the candidate from, I believe, a rational vote by anybody.
I would make that list a lot longer, but go on.
Yep, but these are sufficient, each sufficient on its own, I think.
The first being no demonstrable accomplishments or skills.
Yep.
Which is rather a large category.
Not qualified for the job and not, you know, presumably the American public is entitled to elect somebody because it has an intuition they might be qualified.
That would be an irresponsible thing for the electorate to do.
But in a Democratic Republic, the electorate has the right to do that.
But the Democratic Party...
Doesn't believe in primaries anymore.
It literally has argued for its right to rig them.
And in this case, it didn't even rig a primary.
It just installed somebody.
So these things paint quite a dire picture.
If you believe in the consent of the governed, Kamala Harris cannot be the choice.
There's nothing that merits a vote there.
But we also have an entirely...
Separate list of reasons not to vote in that direction that have to do with the party that put us in this insane predicament.
And I would just argue that, you know, again, I have retained my membership in the Democratic Party specifically so that as I point these things out, it doesn't strike people as, you know, just politics.
Of course, the other side would claim everything's wrong with the Democratic Party.
I would love for the Democratic Party to be an honorable party that attempts to do right by the American people.
And the fact that it isn't that is shameful and unacceptable.
We are entitled to a party that represents us, and the blue team has clearly decided not to do that.
In so doing, as I've discussed on our last livestream, it has become the repository for every single bad idea that can co-exist.
If you want to pick a realm where the Democratic Party has settled on a plan or a platform, every single thing the Democratic Party currently stands for is bad for the Republic and bad for Americans.
Which I find staggering, but at a game-theoretic level, it is comprehensible how such a moment would occur.
Once you have decided to betray average Americans, then the point is you're hobbled in doing their bidding on one issue and betraying them on another.
You're better off just to, at a strategic level, just to absorb all the bad ideas and rationalize them, which is what the Democratic Party has started to do.
And I just wanted to talk about some of the ways...
It's not that early days.
No, it's been going on for quite some time.
I mean, really, you know, the party was a despicable mess at the point that Clinton took office.
But what has happened since Clinton took office and essentially betrayed the labor movement and cut working Americans off from having any party that represented them has been terrifying, right?
This is just a party that, to the extent you can...
Back out what its values must be in light of what it's advocating.
It just hates decent people.
It's really awful.
But anyway, what the blue team, the Democrats, have done Is they have essentially created a de facto two-tier society.
Where it's not that the rules that they want are inherently awful.
It's that there's always a choice between two rules.
And you get one version if you're their favorite, and you get another version if they don't like you.
And this is specifically un-American.
I would point out that the weaponization of the courts, most people, because they didn't go to law school and they didn't grow up thinking about the law, do not realize what a terrifying fact that is.
To have the courts turned against some people and not others, to have justice be unblinded, it is the thing that will bring about the destruction of a society most assuredly.
And this really is the Democrats having done this.
They've turned these courts into a mockery of the idea of equal protection under the law.
Equal protection under the law is the idea that it doesn't matter who you are when you show up in court.
The court will treat you the same way it would treat anybody else.
It doesn't matter what color you are.
It doesn't matter what religion you are.
It doesn't matter what ideology.
There's something in the law, let's say it's a crime, and the question is, did you violate it?
Did you violate it according to some, you know, some evenly applied standard and in light of the view of 12 average people, right?
Did you violate the law or not?
Not, you know, are you allowed to violate the law?
Right, and this used to be implicitly a point that many people on the left understood and were active about, and I'm thinking specifically about rape and how it has been I can't think of the right word legally,
how it has been adjudicated in courts, where the idea of did you see what she was wearing has been understood to be a bridge way too far, right?
Yes, separately, yes, women can act in ways to decrease the chances that they are raped, but they are never asking for it, right?
And so the never asking for it, and therefore it doesn't matter what she was wearing, she wasn't asking for it, she didn't deserve that, and did he rape her, that's the only question that's relevant, is a kind of recognition that it doesn't matter who you are, what you think, who you voted for, we get equal protection under the law.
And now, with this actual weaponization of the courts, we do not see equal protection under the law.
No, you see the absolute inverse.
There's nothing you can do to avoid being prosecuted if that's what they want to do.
We have numerous cases where people have been convicted, imprisoned on the basis of no crime at all.
And then if you're one of their favorites, there's no level of violation of the law that appears to be too much.
You might be protected by it.
So that is the inverse of the America envisioned by our founders.
And we see this also in the cities.
We're most familiar with the West Coast cities.
But the fact that many types of crimes simply don't get into the legal system at all, right?
And it's not just because the police have been effectively defunded and there aren't enough of them, and so 911 calls don't get answered.
Even when crimes are acknowledged as having happened, as having taken place, they are often not processed in the courts.
And this is a political decision, not a resource problem or anything else that you might hear about.
People of certain colors, people in certain neighborhoods, people with certain mutable demographics, like small business owners, don't tend to be allowed to make claims that crimes were committed against them or their businesses anymore in American cities.
It's called selective enforcement, and it is the inversion of a fair system.
Our system is fundamentally about a level playing field.
It will never be perfectly level, but it is about the idea of pursuing a level playing field, and this is the uninvention of that level playing field.
And it is particularly egregious when it is applied in the political domain.
The idea that those in power are entitled to hobble those who challenge them utilizing the courts is obscene.
All right.
The second place that we see this two-tiered society is with our intelligence services.
We see our intelligence services playing a decidedly political role.
For example, in the obscuring of the Hunter Biden laptop during the 2020 election.
The intelligence services told us this had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
It, of course, had no such hallmarks.
So this is the intelligence services lying to the American people on behalf of one political party.
Again, obscene.
And then the final one in this category, and we could come up with a lot more, but I'm just trying to keep this limited in time here, is the abuse of the IRS. And I would point out The IRS showing up at Matt Taibbi's place after he testified in Congress on the Twitter files,
you know, obviously has a chilling effect on the ability of Americans to do exactly the things that our founders carved out the right for us to do.
Well, and that fits with, I know there are many others, as you just said, that you could have come up with, but the idea of hate speech, of course, is exactly something that produces a two-tier society.
And so it's fine.
It's absolutely fine.
In fact, it is considered honorable when Tim Walz goes on air and says, no, actually, you need to make sure that hate speech doesn't happen.
And we know, because of his track record in Minnesota, who he believes is even capable of engaging in hate speech, and who he believes isn't.
And so, you know, this is...
The fact that the 25th Amendment has been utterly disrespected by Kamala Harris and all of the people at the top of The DNC behind the scenes is egregious and frankly should make her a non-starter as a candidate.
The refusal to either understand, although I think that's generous, more likely to respect the First Amendment Which is what the Democrats are doing, feels to me like the biggest threat of all to the United States of America.
And what they like to trot out is that, oh, well, it's Trump that's going to be the threat to the Constitution.
No.
No, actually, you've got people on Team Blue who are actively advocating for and have a history of, see again the Twitter files, right, of getting in the way of people being able to speak in what is effectively the public square.
Yep.
And actually, you have compelled me that I'm missing something on the list here.
So hate speech is one case where you have a clearly two-tiered society.
And, you know, the problem, I'm frustrated that so many people, including Bobby Kennedy, have responded to this by saying, no, we specifically have to protect hate speech, because although I know what they're talking about, he's speaking as a sophisticated legal mind, right?
You have to think this way.
But that sounds preposterous.
The answer is, who exactly gets to define what is hate speech, right?
Is it hate speech to say that there are two and only two sexes and that that is a biological state of affairs that goes back hundreds of millions of years?
According to some people, it would be hate speech.
And the answer is they don't get to tell me whether I get to say that.
So hate speech is one place.
And then the other thing is mystics and malinformation.
Before you go into misdicimal information, if you want to just show my screen here for a second, they're transforming words to fit their particular desires.
And we'll talk a little bit later about my drumbeat at the moment, and ours forever, but their abuse of the word science, and they're convincing people that their new religion is actually science and that the religious people who often embrace science are the ones who aren't embracing science is infuriating and dangerous and may take us all down, but they're doing it with hate and love as well, right?
Hate speech is often things that are true that they don't like because it gets in the way of what they're trying to accomplish, whereas they like to put on their yard signs, and this is just one I pulled up, you know, love is love with, you know, whatever that is, you know, trans...
Pride flag colors in a heart, right?
Love is love.
Except unless you actually want to protect your children from being permanently harmed by these insane people who are claiming love is love and let's have access to them without any parents around.
That doesn't look like love to me.
That doesn't look like love to almost anyone.
But they claim that love is encouraging your children to go on puberty blockers, and that hate is saying, actually, I don't want your damn injection because it's neither safe nor effective.
That seems backwards to me.
Yep.
I mean, I can't really argue.
Love is love.
Sophistry is sophistry.
Yep.
Kangaroos are kangaroos.
X is X. Yeah.
You know, that's the thing, right?
Powerful.
Yeah.
And that image does look like a heart that has some sort of trans-associated myocarditis.
I mean, look at the inflammation on that heart.
Oh, yeah.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I mean, that might be, given that it's the inside, that might be paired in it.
Maybe that's myocarditis, actually.
Yeah.
No, that's not pericarditis.
That's myocarditis.
That's not good.
Yeah, that's transmyocarditis.
All right.
This is what happens when you travel too far down this road.
But, okay, so mystics and malinformation, along with hate speech, is another place where you can see the two-tiered society, because the basic point is there is not some objective standard.
By which we can say, what is mis, dis, and mal?
Information, especially not handed down from on high.
You would need a process to figure out what's even true, and in many cases, you can't know.
A process isn't sufficient.
You would need a time machine and perfect knowledge.
You would need a time machine and omniscience, and we have neither and we never will.
That is not the nature of reality.
But even if you take...
Therefore, it is impossible to litigate Or, you know, mis- or disinformation.
It is quite possible to litigate malinformation being, again, we've been talking about this since early COVID days, but malinformation being things that are true but that make the government look bad.
So yeah, they can definitely point out those things, but the idea that malinformation is going to be a, you know, an offense in a court of law is itself a, should be a mark against voting for the team that brought you that, and that would be Team Blue.
Yep, and I would point out, you can see the two-tieredness of it, right?
Not just the absurdity of it, but the two-tieredness of it based on the amount of disinformation, right?
Disinformation is the actually onerous category.
This is intentional lies, and nobody was a bigger distributor of intentional lies about COVID than the federal government, right?
You're not a horse, Brett.
That part was true.
But the number of lies that they foisted onto the public was impressive.
It would have been hard to lie more consistently than they did.
And so the point is, why are they not downstream of their own claim that disinformation, I remind you, is terrorism?
Right?
Because this would seem to imply that the CDC is a terrorist organization according to their own definition.
And, of course, you hear no word of this because disinformation is only when it is somebody they don't like who they can portray as trafficking in this stuff.
It's two-tiered.
It's onerous.
It's absurd that they defined it as terrorism, which invokes all kinds of anti-constitutional privileges of the executive branch.
And it's applied in an utterly inconsistent way based on whether they like you or dislike you.
So the two-tiered stuff is, again, sufficient reason to vote against the blue team.
My next category has to do with the decimation and repurposing of federal agencies for political purposes.
And I would point out that FEMA, we have recently been reminded, is now utterly incapable of managing a disaster to the benefit of its victims.
This is something we have all paid into mightily with our taxes.
And yet, if you get struck by a hurricane and you happen to live in Appalachia, then FEMA shows up a week late.
And at that point, it's obsessed with paperwork and getting people, quote unquote, into the system to get them their 750 bucks.
This is not the rescue effort.
That we are entitled to.
This is a prosperous society in which we have this apparatus, which, you know, like the fire department, sits there idle until it's needed, and then it's supposed to show up in force and solve the problem and rescue people, and it just simply didn't do it.
Yeah, the firemen don't show up and get the signatures first.
We don't live in that.
You know who did?
Back in the early days.
I know, right?
Back in the early days, fire departments were a service that you contracted with, and you had an emblem high on your building that said which service was supposed to put out the fire.
Because you paid in.
Because you paid in.
But we're all paying into FEMA. Right.
That is, that we are not living, and I don't know when that was.
I'm going to guess, you know, mid-19th century, something like this.
18th century.
Oh, before, even earlier.
So we no longer live in that age, thankfully.
And FEMA has never been that.
FEMA is too new for that to ever have been the model by which they worked.
And yet, what they did was start asking for people to fill out paperwork first.
Yeah, it's obscene.
And so, you know, and guess what?
The blue team acknowledged nothing about the problem.
It's not like the executive branch looked at FEMA and said, uh-oh, what the hell?
This agency has become decrepit.
They claimed nothing bad happened.
And in fact, they came after those of us who pointed out that there was a lack of, you know, helicopters in the sky quickly after the storm had cleared to find people who were stranded.
And that it was in fact, you know, it was blocking runways in order to prevent private people from stepping in.
So the fact that the Biden administration, along with Kamala Harris, was not up in arms.
I mean, it would have been interesting if Kamala Harris Had taken Biden to task over his failure to do the right thing when FEMA failed to show up.
That would have been interesting.
Or showed up herself and taken a look around and seen what was happening.
Right.
Of course, late and photo op is the only way that this stuff happens now.
Okay, FEMA has been decimated.
The CDC and FDA have been repurposed.
These are now effectively trade organizations with a governmental stamp and extraordinary rights that now arrange to get rid of drugs from the market that are useful to fend off a pathogen that, frankly, was federally funded in its creation.
So, To the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.
Yes.
I mean, not all of that is going to have been SARS-CoV-2, but there's recent evidence that the amount of federal funds, of grant money, that the NIH delivered to Ralph Barak, who then distributed it, among others, to his colleagues in China, was over a quarter of a billion with a B dollars.
A quarter of a billion dollars that created...
Arguably the largest error, in my opinion, in human history, in the sense that this is a pathogen that we are now stuck with indefinitely.
And so even if the illness that you tend to get from it isn't all that serious for a healthy person, the fact that you're going to get it many times in a lifetime is deeply troubling.
And there's no...
And even just, I mean, maybe this is one of the most trivial parts of it, but in all parts of the country, as far as we've heard, late summer and early fall is now a season where people are getting really sick.
And it was always true that when kids went back to school, including university kids, when our kids were young and we were professors at university, everyone got a little bit sick as everyone went back to school and exchanged all sorts of things that they hadn't been exchanging before.
But these were relatively minor.
This wasn't flu season.
Flu season came much, much later.
And in late summer and early fall now, a lot of people are getting really, really sick reliably.
That has changed the seasonality, extended the seasonality of extreme illness season, and that is...
Directly downstream of the research that Ralph Barak and his cronies were paid a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money to fund.
And that's, you know, that's downstream in terms of, in terms of Fauci and of, you know, this is not, this is not a...
Completely modern democratic phenomenon.
But this is about the politicization of science, the perverse incentives when you get money, making decisions about what science gets funded and what you're allowed to talk about.
And basically, the Democrats became the party of Big Pharma.
That's what they are now.
Of all bad ideas, maybe the baddest.
Alright, so that was the decimation and repurposing of federal agencies.
My next category is the destruction of basic values.
And this is the category that just goes on indefinitely.
We've already talked about equal protection under the law, which has been decimated by the blue team and the weaponization of the courts.
But there's also the idea of equal opportunity.
And this one Those of us who've been fighting against the woke revolution have talked a lot about it, but this one gets lost because so much of the harm is done under the banner of equity, which is a term most people have a vague relationship with.
They may think it's the same.
It's a fancy term.
For equality, and it's not.
It's the inversion because it involves the equalization of outcomes, which is A, completely unfair, and B, destructive of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
You're, you know...
Cutting down the fruit tree to burn its wood.
You're eating the seed corn.
You are taking the thing that causes us to strive and do well, and you are destroying it to redistribute the products in some short timescale, which isn't fair.
It masquerades as fairness.
It's really the inverse.
But the point is, merit is the thing that creates wealth, right?
And everybody should have the opportunity to pursue the creation of wealth from which we all benefit, and you should be rewarded when you succeed in producing wealth.
That's the way the thing functions.
Nobody has demonstrated a successful alternative to that.
This is the best way to create wealth, and the best way to kill it is to decide that any accumulation of wealth is the result of unfairness and to redistribute it to people who have not demonstrated merit.
Now, I'm not arguing that we have gotten anywhere near equal opportunity, but I am arguing that was always the appropriate goal, and this equity stuff is poison.
And we were moving in that direction, and we were moving fast, actually.
We had become a much more equal society by the, I'm going to just go with like mid-aughts, than we had been even when we were kids in the 70s and 80s, but even then it was clear.
It was clear in most places in the United States that you could strive and you could have a chance of actually becoming anything you wanted if you continued to strive, regardless of Of, certainly, of the sex you were or the color of your skin.
Class was the biggest predictor.
Class, you know, the zip code into which you were born was then, and probably remains so now, the biggest barrier to success.
That's true.
I will make what I feel is an obligatory point.
I made it at Rescue the Republic, and I try to make it every time, which is I do think that there are two populations for which there is a special historical obstacle.
And we need some novel thinking on how to address it.
Blacks and American Indians have a different origin story than everybody else who ended up here.
And that origin story has, I believe, a lot to do with why you find persistent underperformance.
And it is addressable, but not if you don't acknowledge it.
Okay, so merit and equal opportunity is one of the values that the blue team has utterly decimated with this absurd concept of equity.
And I'm not arguing that the term equity is inherently bad, but the way equity is being applied here, it's a cloak for the destruction of meritocracy.
Well, I mean, as you defined equity, and as I think I have understood it to be defined, it is about equal.
It is a demand or a seeking of equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity.
And, you know, it's easy to, if you don't know that, it's easy to interpret equity as just like a contraction of equality.
Like, it means the same thing.
It's just, you just skipped a syllable there in the middle.
But I feel like if, unless there is a different definition of equity that some people are using, I'm sorry, Striving for equity, striving for equal outcomes, as opposed to perhaps hoping for outcomes that are more equal because you have equalized opportunity as much as possible.
Striving for equal outcomes is a bad idea.
Yes, it is a bad idea.
You can't operationalize it.
And to the extent that there's an argument for equity, you would have to draw a case in which it was justified.
So for example, you know, if you were talking about Well, has everybody at the dinner table got an equal amount?
Right.
Well, you know, what if somebody's seven years old and, you know, they, I don't know what a seven-year-old weighs, 60 pounds, right?
The right thing to do is not to equalize the amount of food so everybody has the exact same share.
It's to give people an equitable amount, but that's not a legal standard.
That's not a way to run a civilization.
That's a way to run dinner, right?
Right.
And so, you know, you don't want equity in your med school class or your Air Force class or in law school, engineering.
You don't want equity.
You want the best people to reveal themselves and to do the best job they can, even within a person.
There's no equity of ideas that make sense.
Well, smart person, all my ideas are equally good.
No, they're not.
They never will be.
There is no population, be it people or ideas or anything in between, in which everything is equal in value.
It can't be.
It won't be.
Any population for which there is variance, which, okay, so, no, I'm wrong.
There are some populations for which there, you know, you will have equitable outcomes, identical outcomes, no variance.
Gold atoms.
Gold atoms will always have exactly the same number of protons.
I'm going to, you know, someone's going to tell me there's, like, I don't care.
Like, gold is defined.
Very narrowly by its number of...
What's it going to be?
Protons and neutrons.
And maybe there are some...
Gold is going to be defined by the protons.
Yeah.
So that's the difference between, actually, chemistry, for instance, and biology.
That once you have natural selection, decide...
Preceding the population that you have now, that helped create the population that you have now, there is variance on every single characteristic.
And those characteristics for which there is no variance, like humans are bipedal.
Okay, good.
That's because it was so important.
It's so long-lasting that those humans who are born without two legs have a really, really hard time of it.
And we can still say humans are bipedal because that is what humans are.
Yeah.
Everything basically in the world that isn't an element has variance, or physics, has variance, and therefore the kind of thinking that goes into we will have equitable outcomes, we will have identical outcomes within all members of the population, makes no sense.
We are not gold atoms, and we cannot aspire to be so.
Yeah, I mean, and we're also not talking about a descriptive process.
We're talking about a proscriptive process in which you destroy fairness with this absurd standard.
And I would just point out, we can combine some of the things we've already discussed.
When you weaponize the courts and you destroy the value of equal opportunity by replacing it with equity, you get a society in which some people are allowed to shoplift, right?
Right.
Which matches a prediction that I made back in 2017 where you were going to have reparations in every interaction across the board at all scales, which cannot work.
That is not a viable solution, even if you thought it was desirable.
And, you know, you can't have courts that tell some people that they can steal and other people that they can't because what you then get is mayhem.
Well, I mean, we saw that.
Even in the tiniest interactions, we saw the demand for reparations between individuals for historical wrongs at Evergreen and moving forward.
In every classroom.
You know, insane, insane activist students who'd been sent by faculty who said, I'm going to take the cake.
Like, I'm literally going to take the cake that is the retirement cake for someone who's put in 40 years of service doing an honorable job.
That's mine now because I have a misunderstanding in my head that your ancestors hurt my ancestors.
Yep.
I want to clarify one thing I said in every classroom.
We didn't allow this stuff in our classroom, nor did it get demanded in our classroom.
But it was demanded of us by colleagues who used ideas like this so-called progressive stack in which your right to ask a question was literally defined by your demographic characteristics and how much oppression your ancestors supposedly faced, which is obscene and insane and not functional and not functional.
And you know what it does?
It reduces the quality of discussion in the classroom to a very low level, which hurts everybody, including the oppressed people that you were ostensibly trying to help.
Of course it does.
And so we see that was always embraced by people on the supposedly left side of the political spectrum.
But it has become the progressive stack, which is precisely what it's called.
I think you and I first ran into it during Occupy, right?
Where people were being allowed to speak based on how...
I can see from my eyes what I think the level of oppression your ancestors experienced were, right?
Like, this isn't racist.
But the progressive stack has now become de facto and sometimes explicitly the way that decisions are made by Blue Team.
We privilege you based on your sex and your race and other things as well.
But because it's the opposite direction that the old school sexism and racism looked like, we're going to call ourselves awesome.
And you can call yourself whatever you want, but you're not.
Yeah, and of course the height of this is the most powerful job on earth is now being contended for by somebody who has no characteristics that would make them capable of doing that job and what little track record we have suggests that they are derelict of duty, right?
So what is the argument for them?
There is none and that is effectively the so-called progressive stack and you can see just how dangerous that idea gets if you let it get away from you.
I have said this before, and I've been saying it on Twitter recently, but it'll be awesome when we have a female president, just because that'll be awesome, just like I hope for awesome male presidents.
Having Kamala Harris be the first female president in the United States would be such a shameful embarrassment For women, and it would reinforce the sexism that does still exist in many people's heads and hearts.
The idea that this is what female leadership could look like.
As you have said over and over again, she has no demonstrable skills or accomplishments.
Biden literally said before he was choosing a VP that he was going to choose a woman.
So we know that she was an affirmative action hire.
We know that.
I can't imagine how anyone is listening to her, looking at her track record, choosing to check that box.
And I hate identity politics, but in particular, I cannot understand how any woman who has self-respect is looking at her going like, yeah, she's going to effectively represent womanhood for the rest of history as the first female president when she is Far worse than incompetent.
It's despicable.
It demonstrates exactly the inverse of what you need in a first woman president.
All right, so we were talking about the destruction of basic values.
We've talked about equal protection under the law, equal opportunity.
The next one is, of course, the right of parents to We're good to go.
What you have here is the Democratic Party actually arguing that even when parents are present, that the federal government is in a better position to dictate what's in the interests of their children, including destroying their fertility and their sexual function, fostering their delusions.
So this is, it's an obscene abrogation of a principle that has governed every functional society in history, which is the idea that we run society for the well-being of children.
Yes, precisely.
And some of the ways that the Blue Team, specifically the Biden-Harris administration, are accomplishing this are by borrowing these fictitious ideas like gender identity, which don't exist, right?
This is not a scientific thing.
Gender identity.
This year, Biden-Harris Made sweeping reforms of Title IX. Title IX has been weaponized for a long time now, at least since the Obama administration.
I don't know if it was happening before then, but I believe that Title IX, while there were a number of ways to interpret it, that some of the original interpretations of Title IX were for the good.
They really did do good for many people, not just, you know, girls in sports, which is how it's often narrowly understood to have been originally intended.
But starting in the Obama administration, Title IX has been devastating for many, many people.
And this year there were even more reforms by the Biden-Harris administration that now give protected status not just to sex, but to gender identity, which again is a fiction.
So you can claim to be whatever gender identity you want with no check, no nothing.
And immediately, all the things that fall under that, which who knows, because given it's not a real thing, you can put whatever in there that you want, is because it's protected, that further means that schools, and this is the interpretation of Gavin Newsom of those sweeping reforms of Title IX. Gavin Newsom in California,
governor of California, has interpreted those sweeping reforms of Title IX this year such that now schools are If a child says, I'm not the sex I am, but I'm going to call it gender identity, those schools can now keep that information from their parents and presumably everything else that goes along with that.
And so if a child starts going by a different name, starts Pretending because they're children and they engage in fantasy and they're trying to explore their identity, which is what children do.
They're pretending at school to be a totally different human being than they are at home.
The schools in California are now allowed to and allowed to keep that information from their parents, which is diabolical.
It's utterly diabolical.
Yeah, it is undermining something with literally hundreds of millions of years of Evolutionary history on the basis of a modern fad, which even if you thought that that fad had merit to it, you have to recognize the danger that there are things that you don't know about it yet.
So anyway, yes, it's as bad as it could be.
And the fact that children are on the losing end of that tells you something about how depraved this party has become.
Alright, the next value that I would argue has been inverted by the blue team is informed consent.
And I would argue that informed consent is one of these things that we have a narrow interpretation of because of the place that we become familiar with it from.
But that really, this is a fundamental right, as the Nuremberg Court decreed, and that fundamental right applies to anything novel that you might ingest or might have imposed upon you.
And so what I'm going to argue is that, okay, in the case of medicine, we understand informed consent means you have an absolute right to say no to anything, like a...
So-called vaccine for COVID, and you don't have to have a reason.
You can have an intuition that this is not in your interest, and that is sufficient.
You have the right to consent or not, and you have the right to do so on the basis of all of the information we have available, including somebody who needs to tell you, here are the things we don't know about this medicine.
You know, it's only been out for 10 years.
We don't know what happens to people who take it for longer than that, right?
We don't know what happens three decades after you started taking it.
But this is also a question with respect to food, right?
We have a party now that wants to declare from on high what it is that's safe and therefore what you have a right to know is in your food.
You know, at this point, we do not We don't know whether an mRNA vaccine has been applied to meat that we purchase.
We have a right to know that, and we don't know it.
We don't know whether or not this ridiculous coding appeal that has been applied to fruit to keep it, or fruits and vegetables to keep them longer lasting, is on them because it's been declared safe.
But of course, this is absurd because you're actually consuming this.
And it's allowed to be applied even to organic fruits and vegetables.
So you have no way of knowing.
You have no way of knowing.
The destruction of the organic standard has been long standing.
But the idea that a brand new coating can just be added is without any Any acknowledgement or ability for the consumer to tell.
As you were saying, you're basically using a sensu-lato definition of informed consent.
Buyer beware even more than ever before.
You buy an apple?
You buy an apple that says it's organic?
Oh, it's got a hidden coating on it that you aren't even allowed to know?
And you can't wash off?
How is that by any standard still an organic apple?
It's transparently wrong.
On its face, the idea that somebody has a right to put coatings on that you won't have any way of knowing are there and that you are therefore going to ingest because they've decided it's safe based on, you know, you can do the exact same analysis that you did with the COVID vaccines.
Yeah.
How long has this coating been in existence?
Right?
Not long enough for them to have done a study of what happens if you eat vegetables with this stuff on it for 10 years.
So they cannot say it is safe because they do not know.
So, yes, informed consent is sacrosanct, and they're making a mockery of it, and that is reason enough to throw these people out on their ear.
Okay, then there's the issue of environmentalism, which has been so broken by the blue team that now people see the claim of environmental protection as synonymous with climate, as if there aren't hundreds of different threats to the environment.
So not only have they fed us nonsense over the issue of climate, where we can't even know what's true based on the pollution of the claims, Largely based on models which are themselves not capable of testing anything, but they have abrogated responsibility across all other environmental issues.
This party that was once able to at least claim that as a mode of superiority over the competing party has now abandoned ship with respect to all sorts of environmental protection, and it is now totally obsessed with one issue, which is Unknowable because they've polluted the scientific mechanism that would allow us to figure out how serious a problem it is.
Can I just say a couple words about that?
Sure.
Because I wrote about that issue, those issues, natural selections this week.
And we have, you can share my screen here if you like, the world weather attribution, which is its own mess.
We saw in Forbes this week, and there's a Yale site that is saying, oh, these recent storms.
Helene?
Helena?
I think it's Helene.
Helene.
Helene and Milton.
We now know because climate scientists associated with world weather attribution and other places have clearly found that they're worse than they would have been without climate change.
So I clicked through and found claims like this one.
I'll just read one here.
Quote, we find that heavy one-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20 to 30 percent more intense and about twice as likely in today's climate, that is 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change.
So just take that sentence there.
Okay, so what is actually going on with regard to the research that they did is it's entirely models, and there are, you know, a ton of problems with models as we have talked about before, Especially when people are using models and then pretending that what they were using were empirically generated data.
Very, very different categories of evidence.
But the models that these guys are using find that higher temperatures are more likely to produce bigger storms and that the temperatures are higher now than they used to be.
So those are the two things that their models are producing.
Put aside for the moment whether or not that's true.
Like, that's the usual place where we get stuck, right?
Like, the models may just be wrong.
That's all you've got.
We don't know.
But assume for the moment that the models are right, this sentence has in it a conclusion.
The world is warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change.
The conclusion is it's human-induced climate change that caused the problem.
But there's nothing in their research that actually says that.
They have gone in with an assumption about if we find, presumably, that worse storms because higher temperatures, higher temperatures than before, that's model-based, and if we find that it's higher than before, therefore the storms are worse, then it's human-induced climate change, it's anthropogenic climate change.
But they literally didn't do that work at all.
That is simply an assumption masquerading as a conclusion.
And it is, again, I don't know how many times I've said this word in this podcast, but it is diabolical.
And as I also say here, exactly as you did, the environment may be, you know, I don't know, the First Amendment is vying for it at this point, but the environment may be the most important issue of all to me.
I am a proud environmentalist.
I don't know if I can say I'm a proud feminist anymore, but I'm a proud environmentalist, always will be, always have been, have some ideas, a lot of them based on what we have experienced in the world in many far-flung places, about how we could actually be protecting our environment.
And the conflation of protecting the environment with climate change is bewildering and horrifying, especially given that climate science is largely a racket.
And here's one perfect example of it being a racket.
Even if you accept their models, the conclusion they've come to has nothing to do with the models that they've produced.
Nothing.
It's unrelated.
They have just gone in with an assumption and tacked it onto the end as if it's the conclusion.
It lies all the way down.
Yeah, it's completely uninteresting.
You know, it's almost a tautology.
I mean, because really what it says is you've got more energy in the system, therefore it will increase the amplitude of the stuff circulating in the system.
No kidding.
And then the point is, well, do you have more energy circulating in the system?
And of course, it's a complex system, so you don't know, because you have all kinds of factors.
That's true, but I think you're actually missing my main point.
Like, that's all about the models, and are the models true in all of this?
But is anthropogenic climate change the reason that things are getting worse?
Well, maybe.
I suspect that our industrial behavior is affecting climate.
I don't know because I don't trust any of the research that's being done.
But, huh, you've been talking to some people and we've been talking about some other possible reasons that the climate might be changing that have nothing to do with our activities here on Earth, right?
Are there other possible reasons that climate change might be happening that aren't anthropogenic?
Yes, there are.
Why are those never in the list of hypotheses?
Because they're never even proposed as hypotheses.
They are not on the list of possibilities.
The only thing that we are allowed to conclude, if the models conclude that the climate is changing, is that the climate is changing because of human behavior.
That is the only thing on the list, and that is not science.
That is not how science is done.
It is not only the only thing we are allowed to conclude.
It is, as best as they can arrange it, the only thing we are allowed to consider.
That's my point.
I know it's your point.
Yes.
I know it's your point.
But the point is, it will spit out a tautology every time.
Yes.
For lack of a better metaphor, this obsession with climate, which is based on circular reasoning, which doesn't mean we don't have a climate problem, but we don't know because we have circular reasoning built into the way we get here.
But it sucks up all the oxygen in the room and turns it into CO2. I mean, that's it, right?
You can't discuss any other possibility.
In addition...
It puts all of these resources, and I was voting this morning, and there are a number of things in the state of Washington having to do with carbon, right?
And definitely, in order to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic climate change, you have to deal with carbon.
Maybe.
But that's literally the only thing that we're allowed to consider.
And that's where all these resources are going.
And that's where the corporations are getting their kickbacks with regard to mitigating carbon.
How about something other than carbon?
Like, that's the way science works.
We're not allowed to.
We need to consider all of the possible alternative explanations for why we're seeing what we're seeing.
And if we don't, we haven't done science.
Yep.
No, this is, it's become a racket.
Alright, so conservation.
We have the formerly, the party that cared about the environment has surrendered on caring about the environment has been obsessed with one issue and doesn't even allow us to consider other things.
And, you know, on a very different front, we have now gone from aspiring to judge people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin to now being hyper-acute, acutely focused on the color of people's skin.
In fact, we are told that it's a requirement that we do this in order to be equitable.
So that's obscene for us to take one of the great triumphs of the 20th century liberalism and go into such a regressive mode where we become race-obsessed.
Again, it's the inversion of what it is to be American.
And then the last category here under the inversion of all of these values is what has been done on the blue team's watch to truth-seeking.
And this is actually the equivalent of blinding ourselves in an effort to keep civilization running and figure out what opportunities exist and what hazards we may face.
What we've done is we've taken the only processes that allow us to do this well so that we get better over time and we have replaced the truth-seeking with activism.
And we are told that this is a good, right?
In the same way that we are told we must be race-obsessed in order to be fair.
We have to be activists in order to seek truth, which means obscuring truth, right?
Because activists are not about truth.
You have to choose, as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out repeatedly, you have to choose which of these things is your mission.
You can't do both.
So we now have activist professors who will lie to us about gender and climate and everything else because they think the greater good is served by us coming to believe some simplistic version of reality.
We have activist judges who are now altering the law and persecuting some individuals based on perceived flaws of character and letting others go scot-free.
We have bureaucrats who are acting as activists rather than just simply trying to apply the rules that they are charged with applying.
And we have collusion with social media to silence people who are speaking truths that are somehow viewed to be counterproductive.
And the universities themselves.
And Hollywood.
Right.
By whatever mechanism that is happening.
Right.
All of these things have become places where people do not understand what responsibility they do have with respect to the public.
And they have taken on some responsibility that they were never charged with that destroys their ability to do what they're supposed to be doing.
And it's wrecking civilization.
Or they do understand and there's compromise.
Yeah, which is why I say in the Hollywood case, we don't know why they're doing it, right?
They're telling worse stories that can't possibly compel anybody.
You would seem obvious that they should go back to telling complex stories that have enough nuance to be worth paying attention to, but they can't help themselves but lecture us.
Maybe that's about something.
Okay, next category entirely.
We step out of the values question.
And the blue team has been absolutely steadfast and ruthless in handing over our national and individual sovereignty to organizations over which we do not have influence.
So I would point to the World Health Organization, which masquerades as a global governmental body, but is actually in large measure a private entity fueled by private money, like pharma money, and under private direction.
The WHO sought, we barely beat them, But they sought the right to tell us what we were allowed to discuss, what medications we were allowed to take, what medications we would be forbidden.
They sought their right to...
And which ones we would be forced to take.
We would be forced to take, including gene therapies.
They actually had that spelled out in their document.
They wanted the right to reallocate, for reasons of equity, the location of medications.
So if you can't stop people from taking ivermectin for COVID, you can simply move all the ivermectin to some other part of the world so people can't access it.
I mean, this is obscene, and the US has been pushing it.
They've also taken our sovereignty and they have destroyed it by partnering in the Five Eyes Alliance so that they can effectively take things that your government is forbidden to do to its own citizens and they can farm that work out to other governments.
We got another hint of this yesterday, shocking actually, that we now have documentation Where the Brits have been charged with destroying, quote-unquote, Musk's Twitter.
So this is not the Five Eyes necessarily, but it's...
They've been, what was the verb used?
They've been what with...
Charged.
Charged.
By whom?
By Five Eyes?
Presumably elites in the U.S. who find Twitter and its tendency to allow us to talk about things that can't be discussed elsewhere, right?
So they find this, of course, because zero is a special number, they find this galling, and so they want to destroy...
Twitter, and they've, you know, actually got plans.
They're not just going to gripe about it.
They're going to do what they can.
And then, of course, the UN. Similarly, actually, it is now pursuing many of the same rights, quote-unquote, that the WHO was pursuing when we barely defeated them this summer.
Yep.
Okay, next category involves the decimation of the Constitution.
Now, in this one, we have to be a little careful because the decimation of the American Constitution, I would say, is equal parts the responsibility of Republicans and Democrats.
What happened after 9-11, the Patriot Act, and what followed it began under the Bush administration.
It then continued under the Obama administration, and the two of them together have brought the Constitution to its knees.
In effect, what we have is the executive branch empowered to eliminate any constitutional right you might have on the basis that they are doing so to prevent terrorism.
Who gets to define what's terrorism?
The executive branch.
This can literally be done in secret.
The executive branch can decide you're a terrorist.
When the Department of Homeland Security says that trafficking in mystics and malinformation is terrorism, what they're telling you is, we reserve the right to eliminate all your constitutional protections because we say you're a terrorist.
What makes you a terrorist is the fact that you've made an error, you've told a lie, or you've said something true that's awkward for us.
If those things constitute terrorism, and they can literally pull you off any street in the world, and they can incarcerate you without your right to see the evidence against you, to even know what you're charged with, you don't have any constitutional rights.
So anyway, that's not the blue team or the red team.
That's the blue and the red team together.
However, you know what it isn't?
It's not Donald Trump.
He had no part in that.
And in fact, one of the- Nor did he embrace it when he was president.
Right.
Now, one of the things that I think is likely is that the reason that the blue team has this terrified response to Donald Trump is in large measure that they participated in giving the president powers of an emperor.
And they did that thinking it would never be in the hands of somebody who wasn't in on the duopoly's power structure.
They did not count on a political force like Donald Trump who would be elected as a populist and effectively decapitate one of the parties.
So they know how powerful the powers of the president now are.
They know that checks and balances have been destroyed on their watch.
And that now a president has incredible powers to do terrifying things, and they don't want that in the hands of anybody that they don't have control over.
So I think that's the big story in this election.
And the reason that so many of us have relatives with terror in their eyes telling us you can't possibly vote for that terrifying person is that they have been convinced of this by people who are privately terrified because of what they did to the structures that are supposed to protect us all.
That's not Trump being terrifying.
That's the people who destroyed the Constitution being terrified and, you know, and terrifying.
And yes, they've, through lots of psychological manipulation distributed through mainstream media and, you know, the manipulation of search results and all of that, they have convinced people to be terrified on their behalf.
Right?
But this is not reality.
This is the people who broke the system watching the possibility of the chickens coming home to roost and being frightened by it.
And, you know, we need the Constitution back, but I'm not the least bit troubled by the fact that the people who broke it are scared.
They should be.
Right.
And their playbook is producing fear in as many people as possible because fear is one of the most powerful behavioral motivators.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's your amygdala in charge at the point you're terrified.
Mm-hmm.
Lizard brain for the win.
All right.
There's a bumper sticker in that.
Okay.
Oh, I would also point out it was both red and blue that destroyed the Constitution.
When it was red, it was the neocons.
And guess who they now are?
Hey, they're Democrats.
Right.
So that's an argument that even though red and blue played equal parts in destroying the Constitution, the features of red that participated in it are now blue.
The party that I am voting for, that many people are voting for, appears to be the opposite party.
I continue to vote against the neocons.
Yes, right.
Perfectly consistent.
That's completely consistent across time.
Yep.
Okay, I've got a couple more reasons and then I want to make some special arguments that I think are not widely discussed.
So no new wars.
Trump can legitimately claim he started no new wars.
I think that's an extremely powerful argument in his favor.
And for those who talk about all the terrifying things that might be true or they claim were true, they very rarely discuss that.
There's the fact of comparative prosperity under Trump and, frankly, lying about our current economic state under Biden, the absurd claims over inflation, both the claim that it's much lower than it actually is and the pretense that it's the result of inflation.
Price gouging rather than money printing is insane.
And then there's the border.
So again, we've got a party that stands for every bad idea.
These people were beside themselves over Trump's claim that we needed a border wall.
I will point out, at the time, I said, I don't know if we need a border wall, but there's something weird about the idea that that's obviously a crazy idea.
Yeah, it was, as I remember, the best argument against it was that's really mean.
He sounds like a despot and that's really mean.
It's mean to all those people who want to come in.
There's a border.
It can be three-dimensional, right?
Instead of two-dimensional.
Is that a bad idea?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not nuts, right?
So, okay, in the aftermath of that, they, of course, imposed the inverse plan, which was not only to open the border, but to facilitate vast waves of people, which we now know includes prisoners who were released from foreign prisons.
I mean, of Of course, foreign countries who don't want to pay for housing people who can't be rehabilitated would send them north in this case.
Why wouldn't they?
Of course our enemies have noticed that our border is open and that if they want to bring people or stuff into the country, they can use that open border to do it.
Of course, this couldn't possibly be a bigger betrayal of the American public.
I don't know what to make of the idea that the plan all along was to use these people to shape elections.
But it certainly seems to be one of their benefits as far as the blue team is concerned.
And this couldn't be more cynical.
These are not Americans.
We have a right as Americans to...
Self-governance, to consent to the way we will be governed, to bring in people who aren't Americans, who don't necessarily even want to be Americans, and to have them shape the way elections unfold is a betrayal of the American public at its core.
And for them to pretend that either there's nothing they can do about the influx of people or that they've been successful in reducing that number, bullshit.
I saw it up close.
They have facilitated this for their own reasons, and that is, in and of itself, sufficient reason right there.
Okay.
Now I wanted to make some more general arguments that I think are necessary in this case.
One is, I know lots of people who sit out elections because they're sick and tired of not having somebody that they think represents them.
And my argument to them will be that this is not a moment to sit out an election or to vote for a third party.
And again, I'm somebody who has regularly voted third party in a presidential election.
My statement, which whenever I say it, I'm not sure how clear it is what I mean, but what I say is, if you don't have a candidate in this election, vote in the next one.
That means vote strategically this time to increase the chances that you will have a candidate in the next election.
I am not doing that this time.
The reason I am not doing that is twofold.
One, I believe that Donald Trump, by partnering with Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy and by Hinting that he is interested in partnering with the Unity Movement is actually in a position to do a tremendous amount of good.
good, if he carries through on his partnerships, even if the only thing he did was successfully launch a Make America Healthy Again movement and pull us out of the World Health Organization.
That would be such a slam dunk win compared to what the Democrats are proposing, that it is in and of itself sufficient justification.
So I would do it, frankly, just to pull us out of the who.
Just to pull us out of the who would be a major benefit for Americans.
So third party is not a good idea because this is an election in which Democrats have already cheated mightily across many different domains, including apparently bringing in people across our border and fighting laws including apparently bringing in people across our border and fighting laws that would require you to show an ID to But...
Sitting it out also has this other feature, which is there are a huge number of Americans who sit out elections because they don't care.
If you sit out the election because you do care and you're fed up, you cannot be distinguished from them.
And what happens is you disappear from the analysis done by political people because there's no reason to take care of you if it does not benefit them.
Now, I wish that politicians would take care of people because they were Americans and deserve to be taken care of.
But to the extent that your interests are not being addressed by the body politic, that is in part downstream of your own behavior if you're not voting, because what you're doing is you are taking your electoral power and not exerting it.
There's no reason to think about you in any analysis.
And if you listen to the analyses done by analysts, They are not talking about the vast sea of people who are fed up and sit out most elections because in general it's safe to ignore them.
So don't do that.
You are ruining your own power by synonymizing yourself with people who don't know or care enough to think about it.
That's not the group that you want to be partnered with.
Okay, now here's the argument that I really never hear that I think is profoundly important.
There is a There's discontinuity, a defect in the arguments we make around democracy.
I'm not arguing that there is something to do about it.
In fact, I think there's nothing that we can do about it, but we have an obligation, a moral obligation to notice it.
We have a president at the moment who is decrepit.
Whatever is in charge, whether it's our decrepit president or some other force whose name we don't know, is behaving in a belligerent way in a potentially nuclear theater in which anything could happen.
That has implications for every living person.
In fact, it has implications for life itself on this planet.
All of those people who don't happen to live in the U.S., don't happen to be citizens, have no influence over this process which holds their ability to survive in the balance.
And that is undemocratic.
We have a right to influence processes that have our ability to survive as an output.
So my point is, you have something precious.
You have some amount of influence over this system that is at the moment behaving in this crazed way.
And my point is, you have a moral obligation to exert as much force as you can in the direction of as much sanity as you can Because so many people would love to have some influence over this system, and they don't happen to have it because of where they live, which doesn't stop them from suffering from the consequences of what we do here, whether those consequences come from the engineering of viruses, the mandating of treatments, or the insane posturing over nuclear weapons, right?
These things affect everybody, and so if you have a vote, you have an obligation to exert it with as much wisdom as you can.
Okay, I usually say if you don't have a candidate in this election, you should vote so as to position yourself for the next election.
The question is, given the rate at which the tendency to cheat is accelerating, I'm not convinced that there is a next time in a meaningful sense.
Your ability to vote now and possibly bring about something beneficial is...
Before you.
And if you wait for years, yes, it's possible that you would have a candidate you liked better and an opportunity.
But there's also every chance that the abuse of the law and the IRS and all of these processes will result in no meaningful election in the future.
So it's now or never.
All right.
One more argument.
The argument is, and this is the argument, yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard came out as having joined the Republican Party.
Mm-hmm.
Here's why I'm not going to do that.
I am suggesting that you vote for Donald Trump, and indeed that you vote against Democrats, except where you have a very good reason.
A particular Democrat might merit your vote, but in general, we don't want this party empowered because of what it believes in.
And I guess I'll make two arguments.
One is...
That we aren't just electing a president.
We're also electing a House of Representatives and a good many senators.
And what we want is to empower Trump to do the right thing, which means a hospitable Congress in which he has the potential to do things and not just find himself...
Bottlenecked.
There's also all sorts of things at the state level where we also want people who hold these basic American values to be able to exert as much force in that direction as possible so that we can return to a rational country in which there are things that we can disagree over because, frankly, this stuff that we agree on is all in motion in the right direction.
And back to the reason that I'm not going to be joining the Republican Party anytime soon, I don't trust the Republican Party.
I grew up with a Republican Party that was very focused on essentially corporate rights, and those corporate rights were in general bad for Americans.
Now it may be that the Republican Party has transformed because The vast labor movement has now shown up on its door, and the Republican Party will look at that and think, huh, okay, we'll be that party, and the transition between these two parties will be complete.
But it is not true that all of our power in the system comes from the people that we elect.
There is also a question about the force we exert on that system once these people are elected.
And my feeling is that the unity movement is very powerful at the moment, And that what it should do is it should position itself so that it is in a place to reward behavior that fosters the values that bring the unity movement together.
These are fundamental American values.
And so that it can punish somebody who defects and decides to sell us out.
Right?
That position is powerful.
And so I would advocate voting for the red team and for Trump in this election, but for maintaining as much power as we can to influence the system in the right direction.
That that is the highest and best use of the votes that we have.
Awesome.
Let's hope so.
There it is.
All right.
We came across a story today that actually fits right into the middle of what you were just talking about, but rather than take another long aside in the middle of it, I'm going to tack it on here, and then it'll be done.
So when you were talking about the destruction of an inversion of basic values, you talked about not having equal protection under the law, and getting rid of merit, and taking power away from parents and families, Informed consent disappearing, conservation and climate becoming conflated with one another, judging people by the content of their skin rather than by their character, and others below that.
But then the next one was about truth seeking, which has to do, it's not the only way that we truth seek, but a large part of the way that all humans truth seek.
is through the scientific method, is by science.
And I say that as a scientist, we are scientists, and we are scientists not by accident having discovered that, oh, that turns out to be a cool way to discover truth, but precisely because we were interested in seeking truth, recognizing that the scientific process doesn't provide any guarantees that you will get there.
Nor will you necessarily know when you have gotten there.
But it is, while wildly inefficient and often inelegant, the best way that we know to untangle both complicated and especially complex systems and interpret what it is that is going on.
Do you agree with that so far?
Yeah, I mean, I would make a caveat or two.
They're minor, because I know exactly what you mean.
It's inefficient if just judged on the amount of work that gets done.
How many wrong turns you have to make if you're taking sufficient risks to make bold discoveries?
Right.
But there's no process that's more efficient if what you're measuring is how much truth you've found.
Right.
But I would say the inefficiency is actually a feature.
Because if you did only progress linearly, and it's an impossible world, but if you only ever progressed linearly such that you had never made any mistakes from which you had to backtrack and go back to the last node Which you were certain, then you are going to progress perhaps linearly but so excruciatingly slowly because you can't see outside of the line that you're in.
And I would argue, and I think you will agree, you actually will hit a wall.
You won't be able to continue to progress if you can't, if you only progress in these little micro steps as opposed to occasionally paradigm shift and, you know, discover that the foundation on which you're building your story, which you thought was true, is the wrong foundation entirely.
Well, I don't want to derail us, but I will make an argument at some point that the problem is we become overly sure based on the evidence that led us to believe that something is probably true and that a system in which you don't become more sure than the evidence suggests,
in other words, understanding how insecure the model that you're currently applying, and I don't mean a computer model, I mean a model, a cognitive model, But knowing how secure that thing actually is means that the jumps are small because, you know, although you may pursue an idea as if it's true, you won't be shocked that you run into a cul-de-sac if you didn't convince yourself that it simply was true at the point that you made whatever discovery led you there.
And how do you think that's different from what I was saying?
Because it doesn't require the, you don't have to backtrack to the extent that what you did is you said, pending this conclusion, X, Y, and Z, and then it turns out, ah, that conclusion turns out to be insecure for reason Y. That's just a semantic difference then.
It's not actually going like, oh, I have wasted six months of work and I have to undo everything.
It's, okay, we've got a decision tree and we're going to go down one road.
And sometimes you go down multiple roads at once.
We're going to go down a road and if it turns out to be the wrong road, we have to have retained the ability to know when the last time we were standing on ground that we are almost certain of was.
I agree, but I also have watched scientists make this exact error, where they don't, because they don't take the philosophy of science seriously, at the point that they've got something that starts spitting out all kinds of progress, they assume that what they've hit on is the truth, rather than something that overlaps the truth greater than the last thing they were looking at.
And so, just...
Problem of the humans doing this, who now are being trained to think wrongly about this because they have to, in the process of doing science, they have to become advocates for the funding in order to get where they're going.
So again, I don't think there's any disagreement here.
I'm not sure why you keep...
Well, you keep saying that what I'm saying is an error and it's not how science works.
So I think that you are stuck on something that you imagine I'm saying that I'm really absolutely not, but we've already gone on a while here, so let's move on.
Because this is precisely about truth-seeking being replaced with activism.
That people who are too certain, who've gotten their scientific credentials, are wearing all the garb that they're supposed to wear and know the language to speak, Who think that therefore they've been anointed.
And again, this is a replacement of science with effectively religious thinking.
That instead of people acting as scientists and retaining an element of uncertainty always, that even the things that they are most certain are true could turn out to be wrong, they become activists.
So we have this week, or actually it may even have just come out today, this story in the New York Times.
U.S. study on puberty blockers goes unpublished because of politics, Doctor says.
And I'm just going to read the first few paragraphs of this.
And there is one piece of published research that we can show.
But the point here is, in part, you know, I usually like to skip all the mainstream media reporting or even nature or science is reporting on something.
And go to the document that the scientists have produced that is supposed to tell you everything they did and why they think what they do so that you can actually assess it for yourself.
And the amazing part of this story is that we don't have those documents precisely because the people in charge who received millions of dollars in taxpayer money in federal grants have refused to publish it because they're concerned about the results being weaponized.
When, in fact, what they're concerned about is people reading their results and going, uh-huh, see, what?
Puberty blockers aren't a good idea after all.
So, the leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress, and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.
This is published again today, okay?
An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatment said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.
The doctor, Johanna Olson Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader multi-million dollar federal project on transgender youth.
Let's just click here.
This is back from 2015.
This is the organization that publishes Science.
Reporting on the NIH funding this first multi-site study of transgender youth in the U.S. with a $5.7 million award.
Since then, the amount of funding that this research team has gotten is closing in on $10 million.
But NIH, again, National Institutes of Health, for which everyone in our audience is now well familiar, but one of the main funders of scientific and medical research in the country, taxpayer-funded, awarded these grants.
So, 2015, Federal Project on Transgender Youth.
She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes, like breasts or a deepening voice, that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.
The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health.
An older Dutch study has found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.
But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr.
Olsen-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview.
Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvement, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
I'm going to read a few more paragraphs here, but first let's go to Chen et al.
This is a paper published in 2021, 2020, by this team, including, again, the person that we're hearing from here, Johanna Olson-Kennedy.
I did that badly.
Published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, about halfway between now and when the study was originally funded, called Psychosocial Characteristics of Transgendered Youth Seeking Gender-Affirming Medical Treatment, Baseline Findings from the TYC Study.
Remember, I'm here because in October 2024, Olson Kennedy is claiming, I'm not going to release the results of this study that has received almost $10 million in taxpayer funds, Because I don't want the results weaponized in any way.
I don't really trust them because the kids were probably doing fine in the first place.
The paper that they did publish, about halfway until now, halfway between original funding and now, finds, and this is just the results in the abstract as reported in the abstract, a total of 95 youth were enrolled in the cohort, mean age was 11 years old, and the majority were white and designated male at birth.
Elevated depression systems were endorsed by 28.6% of the cohort youth and 22% endorsed clinical significant anxiety.
About a quarter endorsed lifetime suicidal ideation, with almost 8% reporting a past suicide attempt.
A total of 316 youth were enrolled in the cohort.
Mean age was 16 years, the majority were white and designated female at birth.
Elevated depression symptoms were endorsed by half the cohort.
Over half endorsed clinically significant anxiety.
Two-thirds endorsed lifetime suicidal ideation, with a quarter reporting a past suicide attempt.
Life satisfaction was lower amongst both cohorts compared to population-based norms.
This is their report from five years ago, three, four years, three, four, five years ago, on exactly the cohorts that they were funded to write about, to research and publish the results on.
And here she is saying puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvement, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.
She is already on record in the scientific literature claiming exactly the opposite.
She is lying.
Oh, sorry.
She is lying.
That's amazing.
That is amazing.
So let me just read a couple more paragraphs from this.
But right there, this person who is claiming to be a scientist who's received millions of dollars in federal grant monies has lied to The New York Times about why she thinks that the results aren't what she wanted them to be and is therefore not going to publish the results, which she is frankly obligated to do because that's what federal grants require.
Well, she's obligated for more reasons than that.
I agree that that's one reason.
I know.
They're in really good shape when they come in, she says.
And they're in really good shape after two years.
Remember, again, how much suicidal ideation was there among this group?
And she and her team, a few years ago, said that this was wildly different from population-based norms across the population, age-matched.
They're in really good shape when they come in, and they're in really good shape after two years, said Dr.
Olson Kennedy, who runs the country's largest youth gender clinic at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
Reverse incentives much?
That conclusion—and here, here's how I find that paper.
The New York Times is actually doing something that almost looks a little bit like reporting here.
That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group.
And it wasn't a description.
It was a research paper.
In which Dr.
Olson-Candy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.
That's exactly the paper I was just reading from.
In the nine years since the study was funded by the NIH, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr.
Olson Kennedy's team has not published the data.
Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.
I do not want our work to be weaponized, she said.
It has to be exactly on point, clear, and concise, and that takes time.
She said that she intends to publish the data, but that the team had also been delayed because the NIH had cut some of the project's funding.
She attributed that cut, too, to politics, which the NIH denied.
The broader project has received $9.7 million in government support to date.
$9.7 million.
This person who runs, what was it, the largest...
Largest youth gender clinic at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles?
Patently, clearly, explicitly, has a conflict of interest.
She got almost $10 million in federal research grants in order to fund a study where she clearly assumed that the outcome would be the one that she wanted, on which she has based her entire career.
The results don't match what she wanted, and she is withholding publication.
And she is claiming weaponization.
She is claiming that she is concerned about the weaponization of the results.
This is actually a perfect match for what Team Blue is doing across the board.
It is a perfect match.
Team Blue is claiming weaponization of the Constitution.
Nope, that's you.
Like, that's you who's doing that.
This is weaponization of science.
Clearly they have results that they don't like because obviously to anyone with half a brain who is thinking scientifically forever knew that if you halt puberty in children there are going to be long-standing effects and they're not going to be fully reversible.
It is not safe.
It had no chance of being safe.
There is no The amazing thing here is that for some reason we get to see it this time.
The New York Times is actually reporting this.
They're not doing a perfect job.
Somebody screwed up.
Yeah.
People do not, in general, the lay public does not understand well enough what happened in the replication crisis.
Yeah.
But in the replication crisis, what we discovered, which was obvious to some of us that it was coming, and it is not limited to psychology, but the point is, in a environment in which you are rewarded for certain things, like publishing results that seem to mean something rather than things that negate something or don't show a result, What you get are fields that publish results that seem to suggest that certain things are true that then can't be replicated.
A, we're not incentivized to replicate studies that have already been done because the advantage of just discovering that something that you already knew happens to be true is small compared to claiming that you've discovered something novel.
But the point is when people looked at psychology, they discovered that most of what had been reported as conclusions that we have discovered about human cognition turned out to be not replicable because you couldn't see all of the studies that weren't they discovered that most of what had been reported as conclusions So in effect, a p-value, a p-value tells you something about the likelihood of
I'm now going to struggle because Michael is going to take me to task if I say one word out of place in describing what a p-value is.
But the p-values ostensibly tell you...
That your result is extreme enough to have not been likely to have been seen by random chance if there were no process happening in more than 5% of the cases.
95% significance is what the p-value measures.
And the problem is, you can't say anything about this.
Even if the studies are done correctly, if you've got a bunch of studies which showed no result, which didn't get published, and then the study in which you did see a result, again, 5% of the time you should expect that, did get published.
So, Anyway, what you have here is a rare glimpse where the study that didn't get published is on somebody's mind enough that you get to hear about it, and you get to hear the backpedaling and rationalization of, oh, you know...
In part, you should...
I think...
The reason I included you're obligated to put your research out there is because that may be part of what happened here.
There may be a tiny bit of accountability.
If you're going to get millions of dollars of taxpayer money in federal grants, they do check.
At least the NSF does.
I never was involved in NIH at all, but the NSF did.
Check on whether or not you had actually honored the terms of the contract, which you signed in order to get the grant money in the first place.
And it requires putting it out into the world.
And there's a whole lot of legitimate complaint, and we have participated in this, about federally funded research being paywalled.
If your taxpayer money went to fund the research, shouldn't that be open access?
And there is, of course, a big move for open access science.
There are some journals that are now open access, where even if you don't have a university login and don't know how to use Sci-Hub, you can actually get all the research that you want to get.
This is so much worse than that.
The fact that something is published in Cell, in the journal Cell, and you don't have access to it, and you have to ask a friend or wait for it to become available, is a problem.
But the idea that it's simply not out there at all because the person who got the money didn't get the result that they want and is going to hide behind a whole bunch of ideological jargon to protect her Conclusion that it's really cool to destroy children?
Like, that's several steps beyond the problem of scientific research being paywalled.
Yeah, and what she says is absolute doublespeak.
Yeah.
Right?
Oh, because they were doing really, they were in really good shape.
Really good shape.
Quantify that.
Oh, we did.
Oops, ooh, we published that.
Oh, except they really weren't in very good shape.
Right.
But, you know, really good shape is not a...
So what she's doing is saying her subjective assessment, which is contravened by the earlier report, which probably the reason that you're seeing this is that they did publish the earlier report, which raises the question, oh, what happened to those 95 kids?
Right?
So, you know, harder to hide when you've published the thing, when you were all rah-rah at the beginning, when you didn't realize it was going to demonstrate that the positive effect didn't exist.
Well, my prediction is that that earlier report was, I mean, that was also politically motivated.
Of course.
And so, you know, those really dire numbers, you know, what were they asking those kids that got, you know, that incredibly high rate of suicidal ideation in young people?
And so now she's going to, you know, look at different subsets of those questionnaires and use different definitions of various psychological terms and come up with like, oh, it's so sorry.
It was the earlier research that we published in 2021 that was wrong.
We didn't mean to get people so scared.
Turns out the kids were all right all along.
Well, not that all right.
Not all right enough not to require that we halt their puberty and then probably chop off their bits, but they were all right enough.
Yeah, and we see this across the polluted disciplines where, you know, the endpoints of a study change, some endpoint that was measured doesn't get reported in the end because something inconvenient happened.
But I would also point out, even the reporting here, like, okay, I'm glad the New York Times reported this story at all, but, you know, puberty blockers, they stave off the changes that accompany puberty.
Stave off, really?
How about prevent?
As in irreversible, right?
So they have an obligation to let people know that.
Also, it just strikes me, I feel like we have to have covered this many times.
Gender-affirming care.
Gender-affirming.
No, there are exactly two genders in play.
There's the gender you started out with, and there's the gender that you claim to think you have.
You are affirming one of these things and negating the other.
Yeah, and the term they use in that 2021 paper is designated male at birth.
Right.
Which is, you know, now we're signed, designated, affirming, like whatever fantasy in your head is reality.
That's post-modern bullshit and it has no place in science.
But even just at a mathematical level, gender-affirming care is a euphemism for something.
If we say, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of every doubt, and let's imagine that they're actually recognizing a world in which, for whatever reason, there are people who are quote-unquote born in the wrong body and that there's something positive to be done for them that's medical.
Even in that case, that we give them absolutely every one of their claims, this care is exactly as gender-negating as it is affirming.
Exactly.
So here we get back to this, you know, the Title IX reforms that Biden-Harris managed to push through this year, that now gives protected status not just to sex, but to gender identity.
It's going to be in there somewhere.
This totally fictitious category that they can make mean whatever they want because they made it up.
So they have total freedom to make it mean whatever they want.
And so whatever you currently believe to be your gender identity, that's what gets affirmed.
Right.
Whatever you were designated at birth, your mom thinks you are, your friends know you are, that would be negating your true self.
Right.
But in some sense, what I'm arguing is that they have accidentally picked a term that we can back out the exact mathematical meaning of it.
And so the idea...
This care negates one gender completely, the one you were born with, and it affirms one gender, the one you're transitioning to.
It's exactly equal parts gender-negating.
Now, if we were to start calling this care gender-destroying care or gender-negating care, that would be hate speech.
Right?
And so the idea that the system is two-tiered and that it's going to take two things that are mathematically equal and it is going to declare one of them a virtue.
But they're of course not actually mathematically equal because while there are two possible states, because remember sex is actually binary and because gender is downstream of sex and that's what we're really talking about, you know, And what they mean here is sex, because they're not talking about the 18,000 gender identities that some people think they have.
And really, if we're going to go there, how many people are there on the planet at this point?
Seven billion?
Eight.
I don't know.
There are extant on the planet right now, eight billion-ish gender identities, because it's that kind of a category.
It's just unique to the individual, and then there are two sexes.
Two and only two.
But, you know, your gender identity, whatever it is, is to the degree that it was assigned at birth, it was only assigned at birth because it is a perfect match for the sex that was observed at birth or before birth.
And so, yeah, there's two states, but there's only one state that you actually are.
Right.
Oh, I agree with you.
But my point is, even if we grant them the whole thing at best, even if everything they thought about the biology and the medicine were actually in some way true, which it's not, they're still left with a mathematical identity, which is it is exactly equal parts gender affirming and gender destroying.
And therefore we can detect what they're really up to, because the point is, if we say gender destroying, Yes, you know, we're studying the consequence of gender-destroying care.
They're going to freak out, and that tells us what kind of a racket this is.
You know what it sounds to me like you're doing, though?
What?
Is you're weaponizing the research that this hapless woman, director of the nation's largest gender-destroying clinic, It is hard to engage in hate speech without weaponizing.
I'm sorry, I just haven't found a way to do it.
I don't think you are sorry, though.
You don't seem apologetic.
So I would also point out another little contradiction that this reveals here.
There's so many.
I haven't done the research on the so-called puberty blockers and what their status is, but These drugs were licensed for things like chemical castration.
And also, more relevantly, in some cases, to postpone early puberty.
Which, of course, early puberty is happening in the U.S. because of all of the crap that is in our environment and our diet.
That's a new thing.
That's a new, modern, mostly American problem that is itself caused by the stuff that we're doing.
So yeah, let's just give another toxin on top of the toxins to supposedly undo the toxins, but actually just increase the toxin load.
But here's what I want to know.
I want to know two things.
I want to know if the puberty blocking for healthy kids who claim to be some sex other than the one they were born into, whether that is off-label, and I want to know whether the drugs that are used are under patent.
Because the question is, we went through a lot of shenanigans during COVID where off-label drug use, which is frankly a cornerstone of modern medicine, right?
Doctors prescribe off-label all the time.
It's something they have a right to do.
A pharmacist doesn't have the right to tell you not to, and yet they did.
So I want to know whether or not these are off-label, and if off-label is just fine in this case because it happens that the drugs are profitable, and so off-label is cool, and that off-label only becomes a problem at the point that something is off-patent.
Yeah, I don't know.
But I wanna ask one other question.
I think I found the dog that didn't bark here.
You seem pleased?
I am pleased.
The dog that didn't bark is a great thing, right?
Because it's the kind of evidence...
You want to say what that means before you...
Yeah, it's a Sherlock Holmes thing.
I think it's Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes, where the evidence that something had occurred was in the form of a dog who really should have barked, but didn't in the case.
If the story you're telling me is true, why don't we see this thing in the story?
Right.
Here's the thing we don't see in the story.
Obstetricians who have been sued for assigning the wrong gender at birth to people who later went on to transition.
Where are those lawsuits?
Because, I mean, think about it.
These people do tremendous harm.
These obstetricians.
Right.
Oh, it's terrible.
Right.
Midwives.
And you can imagine the cross-examination, you know, doctor.
Why did you think this was a boy?
Well, his penis had something to do with it.
I mean...
Right?
So where are those cases?
You know, they're...
Where are those cases and where are the methodological- Too busy having their suicidal ideation relieved by toxins.
Right, by a cocktail of toxins and the prospect of fertility destroying surgery.
Yes.
Yeah, but you would imagine, were this not a nonsense landscape of absurd bullshit, you would imagine that there would be lawsuits for obstetricians who had gotten the gender wrong.
And I'm sure there are cases where there's some sort of a disorder.
No doubt.
Oh, yes.
With people with actual disorders of sexual development, DSD is intersex, whatever modern language you want to use.
And there have been some tragic decisions.
But amongst people who were born with a recognizably normal physiology, where are the cases where the obstetrician has been successfully sued for having misassigned a gender?
It doesn't exist.
And where are the analyses of how an obstetrician should identify your correct gender if not by the basics of gross morphology and failing that karyotype?
Well, that's, I mean, usually kids don't get karyotyped at birth, but a lot, you know, certainly both of our kids were born.
We did not want to know the sex before they were born, but we had karyotypes and sealed envelopes because of, you know, prenatal testing and prenatal testing.
And if there had been any ambiguity, which there was not, we could have matched the, you know, Obvious babies in front of us to the karyotypes in the envelopes that match the genetic testing from many months earlier.
And at the fact that we found a perfect match, as you will, in well over 99.9% of cases, I feel like those lawsuits would be over.
Yeah.
Right.
But still, these lawsuits and their absence, the methodological descriptions of how to correctly assign a gender at birth, The dog that didn't bark.
Did not bark.
Alright.
You got anything else?
I think we've covered the territory.
Okay.
Well, we'll be back in actually 15 days.
We're going to be back on Thursday of the week when Americans vote, except most people are voting early because that's the way we do things now.
It's all very normal.
It would be great if by, what will that be, November somethingth, Uh, 7th maybe?
Before we see you next?
Wow, nothing on my computer wants to make things easy for me.
We'll see you on November 7th, Thursday, November 7th.
It would be great if by then we knew who was going to be the next president of the United States.
I suspect we might not.
Even though it feels like we used to be able to do this, right?
It used to be an expectation.
Well, there are more people, and so we have to count the higher numbers.
Oh, that's true.
It's the more people problem.
Yeah, that's the problem.
It would be great if we knew who the next president was before we saw you next, but we will see, and we'll talk about it when we do.
See you next.
In the meantime, do get out and vote.
And find us on lots of places, including Locals, where we've got our Q&As, one of which we just had last weekend.
The Watch Party's going on now.
We will have early release of podcasts, and there will be a couple of more podcasts that you have recorded already with great people coming up, at least one, maybe two before the election.
Your conversation with Ed Dow just went out, I believe.
Yes, it did.
Lots of people are enjoying that one.
Excellent conversation.
So, you know, and those become public, but early release, always on Locals.
At darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, you can find our upcoming schedule.
You can find our store, which has got lots of great stuff, including do not affirm, do not comply, which, you know, you shouldn't affirm or comply.
Right.
Yeah.
I say that.
I never do.
Yeah, I know you don't.
You have never been doing that for a very long time.
Beginning to get good at it.
Yeah, absolutely.
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