Dr. Phil McGraw warns that prolonged unemployment—exacerbated by pandemic bonuses and high gas prices—erodes workforce re-entry, while entitlement programs like food stamps create false income equality, undermining meritocracy. He criticizes AI’s unchecked use of his work for deepfake risks and election manipulation, citing 900+ Paramount layoffs and LA Times cuts as evidence of systemic disincentives. Rogan highlights unfairness in women’s sports from male-bodied athletes and the decline of critical thinking in universities, where dissenters face threats instead of debate. McGraw’s new network, Merritt Street, launching February 27th, aims to counter misinformation with science-backed news, including hosts like Bear Grylls and Nancy Grace, prioritizing truth over virtue signaling. [Automatically generated summary]
This is not the solution, but they should be massively funded, not defunded.
You should train them better.
If you've got all these situations with people, you've got people that, I mean, how much training is involved today in this time of such a demand for police officers, right?
Like, they're trying really hard to get police officers.
They should train them like they train Navy SEALs.
It should be like a very difficult process to get through, and we should be very thankful that people are doing the job, and they should be rewarded and treated well.
You know what really drives me crazy about this defunding that went on?
And, of course, I think everybody's decided that was like a...
Either really bad idea or really poorly worded idea.
Either way.
But, listen, the last thing you want to do is try to get police officers to wear three or four different hats.
You don't want them showing up saying, okay, I want to try to be a social worker and a psychologist and defuse all of this and all...
A police officer should show up and enforce the law.
If not, people are gonna get shot and killed.
Police officers should show up and suppress illegal activity, disarm people that are a threat, and after all that's done, then fine.
Bring in somebody that is a social worker or whatever, but you don't want a police officer doing all of that stuff.
They're there to do one job, and that is suppress illegal behavior, disarm dangerous people, and they need to do it as quickly and efficiently as they can.
They don't want to do all that.
They need one job, and they need to do that one job and do it very well.
And they don't need people in there saying, well, you need to kind of talk to them, and you need to this, you need to that.
I'm not saying be heavy-handed or badge-heavy, but they need to do what they're there to do and then let other people come in behind them and try to do all the rest of the stuff.
You don't want a cop doing three different jobs.
You want him doing one job, and that's suppress illegal behavior, get it under control, and then let somebody else do everything else.
And in this day and age when it's attached to something like the idea of being a progressive or being a good person, being on the left, being a kind person, you go along with these things and the next thing you know, you're supporting the wildest of the leftists.
You're supporting Antifa.
You're turning a blind eye to violent thugs.
And this is how screwed up everything's gotten just over the last few years.
Because I think they've made a serious miscalculation.
They pushed so hard and so long that they've started to wake up middle America to the point that they're saying, wait a minute, what?
That's not okay.
When they start rewriting history, when they start rewriting science, when they start trying to get the government to co-parent with you, with your child, people start saying, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
I didn't mind when you were running around here talking crazy, but now you're starting to get into my business.
Like my grandmother used to say, you've gone from preaching to meddling now.
I mean, Canada has some pretty insane cases that are going on right now about gender transition from really young kids.
And there's all this pushback with parents, and there's all this because the parents are not being told that their children want to transition.
So there's this guy that was talking about these issues of parents' rights in Canada, and he specifically said that parents don't have rights in Canada.
I feel like he said they have obligations.
Is that the term he used?
But he said under Canadian law, parents don't have rights.
What the fuck are you saying?
Let me make sure that's exactly what he said before I get sued.
But when I saw it, I was like, this is such a crazy thing to say.
And if that's the way their law is structured, fix that.
Like, who are other people to tell you how to parent your child?
We were going to launch at the end of February, but we've delayed it a month in order to pick up some more massive distribution.
And I have committed myself to...
Owning the debate lane in America.
I'm willing to let all sides come and say what they want to say, but they've got to be willing to answer hard questions.
And I've had some of these folks—I've already shot about 30 shows on Dr. Phil Primetime, and we're going to have four hours of news and a whole lot of other programming, but it's all about— I mean, let's be commonsensical.
Let's look at the facts.
Let's look at science.
Let's not look at what you want to be the truth.
Let's look at what is the facts.
Let's look at what is science.
And we've got these people that it's interesting they choose words like gender-affirming care.
You know, that's interesting that they call it that.
But really what they're talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children.
And in fairness, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Endocrine Society or whatever the exact name of that is, all of the major medical associations have signed off on this, Joe.
They've signed off on it.
And I have never seen those organizations sign off on anything with less information as to whether or not it does long-term harm of anything in my life.
And when I ask about that, when I bring that up, then they immediately label you as transphobic.
And I thought that The deal was first, do no harm.
And all of the European countries, Sweden, Norway, they've all stopped doing it because they say, we cannot say in good conscience that this does no harm, because it does harm.
If you look at the long-term consequences, if someone changes their mind, at 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, They can't decide which pajamas they want to wear at night.
And their reason for doing it is it stops this drive for suicide, that there's a suicide epidemic.
It doesn't fix that.
It doesn't fix all the comorbid issues that come along with feeling like they're in the wrong body.
But yet they're pushing this, and we're going to do some shows that are already taped that are Revealing what the real results of this are, and I think people are going to be shocked that these medical organizations have signed off on this.
But America's not far behind that, because I've talked to a lot of teachers, and they're telling me that they have a duty to the children that if the child is not ready to talk to their parents about this, that it's okay for them to keep a secret from the child.
Now, let me tell you what my problems with this are and see what you think.
First off, this is either a psychological phenomenon or a medical phenomenon.
And the teachers are not trained in either psychology or medicine.
They're not any more trained to deal with that than they are to take out the kid's spleen in the homeroom.
So if that's true, if it's a psychological thing, if it's gender dysphoria, Or it's a medical issue, then you need someone trained in child psychology, psychiatry, or medicine.
And the teacher's not trained in any of those three things.
Like I say, they're not any more trained in that than they are to take out the child's spleen.
So how are they qualified to deal with that?
Secondly, it's teaching the child to keep a secret from their parents.
It's teaching deception and interfering between the child's relationship with their parent.
Now, their issue, their justification for that is, well, If the child goes home and announces this or if we tell it to the parent, then the child could get abused, the child could get judged, the child could get kicked to the curb.
But they have to admit, statistically, that that is very rare.
And if that's the case, that's what we have Department of Child and Family Services for.
That's what we have Child Protective Services for.
If that's the case, then you call in for some intervention if the child is being abused at home for whatever reason.
Then you get intervention in that way.
But you don't come between the child and their parent.
And also, these people that are teaching these kids, do we even know them?
You don't know them?
I mean, how much do you know about them before they start teaching your kids?
It could be insane.
It's not like the threshold for teachers is so high that only the elite of the elite cross it.
You see, a lot of these Weird people teaching classes, and you don't necessarily want them giving advice to children about decisions for the rest of their life.
And here's an important point that people need to really take into consideration.
There's a reason why they have little kids become suicide bombers.
Because you can talk kids into almost anything.
You talk about believing in Santa Claus.
You talk kids into believing in all kinds of ridiculous shit, because they're really young.
You could easily Convince them in one way or another that they're anything that they're they're they're queer that they're trans you could 100% convince some kids of all kinds of things especially by reinforcing it with love and support and Happiness you can convince people of a lot of things.
That's what's uncomfortable for a lot of people for a lot of gay people They're uncomfortable with the idea that a lot of these kids are just gonna grow up to become gay and My friend Tim Dillon's talked about that a bunch.
He says it's homophobic.
It's like they're trying to say, no, you're a girl.
And really, maybe you're just gay.
Like, that's okay.
It was always a thing.
And now all of a sudden it's getting, you're looking at little kids.
It might just be gay kids.
He's saying, maybe you're a girl.
Maybe you need to go to a gender reassigning surgery center and never have an erection or an orgasm for the rest of your life.
I don't think it's appropriate or safe for children, and I think there is a huge body of literature that addresses these issues from end to end.
There's not a huge body of literature about the transgender people.
And that's the problem.
And what literature is out there suggests that you get, and this is what you see from the European countries, they've done study after study from these suppressive hormones compared to doing psychotherapy and there's not much difference.
If you do psychotherapy you can ease The depression, you can ease the suicidal tendencies with psychotherapy without doing the irreversible things.
They say, well, you can reverse those things.
No, that's not true.
If you arrest the development That can have ramifications long-term, or at least they can't say it doesn't have ramifications long-term.
What do you think is behind it, especially the push towards children, affirming children?
Do you think it's because there's people that are queer or LBGT, whatever, and they want other people to be a part of their group?
Is it they want more LBGT people?
They want to encourage this behavior?
They think it's suppressed and maybe there's more people that are...
Gay or whatever and they want to come out and they just get suppressed by it So they're trying to make it like more enthusiastic like how is how is this trans thing becoming a major?
Point of debate with children where it never has in history and your life in my life There was never all this talk about trans children like this it seems insane that we've forgotten The kids don't know what the fuck is going on yet I think a lot of it is owing to social media platforms and the internet.
I think this is what I'm talking about when I say the activist...
I don't think speak for the community at large.
I think they get an agenda that they're pushing, and I think they really get wrapped up in this, and it gets a lot of oxygen on the internet.
It gets a lot of oxygen on social media platforms.
Now, they say there's no social contagion here, but the girls that are claiming to be transgender, that percentage has gone up Some reports say it's gone up 800%, 1,000% over the last several years, and they say, well, that's because they feel more comfortable talking about it now.
Is that true, or is it because you read about it, you see it on social media, and you think, well, I can distinguish myself in this way?
I think there is a social contagion effect.
So people jump on the bandwagon, and if it's for a short period of time, but they've done things that can't be reversed, I think that's really tragic.
And they say there are very few detransitioners.
I don't think that's true.
I think there's a lot more de-transitioners that want to reverse this and come back than are being reported.
And let me tell you, teachers don't get into teaching for the money.
I don't know a teacher that doesn't get into their own pocket to get resources for the classroom, to help with the classroom, to put up signs and bring in materials for the classroom.
Most of them are very dedicated.
They're very good people that teach because they really want to help young people.
I think they're some of the most underpaid, dedicated people in this entire country, and they don't want to deal with this stuff.
Just the small amount of interactions that people have.
And I also think about both teachers and police officers, the stress of their job and the experiences that they have, particularly if you're teaching public school in maybe a sketchy area.
I mean, those people are risking their health often.
There's violence.
It happens all the time to teachers.
There's all these cell phone videos of teachers getting beat up.
I did a show last week with three teachers from around the country That tried to take a cell phone, tell a student to put their cell phone away, and got attacked.
And one of them wound up in the hospital for a week, had to have knee surgery, go on workers' comp, wound up having to take bankruptcy, lost her house, all of that.
A student jumped on her and just beat the hell out of her.
Well, that's just a way to silence people from talking about it.
They'll say you're transphobic.
Well...
And it might not even necessarily be people.
I have a feeling a lot of the shit that we're dealing with online is foreign agents.
And then what they're doing is setting up thousands and thousands of accounts and targeting specific topics and specific things.
And I think that's one of them.
It would be a great way to weaken America to make everybody at each other's throats about the dumbest fucking things and then even put children and children's health and lives at risk with this crazy shit that we're talking about right now.
And the more that stuff is going on in our country, the more there's going to be a decay of our appreciation for America, less patriotism, less paying attention to what we're doing.
And we got involved and found out what was going on.
And the source of this was a group out of Russia.
And these bot farms, when people say that you think these are phony accounts and people are hating on the internet and posting all this stuff up and they're not real accounts,
These bot farms, some of them, these accounts are 10 or 12 years old, and they've got millions, not 10 or 10,000 or 12,000, millions in these bot farms.
And so we've been getting into all that with our cybersecurity experts, and when all of a sudden somebody targets somebody and says, oh, they're transphobic or they're racist or whatever, and you get into who all's saying this, these aren't real accounts.
Yeah, it's just people need to be aware of what's going on if you're engaging in these social media platforms.
That is a factor.
There are real people out there, and you can connect with them, and it's very valuable.
You can learn a lot of things.
You can interact with a lot of people.
But also, there's a lot of fake accounts.
A lot.
And there was an FBI, a former FBI, was he an analyst, Jamie?
He estimated that it may be as high as 80% of all the accounts on Twitter are fake.
I won't say X. Elon's my friend, but X is ridiculous.
I'll say it occasionally if I'm being charitable.
It's fucking Twitter.
Because what are you making an ex?
No, you're tweeting.
I tweeted this thing out.
We've been saying that for too long, bro.
You can't just change it.
But that's an insane number.
Let's say he's wrong by 30%.
It's still half.
Half the people online.
I mean, if he's accurate, that's crazy.
That means there's just been a mass infiltration of foreign agents into all of the discourse about politics and gender and society and women's rights and men's rights and war and Ukraine and every fucking thing that happens in the world.
Everything.
And you're getting confused as to what the general consensus is of the population.
Because you go out with most people, and you're like, what do you think about that?
You know, nobody wants to speak up because they don't want to seem like a fool.
And, you know, I did not want to write another book.
I told Robin...
I'd written nine books, and I said, I'm done.
My last book will be an autobiography when I'm sitting out in the backyard or playing golf every day.
But I wrote this book, We've Got Issues, How You Can Stand Strong for America's Soul and Sanity, because I looked around at what was going on and said, somebody's got to tell the truth.
Somebody's got to call this for what it is.
And one of the big things I talk about is what happened to our society because of social media platforms and the internet.
And think about it.
We had the Industrial Revolution, right?
And until that happened, we were a very agricultural-driven society, right?
Everybody worked on the farm.
And so family units were really tight because everybody had to work all day, every day.
And so they'd come in at noon and have a meal, and they'd come back at dinnertime and have dinner.
And everybody worked together on the farm.
But then when things got mechanized with the Industrial Revolution, then people moved to the city.
And we went from 95% agricultural to now it's about 1%.
And that was a huge change in the human race.
And there's not been that big a change until 2008 or 2009. And that was the advent of the smartphone.
It was like big airplanes flew over the country and dropped smartphones on everybody.
That's the biggest change in society since the Industrial Revolution.
Think about it.
We went from walking around with our heads up like this to down.
People checked their phone an average of 352 times a day.
Think about it.
352 times a day.
Now, that's adults and children alike.
And look what happened to kids.
When I turned 16, when I was 15 and 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes, I was at the DMV waiting to get my driver's license, right?
Now...
Kids turn 16, they don't even go get their driver's license.
Yeah, I'll get it sometime.
They start dating later, they start having sex later, they get their driver's license, everything later.
Why?
Because they're watching people live their lives on the internet instead of living their own lives.
And in 08, 09, and 10, we saw the biggest spikes in depression, anxiety, suicide, and loneliness since they've been keeping records.
That's when the cell phones came out.
That's when smartphones came out.
That's when the internet blew up.
Because people started watching people live their lives instead of living their own life, and those lives they were watching were fiction.
And they compared their life to that life and said, I suck.
Yeah, and so I've had influencers on the show that said, I post a video where I'm putting on all these clothes and saying, I'm going to the NBA All-Star Game.
Should I wear this or should I wear that?
They said, as soon as that camera stops, I carefully take those clothes off because I don't own them.
I have to take them back to the store.
I'm not going to the NBA All-Star Game.
I'm going to sit on the couch in my sweats, just like everybody else.
I mean, it went up – The thing is, if you do it really well, if you become a fitness influencer or an online influencer and do it really well, you become super successful and you can actually make a really good living doing it.
So what we're seeing with a lot of these people are just really bad open micers.
They want to be Dave Chappelle, but it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.
If you want to be an influencer, they're just sort of LARPing.
Since 2010 and 2011, There was a 62% increase for older teens, 189% increase in depression for preteens, 70% increase in suicide for older teens, 151% increase for preteens.
I wonder if people, of course, because of what I do from a psychological standpoint, I wonder if people ever stop and think how many people you look at every day and never really see.
When you go through your life, whether it's the people in the parking lot, the people behind the camera, that you look at and never really see.
Well, you know, as we've become, especially if you're living in a city, as we've become more populated, people have become almost, they look at people as like a liability.
They look at people as like an inconvenience.
There's too many of them.
As opposed to if you live in a place that doesn't have very many people, you look at people like, that's my neighbor.
What's up, Bob?
There's a guy in my neighborhood.
I drive by him and he's always working on his garden.
I look forward to waving to this guy because he waves at every car.
Every car that drives by, the guy puts his hands up, waves.
I think the anxiety of the internet, I often compare it to the anxiety of living in a hyper-populated city.
Stuck in traffic every day.
It's like this anxiety that comes of being stuck in traffic.
Friends that don't know what it's like to drive to Orange County, we went to Orange County this past weekend for the UFC, and you're driving in Orange County, but you ain't going nowhere at 5 p.m.
You ain't going nowhere.
No.
You're going nowhere.
Bumper to bumper, everywhere you look, it's wild, and it takes hours to get anywhere.
Salute those heroes, those people who live in Orange County and commute to L.A., You people are savages.
Now, this AI is going to change things in a big way.
We're in an election year right now, and creating deep fakes, using AI, I'm really wondering if it's going to drive the election in some ways this year, because it's getting so good.
There's a bunch of foreign countries that are doing it.
Especially these kind of things.
It's like the Nigerian print scam.
They know how to make money.
You don't have to get everybody.
If you cast a wide net, you get a few fish.
Most fish are like, I see that, Nick.
Get the fuck out of here.
But there's a lot of people that are just dull-minded, and they've got a little bit of money in their bank account, and next thing you know, they're investing in some fake Bitcoin exchange.
And it's so sad because these are elderly women that are retired, and in sometimes 30, 60 days, they'll take what they spent their entire life accumulating, and it's gone.
It was this lady and her dad, and her dad, the mama died, and the dad was lonely, and the dad had been interacting with some woman, and he went all the way to Europe to meet her.
He had been sending her money.
Went all the way to Europe to meet her, and then something came out, but she couldn't meet him.
And then it happened again.
He went to Europe again and again.
By this time, he's in the hole, $250,000, $350,000, just sending money to this person that doesn't exist.
When I finally prove it to them, it's painful to do it.
I tell them, I take no pleasure in telling you this, but the only thing worse than being in a bad relationship for a year is being in one for a year and a day.
This is something that every president has agreed on.
If you go back and watch Obama's speeches, you go back and watch Bush's speeches, all the presidents before us, including Clinton, have all talked about having a border, having a strong border, having a protected border.
But this is a weird thing they're doing.
They're just letting people come in, and the Red Cross is encouraging it.
Different groups are encouraging it.
They're giving people maps, showing them how to do it.
And I talked to those guards down there, and I'm telling you, I spent just a day down there, and I know there have been people that have spent a lot more time down there than that, but what I heard down there was...
Even knowing—I felt like I knew a lot about it before I went down there, but I was shocked.
As much as I thought I knew about it, I was shocked when I got down there.
First off, the morale among those guards down there is—the fact that they're hanging in and doing as well as they are is— They're turning into social workers.
They went down there to be guards, and they say, what we're doing now, instead of apprehending these people, is we're greeting them.
And we're processing them and giving them money and resources.
You know, there are the Texas border guards, and they wear brown uniforms.
And then there are the federal that wear green.
And if you get apprehended by a brown uniform, you get arrested, processed, and sent back.
If you get apprehended by a green uniform, You get arrested, processed, given a court date in four years, seven years, or whatever, and released into the country.
So they run to the green uniforms and run away from the brown uniforms.
Same job, different color uniforms.
The green uniforms...
Their court date might be seven years.
But if they run into a green uniform, they get processed, money, and they're into the country.
Now, Abbott Of course, has been taking some of them and bussing them up into different locations instead of sending them back, which has lately been something you can't do.
And I said in We've Got Issues, I talk about ten principles for healthy society, and one is you don't reward bad behavior.
We've got people that we know are lawbreakers if they're coming in illegally.
And so what do we expect them to do once they get here?
And we're rewarding that behavior.
They come in illegally.
We reward it by giving them a free pass for seven to ten years because that's how long it's going to take for them to get a hearing.
And you know how many will show up for that hearing?
And most people would say none.
No, I bet you they all show up for their hearings because it's been seven to ten years and they'll show up and say, hey, I've been waiting seven to ten years.
The system will probably at that point let them stay.
They've been here seven to ten years.
They've had children who are citizens because they were now born in the country.
I bet you a high percentage of them show up for those hearings because they will predict getting a good result when they show up for the hearing.
And they'll have American-born children at that point.
So we're subsidizing behavior that we don't want.
We don't know who it is.
And we've got between – they tell me that between 2010 and 2020, they had about 11 to 1,500 Chinese come across the border.
And in the first 11 months of 2023, they had about 33,000.
Are you worried about that in terms of it being a military threat?
Are you thinking these are people that are escaping a totalitarian, oppressive government and they want to be able to make their own money and live in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I think there are people that 100% want to get out away from the oppressive government there, for sure.
And the number of military-aged men I'm just told by people that are at the border and have witnessed this themselves, the number of military-age men that are showing up with military haircuts, clearly in shape.
These guys are showing up with six-packs and military boots that are coming in is not an insignificant number.
Now, where are they going?
We don't know.
We don't know where they're going.
We're not following them.
We're not tracking them.
And one thing I want to be real careful about, and I'm very sincere about this, I don't want to say anything that causes people to feel badly or foster any kind of hatred toward Asian people in the United States.
It's not the people, it's the government.
That's the problem.
I think that we've got, it's just like, if they are sending people over here that are military-aged with an agenda, would we be naive to think that if we've let that many in,
that they couldn't spread out across the country and In some coordinated effort, attack the energy grid here on a given day and create havoc?
And he terrorized that city for as long as he was alive.
He terrorized those cops.
And a good friend of mine who knows a lot about the military world and the tactical world said, listen man, it would take 10 dudes, 10 well-trained dudes, and they'd take over this fucking city.
I go, really?
He goes, 10 guys.
He goes, 10 bad motherfuckers who are well-trained and well-armed.
Do you remember the, was it North Hollywood, the bank robbery where those crazy fucks showed up with bulletproof vests and machine guns and took over a bank and had a shootout with the cops on the street.
With all this defund the police talk and then that happening at the same time.
If you were playing chess and you were from another country, and we're so naive because nothing ever happens here.
We try to imagine that it only happens in other places.
But we're part of the reason why it's happening in a lot of these other places.
And if you were from another country and you decided to...
Slowly amass a force in the United States.
That's what you would do.
And to see this happening, to see that no one is saying that might be a possibility that's not being discussed, I hear a few people like you saying it.
Brett Weinstein said it.
A few other people say it.
But most people don't even want to even put it out there.
It's me talking to that Brandon Judd at The Border.
Okay, here we go.
- Yeah, we'll play. - These children that are coming in with someone that says I'm their mother, aunt, uncle, or whatever, we have no way of verifying that.
unidentified
We do not.
We used to, under President Trump, we had rapid DNA testing.
So if they find out, well, this isn't their parent, then, okay, what are they going to do with the child?
And so I guess don't ask, and then you don't have the responsibility.
But they're sending these children up there, and he's saying we are knowingly We're knowingly sending them into either a sweatshop or the sex industry up there.
I've then dug into what's happening with Chinese buying...
The Chinese government or Chinese nationals buying farmland.
And I've got a map, if I can find it, of where they're buying this land.
And it's around U.S. military installations.
They're buying up land around U.S. military installations.
And so when you look at the amount of land that they're buying, it's a lot of land.
But given as much land as there is, it's like maybe less than 1%.
But when you look at it strategically around military installations, it's...
It's really concerning.
And then when you look at what's happening at those military installations that they have land around, like B-2 stealth bomber training, drone training and all, it's very, very troubling.
Sun owns 40% of Chinese old land in the U.S. He owns over 100,000 acres of land in Valverde County, Texas.
All those two companies, Brazos, Highland Properties, and Harvest, Texas, through his two companies.
His purchases in 2016 and 2017, his plans to build a wind farm as well as his purported ties to Chinese military drew scrutiny in Texas several years after his acquisitions.
He ultimately has...
Was denied permission to proceed with his wind farm plans.
So they own the land but they won't let him proceed with the wind farm.
And again, I want to be real careful about how to talk about this because I'm not trying...
Look, we have so many Chinese Americans here that are wonderful people that contribute so much.
I don't want to say anything to create any animus against these people or Chinese people in general.
So many of these people are trying to get away from the Chinese Communist Party.
They're just trying to get away from them.
How they're getting out, I don't know.
It's a long way, and it's expensive, and you don't just wake up in China and say, you know, I think I'll take a vacation.
That's not how that works.
You've got to get a visa, right?
You've got to get permission to leave.
You've got family back there.
I don't know how they're getting out, but I know that we've got an awful lot coming across our southern border.
And when military-aged Chinese men are showing up at the border, and it's mostly in California where they're showing up, and it's an awful lot. and it's an awful lot.
Yeah, and that is the entire reason that I did this network, Merritt Street Media.
You know Robin, and I was sitting at our kitchen bar At our house in California, and I was flipping back and forth between different news networks, and I was getting so frustrated.
I said, why won't somebody just tell the truth?
Why does everything have to be spin, spin, spin, spin, spin?
Why doesn't somebody just say what's happening and let us do it?
The media just won't say it straight.
And she was sitting there eating, and she didn't even look up.
She just said, well, you are the media.
And I thought, yeah, well.
And she said, you have a bigger audience than those last three combined, so why don't you do something about it?
And it really kind of hit me hard, and I thought, why don't I do something about it?
I mean, why don't I create...
A platform to just ask the questions and tell the truth without all the spin, let people make up their own mind.
I mean, somebody needs to say, have you thought about or did you know that last year 33,000 plus Chinese came across the border illegally?
Did you know that?
And I just want you to know and do with it as you will.
And if it causes you to start asking questions and writing your congressman or asking questions of them, then great.
But you ought to at least know this is happening.
I don't want you to come up five years from now and say, well, nobody was saying to me.
Well, yeah, they did.
I raise my hand and I said it.
And maybe it'll cause somebody else to say it and somebody else to say it.
Land near the Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, sending lawmakers into a frenzy in 2021. Yeah, you know, there's another thing that Mike Baker, who's from the CIA, had brought up, is that one of the things that they're doing is selling cell phone tower equipment.
And selling routers and undercutting other companies and making, like, really good deals.
So they can set up these cheap routers and cell phone companies.
And, you know, a lot of these have been proven, especially with the company Huawei, right?
When they outlawed Huawei from selling phones in this country.
They were proven that some of their technology has third-party access.
They can do things and siphon information and perhaps even, you know, intercept cell phone signals.
Well, where they bought in Utah, it's the largest supersonic authorized restricted airspace in the United States.
They've got land right next to it.
Whitman Air Force Base, B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber Base, Missile and Drone Operations, MQ-9 Reaper, Global Strike Command, three intercontinental ballistic missile wings, And they're right next to it.
Fort Liberty, they're right next to it.
I mean, all of that stuff.
Why would you want your biggest global threat next to those?
And it said still lawmakers from both parties want to limit purchases by Chinese companies, especially those with ties to the Chinese government, which is all of them and individuals.
To this end, there are several bills in Congress aimed at limiting Chinese ownership separately.
The Biden administration is tightening its rules over who can buy land near military bases.
You know, I think one of the things I said was all they're doing is creating intellectual rot.
They're not teaching these kids anything about critical thinking.
I don't know what they're teaching at universities now, but if they're not teaching critical thinking, if they're not teaching these kids who we're getting ready to turn the world over to, for your kids, Jay's kids, my grandkids, How are they going to think their way through this?
I mean, we're selling them this land here, and we're getting ready to turn the world over to kids who will be adults that we're not teaching to critically think.
I mean, universities have always been a battleground of intellectual discourse, where people get together and they debate things.
But if you have an opposing opinion, they'll pull the fire alarm, they'll chant and scream and stop you from talking, they'll try to block speakers from coming, they'll call in bomb threats.
Wild shit that is the exact opposite of what universities are supposed to be about.
What debates are supposed to be about is an opportunity to prove that you're right, and if you're really good at debating, you can make that person look foolish and you recruit more people to your side of thinking.
That's a great way to figure out who's right and who's wrong.
If you really believe that your opinions are so much more valid than some person who's a conservative Christian, let that person talk.
Get on stage with them.
Have an open discourse in front of the entire population of the student body.
Let them all come.
Have it for free.
Let people ask questions that they want.
Just do it orderly and politely and let's get to the bottom of it.
Let's get to the bottom of it.
Let's find out who's wrong and who's got ridiculous ideologies and who's looking at things from a fact-based perspective or maybe there's a little bit of something from both sides you agree with.
There's only one way to find out and you're not getting that from universities anymore.
And do they have some decrease in performance from using estrogen and testosterone blockers and having their testicles removed?
Sure.
Yeah, definitely a decrease, but not enough.
It's still a male mind.
Chris Williamson was on here the other day talking about the differences in spatial recognition.
Men have the significant difference in reaction time.
There's a bunch of different factors that don't go away.
When you transition someone to being a woman, and then there's tendon strength, and there's a bunch of things about the shape of the hips, the ability to generate force, all that stuff is like so much different.
I had an Olympic athlete, won multiple gold medals in the Olympics.
Different people just said, you're just kidding yourself if you think it's the same.
And I felt so bad that she had that result where they drummed her out.
If we're not teaching critical thinking, if we're not...
If we're not adhering to science, if we're not embracing science—and, you know, when you talk about woke, they say they're postmodernist thinkers, which means they reject science.
They reject morality.
They reject those things that we've always kind of held as the fundamental building blocks of intellectual discourse.
If that's the starting place, we reject science.
We reject objectivity.
And everything has to be self-referential.
If it's important to us at the time, that's our starting place.
Well, internationally, we're 34th in math, 16th in science, and 9th in reading.
And we're going down.
So if we're not – that's what I mean about meritocracy.
If we're not holding these kids to a standard and we're not actually teaching them to get prepared, how are we going to compete on the international stage?
They don't let them on it after 10 p.m., and they highlight science innovation, martial arts, athletic achievements.
They highlight all these very positive things.
That's what their algorithm promotes, promotes all these very positive things.
Suppresses all the other stuff, even deletes it and gets rid of it.
They don't want any social contagions entering into their children.
But on our side, it encourages that.
It encourages the wackiest behavior.
If you're a guy with a mustache and red nails and you're saying, I'm going to take all your kids, that guy is going to get massive traction on TikTok.
He's going to be everywhere.
Your kids are all going to be trans and there's nothing you can do about them.
The outrage, that's a 30 million view video.
And then they monetize that.
And then other people recognize that that's a successful pattern, just like those dorks that sit in the fake jet seats.
Then they start doing it, too.
Then they start, like, whatever I gotta do to get the kind of attention that this person's getting.
Okay, wear nails, wear a wig, wear this.
There's probably fake trans influencers.
There's people saying outrageous things specifically just to attract the algorithm.
The way I've described it is, this is a thing that I stole from Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins was talking about, at one point in time, I'm pretty sure it was him, talking about how if you have two ships that are going in the same direction, parallel to each other, and one of them just takes a slight turn, as time goes on, that one's gonna be so much further off the original path.
And that's what I'm worried about with us.
Is that all this TikTok stuff and all this social media stuff, it's pushing the norm so much further away.
Like you were saying before that people pushed back because they went so far with all this craziness that people are pushing back.
But what Jordan Peterson has talked about, and I think he's brilliant with this, he's like, what they'll do is they'll push until you say enough.
And then they stop.
And then they wait.
And then they push a little further.
And then you wait a while, maybe less than the time before, and then you stop them again.
And then this keeps going on for a long time, and you're so much further away from what you agreed upon was acceptable when you initially started.
They just keep pushing.
They just keep pushing, and you resist a little bit, and then they stop, and then they push a little more.
And it comes in waves.
And by the end of it, you're in a position that's unrecognizable.
I'm a little terrified, because I think that the grip that money has, I'm just gonna say money, forget about defining it, the grip that money has over politics and political decisions that are made in this country is unshakable.
I don't think that's ever gonna get shaken.
And the best way to ensure that that grip remains tight is to crack down on what people are allowed to and not allowed to talk about on social media and to encourage as much chaos like we're currently seeing right now that acts as both valid social issues and gigantic distractions.
So all those things that are at the forefront including the immigrant crisis.
I think the immigrant crisis is a fantastic way to get people to start thinking about this new problem then to be thinking about all the problems that existed before this was ever being discussed.
That's my fear.
My fear is that we've gone past this representative republic that we're supposed to be and into this thing that's controlled by money.
And no one seems to be stopping that.
No one seems to want to stop it.
And the only person that talks about stopping it is Trump.
But even he is, you know, people are skeptical about his connections to money and all the different forces that are running this world.
And if you let that get eroded, and even if you see families together now, they're all on their phones or they're...
Instead of actually talking to each other.
And I tell parents, you should talk to your kids about things that don't matter.
And they say, why?
And I say, because you got to open that channel.
So it's wide open when it comes time to talk about things that do matter.
If you don't ever talk to your kid until it's critical, it's too late, man.
You've got to start talking to them about things that don't matter.
So when it comes time that they've got a crisis at school or in a relationship or something, they're so used to talking to you that it doesn't feel weird.
And so I tell them, you know, talk to them about things that don't matter so you don't make them feel awkward or on the hot seat and they can come to you when they really need to talk about things.
That do matter.
And you've got to start talking to them about how to think for themselves and critical thinking that, as I said, is not happening at the universities.
And these universities now...
Let me give you an example.
You've heard all this talk about trigger warnings that's going on in schools and stuff.
Trigger warnings don't work.
Trigger warnings are exactly the wrong thing to do if somebody's going to be stressed out.
And that's not my opinion.
There are evidence-based therapies that says if there's something in your life that's going to stress you, you need to learn to cope with it.
You need to learn to deal with it.
In therapy, we have systematic desensitization, immersion therapies, things where you learn if you're afraid of snakes or you're afraid of airplanes or whatever, you have to learn to cope with that because there are going to be snakes in the world.
There are going to be airplanes in the world.
There are going to be elevators in the world.
There are going to be whatever it is that stresses you out.
You have to learn to cope with it.
Trigger warnings do exactly the other thing.
They say, oh, if there's something that bothers you, we'll warn you if it's going to come up and you can go over here and put your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist.
That doesn't work.
What's going to happen when you get out in the world and there's nobody there to say, oh, we're getting ready to talk about something that might upset you, so you get to go in this other room and sit in the dark for a while.
You can't do that.
And the research says...
That trigger warnings themselves create anxiety.
Not only do they not lower anxiety, they create anxiety themselves.
The vast majority of universities have used trigger warnings.
They use trigger warnings for Romeo and Juliet, said, involves suicide.
Spoiler alert!
Really?
So...
They have access to the same research that I do, which is that trigger warnings don't work, but they do it because they're virtue signaling.
They want to do it because it makes them look sensitive, even though it doesn't work.
If you want to make somebody feel better, you tell them the truth.
You want to make yourself look better, you tell them what they want to hear.
When they shut the schools down for two years, you may remember, at the time, when they shut it down for a couple of weeks, I said, oh, yeah, okay.
I get it.
You've got to get your bearings here.
When it went past a couple of weeks, you may remember, I came out and said, ah, bad idea here.
You don't want to do this, because shutting this down...
It's going to create more problems than the virus will ever create for these kids.
I said, it's going to create more.
And everybody looked at me like I was some kind of heretic.
Oh, my God, they were saying, oh, he's crazy.
What a nut.
This conspiracy guy.
Absolutely nuts.
And let me tell you who was involved in shutting this down.
Department of Education, CDC, and this is the same bunch that controls the statistics, the research and statistics that I just went over with you that said young people are at the highest levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, and loneliness since they've been keeping records.
That didn't start with COVID. It started 10 years before COVID. So they had that information, Joe.
They knew these kids, this population is more vulnerable than it's ever been, and they also knew that going to school, interacting with their peers, this was their lifeline.
They knew they were the most vulnerable they had ever been and that going to school was the lifeline that kept them going.
And they shut those schools down for two years.
And they also knew that that school is where the mandated reporters are.
That's where the mandated reporters are who report sexual molestation, child abuse, all kinds of trauma to these kids.
And when they shut it down, those referrals to Child Protective Services and Department of Child and Family Services dropped as much as 50 percent because those people didn't have their eyes on those kids anymore.
What they did was send them home and lock them up with their abusers for two years with nobody to protect them.
And you know what they said?
They said, we did the best we could with what we knew at the time.
No, you did not.
You knew better than that.
You knew that was not a risk to those children.
You knew that that disease was not life-threatening to those healthy children.
And you shut it down and sent them home and left them there for two years.
Some of them locked up with their abusers.
The rest of them dealing with anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide.
You did it because you could, and you had no plan to reopen the schools, and that's where government's getting in the way of being healthy.
That's where families are getting broken apart, and that pisses me off.
Stimulus checks, unemployment, extended unemployment benefits, $4.4 trillion of which went into savings and checkings account, which means they didn't need it.
And then when they did spend it, they spent some of it on rent and groceries, the first $1.1 trillion of it.
The rest of it went into savings and checking.
So they weren't living on it.
They were saving it, holding on to it, right?
So it wasn't necessarily needed.
Again, I think at the time, if you're a hammer, you got a new hammer, everything looks like a nail.
They had this power.
And here's the problem.
Our lives are controlled too much by people that weren't elected.
These were bureaucrats that got appointed into positions So who are they accountable to?
We didn't elect the head of this agency or the head of that agency.
They just got put in that position.
And so they shut things down and changed this economy forever.
And those kids that went through that, they lost...
What, a year of learning?
Some of it's been made back, but they were behind to begin with.
Well, the pediatric epidemiologists suggest that millions of years of life have been lost.
And I'll tell you why.
Because they don't close the achievement gap educationally, which means they don't do as well in school, so they don't get as good of jobs, and the more blue-collar jobs are riskier, you know, because they're working with their hands, they're working in places where they're more inclined to get injured.
Or killed on the job.
They have poorer benefits in lesser jobs.
So diseases get diagnosed more slowly.
And so they get treated later in the disease progression, which means that there's a higher mortality rate.
And so it shaves...
More years off.
And if you've got somewhere between 50 and 55 million kids in the public school system, and however many of them were affected by this, do the math.
It doesn't take shaving very many years off at the end of life to—I've seen estimates anywhere from 5.5 million to— 10 million years of lives lost by the fact that they won't have the achievement that they might have had otherwise.
And there are some efforts being made to close the gap, but not enough, and the gaps haven't been closed.
Right now, 30% of 5th graders and about 30% of 8th graders can't read at the most basic level.
19% of high school graduates can't read at the most basic level.
But yet they get progressed on because they get paid if they go to the next grade level.
I'm glad you're out there saying these things as a respected voice, as a guy that people want to listen to when you recognize the actual problems and not what everybody's just sort of parroting.
But do you think that that, when I see stuff like that, I'm like, I go back to the Yuri Bezmenov interview, the guy who was the former KGB guy that said that the Soviet Union had infected our schools with Marxism and we're ruining.
I mean, it really, if you watch that speech, everything that he said came to be true.
It's all what we're dealing with right now.
It's literally the exact same thing that he was describing in the 1980s.
I'm very concerned that it's progressing in a direction that even if people push back, the direction is moving so fast with so much momentum and people are so insane.
I think that you have to get people that typically wouldn't speak out, wouldn't speak up, because they don't.
I think, you know, I said there in this book, there are ten principles for a healthy society.
And principle number one is be who you are on purpose.
And to me, that's a big one.
You can't just wake up and go with the flow and be who you are or whatever you are reactively.
Just whatever comes your way that day, that's what you're going to do and who you're going to be.
You can't do that.
You've got to say...
Look, I'm going to be who I am on purpose.
I'm going to decide what I believe.
I'm going to decide what I value.
I'm going to live those things with intention.
Now, you've got to think about that for a minute, because you always read about famous people, and they say, His philosophy or her philosophy of life was, and there'll be some profound thing, they say.
And I always used to think, I don't really have a philosophy of life.
I guess you don't get that until you're dead, and then somebody looks at your life and says that your philosophy of life was.
But we do have a philosophy of life.
Every single one of us do, and we see it by the way we live.
We have to decide, what is my philosophy of life?
Is it passive?
Do I believe in God?
Do I believe in hard work?
One of my philosophies is I believe in a meritocracy.
I think you reward hard work, added value, talent.
That's one of my philosophies.
I don't care if you're born on third base, dugout, or dumpster.
Wherever you start, you got to work hard to get where you're going.
And I think people have to be who they are on purpose.
They got to decide, what is it that is important?
Am I going to let the school Am I going to let what's going on in Canada come here and say I don't have rights to my child?
If that's true, they're coming out of that school.
They're not going to go to a government school then.
I'll homeschool them or I'll do something else, but I do have rights to my child and responsibilities.
Whatever your philosophy is, Write it down.
Decide what it is.
And embrace it.
I don't think we can be passive right now because the easiest way to lose power is to let somebody convince you you never had any.
That's the easiest way to lose your power is let somebody convince you you never had any power.
Yes, you do.
You have power.
You just have to exercise it.
And I don't think people should go to their kids' school and run up the stairs like their hair's on fire, accusing everybody of doing something.
Find out what the policies are.
They may be fine.
They may be great.
And if they're not, say, how can I get involved here?
How can I help?
You know, we've got too many people trying to win arguments instead of solve problems.
But the way they're being treated, parents, and even in this country, the distinction, the way they're describing some of these parents, like there was this one thing that was – what was the bill – There's something that came up that was trying to recognize parents disrupting school board functions because they were upset and labeling them as domestic terrorists.
See if you can find that.
Because it was so egregious that I was like, how could you ever say this?
You don't think that people are going to be upset if you're trying to tell the parents that everything that you believe is invalid and that we're going to teach your children the way we see the world.
And we're going to protect your child by letting your child tell us secrets and not tell you about them.
And we're going to change the child's name when the child's at school.
To be clear, the Justice Department did not label parents domestic terrorists.
As we said, the use of the phrase originated with a September 29, 2021 letter sent by National School Board Association, a federation of state associates that represent locally elected school board officials.
To the White House seeking federal assistance to stop what it said was a growing number of threats and acts of acts of violence against public school board members and other public school district officials, mainly over the issue of mask mandates and propaganda purporting to the false inclusion of critical race theory within a classroom mainly over the issue of mask mandates and propaganda purporting to the false Critical race theory is a study of institutional racism is a better means to understand and address racial inequality.
It's become a hot button political issue among Republicans who oppose it being taught in public schools.
In that letter, the NSBA said that while it had been working with state and local law enforcement officials, it believed federal involvement was warranted as well.
So did they describe them as terrorists?
How did that term get brought up?
Because they're calling it Hate Crimes Prevention Act, violent interference with federally protected rights statute, the conspiracy against rights statute, and executive order to enforce all applicable federal laws for the protection of students and public school district personnel, and any related measure.
It sounds like they're kind of treating them like what they're saying seems like a lot like terrorism.
Okay, it says, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing two days later, Senator Ted Cruz said, the Department of Justice looked at the issue, critical race theory, and decided to label the parents objecting to this teaching as domestic terrorists.
So that's his distinction, his description.
At that hearing, Cruz asked Christian Clark, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, do you believe parents objecting at school boards are domestic terrorists?
She said, I don't, Senator.
Clark said the Department of Justice was committed to ensuring robust civil discourse and Garland's memo was focused on threats.
Clark said the review directed by Garland would determine how federal law enforcement tools can be used to prosecute crimes.
Nevertheless, later in the hearing, Cruz again claimed, when it comes to parents at school boards, you're perfectly comfortable with calling a mom at a PTA meeting a domestic terrorist.
But this is the thing.
Did anyone actually use the term domestic terrorist that wasn't Ted Cruz?
Because I thought they did.
Letter calling parents domestic terrorism has thrown gasoline on a fire.
It says, the letter on September 29th, warning that school boards face physical threats due to opposition to COVID-19 policies and critical race theory.
The letter claimed that some unruly parents' protests may be equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.
Yet on Friday, the Department of Justice had issued a memorandum.
Apparently based on that letter, NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter, the NSBA said, noting that there was no justification for some of the language including in the letter.
Parents at school board meetings in Fairfax County, Virginia have worn t-shirts declaring parents are not domestic terrorists.
Well, once they changed it, they probably took it down.
Is that the actual letter itself?
Either way, it sounds like someone said it, which is why people responded, which is why parents didn't wear the t-shirt if nobody had actually called them that.
At least I wouldn't imagine they would.
Yeah, that sounds like even the way they were describing it.
But yeah, some of them could be considered domestic terrorists.
I mean, people show up armed.
People are crazy.
Yeah, but the problem is if you call everybody a domestic terrorism, it's essentially you're crying wolf.
And the people that don't, I think they just don't understand what's going on, or they're just ideologically so connected with the idea that trans women are women.
They're willing to sacrifice these biological women and the fairness involved in sports.
You know, I didn't even know this was an issue until, what is it, 2015 or 2016?
A female MMA fighter who wasn't really female.
And they were a biological male and didn't tell the first two people that they fought that they were a biological male.
So this person beat the fuck out of these two ladies and claimed that they didn't have to disclose it because it was a medical issue.
Which is just insane.
And that's when I found out that there was this insane movement to allow trans women, if you're going to say trans women are women, they should be able to do all the things women do, including compete in women's sports.
And then you're going to see records broken, staggering records broken.
By people that just claim that they're women.
And we've seen people do that.
In Canada, some good dude just decided he was a woman, entered into a woman powerlifting contest and smoked everybody.
You don't even have to do anything.
You just have to say you're that.
Which is like at its most basic level, the most ridiculous thing.
Here's something that I found on this Hip Hip Hooray.
It says, the phrase could have anti-Semitic roots.
Rioters in Europe sometimes shouted HEP HEP while on prowl for Jews, and mob harassment of Jews in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and other German cities in 1819 became known as the HEP HEP riots.
If somebody's cheering somebody on for a good thing, that seems like a long stretch back to 1819. It's like when they were trying to say that the OK symbol was white power.
Yeah, that's what I mean about things getting oxygen on the Internet.
If you started that outside a barn in Nebraska, You and a couple of mouth breathers whose IQ matched the number of teeth you had, it would have gone like half the county.
And then they retroactively look for people from the 90s making the OK symbol and claim there's some giant cult, some white power cult that's always existed.
Well, presentism is something I've talked about where people hold people to current standards based on something they may have done Ten years ago,
20 years ago, as an idiot teenager, and it's gone so far as to go all the way back 250 years.
They go back to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and they want to change school names or tear their statues down now because they owned slaves 250 years ago.
Was that a good thing to own slaves?
No, that's an ugly thing to do ever, of course.
But at the time...
It was not looked at.
The mores and folkways and laws 250 years ago were not the same as they are today.
And they judged them because they didn't have the foresight to say, 250 years from now, there will be different standards than they are now.
So they judge them now based on what they did 250 years ago using today's yardstick.
And that's why they're tearing those statues down now.
It's called presentism.
It's like if you were in a neighborhood and the speed limit was 30 and you drove 30, but then they came along and said, well, we're going to change this to 20 and we're going to give you a ticket retroactively because you drove 30.
And you said, well, but it was 30 when I was driving 30.
I know.
But you should have known we were going to change it to 20 in the future and driven 20. So here's a ticket, Mr. Rogan.
That's presentism.
And it's happened a lot.
Why do you think they're tearing down those statues?
Because of what they did 250 years ago.
And I'm not saying it was a good thing to do 250 years ago.
That was not America's finest hour.
That was not okay.
But at the time, it was the moray and folkway of the time.
It was the civil...
Abraham Lincoln is the one...
That changed it all, right?
He led the charge.
But yet, still, people say, well, you know, not okay.
And they do it now.
They'll find a tweet that somebody put out, or an X that somebody put out, I guess it was a tweet then, an X now, that somebody may have written as a 13-year-old teenager.
Your brain's not through growing when you're 13, but now you want to pick you to host some event or something.
Now, there are those that everything is seen through the lens of oppressed and oppressor.
And they will ignore science.
You know, the SAT test was decided to be culturally biased, and so they stopped using it.
But the research now says that is actually helpful To minorities, which you can't call minorities now, you have to call them historically minimized.
But the research says now, these kids don't have the teachers, the resources, the training to make the grades, but they've got the brainpower.
You give them the SAT, That is a way to catapult themselves out of that situation and they can qualify not on GPA but SAT And that it actually is a plus for disadvantaged children, disadvantaged populations.
And schools know that, but they won't reinstitute it because they fear being judged because the general thought is it's a negative.
And even though they know it's not, they're so focused on virtue signaling, they won't reinstitute it because they're afraid of being called racist.
Yeah, and there are so many bad ideas that I can agree it's like DEI. I can 100% agree That you want to try and get as many people involved in as many different things at many different levels as possible.
I just disagree with the methodology.
The quota system...
I'm sorry, I don't want to get on an airplane where they lowered the standards for a pilot.
They fired that professor at, I think it was at NYU, it was in New York, because he made the anatomy and physiology or physiology class too hard, so they fired him because he wouldn't make it easier.
Okay, last spring, campus emerged from pandemic restrictions.
82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.
Students said the high-stakes course notorious for ending many a dream of medical school was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.
The professor defended his standards, but just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones' contract.
The officials Also, it tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from classes retroactively.
The chemistry department's chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.
Mark A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones before his firing.
He said the plan would extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills.
There it is.
An apparent reference to parents, the university's handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions for both chemistry faculty who protested the decisions and pro-Jones students who sent glowing letters of endorsement.
Especially if you've got students that give the guy glowing reviews, especially if he's highly respected.
You know, when you're going to have a very difficult course, like I'm assuming organic chemistry is, and you have 300 people in there, there's some people that just aren't cut out for that.
That's just going to be the case with everything in life that's hard to do.
You can't have chess tournaments become easier because some people aren't doing well at chess and say chess is too hard.
Well, it's not too hard for Magnus Carlsen.
You know, why is it too hard for you?
Well, maybe it's not for you or maybe you're not working hard enough or maybe you need to figure something out.
Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate, he wrote in a grievance to the university protesting his termination.
Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.
The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said.
In the last two years, they fell off a cliff, he wrote.
We now see single-digit scores and even zeros.
After several years of COVID learning loss, the students not only didn't study, they didn't seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.
To ease pandemic stress, Dr. Jones and two other professors taped 52 organic chemistry lectures.
Dr. Jones said that he personally paid more than $5,000 for the videos and that they were still used by the university.
That was not enough.
In 2020, some 30 students out of 475 filed a petition asking for more help, Dr. Said Dr. Arona who taught that class with dr. Jones.
They were really struggling He explained they didn't have a good internet coverage at home all sorts of things the professors Assuaged the students in an online town hall meeting dr. Aurora said many students were having other problems dr. Kirshenbaum another chemistry chemistry professor at NYU said he discovered cheating during online tests Okay So, it seems like COVID had a big factor in it.
They came back from COVID and that just makes a lot of sense.
You're young, for two years you're not studying, you're not doing jack shit, and then you came back and you're really soft.
You've got to find something you're passionate about and some skill set, knowledge set that is specific to you that they can't replace you by noon tomorrow.
Because the liberal professors don't want to get out in the real world and compete.
So they go to the university where they don't have to compete the way they do in the real world.
But that being said, here's the thing.
If you are going to...
An Ivy League school, and so you're paying $200,000 for this elite education, and then they teach the goal is equality of outcome, then why do I need an elite education?
If the goal is equality of outcome, why am I paying you $200,000 for this elite education?
If the goal is equality of outcome, why don't I go get in a bean bag and eat the Cheetos?
Well, that's what scares me about universal basic income.
I used to think that was a really good idea, until I saw the way people responded when they got checks during the pandemic, and especially people that got unemployment.
Well, I can't quote you the exact numbers, but I can tell you the trend, and that is the longer you're off work, The less likely you are to ever return to work.
And I can tell you why the research says that's true.
And these are people that have legitimate injuries, for example.
I mean, truly have a back injury at work or something where they have to have fusions and that sort of thing.
You adjust your world.
Your world shrinks.
First off, your identity changes.
Maybe you were a welder or a bus driver or something.
That was a big part of your identity.
Now your identity becomes patient.
Your social world, your friends become fellow patients.
You get up every day and you go to rehab, to back rehab, and you're doing all these exercises, you're going to the doctor.
They become your friends.
Your world shrinks down.
You adjust.
You say, well, we're going to have to get by with one car.
I can't drive anyway.
You'll have to drive me.
We can sell one car, keep one car.
Your world shrinks down.
You adjust to it.
You're still watching your football team on the weekends, on TV. You're living on less money.
And you adapt.
You adjust.
And you get used to that.
And now, everybody thought, for example, at the end of the lockdown, that when that was over, it was going to look like Remember that movie Grease when school was out and they had the carnival and everybody came running out of the end of the deal and they were running around?
They thought that was what it was going to be like when the lockdown was over.
But it wasn't.
People came out and what they used to take for granted was kind of intimidating.
They were like, is it okay to be out here?
What are we going to do?
They didn't want to go back to work.
It gets intimidating.
So they get used to it and they get comfortable.
I was shocked when people said, what happened to the supply chain?
Well, you paid people more money not to work than to work.
They gave them unemployment, plus a bonus, and then a bonus on top of the bonus, plus they didn't have the money for the commute, and gas was $7 a gallon in California.
You remember that?
It was $7 a gallon there.
And so they went, well, I don't have to spend $200 a week on gas, and I can sit here.
That's what happened to the supply chain.
Nobody wanted to work.
Their world shrunk down.
And the problem in America, and I talk about it in a section in the book, is not income inequality, but income equality.
If you look at the bottom 20 percent, And compare them to the middle 20% of the distribution.
The difference, the bottom 20%, only 5% work full-time.
The middle 20%, 95% work full-time.
And the difference in their incomes is single-digit thousands.
Because of all the entitlement programs for the bottom 5%.
Food stamps, unemployment, rent subsidies.
There are a hundred programs.
And when you get all of that money that they get for free, the difference between them and these that work 95% of the time is single digit thousands.
Yeah, and here's a question that I'm going to have to face is, let's say that ChatGBT uploads 10 of my books and 1,000 hours of my TV shows and then answers the question, what would Dr. Phil say about this?
And from all of that, I'm guessing they get pretty close.
And coming into an election year, what if they get close to the election and do a deep fake with one of the candidates saying something...
Outrageous, like, hey, some stuff has come out about me that you're going to hear soon, and I'm dropping out of the race, so don't waste your vote on me.
And they drop that so late that the real candidate doesn't have a chance to counter it.
I really, really appreciate your perspective and your willingness to say these things, because I know there's a lot of pushback and people get pretty crazy.