Joe Rogan and Christopher Rufo examine Oregon’s reversal of drug decriminalization, shifting from legalization to misdemeanor charges amid fentanyl-driven chaos, unlike California’s failed policies. They critique progressive language—"houseless," "minor attracted persons"—and Rufo’s fight against DEI and gender ideology in education, calling it cult-like suppression. Rogan questions risks like biological male inmates in women’s prisons and drag queen programs in schools, while Rufo warns of leftist elites weaponizing equity rhetoric to control institutions. Their debate reveals how unchecked ideological dominance erodes societal trust and common ground, prioritizing factional power over real solutions. [Automatically generated summary]
This just came out the last week, but Washington state, rather Oregon state, had pursued the defund the police policy, the decriminalized drugs policy.
And there's now this dramatic reversal because guess what?
When you let people shoot up heroin on the side of the road, snort meth in tents downtown Portland, it actually is not good for society.
And there's such this dramatic pushback.
And I was actually shocked to see it that Oregon lawmakers, all Democrats, of course, said, you know what?
It just doesn't seem like when you go and drive through Oakland, for example.
It doesn't seem like anybody's trying to put a cork on that.
They're just like letting it be insanely chaotic, like the areas where they have the shantytown set up and people have tents everywhere and these makeshift structures.
How?
At what point in time do you stop letting these open-air drug dens exist where people are just cooking meth in front of everybody?
It says, the measure makes the possession of a small amount of drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail, and enables police to confiscate the drugs, and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks.
But what about...
What are the other...
See, the thing is, it basically...
What Oregon did is decriminalize almost everything.
The weird thing about drugs is you throw them all into one blanket.
You cover them all with one blanket drugs because caffeine is a drug.
Alcohol is a drug.
There's a lot of drugs that we're accustomed to using and I'm not necessarily in favor of those being illegal.
And when you add in heroin And methamphetamine to something that we're already accustomed to, like alcohol or caffeine.
Why are these the same things?
Why don't you just individually say fentanyl is unbelievably bad for you?
Marijuana, not so much.
Let's figure out which ones are okay and which ones are not, instead of just saying drugs.
Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive.
But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy.
But they're happier and they have less anxiety, apparently.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor.
Because by having structure to life, it doesn't seem like everything is – like if they're in charge, like, oh my god, I'm fucking 12 and I'm in charge.
I have no idea what's going on and I could stay out late all night.
The world's chaos.
Which it kind of is in some ways.
But by imposing structure on them, it gives them comfort.
And I find that's the case with human beings.
I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis that they're very dedicated to, Those are the happiest people.
They're the healthiest people.
They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life.
The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is, pickleball, whatever it is.
That gives people happiness and structure and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom and you want to be just...
Just able to fly away on a whim.
That doesn't promote happiness.
What are you trying to get out of this life?
Don't you want it to be as enjoyable as possible?
We've all had bad times.
They suck.
We try to avoid those.
We try to have the good times.
But That can be applied to a society as well.
The way you raise children can be applied to a society.
Like, you need structure.
You need rules.
You need love and compassion.
You need examples of good behavior.
You need all of those things.
And when you let people fucking cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window.
Imagine being 12, driving by a fucking drug den every day on your way to school.
But I remember our oldest son was in kindergarten, first grade at the time, and we would be walking to school a few blocks up, and we'd have to be avoiding schizophrenics, avoiding tents, avoiding people shooting up, avoiding people just shitting in the street.
This idea that you are going to minimize the harm caused by evil criminals who steal children's lives, ruin their lives forever, and you're just going to call them a minor attracted person and try to say that it's an identity?
I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.
You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour.
You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.
These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children.
That should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language, like you're talking about, euphemisms, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.
But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.
And I wouldn't want to do that.
Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children?
Because they've been stigmatized into believing if you offer any criticism of the ideology, of gender theory, or the practice, you are somehow a bigot.
And so, you know, what I think is so important is...
To stop playing the game and say, you know what, I'm going to tell the truth and I'm going to take the slings and arrows because I know that the public opinion is on my side and people fear speaking out but they need representation.
Well, you are really good at explaining everything that's happening and really good at like laying it out in a very easy to understand pattern, like where it first was introduced into the education system, the blind spots that people have towards how Marxism works, even Especially, like, during the time of the 1960s and the 70s when a lot of this stuff was gaining momentum in the United States because of the anti-war movement.
They were completely ignoring what happened in the gulags.
They're completely ignoring what happened in Cuba.
They had this very rosy perception of communism, which always leads to military dictatorship.
Always!
There's no evidence of it ever not leading to that.
It's like the idea of, like, You know, I know everybody dies of rabies, but I don't think I'm gonna die of rabies.
It's like one lady who didn't die of rabies because of a very novel treatment where they have to put her into a medically induced coma.
Because rabies is such an old disease and it's such an aggressive disease that your immune system can fight it off, but it can't keep up with it.
And eventually the rabies wins and it always wins.
So by putting her in a medically induced coma, I don't know what about the biological process of it, but it somehow or another shorted out her body to the point where it had the resources to effectively battle the rabies.
Because she was just completely immobile and in a medically induced coma.
So she actually was one of the very few people ever in history to survive rabies.
When I was in my 20s, I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union socialist republics, so Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and Mongolia and other countries that had been ruled by the Soviets.
And what happened, and I think there is, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest, it generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest.
And so when you travel through those countries, It is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.
It's these Soviet block housing.
It has enormous rates of alcoholism.
You see people strewn on the road, freezing to death in the winters.
There's no economic productivity.
There's no culture.
The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs.
And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions.
They've been totally annihilated as far as their economic possibilities.
But you still have, you know, three, four, five million people.
And it's what happens when your society is devoured by ideology.
And so the ideology that we're seeing in American institutions is, of course, different.
We're blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history.
But it's it's functionally the same.
And to your point, in the late 80s or late 60s and early 70s, you had true Marxist Leninist radicals, the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, the Weather Underground.
And if you look at their literature, their propaganda materials from that time, and you compare it to what's happening in, let's say, Buffalo Public Schools, their BLM curriculum.
I actually did this.
I looked at the Black Panther Party pamphlets they were selling to Foment Revolution and the Buffalo Public Schools curriculum.
You know, it's like pretty close.
The ideas are the same.
Of course, they're softened.
They use the nice language about DEI or what have you.
But, you know, we should take ideas seriously.
And bad ideas have bad consequences for societies.
And it's a small amount of people that are having an enormous influence on indoctrinating kids.
And that's why you're seeing kids today that grow up with this version of the society and reality that we live in that so doesn't jive with people that are older than them, who didn't grow up in that system, who are like, what are you talking about?
Like, it's not that bad.
Like, the things you're saying are insane.
You're freaking out over almost nothing and not paying attention to the important things.
There's important things going on in this world, but it's not microaggressions.
It's not that Google shouldn't show images of white men when you pump in the AI and ask who the founding fathers are.
It's a very strange thing where logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and challenging young minds Have completely abandoned that task and are now wholesale focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to.
And none of these people exist that are teaching these things.
None of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of university world.
These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated, and then they indoctrinate more and educate more, and they stay in this system.
But they don't speak for us, they don't agree with us, and yet they're ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very vocabulary that we use.
It used to be that you'd have a quirky, tweeted-out Marxist professor who would be smoking a pipe in an Ivy League school, and you could say, well, that's fine.
The kids go to Princeton, and they get two years with the Marxist whack job, and then they get out in the real world.
The problem is that that ideology that was confined to a relatively small part of society where it was tolerated because it added some diversity of experience or ideas has now extended to institutions that really do matter.
And so the question is, if you're sending your kids to school, the majority of the parents don't like what's being taught and it's being taught anyway.
What kind of system do we live in?
Is that democratic governance?
Is that the representation of the people?
If we're paying for it, we're sending our kids through it, but we don't have a stake in and the control of the values that are being formed in those institutions.
I think it's a very serious question.
It's not trivial to say we're kind of beyond some of those limits and some of those constraints that make a democratic form of government meaningful.
When the bureaucracy rules and it's pushing ideology against the will of the majority of the people, We're in a kind of scary position in our country.
And it seems like it's willing participation by the masses as well because they feel like they're a part of change.
They feel like they're a part of imposing these ideas on the rest of the world and the rest of the world is going to have to catch up and they will be the ones that were correct because they were on the right side all along.
And it's very strange to watch it play out.
Because it kind of seems unstoppable at this point.
It's very disheartening.
You see it with DAs.
There's an issue going on right now in Austin where they have this progressive Soros-funded DA who's just letting everybody out of jail.
And they're talking about the drop in crime, but it's because crime's not reported in a lot of places now.
Because the crime went up so high and they defunded the police, it's like, in Austin they need, they're 500 cops down, and the morale is down because of the defund of police and because, you know, cops...
I believe there was 21 cops that were brought up on aggression charges during the Black Lives Matter protests.
But this is a real problem where you see the results playing out.
You see that they're negative.
And I mean, kudos to Oregon for...
You know, correcting course.
But you see it playing out with crime and with prisons.
And here's my number one beef with this.
All this effort to do that, all this effort to let people out of jail, no cash bail, what about reform?
What about putting all that effort into reforming people?
How come that doesn't exist?
What about funding reform inside the prisons?
What about going to all these impoverished, drug-ridden, gang-ridden communities and doing some good?
How come there's no effort there?
If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress.
You don't want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual criminals, and just let them loose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone's anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever.
That's not the solution.
It's very unfortunate those people are in that situation where they are habitual criminals.
And I'm sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that, without doubt, right?
Yeah, and that's an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex, there are so many contributing factors, but I actually don't think it's totally necessary to do that.
You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate, here are the ones that we don't tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences.
And so what we're seeing in El Salvador, which of course is ongoing, it's fraught with potential problems, But what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%.
It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.
Now it's per capita, you know, depending on how you measure it, one of the safest countries in the hemisphere.
The lesson is that it is actually a vanishingly small number of people that commit the large plurality or majority of crimes.
And so it's not that you have to have a kind of soul searching and endless kind of navel gazing and philosophizing.
It's simply to say You know, people who are a direct threat to others that commit violent crimes that maybe have 20, 30, 40, 100 convictions in their criminal history, you know, cannot participate in society without limits.
And it's something that people have been scared to talk about.
But I think that that is ending because when people start to feel a sense of danger in their daily lives, They're going to start to break through some of those taboos and to say, hey, wait a minute.
Yeah, they're letting people out of jail who are violent criminals doesn't seem to be working.
And I think we're there.
Even in Seattle, they elected a Republican city attorney.
They elected a moderate city council, a moderate mayor.
And the big cities, especially the West Coast cities, are waking up to this citizen rage.
These are the most prosperous cities in the history of the world.
So it's like you're going to raise the minimum wage for all fast food restaurants to $20 an hour except for Panera Bread because the Panera Bread guy is his friend and donor.
And so it's almost like— Oh, it says Panera is not exempted from California's fast food minimum wage law after all.
On February 28th, Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California's AB1228 law, a law that raises minimum wage for fast food workers from $16 to $20 an hour start at 81. So why is that?
But they were saying that it was bakeries were exempt.
So what is exempt?
It said, okay, Governor Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times Panera would not be exempt from the law.
The spokesperson also did not acclaim the Bloomberg piece, which cited sources close to the matter that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item, calling the report absurd.
But if Bloomberg started doing shit like that, if Bloomberg started lying about businesses and what businesses would do or tax laws, that seems insane.
How Panera Bread ducked California's new $20 minimum wage.
This is Bloomberg.
Governor pushed for a carve-out that's perplexed industry observers and benefited a donor.
Because when you just look at the way he praised Biden, I would never run against him.
A man of character.
You know, like, I'm old school.
It's like he's playing someone in a movie that's a crazy person.
That's how, like, a really good actor would play a complete crazy person who's insincere enough that smart people recognize it, but that, like, really dull-minded, blue-no-matter-who people are like, he's a winner.
Gavin Newsom is a fearsome political talent and his willingness to do or say anything and do it with a straight face, with that sincere voice and that cool swoopy hair.
The shamelessness on that guy is like, it's like a laboratory specimen.
I mean, it actually is an interesting guy and fascinating person in that way.
I'm not a fan.
I disagree with him politically, but I don't think he should be underestimated because those of us who can see through it, I think are actually a pretty small number of people.
Well, I think you're probably right, and I think there's also people that just want a really good quarterback for the team.
That's what I think.
I think they barely care who the president is, and I think that's obvious with Obama.
Excuse me, with Biden.
Not with Obama at all.
The opposite with Obama.
Obama was like the best example of what we have to offer.
But Biden is, without doubt, anyone can beat him.
If you were just comparing competence, you know, someone who you would trust talking, someone who you would trust to go meet foreign dignitaries, there's zero, no one he's going to beat.
He's not going to be a single living politician.
Since he's a top of this team, that people are like, this team is our team, no matter what.
Like, we're all in.
I'm a fucking 49ers fan for life.
That's what these people are doing.
And they literally don't kill.
They'll gaslight you into a coma.
Did you see that piece that someone wrote the other day?
According to California state law set to take effect April 1st, 2024, a restaurant chain with more than 60 locations nationwide that produces for sale bread as a standalone menu item does not count as fast food.
The confusing exemption led to controversy following a Bloomberg article published February 28th reporting that the fast-casual chain Panera Bread has dodged an upcoming minimum wage increase for fast food workers in California at $20 an hour.
The article connected the bread exemption to billionaire Greg Flynn, a frequent donor to California Governor Gavin Newsom's political campaigns, who owns more than two dozen Panera Bread locations in the state.
In a statement to Snopes, however, Newsom spokesperson Alex Stack denied any such connection, played a role in the law, and even suggested the exemption would not actually apply to Panera.
The governor never met with Flynn about this bill, and the story is absurd, Stack said.
Well, they don't have to meet.
They can talk on the phone.
Our legal team has reviewed, and it appears that Panera is not exempt from the law.
The provision exempting restaurants that make and sell bread as a standalone item from the rule was included in both the 2022 and 2023 bills.
The exemption, as we mentioned above, is real and was achieved by not designating such restaurants as fast food.
However, Newsom's office said a legal analysis determined Panera, like other chain bakeries, does not fall under the exemption because it mixes its dough off-site instead of fully producing bread on the premises of its retail locations.
Interesting.
But that makes sense.
It's like Subway, right?
Subway doesn't make the dough either.
Why would you be able to pay people less if you have an artesian bakery that requires more skill?
Just for people that aren't aware, so this can be standalone, what Christopher's referring to is that Harvard, the president of Harvard and the president of MIT and Penn, they all had this meeting where they were grilled by, which was the congressman?
It's like she is so accustomed to being the boss, so accustomed to people like accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world that she doesn't realize how fucking insane what she's saying is.
The question was, if students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard's policy?
And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was, it depends on the context.
It's like, I mean, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people on the center-left, suddenly became clear.
And so this caused all sorts of chaos, predictably.
You have donors dropping out.
You have alumni furious.
And then a little birdie sent another reporter and me a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, you know, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized dozens of passages in her PhD thesis.
And so, in this context of this big fight, you know, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict.
And so, published it.
Obviously, it causes a huge firestorm.
But the question is the same.
It's to say to Harvard, okay, DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.
That's clear.
But your motto for the last, you know, three, four hundred years has been Veritas, truth.
And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one.
You either choose DEI or you choose truth.
Which one are you going to sacrifice?
And I think as a country, the reason that story drove so much attention is because that's where we are politically.
That's where we're on policy.
That's where companies find themselves.
Where are we going?
What are our values?
And we have this competing set of values.
And for me, as someone who, look, I'm unabashed.
I'm a political person.
I try to drive political change.
I think framing the question clearly so that people really understand what's at stake is just the beginning part of the process of getting sanity back.
But the curious thing to me was that most people, until they saw those videos, weren't aware of how far it had gone.
And then they're like, okay, now I kind of get it.
And there's been a very, very big reaction since then of people realizing, How insane everything has gotten.
I think that this is something that came up, like when Jordan Peterson first started doing my show, which was I think, when was Jordan's first appearance?
Was it 2015?
2016?
Somewhere around then?
When I had seen his story and seen these videos of him being interviewed, explaining to people, no, you don't understand.
If you impose this legislation that makes it a hate crime to not use someone's preferred gender pronouns, this is not going to stop there.
It's going to keep going and going and going and going, and you can't let it happen.
And he's right.
He's 100% right.
But back then, the pushback was so fascinating.
Because people were like, why are you having this guy on your show to talk about this thing that's happening only in these obscure universities?
It's never going to go anywhere.
But now you look at it eight years later, and it's fucking everywhere.
Dude, so one of the things that I do, I'm a trustee at a public university in Florida, New College of Florida.
Governor DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to take over this university, replace all of the leadership, and then turn it into a classical liberal arts university.
It's in Sarasota.
It's a beautiful campus.
The tuition is less than $7,000.
And we want to turn it into a place where conservative families can send their kids and feel like they're getting a good education.
But when we did this, what we did is we came in, we replaced the leadership, we abolished the DEI department.
We terminated the gender studies program.
And then we said, you know, we're not going to comply with these ridiculous pronoun rules.
And so the old DEI director and then her allies at the ACLU and elsewhere actually filed a federal civil rights complaint against me.
So I'm currently under investigation by federal civil rights bureaucrats for refusing to call this woman by Zzer pronouns.
Either way, federal indictment, imagine for even just refusing to call this person he or her.
People have always been rude.
Are we going to legislate against rudeness?
Are we going to say that if someone decides to call me Mrs. Rogan, Can I get them arrested and locked in a cage because they're being rude to me because they're calling me a girl?
If you are a member of a protected class, yes, that's where it's going.
That's where they'd like it to go.
And look, I have to spin up lawyers.
Thankfully, the university is handling it.
But I mean, this is not trivial.
And what Peterson, you know, Jordan Peterson, great.
What he brought up illustrates this point.
If they can get you to lie about something trivial, they can get you to lie about anything.
It's a simple sales technique.
You get people in the door, you get them to buy some small item, you get them to kind of cash up, and then you work them up the chain to a bigger purchase or a bigger commitment or a bigger ideology.
It's how cults work.
Yeah.
And so, like, I learned this as a kid.
My father's Italian from Italy, and we went to Rome, to the Vatican, this sales guy.
It's like everything about sales and persuasion I learned, like, 10 years old, watching this guy.
He came up, he said, oh, you know, sir, It's a beautiful day.
I had a new grandchild that was born.
Let me give you this beautiful St. Christopher medal or St. Joseph medal to celebrate this.
And as soon as you take it, you know you're hooked because he's going to sell you the commemorative Vatican coins for a hundred bucks or whatever.
And so this is the ante.
You know, once you put in the ante, you're playing the hand.
And so this stuff is like, it's rage bait for the right.
It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives, you know, some kind of momentum.
You know, this is where I get so confused because if I really want to go full tinfoil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was a foreign country, I would be promoting this as much as possible in any way I could.
I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.
I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.
I'd be teaching them the kind of things that they taught People, where that woman, do you remember, you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley, and he was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods?
And she is actually laughing.
I just want to point out, what you're saying is transphobic, and opens up trans people to violence.
What they're doing by allowing this culture where every anxiety gets justified and amplified, you're just creating more anxious people.
You're creating more fucked up kids.
You're turning the whole world Into this unfixable, systemically racist, chaotic scene that you have to go out and amend.
And you have to amend it through DEI, and you have to amend it through Equality of Outcome, and you have to amend it through Tax the Rich.
The whole thing behind it is just so unhinged.
And how many of those people, if they had gone to a place where they were met with intellectual challenges by motivated professors who are not ideologically driven, who could have taught them important things about life, that they would remember and apply to the world as they go out and try to make their way?
We're not preparing people for that because the people that are preparing the people have never done that.
And it's a giant part of the problem.
It's like someone teaching you how to do a thing that they don't do.
That's what I say about drag queens.
Unless they're teaching you how to be a drag queen, I'm not But that's what they're doing.
And even the drag queen theorists, if you read their academic papers, which is not everyone's cup of tea, but I've made the sacrifice, they say very clearly and very queerly, they say, we are...
Training kids to move into the queer ideology, the ideology of queer theory, the academic discipline, but also for kind of other ways of knowing, creating a, you know, one of the phrases they use is a site of queer pleasure.
And it's like...
They're not hiding the ideology that's driving this, if you dig far enough.
And they really say, they say, we need to abolish the heteronormative traditional family because that's oppressive.
Having a mother and a father in a nuclear household environment is a form of racism, transphobia, whatever, all of the different kind of social ills you could imagine.
We have people that have no sense of responsibility.
We've inherited some good and some bad.
You're born into the world in a tragic state of being.
Your society and your tradition and your history is some mixture of good and bad.
I think on the whole, our history, our tradition, is on net very positive, very good.
Still problems to solve.
That's a kind of universal human nature.
But what we're training kids to believe is that everything behind them is evil.
All of the structures that have provided a sense of discipline and meaning and purpose should be demolished.
And they should be replaced by ideological communities.
I mean, that to me is evident in the outcomes.
We're creating a generation of anxious, depressed, suicidal, confused kids.
That have been deprived of all these structures that could actually help them along.
I've seen that across the board in my reporting, in my work as a documentary filmmaker, in my own personal life.
And so we have to start first by, I mean, assessing your own situation.
What do I do with my kids?
And a lot of people are asking that question right now.
I don't know about you, but when I grew up, if you were an upper-middle-class, professional-class household, your parents bought a house in a nice neighborhood, enrolled you in public kindergarten, and you kind of went up.
It was set it and forget it.
That's over.
Parents are finally starting to say, hey, wait a minute.
I actually have to look into this.
I want to be careful and considerate about where I'm sending my kids and what kind of life I'm raising them to live.
And for a lot of my friends whose kids are about to go to high school and about to go to college, you know, they're making these next steps towards adulthood.
It's really scary to them because they're like, look, your kid can go down the wrong fucking road, man.
They can go down the wrong road and not be able to self-correct, get caught up in momentum and not realize...
That you're not contributing to any good.
You're just fucking things up worse.
And that none of this unhoused or home-free or whatever you want to call it, that's not helping anybody.
All this language, all this verbiage, it's not helping anybody.
And you have to fucking work hard to get by in this world.
And it's important.
It's an important facet of being a human being.
You have to learn what your capabilities are.
You have to learn how to push yourself.
You have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable.
You have to learn that.
And the only way you fucking learn that is by going through it.
If we protect kids every step of the way from any sort of difficult thing at all, lower math scores because too many people aren't graduating.
So this must be racist.
Let's lower the scores.
Let's just pass people.
Fuck it.
We don't want to be bad people.
Let's just pass people instead of teaching them.
It's hard to learn shit.
It's hard.
It takes work.
That's the whole reason why it's so impressive when someone is really well-read.
Like, wow, that guy put in the work.
It's really impressive when someone knows a lot of stuff.
It's really impressive when someone's really good at something.
Well, why is it impressive?
Because we know it's fucking hard to do.
It's that simple.
If you want to develop human beings that have potential and can reach their full potential in this life and be a fulfilled human being, you've got to teach them how to work hard.
That's part of the process.
It's unavoidable.
And if you don't have that facet, if you don't have that as a core tenet of how you view the world, You're fucking up.
100%.
There's no way you're gonna get everything out of life without hard work.
You'll be anxious.
You'll be depressed.
You'll feel lost.
You won't feel like you accomplished anything.
You'll feel like it's been handed to you.
You'll be a trust fund, baby.
You'll be fucked.
It's not good for you.
You have to work hard.
And so you have to overcome, including emotional harm.
You have to go through bullshit.
You have to go through bad friendships and bad relationships and bad co-workers and bad employers.
You have to go through that.
It's part of the process.
It's how you become a human being.
And you can't protect people every goddamn step of the way.
We're just going to create a bunch of grown-up babies who are screaming in the streets, stop oil now, blocking the highway with signs painted with oil, wearing sneakers made with oil.
Every fucking thing they own was driven by a truck that was powered by oil.
And it's the reason that those of us who are privileged enough, in the real sense of the word, can do what we do.
We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world.
And so I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these, oh, ban oil.
Oh, ban oil?
Our whole society collapses instantly.
Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds.
And so it's like we've created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings.
I mean, these are people that don't know what it means to be human.
They're just...
Kind of symbols of ideology.
They're like, you know, you look at those videos and you're like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions.
These are kind of puppets as part of some agenda, as part of some mimetic ideology that is nihilistic at its heart.
And that's where I think we're going.
If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color, you know, You have no sense of values.
And that's what we all want.
We all operate on a sense of values, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
And when you try to wipe away all existing values as somehow oppressive or racist or patriarchal, You're dooming people who need to grow up in a world where they know north from south.
They know up from down.
And so, you know, with my own kids, that's what I'm trying to do is protect them to the extent that's necessary, create good influences, create some structure, and then prepare them to fight.
Because life is a fight.
Life is a struggle.
They're gonna confront very difficult things as they grow up.
And, you know, and then at some point, you know, you hope that you've prepared them enough.
Yeah, and when you're looking at the difference between the world of today and the world of just 20 years ago, the change is so quick.
There's never been a moment in time where so much of society collapsed so quickly.
Like, what year was it?
Was it 2020 that we had the highest jump in murder ever?
The same year we had the defund the police?
That's scary.
That's scary because that's the opposite of where we expect.
If you look at like Pinker's work on violence over time, you see that societies are trending in a very positive direction, at least we were until 2020, and that this one change Just because it was just one year, but that one year was just three years ago, kids, okay?
Another thing like that could do that again, especially when you're dealing with even more people who are released out into the world with these radical ideas, especially the people that are inclined to believe that violence is a necessary aspect of change.
And these are ironically the same people that don't want anybody to be armed.
It's all so wild.
It's so wild because if you wanted to create a perfect recipe for a collapse of a society, you would have a president who's not there.
You would have a society that is It's run by fucking maniacs in the educational institutions that when Antifa commits violence, somehow it's mostly peaceful, but yet when anyone else does it, especially if anybody else does it in any sort of a right-wing way, that is everything you could throw at it.
Transphobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever the fuck you could say.
It's everything wrong with the world.
Like, this is a recipe for a civil war.
It's a recipe for chaos.
It's a recipe for a complete collapse of everything that's around us.
If you just go from what happened so quickly in 2020, it's not hard to imagine if you could bring yourself back to the time in 2020 To think, this is never coming back, and it's going to be like this forever, and it's going to get way worse.
Because if it can get like this, where people could just smash into stores and loot, that's what I started seeing.
That's one of the things that got me out of California.
I watched these guys smash into this clothing store and steal everything.
And this other one that was some recent trans-military person who was saying we should all put our pronouns in all of our emails, even if it's obvious.
Like, shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
How come something that used to be considered a mental illness just 10 years ago is now at a precedent?
Now it's a valuable asset?
Now it's an important part of our community?
Now it's not?
Like, if you found out someone was suicidal, would you want them in charge of the nukes?
You wouldn't, right?
Well, you know, just on paper, the amount of trans people that are suicidal is much higher than everyone else.
Isn't it something insane like 40%?
It's something crazy like that.
What are you doing?
Like, are we ignoring facts and statistics?
If you know that someone is a bipolar schizophrenic and you got them working on a gun range, she can say, hey, Harry, we just pulled your file.
And you fucking fly off the handle and you have 113 violent episodes since you were a teenager.
Where we have decided that, listen, I have full sympathy for someone who has gender dysphoria.
I've met many people that I truly believe they have somewhere in there, they're a woman, and they got stuck in a man's body, and I think that's real, and I think that's always happened.
When you make that more powerful than just being a normal person, more preferable than just being a normal person, subject to less scrutiny than being a normal person I'm not saying you should discriminate against trans people.
I think you should just let everybody be whoever the fuck they are.
But don't tell me that I'm supposed to ignore all the other things that could be at play.
Say if you're a biological male inmate and you decide that you're a woman and you want to transition to women's prisons, which in California 47 men have done.
Don't tell me that just because you're trans, like, I'm supposed to abandon that.
Like, I'm supposed to ignore that sex offenders could just walk into a women's locker room with an erection, and everyone's supposed to ignore that.
Like, what do you do?
Now you are fucking up the acceptance of trans people, because you're saying that trans people are gonna come along with all these sex offenders.
Which is not really true.
There's a lot of the trans people that aren't sex offenders.
They're just trans.
These other people are taking advantage of this fucking massive loophole that you've left in here, and you're victimizing female professional athletes, female college athletes, you're jeopardizing scholarships for those athletes.
You're doing a lot of things that fuck up biological women, and there's no consideration for that at all.
I think it's probably the best example of this phenomenon where you have some, you know, 6'2 male that is now bunking with a house full of women, young women in a sorority house somewhere.
And look, obviously, you know, this guy's a pervert.
Full stop, that is a kind of patently obvious thing, right?
I think it's at the minimum a big bright red flag that is waving in your face.
But the question is an institutional question.
You know, the fathers of these young girls, the deans of the universities, the university presidents, it's like, hey, wait a minute, like, accommodate this person, try to talk to this person, figure out what the deal is, assess whether it actually is kind of a real threat or not, figure out some alternate arrangement for this person.
But especially if the young women are telling you, we don't want this, we're uncomfortable with this, we don't like this, get this person out.
It's a failure on our social institutions that we haven't developed any kind of method for solving this problem.
Well, it also shows our oppression hierarchy, that we have always protected women from sexual predators, unless that sexual predator identifies as a group that has a social hierarchy above biological women, which is a trans woman.
We want to avoid that by having sensible policies now and head off these problems before they balloon into something that is unmanageable.
If it's not already.
Again, people are scared to speak out.
You talk to folks that are...
I used to have this idea that, oh, you know, there's the concept of fuck you money.
Once you have a certain kind of net worth, you're untouchable, you're kind of immune to social consequences, you can do whatever you want.
That's not even true.
I talk to a lot of folks of considerable means and not all of them, but many of them are also scared because there's status and prestige concerns, family concerns, business concerns.
And so it really is up and down the line.
People are scared to speak.
They're scared to tell the truth.
And because there are real social consequences for doing so.
You know, there's consequences in terms of your own personal safety.
There's a lot of weird shit is going on that people are just tolerating.
And it's so strange for me for, you know, I'm 56 years old.
I was born in 1967. I lived in a different world.
And, you know, I grew up in a world with no internet.
And so to watch this world change the way and to be a part of the internet now and to have existed in both worlds is a very fascinating contrast because I get to see.
It's also, it gets you very accustomed to the idea that you have no privacy, which is a reality that we will soon face.
And the problem is also that the same people that are involved in pushing these psychotic policies, they're not just the educators.
They're also these institutions that recognize the power dynamic.
And the amount of influence that you can have, if you can get people to adhere to these things, you can get them to do something really stupid, like submit to a social credit score system, which you would attach to a centralized digital currency.
Now you've got communism, and it's...
Like that.
It's very quick.
And just like people self-censored on Twitter and self-censored before Elon Musk and self-censored on YouTube because they don't want to get demonetized, people will start doing that in regular society.
They will do that because you don't want your social credit score system to drop.
And it could be something as simple as not using ZZR. Not using ZZR and all of a sudden you get hit with a federal charge of not using ZZR. And now you are being tried for discrimination.
And if those fucking psychos are in charge, you might get convicted.
And now all of a sudden you've got a real Soviet Union-style gulag situation in 2029, United States of America, with Admiral Levine as our first female president.
I mean, the absurdity of the ACLU filing a complaint and now the Department of Education Civil Rights Division following up for refusing to use Zsir pronouns.
I mean, it's like it is what it is.
This is something we're already here.
And so the first step is to intimidate, right?
It's an intimidation mechanism.
You got to defend yourself.
You got to get a lawyer.
You have to spend time on it.
Maybe you'll get deposed or subpoenaed for your records and texts and documents.
And so a formal social credit system that's tied to like your digital identity would just take this to the nth power.
And, you know, I spent a year living in Western China when I was a documentary filmmaker.
And this is like where the Uyghurs are.
The Uyghurs are the Muslim minority population of China's West.
And they're, you know, ruled by the Han Chinese who comprise the majority of the country.
And so I'm observing kind of what they're doing, what they were doing over time.
And it gets to be a centralized control over your identity.
You know, they wouldn't allow Uyghur men to wear mustaches, like trivial things that are the beginning.
But then it's like very serious kind of regulation of thought and opinion.
And so it's propaganda that is backed up by force.
That's really all that we're talking about.
And we have in a much milder form, like a light beer form, Propaganda that is backed up by the force of the state.
And we have to push at every opportunity.
And look, I'm a conservative, I work with conservative politicians and intellectuals, because we're cobbling together the only viable counter movement.
You can't solve this by culture alone.
You have to get in the arena of politics, you have to change the law, and you have to replace institutions that are broken with new institutions.
It's an uphill fight.
There's not a huge reservoir of talent and resources at our disposal.
But what I've been trying to do, whether it's with Harvard or critical race theory or DEI, all of these stories that I've broken and campaigns that I've run, is at least turn people on to the idea that something is deeply wrong, put a name and a face to it, and then offer some pathway for them to resolve these problems.
And If we don't, we lose the great promise.
We were promised liberty and equality.
Those are the two fundamentals.
People don't even have an understanding of what that means anymore.
And so we have to recover intellectually what has been erased from our discourse.
And then we have to fight in the arena of actual political power.
We have to take action.
We have to change laws.
We have to reform bureaucracies.
We have to lead institutions.
And so every day that I wake up, it's like, that's what I'm doing.
What wins are we putting up on the board?
Because unless we're having substantial wins in all these little areas, that social credit system that you're talking about, it's just a matter of time.
When you look at the current political landscape, particularly these trials, how disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?
Because to me, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, Setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another either put them in jail or make them seem like complete total criminals In a way that would – for the casual,
for the person who's not reading deep into the headlines, for the casual Democrat that sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened where he got fined $365 million, the casuals – I've seen people argue that fraud is fraud and this and that and he's a fucking fraud.
And then I saw Kevin O'Leary explain it from Shark Tank.
He was saying, this is what every real estate developer does.
They say, my building's worth $400 million.
And then someone comes along from the bank and they say, no, it's worth $300 million.
It covers both sides of the little quay or whatever you call it, the little island.
But the bigger question is, the question that was first raised by the presidency of Richard Nixon that is now coming to fruition with the presidency and the kind of ex-presidency of Donald Trump, We have a democratic system that favors Trump in the sense that he won in 2016. He's winning the primary right now for Republicans in 2024. But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him.
And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim.
We want to keep him off the ballot.
We want to put him in prison.
We want to bankrupt him so he can't become the president, even if the people support him.
We want to deprive the people of making the decision.
So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts.
I mean, the cases are bogus.
And so what you're...
The question that we're raising is, who actually rules in this country?
Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government?
Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?
What they can say even to Donald...
I mean, Donald Trump has been one of the most famous people in the world for decades.
He's enormously wealthy.
He's already been the President of the United States.
He's a powerful person.
And the message is we can take out anyone that is a threat to the interests of the system that we've built up.
And so as someone who I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, I did vote for him for 2020. I'll absolutely vote for him now in 2024. It is a contest of how we think of our democratic system.
And I'm of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy.
And this is a contest where Democrats are saying, essentially, we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.
Democracy has very different meanings in the two usages in that sentence.
We have to destroy democracy as we've traditionally known it, electing a president through a vote of the people, in order to save democracy, which is rule by expert opinion, rule by the bureaucracy, and essentially left-wing hegemony, left-wing domination over institutions.
And as someone who tries to maximize whatever I can do to push forward on these issues politically, It's not lost on me that if they can wipe out someone like Donald Trump, you know, we're all table stakes, relatively.
And they're going to have no hesitation because once they cross the Rubicon, metaphorically speaking, you know, that's when dissent becomes a crime.
And we've already seen that, you know, I reported on the gender ideology in schools and, you know, work with some of the parent groups that we're trying to mobilize.
And they all got put on an FBI list.
We know this for sure.
A FBI counter-terrorism list that was specifically for parent school board protesters.
So if you participate in the democratic process, we'll turn you into a criminal.
I hate that with every fiber of my being.
And whatever threats come my way, whatever lawsuits, whatever investigations come my way, it's worth it.
Take me to prison.
You know, fine, let's do this.
Because we have to actually confront these questions head on.
We need to have people to have enough courage to put, to actually, you know, courage without risk is not courage.
And again, because it's a person like Donald Trump, you get people thinking, like, if you could stop Hitler by any means necessary, wouldn't you stop Hitler?
And so they equate Donald Trump with Hitler and go, here you go, this is our modern Hitler.
But I feel like with a lot of moms that I know that were like hippies, they were like, and then they had kids and they're like, fuck this, like immediately.
Like a buddy of mine's mom, who was like super fucking left wing, Full-on leftist.
She had kids and then the riots and COVID and all the chaos.
She's like, fuck this.
It red-pilled so many of those folks.
They're just not talking about it.
They don't talk about it outwardly because they're real uncomfortable with being ostracized and being yelled at, especially with groups of their old friends that are single, that still live in Los Angeles.
You know, especially if you're certain ideological hubs, you know, like fucking Silver Lake.
Well, you know how you know that this is an ideologically driven thing that, you know, you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the Gays Against Groomers movement.
But for low information viewers of The View or listeners of MSNBC and the people that kept repeating that, that don't say gay law over and over, they go, wow, you hear what they're doing in Florida?
You can't say gay in school.
Imagine being a gay kid and you're in that class and you can't even say you're gay.
But it's like, I worked a lot on the policy in Florida.
What it boils down to in Florida is a pretty simple thing.
There's been such a politicization and radicalization of gender theory in schools.
The governor wisely just said, you know what?
Let's just take that off the table.
Let's focus on reading, writing, and math.
Let's focus on a good civics curriculum so that we have real citizens, that we're graduating from our Public K-12 schools.
And then let's let families, churches, and, you know, private society determine for themselves what they would like to teach their kids about these controversial issues.
Just take it off the table.
No instruction on gender ideology, no instruction on, you know, of course, the explicit, you know, kind of sexual materials beyond some reasonable, you know, considerations.
This to me is fair.
You can't teach religion in schools.
They delegate that to the private sector, to civil society, to parents and families.
And so unless we want to have an all-out fight all the time over these issues, why is it even necessary?
And the legislator said, all right, you know, we're just going to double down.
Now it's K through 12. They're saying no gender identity, no sexual orientation, no explicit, you know, kind of pornographic materials in K through 12. We're taking it totally off the table.
And look, there is a reasonable argument to be made to say, okay, elementary school, I get it.
Maybe a little bit in middle school, maybe in high school, there's more latitude.
Like, okay, that's a reasonable consideration.
But it's also eminently reasonable to just say we're taking it all off the table.
Also, I'm sorry, but I had good teachers growing up.
I had quite a few that I remember.
I have a science teacher from seventh grade that to this day I think about fondly.
He was a brilliant man and he taught me about wonder.
I think about that guy.
I've also had a gang of fucking morons who taught me, and I don't want that gang of morons teaching my children about biological sex or gender or homosexuality or heterosexuality or oral sex or anal sex.
What is the odds that someone who's a man who likes to dress in drag has other problems?
I'm not accusing all of them of having other problems.
I'm sure some of them are just lovely people who like to wear women's clothes.
Have at it.
Have a good time.
However, there's a possibility that you might be a kinky freak.
There's a real possibility if you're putting fake eyelashes on and 10-inch heels and you're calling yourself Miss Wanda and you're wearing fishnets and you tuck your dick into your butthole region and tape it down, or whatever they do, It's a possibility you might be out of your fucking mind.
And if you're doing a drag show at a bar in the Castro and that's a kind of subculture where they're all adults, they're all opting in, have a good time, knock yourself out, totally fine.
But it's like bringing that into the public schools with government funding, with other people's kids, that's when I think reasonable people say no.
Reasonable people should say no, and the people that don't say no think that they're going to be attacked for being bigoted if they do.
But there's so many people that are like on the fence and scared and don't know what to do, and their kids are coming home with these wacky ideas, and they're like, what the fuck do I do?
What do I do?
And if you try to go to the school board meetings, you get labeled a domestic terrorist.
Like, you're just enforcing indoctrination and you're just making sure that I comply.
And that is a slippery slope, kids, because you might be getting your way right now doing this and you might think that you should be able to get your way.
But what if someone else gets into office?
What if there's a war?
What if there's chaos?
What if we have a military dictatorship?
You've already established the rules.
No one's gonna give you those laws back.
You've already set it so that the state and the government and the institutions can dictate personal behavior and how people are allowed to communicate.
If you've done that, you've fucked up because now you've given power to the people that are in control.
And if you pay any attention to donors, you realize the same donors donate to both people.
So what have you done?
You've empowered the deep state to control your lives and make it easier to steal your money.
You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term.
And so...
Look, as a political person, what I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have.
That's how it works.
And so when there's the kind of Hamas attacks and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy or it's the capture of K through 12 schools and the gender ideology is going is going radical.
You know, all of these problems also provide opportunities for for correction, for reforms, for decentralizing some of these institutions.
And I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.
You have this confrontation between Trump and Biden, but really between Trump and the entire state apparatus that's trying to jail him and prevent him from running for president.
You have a military budget and a federal budget more broadly that is running, you know, trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
You have a higher education system that is now, I think, 1.6, 1.7 trillion dollars in student debt that the government has absorbed that's ready to blow up at any time.
The 2020 was a wake-up call for many people.
The next wake-up call is going to be 2020 a hundred times over.
And so those of us and those people who are just arranging their personal lives that are listening should be figuring out what to do, how to best position themselves to be successful for their families, for their careers, for whatever they're working on.
And those of us who want to see deeper changes You know, we're all preparing, we're all getting ready to say when the House of Cards falls over and it's revealed that none of this is sustainable, the fundamentals of our country, institutional, financial, political, cannot hold and they can't be covered over with ideology for anymore.
You know, we have to have responsible, civic-minded people that are ready to take leadership again.
And I think that it may not be this election cycle, it may not be in a year, it may not be in two years, but by any vector, if you talk to people who really know, we're heading towards a big shift.
And I hope that we can emerge on the other side, just freeing ourselves from a lot of this ideological capture that I think is hurting people and hurting our country.
The ideology, leave me alone, the kind of philosophical statement, is correct.
I believe in it.
It's a kind of civic, Republican ideal.
It's been the American way is give people the maximum autonomy to their lives, delegate to civil society as much as you can.
But we don't live in that world anymore.
We have a massive federal bureaucracy.
We have these huge institutions that control the culture.
And so, if you're arguing to be left alone, you're always going to be run over by people who don't want to leave you alone.
The solution is not to then, you know, assume it and impose your vision.
But you at least have to have people who are willing to fight the public fight.
Because, you know, most people want to be left alone.
They deserve that.
But we need to have a leadership class, a kind of counter-elite capable of taking over these institutions that can then adopt the policies and administer the centralized institutions to protect the average person.
The average person is not going to read queer theory and understand what's happening and fight the good fight.
But people who are involved in political life, I think we have a duty To provide protection for the average person.
The average person is calling for physical protection, protection of their livelihood, protection of their reputation, protection of their kids, protection of their institutions.
Do you see anyone that is directly speaking to that need and offering a plausible vision for how that could be accomplished?
I think very few people are thinking in those terms and to me that's a shame.
And so I think rather than lamenting the fact that it's this way, we need people, and I certainly adopt this attitude, and I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has really achieved this and demonstrated this.
Remember COVID? They were calling him all sorts of names.
Yeah.
I mean, they fired up the press machine against him in a really brutal way.
And as conservatives, I've estimated...
That we take somewhere between 100 to 1 and 1,000 to 1 negative to positive stories in the press.
That's just the ratio that we have to live with.
100 to 1, negative to positive.
But what he taught me, and I think it's a valuable lesson for more people to understand, is he's saying, look, the people are smarter than the press.
And so when we're fighting, when we're raising the issues, when we're getting attacked, when we're driving forward something that's the right thing to do, you'll be rewarded by the people later.
And so he won a very narrow election his first time.
He went through all of this controversy with Disney, with COVID, with gender, with history curriculum, whatever it is.
The people of Florida delivered him a huge 20-point victory, unprecedented.
And to me, that's a sign that when you take ownership, when you take courage, when you take the hits, and when you do the right thing, people are smart enough to sift through the lies, the propaganda, the suppression, the censorship, and reward you.
And I've certainly seen that in my own experience, dealing with hostile media, dealing with threats, dealing with people screaming at my kids.
I mean, like real...
Intimidating things.
And you have to say, you know, you have to make prudent decisions, you have to protect the people around you, you have to make sure that you can not get wiped off the board.
But then once you get past that, what I found, when you get past that initial barrage, when you get through the gauntlet, you feel freedom.
You feel this incredible sense of you've survived, you've gotten to the other side, and now people can't hurt you because they've tried, they've failed, and now you have the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom to do what you want, the freedom to chart your own path.
But until you get through that barrage, I don't think that you're free at all.
And so people that have wealth, people that have power, people that have prestige, Are sometimes desperately holding on to that.
They want to protect it as much as they can.
But I think what happens is they become, they go through life and they get to a point where they'll finally speak out if this happens, if that happens, if the cost is lower.
You're kind of wasting away your life and your opportunities.
And so my goal, and for the past year especially, is to radicalize America's elites, to show them the problems that our country is facing, and then to summon them to courageous action to fix it.
Because as we get people who have something to lose, When they start talking, people listen.
I live on a small farm in rural Washington state.
There's only so much I can do personally.
But certainly with the book that I wrote, with the articles that I'm doing, with the media engagement that I'm trying to drive, What I found is that the attitude among America's elites, finance, tech, entertainment, have changed dramatically in the last few years.
And we just have to get them over that hump so that they're saying, the things that they tell you in private and tell me in private, when you have those conversations, I would just recommend to say, hey, what about saying that publicly?
And I think these conversations happen and more of them happen and more people listen to them and it changes people's perspective and they realize that this is kind of dangerous.
And that there's real urgency involved here.
This could really go sideways for us.
And there's a lot of factors that are trying to force it into going sideways, and not all of them are domestic.
There's a lot going on with social media influence that's 100% manufactured.
I believe it's probably AI. I mean, with the ubiquitous use of ChatGPT and all these different things, you could easily attack a tweet in a progressive fashion and you could give it parameters of how to attack it and what to say.
No, I think it's actually a little difficult to learn.
Because even if you look at kind of Chinese, kind of CCTV, which is the national Chinese broadcaster, you look at the propaganda that they're actually trying to push, it's like...
Because if you can have people organically talking about things, which you do on Twitter, and when you see the things that are happening on Twitter, a lot of it's very distasteful.
You'll see some very racially charged, frankly racist arguments about things, just openly discussed, and people agreeing with them openly, and it's like, whoa!
You know, lumping people into one gigantic group of this or that, and it's just like, man.
The opportunity for other people to successfully counter those statements exists too.
The opportunity for people to jump in and say, this is why what you're saying is so fucking stupid.
You know, take into consideration that.
Take into consideration this.
You don't know about that.
You don't know about this.
What you're saying is nonsense.
And that's a whole part of human discourse that's being ignored when people are censoring in favor of blocking hate speech.
The problem with blocking hate speech is You block the potential condemnation of hate speech.
You block the potential intellectual battle between morons who believe stupid shit and smart people who are motivated to make them look dumb.
And this is all good for the viewer.
This is all good for people, the young minds and the people that are easily influenced and the people that are on the fence and the people that hadn't...
Taking into consideration this perspective or that perspective, that's what free speech is supposed to be all about.
The answer to bad speech has always been better speech.
It's always been the case.
But when you got people that will ban your account, if you use a person's name that they used to have when they were a man, but now they're a woman, so you dead-named them.
So you made up this thing.
At the same time, will you have the fucking Taliban on Twitter?
You're insane.
You're an insane person.
And Elon has done a service for the entire human race by purchasing that platform.
And I do not say that lightly.
I do not say that flippantly.
Him purchasing Twitter is...
One of the most important things that's ever happened to us in terms of pushback, in terms of just recognizing, like, this is insane to tell people that they have to abide by your insanely rigid ideology that doesn't make sense.
It's not logical.
And if they don't, they can no longer participate in the discussion.
And it was playing to his favor until they erased him from everywhere.
And I think they erased him particularly.
The first part was his criticism of Ghostbusters.
And then he was criticizing the new all-female cast of Ghostbusters, saying how sexist it is and every man's a moron and the women save the day and how ridiculous it is.
And then he got into it with Leslie Jones.
So Leslie Jones and him got into it and I think he retweeted or liked something that people had said that was comparing Leslie Jones.
What was it exactly?
I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was something racist or something gross or something unflattering, something.
And, you know, people were tweeting it at her and they were blaming him.
I mean, he apologized for it, but he feels deep remorse that he did it.
He's just overwhelmed by it.
But getting rid of that guy is a slippery slope.
And no matter what you think about what he said, you can't support that.
You've got to let people sort it out.
The way to find out Let's say he says there's a false flag and some attack somewhere.
The way to find out if he's telling the truth is to have people investigate it.
If you say that Operation Northwoods was a document drawn up and signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was going to attack Guantanamo Bay and blame it on the Cubans to start a war, and you say that on your show, People will go, you're a fucking crazy person.
How are you allowing these?
No, no, no.
You have to be able to have someone come on and say, hey, actually, this is true.
And then you realize like, oh, wait a minute.
Some conspiracies are real.
And if you silence this one guy that calls out all of them because he fucked up on one, you're also limiting his ability to call out the ones that are legitimate.
And you're talking about a guy who's doing this all day long, every day.
But he's out there talking about the World Economic Forum.
I've said this a hundred times, and I'll say it again.
He told me about Jeffrey Epstein over a decade before anybody was in the news.
He was telling me that there was this operation, and they take these guys, high-profile public figures, and a lot of politicians, and they compromise them with young girls.
I was like, what?
On an island?
What is this for?
Fucking ABC after-school movie.
That's crazy.
That sounds nuts.
And then now everybody knows it's true.
And there's been a ton of those from him infiltrating Bohemian Grove and catching these fucking wackos and heads of state, burning an effigy in front of an owl god.
Like, what the fuck?
That's real?
The video he did with John Ronson in the 90s.
So it's like all of this stuff at a certain point in time It needs to be out there.
And people need to find out what's real and what's not real.
What's real?
And the only way to find out what's real is not to silence everybody who says something that's incorrect.
It's to let people talk it out.
So when someone gets on there and says, the Earth's hollow and there's fucking aliens inside shooting laser beams.
Let's talk to geologists and have them explain to you that they would be boiling in lava.
They don't live in the center of the Earth.
We know what the Earth's made out of.
We know all the planets.
This is how we know.
This is why we know the Earth is round.
Because every fucking body of mass, as it's spinning around, it takes on that fucking form.
If you believe that the world is flat, it's obviously false.
Any thinking person will conclude that this is a ridiculous, crazy thing to believe.
And yet having a group of flat earthers in our broader society, provided that they're not given power over NASA or something, Adds texture and richness to our culture, even if they're totally wrong.
And so what we're having is we're trying to align a discourse rationally within these strict ideological bounds.
It actually ends up breaking this great proliferation of culture, some of it which is good, some of it bad, some of it's crazy, some of it's insightful.
But I think that the real calculation that we have to make is not even a free speech issue.
It's not really even about censorship.
It's about power and the distribution of power.
If you stack up all of the people who have been kind of nuked from orbit online on the right and then on the left, you have a graph that looks out like this.
And so you have to then say, well, why is that?
Who's making the decisions?
How are decisions being made?
And who are they going after?
What views are they trying to suppress?
And so again, getting it out of the realm of the abstract debate and into the realm of a political analysis gets us to this uncomfortable point.
This was happening during Trump.
Trump was president and this was still happening.
And so we have to figure out why this is the case and go and disrupt it.
And look, I think that you want to have more views, more opportunities, more subcultures, more quirky people, more people that are way out there.
My old naked neighbor in Topanga.
Let the guy speak!
If he believes that we have to have live water and it's like the average person is not going to be persuaded and the view is not correct but the broader culture suffers when everyone is fearing that if they step outside of the box that they're going to get crushed and conservatives, you know We get all worked up about it because, look, every political faction has their fringe.
We have fringe people in our coalition or on the outsides of our coalition.
But you have to figure out what's harmful and what's relatively harmless.
And a lot of these folk beliefs and superstitions, if you take them not to condemn people as stupid or ignorant or uneducated, but you actually talk to people and try to get a sense of why do you believe this?
It's usually because they feel a sense of powerlessness and even the WEF kind of thinking.
They want to believe that there's someone out there that is calling the shots, that is the problem, that is controlling the society, because they feel that just by identifying a single point, they have a sense of understanding, a sense of power.
I actually don't think that that's the case.
I think it's misleading.
I don't think it's the right way to look at it.
But I try to also forgive people to say, people are entitled to their superstitions.
We all have superstitions.
And we want a society where superstitions are eradicated.
But you actually end up getting rid of a lot of the texture and a lot of the variety of culture.
When you try to have a hygienic treatment of culture, you treat culture like a disease, like a petri dish culture.
I lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And we lived in a super gay neighborhood.
Our downstairs neighbor used to – these gay guys that would get stoned with my aunt and they would play bongos naked because she could play bongos naked with these gay guys.
They didn't give a fuck about her.
They were just into playing bongos naked.
They would just get really high.
And it was the anti-war movement days.
And so I lived around that and then I moved to Florida, to Gainesville, which is very conservative.
I mean, I remember very clearly I was 11 at the time.
And I was just blown away.
I'm like, do you not know any gay people?
This is crazy.
Like, what do you care?
Like, if you're not gay, why do you care if they get married?
But I didn't say it because I was 11. I just wanted to be quiet.
But it burned in my head that I had gone from San Francisco in the 1970s, which was like this very open-minded, hippie-dominated culture of music and art.
And then all of a sudden I was in Gainesville, Florida.
And I was around this guy who was angry that gay people wanted to get married.
I think the question, if you look at the cultural left of San Francisco at that time, I think it's always a question of proportion.
You can have a successful, interesting, functioning society where you have a portion of people who are getting stoned and banging the bongos.
Okay, fine.
The problem is, though, that when it becomes out of proportion, when that ideology, that kind of elimination of prohibition or limits or constraints becomes the dominant Policymaking regime.
Italian relatives, they were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists.
And so that was like my political upbringing.
I remember going to visit my aunts and uncles and seeing like the books on their shelf.
And it's like, oh, they have this beautiful collection of bound books.
And I talked to my aunt and I say, oh, what is this book?
And it's like, oh, this is the collected works of Lenin.
Not ironically, not as a historical thing, but as this is the father of our revolution.
And so that was my political formation.
I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.
The first thing that really kind of disillusioned me Was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man.
It's not to uplift the downtrodden.
It's about maintaining their own status and prestige with the institutions.
It's like a McKinsey consultant kind of worldview with the trappings of the left.
It's the Harvard student who's wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh who then goes on to become an investment banker.
And it's like, to me, it was so phony.
I mean, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.
The second thing that really changed me, I spent five years, well first I traveled around the world making documentaries.
I saw how Marxist and communist governments actually work out in practice.
Not great.
And then I made a film for PBS, of all places, looking at three of America's poorest cities.
And my, by then, kind of center-left views, which was, oh, you know, the Great Society, you know, public welfare programs, trying to help people.
When you actually see how those programs manifest in the south side of Memphis, south side of Youngstown, south side of Stockton, California, the poorest places in the country— You realize that many of those ideals that are presented to you as care,
compassion, concern, equality, reparations for our racial past, are at best cynical and at worst deeply destructive to the people that they're supposed to help.
And so I spent so much time getting to know people and thinking about people's lives and then how politics affects them.
And you realize that the project of the left is a human disaster.
Even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something that is good.
And then the final change was in the run-up and then after 2020. I mean, 2020 radicalized me because you realize how profound this cultural capture is.
And you realize that the consequences are no longer abstract.
They're no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state.
But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes.
This is something that wants total domination.
And so I got canceled out of my documentary career.
Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution.
And then it's like I'm out, kind of launched into the wilderness.
Like, all right, well, that career is done.
What do I do next?
And then say, all right, well, let's get into politics.
Let's use some of the skills that I've developed as a filmmaker and I'm not a traditional conservative.
You know, rural people in the United States are not angry enough, frankly.
And so...
I just try to think in those terms always.
And I've taken over some of the tactics of the left, some of the maneuvers and some of my activist work, which I think has been helpful.
But I just have this visceral anger at people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige.
They give all this rhetoric about helping the oppressed, the underprivileged, the whatever is the kind of term of the day.
But they're actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status.
I find that a betrayal of true left principles.
And I don't think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal.
Up close and personal and really want to fight.
I want to destroy that.
I want to take all of those people who are Selling a bill of goods to the people who are struggling in this country under these principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it's just about having a tenured position, having a feather-bedded job, being able to do the activist work on the public dollar, not creating anything of value, not helping anyone but themselves.
I think that that is...
It's such a betrayal of the principles of the left, but really the principles of the country.
And I think the way you're explaining it, particularly in the desire to have a richness of culture and not have rigid rules and to have the openness to have basically anybody.
Just be who you are.
But recognize that being captured by this ideology that supposedly supports you, it's doing it for its own means.
It's doing it for a very specific purpose and it's not doing it to support you.
It's using these ideas and principles as camouflage.
To sneak in through your defenses.
And it's dangerous.
And it's creepy.
And it's weird how effective it is.
And that's why I'm really happy that you're out there.
And I'm really happy that you can lay it down so articulately and express, especially coming from your background of being a guy who grew up that way, grew up leftist, to be able to express it.
I think you have a very unique position in that regard, so I'm happy that you're out there.
Yeah, and likewise, I mean, what I think is so special about what you do is that you're You're talking about culture and politics, society, business, for people who aren't in that bubble.
I operate in a political bubble every day.
But what you've built, and I think it's a testament to the possibilities of the internet, you don't have to be an ABC, NBC, CBS talking head.
You don't have to have the...
Massive studio lights and the eight layers of makeup.
You're doing something that's real.
And people have really responded to that.
And I think that it's a reflection of something that we need more of.
We have an artificial culture that is trying to take over.
And the people that are talking about these things aren't even necessarily interested in these things.
And that also resonates with the people that listen and watch.
Like, I don't have people on that I don't want to talk to.
I just have people on that I'm only interested in talking to.
And if you can do that and you're actually interested, that's contagious.
And these principles that we're talking about and this thing, the way you're laying it out, it's important for people, even that consider themselves leftist, to just consider what you're saying.
It's for you too.
It's for everybody that we can't let this happen.
It's for all ideas.
It's for gay people, straight people, trans people, white people, black people, Asians.
It's for everybody.
The reason the founding fathers of this country set all these checks and balances in place is because they didn't want anyone to get total complete control over the people.
And that's what's happening right now.
And if you don't wake up to it and you think it's okay because your side is winning, you're actually anti-American.
There are people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the right.
And there's people that are very compassionate, kind, warm-hearted people that are on the left.
And because they have this idea in their head that they're on the good side and these people are on the bad side, you don't consider that these are just human beings that think about things differently than you.
And that is the only way we're all going to get along, is if we realize there's just human beings that think about things differently and we should be able to engage with those people peacefully.
It used to be you could sit down with a conservative person or you could sit down with a liberal person and you might not agree with them, but you could have a friendly discussion and it doesn't have to be a hate-filled attack on your very humanity because, you know, because you don't think, you know, X or Y. It's just like that's not good for anybody.
I don't know if you've come across it, but 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this culture of debate.
Left and right got together, they hashed it out.
I've challenged people to debates.
I've been, you know, people try to set up debates and it's like we don't even talk even in a confrontational way, conflict of visions.
It's like everyone in their corner, everyone's trying to make the play.
And I think that's too bad.
I think we need more.
Actually, more friction is good.
The more public friction, engagement debate will get to that point where it's like, all right, we're up on stage debating, but then we go to the green room and we can talk about kids, music, sports, whatever it is.
Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Real Chris Ruffo.
I have a sub stack.
It's ChristopherRuffo.com.
And I have a New York Times bestselling book, America's Cultural Revolution, that tells the history of the radical left's long march through the institutions.