Election 2024: Rescued Republic? The 250th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 250th 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 election results. The outcome—Trump in office, and both legislative bodies having a Republican majority—has the strong potential to be positive for everyone, and yet so many people are scared or angry. We discuss why, and provide some reasons that letting go of your fear and anger i...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 250, is it?
Yes, it is.
What?
Incredible.
I'm Dr.
Brett Weinstein, you are Dr.
Heather Hying, and we are now living in the future.
I can't stop smiling.
I don't know what that's about, but it's definitely about something.
It just actually feels like a future that may unfold in which we are all capable of living up to our potential in health and prosperity.
Let us hope.
Well, in a world in which we are all capable of living up to our potential, I have no doubt that I will be falling short of living up to my potential.
Because that was one of the things that your teachers most likely to say, most liked to say about you.
Virtually every teacher I had until I don't even know when said that.
And at some point I had...
Tell that guy something going on, but...
Yeah, not performing to potential.
And I did expect that to show up on my tombstone.
But, you know, whatever, you roll with it.
Well, America, let us work on living up to our potential.
And we're going to talk about the election.
Yes.
Of course.
That is what we're going to be talking about.
But first, as always, we have three ads right at the top of the podcast.
And they're actually, we always pick our sponsors carefully, but all three of these this week...
um are are apropos because they all um are in some ways about health about human health and of course one of the main ways that um that trump managed to win this time was by uh signing on with kennedy and the maha movement make america healthy again and uh and Yes, we can.
Yes, we will.
Yes, we must.
And so, without further ado, our three sponsors, all of whom could be seen as part of the burgeoning Maha movement.
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On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about the risks of agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, dyes in our food, seed oils, and so much more.
One thing we haven't talked much about are the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
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And I've checked, and at least some of that scientific research that says all those things is actually good research.
You have some actual science behind that science, yeah.
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You know, I don't know why I was musing to myself yesterday about the wonder of bees and the farming of honey.
Well, we ended up driving past in our recent adventures, some of which we'll talk about today, bee boxes in a few places in the country.
And we were considering the different flavor profiles, the different species that those bees will have been Visiting, and therefore the different flavor profiles of the resulting honey, and whether or not the bee boxes that we saw in Montana could possibly be active right now.
All of these things.
It's amazing, amazing to partner with these little tiny creatures who can go out and collect something that you couldn't possibly collect on your own and turn it into something awesome.
Just, it's stunning.
It's stunning.
And the fact that we actually know the story from collecting wild honey, which is its own kind of adventure, To partnering with the bees and bringing them in on the thing and anyway.
And the bees that we're partnering with are pretty much all female and they're not confused about their sex at all.
Whoa.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if that's a good point.
It's a reality-based bees.
It's a true point.
Yeah, it's not.
Reality-based.
I think all bees are reality-based.
They kind of have to be.
Bees are based.
Bees are based.
Okay, right.
Which brings me to our final sponsor, which is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
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Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
It says no really, but yes, really.
There are all sorts of health benefits that we could mention from being heart healthy to helping prevent Alzheimer's to being high in antioxidants.
But you've been living on this planet, you know these things.
Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets and it's used in everything.
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The circle where he's known as that being this one right here.
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When we first tasted TJ's farm fresh oils, we couldn't believe how delicious they were.
They were, they, they were sent.
You got this.
I do.
You totally have this.
Totally.
Yeah.
You got this.
I'm going to go back to reading.
Because, um, TJ, the olive oil hunter, he's on our team.
Yes.
Ninja.
Sorry.
The olive oil ninja.
Um, we were sent three varietals with noticeably different flavor profiles and we used them in Man, it's going to be a rough one.
I'm not used to living in the new world, but we use them in all the usual ways.
A light dressing on a caprese salad, marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting.
That was the carrots.
And never been disappointed.
And we just got another three bottles.
All different, all extraordinary.
I, meaning Heather, drizzled Yeah, these are just, they're not as universal, the scripts.
I, Heather, just drizzled a little on one of the season's final heirloom tomatoes last night.
Last night, but you ate it, so you could have claimed it.
You're allowed to have claimed my drizzle.
This has now gotten very odd.
But let's put it this way.
The olive oil is extraordinary.
Some of the olive oil was drizzled on one of the season's final heirloom tomatoes on a recent night.
Olive oil drizzles.
With just a few flakes of coarse sea salt and a sprinkle of apple cider vinegar.
And wow, it was so good.
Do you see how I corrected that seamlessly so nobody knew?
No one noticed.
No one will remember.
I am the script ninja.
All right.
Are you?
No.
And what about the orange olive oil cake?
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All right.
I survived.
Yes.
Yes, you did.
Yes.
Yes, you did.
Hopefully everyone in our audience did as well.
You can show my screen here.
So this happened.
We've got a...
Oh, yeah.
We've got what has been called, even by talking heads on CNN, a mandate.
312 votes in the Electoral College, popular vote by several million.
Trump did it.
And one of the things we're going to be talking about today is how people who really didn't want him to win are reacting.
But first, I thought maybe we should talk about why we see this as really a win for everyone, with a couple of exceptions.
Before we do that, you have live results here?
This is 270towin.com.
This is not a site I'm not familiar with as some.
But what is the current standing of the House of Representatives?
Can you see that?
213 Republicans, 200 Democrats, 22 still undecided, according, again, to 270 to win at, you know, almost noon Pacific on Thursday, November 7th.
Right.
Okay.
So what we have is a...
And as long as, sorry, as long as we're doing that, let's just show Senate as well, which is at 52 to...
The Democrats picked up a couple since I checked last, 52 to 46-ish, although what's up with the purple?
I don't know what that is.
Okay, so let's just put it this way.
This is a multi-dimensional win for the coalition currently functioning under the red banner.
We have a mandate at the level of the Electoral College victory.
We have a win at the level of the popular vote, which means that we are not going to have the usual annoying battle over whether or not this is the result of the abomination of the Electoral College.
And I'm not saying that.
I believe the Electoral College to be an abomination.
But nonetheless, we can all understand the argument that there's something about the Electoral College that puts us in the predicament of having presidents who were not elected by a majority of the public.
We have at least one of the two houses of Congress.
The Senate is going to be in Republican hands by at least a small margin.
And we have the strong likelihood that the House will be as well.
Yep.
That is an incredible Incredible situation to have unfolded, given how contentious this election was and how contentious recent elections have been.
That is a commanding position of power.
It opens the possibility...
You could probably take off my screen so I can...
It opens the possibility for substantial change, whatever you think about whether the direction of that change is positive or not.
But at the very least, in the beginning of this administration, assuming that over the course of the next three months that nothing remarkable happens to upend what actually is brought into power on January 20th, So, we are living in a new world.
We should talk about...
You wanted to start by talking about what people's reaction is and what our perspective on...
No, I don't want to start with the reactions.
I do want to get specifically to talking about how I understand how this affects women, specifically, since women are a demographic that other than white women, I believe, did not tend to vote for Trump, or it wasn't the majority anyway.
But I don't want to go there first.
What I wanted to go first was that this really does feel like, and I think really the entire conversation today, except I do want to show a little bit of how I feel like the New York Times is already messing with things later on, but this really does feel like a win for everyone.
And, you know, there are some exceptions to that.
It's not a win for, you know, the criminal illegal immigrants who are coming across the border.
It's not going to be a win for them.
It's not going to be a win for, you know, the Troons, you know, the autogonophiles who are hanging out in women's bathrooms.
It's not going to be a win for pedophiles.
It's not going to be a win for, you know, these core nasty groups.
But other than that, I think it's really going to be a win for everyone.
I do think it's a win for everybody, almost.
But I wouldn't actually start with all of these people who think that they are in one way or another going to be targeted.
I certainly hope it's not a win for pedophiles, for example.
But even, let's take, you know, troons, which you want to define troon?
Troon is a word that TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, have...
Actually, I don't know the origin of the term, but it has been showing up a lot in sort of TERF space as a word for an autogynophile, that being a man who is cosplaying as a woman in public because he gets off on it.
That is what autogynophilia is.
And so these are people who are passing themselves as trans people, but are honest, honestly, about the fact of their motivations being one of sexual kink.
Whether or not they call it kink or fetish, I don't care, right?
And so this should be a really obvious point to certainly all women who have ever gone into a public bathroom, Or who have imagined what it might be like in a women's prison or a domestic crisis center.
If there were men around who are actually well aware that they're men, but are dressing up as women in order to get regarded as women and get off on that.
So, Troon.
Okay, so let's take Troons as a test case of the argument that you and I are making that this is a win for almost everybody.
And the people I would put outside of that category are some tiny group of ultra-elites who have somehow commandeered the system.
Those people are not liable to win from this, but let's take the example of A troon.
Somebody who has had their kink promoted to a protected status and is using that to take advantage of civilization.
Well, I want to actually build an analogy that is increasingly, I think, useful in understanding for everybody involved in this conversation where I and I think we believe we actually are.
I want to imagine that we are on a ship together.
And the ship has been under the command of a captain that many of us have come to understand to be not only insane and incapable of guiding the ship, but effectively suicidal in his misuse of his power over the ship.
That captain puts the whole ship in danger.
What we have just been through, this electoral cycle, is the equivalent of a mutiny.
And I don't, although mutiny and insurrection in this analogy are obviously analogous.
Oh.
They are analogous in this metaphor.
How about that?
I do not mean to suggest that anything that took place during this electoral cycle has any relationship other than metaphorical to an insurrection.
This was an insurgency within the confines of the Constitution.
in which a lead mutineer has commandeered power and wants to govern the ship in some different way.
Everyone on the ship is effectively depending on the ship remaining afloat.
Troons may have been taking advantage of the rest of us by virtue of having their kink promoted to a protected status, but they are also dependent on the fact that the ship stays afloat, that it doesn't run out of water and food, that somebody is properly navigating that it doesn't run out of water and food, that somebody is properly navigating and provisioning the ship so
And I think the irony of the moment is you have something like half the population convinced that something terrible has just happened, And that half the population, I think, does not appreciate that actually the terrible thing was already well underway.
We were living under what was at least a turnkey totalitarian state in which actually the key had begun to be turned and we had all sorts of advantages, all sorts of examples of You know, political prisoners, lawfare being wielded, people being disenfranchised, borders being opened for cynical reasons that we can't know.
The costs were accumulating for the insane captain's perspective on how the civilization, or the ship in this case, was to be run.
And so...
At some level, the fact that you believe that something terrible has happened in this mutiny doesn't mean your life wasn't just saved by the mutineers.
You may not get that, but we should all be able to agree that we are bound together and that what we need is for the ship to be well governed and what we disagree over is which of these prospects was the terrifying one.
So I actually want to share just a little exchange that I had this morning with a friend, a female friend, who I believe voted for Harris, who texted me to say, how are you feeling post-election?
And I said, I am feeling very hopeful, elated even.
Even though many people in the country feel crushed right now, like this was not the result they wanted, and I believe that you are among them, as I was eight years ago when the same result came down, I am confident that this administration, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard and Massey and Vance and more, can raise the prospects and spirits of all Americans.
And I go on, and she responds...
I appreciate that you are feeling hopeful, and I'll take some of that hope.
I do feel a bit disappointed, but mostly a little scared, and I hope that you who aren't, and I'm not ad-libbing here, are right.
And so that is not the kind of interchange that we're seeing online, right?
What we're seeing is the extreme neurotic output of people who are for some reason feeling like they need to release that all into the public sphere.
So I want to remind people, or if they're not old enough to remember it, to tell them that it existed and talk about it.
I want to discuss what it is to be a patriot in this context.
A patriot, upon losing an election, hopes that the people who have just gained power succeed in governing the country well.
You may fear that they won't.
You may believe that what they say would lead us in the wrong direction.
But you have to leave open the possibility of being pleasantly surprised.
And I think in this case, there's been so much ink spilled demonizing President Trump that many people cannot imagine that he will take us anywhere positive.
But you're jumping the gun, especially in light of all of the excellent people who have accumulated on his team.
You are jumping the gun to imagine that you know what the future will bring.
The question, to me, as somebody who I think took a great deal of risk here, is Will something happen?
Will we be betrayed?
Will some set of forces unfold behind the scenes that we don't understand that will take what could have been a marvelous positive turn for the Republic and turn it into some kind of negative?
It's possible.
Has it decided to go on defense?
Is that why a victory of this sort was allowed to happen, that the deep state has decided that it was better off to hand the Trump administration a problem it can't solve and then to battle it behind the scenes?
Lots of things could happen here.
But the idea that you know that what's taken place is definitely bad is unacceptable and it's unpatriotic.
You have to give them the opportunity to pleasantly surprise you even if you have the expectation.
That it won't happen.
And I would point out you also, because there are so many good people who have accumulated in the circle around President Trump, you also have an awful lot of people who can exert pressure and attempt to steer away from some of the dark forces.
And I do think the snakes are already at work.
The snakes are very interested in commandeering the Trump administration and turning it to their ends, whatever they might be.
But, you know, We're not blind.
We understand how politics works.
And the idea that we are in an excellent position having invested in trying to make this happen, an excellent position to critique it if it goes awry.
So anyway, I guess I would...
I hope that...
Lots of people who have believed that this was effectively going to be the end of democracy in America will recognize that it's interesting, if that's where we're headed, that so many smart people are not convinced of that, and actually many of us are feeling this tremendous sense of relief, and you can do yourself a favor and hope that we're right.
I mean, that would be great for you, wouldn't it?
If it turned out that this was not a disaster and that, frankly, we could address major problems like making America healthy again.
I mean, if that was the only thing that happened in this administration was that we turned in a positive direction with respect to the health of the public, you know, that'd be a huge win.
A huge win.
Unthinkably big, actually.
So there's lots of other positive things that could happen, but even just one...
Unthinkably big.
And really...
All it takes is going, I suspect at this point, anywhere else in the world and seeing and comparing what the American population looks like at this point to what the population of, again, I haven't been everywhere, but what I think the population of every place else in the world looks like.
We allow things on our crops, in our food, in our medicine cabinets.
That either no or almost no countries otherwise tolerate.
And all of this has been said before, but we are only one of two countries in the world that allows advertising of pharmaceuticals.
And the issue there is not, oh my god, the children will get the wrong idea from watching the ads.
The issue there is that therefore the media is owned, because the pharmaceuticals have extraordinarily deep pockets.
And once they're getting some large percentage of their income from the pharma ads, they are much less likely to say anything bad about pharma and therefore much less likely to do investigative journalism, which is part of what got us to COVID. Like part of why so many people were so easily coerced and convinced by non-science claiming to be science, because there was almost no investigative journalism.
And I think no investigative journalism in the mainstream media That actually questioned the narratives coming down from Fauci at the NIH and, well, let's get the CDC and the WHO and all the rest.
So I would also point out that we are suddenly having a discussion about pulling fluoride from the water.
And this is something most people probably go years without thinking about, right?
That there's fluoride in the water.
It is now, I believe, incontrovertible that fluoride in the water has negative implications for cognitive ability.
Many other things too, but...
The research was out, I mean, we wrote about it in 100 Gatherers Guide.
Right.
And the research was already out there, just no one was talking about it.
Right.
But here's my point.
How much harm has been done to how many people and to civilization, which is the collective manifestation of our understanding of ourselves and our opportunities.
We have actually been putting something in water.
You can't insulate yourself from it.
Even if you don't drink water from your own tap, you travel, you Go to a restaurant, you don't know how much fluoride you're taking in, and this is something that demonstrably reduces the capacity of the human mind to function.
Direct cognitive impacts, especially when ingested when young.
And if you think that any part of where we are has to do with some large fraction of society being dumber than they should be, some of that comes down to the water, right?
We did this to ourselves and to have an administration that is even talking about the problems that come from fluoridating water is a breath of fresh air, right?
Imagine, just imagine whatever your fears are that Four years from now, we have stopped poisoning ourselves with fluoride in the water and the population starts to get smarter.
And the story with fluoride is actually in many ways very similar to the story with seed oils.
Because the fluoride that we're putting in our water is the leftover from an industrial process that the people involved in the industrial process were looking for a profitable way to get rid of.
Just as seed oils are left over from an industrial process that was never intended for human consumption and is a result of the people involved in the industrial process looking for a profitable way to get rid of their waste.
Why are Americans By and large, every single day, taking in industrial waste as if it is healthy.
It's not.
And so this administration, who has signed up with MAHA, with Make America Healthy Again, with Kennedy, and all of the great people who were involved in that movement, including us, are going to make this discussion mainstream.
And, you know, frankly, It's not new.
There's been a resurgence of farmers markets, of buy local, eat local food, of CSAs, of community-supported agriculture, of being able to buy half a cow, get a chest freezer, buy half a cow, and have the meat that you are pulling.
To feed your family, be from a known animal that was grown by someone you know, and an appreciation for people who actually hunt and fish and forage their own food.
These were lefty.
Right?
Propositions.
And, you know, they are things that we've been doing for a long time.
And of course, many on the right have as well.
So now, this has all been accumulating.
All of this thinking and this movement and this drive has been accumulating under MAGA and MAHA and the new administration that has just been voted in.
So actually, I think this leads to a novel way of thinking about what people's reactions are.
One thing that has happened, because, ironically, a completely free market has allowed the capture of all of the component parts that allow you to make sense of the world.
The fact that there is no real journalism happening.
You have a few renegades who have gone independent, but basically all of the journalistic establishments have become subservient to these dark corporate forces.
Here's what's going on.
We know what the news is supposed to be.
Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history.
It's telling us the way the events look, what events we can agree took place, and then some interpretation on what their implications are.
And once that thing becomes subservient to corporate interests, The mindset of the people who consume it becomes a corporate mindset.
And so you have all of these people who are viewing what has just taken place as if it is an existential threat.
And the fact is, it is an existential threat, but not to you.
It's an existential threat to something that is taking advantage of your naivete.
Something that has no legal liability and doesn't want you to understand what an adjuvant is and what effect it may be having on your health.
From allergies to autoimmune disorders.
Right?
An adjuvant is an ingredient in a product for which the manufacturers have no liability and they don't want you to know it.
So of course they are terrified at this moment.
Right?
But the point is, your terror is their terror reflected.
You actually should be feeling elated.
Now, again, I don't know that this is going to work.
All sorts of things can happen.
But you have just been liberated from the people who don't want you to understand an adjuvant and the possible effect that it will have on you or your child.
Right?
That liberty is something that you should be feeling, not the terror of those people who may just have had their businesses radically curtailed by the idea that we are entitled to know what it is that we are taking in and be informed about its likely consequence on our health.
And actually, this is a little out of order from what I was thinking, but let me just show a few screenshots of what I'm seeing of the terror that people are reflecting.
And these are all women, I believe.
So this is about the particular terror that many women are feeling.
But just in the context of what you just said, Brett, this is not actually your terror.
You are being fed a terror narrative by very powerful interests who stand to lose something real.
And they are creating terror in you to serve them, not to serve you.
Don't let politics ruin your relationships, this post reads.
It's funny how this is almost always said by the same people who voted against your rights.
I don't feel comfortable around you.
The person that you voted for is homophobic, racist, and hates women, and none of that was a deal breaker for you.
It is personal.
We have a difference in morals, and I do feel differently about you.
You cannot tell someone you love them and then try to take their rights away.
Trump has given no indication that he is going to try to take people's rights away.
Nor is there any evidence that he is homophobic or racist or hates women.
I feel like this is the first time I voted for him, thought about it last time, could not imagine it eight years ago.
And the first thing that I said to my class, that was eight years ago, I was still a college professor, and the first thing I said to my class, we weren't in class session, but they all had that look that everyone in liberal pockets did then, And I said, anyone who wants to say, let's talk.
And the vast majority of my students stayed.
And what I said then was, if you think that what this means is that half the country is sexist or racist, you need to rethink how you understand the world.
Because people, even people who believed then, and I truly hope that fewer people believe now that Trump was ever racist or sexist, even people who believed that, who voted for him, the vast, vast, vast majority of them did it in spite of that.
Not because of it, okay?
That's one thing.
Here's just a few more of these screenshots from what people have been putting up in the wake of the election.
I dream women will one day have the same rights as guns.
I don't know how to respond to this, but just to get a snapshot, kind of a snapshot of what the fear and the pain and the terror that women in particular are experiencing right now.
Although this is from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
How sad it must be believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.
Now, I don't know when Neil deGrasse Tyson said this, but I know he was living during COVID and saw, has every reason to have seen, because he's a smart guy, that many people who call themselves scientists and scholars and historians and economists and journalists Didn't devote their lives to deceiving you,
some of them did, Fauci did, but they weren't devoting their lives to deceiving you, but they were deceiving you, given that, as we pointed out for years and years and years now on Dark Horse, that really your best move during COVID was to listen to what the authorities said and do the exact opposite.
Do get outside, do take vitamin D, you know, do not wear a mask, all of these things, right?
I do.
I want to just intersperse something here.
You want to show that screenshot that I sent you.
There's a screenshot that was apparently circulating on Facebook, and it's sort of...
I think it...
Reveals where this mindset leads.
And I will try to read it.
They've used some emojis to cover some stuff.
You know, ice cream cone, which presumably means Biden, could send in a seal.
Seal Team Six.
Team Six to take out and then a picture of an orange, which is presumably Trump, and a sofa, which is representing Vance.
And the Supremes say it's legit.
Now, what that really...
Why does the sofa represent Vance?
It was a slander of Vance that you don't want running around in your head.
Okay, I don't know.
Something sexually untoward that involves a sofa that I don't think had any basis really in Vance, but some story somewhere.
Don't need to know.
Yeah.
Anyway, the point is, this is somebody who is, you know...
Ironically, presumably, but who the hell knows, arguing for a military coup at this point.
SEAL Team 6 being sent in to take out a president-elect and his vice president, and the Supremes say it's legit.
Now, we cannot argue...
Well, but they're allowed to because they're just processing.
Right, and I guess my...
They're not jokes.
It's just a joke, clearly.
Right, it's just a joke.
But, I mean, here's the thing.
The double standard...
Right, that's my point.
Right.
This is such an unthinkably terrifying thought to be deployed as if you were proud of thinking it, that we're somewhere in brand new territory.
But this is where, once you take on that corporate mindset and you start feeling the terror that the corporations who have been poisoning us must be feeling, it leads you to this.
Because, of course, it's an existential threat to them, and so they're making it an existential threat to people.
Right.
So there are a number of more of these that I have here on my screen, including supporting a convicted felon over a woman is fucking insane.
This just gets so many things about how it is that we make decisions and what is actually going on.
That it's hard to know without, you know, I hope that given a face-to-face with whoever wrote this, that inroads could be made to allow a bit more understanding on their part.
Part of the way that social media is deranging us, though, is the asynchronous nature of the communications.
And so you can put something out there, in this case anonymously, and have it read at any moment in time by anyone in the world, and they will have their own bubbled emotional reaction to it.
And perhaps spin further into the abyss of terror that, again, is useful not for them, but for largely the corporations and the deep state that benefit from our terror.
And then this.
Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birthrate decline.
No marriage, no childbirth, no dating men, no sex with men.
We can't let these men have the last laugh.
We need to bite back.
That is a ferociously excellent sex-competitive strategy being deployed in the guise of politics.
Good show, whoever did that.
Wow.
So the 4B, I looked into, I had never heard of the 4B movement in South Korea.
It's, um, you know, tiny, a couple thousand, uh, women movement in South Korea to do this, to, you know, for, I guess, straight women, although who knows, um, because To just,
you know, take themselves completely out of the pool, the dating pool, the sexual pool, I don't know how many pools there are, but to completely remove themselves from, gosh, you know, so many of the things that brings joy and passion and meaning to life.
And so, if this isn't a perfect example of sort of an invitation to society-level Um, spite.
I don't know what is.
Unless the people who are signing on to this have been so destroyed, and many people have, by, for instance, the combination of cross-sex hormones and of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones such that they actually don't have any either libido or romantic interest left, in which case maybe it's not a sacrifice.
But, you know, this should be an...
anyone Male or female.
Turn it into male-appropriate words.
No marriage, but no having children, no dating women, no sex with women.
Anyone of either sex, and it works for homosexuals too, just change the details, should read this and go like, oh god, why would I give those things up?
This actually seems like you're asking me to give up a core piece of my humanity.
Out of spite, and once again, and the reason I wanted to show this originally, is it It confuses what just happened as about the people who are feeling the terror and the outrage, and as it being specifically a, excuse me, but fuck you, to them.
And it's not.
Like, are there fringe elements in society who hate women?
Yeah.
And those people should not be encouraged, obviously.
But the vast, vast, vast majority of people who voted for Trump and the vast, vast, vast majority of people in America and in the world didn't vote the way they did this time or are ever voting in order to hurt some other group.
That's not largely what we are doing.
We are voting for something and not to hurt people.
so i want to just highlight the game theory problem here because i don't take that person at the word even if that person thinks that they are reporting what they actually believe i don't believe it okay i think that that is a ploy and it represents two things can we put it back up on the oh hold on my screen don't wait you want this back up on the screen yeah yeah okay um There's a collective action problem here, right?
If you want to increase the degree to which you can marry up, getting other people with whom you are competing to stop competing is one way to do it.
So, I don't buy...
I don't know what the 4B movement is or how big it is, but the idea...
There's a couple thousand people in South Korea, like I said.
But a couple thousand people is not a major movement.
And I don't know what the details are.
So, I don't trust that this person is telling it like it is.
But I would also point out that there's a reflection of this...
There are some corporations that are enjoying putting shit in your water, adjuvants in your vaccines and not facing liability, deploying industrial lubricants as if they're legitimate ingredients in food, all of the stuff that's being done to us.
And those people are terrified.
Because somehow Bobby Kennedy and Maha are now scrutinizing all of this stuff in public and not withdrawing into the shadows at the mere mention of the idea of anti-vaxxer or whatever it is that's supposed to happen in corporate world, right?
There is also a way in which, as you have pointed out very clearly, there is a.
A power coalition, you know, the brides of the state are wielding a tremendous amount of power through the blue team.
I believe that's originally David Samuel's observation, the brides of the state.
The brides of the state.
So the idea that there are a group of Women who now have the state acting on their behalf.
It's a cryptic partnership where...
If we can take this down, I want to show something else.
Okay.
But my point is, if you had commandeered the state through a partnership in which the state was getting political support from you as a coalition and it was doing your bidding and it was altering the way that humans interact, then the point is you might also be terrified of losing that power.
And what might you do after you've just lost...
One and maybe both houses of Congress, the presidency, the popular vote, as you see your power waning, you will go into a desperation mode.
And that desperation mode would look like, come on, ladies, you know, we have power and it comes in the form of all things sexual and romantic.
So, you know, let's go on strike is what that is.
At the level that it's an honest claim, it's strike.
What are they striking about losing their power?
Yeah, and to that point, to the brides of the state point, and who voted how?
This is NBC News exit polling, so take that as it is, but we have, this is representing, this is exit polls across, there are a number of things we could show here, but Parents split by sex, men with children, women with children, men without children, and women without children.
Of those four groups, women did come out slightly in favor of Kamala and men more strongly in favor of Trump.
But women with children were 51% in favor of Kamala, whereas women without children were the strong leader in terms of voting for When the data are split that way.
Single people.
Are you currently married?
This is both sexes.
Single people were much more likely to be in favor of Kamala than married people.
And gender by marital status, the only group of, when split by married men, married women, non-married men, and non-married women, the only group of those four that came out for Harris are the non-married women, and it's strong.
It's 59%.
And so this is obviously reifying of the observation that you're making.
It is a hypothesis test of the brides of the state hypothesis, and it comes out pretty compellingly favorable to that idea.
Yeah, and there are a couple of other interesting things in here in these exit poll results.
You can show here, let's see.
You can show my screen here just so there's something for people to look at while I'm looking for it.
There was a generation thing, right?
Where, you know, you're welcome, non-Gen Xers.
The Gen X people...
Oh, here it is.
Yeah, age.
So when split, and this isn't exactly by generation, but...
The 40 to 49-year-olds and the 50 to 64-year-olds, which is not exactly but roughly Gen X, were the two groups who supported Trump more than Kamala overall.
Yeah.
And not the boomers, not the Gen Ys, not the Gen Zs.
All right, which brings me to something.
I don't know where you were in your trajectory here, but I'm going to take the risk of being a little bit candid about an interaction I was having with my dad, which you were parted to.
Yep.
My dad is 90.
He lives in Los Angeles.
As a 90-year-old guy, his friend group, which is basically, you know, couples that he and my mom have been friends with forever, is increasingly female because the men are dying off at a faster rate than the women are.
So anyway, he's pretty thoroughly surrounded by people who are pretty sure that Donald Trump is a maniac.
Highly educated, highly liberal, you know, women on packs and such.
People who never got over the New York Times, so I think didn't update for the fact that it went from being a flawed newspaper into being a propaganda bullhorn for the regime.
But anyway, we've been having a conversation.
I think in the absence of our generation within the family taking up a heterodox position, there'd be no hint of any reason to think about whether or not the opposition was in fact up to something interesting.
But in light of our existence, my dad's been thinking about it and he's talked with us many times about, you know, are we fully aware of the horrors of Donald Trump?
And he forwards things and, you know, it's the same pattern every time.
Oh my God, do you know he said he wanted to be dictator for a day?
Huh, I wonder if I chased that down, whether that's actually what he said.
Oh no, he didn't, right?
Again and again and again.
Can I just say that the piece that I wrote for Natural Selections last week, why I'm voting for Trump, was a response to a number of people, family and friends, who had reached out to say, what are you doing?
But specifically for your father, because the question that I sort of begin the piece with is almost literally the question that he asked us, which was, I get why you're not voting for Kamala, because it was really obvious to most smart people that she was not up to the job, that this was a bad choice.
And it's really easy to point out all of the ways that she was not up to the job.
I get why you're not voting for her, but why are you voting for him?
That was the question.
Yep.
But let's just say in the aftermath of the election, you know, there's a taking stock because obviously, you know, for people who thought that, you know, Trump was potentially a catastrophic development, they're now going to be living in whatever world that is.
And that means it's sort of a test of whether or not we have seen accurately where we are or not.
And, you know, to my dad's credit, he's very much open to that.
And And, you know, he definitely does remember the idea of the loyal opposition and giving your opponents a chance to demonstrate themselves and all of that.
So anyway, that's all very heartening.
But I wanted to use that experience, that discussion in the aftermath where...
My parents are more open to hearing nuances and the perspective on the other side because they've in some sense had a unique training period over the course of this election as we've talked about how we see things and compare it to the experience other people are having where there is no such nuance that they are encountering in their friend group.
And I want to throw a hypothesis at what's going on here.
Okay.
Imagine for a second that you lived in an unambiguously totalitarian society.
Let's say you lived in East Germany under the Stasi.
And Stasi were a terrifying secret police organization that famously got some huge fraction of the population to be willing to rat on each other if they showed signs of independent thought.
And so anyway, everybody had been trained by the trauma of living under the Stasi to know what thoughts were illegal, what you shouldn't say, what you mustn't do, etc.
And imagine that you lived in such a circumstance because there was a force that was in a position to just zero out your account if you stepped out of line.
And so everybody quickly learns to figure out I mean, and one of the ways that these totalitarians work is the line isn't clear.
So everybody learns to police themselves so they don't get anywhere near the line because it's so terrifying that you wouldn't know if you'd crossed it, right?
And we've been actually seeing that in the West here of late where you just have this double standard being wielded where one side gets to do one level of thing and the other side doesn't, you know, one side can do no wrong and the other side can do no right.
But anyway, imagine you lived under such a terrifying regime.
And something happened behind the scenes that disabled it.
Well, you don't notice that immediately because everybody's trained themselves.
Everybody's policing themselves, right?
And so you've got all of these people who are- That's the most powerful kind of control.
Right, exactly.
And it's the most powerful kind of censorship, getting you to self-censor, right?
So, okay, you've got all of these people who probably...
I've never lived under such a regime.
The closest I've been is recent times in the US. But if you live under such a regime, It's hard to remember what you think and learn what not to say.
There are people who pull it off, and the people who are renegades in these situations are often the people who figure out how to talk privately, blah, blah, blah.
But most people can't manage it.
It's too much cognitive dissonance.
It's too much cognitive dissonance and the danger of, especially with the Stasi trying to get everybody to rat on everybody else, as soon as somebody else is uncareful and they get in trouble, they rat you out to get themselves out of trouble.
Everybody starts convincing themselves of nonsense in order that they can effortlessly deploy self-restraint that keeps them safe.
But if the power that initially imposed this regime suddenly is neutered, you don't immediately discover it.
And in fact, at the point you do discover it, some renegades, let's say, decide that they'd rather die on their feet than live on their knees, as Catch-22 puts it.
And they say some stuff and nothing bad happens.
And then, you know, the next most courageous people are like, huh, I can't believe he said that.
And so they start experimenting.
And the point is, it's contagious.
People start realizing and they start maybe experimenting with a thought and they don't say it at first and then they say it a little bit.
Here's the new part of this.
I believe that what was once Twitter and is now X has a group of us a year ahead.
Twitter has been...
It's not perfectly free for reasons none of us are completely aware of.
But nonetheless, it's so much freer than the next nearest competitor that a lot of the people who are blue partisans fled in terror at the point that it was purchased by Musk.
And what it means is that a lot of us have been living in a free Hong Kong rather than mainland China or something.
I realize things have changed in that regard.
But nonetheless, we've been living in a freer regime.
And so what that did was it created a mindset amongst people who have been talking in these terms.
You know, it's not...
There's a lot of awful stuff being trafficked on Twitter these days, but the point is it's the Wild West.
Everything is being discussed, including the truth.
And so anyway, you've got all of these people who are a year ahead in freeing themselves from the self-censorship that comes along with the totalitarianism.
And so the punchline is, if this hypothesis is accurate, you would expect All of the people who have just woken up in a new reality that they have convinced themselves is terrifying.
You would expect them to sound as they have over the course of the last six months or a year or whatever.
Yeah.
But you would also expect them to be closer to an experimentation with, well, what if that's not true?
Then you can see.
So I would say, I hope that the people who are self-policing We'll mentally experiment with, what if I've taken on the corporate mindset and I don't know it?
What if my existential terror is referred terror that Pfizer is feeling and they've convinced me to feel by buying too much influence over the things I read?
So if they're doing that, so I guess the point is Be kind to the people who are self-policing.
You don't know how close they are to waking up.
And, you know, I think they're probably closer than you realize.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Maybe that is a good segue then.
To that end, I wanted to talk a little bit, going back to these screenshots from these women, it's very easy to find these meltdowns, these publicly posted meltdowns, largely of young women in the wake of the election.
And it is easy If you voted for Trump, to feel dismissive, disdainful, scornful, superior, and that's not helpful in the end.
These are all real people who have been, I would say, betrayed, confused, lied to, and are still living under this veil of confusion.
And to that end, I wanted to say just a few things about some of the amazing women that I met in these last couple of weeks.
So we were on...
We were traveling for almost two weeks, and we started out in Key West because I'd never been, and why not?
And then we went to a conference in Miami for a few days, Miami Beach.
From there we went to the Brownstone Institute Conference in Pittsburgh, which was extraordinary.
And from there we went to Livingston, Montana for the county highway election night party, which was amazing.
In each of these places, we talked to some people in Miami Beach, in Key West, because unexpectedly we landed in the middle of this crazy street festival that I've written about, but we won't go there.
But at each of the others, and so we did meet some people there, but at each of the three other events, we talked to a number of people, some of whom I already knew, many of whom I didn't.
And just kind of a A snapshot.
There were young women and middle-aged and old.
I actually heard invoked maiden mother crone at one point.
Young mothers and middle-aged mothers, women who will become mothers, and women who know that they never will.
Women who became mothers during peak fertility when they were young, and women who waited until the doctors called them elderly for having a baby after 35.
Women who were childless by choice, and women who are fiercely pre-choice, and a few who are not.
And some, but not many, who have had abortions in the past.
I interacted, met women who were in partnerships with men.
Some of those relationships are healthy and strong, and also women in partnerships that are struggling, in which the women are wondering what's going to come next and whether the relationship will last.
Women in intimate relationships with other women and also women who are single and like it that way and tend to stay that way.
I was interacting with women who are suffering addiction or did or suffered from abuse or rape, who have not in the past been allowed to make their own choices and fought for their freedom.
Women who put themselves through years of schooling to attain advanced degrees, often on their own dime.
I met a former mayor, a fashion designer, a comedian, a former sportscaster, future theologian, self-described hippies.
These are all different people.
Writers and analysts and doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, and yes, a bunch of scientists as well.
And all of these women, to a person whom I have just indicated something about them here, are smart and strong and capable.
And everyone who I've mentioned on this list...
Voted for Trump.
In a couple of cases, they're not Americans.
They would have voted for Trump if they could have.
Every single American citizen who I just mentioned, and almost all of them were, are all female and they all voted for Trump.
These are not self-hating women.
They're not immolating themselves on some fire, not voting the way that some man wants them to.
They're independent and curious and adventurous, curious about the world, about themselves, about other people.
They have talent, they have passion, they have vigor and drive.
And they saw in this man Someone who could bring to the United States renewed energy and economy and productivity and, frankly, and maybe this is just a totally inappropriate word to use, but joy.
Like, actually help bring us back to being able to communicate with one another across these divisions, which, again, it's the...
Terrified corporations and deep state who want us terrified.
We don't need to live in that terror.
We can live with openness and exuberance and passion and hope and joy.
All of these women that I met, all of whom to a person of the people that I just mentioned who voted for Trump and were hoping for the outcome that we got, myself included, are not a match for the fear that we're seeing online that are represented in those screenshots that I showed, right?
It's like two different universes, but we all live in the same universe, so we have to figure out how to communicate with one another and how to reveal I see something different about what this is going to mean for you and for all of us, and I think it's amazing.
So come along.
Come along with us.
We're all in it together.
That's great.
I want to pick up on one theme here, which In these travels, this is not the first time we've had this experience, but in these travels, we find ourselves interacting with what I would call the unity movement.
Yeah, that's right.
The irony of this is that the unity movement is It is truly diverse, it is egalitarian, and it is inclusive.
So it's sort of the real, and I hesitate to even put it this way because I don't want it dismissed on this basis.
That's not what created it.
But the point is, nobody in this movie, it's the real DEI. But where it's equality, not equity.
Equality, not equity.
But it's actually inclusive, and it's actually diverse.
And it is not vindictive, right?
These people disagree ferociously across many things, but it does not get in the way of camaraderie, right?
There's this sense of like, well, you know, isn't it interesting that we have disagreements over this and that?
And those disagreements are had passionately, but it's not personal.
And I wish...
That people who are on the other side, fearing MAGA or whatever mythological boogeyman they have been led to be concerned about, I wish that they could actually just be fly on the wall in one of the rooms that they've been led to believe is full of these horrible,
horrible racist misogynist dullards or whatever it is that they think is happening because what you would discover is that actually those are just enviable rooms to be in these are rooms where people really are having a good time and talking about things that matter and you know frankly falling in love and doing all the stuff that people do these are this is normal rooms
it's like the speakeasy in a you know in an oppressive environment where the speakeasy is the only place that you can afford to be yourself So it's just simply the experience of being there and it's very hard to convince other people of it because they have this toxic portrait that's been painted for them that isn't a match for anything.
But nonetheless, they're so sure of it.
They're so sure that they've seen it and they know what it is that they can't see the reality past it.
And, you know, if they got an invitation, they'd turn it down out of spite, which is exactly what the corporate mindset thing wants you to do.
It wants you not to encounter the thing that would tell you that something about your information stream was broken.
And frankly, we've seen this done to us over the course of years now, where the idea is, if you can't see through Brett and Heather, I can't help you.
They're so obviously charlatans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That is designed to get you not to check, right?
That is what it does.
It tries to get you, and it's not that you necessarily believe it, but the point is, well, I don't really see right through them, so maybe I am a sucker, so that doesn't feel very good, so I'm going to go elsewhere.
I'm not going to engage, right?
Right.
That they're trying to get you not to engage and the best thing you can do is just circulate amongst the enemy.
Figure out if we are everything you've been told we are, right?
Go ahead.
Oh, I just wanted to say, Alex, our friend Alexandros Marinos, is a little bit irked that his most popular tweet ever is going to be not an example of some of his remarkably deep insight, like analysis that nobody else did or predictions that nobody else has made.
He's got a lot of that, but his most popular tweet is going to be advice, is advice, that once you hear it, it's obvious.
But I just wanted to share it, which is probably going to irk him further.
I re-broadcast already.
Right, so I would ask before I show this, that all of you who are angry or anxious or fearful now, to take this advice from our newest self-help guru, Alexander Serena.
Oops, that's not it.
Here we go.
So he writes...
If you voted Democrat and you are feeling that the election result is truly horrifying, do this one simple thing for your mental health.
Write down your fears of what might happen in the next four years on a piece of paper.
Reread and check in on them every few months.
It will be a constant source of relief to you when you see that your fears will not, in fact, come true.
Then start asking why you had those fears in the first place and how you can prevent them from forming the next time.
At the level of leveling up yourself, your understanding of the world, your interactions with the people in it, anytime you feel certainty, this is a good thing to do about anything.
But especially when that certainty comes in the sort of, you know, a group movement.
Where the borders are policed by the people inside it, but not the people outside of it.
The people inside it say, you cannot stray from this.
You do need to be scared and anxious and angry.
You do need to be all these things, because look at what he will do.
Write down the things that you think are going to happen.
And just check in on that piece of paper.
Write it down and actually print it out so that you can't change it, so that you can't mess with your own self.
Have a physical object of what you are worried about right now, that this election that happened two days ago in the United States might mean for you and the people you love.
And check back, like set an alarm, check back every month and see if any of it's happening.
And as Alex says, as it doesn't, and I hope as things actually begin to improve, then reflect on how you were so certain of things that turned out not to be true.
So I actually think it's a great tweet and I don't know why Alex...
Because he's got such deep analysis in many places that no one else does.
Yeah, but I think it's a better tweet than he realizes.
But I also think, you know, I wish I had done it for the Biden years because my sense is actually things were, you know, it's not every single front.
There are places where I expected some things and didn't see them.
But across my fears...
I think it was as bad or worse on most topics, right?
And, you know, you see this every now and again.
You'll see, like, you know, remember when Jordan Peterson got in trouble for Overby Bill C-16?
And he argued, actually, that ultimately people were going to go to jail for failing to say the right things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it was like...
I don't know, Jordan.
I mean, I agree with you.
Things are bad, but I don't know if it's going to get there.
Oh, you know, oh my God, it's happening, right?
So anyway, I do think it's a worthy exercise, and I think it's a worthy exercise in this case.
And, you know, yeah, I certainly know how I think it will come out, but it's worthy either direction, finding out whether your perceptions are accurate or inaccurate.
And in this case, I think they will be inaccurate for those panicking over this.
But, you know, let's hope.
I wanted to say something else, though, about the experience of this, which I think is going to get lost.
And I realize that as I've tried to explain this, it defies my ability to figure out the right words to convey it.
There's something about our experience, and I know because we were traveling together, so it was like as much as you and I spend a huge amount of time together ordinarily, it was even more so in this context.
And so we went through the experience of the run-up to the actual election night, the actual election night, and then the follow-up to actually knowing that night that there was essentially no way this wasn't going to at least be a victory for Trump and probably the Senate.
Right.
We traveled home yesterday after the election.
Yeah, and I must say I've been in contact with a huge number of people from what I would call the Unity Coalition since, just checking in with them.
And there is a feeling that I can only compare to surviving a near-death experience There's a feeling of relief at what took place for those who were public about trying to bring this about.
And I think What it is, is that actually, in light of, you know, look, I don't know if my fears are accurate.
I know that they have been accurate, but I don't know if my fears of what a Kamala Harris administration would have been like are accurate.
I will never know.
But given what those of us who went out on a limb for this believed was likely to occur over the next four years, there was a sense, whether we were accurate in our fears or not, To the extent that we believed what we were saying, which we did, it was a very frightening moment.
Because even if we knew from what I, you know, what I do in lieu of believing polls is I talk to people who my interaction with them is arbitrary, right?
Presumably, you know, Uber drivers are not, you know, or checkout people or whatever.
They're not in my circle because they're in my circle and part of my echo chamber.
They're in the economy.
They're in the economy, and I'm interacting with them, if not randomly, at least arbitrarily.
And so there was an overwhelming signal from my talking to people.
So I believed that Trump was in a position to win a decisive victory by the merits, but I didn't know whether or not...
Something would cause us not to know that he had won or something like that.
So, anyway, the experience of this wave of relief that passed over all of these people, just the sense of exhilaration that came from, you know, I guess in the analogy of the ship that we are all somehow on and what I think is an honorable mutiny that took place,
If the mutiny hadn't worked, I was expecting we would be made to walk the plank in one way or another.
And given the environment that we've been living in, where lots of people find themselves, you know, somehow jailed over some standard being exerted in their case, that was a very frightening thing to worry about.
So I just want to try to...
Just capture the fact that something took place that I think all of the people whose names you know who took a risk on this were feeling simultaneously the day after.
And it was not vitriolic.
It was not angry.
It was not any of the things that you might imagine.
It was this feeling of, I can't believe I feel hopeful and I can't remember how long I've been living under this Feeling of pressure that we cannot afford to lose because we are in the bullseye.
So anyway.
We, everyone.
I know you were talking about specifically the people who publicly took risks on behalf of Unity, on behalf of Maha or MAGA or whatever group that you particularly identify with.
But everyone I have met who was driven to be public or even working actively behind the scenes, we've met so many people who are working for Maha, so many.
They really all do believe that I mean, I haven't talked to all of them about this particular thing, but I think that everyone in this movement believes that this is the better outcome for all of us.
That this is not divisive.
That this is that we want everyone to see what we are seeing, and you will be brought up and forward with the policy changes, regardless of whether or not you currently think he's Hitler regardless of whether or not you currently think he's Hitler or not.
Well, what I mean is, if you take my ship analogy, if we had failed, we would have been made to walk the plank, and the ship would have gone down somewhat later.
You know, there was no escape.
And this is why I think so many people took what they at least perceived to be such risks with their own personal well-being was that we didn't have a choice, right?
We really believed, and I still believe, that the other outcome was utterly intolerable and that this was probably our last shot to, you know, gain control of the helm and steer the ship back on a reasonable course.
Um, but I was imagining the ship, if the other outcome had happened, the ship would go down and a lot of people would be scratching their heads at the last moments as to whether the mutineers might have been, uh, onto something, you know, um, which, you know, is a, that's a terrible screenplay.
I don't want to live.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, can we talk about the New York Times for a moment?
Sure.
Oh, good.
And then that's a good segue to my last piece here.
I prepared a little PowerPoint.
You can show my screen here, Jen.
You can take the professor out of the college, but you can't take the college out of the professor.
Not at all.
And it's just screenshots.
But this is all from the New York Times earlier today.
So again, Pacific Time morning, Thursday, November 7th.
And I screenshotted them just because it was messy to go in and out, but you can do this at home, and I recommend that you do.
So, New York Times, which for decades now I have relied upon to have some of the best graphics as they are reporting on elections, even if I don't trust their politics anymore, nor do I inherently trust the numbers, but they put together things in a way that make them visually interpretable.
And so one of the things that they have is this shift from 2020 map.
This is how counties voted for president in 2024 versus 2020 with arrows that are red and to the right indicating a shift to more Republicans, so a shift away from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, And, of course, the blue arrows to the left indicate a shift in those counties from Trump in 2020 to Harris in 2024.
Hope I don't get the math wrong.
These are vectors and the degree of the shift is correlated with the length of the arrow.
Is that the idea?
I don't think the angle of these arrows is meaningful in any way.
Not the angle, but the length.
Right.
But a vector, both things are meaningful.
So they're not vectors.
They're just...
They're scalars.
I don't even know if they are meant to be.
They don't give any indication of that, but they probably are supposed to be scalar values, but I don't know.
Really, this might be harder for you and the other colorblind people in the audience, but you see this overwhelming red, which is, of course, consistent with what we saw.
Every single swing state went to Trump, and no states flipped blue that had been red, etc., But one of the things that I've been noticing, and all of these screenshots are, again, from this morning.
This is more than 36 hours after the polls have closed almost everywhere.
And five states have no...
No values at all.
Including, I'm going to just put aside Alaska and Arizona for a moment, but the entire West Coast.
And, you know, there are a lot of people.
We've met some people on our travels these last two weeks.
Like, when I heard you were moving, I thought, you know, out of Portland, I thought, that's great.
And then when I heard you moved back to Washington State, I thought, what the hell is wrong with these people?
You know, why are they still in deep blue territory?
And part of it is that the West Coast is amazing, right?
It is our home, and we love it here.
And that doesn't indicate that we will never move, but the West Coast really is a world unto itself, and it's not just the politics.
You know, the people really do have a different feel, and it's great, by and large.
So, here we are.
On the West Coast, we grew up in California, have lived in Oregon, have lived in Washington, and it's just a foregone conclusion that all three of those states are always going to go blue.
No one questions it, even though there are a lot of people who vote red in these states at this point, knowing that when they're voting red for president, it's not going to make any difference for the Electoral College.
But it still seems surprising.
There's no shift at all?
Yeah, yeah.
The fact that the states...
May effectively be permanently blue.
And they're not effectively permanently blue.
They have gone red.
It doesn't mean there hasn't been a move in the direction of red.
That's right.
So that's what I'm going to show you.
Okay.
So this is maps from different...
All of these are from the New York Times.
In 2020, because things are decided, they show...
And I'm just going to focus on California because there's two...
I just decided to focus on California.
So, in 2020, the results are in.
We got 100% precincts reporting for the 2020 election at this point.
Is that surprising?
That shouldn't be surprising.
You're not paying any attention.
I am paying attention.
Yeah.
So, it's shocking how many precincts are still below 50% for some of the 2024 election.
Yes, 2020 has long since decided that's 100%, and so we have actual...
And here, you know, the hue of the blue versus the red is sort of an indication of what the margin was, right?
So coastal California was largely very blue, except right up in, you know, Crescent City, whatever county that is, at the border with Oregon.
And other than the Central Valley and up in the corner with Nevada and Oregon, it was pretty blue throughout.
So let me just say, the reason I was thrown by this is I will not reveal the person's name because I didn't clear it with them.
But somebody, a Californian who I know, had the experience of voting in person on election day and then received a confirmation of the receipt of their absentee ballot.
Which should not have come.
In any case, I can't imagine why the New York Times or anybody else would be, given that the election is not going to shift based on what is discovered in California, for example, what's the point in holding back the data?
Right.
Well, so what I'm getting to here is that you can actually find the data, but you have to look and you have to go to the 2020 results and the 2024 results and you have to put them next to each other, which I have done in the next several slides.
But their graphic, right?
They have a graphic on their main page, which is the thing that people will look at.
And people...
You know, the overall point here is people look at this guy like, oh yeah, red shift.
Hmm, I wonder why everyone's such a misogynist, transphobe, racist.
Like, oh, I can't believe it.
Well, at least the West Coast holds strong.
There's no shift to the red on the West Coast.
And my point here is going to be, no, actually there is.
There absolutely is.
Why isn't the New York Times revealing that?
They have the data there and they have them, they have it, it's findable, I'm about to show you, but they don't put it on their main graphic and I think it's about compelling people that there's kind of no hope for the West Coast and like keeping people from not imagining that the West Coast too, not just the rest of the country, but almost every single county in the United States this time voted more red than they did in 2020.
So, right away, you see, and these maps look different because in 2024, there's not a single precinct that's 100% reporting yet, and so they don't.
They just have sizes of bubbles and blue versus red.
But let's just take a look at three counties, Orange County, San Bernardino, and Riverside in SoCal in Southern California, which were blue, Orange County, Riverside, and San Bernardino in 2020.
And if you look at just the circles, you see Orange County, red, Riverside, red, San Bernardino, red.
Right there.
Okay.
Those deserve little red arrows, right?
Here's a few more.
Humboldt County, which is the county in the northwest, coastal northwest, gorgeous, just south of...
I can't remember what county it is that touches Oregon.
But Humboldt County in 2020 went 65% blue towards Biden, with only 44% of the votes in.
I don't know why.
Maybe they're all too stoned.
Sorry.
59% went to Harris.
So that's a 6% move away from blue.
And indeed, Trump got 31.6% in 2020 in Humboldt and 37% with 44% of the votes in 2024.
So that's a move.
That deserves a red arrow.
Here you have Contra Costa County.
I didn't put an arrow in because it's too tiny.
Contra Costa is one of the counties in East Bay, San Francisco Bay Area, that has Lafayette and Contra Costa in 2020 went 72% to Biden, and in 2024 with 58% of the votes in went 67% Harris.
Trump got a little less than 4% more of the vote.
Again, that deserves a red arrow.
Inyo County.
Inyo's here near the border with Nevada, the foothills of the eastern Sierra, was pretty close.
In 2020, 48.9% versus 48.7% for Trump.
Reversed in 2024.
Again, not all the votes in, but Trump's up by three points.
I'm just heading south.
Two more.
We're going to do L.A. County and San Diego County.
L.A. is deep blue.
We know this.
Deep blue.
Trump got 27% of the vote in 2020, and with 61% reporting, he's got 34%.
34% in LA County.
Again, not all the votes reporting, but again with a shift.
Yes, the county remains overwhelmingly Democratic, but that's a big shift, and that's what's supposed to be reported on these graphics that the New York Times itself is putting up.
Finally, San Diego County, right down at the bottom of the state.
Trump got 37.5% in 2020, up to 42%, again, with not all the votes in 2024.
So just to go back to this screenshot one more time, this is from the New York Times at 1020 a.m.
Pacific, Thursday, November 7th.
It just showed you a bunch of counties, several counties in California alone, where, yes, not all the votes are reported yet, but presumably they're not all reported for all the rest of the country either.
Every county I looked at in California has a rightward shift, has a Republican shift, and it's not actually right.
That's not the right way to be talking about it.
It has a non-neocon shift.
And yet, by looking at the New York Times official graphic, it appears that the West Coast just stayed true, if you will.
This is misleading in a really important way.
And I'm, frankly, I'm no longer maybe disappointed by the New York Times, but disgusted.
Like, what the hell, guys?
Like, make your graphic actually accurate, or take the whole thing down.
Like, this just leads people to a sense of what the country is doing that it's not.
And frankly, if you see, if you put all the data that you have up here, and you would see that there are some places in, like, Colorado with, you know, movement to the blue, and, like, little places in eastern Montana, even.
Little, like, I don't know what's going on there.
And I can't even tell if that's Tennessee or Georgia with, you know, a cluster of blue-word scalar arrows.
But the fact is that The entire country at the county level almost went to the right.
There weren't whole states that went blue.
Didn't happen.
And that should be reflected in a graphic that's pretending to show just that.
Yeah, this is not only misleading, it's not even pseudo-quantification.
This is misleading quantification.
Because everything I showed you is from the same site.
They've got the information and I hope and expect them to say things like, you know, not all precincts reporting and change.
Well, I do wonder if there might be Might be a reason, so it does not explain the failure, given that the data is on the site for this graphic.
It might be a reason for people to be dragging their heels over the reporting for the Western states.
It may be that there's stuff that you and I are not tracking, structural stuff, where there is ballot skullduggery and they're trying to get their story straight.
Hopefully not.
But...
Actually, if I can put my screen back just for a minute so I can pull up.
Just before, so that's from a couple hours ago, and I just pulled up this live.
You can show my screen again here.
And this is the same graphic from three hours later, and it is beginning to populate now.
Just now it's beginning to populate.
We've got a few in Oregon and Washington.
California is still empty.
Alaska is still empty.
A few more in Hawaii.
A few more in Hawaii.
One in Arizona, which there wasn't one before.
I think the claim will end up being, oh, we were just waiting.
But I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
Zach, our older son, and I were talking about this last night, and he and I had independently been focusing on this map, and we're looking at it going like, that's not plausible at a data level.
This feels like an attempt to have Unconsciously, subconsciously affected how people view this shift, especially if you are on the West Coast and are feeling, you know, terror, anger, all of this stuff.
Like, well, at least, like, I know, you know, my people know what's right.
Like, no, your people, too, moved towards the Republican nominee just like the rest of the country did.
Alright, which brings me perfectly to the last question.
We talked, I think, last livestream a couple weeks ago about the fact of people, of the spell that kept people from admitting that they were supporting Trump or the Republicans more generally, the stigma has dropped away because a lot of us have modeled that we can say out loud that we're doing this.
And anyway, so lots of people have been admitting it and that it's a contagious phenomenon.
Yep.
That contagious phenomenon, though, reminds me of exactly what happened with COVID. They attempted to keep the discussion on the channels that they owned.
Many of us experimented with discussing these things in the world of podcasts, and it broke the spell.
Now, here's the important part.
I often say Goliath is excellent at fighting battles that he understands and terrible at fighting on territory he doesn't know.
In this case, Goliath has made the same mistake twice.
And my hypothesis is that Goliath is actually...
Losing his marbles.
That he's going senile.
For exactly the same reason that I've argued that civilizations go senile.
That they accumulate all of these characteristics that work in the short term at some cost.
In the long term, that's exactly why an animal senesces is that the genome is a collection of things that make you stronger when you're young at some cost later on.
And so I wonder if Goliath is not becoming senile and that we are winning.
We've now won the same with the same strategy twice.
And that's a good sign, right?
Goliath is a ferociously powerful demonic presence, but I think we need to keep fighting absolutely courageously and not be terribly surprised if it takes less to knock him down than we think.
Absolutely.
Um...
Maybe that's it.
Alright.
Maybe that is it.
Um...
Yeah, I feel like there's an infinite amount more to say, but...
We will be back unless the universe ends or something.
Actually, let me do one more little thing, if you may.
Because...
The way that the terror is coming out in people, the things that they will say, the terrified, the ones who we invite to come along and be helped by what is to come, largely talk about two things.
They talk about reproductive rights for women, and they talk about the fact that Trump and Republicans are fascists.
And I would just show this to remind us where the totalitarian instincts seem to be.
This is a tweet from Joshua Rayner, who I don't know, from today, in which he has a screenshot from Rasmussen reports, Democrats in January 2022.
January 2022.
Do you want to fine the unvaccinated?
Less than 20% of Republicans did.
55% or so of Democrats did.
Do you want to lock the unvaccinated at home?
A little more than 20% of Republicans did.
Almost 60% of Democrats did.
Do you want to send the unvaccinated to quarantine camps?
A little more than 20% of Republicans did.
The hell, guys.
And something above 40% of Democrats did.
Do you want to take children from unvaccinated parents?
A handful of Republicans did.
Something closing in on 30% of Democrats did.
Do you want to fine and imprison critics of the vaccine?
Something over 10% of Republicans did and close to 50% of Democrats did.
This January of 2022 was when the trucker's convoy in Canada was happening.
It was just before, surprise of surprises, war broke out in Ukraine.
And there were many of us who were yelling as loudly as we could, despite the demonetization and the censorship and the shadow banning and all of it, about the deeply undemocratic things that were being enacted on people.
None of these things happened in the United States.
I don't think.
Although many people lost jobs and opportunities as a result of not being vaccinated.
Well, there is one new thing, and I didn't cover it today because I just saw it in the minutes before we went on the air.
But Jeffrey Tucker, the...
Commander of the Brownstone Institute, the benevolent dictator of the Brownstone Institute, as I sometimes jokingly referred to him as, put out a piece today, which we will link, in which he describes plans that were apparently, here we have, the CDC planned quarantine camps nationwide.
And I just skimmed the article before.
He's an excellent writer and he's very careful, so I have no doubt about its veracity.
But anyway, the CDC apparently had the plans built for quarantine camps, and they remained on their site effectively undiscussed until, I think, 2023.
So anyway, it was called, he says, it was called Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.
Well, that does sound efficient.
Good.
Well, that's bad news.
Yeah, it's terrifying.
So anyway, that graph about who wanted what was, you know, trial balloons for plans that actually already existed for, you know, locking us up.
Concentration camps.
Yeah, so there were confused people on all areas of the political spectrum, but by and large, it was the people who identified as Democrats, who were voting blue, who were the ones who wanted these...
One can easily actually use the word fascist here.
These fascist actions to be part of the United States government.
That wasn't Trump.
That was Team Blue.
And we may now be headed towards a freer, more equal, more diverse, and more inclusive world.
Let us hope.
You're here.
Let us hope.
All right.
We'll be back in six days.
We'll be back on Wednesday.
At our usual time, you can find us on Locals.
Great stuff there, always good content.
Go to the darkhorsepodcast.org website to find updates about schedule, find our store, you can buy some merch.
Hopefully some of that merch will be less necessary.
Now, do not affirm, do not comply.
Hopefully you do not need to be as worried in the future about affirming or complying because the cultural conversation will be changing around issues like transitioning your child or complying with vaccine mandates.
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