March 14, 2025 - Slightly Offensive - Elijah Schaffer
01:03:47
How Ye's DE*TH CON 3 Moment Almost DESTROYED Shane's Career | Almost Serious Clips
Journalist and author Shane Cashman shares the behind-the-scenes story of two of his most controversial investigations — and how they nearly ended his career.Show more First, Shane reveals what it was like spending time with Kanye West immediately after Ye’s infamous appearance on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, where Kanye declared “I love H**ler.” Shane details his surreal experience visiting Yeezy headquarters, talking art and faith with Kanye and Nick Fuentes, and even going to church with Kanye the very next day — as the world was calling for Ye’s cancellation.
Second, Shane dives into his deep-dive reporting on Eliza Bleu, a woman who rose to fame as a human trafficking survivor and activist. As doubts began to surface about her story, Shane was already embedded for a profile. What followed was a media firestorm: accusations that Shane was “running cover” for a grifter, betrayal by colleagues, and even blacklisting by The Daily Wire.
⇩ SHOW SPONSORS⇩
➤ THE WELLNESS COMPANY: Be prepared for what is coming next! Order your MEDICAL EMERGENCY KIT ASAP at https://www.twc.health/ALMOSTSERIOUS and enter code SERIOUS for 10% off. The Wellness Company and their licensed doctors are medical professionals you can trust, and their medical emergency kits are the gold standard to keeping you safe! Again, that’s https://www.twc.health/ALMOSTSERIOUS, promo code SERIOUS.
➤ LOCALS: Visit our Locals page and use code ALMOSTSERIOUS for 1 month FREE! https://bit.ly/411OyIQ
__
⇩LISTEN TO THE AUDIO-ONLY PODCAST⇩
https://linktr.ee/almostseriousE
__
⇩FOLLOW Shane Cashman⇩
➤ https://x.com/ShaneCashman
➤ / shanecashman
➤ @TalesfromtheInvertedWorld
__
➤BOOKINGS + BUSINESS INQUIRIES: [email protected]
#kanyewest #dailywire #benshapiro Show less
It's really not a coincidence that Candace Owens, Ian Carroll, and of course, our very favorite Andrew Tate are all back in the media spotlight as the gatekeepers of conservative media, Jeremy Boring, Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee.
You have Joel Berry and so many others, including from the post-millennial, freaking out, telling us all that we're not allowed to talk to people if we want to have a job in this business.
And that kind of control method is what's kept the media in such a terribly distrusting place with the approval rating for media being lower than the actual Congress of the United States.
But when did all this gatekeeping start?
What is it really like working in the media and how hard is it to tell the truth amidst an emerging field of independent journalism?
People in the United States trust it more than ever.
They're watching it over the mainstream media.
But have we become the mainstream media?
And are we implementing the same gatekeeping, censoring, and control tactics just without the big titles and paychecks?
My guest today is Shane Cashman.
He's an American journalist, author, and previous professor known for his engaging storytelling.
might know him from his amazing stories from Eliza Blue to Kanye West.
He's a very interesting character, not one to really give into public pressure.
And believe me, they've tried to cancel him multiple times, but yet here the hell he still is.
This is like three years ago, but I believe it was she reached out to different outlets during lockdowns to tell them they should raise awareness that lockdowns would accelerate human trafficking.
And Daily Wire was the first one to pick it up.
So they ran it.
And I saw these emails between her and whatever writer that was at the Daily Wire at the time.
But the writer said, we'll only run this if you use your name.
And they convinced her to share her name.
She initially, in the emails I saw between her and this writer, was wanting to be anonymous.
And then Daily Wire said, it'll be better if we could put your picture in your name.
And that's how it started.
And from there, she became like, you know, everyone's podcast darling of human trafficking.
I don't know if I did really, but people were very upset with me for sharing my opinion on things.
And it was, it's funny to be at the receiving end of that because I'd spent a lot of time writing profiles on people before the Eliza story when I got the heat directed at me writing about like Kanye when he said, I love Hitler, right?
And I'm with him the day after that happens on Alex Jones.
So I'm writing a story that I could have never written anywhere else, right?
Because I used to write for these more mainstream places like the Atlantic or, you know, Vice and stuff.
And they would not let that go down.
But I was able to, for Tim's website at the time, go to LA and be with Kanye at a time when he was like setting the world on fire.
And I love it.
That was like one of my favorite times to be out there and talk to him.
And we went to church and Bible study and wrote raps.
And I understand what I think he's trying to do and pushing all the buttons and just upsetting everybody, which I love.
But there's certain things where I will draw the line when it comes to blasphemy and the porn.
I'm like, I'm just can't get behind that.
And like opening Twitter.
And then all of a sudden there's Kanye's favorite porn.
But Eliza, having done all these interviews, becoming like the number one human trafficking podcaster person on every podcast, they started to break down her whole life story, right?
Like her thing was like, she was here.
She was engaged in my chemical romance guy.
She was trafficked at this age.
And then someone put out a thread that just kind of like took everything to task.
The Eliza thing was three parts, and that was interesting.
My goal, actually, before it was published, I was trying to convince Cassandra to let me just go on IRL and just read the whole thing.
Cause like by the time, so when I landed on the plane, I'm moving out to Iowa.
I am now the focus of the story because I'm the guy Tim has announced to do the breakdown, right?
And so everyone, there's nothing I can say at this point to change anyone's minds because everyone's got their minds made up about me or her or whatever.
But I, they were expecting me the way it was billed was I'm the investigative journalist who's going to now break down this whole thing.
And they wanted me to like slaughter the whole thing, right?
And her.
But like, that was never my intention to do like a total breakdown of someone.
When I write profiles, I just let I let them speak.
Right.
And I say I definitely have opinions, but I let them go.
One thing that I think happens and why I call it you being canceled is it doesn't cancellation doesn't have the same effect.
It only really matters if you agree to your own cancellation.
Like I firmly believe this.
It's like, if so, I get calls from people, right?
They'll be like, yo, E, you know, you've been canceled.
And I'm like sitting in a studio with a dozen employees, you know, like going like, oh, I guess, well, if this is being canceled, then I hope everyone gets to experience it because life's pretty damn good.
But the joke is, is people saying, no, you know, what it means is you've had people try to take everything from you based off of slander and lies, right?
Or just because they don't like what you said, right?
It doesn't have to be, but so they slander and lie about you based off of just not liking you.
And I usually tell people the same thing.
I say, look, whether you're innocent or you're guilty or whether it's just a misunderstanding, don't stop making content.
Tweet through it.
Keep going.
Keep producing.
Because ultimately, if you go away, it's one thing to be guilty, make a mistake, and just move on with your life.
It's one thing for people to pry into your personal life and try to pull you apart.
It's another thing to be like, hey, you know what?
I actually agree with you guys.
I am a bad person.
Goodbye.
So don't leave.
Don't step away.
Like Louis C.K., a lot of these guys, you know, from the Me Too movement or even just actors when they do a bad performance, they go into hiding.
And I think that's how you kind of won is you didn't hide.
I did a lot of shows and people were like, well, he never apologized.
And I would never apologize.
I only apologize if I felt like I did something wrong.
But I felt like I did exactly what I wanted to do and would do it again.
But people hate her so much and now hate me by extension that they will, a lot of them refuse to see me any other way.
And that's fine.
So like anytime I'm on IRL or anytime I do shows, it's always brought up.
Like it's three years now, right?
I'm still talking about it.
And the Kanye story.
But that to me is like a reward.
And their scorn is my reward.
Like, I didn't do it to be liked.
I didn't do it for any other reason other than I had a story to tell.
And like I always said, and I said it in the story, I was like, I'm not the authority on the truth here.
I can't verify every part of her life, right?
What I could verify is that I have these documents from her family that show me where she was with receipts, like literal receipts, right?
For rent.
And I could put those up next to the thread that was made that started the whole debacle and they don't line up.
So this is like contradicting this.
So I don't know what the truth is, but these two like are in conflict.
So like everything that everyone believes out of that thread, that's not totally true, right?
And she's not the best narrator of own life for whatever reason.
My opinion is that she was on lots of drugs around a lot of those times.
She's like she said.
So there's a lot of unreliable narration happening.
And, you know, people attacked her family for her dad's like a some politician, like a like a rep, state rep or something.
So they'll say they use that.
But my takeaway was, I think something happened to her.
I can't verify what it was.
And while I was writing that story, you know, she was calling with like receipts like to be like, this is what I found this and that.
And I just give her to my wife to talk to while I'm typing.
And, you know, we both really felt like there was something there, but we just, I have no way to verify anything.
And that was my whole thing at the end of the day.
It was like, and I said it in the story.
I can't tell you what's what's correct, but I just know that that story and that story are both not fully fleshed out and probably never will be.
So that was, it was funny just because I got into, I left mainstream journalism because you're not allowed to say certain things.
And I was like, oh, the right seem more open-minded with telling different or at least sharing different voices.
Right.
And then I started to really see how that was a lie months before the Eliza thing because of the Kanye thing, seeing like Jeremy Boring and how they were reacting.
I was like, okay, so now these people are pure gatekeepers.
Right.
And then, you know, it got crazier with the Eliza stuff just because then it was colleagues trying to get me fired.
Like there's people reaching out to Tim being like, you should fire him.
I'm surprised he didn't, honestly, because I brought him a lot of trouble for that story.
And I wasn't going to stop.
And I didn't feel, I didn't feel bad.
Like I felt like you can fire me and that's fine.
To his credit, he kept me around.
The stories were deleted, which was like a bummer.
Everyone got so afraid.
Everyone got so afraid.
They were just like inundating everyone with so much hate.
I had colleagues who were writing out like some tweets in defense of me.
And I didn't, they didn't have to.
I didn't care.
I didn't ask anyone to help me.
I really did not care.
I somewhat enjoyed it because I'm a bit of a masochist.
And I was like, you know what?
They want to do it.
That's fine because I learned so much about everyone.
Like who's willing to just believe one little headline, which is just like everyone who believed just one little headline from the left that I, you know, hated when I, before, you know, in New York.
So seeing people just delete everything and scrub their Twitter of my name because they were getting like quote unquote attacked in their DMs was hilarious.
But it was a learning experience.
It was a blessing because I was able to be like, it showed me how those cycles work in the news.
Cause there's, there's a, that, that little thing lasted for, it felt like forever, but it was like a few weeks.
It's kind of what we're talking about first is like the pressure from the audience control, right?
Trying to control you and what you can talk about, what you can't talk about, the angles that you can take.
And most people, I'd say, in entertainment and in media kind of play to the audience.
They don't really need a higher up coming down upon them and saying, you can't say this or that.
They're looking to be accepted by people, which is like the fear of man.
And guys, we're going to talk about this a little bit about the way that people play to their audience and how it affects the information that you get.
But obviously, everybody knows that there was no other time in history that people probably played to their audience more in media that was more recognizable than the years 2020 through 2022.
I mean, the amount of people who, you know, took on treatments that probably ended up doing more harm than good, people who went out of their way to shame family members, cut them off for not taking experimental procedures.
I mean, this was not a good time.
And I lost connection with some family members as well.
But that's why it's so important that you have to understand that you need to have an emergency medical kit, particularly from the wellness company right here.
Now, these emergency medical kits help you to bypass going to the medical system, but as everything that you would get prescribed from a doctor from a real medical physician, but it's delivered straight to your door.
You get ivermectin, which of course people have been combining this with other medications to fight long-term illnesses like cancer.
That's not a medical statement, or I'm not making medical advice.
I'm just saying what people have been using ivermectin for.
And they've been reporting good, good developments.
Now, of course, you should talk to your doctor and find out if that's true or not.
And of course, you should never take my word for it.
But I can tell you this, people are using ivermectin and they have been for decades to fight against parasitic infections.
You also get fluconazole.
You get to help with nasal infections.
You get moxicillin, ZPAC, and other antibiotics to help fight against most infections from the common cold to C19, even to help with reducing symptoms of the flu, STDs.
I mean, look, it's all here.
And you don't have to go to the emergency room.
You don't have to go to urgent care.
And the best part is you go, well, I already have health insurance.
Guess what?
You probably have a very high deductible.
Most of us do.
If you do have a deductible, if you don't have a deductible, then you got to make the appointment, get the appointment.
And then either way, even if you want to go now, you've got to go to urgent care emergency room.
And this is cheaper than going to either.
It has all the medication that you need right in this kit.
Get it 10% off at twc.health slash almost serious.
Use my promo code Sirius for 10% off.
That's TWC.halth slash A-L-M-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-O-U-S promo code Sirius for 10% off.
Make sure that you get one of these today.
Buy it for friends and family as well because, you know, just because you have insurance or you have, you know, you're taken care of, think about the people in your life.
I'm here with Shane Cashman, journalist and ex-professor.
I would say a lot of things.
It's quite interesting.
You know, we're talking about, you know, the way that media has changed and the way that people are controlled.
And I thought I brought you on because I know that, you know, you mentioned, I mean, you've been with Kanye West.
I mean, he's one of the most popular people in the world.
And, you know, you've gotten serious flack, not just from what would be considered your ideological or political enemies, but a lot from like your own people, right?
Your own readers and your own colleagues.
And you mentioned something earlier that I thought was really interesting was the fact that, you know, people try to bully people.
Like, you know, if you don't, if you talk about this, I won't follow you anymore.
Or, you know, you changed.
That's the best one.
You've really changed.
And there is a lot of pressure.
I think like a lot of people, not just that work in entertainment media, feel that, right?
Entire marriages can be a fake because a spouse will hide who they really are to try to please their spouse and keep them, you know, them from leaving and from being alone.
You know, kids will lie to their parents and hide entire identities and then come out as gay when they're like 25 or something like that and freak the parents out because they didn't want to be rejected.
And, you know, there's the list goes on and on and on, whether I agree with the choices or the lifestyles or not, people hide who they are because they want to be accepted because they're afraid of being rejected.
And I think you have kind of given enough middle finger to that.
How do you do that?
Like, what was your why?
Why do you choose to live a life where you intentionally bring on pain in order to make sure that you're not compromising on your own your own beliefs?
I probably growing up listening to a lot of music that probably reflected that, you know, whether it was like gangster rap or Marilyn Manson, you know, that those or writers I looked up to for various reasons.
I just saw people who were being authentic and were saying whatever they felt like they had to say at the behest of their audience.
You know, I've always liked people who were being antagonistic, but not just doing it to be antagonistic.
They just happened to be because the thing they were doing was rubbing their audience the wrong way.
But they were like, we're staying true to ourselves.
You know, whether it was a bands like Daughters, you know, like they would change their record every time, though, their sound every record.
And the audience would always be like, what are they doing?
But they did it because they loved it.
And that's how I feel.
I care about God and my wife.
Right.
And then those people, like, well, God and my wife, what they think of me is all I care about.
And, you know, at home, my wife and I are talking about these stories that I'm writing, whether it was the Eliza one, the Kanye one.
We're like, this is really important.
I'm going to write it.
We know what's going to come with it.
You know, like, oh, media matters, hit piece for the Kanye thing.
I'm an anti-Semite because I said he should be president, you know.
And then my own colleagues or people like this new media world don't like me for the Eliza stuff.
But I just want to be able to say what I have to say and never feel like I have to say it to be liked.
I'd rather be hated for saying what I believe in than be liked for being fake.
And that's always, always been very important to me.
And, you know, it's like I'm noticing now.
I voted for Trump, but like it's people in this space are get really uncomfortable if you start to criticize Trump or Elon.
And, you know, I spent, despite being blacklisted from the Daily Wire, I was there for election night because I was there with Tim and I wasn't able to do any shows, but I was only IRL.
And I'm sitting next to Jeremy Boring, just listening to him say repeatedly, like Elon Musk is the greatest living American.
And I was getting nauseous because I'm like, to a degree, he's very close to Andrew Tate, you know, but you don't like Andrew Tate.
They both leave a wasteland of broken families.
You know, they're both like promiscuous degenerates, in my opinion.
But it's okay to not like Andrew Tate, but you can worship Elon just because he's on your team right now.
And I can't stand that.
Right.
And he has no, in my opinion, Jeremy Boring has no moral center and he'll do whatever he has to do to sell his candy and whatever.
He has Jeremy Boring has cam girls, wage slave cam girls, just like Andrew Tate did.
You know, we know that through the crowder tapes, you know, he literally talked about having wage slaves who sit in front of cameras.
So I don't like him and I don't like that attitude.
And I don't like that you feel like they feel like they have to say things because it's going to echo throughout their base.
I don't care if I lose every reader and every follower.
I'll just go back to moving furniture.
Right.
I feel like I've trespassed into this whole world.
Like I've trespassed into the Kanye thing.
All these stories kind of fell out of the sky.
I wasn't really, you know, searching for them.
Although, oddly enough, in June of that year, I interviewed Kanye.
I did tweet I was going to interview Kanye.
I had no connection to him whatsoever.
It was just a thing I thought.
And then it happened.
But all these stories just kind of fell out of the sky.
And I was like, it's amazing.
I'll tell him exactly how I want to.
Tim let me do that, you know, despite the heat that the Eliza one got.
But like the Riffraff one, Carrie Lake, I'm trying to think.
There's some others I'm forgetting.
Oh, Alex Jones with him before like he was acceptable, before he was back on Twitter, right?
And then that's another person who the right at that time hated.
You know, you get drunk one time and, you know, you get a girl pregnant.
I mean, look, that's obviously not ideal.
And I'm not promoting, you know, not promoting broken families, not promoting single motherhood.
It's not what I'm promoting.
But, you know, there was times in life where men did marry multiple women.
And, you know, there's different cultures that still do that today.
Again, not promoting it, just saying, like, I understand there are some nuances here in terms of, especially if you're not a Christian, you know, of what's acceptable.
But yeah, it is funny because it's like, well, but Elon is beneficial to these people and Tate is not.
And also the key thing is, is that, you know, Elon obviously supports certain countries and Tate doesn't, which is really why they're against him.
You know, they're really against him for being against the people who fund their operation.
So it's a very politically motivated bias.
And I feel like that's what's so disgusting to me most recently about people like Jeremy Boring is that, like, I don't see any problem if you just want to be rich and want to make money, but to pretend to be in a moral high ground or like to be in some sort of a place to make judgments upon people and not just like, oh, look, I don't think the way Andrew's living is correct, but like so hypocritical that you'll condemn Andrew's sleeping around with women and then you don't condemn Elon.
And just because one of them agrees with you on a foreign country and the other one doesn't, it's such a bizarre hypocrisy.
And it's because, look, you don't have to like everything Candace says, but she is now open, literally open to having more conversations, right?
And that's all I ever wanted.
I want to have more conversations.
I don't have to agree with the people.
I think Andrew Tate is a degenerate.
I would still interview him, you know, which is funny.
I was supposed to interview him right before the Eliza story.
You know, they had that weird history with her and her survivors, allegedly.
I was going to fly out there and interview him.
And back then, I really didn't know who he was, other than Tim was like, I talked to him, you know, years ago.
But I want to talk to everyone.
I want to hear their perspectives and then let the audience decide how they feel.
Right.
I'll pepper my opinions.
I'll say, you know, my piece.
But watching the Daily Wire control that narrative is exactly why I left places like the Atlantic, you know, where, you know, I was freelancing for all these places, but you get to know all these editors and how they act.
And like, for instance, I wrote for Pitchfork a little bit and I was writing a music review about, well, Kanye, actually, oddly enough.
And they wanted, the editor wanted to add in that he was a so-called artist.
I thought that was a weird phrase.
I'm like, why?
He's an artist.
Like, why am I putting it?
It was just a dig.
They just wanted to have a dig in there, right?
And those little things, I was just like, I'm done.
I can't stand these people.
But that's now happening with the bigger names on this side of the aisle, which is, you know, it's really sad.
Well, it's a diminishment because I want to say about the gatekeeping.
You know, what's really weird here is, you know, Ian Carroll was just on Joe Rogan.
Candice Owens was just on Theo Vaughan.
And of course, you know, you have Andrew Tate, who's just in the country.
And it's really weird to me that these people spend so much time trying to not just attack their opponents because we're not literally ideologically or politically opposed.
In fact, we're all probably aligned on the same president and most of the same senators and probably most of the same policies.
But we do disagree on a critical issue, right?
Which is foreign support for Israel.
And that's a really contentious conversation for a lot of people.
Very, very, very contentious.
Because it is not customary in right-wing politics for there to be a disagreement.
It's always been a pretty universal, everybody supports this.
Everybody's a part of it.
And if you question it, we all kind of agree.
You'll be fired, ostracized, and you don't want to work here, right?
It's like being in a family.
It's like, hey, if you do drugs and sleep around, I'm not kicking you out.
You're leaving type of thing.
A parent might tell their teenager, you know, you're choosing to leave.
And so there was sort of an unspoken pirate code where everybody knew that this was off limits.
You didn't discuss it.
You didn't talk about it.
And if you had evidence like the Epstein files, you destroyed it, right?
Because we protected these people above our own country and we gave them what they wanted, whether it was our weaponry, our plans, our intelligence, and even our loyalty, right?
The loyalty to our own country.
But then what came along is these people came along and were like, hey, you know what?
I mean, we're all on the same page, just not over here, because this is conflicting with the America first agenda.
This is not, this is not working out very well.
And what we're finding out is that, you know, what used to be an unspoken pirate code has become a very, very frantic and open cry for attention from these people that they're like kicking and screaming now.
unidentified
Like, if you don't agree with us on this, we're going to kill you and your career.
These are multi-millionaires with hundreds of staff, powerful voices, putting the top 100 most powerful voices in American media having tantrums and meltdowns because people are getting successful without their networks and without their gatekeeping.
And they're independently making money and making waves because the people are supporting them because they're telling the truth.
Their gatekeeping is their own way of building their own concentration camp of their ideologies, if you will.
And I think that will destroy them inevitably because the American people and people at large want to hear these conversations.
And it's funny with the Israel thing, how it used to be bipartisan for so many years.
Like growing up, it was like Dems and the right, the Republicans, all pro-Israel.
And now you see that's totally left the left.
And then the right is now fractured over that as well.
But I'm just like, I'm at a point where I'm like very isolationist right now.
I don't want to help anybody.
We can't even help ourselves.
We're totally like our cities are pretty messed up.
You know, I've had the opportunity to travel this country a bunch and we're totally destroyed.
I just want to like help us first, you know?
And everyone's so concerned with either Israel or Ukraine.
And the people on the right who are screaming about Israel sound just like the people on the left who are screaming about Ukraine, right?
Like I have friends who are, I made fun of Zelensky after Trump dressed him down, you know, in the White House with JD.
And I had friends reach out to me who never reach out, right?
These friends, they're not really friends.
They're old friends.
They're like, you have lost your humanity.
I'm like, really?
I've lost my humanity because I don't want to send missiles anymore to anywhere, right?
With our money.
And it's just hilarious because they're the same people who were like punch a Nazi and now they've got the Azovs in Ukraine that they have no problem funding in particular.
These people I know literally hate everything because it's a projection.
They've been taught to hate themselves.
And I remember that feeling before I was a conservative, before I was saved, before I had these feelings, before I believed in God, I know that feeling of like, it's just destruction, right?
This is all meaninglessness.
There's nothing, you know, there's nothing after this.
They have to have it that way because in order to implement this giant globalism, these big governments, you have to see the government as your God and your parent.
So they killed the nuclear family and they tried to kill God and they didn't in these people's hearts.
So their atheism is like, it's like a false religion, obviously, because they still worship something.
They worship materialism and they worship destruction and they worship the state.
And it's hilarious to see that happening because we all used to agree on, you know, back in the day, me and my friends in New York, that we were free speech, anti-war, and they've just been totally sucked up by the military industrial complex.
And now they're so pro that.
They're so pro-abortion, which I guess has never changed for them, that they're totally captured.
And they will probably never get out of it.
Most of them will die alone, you know, because most of them don't have kids.
Most of them are like our age and they're lonely and they will die alone.
And it's very sad.
And when I became a Christian, when I became safe, that was like, that was almost worse for them than when I said I was going to vote for Trump in 2016.
Because now, like, Shane is now totally gone, you know?
But for me, it was the greatest thing ever.
And my wife and I were baptized in a river in West Virginia, and it was amazing.
And I knew moving to West Virginia, like it was going to be more God-focused because it was such a divorce from the reality in New York where everything was destruction, you know, and everything they do is an affront to God.
All of their art, all that stuff, not all of it, not all the art, but what they believe in is how can we just attack, you know, like tradition, you know, and family and then while also implementing this giant government.
So, yeah, I think they have to have nihilism to get to this part, they get to this point in the world where we have a giant government that you can't escape.
And like, that's something this country wants to debase.
Right.
And maybe not our country because there's still lots of Christians, but the culture, right?
And when you said that maybe God's an afterthought to a lot of these cities, yes and no, because I think God is a thought in their minds in terms of it's an enemy.
God is an enemy to these people.
And, you know, like, I think a lot of them hate Trump so much because their false God is the government.
That's their cult leader.
Right.
And Trump right now is attacking their cult leader.
Doge, all that stuff is literally severing all these, the way they've been subsidizing their cults, right?
All their strange gender stuff, all that stuff.
So they're lashing out as if it's their religion being attacked.
And that's why I see the rise in like mental illness and acceptance of violence on the left because they are feeling as if it's their God being attacked.
But it's totally cool for them to attack Christianity constantly and only.
And like they'll defend the deaths of people who make fun of Muhammad, right?
But I do remember people years ago saying J. Sui, you know, Charlie Hebdo, they were on the left saying free speech.
I don't think those people exist anymore on the left because that's that's part of their weird identitarian death cult, right?
Uh, and it's it, I don't know if those people uh I don't think those people like I think they'll phase out eventually because like what I said earlier, because they're not going to have kids, but evil will never die on this fallen earth.
But that's why they prey on our kids, though, because they're not reproducing themselves.
So ideologically, they try to capture our children.
Yeah, and then the way they do that is by creating a system that we have now where essentially you, you know, you have to put your kids in public school and then, you know, you're absent from your children's lives, you're putting them in public education, et cetera.
And then they put your kids in an environment where they have spend more of their time with the state, more of their time with outside influence, that they do get pulled into these weird ideologies and these fanciful notions.
That's why I am a firm.
You said you guys are homeschooling, right?
Yeah, I'm a big, so talk to me about that because I'm big on that.
So even though we moved to West Virginia, there's still public schools.
And even though it's a very red state, extremely red state, the people who are running those schools are still ideological.
And some of them even consider themselves Christian, but they're heretics because they'll probably go to a church with a like a rainbow flag, right?
That's heresy.
That's insane to me that that exists.
But it's right.
It's so funny to see in West Virginia, but it's everywhere.
So even though we would, you know, my wife and I would go to these schools and be like, well, you're teaching critical race theory.
Then they'll be like, no.
But then you look at their curriculum and you'll see how a critical race theory has been applied through it.
So it's not explicit, but it's there.
So once you realize that, nowhere safe, you kind of have to take control of the whole situation and be like, you know, we, we, we do classical conversations.
It's very Christ-centered teaching.
So we learn about the Bible.
You know, we read the Bible every day.
And we, it turns every part of our, every part of our life when we're not working into how can we teach these kids morality, how to make good decisions, you know, how to keep Christ centered in their lives.
So, you know, kind of like everything is part of school now, right?
We say we go to a cemetery, you know, there's a million things in that cemetery I could then apply to their teaching, right?
We have an eight-year-old, a four-year-old, and a six-month-old.
So eight and a four-year-old, like I can teach them history in that cemetery.
I can teach them letters.
I can teach them dates, you know, I can teach like numbers.
We can talk about biology.
We can talk about science.
There's so many things happening just at one spot.
Now it's an opportunity for me to be like, go through all these different things we can talk about.
And then, you know, once a week we go into like a actual classroom and they can have friends and stuff.
But all these things could also become field trips, right?
We have friends from other homeschool kids who can go do field trips with us and do that.
So, you know, I'm sure we're going to raise weirdos because there have been for sure moments where my son, our oldest, will bring up the idea of fake clouds, which is dear to my heart.
This idea that the clouds are fake, clearly.
There's vintage clouds that God made for sure.
But there's also, you know, all the chemicals and all this crazy stuff we've been seeding in the clouds for all these years.
So he'll talk to people about fake clouds and also how salmon is part bug ever since the FDA approved the like bug hybrid for salmon and they accidentally were released into the wild, which is a crazy story.
That's since the 90s.
So you really can't trust salmon anymore.
Can't trust anything.
So like we're definitely raising weirdos who might also believe that dinosaurs were dragons, you know, but I think that's fact.
But like also on top of all that, like the important stuff about the Bible, you know, you go talk to kids who are going to public school that like when my kids have play dates and my kids' references are the Bible.
Like the kids from public school's references are, you know, whatever is on TV.
Like we don't have a TV in our house.
Like we're like a year away from being just Amish, I think.
You know, I'm not a Luddite.
Well, no, I take that back.
Luddites get a bad rap.
Luddites are said to be anti-technology, but Luddites were just anti-being replaced by autonomy.
But like, so we're raising weirdos.
Um, but I want them to understand the modern world at the same time because I don't want them to be Amish and going like a rum springer and then all of a sudden be like, oh, this is better out here.
And they, and they, you know, uh, don't know how to handle the modern world.
Well, that's to say, like, I just want my kids to inherit a future where they have a moral center, they have Christ, and they understand how degenerate the world, the fallen world is, but like, um, they won't succumb to it, you know?
And it's scary because, you know, who knows what's going to happen.
But I saw so many kids who were brought up religious, who were sheltered too much, and then they got freedom.
And then just some of them died, you know, because they go to college and all of a sudden they're overdosing with freedom.
So it's like a weird balance.
And sometimes I worry about that with homeschooling because you're like, why send your kids to college, though?
Sounds like a good thing, but it, but that's what I want to ask you about, you know, because you're not, people would accuse you of being homeschooling and your kids and stuff.
You're like anti-education, but you know, you and I both have pretty decent educational backgrounds, did fairly well, I imagine, in school too.
But like, how'd you go from, you know, what was your experience going from being a professor, like teaching at a collegiate level, all the way to just then going down to being like, I actually don't want my kids to go to school.
I think I realized while I was teaching, you know, I don't want my kids to go to college.
And I used to, being a professor was like my number one thing other than writing.
I used to love the idea of being in a room and just talking about ideas, teaching writing, journalism, fiction, all that stuff.
But once I got on the other side of the desk as a professor, I realized how rotten the institutions were and the administration is just destroyed.
And where's all the money going?
The tuition is just going way up.
I'm getting nothing.
The college keeps building and they're taking all this money.
And also every semester, I would realize it would just get worse and worse in terms of ideology.
I'm teaching fiction mostly.
So, you know, I would teach like Flammar O'Connor, one of my favorite writers, Catholic writer.
And she would, and she would punish her characters like violently.
And you would see every semester, oh, kids have more and more issues with these characters.
And, you know, can we curse on this show?
Yeah, So one of her characters says, right?
And then like, that's a bad character.
Like, this characters are just like a horrible person.
And she gets shot in the head.
Right.
And you're supposed to learn some moral lesson from this, right?
About like questioning your religion and being like, is she a good person?
Why or why not?
She's just an awful lady, the whole story.
And like her just saying made the whole class go, we can't even read this story.
I'm like, but you understand, we're trying to learn like what it means to be good and bad and question your reality and question, you know, why you believe this and stuff.
And just one word would take everyone out.
And that would just get worse and worse.
And it would like, that's an obvious one for like a college class, but every semester would be something else.
And I forget what it was.
I would show them story, moth stories from like NPR.
Mean Carol's been on the show, talk about a lot of wild stuff.
And we've had, you know, Sam Tripoli and Owen Benjamin, a lot of fun guests.
And we go through all the weird stuff, you know, and people who also, I think, should have way bigger platforms who don't get recognized enough, like BX, you know, her, Becca.
She does the best reporting on satanic cults who might be posing as satanic cults, but who actually harm kids.
You know, like following her is the best because she shows you actual horror stories, right?
Or radics.
I don't know, Christina Urso, you know her.
She covers the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot.
Like that's stuff that's so important that just seems to be underreported, at least in bigger platforms.
And, you know, it goes back to what I was saying with Jeremy.
A lot of places won't have her because she's so critical of Elon.
And I think there's really legitimate reasons to be critical of Elon outside of, I like Doge, but she's very critical of Elon for the same reasons I am because he's a defense contractor.
There are conflicts of interest.
I don't think she cares that he's a degenerate as much as I do, but he is.
And, you know, I don't like the surveillance state that he's helping to build.
And a lot of people on this side of things look up to a lot of those people like Curtis Jarvin.
And I think Curtis has a lot of really good ideas about democracy in terms of like the right doesn't know how to show force and be actually be powerful, which maybe we're doing a little bit now.
But I don't agree with corporate America.
I don't agree with the CEO president.
I want things much smaller and without so-called experts that we learned during COVID.
That was a death of experts.
And that's so Whitney talks a lot about that stuff, which I really like.
Yeah.
People like Ben and them don't.
So she's done Patrick Bet David.
I'll give him credit for that, although he's had people like Anthony Weiner on.
But that's fine.
I can think he's a degenerate, but I like that conversation.
Right.
And I like that he was able to finesse Wiener at some points.
Even though she's gone at Ian a lot, right, on Twitter, for whatever reason, you know, maybe she feels jilted that she doesn't have that platform.
Maybe it's not even about jealousy.
Maybe it's just that she doesn't like the way that he reports on her stuff.
But I like that because amplifying her work is very important.
And her whole idea about our country being run by basic mobsters under blackmail, that is our history.
That's since Hoover, right?
So yeah, shout out to all those people who those are the kind of people I like to like read and watch because they're saying things that are extremely important and not just surface level BS.
The rest of you guys watching, thank you for watching another episode of Almost Serious, where we're having conversations that are not necessarily the most serious, not necessarily not serious, but they're almost there.
And that's sort of the point of everything that we do is to bring you something that's lighthearted with a little bit of weight just at the right date, which is every Friday at 12 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube.
Of course, the shows are released a week later on alternative platforms like Rumble, but we're trying to grow our YouTube channel.
So make sure you follow us on our YouTube, Almost Serious, if you're watching this anywhere else.
We appreciate you watching.
Shout out to our sponsor, The Wellness Company.
Don't forget to get your wellness company kit at TWC.health slash almost serious promo code serious for 10% off.
I really appreciate it.
And to follow us on locals at ElijahSchaefer.locals.com.
If you make it this far, we are on audio now.
I was just going to say that at the very beginning, should probably put a lower third.
The editor should put a lower third at the beginning.
It says, like, you know, now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, probably put that up a couple times, as well as hopefully this is the first show we'll finally have some lower third name keys because this is a new show.
