Charleston’s Drayton Plantation tour guide, a 20s archaeologist, avoided "slaves" and "owners," calling them "enslaved people" and "enslavers," sparking debate over historical accuracy versus ideological framing. Meanwhile, University of Buckingham professor Eric Kaufman’s study (CUP 13) shows non-binary student identifications halved from 2023–2025, possibly due to pandemic-era mental health crises rather than a decline in transgenderism. The speaker links this to government overreach—mask mandates, vaccine policies, and "noble lies" like gender distortions—warning that truth must guide discourse to prevent further ideological harm. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm going to talk about a study about transgenderism, but I want to talk a minute about a personal experience that I had that was really interesting.
My wife and I went to spend the weekend in Charleston, which we'd never seen.
We just went to see Charleston, South Carolina.
And it was raining, so we didn't really get to see this city at its best.
The people were friendly.
The food was spectacular.
But we didn't really get to see the city at its best.
So we had to stay indoors.
And we went to a plantation.
I think it was called the Drayton Plantation.
My wife loves these things.
And I'm like, you know, I will do anything to make her happy.
I'm just her love slave.
So I went to the, I can't stand going to the houses, but, you know, if it will make her happy, I will go into a house.
So we went to this plantation.
It was kind of cool because it was preserved.
It wasn't like reconstructed.
And the guide, we took a tour, and the guide was this absolutely lovely, charming, young, I would say in her 20s, archaeologist.
She was one of the archaeologists on the grounds who were digging things up and looking for ways people lived.
And she was an absolutely earnest, straightforward, friendly, sweet, nice person.
I want to emphasize that.
But the words coming out of her mouth showed that she had been indoctrinated in a kind of cant, a kind of talk that expressed an ideology.
So for instance, the whole tour was about the quote-unquote enslaved people.
Now, you're not supposed to say slaves, you're supposed to say enslaved people.
And she referred to the Draytons, the people who owned the house, as the enslavers, where of course they didn't enslave the people.
The people who were enslaved in Africa by their fellow Africans and then sold over here and these people owned them, but you're not supposed to say they own them because that suggests they own them, which they did, which is one of the grievous sins of slavery.
You can't own another human being, but you can under the law.
You know, it's just like saying that, you know, two people of the same sex can't be married, but they can under the law.
And so she kept saying this, and all she talked about was the slave, you know, the slaves.
She just, every place we went, she talked about the slaves and the slaves of this and all that.
And I was thinking, and I don't want to start trouble, you know, but I'm thinking, you know, I'm interested in the life of the slaves, and I certainly am not one of these people who makes excuses for slavery.
I think slavery was a bad.
I think it was an evil.
And I think, yes, it was universal.
And yes, we fought a terrible war.
America fought a terrible war with itself to end it.
All those things are true, and yet it was a bad thing.
And so, you know, I have no problem saying that.
Great countries do bad things and bad countries do bad things.
And we are a great country that has sometimes done bad things.
And I thought, I don't come to a plantation.
Like, you get this kind of at Mount Vernon, too, where George Washington lived.
The lives of the cook, of a cook, are not as interesting as the lives of the people who ran the plantation, who were doctors and scientists and really interesting.
So at one point, in this kind of mild-mannered way, I said to her, we were in the dining room, and I said, well, who would have dinner here?
And all she was talking about, the enslaved people would come in.
They were forced to bring in the meal and all this stuff.
And I said, well, who would come in here?
And she would say, well, they would have dinner with other enslaving families.
That was her response.
And again, lovely person, very smart, just an archaeologist, digging stuff up, doing really useful work.
But it was like a mind virus.
There was no way to challenge her without challenging, you know, without basically making a pest of myself and making myself kind of unpleasant to her, which was not going to heal anything or change anything.
But I was sitting there thinking, like, this is bad.
We should not let these sites, especially the sites that are presidential houses, we should not let them be taken over by this philosophy.
And we should explain that people come here because George Washington was a great man.
That is why they're here.
They're not here to see the houses where the enslaved people live.
They're here to see George Washington.
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Why Miss the Thrill?00:05:25
Is it legitimate to talk about the slaves?
Yes.
Does it correct something that we were doing before?
Yes.
But we can overshoot the center.
We can over-correct and say things that are kind of, that it's kind of crazy.
It's basically saying that the normal way people are, that they want to see the lives of the great men who formed their country, that is a normal, normal thing.
They're somehow wrong about that and they are to be deprived of that.
So I say this because a new study, and there is a connection, a new study has been come out showing that the number of young Americans who identify as non-binary has dropped by nearly half since peaking in 2023.
The percentage of university students not identifying as male or female plunged from 2023 to 2025 in three of five surveys evaluated by political science professor at the University of Buckingham in England, Eric Kaufman.
And here is Kaufman describing his study, which is CUP 13.
The trends look the same across these three separate studies.
The peak of woke and the political peaks are not necessarily the same as the gender and sexuality peaks.
They're not the same thing.
There's quite a bit of independence between these trends.
That is a peak in 2023 of what you might call non-conforming sexual orientations that is neither heterosexual nor gay or lesbian.
So one of the other categories, which could be bisexual, but equally could be queer, questioning, pansexual, asexual, demisexual, one of these other categories.
The choosing of those kinds of non-conforming categories has declined.
The pandemic led to a rise in mental illness in the entire young population.
I suspect if we had data for 2021, it might even be worse.
The study, as he says, as he's sort of saying there, it doesn't actually say that transgenderism declined, but he is deducing that from the fact that fewer people are confused about what sex they are, that people are identifying as male or female.
That's what he's saying.
And so the headlines of transgender identification among American students nosedives study shows.
But I think the interpretation is largely fair.
And I think that two things come out of this.
One is that during the pandemic, when people were locked up, when their school was ended, when they were told that they had to go out in masks, which was a ridiculous thing that had no effect on the spread of the disease, when they were told that they couldn't do anything until they got the vaccine, and if they didn't get the vaccine, they were evil.
And anybody who believed the truth that it came from China was evil.
And anybody who believed that the vaccine didn't cure things, which it didn't, was evil.
You know, all of that stuff.
I think it drove people crazy.
the mental illness was on the rise and this is a mental illness and it's a mental illness to think you're something that you're not.
It's not a mental illness, I don't think, to think like, oh, I'm a guy, but I feel girly or I feel feminine.
That's a problem that you have, but it's not necessarily mentally ill, right?
Mentally ill is to see what is not.
And to say that you are a woman when you're a man is to see what is not.
And that is mental illness.
And so we have this spread of mental illness caused by the mishandling of the pandemic.
And it's not caused by the pandemic.
It was caused by the government mishandling of the pandemic.
And then you have this induced direction of mental illness.
And I think that like to do this to people, I think, you know, I'm not saying this lovely lady who's giving a tour in the house was mentally ill, but I think it's important to understand how powerful ideas are and that some ideas are true and some ideas are not.
I mean, it's like talking to kindergarten people to describe this, but I think we have to talk about this.
Some ideas are true and some ideas are not.
And when you have ideas that are not true, you may think, oh, this is a noble lie.
This is going to make things better.
No.
You know, when I hear bigots talking about people, a lot of the stuff they say is true because we're all screwed up and people are terrible and black people are terrible in a different way than white people and Jews are terrible in a different way than non-Jews and all of that stuff.
We're all awful.
But you can always be honest and be a bigot.
But my question is, like, how do I love people as they are?
How do I take people as they are?
And I find, by the way, that that makes the world more real.
It makes life more realistic.
I can tell more what's going to happen when I take people as they come than when I try to tell everybody that everybody should act like this or everybody should act like that.
And so this phase we have been through, this 60-year phase, a lifetime-long phase of leftism, which is all false.
It's all false.
It's not false that slavery was bad.
It's false that slavery was the only thing that was going on.
It's not false that women roles, women should have more choices.
It's false that women should stop being women.
It is an induced mental illness.
And so we actually have a job in front of us of making sure that our ideas are healthy ideas that reflect the truth.
It is no good lying on the other side either.
It's such a powerful moment, such a transitional moment.
We don't want to miss it.
We don't want to miss the joy of it.
We don't want to miss the thrill of it.
We don't want to miss the excitement of it.
But we also don't want to miss the truth of it.
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