Trump, One Year In: The 310th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 310th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss Trump, his presidency, and the state of the country. Disappointments include military interventions and renamings, a failed and politicized DOGE, and the embrace of tech-utopianism and associated heuristics and algorithms. Positive moves have been made in MAHA (e.g. revision of the childhood vaccine schedule, food additives and food pyramid), sex and gender (sex is real, men can’t become women); and, to some degree, constitutional an...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 310, if I am not mistaken.
You are not mistaken.
I am not mistaken for once.
It is a gorgeous day here in the San Juan Islands.
It is one of those winter days that we are famous for here where it's actually sunny and beautiful, cold, but we are not famous for that.
No, we're famous for it, whether it's a common thing or not.
No, we're not.
Yeah, sunny days in the San Juan Islands.
260 sunny days a year is the claim, something like that.
Anyway, it's a claim.
It's based largely on wishful thinking.
It's a claim that you just made up.
No, no, no.
It's because, see, we're in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, so the rain tends to fall out.
And in fact, pilots describe that there is often a hole in the clouds over the San Juan Islands.
It's like you can literally see it.
So we are sunnier than the mainland, but not as much.
We are sunnier than the mainland, but that doesn't mean that we're in any way famous for sun in the winter because we don't tend to get much.
But it has been beautiful the last few days, and the rest of the country is about to get walloped.
And we are sorry for that, although we have had so much drenching rain for so many weeks that the ground is still spongy and saturated, even though it's been sunny for days.
But that's the weather report.
That's the weather report.
So it's a new segment here on Dark Horse.
It's also the last of this new segment on the weather.
For now, anyway.
So here we are, Wednesday, January 21st, one month into winter.
So winter is here, not coming.
A third of the way finished.
A third of the way finished.
That's right.
And today we are going to talk about, we're a year into the second Trump presidency.
And so we're going to talk about what we thought was going to happen and what's happening and what we like and what we don't.
And also what the Atlantic predicted would happen if Trump won and where they got it right and wrong.
Nasal Spray Solutions00:04:24
That used to be one of my favorite oceans, but now I just, I have trouble with them.
It seems as an ocean, it seems to have shrunk.
I don't know.
Yes.
Yes.
Its perspective certainly has.
Yes.
Okay, so we're not going to do a Q ⁇ A today, but we've got a watch party going on at Locals.
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Donning the equipment.
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Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life.
More so than traditional medical advances, for instance.
No.
For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down.
Go figure.
Yeah, go figure.
It seems so obvious in retrospect.
But yes.
And yet.
How many things that seem so obvious, will seem so obvious 50 years from now, we are doing.
I think it's fine.
I shudder to think.
Yes.
Breathing polluted air.
Where was I?
Sorry.
Yes, the deaths went way down after the discovery of hand washing between cadavers and birthing.
Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health.
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While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugar like glucose and fructose.
Six carbon sugars like group.
I'm not.
Yeah, you know, you can read in post.
We'll correct it.
We'll put the pauses where they go and the intonation.
No, we probably won't.
You know what we need?
We need to auto-click.
Livestream means there's no post.
That's part of the wonder of live stream.
Yes, it really is.
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If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses.
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Man, just think of the difference if you do this and you even fend off one respiratory virus a year, even if it's a mild one.
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Armor Colostrum Insurance00:07:12
So anyway, it's a small investment for a big payoff.
Oh, you're done.
Oh, yeah.
That was just a side note after at the end.
I thought that was an intermediary note.
That was an amusing aside.
Oh, was it?
No, but it was.
Wow.
All right.
It's better than laugh track.
I'll give it that.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't cry on command, but I think everyone can laugh to some degree on command.
Yeah, not all that compellingly, but sure.
Was I compelling?
No.
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That's the product that is certified to be glyphosate-free.
Presumably the quality control itself is also glyphosate-free.
One would help.
As written, which was my sentence, I claim full responsibility.
I have claimed that the quality control is glyphosate-free.
You also claim that the cows have co-op dairy farms, which is very advanced, economically speaking.
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Re-read that sentence again.
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Well, but the there is the armor colostrum.
I'm going to defend this one.
I don't think it's brilliant, but I think it's defensible.
I mean, I think they'll infer the correct meaning, but I have exactly.
Okay, good.
I mean, what we definitely do not want is cows wandering around with misinformation about it.
Wow, that would be frightening.
I'm not sure we could tell the difference.
But still, I don't.
I don't think the vacant look in their eyes would change.
But we'd know.
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Actually, we wouldn't.
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Oh, no.
That's probably a thing.
Oh, we've met them.
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Oh, you mean like actually the art of collage?
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Gulf of Americas Controversy00:08:04
This is how we win.
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All right.
We got mostly we're going to be kind of riffing today.
I was prompted, I was prompted to think, you know, a year into the Trump presidency about how he has surprised us in both directions and how he has lived up to expectations and not lived up to expectations,
in part because back when this issue of The Atlantic came out, and it's the January, February 2024 issue, a year ago, fully a year before he took office the second time and more than half a year before it was known that he would win the election, The Atlantic put out an issue called If Trump Wins.
And it's got several short essays by people.
And I thought I would do a careful analysis of all of it.
And I started looking through it, and I just don't really think it's worth it.
So I do want to come back to this and point out a few things in it.
But first, I thought maybe we should start by just reviewing some of what we think is not going right.
And then some of what we think is going right, and then go back to The Atlantic and see where we think they didn't get it right.
And then I actually want to finish, excuse me, by going back to the essay that I wrote for natural selections, my sub-stack, at the very end of October of 2024, right before the election, called something like, why I am voting for Trump.
It's the first time I was doing so.
And I felt that it warranted an explanation in the positive as opposed to what so many people were doing on both sides of the political spectrum.
They were voting against what they saw as a major threat and instead of voting for someone.
And so I made a number of cases for why I was voting for Trump.
And I'd like to also review which of those things I think I got right and I got wrong at the end.
Yes, that essay made quite a stir, as I recall it.
People having somebody who's obviously known for careful, thoughtful, compassionate responses to things say out loud, I'm voting for Trump and here's why, making the case for him was, I think, unignorable for people who encountered it in both directions.
And those other people who were voting for Trump were super grateful to hear the case made in rigorous terms.
And of course, other people were dismayed by it.
But anyway, quite a good essay.
So let's go there.
Yep, let's go there.
But we're going to go there at the end.
Okay.
So, I mean, there's obvious stuff right now that's going on that's hard to look past, right?
Just I'm going to try to stop doing that.
Let me just say it in summary form and then let you pick up on anything and everything you want to pick up on.
The sort of the three big things that I find reason to be concerned about, gosh, excuse me, are the aggressive interventionist policy, the foreign wars, sort of the generally bombastic and might makes right attitude, you know, everything from Greenland to Venezuela to Iran, maybe, you know, what's going on with Israel, all of that.
And that includes, you know, from right from the beginning, renaming things like the Gulf of Mexico, which was ridiculous and it's not his right to do so, to the Department of Defense, which I suppose is his right to do so.
But come on.
Come on, man.
It's just not a good look, right?
The Department of Defense makes sense as something that we should have.
The Department of War makes us look like what you appear to be making us be becoming.
Second large point, unless you want to interject with each of these.
Well, actually, I do.
As I said at the time, the Gulf of America is an insane thing to have done.
It was a deliberate thing.
And it's not.
It's a deliberate finger in the eye.
But what I said at the time was if he had made this obviously symbolic gesture and called it the Gulf of the Americas, I think it would have actually started a proper discussion of something.
Now, mind you, I don't need stuff renamed.
The symbolic level is not what this is about.
But Gulf of the Americas actually, I think, would have been a hint towards some of what we are seeing him do in this hemisphere.
Now, why he's doing it, we'll get there, I hope.
But I don't mind the idea that it would be the Gulf of the Americas.
In fact, it is the Gulf of the Americas, and the Americas are a real thing.
And because the Americas are a real thing, that would have been A, not excluding anybody.
It's not like stealing a Gulf from Mexico, which is obviously not exactly what happened.
But the idea that, hey, the Americas are a thing, this giant bay sits inside of the Americas, and we need to go back to thinking about the Americas as a thing.
Maybe not as we once did, because our history in Latin America is truly brutal and awful.
Or the United States history.
Right.
Nonetheless, there are regional considerations which are important.
So anyway, if he had said Gulf of the Americas, I would have thought, hmm, I didn't think of that, but I'm okay with it.
Gulf of America just seemed petty.
Yeah, it seems petty.
And it also returns us.
And I think we have said this a year ago when he first made this announcement.
It's reminiscent of the very small-minded nature of Americans who've never gone anywhere.
And obviously, Trump's been all over the place.
He's a worldly man.
But when the fact that we call ourselves Americans when we are one country in two continents, each of which are Americas, is revealed when as Americans, and we have no other word for what our national identity is in English, when we travel into Latin America, we are told, no, what do you mean you're calling yourself Americanos?
We all are Americanos, be we Ecuadoran or Panamanian or Salvadoran or Chilean, whatever.
And interesting that their word for us still doesn't get to perfect specificity, but we are asked to call ourselves Norte Americanos, North Americans, which is at least a bit more precise.
And so, you know, this conflation of like, we are America.
The United States is America, as opposed to, granted, the most powerful country within the Americas.
But we are one, living in a global world, living in the Western hemisphere.
We are in the Northern Hemisphere as well.
But I think your point about what sorts of moves he's making with regard to the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Masalmenos, is an interesting one, an important one.
And it suggests that we should be constantly recognizing that we are not the only ones out here.
On the Department of War, I would say I'm actually neutral.
I don't think, again, I don't think renaming is where we need to be focused.
And it obviously drew a lot of fire to do that.
On the other hand, I do think one of the subtle messages of the Trump administration is we are going to be more honest about what we are doing.
I don't think we're being perfectly honest across the board.
Sure.
But to the extent, what is the Department of Defense?
Propaganda and Grants00:15:46
Is it always defensive?
No.
A lot of the time it isn't.
And so at some level, the idea, what this thing does is war, whether we're defending ourselves or aggressing, maybe sometimes in a justified way, other times not.
But I did have a sort of sense of like, that's a weird flex, but I'm okay with that one.
I'm not wild about it, but I'm okay with it.
I don't like it, I think, for sort of a more meta reason, which is that it seems to be borrowing directly.
And this, you know, maybe is sort of a James Lindsay style point, but it seems to be borrowing directly from the woke playbook.
You know, it's like they got so focused on trying to get us to change what we thought by changing the words that we were allowed to use.
Yeah.
And by spending time, you know, I mean, the most obvious go-to example for us, because it's personal and most people won't know it, is, you know, summer of 2020.
Schools have been shut down in March.
Schools in the West were going to be cut down.
Gosh, I'm really sorry.
Schools were going to be shut down for the 2020-2021 school year, although we didn't know that for sure, that it was going to be the entire school year yet.
And the public high school in Portland that Toby was about to start at, having graduated from middle school during COVID lockdowns, knew that part of what it needed to do was a big public school with a lot of low-income students, that if they were going to be doing entirely remote schooling for a while, they were going to need to get computers into the hands of the vast number of students who didn't have them.
Orson didn't have that problem.
He had a laptop of his own.
We weren't suffering in this regard, but a lot of students were going to be in trouble.
And the school system already knew that.
And instead of focusing on trying to get students, students' laptops that they would need once school started, the entire summer was spent working on how to rename the school.
It had been Woodrow Wilson High for many, many decades.
And it was triumphantly renamed the Ida B. Wells Barnett High School.
And that was an insane use of resources and time.
It was time that needed to be spent actually getting resources into the hands of underprivileged and underserved students, which is exactly what the local left claims to be caring about, and they clearly and patently don't.
And it drew the anger and ire of people who had long known this as, you know, I knew a woman whose kids were going there who had gone there herself when she was, she was our age, when she was in high school in the 80s.
She's like, why are they doing this?
What is the point?
And, you know, she was someone who voted, who continued to vote blue.
So the idea of renaming things that are absolutely fine is a way to waste time and anger people.
And I don't think it generally doesn't serve much good.
Okay, point taken.
Yeah, I think you're right about the analogy.
But again, any move in the direction of more honesty is probably a good thing.
Okay.
In the broad category of things going on in this presidency that seem questionable at best, item two is that Doge turned out to have been done very badly.
The idea of government accountability and government efficiency is obviously fantastic and we need it.
And I think it could have been done well.
There would have been a lot of collateral damage no matter what.
And we talked about that at the time as we were holding out hope.
And I actually, we haven't talked about this.
I don't know where you land, but my feeling is it could have been well done.
It was not.
It was a total shit show, really.
Took out lots of good people.
And it seemed to be in service to political aims when the stated purpose was exactly to get the politics out of these systems and to clean house.
And, you know, for instance, and we discussed this fairly extensively at the time, it's not just fine and legitimate, but actually a positive to review the ideologically informed grants, for instance, that the Fed is funding at the NIH, at the NSF, at the DOD.
The DOW now is at the Department of War, I guess.
So, and try to make them more scientifically more scientific and less political.
That is to say, while individual grants are given with regard to particular political beliefs made, you know, that the individuals who are deciding on grant programs may have, the programs that exist are bigger political decisions.
And many of them had become either calcified to serve old aims that no longer made sense, or worse yet, had grown in these just like these crazy ways, such that, for instance, and again, I talked about this at the time, whole degree programs at elite institutions and presumably elsewhere too, but I've chased this down at some of the elite institutions.
Entire degree programs, like the MD-PhD program at Harvard, are effectively entirely funded by the federal government.
And yet the degrees that people get don't say NIH, degree awarded by the NIH.
They say degree awarded by Harvard.
And that's dishonest and it's despicable, honestly.
And I didn't know that.
I thought I knew a lot about what was going on with regard to grants and granting agencies and the programs and how politicized they were.
And the fact that entire degree programs had become effectively funded by the federal government is absurd.
And the curtain was pulled back.
We got to see some of that.
But instead, I don't think that there's actually been the follow through and the accountability of the universities to actually take responsibility for their own degree programs and not have taxpayers pay not only for science, scientific research, which is a common good and I will stand for, but to actually stop funding degree programs, I don't think there's been follow-through.
Instead, what we see is things like Trump demanding that Columbia take a particular stance on Israel or else they lose their funding.
That's explicitly political.
I know it was framed in terms of free speech, but we didn't get what we were promised.
We got something political instead, and it was framed as the anti-political way to clean house, and it was the opposite.
So I definitely feel like I voted for Doge and then I got something else.
And I think the most obvious indicator that this was not what it was billed as is the fact that they failed to do the congressional work necessary to recover anything from that.
Yes.
So what that suggests is that this was propaganda.
Of course, is it better for the government to be efficient?
Obviously, how much do we spend on this thing?
But if you're not going to get the dividend, then it's not about government efficiency.
It's about using the claim of efficiency to go after things you don't like, some of which I also don't like.
But I didn't vote for that.
What I voted for was let's simplify this, shrink it down, keep the good stuff, get rid of the bad stuff, and spend less on it.
And it's like, okay, so I voted for the label on the box.
I didn't vote for the contents of the box, even though some of the contents of the box were all right.
That's right.
And I guess I will say, and I believe I've said this here before, that I personally know people who had not just their research, but their livelihoods extremely badly affected by the way that Doge was enacted, which is to say this.
It's quite one thing to look at a grant program and say, you know what?
That is either politically motivated in its very framing, or the way that it is being manifested has become politically owned.
And so we're going to stop that.
We're not going to fund those sorts of grants anymore.
We're going to take that program off the books and maybe revisit it later, whatever.
But I know that there, and I'm making something up here, but maybe there's people who've been getting grants in this program for 20 years and they've sort of begun to build some of their career on the expectation they will continue to get grants.
Well, too bad.
That was federal funding and the federal government is allowed to decide that those grants are not going to be available with the next grant grant cycle.
What Doge did was it actually took money mid-grant from people, money that had already been promised, money that had already been in the pipeline that people were relying on both to do their research and to live.
Because one of the things about how academia and specifically academic science is funded is that you might imagine that if you're a professor at Harvard or the University of British Columbia or wherever, that Harvard or the University of British Columbia, or UBC is a bad example because it's Canadian, but University of Ohio, are being paid entirely by the university, that they're entirely on salary.
Not only is it the rare research professor that is entirely on salary, usually they actually solicit summer salary from their grants, but there are many, many researchers out there who are entirely on what's called soft money, which is to say they're entirely reliant for all of their income on grant money and they get nothing from the university that they may be affiliated with.
And so it can look like they're affiliated with the university, therefore they're getting salary from them, but they may not be.
None of this is any of your problem inherently, right, as a taxpayer.
But if you are promised a grant that is supposed to be paying out a certain amount through a certain date, and a new administration comes in and says, actually, all those promises are null and void, and sorry, you don't get to pay your mortgage next month, that's not okay.
So, you know, promises made should be promises kept.
And that's quite different from saying we're not going to fund that sort of thing going forward.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Doge isn't what it seemed.
That's the second big negative I see in the administration so far.
And then this is a big one and can go lots of places.
The third of three is the apparent reliance on sort of tech bros, tech optimism, and the unnuanced embrace of algorithms and heuristics that will actually and obviously hurt people.
So it feels like we have been forced to embrace a kind of transhumanism that's scaled up to an apocalyptic scale.
It's juvenile.
We're seeing constant conflation of complicated systems with complex systems.
And it emerges from that sector of the economy that seems super sophisticated and science-y to people who aren't thinking about it.
And so people trust it.
And they shouldn't.
So here I want to spend just a little bit of time.
And I think you, and I'm going to read a little bit from our friend Holly's piece on Pete Hegseth, and then you can riff on this.
So I'm not going to get into the details much, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has declared that he is taking a sledgehammer to the oldest DEI program in the federal government.
And that's the 8A program.
And there's ample evidence, to the contrary, that the program under attack is, while flawed and gameable, not the biggest, the oldest DEI program in the federal government.
So let's see.
Can you see my screen?
No, you cannot.
That's not all that surprising.
How about now?
All right.
Okay.
So this is an open letter to Secretary Hegseth by on Holly Mathnard's substack.
I have a PDF here.
I'm just going to scroll down to, it's a very good piece.
I recommend it.
We'll link to it, of course.
But here's just a section I want to read and then have you discuss.
When you examine Department of War sole sourcing, you will find that from fiscal year 2018 through fiscal year 2024, the Department of War obligated approximately $1.06 trillion through sole source awards to non-8A firms, compared with about $19.7 billion to 8A firms.
That means that over 98% of sole source Department of War dollars flowed to non-8A contractors during this period.
So I haven't even defined what 8A is yet, but just like take it at face value for the moment that Hegseth has said, 8A program is the oldest DEI program in the federal government.
Here we have a, wait a minute, it's less than 2% of Department of War funding.
Department of War sole source funding.
Soule source funding, yes.
Who got that $1.06 trillion in non-8A sole source taxpayer money?
Hollywrites.
Mostly the largest primes, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and a small handful of other incumbents that face far less scrutiny on their own sole source awards than 8A firms do.
8A sole source contracts require mandatory price negotiation, formal determinations of fair market value, and SBA acceptance of the requirement.
By contrast, sole source awards to large primes typically proceed without SBA oversight or the same program-specific line-by-line negotiation regime.
Gutting 8A does not discipline the largest contractors.
It removes one of the few areas where the department demands exceptional transparency and leverage.
8A sole source awards are tightly constrained and have very real consequences for failure, which is why you will never have to ask President Trump to call an 8-day company on the public carpet.
Because the 8-day program gives the customer the power to choose which contractor they want instead of being forced to take the contractor that wins the bid.
It also makes firing 8-day firms exceptionally easy.
If an 8-day screws up, they simply do not get federal work again.
And you on Twitter had something to say about this as well.
Yeah, I did.
And what I will say is this issue is nothing if not complicated.
And what I had the sense of watching HegSeth's video.
First of all, I would have people notice how slickly produced that video is.
The transitions, the multiple camera angles.
This wasn't a Department of War secretary who has become angry about 8A and went to the public directly.
This is a well-produced piece.
And it's clear from the piece that HegSeth has been spun up by something about the idea that this is a DEI program, rampant fraud.
Alaska Native Grantees Eligibility00:04:24
And there is fraud in the 8A program.
It's been established.
But is there more fraud than in the rest of the Department of Defense now Wars portfolio?
That's a different question.
And Holly's point is it's likely to be less.
It's likely to be less.
Because it has more, so much more legitimate, regular, rigorous oversight.
Right.
So much in HegSeth's statement is actually upside down once you understand how the program works.
Now, is there a arguably diversity orientation to the program?
Yes, the largest group of grantees are Alaska Natives.
We will get back to why that is, why Alaska Natives are eligible for this 8A program.
But the Congress specifically rejected making this specifically about demographics and included an economic justification.
So something like the third or fourth largest group of grantees are veterans, right?
These are people who face economic disadvantage and are eligible for this program.
So it is in error to portray this as a DEI program in the first place.
And unlike much of what we've seen with regard to DEI hires in the workplace, where people apparently don't have skills and don't have the capacity to do the work for which they are hired, as Holly points out, the 8A program is actually constantly constantly assesses the work done.
And those contracts that don't turn out to have been effective don't get reestablished.
They don't get re-upped.
Right.
Now, why is this so heavily in the direction of Alaska Native grantees?
The reason is apparently because the federal government did not want to give Alaskan natives the sovereignty rights that it gave to natives in the lower 48.
Why?
Because they did not want to fight battles over mineral rights later on.
They recognized Alaska as full of minerals that they wanted access to, and so they gave this instead.
Instead of reservations.
Instead of reservations, exactly.
So at some level, this is a concession to a group that gave up a tremendous amount and it does force them into competition in order to get these grants.
What I suspect is going on here, and I really don't know, but what I suspect is going on is that other players, big players like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to gain a great deal if 8A vanishes,
have portrayed this as a DEI, fraudulent, anti-meritocratic program in order to get those contracts, that this is galling to them that these smaller players, and there aren't very many small defense contractors outside of this program, this program that allows smaller firms to compete with these larger firms, that's galling to the larger firms.
And obviously there's profit to be made if they can be done away with.
So that's what I suspect is going on.
But I think HegSeth just doesn't really understand what this program is or how it works.
I'm not saying there's no fraud, but I am saying you got to compare what's going on in this program to outside this program.
Is it competitive?
Yes.
Is it more fraudulent?
Likely no.
So those things belong in the discussion.
Instead, people have been ramped up over a headline and it's a mistake.
That's it?
That's it.
All right.
There's been a lot right too, though, in this administration so far.
Tallow's Cultural Shift00:07:46
And I think it's easy to forget that, especially because the right things are there are caveats, right?
Like it's not far enough.
It's not fast enough, all of this.
But, you know, the two big things, the two big, absolutely clear positives that yes could go further and should are basically what's going on at HHS, you know, Maha and sex and gender.
So with regard to Maha, installing Kennedy at HHS and Jay Bhattacharya at NIH and several other people in the various relevant agencies are excellent choices and have created, and we've seen positive movement.
We've seen the childhood vaccine schedule come closer into line with that of Western Europe.
We talked about this last time or the time before at some length.
And it's, you know, to many of us, it's not far enough.
It's not fast enough.
But it's huge.
And there was no indication of us going anything like that direction before now.
We've got the food pyramid.
It's been changed from a toxic recipe for ill health to something resembling good advice at any rate.
And interestingly, with regard to the food pyramid, I'm already seeing things change on grocery store shelves.
Like I'm actually shocked at the speed with which I am seeing change.
So the particular example I'm thinking about is I'm seeing tallow, cooked tallow, you know, beef tallow to cook with sold in glass jars.
Yes, it's on the shelves of our excellent food co-op here on the island.
So just we live on an island with less than 10,000 people.
And those numbers swell in the summer because it's a beautiful place to come visit.
And a lot of people do so.
There's destination weddings and just people come and they kayak and they hike and they look at orcas and they buy knickknacks or I don't know what people do.
But we have a stable population of less than 10,000 people and a couple of grocery stores and an excellent food co-op.
And the fact that you can buy tallow at the food co-op isn't all that surprising, although I don't think I would have seen tallow at a food co-op 20 years ago.
But still, I'm not too surprised by that.
At the larger market on the island, I was looking and they've got like a natural food section and it's not the main part of the market.
And all of this is true.
But they've got not one, but multiple brands of tallow to choose between.
And that is, that is brand new.
Like I know I didn't go explicitly looking for tallow two years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but I wasn't looking this time and there it was in among the other cooking fats.
And that's that's extraordinary.
So I feel like this is a cultural shift that we're living through that has been waiting to happen.
Like we were just, we were poised on the edge of ready to stop eating crap.
And even people who didn't know it were ready to embrace change for the good.
So I had a clip go somewhat viral from my discussion with Michael Shermer a week or so ago.
I got angry at Michael for failing to understand the degree to which the change in our orientation towards, in this case of this clip, the COVID shots is not the result of the system working and coming to understand things better.
It was the result of renegades having forced the system to acknowledge something that was clear and that the system would never have acknowledged had it not been for this end run that we did through Podcast Land and X more or less.
This food pyramid thing is a really interesting test case because many of us were already on board with the new food pyramid before it was announced.
We had no idea.
Well, we'd been mocking the food pyramid as it stood for years, our course, and I presumably other people had been as well.
But I know we explicitly brought it up a couple of times and like, look, look at this nonsense.
You eat like this and you're, of course, you're going to be unhealthy.
Right.
But the point is the federal government is last to the party on this.
Lots of people were aware that the food pyramid was a terrible guide to health and had re-engineered their own diets.
Many other people were listening because many of us have gone around the system and contradicted their advice and explained why and pointed to the evidence and all of that.
So I guess my point would be one of the things the Trump administration has done is it has unlocked a understanding of the world that existed but was not allowed into official circles.
So this is, you know, the rebels having, you know, burst into the institutions and, you know, Kennedy is, of course, portrayed as a, as a madman and somebody who doesn't understand and somebody who has a vendetta against vaccines or something like this.
It's not what's going on.
And you can see this with the food pyramid.
The reason that the tallow showed up in regular markets all of a sudden was that this was just waiting for the officials to finally get on board with the wisdom that had been circulating outside of the institutions for a decade or more.
No, I think that's exactly right.
And I did vote for that.
I absolutely voted for that.
I mean, the Maha part, there are a lot of people within Maha who are frustrated that things aren't going fast enough.
It doesn't go far enough.
It's not fast enough.
And I agree.
But my goodness, like we're seeing changes with regard to Maha that we could not have begun to dream of under standard issue red or any of the current blue team presidential.
Yeah, it took a rebel.
I want to say, though, I voted for this style more than just Maha, right?
Yes.
The approach to DEI, for example, there were many of us who understood on the outside that this is a hijacking of the system.
It's anti-meritocratic.
It jeopardizes every single thing that functions and it's got to go.
That was well understood by outsiders.
And now, you know, it's in the top office and it's making positive moves.
On the Maha side, though, I think it is very important to say, and maybe this is just more generally a Trump point.
Trump alerted us with his book.
The art of the deal, what his approach to everything was going to be.
It is both his greatest strength and his Achilles heel because there are many things that can be renegotiated and you need somebody incredibly bold to pull it off.
Somebody has to level a credible threat in order to negotiate for a position that we need to get to that you couldn't get to if you did things politely.
On the other hand, there are non-negotiables and I don't think Trump understands that.
So what we got on the Epstein files was Trump changing his position from the one that we voted for and then getting angry at us in the public for not accepting it.
Objection To Low-Fat Dairy00:04:58
And his point was, look at all the other cool stuff you're getting.
And the answer is, so what?
This is a giant question mark until you resolve it.
How much influence is this having over the life that we are living?
How much influence is this having over the federal government?
Until we've nailed that down, this is not negotiable.
It has to be dealt with and you can't give us other stuff in exchange.
No, there's a bigger issue that is being obscured by pretending that these are all just interchangeable commodity wins or losses.
Right.
Right.
And I think actually this is going to sound like a non-sequitur.
It goes back to what we were just talking about, but I think it actually plays into this.
One of the biggest mainstream media lines of objection to the new food pyramid is about the full fat dairy recommendations.
Right.
And even though it's become clear that, you know, the war on fat that was waged by, you know, Kellogg's presumably and other big processed food purveyors that encouraged Americans to be eating carbs, garbs, garbs, and to focus less on protein and to be really, really worried about fat was misguided and a problem.
And yet, obviously, an extremely high fat diet is going to contribute to you getting fat.
Like that is true, even though in general, fat doesn't make you fat.
It's all the crap and all the carbs in combination with a little bit of fuel in the form of fat that will.
Go on.
Okay.
It's not clear to me that a high percentage of fat in the diet makes you fat, a high amount, a high total amount.
Yes, I did not mean to say, I didn't say percentage.
I did not mean to imply percentage.
That high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet is your best bet for for health.
But the fat has to be real fat and all of the food should be real food that's low processed.
And this is not the place for whole back dairy analysis.
But with regard to these, frankly, moronic dietitians who are convinced that what you really need is low-fat dairy, one thing that I have not, one point that I have not seen made in this particular place of the argument is the objection that many of us have to low-fat dairy is,
yes, in part you are blaming fat for the problems caused by other foodstuffs, but also the only way to get low-fat dairy is to mess with your dairy, is to use modern technical interventions to pull things out of your dairy.
And I want my food as whole and as close to source as possible.
This is part of why I want to be able to buy raw dairy, right?
There is no low-fat dairy that hasn't been messed with to some degree.
An exception being that you could skim, you can natively skim cream off the top of milk, not pasteurize it, not homogenize it, and end up with cream over here and lower fat milk over here.
But that's not any of the dairy that people are arguing about.
So the low-fat dairy proponents are effectively inherently arguing for the technologizing of our food, which is part of what those of us in Maha are saying.
Actually, no, thank you.
Also, the government doesn't get to tell me that I don't get to eat real food.
Before we leave Maha Land, I just wanted to say that I am stunned by how much progress has been made, and I am dismayed that negotiation seems to be required of Maha also.
And, you know, I don't know how Kennedy does it because I know he understands that every time he negotiates something away, it means people are going to be maimed because of it, right?
If we say, well, nobody wants to take away your COVID shots, we just want you to have a choice.
That means some doctor and parent are going to inject some kid with a COVID shot that he doesn't need that's going to result in a radical shortening of his life.
So every one of those is not only a tragedy, but it's a crime.
And so to have to negotiate in this milieu where everything that you have to give up in order to get these obvious gains is costly in terms of human life and well-being, that's a tragic position to have to be in.
Radical Shifts and Scammers00:03:49
Many of us wouldn't be able to stomach it.
And I know it must be very painful to Kennedy to have to do it.
But thank goodness he's doing it because of the massive savings in life and reduced maiming of innocent people that will happen as a result of the radical shifts we have seen.
So I think it's not even a Faustian bargain.
This is some extreme case that one struggles to find examples that are not part of the major tragedies of history where I don't know that the representation at the end of the movie Schindler is accurate, but where he's lamenting the fact that every item, every fancy cufflink he had could have been liquidated and used to rescue a few more people.
And so it's kind of like that, right?
We're in this extreme situation and the idea that negotiation is possible over these things is great in one way because of all of the hardship that will be avoided.
But wow is negotiation not where we should be when it comes to human health and well-being.
It's just, it's, it's shocking.
Yes, indeed.
The other the other obvious big positive, and I'll return to this a couple of times as we talk about the Atlantic issue on what will happen if Trump wins, written two years ago, published two years ago, and also my piece as to why I was voting for Trump in this last election, is he put out these executive orders early on.
We talked about them like in day one, two, three of his presidency that embraced the reality of male and female, finally.
Just, you know, it should have been so simple, so obvious.
I can't believe we got here to this level of confusion where still, and as we talked about on the live stream last week, you've still got people, elected officials, refusing to say what a man or a woman is and claiming that you can switch sex if you're a human, which you cannot.
And frankly, everyone knows that.
Everyone knows that.
So these executive orders state what male and female are, reveal the unchanging nature of men and women.
And downstream of that, we see men still trying to force their way into men, still trying to force their way into women's sports, into women's locker rooms, into women's domestic crisis centers, into women's prisons, all of this.
But that particular scam is beginning to fail because there is so much now governmental support for reality on this topic that the scammers, very few of them are actually confused about what they are.
Most of them are scammers trying to get access to something they should have access to.
And most people are now waking up to the reality that that's them getting away with shit they shouldn't get away with.
And we shouldn't need anyone to thank for that.
But under Biden and before that even under Obama, we had Obama, we had the beginnings of support for this.
And under Biden, we had a full-fledged embrace of the nonsense that is reality denying.
And certainly that would have continued under Trump's competitor, Harris.
Yes, absolutely.
And this just simply required somebody willing to endure the slanders that would be hurled back.
Illegal Families Speak00:13:24
And, you know, you need a Trump-like person to do it, right?
You just need somebody who isn't going to listen to that stuff.
Yeah.
Right.
And then I guess a third item on my sort of what's going right is obviously fraught.
And it'll come up again here when we go through a few of the things in the Atlantic.
But, you know, we have borders for a reason.
Yep.
Right.
We need borders that are actually defended.
And obviously conflicts between ICE and protesters is getting a lot of media play right now.
And some of it's very bad.
And we're going to come back to a story that Rogan mentions that you responded to on Twitter.
But the fact is there are legal ways to come into the country.
And legal immigrants don't want illegal immigrants here any more than citizens do.
So this is not an anti-immigration stance.
This is a, if you are actually arguing for no laws or borders whatsoever, own it.
Own the fact that you are arguing for the end of the nation state and for pro-anarchy or grant that borders exist for a reason and you are going to support the laws to allow people to legally immigrate and not support people who do so illegally.
Yes.
Are we going to do that Rogan piece?
Because it will lead to the things that I want to say on that topic.
Let's yeah, we can do that.
Let me just find, I wasn't going to do that right.
Oh, yeah.
So, okay, let's just, let's, let's, let me segue first into, so this, this January, February, 2024 Atlantic issue of Trump Wins has a whole bunch of pieces in it.
And I'm not going to really read from any of them except for one.
On page 24, we have, I know the order that numbers go in.
The specter of family separation by Caitlin Dickerson.
And this is, you know, it comes with a terrifying picture of a child, a Honduran asylum.
I didn't send this to Jen, so you guys can't see it that well.
But a Honduran asylum seeker child being, you know, terrified perhaps by border police.
And, you know, the piece is terror-inducing, right?
And that is a real risk.
Before we show the Rogan video and your response to it, though, I will say that the left seems to, frankly, enjoy the, you know, the left, the left, in which I still sometimes feel to be a member, seems to enjoy telling stories of families separated at the border by Trump.
But Democratic presidents have presided under separations quite a lot as well, and they never tell those stories.
So there's a political slant to which stories they do and do not want to tell, even when the stories sound identical.
So there's a dishonesty in the reporting.
That said, we're talking about right now.
And there is chaos happening right now and injustice.
Yes.
So if you would show, Jen, the Rogan talking about one such story.
Then they start showing up at Home Depot.
Instead of like looking for gangbangers, looking for criminals and cartel members, they go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up.
Do you know Ed Calderon?
Do you know who he is?
He worked, he was a Mexican military guy who now is an American citizen, but he reports extensively on the cartels and just was telling me some horror stories about ICE raids.
And one of them was they took this guy who'd been brought over here when he was a baby, but didn't have American citizenship.
His family came over here illegally, lived here for 20 years, can't speak Spanish.
They deport him, send him to Tijuana.
Can't speak Spanish.
Can't speak Spanish.
Does not speak Spanish.
He is essentially an American citizen.
He just never lived anywhere else.
He just doesn't have the paperwork.
He's not a criminal.
They sent him over to Tijuana, and now he has to live in Mexico.
He doesn't know what the fuck to do.
He's on the streets.
Has no idea.
He doesn't have any money.
So I responded to this because my tweet.
I said, I have been vocal about my concerns with respect to illegal immigration, and my sympathy has rightly or wrongly been limited for people who broke the law to enter.
We can't give illegal immigrants an advantage over those who chose to abide by the law.
Needless to say, I have zero tolerance for any illegal alien who has broken important laws within the country.
But a person who was brought here as a minor, especially a baby, is a different matter entirely.
Such people didn't break the law.
And deporting such a person once they have grown within our country and our culture is inhumane.
I did not vote for that.
And it should obviously stop, along with the harassment of citizens who don't happen to be carrying their papers.
This is out of control.
So The straw man response, I don't know if it's the straw man, the response from the other side will be, but birthright citizenship creates a gameable set of conditions wherein, you know, rich Russian women come over here just to give birth and their kids get citizenship.
Right.
I am aware of that.
And in fact, the response to my tweet shocked me because basically people who voted for Trump, as I did, are largely of a mindset that this has gone too far and we have to have no compassion whatsoever.
And my point is, look, I'm actually with you farther than you think.
My feeling is there are lots of productive illegal aliens in the country.
And my sympathy for them is truly limited because we have lots of people who'd like to come into the country and are trying to do it legally.
And to have a system where we look at individual stories and try to make exceptions, my feeling is no.
We should figure out how much immigration is good for the country.
That should be our litmus test.
Is it good for the country?
We should set that number and we should have a process that works well.
And then we should have zero tolerance for anybody who does otherwise.
Do I think children who are born here ought to stay if their parents are being deported?
No.
I actually think irrespective of what the law currently says and the difficulty of getting the law to be what it is, the parents should be deported if they broke the law and the family should be kept together and they should be deported in a humane way, but they should go.
This is a different case.
This is a special case in which somebody did not break the law.
Somebody brought over as a baby did not have a choice in this.
Their parents broke the law.
They apparently are not law-breaking and are therefore presumably productive in the country.
And there can't be that many cases of this.
So my point is if you don't see that this is a different situation, then you're not thinking very hard.
This is a person that is inhumane to send somebody to a country where they don't speak the language and have them fend for themselves.
That's not a rational policy.
And we're better than that.
So anyway, my feeling is in the truly rare exceptions where somebody didn't break the law but is here illegally, that does not fall within the policy.
Further.
So I agree with that, but isn't that going to be the case for all children who were brought over?
Who didn't become criminals?
Well, none of the children who were brought over broke the law by being brought over.
Yes, but first of all, if you were brought over at 15, that's a very different situation because you have your home culture.
If you're brought over at two, my feeling is if you haven't been breaking the law while you're here and you're brought over at two, that's the answer.
And it's not that big a population that we have to worry about it.
The argument has to do with what humans are, right?
That we are the products of our environment.
And if you're culturally American, sending you back to Mexico because you are ethnically Mexican is cruel and inhumane.
Yeah, it's not really back is the point.
It's back in one regard and not in the one that matters primarily.
So it's inhumane.
Let me just say, I have one question about the story as Joe reports it, which is that people coming over from somewhere in Latin America and bringing their baby with them were already English speakers because how else does this young man not speak any Spanish?
Well, I wondered about that too.
I don't know.
And, you know, we don't know if the story is right, but given the facts of the story, I mean, it doesn't really even matter from the point of view of my interaction with the people who disagreed with me because it all proceeds from the assumption that the story is basically right.
And there are people who say it doesn't matter.
And then there's me saying, yeah, it does matter and we're better than that.
So anyway, I would ask everybody, first of all, if you're yelling at me about immigration, like really?
Didn't I invest a bunch to make it clear that there was a huge frickin immigration problem coming up through Central America and not entirely Latin Americans either.
We had people from the Middle East.
We had a huge number of people from China.
And I do wonder.
Where did that story go?
I mean, you and Zach went down there along with several other people and did amazing reporting on the Chinese camps.
All these people coming to the U.S. illegally from China.
And I haven't ever seen that in the mainstream media.
Yeah, I don't see it in this wave of deportations.
And I just have to wonder.
It seems to me that that would, you know, I'm very much of a mindset that we have to prioritize people who are rampantly breaking our laws after illegally immigrating.
But in light of where China sits with respect to us and the apparent bias in the direction of military-aged males, I think we have to be very concerned about what it was that Zach and I witnessed.
And it has to be dealt with.
And the idea that Trump is not dealing with it doesn't make any sense to me.
It would be a political win.
Yeah.
It would be the obviously right thing from the point of view of the security of the country.
It would be symbolic.
No, one of the things that you guys reported at the time was that in the Latin American camps, you were seeing families.
And not that, you know, the faces of deportation of criminal people here legally are, you know, dudes from Latin American gangs all tatted up and looking like badasses.
But families are families.
And in the camp that was filled with Chinese people, you weren't seeing families.
You were seeing young men of military age.
And young men of military age don't come en masse and create honest lives for themselves, typically, whereas families do.
And, you know, this is not an argument for illegal immigration.
It is an observation about the distinct behavioral futures of the demographics of families versus a bunch of single men of military age.
Yeah, I mean, there just obviously ought to be priorities.
And yes, we should deport people who came illegally across the border, even if their families and the adults are working productively.
However, we ought to be prioritizing people who are a military threat to the country.
And I'm not saying every Chinese person who came across the border is, but that certainly was a potential element.
And, you know, we left the border open.
Do we really think our enemies abroad didn't exploit that?
We should be looking for the people who are most likely to be in that hostile group.
And I anecdotally will just say we experienced nothing but hostility in the Chinese camp in Darien.
It was decidedly hostile, which I can't say.
China is a different culture.
But if I were picking up my life and I were moving from China to the U.S., I would be very curious about Americans.
I wouldn't be hostile to them.
That was exactly two years ago.
I believe that was January of 2024.
That's not that long ago.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's something off about the fact that that does not show up prominently.
And I can't figure out why Trump wouldn't do it because even if it were purely symbolic, it would be a win for him.
Absolutely.
Okay, so the Atlantic sort of nominally got that one right.
You know, the concern about the specter of family separation, maybe not framed that way, but is there chaos and brutality happening?
Pseudo-Liberal Mindset Risks00:15:22
There is.
On page 20, we have America will abandon NATO, a prediction.
No, that hasn't happened.
But to be fair, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024, which was enacted at the very end of 2023, presumably after this issue of the Atlantic went to press, makes it very, very difficult to do so.
So it's not that Trump didn't necessarily want to and hasn't spoken about separate from NATO a lot, but it became very, very difficult.
So wrong, but with a big caveat.
On page 29, we have of this two-year-old, if Trump wins issue of the Atlantic, women will be targets.
And it's just, it's the same, it's the same stuff, right?
Like he is gross and he says gross things about women and he encourages grossness in influencers and gives credence to the manosphere and helps create a culture of grossness in young men.
All of which is kind of true.
But as I said in that Why I'm Voting for Trump piece, which we'll come back to shortly, he is absolutely net positive for women.
100%.
Because saying mean things and gross things about women is bad.
Okay, cool.
But if you think that's more bad than protecting the safety and dignity of women and girls across the board is good, then I don't even know what universe you're living in.
Like you have just completely failed to understand the risks that women and girls actually face.
And, you know, if having mean things said to you or about you is the highest bar that you can imagine for bad things that can happen, you've been living in a really sheltered world and you should get out more.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's wrong.
We have on the next page, and I'm skipping a bunch of them, but we have climate denial will flourish.
Well, it would be really, really fantastic if we could take politics out of the science and actually, actually fund and encourage scientists to do research that might come up with different answers and not be forced to then slide those answers under the carpet and pretend they never did the research because is our climate changing?
Yeah, it is.
Is it anthropogenic?
Partially, sure, probably.
To what degree are the changes that we're seeing anthropogenic?
We don't know because we haven't been allowed.
People who do this kind of science hasn't been allowed to do the work that would actually find those questions out.
Most of the work is model-based, which means you feed in your assumptions and you get your assumptions out the other end and you claim that's results.
And what we do know for sure is that there's a lot going on on our planet that is changing our climate that has nothing to do with us.
And we're not allowed to talk about that either.
So climate denial will flourish.
How about you people on the left start actually thinking scientifically and learn what it might mean to assess what the climate changing means and how it is changing and why.
Yeah, 100% agree.
There is climate change, but we have bigger dangers.
And what we don't have is science capable of telling us how significant anthropogenic climate change is.
It's not that we don't have the capacity as a species.
It's that we're not being allowed to do it.
No, and, you know, we've got science that's only allowed to reach one conclusion.
So that's not science.
It's not science.
On the next page, we have, and I'll just put this up, is journalism ready?
Not if you're at the Atlantic.
Like, nope, because you stopped doing journalism, guys.
This is on you.
Like, start journalisming again.
Consider that.
Consider that.
And then watch your audience come back.
Like, that'll be amazing for you.
You'll actually grow your subscribership again if you actually start doing journalism.
Is journalism ready?
No, because you stopped doing it.
Journalism is dead, but that's not on us who are questioning what you're saying.
It's because you're not doing journalism.
Majata.
Make journalism a thing again.
A thing again.
Yes, good.
Next page.
Man, they really, they really got going.
When science becomes a slogan.
Can you imagine the people at the Atlantic who brought us the most biased and crappy so-called science reporting during COVID of any of the major players?
Like even the New York Times could not hold a candle to the Atlantic with regard to the really ass backwards reporting on COVID is when science becomes a slogan.
Yeah, you did that.
That was you.
And so, you know, do you have a problem on the right where a lot of people, I don't know, my right, on the right, where a lot of people are saying, screw it.
No more science for me.
I'm out because science keeps lying to me.
Yeah, that's a problem.
You know why?
Because you have people on the left going, I follow the science.
In this house, we believe in science and you don't.
You believe in authorities in lab coats and nice grants and fancy degrees telling you what to do because you like to follow instructions.
That's not science.
It never has been.
So you've got the abuse of science on the left and the rejection of bad science on the right.
And there are still a bunch of us out here going like, actually, guys, we're going to need the science.
We're going to need to be able to do science.
All of us should be able to think scientifically.
And we can.
But not when you have this stupid, insane war between reject all science because it sounds like that and accept all science, except I don't know what science is, and I'm accepting something that isn't science after all.
So like when science becomes a slogan, how dare you?
What a bunch of nincompoops.
Yeah, totally.
Bunch of nincome poops.
Okay, I'm going to skip a few because it's just too many.
Anyway, I skipped too far.
Page 43, a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere.
No, that was never his plan.
Are there some people in the United States who would like to outlaw abortion everywhere?
Yeah, of course there are.
There always will be.
That was never Trump's interest.
I don't know that he actually cared at all about Roe v. Wade.
I don't know that he cared about that issue at all.
Was he pandering to some degree to his constituents, but also listening to many constitutional law experts who said that's bad law.
That's not going to stay on the books forever, no matter what.
And you're going to need to send it back to the States.
I don't know what his justification was in his first term for putting the people on the court that he did and knowing that that would end up overturning Roe.
But it wasn't that he was gunning for abortion.
He really, I believe, was interested in sending it back to the States.
And does that mean that in some states, it's now very, very difficult, if not impossible, for women to get an abortion?
And it wasn't nearly as difficult, if not impossible before?
Yes.
But good people who know the law say that Roe was bad law.
And that is actually distinct from the question of whether or not you feel that it should be your right to have an abortion and when.
And so, you know, again, we have some people on the right having a very extreme position and some extremely vocal people on the left having an extreme position that is frankly disgusting to almost everyone to hear and that's not helping.
The idea that you should be able to have an abortion until the moment before you give birth at your whim is reprehensible to basically all human beings.
And the idea that you would celebrate an abortion, no, no, no, no one reasonable celebrate such a thing.
And yet, you know, I feel that it should be a right early on for, you know, for women.
But I don't think that any normal human being would be celebrating such a choice if they had to make it, if they felt that they have to make it.
So, nope, Atlantic, wrong on this.
If Trump gets into office a second time, this again published two years before now, there will be a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere.
Wrong.
Okay, so it goes on and on and on.
But the one of these that I wanted to read a little bit from seems to me kind of the encapsulation of this what I insist on calling the pseudo-liberal mindset that has helped us arrive in a place where the Atlantic could publish so many things.
They got it right in a few places, but a lot wrong.
Even a broken magazine is right a couple times.
Well, the Ant Applebaum piece on NATO was, I think, right in spirit.
And I can't remember who wrote about the specter of family separation, Caitlin Diggerson.
And there are some other pieces that, you know, right.
But in part, what has happened, and I am not the first to say this, but I have been saying it for a long time, is that we have placed the neuroses of women front and center in the American consciousness.
And that doesn't mean that we've placed women's interests front and center, far, far, far from it.
We have placed the neuroses of women who are interested in being vocal and active front and center and allowed those neuroses to triumph over reality.
My line of evidence here is this piece.
On page 60 of this Atlantic issue from two years ago predicting what would happen if Trump wins, it's called The Psychic Toll by Jennifer Sr.
I'm just going to read a few paragraphs.
There were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all.
The taunts and the provocations, the incitements and the resentments, the disorchestrated reasoning, the verbal incontinence, the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and the soup song of hydrochlorica.
I'm going to have to read that one again because it's good.
I'm going to start over.
There were times during the first two years of the Biden presidency when I came close to forgetting about it all.
The taunts and the provocations, the incitements and the resentments, the disorchestrated reasoning, the verbal incontinence, the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soup song of hydroxychloroquine.
I forgot almost that we'd had a man in the White House who governed by tweet.
I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds.
I forgot even that we had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated, this being a central irony, that our nation's top executive had zero executive function, that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the Constitution.
I forgot, in short, that I'd spent nearly five years scanning the Velda for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Jong believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.
Say what you want about Joe Biden.
He's allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he's there.
But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration.
We've already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails.
What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again?
What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years and possibly far beyond?
This is on you, okay?
Your neurosis is your problem.
Neuroticism is more common in women than in men.
It's one of the big five personality traits, and it's one of the things that is highly sexed.
Full disclosure, this is one of many places that I myself am gender non-conforming.
I both have extremely low neurosism and have very little patience for it in other people.
So my reaction to this is kind of extreme.
I simply have no patience for your bullshit.
Your anxiety, your neuroticism is a you problem, not a rest of us problem.
And we have our entire culture has been turned into a the neuroses of some women have become the problem of the rest of us.
And it's insane.
It's it's just insane.
So just let me be neuroticism is broadly, broadly speaking, having a negative reaction to events as they happen, tending towards negative emotions rather than positive ones.
So things like fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness, people high in neuroticism are more likely to have negative interpretations of events, of events, greater difficulty dealing with stress.
They're more likely to lash out at others and conclude that ordinary situations are impossible or untenable.
So of course, women who are on average higher in neuroticism are going to be more likely to view what they already see as a negative as world ending.
The sky is falling.
But it's in their power, your power.
You are the individual who's experiencing this.
It is in your power to reframe your response to it.
And that doesn't mean that you may not want to make change in the world, but your neuroticism, enough that it actually shows up in the Atlantic's issue about what will happen if Trump wins, we're all going to have a psychic toll.
We're all going to be neurotic.
No, we're not.
Even those of us who are displeased with what is playing out and don't like a lot of what is happening can do so without the anxiety and the fear and the anger and the, frankly, insanity that you are inflicting on the rest of us.
You aren't allowed to make a you problem and our problem, and yet you're doing it.
And it is our not just response.
It is not just our right, but our responsibility to resist your neuroticism from taking over more.
Beautifully said.
I would also just point out that that little bit at the end where she points out that under Biden, it was possible to just relax and not think about these things.
This is the problem with being governed by neuroticism is that it's what you've decided to freak out about.
And the fact that you weren't freaked out about a demented president sitting in the White House with the capacity to launch nuclear weapons, presumably because somebody else wants them launched and he doesn't know enough to say no.
Everything that happened over COVID under the Biden administration, you're choosing to freak out about this thing because somebody's wound you up over it.
And you're choosing not to freak out about this other thing.
And you have to compare them, right?
When it came to Joe Biden, there wasn't much there there.
He was gone.
And you can tell if you just look at a comparison between his speeches at the end of his presidency and compare them to Joe Biden from 20 or 30 years ago.
Or 10.
Even 10.
Yeah.
It's obvious what had happened and you chose not to freak out about it.
So anyway, neuroticism is both your reaction and the fact that it's pointed at some things and not others.
Venezuela And Geopolitics00:11:15
It's totally arbitrary.
And, you know, we can't live like that, as you say.
Yeah.
That's right.
So the last thing I want to do is just go through the main points.
And I just, in my original piece, Why I'm Voting for Trump from a year and a half and 14 months ago, not read the whole piece, but I think I split it up into sort of five main points.
Well, I have a couple of things.
And I don't need to go there yet.
Yeah.
I have a couple other things that I wanted to say before we do that.
One is I want to talk a little bit about foreign policy.
I want to talk about what's going on with Iran, and I also want to talk about Venezuela.
Okay.
Now, when it comes to Iran, this is a place where I absolutely didn't vote for this and I know it.
I do not feel that it is in the United States' interest to attack Iran, and it is especially in our interest to avoid going to war with Iran.
So the bombing raid on Iran seems to have worked the first time without precipitating a wider war.
On the other hand, I remember, you know, Gulf War I, and then I remember the quagmire in Iraq years later.
So there's a pattern.
The neocons and now the neo-neocons have Iran on their list.
It's next.
It has to go.
The United States has to fight this war, and we are told that it is in our interest.
And frankly, if the neocons say it is in your interest, that's like the CDC telling you how to avoid COVID, right?
It's upside down and backwards.
The neocons are not on our team.
I don't know if that's because they're entirely delusional or they're actually effectively working for somebody else.
But the point is, no, war with Iran would be a terrible error.
And Trump is obviously contemplating it.
We had a false start last week, which I take to have been strategically clever, lead the Iranians to think that we're about to attack them so that you can see what their countermeasures look like.
Yes, I'm sure that's a wise way to go about conducting a war, but the war itself is misguided and we shouldn't go there.
And I have the feeling this time, we're not going to be allowed to say no, that the powers that be are going to force this to happen and we, the American public, don't get a say, and that ought to make you think.
Not even Trump.
I don't know that Trump wants to go to war in Iran, but I don't think he has a choice somehow.
Now, Venezuela, I want to say this very carefully.
What happened in Venezuela, I don't know whether I voted for it, right?
Because I don't know what it is.
I know that there was a pretext that I really don't like, that this was about interdiction of drugs flowing into the U.S. Fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela.
No, I don't think those speedboats were, what did Toby call them?
Ultra-rapid fishermen?
I don't know.
I'm willing to believe that there's likely something off about those boats, but I don't know.
And we don't kill people based on, you know, the executive telling us that they're guilty of stuff.
That's not how we behave.
So there's definitely some uncool stuff that we've done in Venezuela.
As for, and I don't love the idea that we're going to go and kidnap leaders of foreign countries, because once you open that particular version of Pandora's box, who knows where it stops and what we feel entitled to do.
But that said, Venezuela was a total disaster.
Maduro needed to go.
The Venezuelan people are caught in the middle of something that is clearly much bigger.
Now, the question is, why did we go after Venezuela?
Did we do it because of oil?
Well, I'm persuaded that we probably did, but that the picture is likely a geopolitical, a global geopolitical question in which Venezuela and our ability to hopefully purchase its oil, rather than having that oil flow to China, changes the picture of the world radically in the direction of our being safer.
in the Western Hemisphere and possibly Taiwan being safer without as big a threat from China.
The idea is that without access to Venezuelan oil, the Chinese can't afford to attack Taiwan.
We were in danger of being dragged into a conflict that was going to be potentially ruinous in Taiwan.
So what I'm saying is I don't know how clear-headed this attack was or what it's about.
It's very undemocratic.
But there is a question that I can't answer, but I think it belongs on the table.
Can we be a functioning democratic republic at home and function more in an imperial framework abroad?
And could we do it humanely?
In other words, you and I have spent, I don't know how many years in Latin America.
We have not only fascination with the place, but a great love of numerous cultures there.
And I find it tragic, actually, that our relationship, that the American relationship to Latin America has been exploitative and authoritarian.
Just over and over and over again.
Nicaragua, Panama, Chile, Venezuela.
And I'm missing many.
Those are the obvious ones.
Right.
So what I'm hoping is that, yes, we're going to make some moves that are going to make people thoroughly uncomfortable, that they will be made in a way that the populations who have no choice about this, that's very anti-democratic, but that those populations end up feeling that it was in their interest and positive.
And to the extent that we have a global realpolitik situation, how do you deal with the threat of China invading Taiwan?
I don't know that Venezuela has the effect that people have suggested it does, where our control over Venezuela prevents China from attacking Taiwan.
But if so, that may well end up being net positive for planet Earth.
And I am not, I am definitely for us being a democratic republic at home and us abiding by those principles 100%.
Our constitution, I think, is incomplete.
It's got some flaws, but overwhelmingly, it's the best document on planet Earth, and I want us to live by it, and we haven't been.
So that's a problem.
But am I willing to understand that the world is a more complex place and that the rule set is different abroad and that even our values at home cannot be mapped onto the entire world and that it may end up causing a net decrease in those values being realized across the globe?
Yes, I am.
So if this was well thought out and wise somehow on the Trump administration's part and it ends up working to the advantage of the Venezuelan people who were frankly suffering terribly, then I did vote for it.
If, on the other hand, this is more bravado and it's going to be turned into a vassal state and we're going to extract from them in a way that the population now suffers in a new way under our hegemony, then I didn't vote for it.
So I'd love to know the answer to that question and I don't.
I agree.
I agree with everything you said.
And let me just add an anecdote, one that you're familiar with already, which is, you know, I don't, having interacted with people in several of the nation states in Latin America who have suffered because of the interventionist policies of the United States in the past,
I was I watched this with, you know, some horror, but also with a recognition that at least many, I won't claim to know what percentage, but at least many Venezuelans had fled Venezuela in recent years because it had become an untenable place to live.
that first under Hugo Chavez and then under Maduro since 2013, what had once been a country that was coming up to standards of quality of life that were quite high, that suddenly, not suddenly, under Chavez and then under Maduro, conditions got worse and worse.
Goods weren't available.
Inflation was rampant.
Corruption was on the rise.
And there had been a movement in the right direction.
And now there was movement in very much the wrong direction.
And specifically, it was 10 years ago, actually, that we spent 11 weeks in Ecuador with our sons and 30 students leading study abroad.
And when we were in Cuenca in Ecuador, a colonial Spanish city in the Andes for a couple of weeks while students did homestays in Spanish language and we did some day trips and such, I met a Venezuelan family who had escaped on foot, if I remember correctly, from Venezuela and had opened up a restaurant.
I found myself in the restaurant and I took you guys back there and I had several conversations with these people.
These had been professionals.
These were, and I didn't find my notes.
I didn't know exactly where we were going to be going here.
But if memory serves, I think, you know, she was a veterinarian and he was a judge or something.
They had been upper and middle class professionals in Venezuela.
And they had an adult, a young adult son or daughter as well, who was helping run the restaurant, who had been in college, was just trying to figure out what they were going to be doing in the world.
And they'd had to escape.
They felt that they were at risk, that they were going to be having their belongings taken from them because that was the kind of state that Maduro was creating.
And he wasn't the first to do so.
He had inherited such a set of policies from Chavez before that.
So I, for 10 years, have had this knowledge in me that Venezuela is failing its people and that Maduro was failing its people and failing his people, failing Venezuela's people, and that it would be better for Venezuelans were it under a different kind of leadership.
I don't know if this is the way to do it.
It certainly feels that abducting the leaders of other states is a bridge too far.
Trump Not Owned00:14:56
But that doesn't mean that this won't be net positive for the people of Venezuela.
Right.
I would agree.
Yeah.
Did you have more?
Nope.
I think that's it.
We're going to go to your piece, and then I have one thing at the end.
Okay, fair enough.
Okay.
So in, can you see my screen?
Awesome.
Amazing.
Well, wonders never cease.
On October 29th of 2024, about a week before the election, I posted why I am voting for Trump and am proud to do so.
It was by far my most engaged with and appreciated piece on my sub stack, which is maybe should have been obvious that that was coming, but I didn't see it coming.
You know, I rather like my piece on Starfish, but somehow it didn't attract as much engagement.
So I begin just this way.
I'm not going to read the whole piece at all.
But eight years ago, I couldn't imagine that I would ever vote for Trump.
Four years ago, I considered it, but opted against voting third party instead.
I voted for Chelsea Gabbard.
This year, I am voting for Trump.
There are many Americans who have followed a similar path.
Last week, Starkhorse made a case for Trump, but I am still met with dismay and disbelief by some family and friends.
Increasingly, what I hear is this.
I understand that you can't possibly vote for Kamala, but what are the reasons to vote for Trump?
Here's one set of answers.
So I'm just going to go through the main categories first and then work back up to point out where I think I got it.
Either I got it wrong or right, or maybe I had it right at the time, but conditions have changed.
The first one was Trump is not owned.
The second is Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots.
The third broad reason is Trump is better for Americans.
Trump is better for women.
And finally, Trump is better for America and for its core values.
So in reverse order, is Trump better than the alternative over in Teen Blue for America and for its core values?
I still say yes.
I don't even think this is close in light of the fact that we had a non-president followed by a candidate who wasn't supported by anybody and was an empty shirt.
Well, and one of my pieces of evidence here in advance of the election is that the Biden administration literally formed a ministry of truth, short-lived though it was.
Its formal name was the Disinformation Governance Board.
The Biden administration defined and took a stand on misdis and malinformation, definitions currently housed at the site of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, and I named them.
So the evidence is there.
And this is a place where, although I didn't point out how Trump has been positive in this regard, because I don't think there have been any executive orders or explicit places, the standing against DEI and awokeness is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to actually standing up for our Constitution.
And the First Amendment is a key piece that obviously he's better than the opposition.
So that was the last of my reasons and still stands.
Trump is better for women.
Yes, we already talked about this.
But the recognition that male and female are real categories that can't get turned into the other in mammals and that allowing men in a dress into a domestic crisis center or a prison is barbaric is obvious and somehow team blue didn't get that.
So I would argue on the substance, he is leaps and bounds better.
Absolutely.
What is being responded to is pure symbolic stuff.
And, you know, so I made a point in this piece of not saying anything about Harris.
It was just too easy.
But like, you know, there was so much being written then about what an incompetent know-nothing she was.
But remember Brat Sommer?
Right?
So this was, you know, this sort of hapless, vapid, banal embrace of the lowest form of female sexuality as a stand-in for an embrace of womanhood and femininity.
If that's good for women, I'm done.
I'm not interested.
So yes, not interested in being in on the private conversations Trump has with his bros about women.
I'm sure they're gross.
But on the substance, he's way better for women.
So that's two points on which I believe I was correct.
This one, Trump is better for Americans.
This is a little bit more nuanced, right?
There's the border.
There's border protection.
There's prices.
The prime rate isn't really falling like I expected it would.
Inflation is still bad.
There's a lot of people still suffering.
I think less than they were under Biden, but this is a mixed bag.
Well, I think we don't know.
I think we don't know.
I think we don't know yet, but the Venezuela move, which may be, depending upon what it was, could be thoroughly unjustified, would still, I think, be net positive for Americans.
The amount of oil that Venezuela has and the likely impact of our access to it, especially as a new energy crisis looms in light of the demand for energy that is obviously inside of the AI revolution.
So we suddenly, the battle is on and it is about energy.
And oil is clearly a big piece of that puzzle for now.
If fusion showed up, maybe 10 years into building reactors, oil wouldn't be such a big player.
But for the moment, it's oil.
And so from the point of view of the well-being of Americans, I think that may end up being a strongly positive move, whether or not it can be justified.
Yep.
Yeah, I agree.
I just think we don't know this one yet.
We don't.
But I'm still hopeful.
Yep.
Okay, so that was three of, I think, five main points, or maybe it was six that I'm making here.
Oh, yeah.
Five.
Four.
Number four, Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots, specifically Kennedy and Maha.
And I write, you know, Kennedy sees the death grip, the big pharma, big food, and big hab and big ag have on the American people.
We've already talked about this, but this is all moving in the right direction.
The sway that the neocons and...
But that's not this point.
This is going to be the final point is the sway.
Well, I guess what I would just say is I see a tension.
There are a number of factions.
So let me just, so, Trump is taking counsel for Truth Speaking Patriots.
Well, that's true.
Yes, he is.
And yes, he is.
And we've seen really excellent, excellent changes afoot already.
My first point, however, Trump is not owned.
I wrote, Trump is not the nominee for the Republican Party of old, just as Kamala is not the nominee for the Democratic Party of old.
Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris, and all the neocons are becoming Democrats, saying that Trump has suffocated the soul of the GOP.
Traditional power is scared and is concentrating in the modern Democratic Party.
Trump doesn't answer to the power brokers of either party.
He is his own man, and he is what you see is what you get.
I don't know if that was true when I wrote it.
I hope it was.
I don't think it is anymore.
And I think this, to your point about the neocons, the neocons switched again.
Like they clearly have sway at this point.
I think they are clearly indifferent and agnostic to party.
Oh, of course.
But they have an agenda.
And the point is wherever the power is, they'll be there and have their voice in the president's ear.
But I do worry.
I think Trump intended to be his own man and that we don't know what happened.
There are ways in which he is still his own man.
But again, in the idiom of negotiation, I think it feels like somebody said the equivalent of, Mr. President, congratulations.
Well done.
There's certain things you can do.
There's certain things you can't.
And then I don't know what was said that gave that weight.
I mean, I don't know that it was said at all, but it feels that way.
There are certain places in which, you know, our belligerents with respect to Iran, this was the no-new wars guy.
So what happened?
Right?
The Epstein file.
Why the turnaround?
Yes.
So anyway, yeah, I think there's a ratio.
How free is this person?
And we don't know.
There are some places where he appears to be quite free and it's good.
And there are some places in which he appears not to be free and it's frightening.
I absolutely agree.
So, you know, I stand by this piece that I wrote and I very much prefer him to the alternative.
But my very first point in it, which, you know, maybe it's ranked, maybe not.
There's five important points that I made.
And I think the very first one is the one that is least true.
Trump is not owned, I wrote.
And again, I don't know if what is true now and what was true then are different things, but there are clear indications that he is not entirely his own man now.
Yeah, I would say, yeah, it depends on your definition of owned.
He's not as free as he might be.
All right.
I had one last thing.
I wanted to connect the question that was raised by Hegseth regarding 8A with the midterm elections, as I did in my tweet on the subject.
There is a concern that whatever Hegset is being spun up over and whatever the ultimate reason is that he's being spun up about this and he is spinning up the public, giving a very cartoonish portrayal of what the 8A program is and why he's taking a sledgehammer to it.
There is a danger in his approach that could cost Trump his presidency, literally.
And it has to do with the fact that the 8A program is overwhelmingly benefiting rural voters.
It is overwhelmingly, it is a profound influence on the well-being of the state of Alaska.
And so in the sledgehammering or Hegsething or whatever it is of the 8A program, he could change the will of the electorate with respect to the Senate.
So it is very likely in the midterms that the Democrats will regain the House, which means that they will impeach the president again with near certainty.
They can't convict him if they don't have the Senate.
And so if Hegseth creates, you know, changes the will of Alaska, changes the balance, you know, by empowering the urban centers and putting a finger in the eye of rural people, veterans, if he ends up costing Trump the Senate or the Republicans the Senate, then it is very likely going to result in this president being removed from office.
And that is obviously a spectacular loss.
So what I urged in my tweet and what I urge now is for Secretary Hegseth to go look at the complete picture of what 8A is, what the comparison is between fraud inside the 8A program and the rest of the defense budget.
And an honest reading will lead him somewhere very different than he is.
I'm not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but This is a mistake, and it's a mistake based on a cartoon portrayal of this as yet more DEI when that is by far not the full story of the A-Day program.
So anyway, I've said my piece, and I think people need to pay attention to the fact that it is connected to the fate of the Senate, which is connected to the fate of this presidency ultimately.
Well, on that happy note, it's January, and a bunch of you are about to get thwacked by major storms.
I feel bad for those people.
I hope you do fine and that the grids don't go out and that there's not too much accumulation of ice as they're saying there might be in the South and the middle of the country.
We will be back next week, same time, same place.
Wait, wait.
Hold on.
Yes, we will.
It occurs to me that in light of what may be about to happen in the East and in the South that we are going to have a confusion brewing because an ice storm could be a reference to immigration or it could be a reference to snapped power lines and broken trees.
At the very least, we should expect some good cartoons.
Well, I think for the next, for the foreseeable weather future, we should refer to an ice storm that involves actual ice as an ice storm and an ice storm that involves immigration as a shitstorm.
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Okay.
That was a long way to go, but there's something there.
There is something there.
Consider it amongst yourselves.
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