Why Trump Wants Greenland: The 257th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss the World Health Organization, Greenland, Panama, and how Trump plans to interact with all of the above. Is it moral to ask for, buy, or take, other people’s land? We need to remember the Monroe Doctrine. Also: the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out an annual hate map, in which they showcase hate groups like “anti-government groups” that promote “conspiratorial and dubious views of government…as evidenced by the movement’s popular rhetoric on such issues a...
Hey folks, welcome to the dark horse podcast live stream number two 57 two 57.
It is Christmas Eve, a term I always find awkward this early in the day.
Am I wrong?
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
I am wrong, but it still feels right.
It feels like Christmas Eve would be the evening before Christmas.
But in any case, Merry Christmas to you all.
This one feels different than any in recent memory.
Any Christmases?
Any Christmas Eves?
Christmas I. Yeah, so we've got a guest producer today who's just walked away, but I'm pointing to his empty chair.
Zach is back for the moment from Europe and working with us behind the scenes once again.
We might get him in front of the camera before he goes back.
We might do that.
Get him on for a locals Q&A possibly.
You can check out his new accent.
Yeah, his new accent.
Incidentally, you are Oh, I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You're Dr. Heather Hying.
This is the Evolutionary Lens, part of the Dark Horse podcast pantheon.
Yes, it is.
And this is, as you mentioned, 257. 257 is prime.
Yes.
And also a balanced prime.
What?
Meaning that it is equidistant from its two nearest primes, which also means that its two nearest primes, their mean is this prime.
Do mathematicians have real jobs?
No.
No.
They just spend time looking for relationships amongst the many haphazardly distributed primes.
Okay.
Not haphazard.
Also, looking for relationships.
Isn't that what...
All of us are doing over in science land, over in art land, isn't looking for relationships, looking for patterns, and being excited when you find them.
And okay, the part that mathematicians, along with everyone else, is a little bit silly about is like, and now we're going to give it a fancy name so that all of you who don't know the name yet can feel a little bit on the outs.
But still, I like it.
Balanced prime.
All right, but I am not looking for relationships, and I hope you aren't either.
It's not like that.
It's not like that.
Okay.
But wait a second.
I'm waiting.
I'm now going to leap into...
I'm going to put on my mathematician hat.
Aren't the relationships between the primes haphazard?
Isn't that literally the description of what they are, which is why you can't come up with an algorithm that finds them in any elegant way?
You might be right.
I'm not sure.
I'm not actually...
You may be right.
I was objecting to your flippant apparent rejection of prime distribution, but you may be right.
I take haphazardness very seriously.
I know you do.
And the distinction between it and randomness.
Oh, yes.
The distinction between the two has meant a lot in experimental design in fieldwork, for instance, where one can not always obtain randomness, but one can obtain haphazardness, hazardousity.
Yeah.
Actually, I wonder if it's not a distinction that becomes important as you move into complex systems, which we have increasingly been talking about in the sense that to say, let's just take an example that our listeners will remember from many discussions here, the uptake of the mRNA from the COVID vaccines is probably not perfectly random.
Some cells are more likely to take it up just based on what they've got sitting on their surface than others.
It is haphazard with respect to what those cells do.
In other words...
The emergent nature, the many variables that affect what cells take it up in a particular individual body may, in the net analysis, be haphazard.
Haphazard, and it's almost certainly not random.
Yeah, it's not going to be random, but it's also not going to be completely predictable based on at least what we now know.
So it is almost exactly parallel to the distinction that we draw between signal and noise.
Noise is not inherently meaningless, but it's meaningless with respect to the thing you're trying to measure, right?
It's one of the other factors, and you can go on to study that next factor, or it's the composite of all of the other factors, and you can go on to study any of those other factors, and then they become signal.
So it's not like you are inherently one or the other, but the point is the, uh, The haphazardness is with respect to, in the case of the vaccine design, with respect to the functioning of the vaccine.
The manufacturers did not program it to interact with certain cells, as far as we know, and therefore the uptake will have to do with biological factors that were not on their minds.
Indeed.
Now I'm smirking at you mildly, because I do not think that Christmas Eve, be it day or night before Christmas, is the time to get into a reliable and ancient fight for the two of us on the nature of homoplasy.
It should rightfully be identified as noise or signal.
So that is where I thought you were going briefly.
And I'm not even going to define the term for those presumably abundant listeners who have not been paying such close attention to us for so long that you already know what the term means.
I'll save that for a non-Christmas Eve live stream.
Let's put it to you this way.
Even if we did start that discussion, I would just, out of generosity, it being Christmas Eve, adopt your position, albeit temporarily.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
I don't remember what your position is, but I would, just because it's the right thing to do, Christmas spirit being what it is.
Christmas spirit being what it is.
Okay, so we are going to talk today about Greenland, I guess?
Oh yeah.
And Drag Queen Story Hour.
And I think we're going to review, as we have a few years, our Hanukkah tradition, because this year Hanukkah starts on Christmas on the Evening of Christmas itself, as opposed to Christmas Eve.
And we may talk, we may do a tiny bit of astronomy here today as well, maybe.
Awesome.
Just maybe.
As always, Locals is where you can find our community.
That's where the watch party is going on right now.
And we'll be doing a Q&A this Sunday at Locals at 11 a.m.
Pacific for a couple of hours.
So please join us there.
And we have, as always, three sponsors right up at the top of the hour.
Three sponsors that we have carefully vetted.
Without further ado, here they are.
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It's coming up on the holidays.
I did not change this.
It's coming right up on the holidays.
Yeah, just like...
Yeah, right here.
When many people gather with family, honoring old traditions and sometimes coming up with new ones, baking the gingerbread that everyone loves, having hot mulled cider by the fire, playing music together, those traditions would be different if you were gone, Brett.
Okay, if I were gone too.
Yes.
I remember the last time you read this and you came up short.
I mean, it just seems like all traditions are different if I'm gone.
To me.
Yeah.
You know?
True.
Yeah.
True to everyone else as well.
I mean, except for the ones that you weren't involved with in the first place.
Right.
Which is almost everybody.
Yes.
Oh, pronouns.
Such a complicated landscape we're in.
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Until it's over.
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Our second sponsor this week is Armra, and this sentence is missing a verb, but I just added it right in.
You want one?
Yeah.
Um...
Upend.
Okay.
Facilitate.
Alright.
Um...
Stagnate.
Decipher.
All right.
We could go on a look.
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Brett's just writing verbs on a paper that is out of your view, but within my view, so I don't know if I'm supposed to integrate those verbs.
In case it comes up again.
Into my read here.
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Before you go and read the third ad for this Christmas Eve edition of the Evolutionary Lens of Dark Horde.
I'm trying to speak and find words on a piece of text at the same time.
I was wondering if we could perhaps push into more common parlance, or for the first time into parlance, the idea of using other pinnipeds when discussing seals for ourselves.
So this ad read says, armor colostrum protects and strengthens your body's barriers, creating a seal that guards against inflammation, everyday toxins.
Why couldn't we use a walrus to protect against everyday inflammation and toxins?
We could use a sea lion, but that's a little bit too close.
I say that we advocate for using walruses to protect against toxins and inflammation.
They're not that useful for other things, so I think this is a perfect use.
They might object to your positioning of them as low in the utility ladder, but yeah.
So from now on, we're going to use...
They don't have a leg to stand on.
They got...
No, flippers.
They're all flippers.
There's leg bones.
They've got flippers, they got vibrissi, and they've got tusks.
Dude, the Fabrisi and the tusks are not homologous.
The two legs.
Right.
Oh, right.
They got leg bones and arm bones and, you know, leg bones.
If you squint.
I don't have to squint.
I mean, from here you do, because we don't have any walruses, so you gotta look well over the horizon.
See?
I predicted what would happen.
We've stagnated.
I don't think so.
Heather?
This is going to be awkward because...
Is it?
Yes, because I have scanned ahead on this ad and realized I'm going to have to correct it in real time.
But nobody's even going to notice.
Our third sponsor for this episode is CrowdHealth, which is unlike any other service on the market.
Heather knows because before they were a sponsor, Heather went looking for exactly that.
Which they provide.
Heather went looking for exactly what they provide.
That's what it almost says on the paper.
Heather desperately wanted to get her family out of the health insurance rat race, and she did.
You would have too, had you been intimately familiar with how much money we were paying and for no benefits.
Right, absolutely.
No, it's really just a technical matter of correcting the script.
It wasn't just, I was like pushing, I was, you were like, no, I want to stay in the insurance rat race.
I was rooting for you from the sidelines as you were doing this onerous work.
Hopefully there will not be a lot more correction necessary in the ad raid.
Health insurance in the United States needs to be reimagined from the ground up, or just simply needs to be ground up.
Between the astronomical prices, Byzantine paperwork, government interference, and focus on quick and easy pharma-based solutions that themselves often cause more problems than they solve, it's a mess.
Enter CrowdHealth.
It's not health insurance.
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Stop sending money to fear-mongering insurance companies who profit off you while they are barely covering your medical needs and check out CrowdHealth.
for years now our family that's both of our families see doesn't need a correction has had health insurance for emergencies only an accident or a bad diagnosis for a family of four we were paying almost two thousand dollars a month for a policy with seventeen thousand dollars annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever Heather went looking for alternatives and Heather found crowd health.
Oh, this is going very smoothly.
For $185 for an individual or $605 for families of four or more, you get access to a community of people who will help out in the event of an emergency.
That's a third of what we were paying for bad health insurance.
With CrowdHealth, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or an accident, you pay the first $500 and they pay the rest.
Heather didn't expect to know how well crowd health actually worked for a while, but then Toby, our 18-year-old son, broke his foot in July.
You know, some of this you could just say we.
Yeah.
Well, now, see here, you raise it, but I can't because...
But you could have said we didn't expect to know how well crowd health actually worked for a while.
Right, but the problem is, being a dyslexic who is not looking ahead and therefore able to figure out where a sentence is going, I've got to stick to things that I'm certain are not going to put me in an awkward spot later in the sentence.
So again, second ad read today, where it's the pronouns that are muddling us up.
Right.
Down with pronouns.
Oh, down with pronouns.
Absolutely.
Seen that one coming for years now.
Heather and Toby went to the ER and he, that's Toby, got x-rays and the afternoon, no, got x-rays and the afternoons of several doctors and nurses plus crutches and a walking boot wasn't cheap.
And the what?
Wait, wait, wait.
That says attention.
I don't even know what it would mean for doctors to give us afternoons.
Were you not there in the afternoon?
I think you do know what it would mean, which is why I read it that way, but it does say attention.
No, that's not why you read it that way.
Nice try though, buddy.
It's tough being me sometimes.
All right.
Not only has Kraut no sympathy from you.
In this regard, no.
Not even dry fasting either.
True, true.
See?
Watch.
Proof.
Cheater.
Not only has Proudhout the page...
You're going to get scared reading the end of this ad if you're not careful.
Are you pushing Justin around?
What did he do to you?
He was a secret, you know?
Yeah, no excuse.
Nope.
See, I'm gonna cheat too.
See, we were dry fasting for months now.
Yep.
Okay, it's over.
Alright.
Step watermelon.
We're not dry fasting.
Nope.
The local people had already asked if you guys had been fasting.
Alright, I even know where I was.
Do you?
In the afternoon of doctors.
Yeah, nope.
Not only has CrowdHealth paid our bills...
You're not even trying to be helpful.
No, I'm not here.
Allow me to allow Justin to help.
Wait, he's out of view now.
Oh, here we go.
All right.
Oh, there we go.
Are you done?
No, really, no.
So much dead hair.
And you know what?
We love these guys.
We love Grad Health so much and they don't deserve this from us.
No.
No, they don't.
They deserve better.
All right.
Not only has CrowdHealth paid our bills, everything about the interaction was smooth.
Their app is simple and straightforward.
The real people who work at CrowdHealth are easy to reach, clear, communicative.
And with CrowdHealth, we are part of a community of people with aligned interests rather than the antagonism that is inherent to the insurance model.
It turns out that CrowdHealth has a...
That is actively disruptive.
It turns out that CrowdHealth has approached us about being a sponsor a couple years ago.
Heather didn't get it then.
I also didn't.
It felt complicated to switch things up.
We were wrong.
See, I corrected that one on the fly.
Having rediscovered them on our own and benefited directly from what they are doing, Heather is now confident that CrowdHealth is the way to deal with medical expenses and so is her husband.
Yes.
And how is their zebra, Justin?
Totally.
Join the CrowdHealth revolution.
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That's joincrowdhealth.com, code DARKHORSE. All right.
Barely survived the ad read.
Hopefully the rest of this goes more smoothly.
Oh god.
Alright, where are we starting?
I don't know, ask Justin.
Was he named Justin before today?
He was named Justin before the livestream.
Okay.
Are you setting yourself up for the obvious joke?
Something about just in case.
Just in time, I was thinking, but okay, either way.
All right.
Are we starting with President Trump and the remarkable postures he has taken of late?
If you like.
All right.
I think we should.
So there's...
I think we're in a very strange period, the period after Donald Trump has been re-elected to the presidency, that is re-elected to non-consecutive terms, and before he is seated in the inauguration on the 20th of January.
And this is, of course, a moment that exists after every election of a new president.
But in this case, it's very strange because the powers that be have been so dead set against President Trump returning to the White House and they are so clearly possessed of extraordinary powers to do extra constitutional and highly illegal things that a lot of us are nervous about.
That something might happen.
But it also means that the attention that is not generally focused so intensely on the president-elect is quite directly focused.
And there's been an awful lot of not only announcements about who he intends to appoint to various positions, which would be standard, but obviously there's been a lot of discussion also about policy changes, some of them quite radical.
And anyway, this doesn't feel like that period in any prior presidency to me.
I agree.
It's tough.
I certainly haven't, and I don't know that anyone has tried to keep careful note of What this period of history looks like and also, you know, at an empirical level it also feels like.
But if memory serves, this does not feel like this sort of interregnum that happens every four years for a couple of months in the United States.
Yep, and it's definitely, so there's both the focus on President Trump and there is also the highly unusual nature of the person in question.
That is what it is.
But nonetheless, his interaction with the public, his use of the bully pulpit and posturing that would be very atypical for a president makes it a much more interesting phenomenon, too.
Although that has changed dramatically since the last time he was in office.
Bully pulpit suggests something in particular when you're talking about Trump, and he is not playing the part of bully nearly so much as he did.
Yeah, well, that's the question is, what exactly is he doing?
And I wanted to point to two things that have emerged very recently in the last couple days that, oh, actually, there's a third thing, which you may not even know about.
I probably don't, Justin.
I had some difficulty ascertaining whether or not this had actually happened.
So have I. In fact, Grok tripped over it.
Grok gave me the right answer and some wrong sources.
But it turns out that President Trump has apparently announced that he will be pulling the U.S. from the World Health Organization early in his second term.
I hear intimations of this.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
So Grok gave me several sources.
I asked for the best sources that indicated that this had happened again, because he did pull us from the World Health Organization in his first term.
And Trump gave me several sources from his first term, but this one from Reuters appears to be modern.
This may be the highest and best use of things like the AP and Reuters at this point in order to effectively fact-check whether or not the mainstream media...
to a particular version of events.
Right.
What, you know, doesn't mean it's true, but are they saying, you know, it gives people cover.
It does.
In this case, it did.
You know, this was the third source it gave me, but this one does appear to suggest that he has announced this.
And as I said before his election, that if he did this one thing, that actually in and of itself is sufficiently important to justify taking the risk on the rest.
The third bullet point here.
Critics warn U.S. withdrawal weakens who?
Well, that's the strongest point in its favor.
I hope it weakens it to death.
It's a terrifying organization, and once you understand that it isn't what it pretends to be, it's not some international governance thing.
It's largely private, funded largely by Gates and the Wellcome Trust, and it has done no end of harm.
So anyway, my wishing an end to it is perfectly justified.
But in any case, the other things that Trump has announced in the last couple of days involve two international questions that I believe, although we don't have terribly much to go on, lead us...
They give us an indication of where we may be headed.
Some of it may be marvelous.
Some of it is certainly frightening.
But anyway, it's certainly worth our consideration, even though we don't have a ton to go on.
So do you want to show President Trump's tweet on his true social account?
This is, he says...
I am pleased to announce Ken Howery as my choice for United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark.
Ken is a world-renowned entrepreneur, investor, public servant who served our nation brilliantly during my first term as US Ambassador to Sweden.
Where he led efforts to increase defense, security, and economic cooperation between our countries.
As a co-founder of PayPal and Venture Capital Founders Fund, Ken turned American innovation and tech leadership into global success stories, and that experience will be invaluable in representing us abroad.
For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels...
That the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.
Ken will do a wonderful job in representing the interests of the United States.
Thank you, Ken, and congratulations.
Now, that is an utterly extraordinary statement for a soon-to-be president of the United States to deliver.
Why exactly he is focused on Greenland is not clear.
Those who have explored the topic see two reasons.
Likely both of them are in play.
One of them is the strategic importance of Greenland.
Its location is obviously unique.
And then there's a question about resources, largely mineral resources, that would be Buried within it.
And Denmark has of course responded by saying it's not for sale, it won't be for sale, and cut it out.
In order to understand where we are, we need to remember that President Trump is in reality and very much in his own mind a master negotiator.
And so there's a question about whether or not what he's saying is actually an account of where he thinks we are headed or it's an opening gambit in a larger progression.
But It raises questions about what the proper interaction is between international entities.
And I find it interesting that in discussing this, of course, there is something that appears to be a violation of international...
Norms in this statement.
But of course, he's speaking to the Kingdom of Denmark, which suggests that actually the world has not fully agreed on the values and standards that govern how we administer ourselves.
So New York Times wrote about the story as well.
About both Greenland and Panama, which you're going to be talking about as well.
You can show my screen here.
Trump's wish to control Greenland and Panama Canal, not a joke, this time.
So I had not remembered this.
I don't think I knew.
I don't think I was aware of it as it happened.
But unlike the New York Times says, the obvious joking about making Canada the 51st state and referring to Trudeau as Governor Trudeau, which is kind of hilarious.
But which the New York Times anyway is saying that they knew all along was just a joke and no one was supposed to be taking that seriously.
So here we have, while naming a new ambassador to Denmark, which controls Greenland's foreign and defense affairs, Mr. Trump made clear on Sunday that his first term offer to buy the landmass could, in the coming term, become a deal the Danes cannot refuse.
And as you say, it's about both the strategic location and the resources.
And, not surprisingly, the government of Greenland immediately rejected Mr. Trump's demands, as it did in 2019 when he first floated the idea.
Greenland is ours, Prime Minister.
I have no idea how to pronounce things in Danish.
The Prime Minister of Denmark said in a statement, we are not for sale and will never be for sale.
We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.
No, I'm sorry.
That is not the Prime Minister of Denmark.
It is the Prime Minister of Greenland.
And so Denmark is the sort of the nation state in control of, what did it say, defense and economic maybe, but Greenland is autonomous in some regards.
Right.
In thinking about this story, and we will come to the Panama issue, so at one level, I actually quite applaud the approach here, right?
He is not...
President Trump is not acting in a belligerent way.
He is talking about the necessity of Greenland to the United States, which can be a reality, and we can talk about all of the other cases in which some item somewhere has been important to the United States and how we have dealt with it.
And we can evaluate that in light of the values we actually hold and the values that we pretend to hold and sometimes don't live up to.
But, you know, to take one obvious example.
Why the hell is Hawaii an American state?
Right?
It's a very odd item for us to have except for the obvious fact that it is strategically unique sitting out there in the middle of the Pacific.
So...
Whatever the story may be, the fact that that piece of land has a unique value and it became a state in spite of having a population which obviously in any normal sense is entitled to have kept that state to itself.
So there is a realpolitik of items that have special strategic importance.
We make the same case for Alaska.
And Guam.
And Puerto Rico.
And Guam and Puerto Rico and all of the others.
And then that brings us to the other question here, which is Panama, right?
Panama, which, you know, is a sovereign nation in which the United States successfully built a canal, which was then turned over to the Panamanians by treaty signed by Carter in 77, I think, turned over finally in 1999. Right after you had spent 19 months living in the canal zone.
Yeah, I lived there in the final days of the...
American-controlled canal zone.
Yes, in the American-controlled canal zone, I will just point out for those who don't know, involved five...
Active military bases actually in the state of Panama within the Canal Zone, which was American territory.
And when the United States attacked Panama in 1989, Oh, Nariega?
Yeah.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Attacked Panama under Nariega.
It effectively invaded Panama from within because it had five active military bases.
They literally drove their tanks out of the canal zone and took over Panama briefly.
So...
There are all kinds of questions, right?
Do the Panamanians have the right to Panama?
Yes.
Except Panama was actually broken off of Colombia in order to make the building of the canal possible by the Americans.
The Americans literally created Panama.
They created international events that caused Panama to become an independent state.
So, anyway, the point is...
There's some real story about the way the world works.
And we can say, well, the right of self-determination is really what we should all be governed by.
But the problem is, even that doesn't work.
Because, you know, do you and I have the right to declare this building sovereign and secede?
No, right?
We could take a vote in this building and we could vote to do it.
And the point is our ability to vote, you know, and not only have a majority, but unanimity over the idea doesn't mean we have the right to do it.
And in fact, the world wouldn't work if we did, right?
If everybody can be seceding anytime they feel like it, then the point is, then there's no ability to govern larger things, which creates vulnerabilities that we can't afford.
Well, it is perhaps the fate of all people to imagine they live in a post-historical time.
Certainly, it is the fate of 21st century weird people.
And it feels like, in the 21st century, the borders are supposed to be set.
And this explains in part our outrage, or many people's outrage, when borders are breached.
When Russia goes into Ukraine, when anything happens in the Middle East, even though those borders are less established than just about anywhere else in the world, the people in the weird countries get less upset when countries in Africa get Get messy.
But that has probably more to do with our recognition that we have less to gain by messing around there.
So, I mean, actually, it reveals our self-interest rather than revealing anything honorable about what humans are, what Americans are.
So it does feel like, wait a minute, Greenland's part of Denmark, haven't we already established that?
Isn't that a done thing?
But of course, there have never been done things before in history.
And it is a particular...
It feels like a particular imagination of our time, but I think that probably everyone to some degree imagines well that now we're settled.
Like now we got things under control and these things aren't going to be changing.
And of course that's not necessarily the case.
Well, it's not necessarily the case.
I will make an argument.
I'm actually going to make an evolutionary argument in here somewhere that actually the end of history has been wrongly declared, but actually we should be aware that it is a state that may even be necessary.
And I don't mean that we will not continue to have things happen and write about them.
But as you point out, when we talk about the end of history...
We are really talking about the settling of dominion over various things.
And we aren't there for reasons that I think are fairly clear, but it may be actually important for the continuation of our species that we get there quickly.
Go ahead.
Well, I just want to point out the thing that is different about Trump's approach to Greenland here Is that...
If the question is, well, can we buy it?
On the one hand, that's unseemly, right?
Like imagine, you know, somebody comes into your house and they're like, you know, that is a lovely sculpture.
How much?
And it's like, well, that's not done, right?
You're a guest in a house.
And like, I imagine there probably is a price at which I'd part with the sculpture, but that's just not how we behave.
On the other hand, if the answer is actually like it or not, Greenland, and I'm not saying this is true, but if Trump's perception is, like it or not, that landmass has to effectively be under our control in order for us to be secure going forward.
And then the point is, well, let's just deal with the reality.
The Danes and the Greenlanders, whatever you call Greenlanders, can say, well, it's not for sale all you want.
But the fact is, we're talking about the largest economy in the world.
We're not talking about Greenland now.
No.
We are no doubt in a position to change the position of Denmark.
So in other words...
Are we still the largest economy in the world?
I believe so.
And now, there might be caveats about how you measure, but yes, I believe we are.
And so the point is, it is not obviously wrong that if the President of the United States says, we would like to buy Greenland, and the folks who own Greenland say no, that that's the end of the negotiations because the capacity to incentivize is massive.
Yeah, so maybe you first mentioned this Greenland, developing Greenland situation to me yesterday, the day before, and I had not been aware of it.
And to me and Toby, in fact, our younger son, and both Toby and I had the immediate reaction, although we weren't explicit about this, of thinking in terms of frontiers.
And as we write about in A Hundred Gatherer's Guide, There are historically three kinds of frontiers that humans engage with, and we are proposing a fourth frontier.
Without going into that, the three types of frontiers that we identify in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide are the one that you immediately think of whenever you think frontier, which is a geographic frontier, just finding a place that does not already have people in it and making it your own.
There have been effectively no geographic frontiers left on Earth for a long time.
There are technological frontiers, second type of frontier that we name, in which we innovate from conditions that existed before, but the people who were there before did not see things in the same way that we did.
So everything from terracing of steep slopes so that you can plant You know, potatoes in the Andes, whereas without the terracing, the water would just run downhill and there was nothing to be made, to, of course, the technological innovations that mark everything since the Industrial Revolution, everything from radio to smartphone.
And then you have a third type of historical frontier, which is illegitimate in its theft, but it is nevertheless a kind of frontier, which is what we call the transfer of resource frontier, wherein you come into a space that is already inhabited and you say, that looks like something I'm going to have, and you take it.
And so when you first mention what is beginning to happen in Greenland, and apparently did happen in the last Trump term as well, which again, I didn't know, my brain immediately goes to frontiers.
Well, it's already been claimed, it's already got people living in it, and the Greenlanders live there, and Denmark oversees it, and it's already there.
And a technological frontier is not a relevant kind of thinking here, so we must be talking about That third kind of transfer resource frontier, and geez, I kind of thought we didn't do that anymore, right?
But actually, it isn't necessarily a kind of frontier, right?
If, as you just pointed out, Trump is saying, we'd like to buy this, Then that's not frontier thinking.
We're not in frontier space.
We are in business space, which of course is exactly where Trump has been effective in the world.
And he's looking at resources and looking at the pieces and going, yep, this would be really good for us.
Hopefully, presumably, he's acting as a patriot and as the future president, once and future president.
And this isn't about personal advocacy, personal benefit, but he's looking at this from a strategic perspective for the United States and going, this is something that I think that we need to have.
Let's see how we could obtain it.
We are going to come to you with Most, not all, presumably, cards on the table and say, hey, Denmark, this is something that we'd like.
I don't know what all is in his head, but that does take it out of the, oh my God, wait a minute, we aren't allowed to do that.
That's the third kind of frontier space, transfer of resource frontier.
Like, nope, not That is not actually what he said he's doing.
Right.
In fact, when you say business space, the point is what we're actually talking about is wealth creation space.
Is there something that Denmark would like to have more than it wants Greenland?
And that is at least a valid...
Question that can be discussed above board.
Maybe the answer is no, but...
Right.
Or, you know, nothing within our willingness to pay for it.
But it is at least...
It's the adult version of the discussion.
And I do think...
A discussion for another day, we have to start, we in the public have to start thinking very differently about our strategic well-being.
The world is technologically changing out from under us, and what it is that is necessary in order to be safe is different than it once was.
It's going to require some things of us that actually run counter to the ethos of the moment.
A bunch of discussion in the last week or so, Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk have both pointed to the fact that drone warfare has changed the nature of warfare absolutely radically.
And I don't think people have properly understood what that implies.
Because the problem with drone warfare, yes, you can have some very fancy drones, but Right, that are only available to, you know, state-level actors.
But the problem is, you have all kinds of things that are becoming readily possible at a very inexpensive price.
And so this video that somebody put out a number of years ago, the Slaughterbot video, do you recall that?
About what would happen if a renegade entity decided to target people with swarms of these drones with facial recognition capability and explosives.
And the point is actually that's readily conceivable today.
And in fact, we're learning a lot in Ukraine about what can be done with off-the-shelf drones.
So, anyway, we are in a brand new world and what is necessary so that we are not all at the mercy of evil actors who wish to deploy these drones.
Evil actors who, you know, frankly, I think whatever took over the Democratic Party and has been inhabiting the presidency over the course of the Biden administration is certainly capable of deploying evil things for their own purposes.
We've seen them behave very cynically.
And so the point is such a thing must never be in a position where it decides who has to fear, you know, drone swarms.
So that means you have to have some system that's stable enough that we can spell out what our values are, what isn't allowed, how it's going to be punished if you violate these rules, so that we are not all living in constant fear of whatever somebody might decide to deploy with now cheap technology.
What that has to do with Greenland, I don't know, but But the idea that somebody looking at the malignant governance that has wrecked all of the structures that make us safe and thinking, you know, well, who's got to go?
And actually, Greenland can't be independent because our well-being depends on it not being.
And I would point out, actually, would you put the picture up I took of Greenland when you and I flew over?
By the way, I highly recommend if you are taking a transatlantic flight that you fly so that you cross over Greenland during the day, get a window seat and check this place out.
It is non-stop fascinating and utterly inhospitable.
So anyway, I had my face glued to the window as we were flying over Greenland.
It's quite a remarkable landscape.
Okay, so let's broaden this discussion.
Let's bring in...
Before, in Panama?
Yeah.
First, I actually, the quote that I wanted to read from this New York Times article was just after where I stopped.
Let me just say that the Prime Minister of Greenland said, we are not for sale, we'll never be for sale, we must not lose our long struggle for freedom.
But the Danish prime minister's office was more circumspect, the New York Times writes, writing in a statement that the government was, quote, looking forward to working with the new administration and offering no further comment on Mr. Trump's remarks.
So that is probably just politic, but it may also indicate something about what Denmark sees as an opportunity.
Yep.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, negotiation wise, that's exactly what they should be hearing is, wow, the most, the wealthiest nation on earth is interested in something we've got a sparsely populated landmass What do we think they would be willing to pay for it?
Okay, so now let's go to the Panama story.
Do you want to put up the...
Again, there's not terribly much information here.
But there is, so here is, well, this is Grok's summary.
Was there also an announcement?
Maybe not.
Okay.
So there are several things that Trump has indicated.
One is he has leveled an accusation of absorbitant fees for the Panama Canal.
He's leveled what sounds to be a threat to reclaim the canal and he has expressed concerns about Chinese influence.
I will say my view on what's going on here is heavily affected by Michael Yan, who has spent a tremendous amount of time in Panama and traveling around the world trying to understand what's going on with the international order.
And it was your guide in the canal zone on the Darien Gap when you and Zach went down there in January of this year.
Yes, he took us into the Darien Gap.
He brought us to the San Vicente camp, which is the Chinese entry point into Central America, where Mayorkas himself had gone and pledged to enlarge the camp.
That camp is now, as far as I know, closed.
There was a fire that destroyed the records that had come through the camp.
Anyway, so Michael Jan brought us there, and I am heavily affected by his perspective, which I regard as prescient.
Now, there are some places where he and I differ.
He is very much not a fan of President Trump, and I believe Michael should probably be more open to the possibility that President Trump is the necessary and only way out of the hole that we seem to have dug ourselves in But nonetheless, what Michael sees is the drums of war beginning to beat with respect to Panama.
Now, as I mentioned before, the state of Panama is itself a construction.
Panama was part of Colombia.
It was broken off from Colombia because it was thought to be impossible to dig the canal if the Colombians...
It had governance over Panama, and so Panama became an independent state.
That independent state had the United States as the dominant partner.
In fact, there's an argument that it wasn't really an independent state because the fact of the canal was so powerfully economically important over the period of American governance of the canal zone.
So anyway, Panama is now a country of its own.
It has dominion over the canal.
The Chinese have made tremendous inroads into Panama.
This is a very powerful, wealthy state, and it has long-term global intentions, largely encapsulated in the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, where there is an understanding of essentially where the Labor and resources exist on planet Earth and how they are to be facilitated in their flow to the betterment of the Chinese people.
I'm not familiar with the term Belt and Road Initiative.
It is a description by the Chinese of how to facilitate the flow of labor and resources to the betterment of China.
In the world, not specifically in Panama.
Correct.
In fact, it's largely a fact of the old world and has been extended into the Americas, which I think is in part what is going on with President Trump.
President Trump regards the incursion into the Americas by the Chinese As dangerous.
I also think it's dangerous.
The influx of Chinese immigrants through the Darien Gap has a meaning that I think we still don't know.
Lots of people have advanced ideas, but I think we don't know.
That said, menacing the Panamanians over the influx of migrants through the Darien Gap is strange.
So The Panamanians have just elected a new president.
I believe it's President Molino.
President Molino was elected...
Now, their electoral system doesn't look anything like ours, so I think he was elected with 30-some percent of the vote.
Maybe it was 38 percent of the vote.
But his platform...
Was largely built around closing the flow through the Darien Gap.
Now, when Zach and I were in Panama, it was actually clear to us that most Panamanians, if you weren't right on the route that the migrants were flowing through Panama, largely not stopping flowing through Panama, if you weren't involved in seeing this influx of migrants, if you weren't involved in seeing this influx of migrants, you didn't understand what was really going on.
You didn't understand that there was actually a flow of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people through your country.
It's actually remarkable.
I mean, this holds across so many different kinds of Gigantic events that happen at human scale, where if you're removed from it and you hear that a civil war is happening, and maybe civil war is actually the exception here that proves the rule, but you hear that such and such is an unsafe place to be, that things are being disrupted at a level that no one has seen before.
Then you go to a place and you go, huh, actually, it's amazing how normal life seems just a little ways away.
And, you know, we used to have this experience in the 90s when we were traveling a lot to Latin America and people who'd never been anywhere would say, But it's super dangerous to go there.
There are places where it's very dangerous to be, for sure.
But the idea of an entire region of the world being a dangerous place to be doesn't make sense.
It doesn't hold water.
And to some degree, this is just about the highly local nature of things like a mass migration.
And then to some degree, there's a kind of Potemkin village element in some cases.
And I'm reminded, and this is a totally different domain, but I'm reminded of the first time that you and I drove through the Pacific Northwest when we were on our way east to go to college.
And never having been up in Oregon or Washington before in any depth, we were seeing just, you know, these amazing forests, these, you know, these Doug-fur dominated forests.
And then came to realize that many of them were actually only about 50 feet deep, and they'd been clear-cut.
But there's like a 50-foot buffer near the road to keep drivers like us having the sense of like, oh, the great old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest are still standing.
And of course they weren't.
And so we couldn't see the stark Devastation until we pulled off on a logging road and drove in and went like, oh, oh, okay, now I know.
And then you can't unsee it.
But until you do see it, you might not even believe it because it feels impossible.
Actually, the funny thing is it's the inverse of the migrant issue.
So the migrants are, you know, a very local phenomenon because they're where the Pan-American Highway is.
They're flowing up the Pan-American Highway.
And if you're, you know...
20 miles from the Pan American Highway, they're not impacting your life.
The buffers, I've forgotten what they're called, but the logging industry actually employed very sophisticated software in order to figure out where to stop cutting so that the degree to which they were devastating the forest, the Pacific Northwest, would be largely invisible.
Of course, it was never invisible from the air.
If you flew over, you saw this.
They were using software to figure out, you know, basically which trees they could cut, and the drivers wouldn't be any the wiser.
And so anyway, they were creating kind of a Potemkin Forest phenomenon.
But, alright, so something weird is going on with Panama.
Panama did not allow the invasion through Darien.
It's not clear that they could have even stopped it.
By they didn't allow it, you mean it's happening?
You mean they did not facilitate it?
I mean, yeah.
I mean, larger forces, including and most especially the United States, which clearly, for whatever reason, wanted this invasion.
But I mean, it is happening.
So it has de facto been allowed.
But you're saying they did not...
There's no indication that they wanted it, that they facilitated it, that they helped it along.
Right.
Well, I think the Panamanian regime rolled over, but it's not obvious that they had the ability to do anything else.
When the United States decides that it wants an invasion to pass through your territory, then, you know, what happened is all of the countries that the Pan-American Highway passes through, you know, from Panama to Mexico, basically decided...
To facilitate, to get those people to move through so that they didn't become a local problem, right?
The point is the United States wants its invasion.
So people come in and they flow through and hopefully they cause us a little trouble and cost us as little as possible.
So just to name it, we're talking about, it's going to go Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico.
There it is.
So all of those countries allowed it.
It's not clear that they had any ability to do anything else.
Yeah.
Sorry, but the Pan American Highway misses El Salvador and Belize only in Central America.
Correct.
Exactly.
So, anyway, one thing that I think we need to sort of dust off, right, from all of our history that we took in high school or whatever, is the Monroe Doctrine.
Because I wonder if what Trump is seeing and giving voice to and, you know, so I'm critical of his stance with respect to Panama in the sense that he's menacing the Panamanians over malfeasance of the Biden administration, not the Panamanians, right?
What's more, he's got a new president of Panama to work with who actually campaigned on the side of the issue that Trump would have him be on.
So, you know, Maybe, again, the right way to deal with this is something similar to what's going on with Denmark and Greenland, which is to deal with it above board and say, look, here's what we need.
And it's possible.
I'm not an expert in global military strategy.
I'm very nervous about the Chinese having control over the canal.
The canal is a profoundly important fact, both in terms of military strategy and in terms of the flow of resources.
And I don't trust the Chinese for obvious reasons.
And so...
I will just add, I believe that the reason that Carter handed over the canal by treaty was that the canal was understood to have become less important because our largest military ships couldn't go through it.
I think that's right.
But nonetheless, the flow of goods through the canal, the percentage of the world economy that depends on the canal being open and not charging users fees and not being allowed to decay or to drain of water or all of the things that can interfere with it, that importance is so great.
That it is conceivable that the same kind of logic that has the United States in control of Hawaii and Alaska and has Trump talking about Greenland, that the same kind of, if we're to be adults about this, yes, I'm very concerned about the Panamanian people.
I believe in sovereignty and democracy and all of these things, but there's also a question about What the world needs to look like in order for it not to be descending into resource wars that frankly jeopardize all of us in the long term, right?
So the Monroe Doctrine was the creation of Jim Monroe.
Jim?
James Monroe.
But now we call presidents by nicknames.
And so Jim, well, Dewey, I don't know what his name was, but we, so James Monroe and his secretary of state, who was, hold on a second.
You say we should dump off our history.
Jack Quincy Adams.
Oh my God.
Formulated the Monroe Doctrine, although it wasn't called that to begin with.
This was in the beginning of the 19th century, and the Monroe Doctrine effectively declared the Americas off limits to the colonial powers.
At that time, it was Europe that was the concern, but basically it said that the Americas were off limits to colonialists from elsewhere in the world.
Now, on the one hand, You know, all us liberals can reach for our fainting couches and decry the abridgment of sovereignty, right?
The fact that the people who live in the Americas have the right to self-determination, and, you know, if they want to Sell us out to the Russians or the Chinese.
That's their business.
But the reality is actually all of us, humanity, depends on a stable order.
And so the question is how we've watched a lot of colonial bullshit.
And in fact, the Americans have done a terrible job of respecting the rights of Latin Americans, right?
Invasion after invasion.
Yes.
We've upended democratically elected regimes.
We've installed dictators.
Especially in Central America, but really throughout Latin America.
Right, throughout Latin America.
And so the point is, I'm not advocating for that, but there is a question, and I do wonder if Trump is pointing at it in mentioning these things.
There's a question about how to...
Actually, it's really a subsidiarity question.
So many people will have heard me or Jordan Peterson point to subsidiarity, which is this idea that actually strangely comes out of Catholicism.
And the idea is everything should be governed at the lowest level that works, right?
So global governance, actually, we need it for a few things, right?
There are some things you can't govern otherwise, right?
Like who protects the oceans?
But you want most things governed as close to local as you can do it effectively.
So there is a natural how do we protect the Americas that involves more than just U.S. interests.
So could there be a 2.0 version of the Monroe Doctrine in which we actually sat down with the countries of the Americas and recognized what world we lived in and instead of, you know, Coming up with casus belli and installing a dictator who happens to be hospitable to our foreign policy and not worrying about the consequences for the local people.
Could we actually come to agreement, you know, and, I don't know, start governing ourselves like adults with...
I think the key thing would be with values stated up front and values that are not just things that we like to talk about, but things that we actually aspire to and that we stick to, you know, whether we are advocating for them for ourselves or whether we are suggesting them to others.
Those things have to have symmetrical importance.
But anyway, I don't have a ton more to say other than...
The noises that President Trump are making, some of them are brand new seeming, and some of them seem like a retreat into an old mode that we mustn't return to.
But thinking on the scale of, you know, the Americas and how to protect them, Is something I would hope that presidents were doing, and I'm open to seeing that maybe President Trump has a broad-minded objective in mind here.
Let's hope.
Yeah.
Hope so too.
We should all hope.
Yes.
We should all be rooting for President Trump to do well by the United States and the world.
And if he's got his eye on the Americas, hopefully we'll do it right this time.
Good.
I guess a slight change of topic, perhaps a large change of topic.
I got a piece of mail from the Southern Poverty Law Center this week.
Which our listeners will recognize as once an important and well-appreciated defender of civil rights.
And ACLU was more known for free speech, but the SPLC and the ACLU lived in a similar place in my mind anyway, in terms of being Important non-profit organizations in the United States that were fighting the good fight.
Both of them have fallen.
Both of them have become In many ways, mirror images of what they had been.
And so I wanted to just share, so this, one of the things that came in the mail, and I will show a picture as well, I mean, I will show the URL as well, but was this, 2023 Active Hate and Anti-Government Groups, a map.
So 2023 being the most recent year for which they have complete data, I'm sure that's 2024. Active hate and anti-government groups map will be coming out shortly, and they count 835 anti-government groups and 595 hate groups, including among them white nationalist hate groups, general hate hate groups, anti-LGBTQ, skipping some anti-Semitism, you've got hate music.
No idea.
Male supremacy.
And then over in anti-government groups, by far the largest, the three quarters of the anti-government groups, the SBLC, has identified our general anti-government.
So I thought we would just...
Take a moment here.
This is their interactive map, and you too can find, and I will, of course, link in the show notes, the SPLC's interactive hate in anti-government groups across the U.S. So if we filter by ideology, and we say, okay, how many anti-government groups?
Wow, that's a lot.
Okay, so all of them, and all the ones in black, you know, we got some anti-Semitism, not, oh, actually, only a couple.
That's down in the south there, Texas, and, oh, Boy, I should have looked at that.
Is that Alabama or Mississippi?
I'm gonna get in trouble for that.
Okay, Christian identity hate groups, okay, etc, etc.
So, you know, just a lot, a lot of hate groups.
But it makes a person wonder what counts as anti-government general ideology, according to the SPLC. And so if we click on that, we get to the anti-government general.
Anti-government groups are part of the anti-democratic hard right movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They believe the federal government is tyrannical and they traffic conspiracy theories about an illegitimate government of leftist elites seeking a new world order.
In addition to groups that generally espouse these ideas, the movement is composed of sovereign citizens, militias, overt conspiracy propagandists, and constitutional sheriff groups.
In the past, this movement was referred to as the Patriot Movement by adherents and critics.
And so just the top paragraph here in terms, again, three quarters of the anti-government groups that the SPLC identifies from 2023.
Over 600 organizations are anti-government general, for which the top takeaways from the SPLC are.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified general anti-government groups in addition to specific militia, sovereign citizens, constitutional sheriffs, and conspiracy propagandist groups that also make up the extreme anti-government movement.
In 2021, the conspiratorial and dubious view of government was pervasive, as evidenced by the movement's popular rhetoric on such issues as COVID-19 regulations, local school curriculum, as evidenced by the movement's popular rhetoric on such issues as COVID-19 regulations, local school curriculum, the big lie
These views largely continued in 2023, but with a marked and troubling rise in anti-government activity against inclusive public schools and the continued incorporation.
Yeah.
Um...
Movement's popular rhetoric on such issues as COVID-19 regulations.
That should be enough to tell us what the, frankly, batshit crazy slant of the SPLC is.
But this line here in the last phrase that I read, the inclusive public schools, activity against inclusive public schools, I take that to be code for...
I may be wrong, but if we go back to filtered by ideology and we go to anti-LGBTQ, there's a lot, but there's not that many compared to if we Look at all of the groups out there.
But if we click through on that anti-LGBTQ, we have the opposition to LGBTQ rights or supportive homophobia, heterosexism, and or cis-normativity often expressed through demonizing rhetoric and grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society, and often public health.
So let me just identify again, as they say, homophobia, heterosexism, and cisnormativity.
What do these three words mean?
Homophobia refers to a dislike or phobia, but really it's rarely a phobia, a dislike of people who aren't straight.
We know that this exists, it's relatively rare these days, but there are certainly and there are religious traditions that don't approve of homosexuality.
So homophobia is a real thing that some people do.
Some people will proudly announce that they are homophobes because they don't appreciate the phobic part of that and they say actually this is not in line with the often religious perspective that I believe in.
Heterosexism feels like exactly the same thing, honestly, right?
What is the difference between homophobia and heterosexism?
I don't know.
Those feel like the same.
Yeah, it's redundant.
That's redundant.
And then cisnormativity.
Cisnormativity, I believe, is the apparently bigoted, hateful, and just bigoted and hateful belief that Believing that you are the thing that you were born as with regard to your biological sex and that you actually as a mammal cannot change that is itself hate speech and awful.
So unlike homophobia and heterosexism, which are real things that some people believe and most people don't necessarily anymore, but it is true that historically people who have been heterosexual have left many more Cisnormativity is a made-up term
that makes a Fundamentally mammalian truth out to be hate speech.
So that is kind of in keeping with what the SPLC is doing now, but I wanted to share parts of a video that they have up on their site.
Actually, it looks like you maybe have something to add here.
Well, I got a lot of different thoughts here.
I mean, for one thing, I'm always bothered by something like cis-normativity because normativity does not mean what you would imagine it means.
Normativity is the idea that this has a moral dimension rather than it being normal.
Yes, normative as opposed to normal.
And even the normal distribution also is describing what tends to be true without making a moral judgment.
But normativity specifically is making a moral judgment.
And so cis-normativity, you know what?
Yeah.
You know, you don't...
Have to ascribe to the religious traditions that suggest that being gay is not a moral thing, or the religious traditions that suggest that being heterosexual is inherently the best thing.
While still understanding reality enough that you recognize that actually Identifying as the sex that you are is not a moral judgment.
It is a recognition of reality.
That's what recognizing being cis as opposed to trans is.
Yep.
So, um, Zach, you want to show, uh, or cue up the, um, the, I'll show first, um, So this is Fighting Illiteracy, Preserving Democracy, is on the SPLC site.
And at the very top we have, this is from June of this year, we have a video called The Power of Drag Story Network.
And I am also afterwards going to just read a couple of bits from the written version of this, but I've asked Zach to queue up a couple of excerpts from this video for us to watch.
The SPLC is advocating against cis-normativity in favor of the power of Drag Story Hour as evidence that hate crimes, hate in America is rising because some people say that things like this are perhaps Bad for people.
I think we're ready.
Yeah.
Hi, my name is Tara Lipsinke, they, them, in and out of drag.
I am the owner of Mosaic's community bookstore and venue here in Provo.
I'm also the executive director of the United Drag Alliance, which includes the official programming of Drag Story Hour, Intermountain West.
In September of last year, the King's English here in Salt Lake, I received a bomb threat of a story hour that I was a presenter at.
And then on April 13th of this year, Mosaics received the bomb threat, and it was about Drag Story Hour.
In December of last year, a far-right hate group doxed me, which if people don't know what doxing is, it is sharing private information for malicious tasks as a call of violence, and that group shared my info.
As a way to silence me.
And with that, I had to flee my home.
My home is empty.
Because I have to sell it because of the doxing that happened last year.
So I figured I look like a realtor today.
Used to be a realtor, so let's give you a house tour.
I had been there for 30 years.
It was my childhood home that when my mom passed, I acquired my husband with the dream of having our kids live there.
I'm estranged from biological family because of all of this, and I'm like, they know where I'm at.
And a lot of them are heavy believers in guns.
Before we go to the next excerpt from the same...
Sorry.
Before we go to the next excerpt from this video, I just want to...
I'll point out a couple of lines there.
That's a guy.
Everyone knows that.
Or Lipsinky.
Cute little stage name there, but that's how he is identifying everywhere.
I'm a they-them in and out of drag.
So, as I wrote about summer of 2023, after I went to the RuPaul's Drag Race live event, Work the World, I think it was called, W-E-R-K, Work the World, in Portland, the lines that we have been told for a long time are absolutely intact between drag and trans were clearly fraying.
The boundaries are not actually real, and this is part of what many of us who did defend some of what is happening for a while began to grow concerned about, and it's clearly happening.
So this Tara Lipsenke character is saying, I'm a they-them in and out of drag.
Which tells you right there, this person is clearly a guy.
Some part of him knows that.
And he is adopting caricatures of womanhood for whatever reason.
We don't know.
But has adopted pronouns that are ludicrous.
They make no sense.
There is no plural human way of being.
You can be a man who It has feminine ways of being without pretending that you are a they-them.
And then he also finishes that clip by saying, I'm estranged from biological family because of all this.
And one wonders, because of what, though?
You know, because you say you got targeted by a far-right hate group?
Or because of what you're doing?
Right?
I'm estranged from biological family because of all this, he claims.
And a lot of them are heavy believers in guns, which is a very strange and un-nuanced way of basically accusing his family of perhaps wanting to inflict violence on him because of the way that he lives, which is...
Entirely without evidence, but there is a chance that this person is actually scared for his safety.
I don't know.
But so much of this feels utterly theatrical, even down to the, like, I'm going to pose in front of my bookstore and act like a 14-year-old girl who's just coming into her post-pubescent body for the first time.
That it's hard to have the compassion that he claims to want to be invoking.
Yeah, and you know, there's something about the fact that this person who misrepresents themself as a woman is representing threats from family members And we're supposed to take their word for it.
And, you know, the problem is, you know, your point about theatrical, right?
It's possible that somebody said something menacing to this person, but it is also entirely possible that no such thing happened.
And that the whole idea is this person is acting across many domains and isn't it kind of a cool part to get featured on the SPLC site, you know, describing a trauma that, you know, you, you know, basically wrote the screenplay.
And we're in no...
We're supposed to...
It is, as always, playing on our natural compassion and tendency to take people at their word, but...
And that's why I showed that part, which begins with him saying, I'm going to evade them in and out of drag.
Right there, you know that we shouldn't be taking this person at their word.
Because they've used made-up pronouns that cannot possibly apply to a human being because we're mammals and we have sex that is determined at fertilization and does not change and cannot change, playing to archaic, regressive, sexist stereotypes of what it means to be a woman and a man and kind of alighting that by claiming to be a they-them in and out of drag.
But there's nothing in the way that this person presents that Indicates there's any they them about him.
He's a guy who acts like his understanding of what a woman does.
And, you know, as always with these drag performers who are actually messing with the boundary between drag and trans and actually seem to believe a lot of their story.
I've never met a woman in real life who looks like this or acts like this.
Right.
Well, there's also something interesting.
Okay, so this person acknowledges that they have an in and out of drag phase.
They are...
Yeah, okay.
They are electing to show up in describing the story of their traumas in this...
They're made up.
Literally.
Yeah.
Right?
So the point is, if this person showed up in their regular persona, not in drag, and described and said, yes, I'm a drag performer, and here's the situation that I have faced, that would be what you would do if you were presenting the story and the story itself were accurate.
But the point is, oh, well, you've elected to show up in costume.
To tell me a story about some events that I have no ability to check.
Well, he's speaking his deepest truth.
And I don't remember if the next one includes it, but if it does, I apologize for the reiteration.
But he mentions bomb threats.
And when you go digging into the story of the bomb threats, there was a call in that did disrupt a possible event at a different bookstore.
But it is...
It was mentioned once by the police that maybe there was a credible call that maybe involved a bomb threat.
But now the story has been written, the history has been written by Tara Lipsenke as it was bomb threats and then the doc saying, and I'm losing my house.
And, you know, this is what happens when all you do is you're trying to stand up for the children.
So let's show the other little bit from this story.
Southern Poverty Law Center video on the hate groups that are targeting LGBTQ people.
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes, head, shoulders, knees and toes, eyes, ears, mouth and nose.
The space here in Provo is really special.
It's meant to be a mosaic of different things.
So we have the books and we have events and we have social programming.
Pretty much everything here is pay what you can and it's social driven.
We do a lot of queer-centric events like speed dating, speed friending, craft nights.
We have drag shows here, story times.
We are going to read some books today.
I'm going to do three.
Mosaics came out of a place of necessity.
It was needed to have a safe space for queer individuals, especially here in Utah County.
I always had the dream of opening a queer safe space.
With legislations and everything where it was going, I made the decision of, well, it needs to be accessible to all ages.
It needs to be available to everyone in the queer community.
A lot of people start sharing their stories and like, well, I found safe space in bookstores.
It was inspired by me writing my children's book as well.
I wrote my book letter from the Queen and said, well, we need a place to read it.
So let's make one.
Never be afraid to write your own happily ever after.
Love, Tara.
The end.
So there's that.
Yeah, that's...
I mean, I hate that one ends up with these tropes, but it does feel, watching those kids listening to this with their parents' approval cannot help but elevate Cannot help but elevate the normality of this,
if it exists, extremely rare phenomenon in the minds of children who are trying to figure out whether or not they're trying to figure out who they are.
And unlike fantasy, like I'm going to read about, you know, unicorns and trolls and orcs, and we all know they're not real.
And maybe you believe in it for a little while and maybe you have an imaginary friend and he looks like one of these characters from your fiction.
And over time you come to either outgrow it or incorporate that piece of your life that was important to you into your main personality.
The difference there is that we all know this is fiction.
And here what we have, and presumably the so-called hate groups that the SPLC is lambasting for being critical of things like this, are mostly pointing out, you know what, that's fiction.
That's fantasy.
And you shouldn't put fantasy that is being conflated with reality in front of children over and over and over again, because they're going to get confused, and then as soon as they do get confused, in come the, you know, the doctors, although that is falling, I think.
In come the doctors and the so-called health practitioners and the so-called mental health consultants to say, ah, if you say you're a thing, then you are a thing.
We're not going to buy it when you say you're a mutant ninja turtle or a unicorn or a princess, but if you say you're the sex that you're not, we're going to believe it.
Well, where did you come up with that idea?
Oh, it's because it's some ingrained sense of identity.
No, it's because you were dragging your kids to drag queen story hours in which it was presented as normal.
And it's not.
Not only normal, but something to be celebrated.
Yes.
And it is that, the idea that you are going to place this odd phenomenon in a position where you're going to spend time focusing on it, not focusing on the zillion other things in the world that you might focus on.
And so the point is, of course, the child is going to see it as special.
And so it does amount to grooming at some level.
That's right, it does.
Okay, so you can show my screen here.
This is the piece that that video is on, on the SPLC site, and they called it fighting illiteracy, preserving democracy.
Like, in just as much unintentional irony as I think the SPLC could possibly have mustered here.
Fighting Illiteracy, Preserving Democracy, we have the Power of Drug Story Hour, which includes a seven-minute video of which we just showed you a couple minutes, and just a couple of bits from this piece.
In 2023, the SPLC documented 86 active anti-LGBTQ plus hate groups, about 33% higher than 2022, and the highest number ever recorded by the SPLC. The increase is primarily the result of anti-trans organizing, motivated by the hard rights renewed focus on false conspiracy theories that paint LGBTQ plus people, notably trans people and drag artists, and their allies as sexual predators.
One point in the favor of SBLC here is that they at least identify notably trans people and drag artists as being the target of the ire of many of us who are speaking on behalf of reality.
You don't actually see a lot of homophobic rhetoric At least, I don't see it anywhere.
But what you do see is actually reality, people.
Reality is what we need.
Okay, so just a couple of other excerpts from here.
Members of Drag Story Hour, a non-profit literacy program founded in 2015 to, quote, use the art of drag to read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores, end quote, have experienced the surge in right-wing violence firsthand.
And finally, um, oh actually I think there's one more.
Drag, which often challenges strict adherence to binary gender roles, poses a problem for hate and anti-government groups because it offers freedom from the restrictive ideologies they espouse.
So, this is a point that you see a lot made.
That drag is actually a response to restriction.
It's a response to conservatism, to conservative, antiquated, religious, traditional roles.
And it's not.
It is the opposite.
Drag is the embrace of traditional, restrictive, regressive It is the embrace of that.
It just happens to be worn by the person who's sexy or not.
And you don't really have this going the other direction.
I mean, because women have been wearing pants for a long time now because it's a lot more practical to get a lot of things done, right?
And yes, there are certain types of, you know, mostly lesbians who adopt particularly male styles of dress, but it's not even really commented on.
It is this exaggerated Absolutely exaggerated, stereotyped, helpless, embrace of helplessness, embrace of the tottering heels and the long nails and the face that you can't show any real emotion with because your face will melt off and reveal what's underneath,
and the hair that is either completely fake or took A long time to do and you can't go out in the wind or do anything real because it'll get blown all around.
This is an antiquated and frankly reprehensible version of a pampered woman who has so much privilege and so little real work to do in the world that all she has to do is look, if you call that pretty, but, you know, look good to an audience.
That's not what it means to be a woman.
And so the idea here, drag, it says, SPLC argues, drag which often challenges strict adherence to binary gender roles.
The only part that's true there is adherence, because you've got men adopting the most quote-unquote binary gender roles possible and being celebrated for it.
It's It's frankly unbelievable that that piece of this has not fallen.
Amazing.
I'm grateful that in the UK in particular, and now I believe in the US, we are beginning to have the fall of the of the gender ideology that is actually maiming children and adolescents and young adults.
That puberty blockers are beginning to be understood as permanently harmful, cross-sex hormones are permanently harmful, obviously these surgeries are permanently harmful, and increasingly people are willing to say that out loud.
But this idea that drag is somehow freeing and expressing of a better world for everyone, no, it's really bad for women.
It's actually very, very bad for women.
And it's bizarre to me that it's mostly women who are defending this garbage.
There's also something, you know, they put a lot of verbiage into outlining the worldview that is creating all of the hate that they're pretending is here.
This is the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Yep.
What is it doing advocating...
This is not a natural constituency, right?
The Southern Poverty Law Center began as a civil rights organization, right, where racism was a critical problem.
This is emblematic of a takeover that has happened Well, but the common theme, if I may, I think I know what that conversation sounded like.
I'm not going to pretend to steal mana, but I think the conversation sounds like, well, what we are is against hate.
No, I get it.
I get it.
But the point is, okay.
Conspiracy theorizing.
That's one of the things they point to.
Well, here's what I think happened.
I think you had an organization that was dedicated to something important that got taken over by something else that had an agenda that isn't legitimate.
And that thing is now wielding the organization that it has taken over like a weapon.
This has happened across the board.
We are watching government weaponized by the very same sophistry.
It's hard to explain.
You're not into gender affirmation?
Let's take that apart.
What you're calling gender-affirming care negates exactly as much gender as it affirms.
It pays attention.
It does not affirm anyone's gender.
That is not surprising.
So it affirms only surprising genders.
And when you have a gender in conflict with a person's sex, it declares gender affirmation as essential and compassionate, but sex affirmation is somehow immoral, right?
It's far right.
Right.
So the point is, you've taken something in which there's a discussion to be had, at the very least, and you've decided that one position is inherently good and one position is inherently bad, and now you're going to declare the extremely viable position that actually when a person's mental state and their physical state are out of sync, the proper thing to do is counseling or do nothing.
Most cases of gender dysphoria clear up of their own accord.
So the whole idea that...
Yeah, actually, I know, I know now some good clinicians, mental health practitioners, who I would trust children and adolescents and young adults with, who were struggling with identity.
But by and large, I would say, no, actually just...
Go outside.
Go have an adventure.
Climb a tree.
Jump in the ocean.
Ride a bike.
Take a long walk with some friends or your dog or get a dog.
There's so many things that you should do rather than Mmm, mull over how you don't quite feel like the thing that you were told you were supposed to feel like, given what you're told you are.
Like, you know what?
You contain multitudes.
You're a human being who was either born a boy or a girl, and you will become, therefore, either a man or a woman, and those things aren't gonna switch, and those truths don't limit you all that much.
They do limit you some.
But they don't limit you all that much.
So whatever confusion you're feeling deep in your heart about how you don't really feel like a boy, you don't really feel like a girl, get over it and go do something real with your life.
Right.
Now, I'm not arguing, in fact, the discipline or lack of discipline of psychology has been taken over by the same madness.
So I'm not arguing you should go find a shrink.
A shrink is going to tell you that gender-affirming care is the only tolerable thing in general.
So I'm not advocating for that.
But to the extent that there is any natural thing to do in the case that you, in 2024, find yourself where you're If your gender and your actual sex are in conflict, modifying your body, that's an insane response, right?
For one thing, did you know this fact?
That there has never in the history of medicine been a successful sex reassignment?
Define successful.
Where you get to be the other sex.
Oh, just like you actually become the other sex.
Right.
Never once more.
So this is sort of actually beyond our capacity, medically speaking.
Whereas...
On account of you can't fool phylogeny.
Right.
You can't undo 500 to 2 billion years, depending on how you count years of evolution.
I think of it in a different way.
I think that it's because what they're claiming they can do is just simply impossible.
That's, I mean, it's the same thing.
Yeah, it is the same thing.
But the point is somehow, I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there's this ideology that has infused itself into all of our institutions, including apparently the Southern Poverty Law Center, selling a nonsense story that nobody is in a position to say, no, that actually doesn't even make any sense.
Well, and, you know, part of why, you know, I thought that we might spend the Christmas Eve livestream speaking of lovely things that would bring us together, and we are going to actually finish with the Hanukkah tradition in our family as a way of doing that.
But part of why this comes up is because, again, I got sent by the SBLC this active hate and anti-government groups map in 2023 with all these hate groups and all these anti-government groups, and We haven't formed a group, but we'd be on that list if we'd formed a group because of the things we say.
And that's nuts.
These people, I mean, as you said, they would be unrecognizable to themselves 20 years ago or 40 years ago.
I don't know how old the SPLC is, but it's at least 40 years old, I think.
Two more quotations from this article that they post here.
Namely, they say, teaching kids and adults to read is a public good.
It improves society by making it more educated and more politically engaged.
Unfortunately, there were a few issues more threatening to the hard right in 2023. I did not extract from the video, the bits of the video that we showed you, all the parts where they were improving literacy in children and young adults.
No, you saw that.
You saw it.
It's this drag queen trans they-them person reading their own children's book to a rapt audience of kids and LGBTQ identifying adults mostly, as far as I can read the audience, right?
Teaching kids and adults to read is probably good.
Okay, yes.
That's not what's going on here.
There's none of that that's happening here.
There's no teaching kids or adults to read.
There is exactly what you saw.
There is no teaching kids to read, but there is identifying as teaching kids to read.
Yes, while wearing whatever those things are on his face.
Okay, one more...
Excerpt from this piece from the SPLC, the title of this section being Drag, the Personification of Pluralism.
Again, no.
Here we go.
Oh, actually, this is inter-drag story hour.
Drag story hour events are often filled not only with whimsy and imagination, but also a deep sense of solidarity and commitment to helping entire communities flourish.
Ready or not, our children live in a world that is rich with color and sparkling with variation, Lopez de Victoria told the SBLC. Kids build up their empathy muscles by looking through windows into lives that differ from their own.
Indeed, a 2020 study in the Journalum Curriculum Inquiry, co-authored by Drag Story Hour board member Little Miss Hot Mess, suggests programs like Drag Story Hour help both destigmatize shame associated with restrictive societal norms that make marginalized children feel like outsiders in their classrooms and foster kinship between students from diverse backgrounds.
Wait.
Little Miss Hot Mess.
Yeah.
De-stigmatize shame.
Yeah.
What does that even mean?
You know what it means, and if you say it out loud, we're going to end up on the SVLC's list.
As a sex-affirming podcast.
As opposed to a gender-affirming podcast.
Exactly.
Oh, wow.
Yes.
Not sex-positive, but sex-affirming.
Sex-affirming.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, if Little Miss Hot Mask wants us to destigmatize shame, I don't see how he can object to his, her, they, their desires.
I don't really know what destigmatize shame means.
I think it means destigmatize shameful behavior.
Feeling shame at having desires or doing things that you should probably feel shame about is bad in 2023 when this is about.
And so what we want to do is take the stigma away so that you too can become someone with a peer-reviewed study to your name and go by a name like Little Miss Hot Mess.
So if we believe...
That shame is a good thing.
That it keeps people...
That makes us hateful.
And it makes them shame-shamers.
They are shame-shamers.
Yeah, I think they are shame-shamers, which...
I don't know.
More is the pity.
Okay, so...
I don't know how to finish up the discussion of how far this Southern Poverty Law Center has fallen, but...
I want to, I want to finish it with something that you brought my attention to quite some time ago that looms ever larger in this discussion.
In trying to figure out, you know, just scrutinizing the idea of gender affirming care is actually no more affirming of gender than it is negating of gender and recognizing that.
And then recognizing that sex affirmation is forbidden and gender affirmation is required.
I'm just realizing how nonsensical all of this is.
What I realized is that the underlying rubric is actually interventionist.
Yes.
And the reason I say you brought my attention to this is because the underlying tendency towards medicalizing and pharmacolizing is the thing that makes the most sense of this nonsense.
Right.
The idea that sex affirming care where it's like, no, actually, you're a girl.
Right?
Does not require pills or surgery and therefore isn't profitable.
Yes.
Right?
And so the idea that actually what's really going on here is that we have a system in which powerful forces have captured all of the institutions that might make sense of the world and turned them towards aiding them in parasitizing the public.
And so you've got an industry which we never talk about.
We talk about the kids and we talk about the drag queens, but we don't talk about the industry that pretends it can change your sex and can't.
And you find that out after they've done their work and walked away.
Right?
Well, and turned you into a patient for life.
Right.
Turns you into a patient for life, a profit center.
That's not an accident.
Customer for life.
There's a question about what fraction of this wave of madness this is responsible for, but at the very least you've got an entire industry that just happens to be the same industry that doesn't really care if it maims you with its shots.
That same industry doesn't care if you get maimed downstream of their so-called puberty blockers, because they don't see you as a person.
They see you as a profit center.
Increasingly, that's what I think is driving this is just, oh, some people want to profit off some other people.
That's the, you know, it's the oldest story there is.
And they've, you know, decided to wave this new flag for a little while.
And at the point that they burn that out, they'll wave some other flags.
So, you know, beware.
Yeah, no, that's, that's right.
Yeah.
There's some history that is known with regard to the Pritzkers and their role in Chicago politics and their role in the pharmaceutical industry, including one of them who thinks he's a woman and has been pushing hard for the For the trans madness to take root and be adopted by as many people as possible.
I feel certain that there are many pieces of that story that are not yet known.
But if we just go simple and say, you know, Why am I forgetting?
Is it a cui bono?
Who benefits?
And it's not the kids.
I don't tend to use the word, not because I don't think it's right, but because it just immediately polarizes.
Are there people who are grooming out there?
Is there like a pedophilia aspect?
Yes.
But that, I think, is largely secondary to the financial bottom line and the very many institutions and individuals in the institutions who are making bank on the destruction of children and young adults.
Yeah.
Monsters.
Monsters.
um not monstrous uh it is uh again it's christmas eve tomorrow is christmas and um tomorrow night is also the first night of hanukkah and we have um as we've written into our book and actually maybe um maybe instead of showing my screen i'm gonna let you riff from it i'm gonna go grab our book and read it from our book rather than from my screen yeah it's right over there um Hanukkah
is not a major holiday in Judaism.
It has been sort of up-ranked in order to make Jewish children feel like they don't lose as much in the Christmas season if their parents don't also Celebrate Christmas with them.
But there is a nice story behind it around oil running out and having light.
Oil not running out.
Oil running out, not running out.
It should have run out.
It doesn't run out.
And so you have light during this darkest time of the year.
And of course, it does make sense that there would be holidays around the solstice.
And we pretend that we have left our pagan roots, although I don't know why.
Because, you know, the solstice is three days ago, as we are sitting here, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
The days will continue to get colder, but they are getting lighter, imperceptibly, very slowly at this time of year, but lighter just a little bit.
And so it is exactly the time of year when the Maccabees, whoever they were, might have had more need for oil lamps at night than they would have, say, in June.
And And in keeping with none of that, you, mostly, many years ago, started to have us honor an important idea each night of Hanukkah.
Yeah, I will just say, you know, in our household, we celebrate both holidays, and it did not make sense to have redundant holidays, so we took the liberty of tinkering a little bit with Hanukkah, which is probably sacrilegious, but nonetheless...
I mean, a Christmas tree isn't exactly traditional either.
That's true.
It's always struck me as strange having trees indoors.
And yet we do it.
Yep.
You participate as little as possible, but we still do it.
You want to say anything else?
No, not really.
Okay, I thought you were going to say something about this tradition.
No, just that we've taken principles that we think are important, given one to each day, and we go through them while lighting a menorah.
Yeah, and we'll be nearing or at the end of Hanukkah by the time we see you next on the first day of the new year, but we're going to read all of these here.
So the epilogue of our book, Hunter Gathers' Guide to the 21st Century, Tradition and How to Tweak It.
We write, in our home, one of our annual rituals is to celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that occurs just before or around the northern winter solstice.
We like the menorah as is traditional, and each night review an additional principle, which is not.
So our family's new Hanukkah rules are.
And we also, one thing I'll add to this is that we also ask our children, now young adults, If they remember what each of the days are as we go through them, and they get them more and more.
They remember them more and more as the years go on.
Day one, all human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
Day two, the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Day 3. Only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world.
Day 4. Don't game honorable systems.
Day 5. One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom, and engage novel problems consciously, explicitly, and with robust reasoning.
Day six, opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages.
Day seven, the precautionary principle, when the costs of an action are unknown, proceed with caution before making change.
And day eight, society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.
So, there they are.
I guess that is perhaps it for today.
Yep.
Did you or Justin want to say anything else?
I keep on hiding him behind.
Oh, see, we don't get Justin anymore.
Here we go.
Justin wishes you a Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.
Anything else to say before we sign off here?
No, I feel like we are hovering in an energized state, hoping that things go well in the new year.
And I'm not going to think about what those alternatives to that might be.
But anyway, Merry Christmas.
Indeed.
So, join us on Locals.
We'll be having our Q&A this Sunday at 11am for a couple of hours.
Lots of other great content there, including some of what Brett and Zach found in Panama earlier this year.
That's available only on Locals.
Check out Natural Selections.
I posted some recipes for Christmas cookies there today, which is a little bit weird timing, given that last week I wrote about Ozempic and the perils of Ozempic, and I insist that you really need to stay away from Ozempic and the cookies are not good for you, but sometimes they're just really delicious and you should have some anyway.
That's true.
So all of that is actually true, although the counterpoint between the two weeks is a little bit strange.
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And until we see you next time in the new year, remember to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
