Dave Smith critiques Henry Kissinger's Davos strategy and President Biden's aggressive posturing as dangerous conformist errors, while analyzing Bill Maher's concerns over rising transgender identification in Gen Z. Smith argues that enforcing subjective social constructs over biological reality undermines objective truth and individual liberty, creating a precedent for government manipulation seen in the Ukraine conflict and pandemic response. Ultimately, he asserts that true libertarians must reject this ideological conformity to defend freedom against what he terms the "woke mob." [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Excited for Tomorrow's Trip00:02:00
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gas Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
I am riding solo for this one.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein is out in Los Angeles or somewhere in California and was having some internet issues with his hotel Wi-Fi there.
So I'm going to do this one solo.
Me and Robbie the Fire are going to meet up tomorrow in Reno, Nevada.
And I am very excited for this trip.
So doing some stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast tomorrow night.
And then all weekend long, it is the national Libertarian Party Convention.
And I'm very excited about the shake-up that's going to be happening in the Libertarian Party.
So anyway, we'll have that podcast that we're recording tomorrow night for you out as soon as possible.
And then, of course, we'll talk about the results of this weekend's national convention on the following show, I would imagine.
We'll be talking about it a whole bunch.
I think it's going to be kind of a big deal.
So yeah, I'm sure there'll be plenty of time to talk about that.
But right now, very excited to go out there.
I always enjoy these events.
They're always just a good time.
And this one is going to be like the most fun, probably of any of them.
And so just on that level, I'm very much looking forward to it.
Also, I think it's going to be very important, but just a really good time.
So it should be cool.
All right.
So a few things that I wanted to talk about on today's show.
Kissinger's Geopolitical Strategy00:10:03
So the first thing that I wanted to mention, I thought this was a really interesting little thing that happened over the last few days, which was Henry Kissinger speaking at the World Economic Forum, I believe they call it there, in Davos.
So Henry Kissinger speaking to the ruling elite of the American Empire and giving his take on the situation with Russia and Ukraine, which is not actually that surprising if you're familiar with Henry Kissinger and where he's been on Ukraine and Russia for quite a while now.
But it might be surprising to some people who just know of Henry Kissinger more broadly.
But I thought it was very interesting what his take was on this and how it really kind of reveals this unbelievable flaw in the American like geopolitical strategy that we're embarking on right now.
So here's the video.
Let's hear from Henry Kissinger what he had to say to all of the lizard people in Davos.
Need to begin the next two months or so.
The outcome of the war should be outlined by them before it could creates upheavals and tensions that will not be even harder to overcome.
And particularly between the eventual relationship of Russia towards Europe and of Ukraine towards Europe.
Ideally, the dividing line should return to the state of the probe anti.
Maybe pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine, which has been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO and a new war against Russia itself.
And so this seems to me to be the dividing line that it is just impossible to define and it will be difficult.
Okay, so I do apologize that audio is not the clearest, but we can go through some of the things that Henry Kissinger was saying here.
He has a very thick accent, as he always has, and he's also like 236 years old at this point.
So it's not that easy to understand him if you're not watching this on video and seeing the captions there at the bottom.
But Henry Kissinger, so what he's basically saying is that he, yeah, he's, I know, he's got this, we will find the global new order.
You know, he always spoke like that, but now when he's old, it's a little bit even tougher to deal with.
But so Henry Kissinger is basically sounding, you know, a lot like what I've been saying about this conflict in Ukraine and a lot like what Scott Horton and some of the other great libertarians and people who are, you know, generally anti-war, what they've been saying.
And so you might ask yourself, like, why is this?
Why would Henry Kissinger, for people who don't know, Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State under Richard Nixon?
He's been an incredibly influential person to the ruling elite for decades since then, since the 70s.
I think every single president, I believe, has met with Henry Kissinger and had him as an advisor.
There might have been one, maybe Jimmy Carter didn't, but like everyone else basically did.
And so why would this guy, who is obviously like the biggest proponent of what he would call the new world order, what we might call the American empire, why is this guy sounding like us on this issue?
You know, I've already had some people on social media there who are like, well, Dave, like maybe you should question yourself if you're in alignment with this evil guy, Henry Kissinger.
But of course, you know, all the people who are disagreeing with me on the war in Ukraine there, you're all in line with a bunch of evil people too.
So, okay, you got Bill Crystal on your side and basically the entire corporate press.
And, you know, anyway, the question isn't that, right?
The question isn't, does some bad guy agree with you?
The question is, is this guy right?
Are you right?
That's what really matters.
You know, it's like, if I were to say, you know, I hate communists, you could be like, well, that's how the Nazis felt.
But, you know, it's like, okay, well, they might be right about that one.
And if I were to say, you know, some of the, I hate, you know, American imperialism, you might say, well, that sounds like what the commies say.
You know, it's like, okay, but they're right about that.
They're right about that one.
You know, the commies don't have much right, but they're right that uh imperialism is bad and uh that the Nazis are bad.
So, there you go, give them a couple points for that.
So, this is the so the point, what Henry Kissinger was saying, and he specifically said in this talk that there should be a negotiation and that Ukraine should make concessions, territorial concessions to the Russians.
And he's basically what he's saying here is that we need to work out the end of this war immediately.
He says this has to happen in the next couple months because otherwise it's going to become a war against Russia, you know, if it isn't already.
And he's like, This is bad news.
So, now the question you might be wondering is why?
Why does Henry Kissinger feel this way?
And it's not exactly for the reasons that we, you know, basically agree with the same thing.
That's not, that's not where he's coming from, right?
So, in the same sense that somebody could oppose the, let's say, the war in Iraq.
Someone could have opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds that it will give Iran more influence in the region.
Now, someone else could oppose the war in Iraq on the grounds that, you know, it's going to kill a whole lot of innocent people.
Someone else could oppose it on the grounds that it's going to waste a lot of money, or you could do all three.
But my point is that you can oppose things for different reasons, but still have the same goal in mind.
So, why is it that Henry Kissinger is opposing this conflict?
Well, keep in mind, Henry Kissinger was Nixon's Secretary of State.
And if you, if you, as you may know, what Richard Nixon did, which was one of the most famous accomplishments that Richard Nixon ever had, was that he went to China when Mao Zedong was ruling China, and he met with him and talked with him and talked about opening up the country and having more trade relations between them.
And this was a huge deal at the time.
This was like, you know, at the height of the Cold War.
And, you know, China is this communist country.
And, you know, the president of the United States goes there and meets with Mao Zedong and had some nice things to say about him.
Now, however, you may feel about saying nice things about Mao Zedong, who's, you know, quite possibly the most evil human being who's ever lived, responsible for more deaths than Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler combined, there was a purpose to this strategically.
And the purpose was: well, we're locked in this Cold War with the Soviet Union, and they're allied with China.
So maybe we go start being friendly with China, and we could kind of put some pressure on them to be more in our camp, or at least less allied with the Soviet Union.
The idea was to divide the two of those, these two superpowers against each other.
And so when you have these big, powerful countries and you're looking at them as, you know, as two threats, well, you'd rather those two threats not be allied together, right?
You'd rather they be divided.
And so that's kind of the whole model here that Kissinger is looking at.
Now, Donald Trump, if you remember, Donald Trump, when he ran for president in 2016, he talked about this very openly on the campaign trail.
He wanted to have a good relationship with Russia.
He was like, oh, we can be friends with Russia.
We can talk to them.
We can work together.
They really hate terrorists.
They're over there bombing ISIS in Syria.
Well, hey, we don't like ISIS.
That's pretty good.
Let's work together with Russia to kill terrorists and then maybe be friends, you know?
But he was very tough on China because he was like, China's ripping us off.
And then all this.
So this, and he met with Kissinger, and Kissinger basically agreed with him.
He goes, yep, that's the move.
The move is to befriend Russia and turn them against China.
That's how Henry Kissinger is looking at this from like a geopolitical strategy.
Like the world is a chessboard and you're trying to win this game and take over the whole world.
iTrust Capital Crypto IRA00:03:39
Now, I may not be looking at things that way.
I'm saying more that like my perspective is that the threat of Russia to the United States of America is non-existent.
I think the threat of China to the United States of America is greatly over-exaggerated.
But my concern here is really what Henry Kissinger said there, that this is going to turn into a war against Russia.
The concern there is that what the hell does that look like when you're talking about the United States and Russia in a war, two countries that have 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal and the ability to destroy pretty much all of mankind.
That's the big fear.
So forget this like grand chessboard of like who runs the world.
The fear is like we might destroy the whole goddamn world.
So that's my perspective on it.
However, the Trumpian perspective here or the Henry Kissinger's perspective here is that we should not be driving Russia and China closer together.
Now, you could agree with me on that, or you could be more in the Trump Kissinger camp on this.
But how could you argue that those aren't preferable to the current course of action?
Now, I'll get into a little bit more in a second.
We can talk a little bit more about why I don't think, why I don't think that China is such a great threat to us.
But that's neither here nor there for the moment.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Stupid China Containment Strategy00:09:04
Let's play this clip from Joe Biden the other day so we can get a little bit of a feel for what the Biden strategy is here coming in.
Get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons.
Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?
Yes.
You are.
That's a commitment we made.
That's a commitment we made.
We are not.
Look, here's the situation.
We agree with a one China policy.
We've signed on to it and all the attendant agreements made from there.
But the idea that it could be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not appropriate.
It will dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.
And so it's a burden that is even stronger.
So here you have, yeah, that's enough of the video.
That's the point.
So here you have the Democrat, the Democrats' Biden strategy, because I just want it to be clear how truly unhinged and insane their current strategy is.
Okay.
So here's the one strategy.
You divide these two powers against each other.
My preferred strategy would be to recognize that none of them are overtaking the world or anywhere close to threatening the United States of America at all.
But the Democratic Biden strategy is essentially this.
Demonize Russia with absolute bullshit propaganda for years.
Accuse them of acts of war against America, even when they just clearly haven't happened.
And I mean, you know, things like they, you know, overthrew the election and installed their puppet, Donald Trump.
They have bounties on soldiers' heads in Afghanistan.
They, you know, whatever, tried to interfere in another election by creating this fake laptop Hunter Biden story and on and on and on, poison people in Europe, like all these things that turned out to be complete bullshit.
Just demonize them and demonize them and pump war propaganda against nuclear-armed Russia to your citizenry.
Then, you know, ship weapons into an active combat zone on the other side of Russia.
So actually start getting into a war and publicly talk about how Vladimir Putin must be overthrown.
Just have the president of the United States publicly talking about regime change in Russia.
Okay?
That's their strategy.
And then also threaten China.
China hasn't invaded Taiwan.
There's no reason for him to even be saying this right now.
But yes, we will have a military confrontation with China and Russia, I guess.
So that's the Biden strategy.
Yeah, let's fight a war with two giant nuclear-armed countries.
Why not?
What can go wrong?
So Henry Kissinger here, you have, who's like the grand strategist who's been at this for fucking 50 years, right?
You could see where he's looking at this like, guys, this is insane.
The whole thing we're supposed to be doing here is like strategizing how we dominate, not to risk losing everything.
Like, so this is how he's looking at it.
And I think it makes a lot of sense.
And I think it also, I'm not saying he's right.
He's a bad guy, but he's right on this.
He's right on this issue.
And the Biden strategy is just the most freaking insane thing in the world.
Now, personally, as far as my point before about China not being as great a threat as it is exaggerated to be, it's like, I just, I look at it like this.
Nothing, everything is compared to what?
Everything is compared to what?
What are the alternatives?
So what, you know, if you say like, oh, is China taking over Taiwan bad?
Yeah, it's bad.
But compared to what?
Compared to a war with China?
No, it's not as bad as that.
It's not as bad as that.
Is China a threat to the world?
Sure.
But is our government going to war with China more of a threat to the world?
Absolutely.
China, you can say, you know, that China, the Chinese Communist Party is a creepy fucking party.
And Chinese people sure ain't free.
And they've never been free.
But I mean, look, they're better off than they were under Mao Zedong, but it's still not great.
Are they going around the world and trying to expand their influence?
Absolutely.
They're doing that.
It's helped that they're going around the world investing in places while we've been going around the world blowing up bridges and then paying to build those bridges again.
So they have somewhat of an intelligent strategy.
We have a very, very stupid strategy.
However, I will say this.
China, you know, it's one thing to blame them.
Like you could go like, oh, look, they unleashed this virus on the world or something like that.
But then, you know, the more you dig into it, you're like, oh, our government funded a Chinese lab that then released this virus on the world.
And oh, yeah, wait a minute.
The major problem in terms of policy wasn't even the fucking virus.
It was the response to the virus that did nothing to mitigate the virus that destroyed the entire economy.
And who did that?
Not the Chinese government, our government.
That's who did that.
Now, if we're going to fight the Chinese government, we're going to need our government to do it.
And by the way, we never even really end up fighting the Chinese government.
We fight the Chinese people.
And the Chinese people haven't really done anything to us.
It's the Chinese Communist Party.
So we have to use our government, which is more responsible for our suffering, in order to fight their people who aren't responsible for our suffering, but that will maybe hurt their government.
The truth is that the United States of America is a far richer country than China is.
I mean, the amount of real poverty that they still have in China dwarfs the amount of poverty in the United States of America.
And we can't afford to be the world empire.
We're $30 trillion in debt and our currency is being destroyed.
China definitely can't afford to be the world empire.
What they can do is bully around some of their neighbors.
Probably not all of them.
They've got a lot of hostile neighbors.
Japan doesn't like China.
South Korea doesn't like China.
We've got a lot of hostile neighbors.
They're not going to bully them all around that easily.
But they might be able to bully Taiwan or Hong Kong or places like that.
And the bitter pill that we have to swallow is that we can't stop them from doing that.
We can't because we're not God.
We're not the policemen of the world even.
So look, we couldn't stop the Taliban from running Afghanistan.
So we definitely can't stop China from invading Taiwan if they want to.
We could try to discourage them from doing it, you know, but we can't stop them any more than if the United States of America, let's just say hypothetically, let's say Hawaii wasn't a part of America and we said, we're going to make it part of America.
We're going to go take Hawaii.
And China was like, no, we're going to stop you from doing that.
You're like, okay.
How?
How are you going to stop us?
Oh, that's right.
You can't.
If we said we're going to go take Mexico City and make that part of America, can China decide whether we want to do that or not?
Can Russia?
No.
They have no say because we have like a huge badass military and, you know, H-bombs and all types of weapons and a big population.
We're a big country.
You're not stopping us within our sphere of influence.
And that's also true for them.
See, it's real easy to understand and accept when you put the shoe on the other foot.
We have to abandon this empire mentality.
What is China really guilty of doing to the United States of America?
It's like, oh, okay, they fucking, what do they do?
Well, they do they influence our politicians?
Okay, right.
So how do they hurt us?
Through our own government.
What they call it, they flood cheap stuff into our markets.
Like, okay, that's what they're guilty of is giving us a lot of cheap crap.
Like, okay.
Well, then Americans can choose not to buy it, or we can buy it.
All right.
So what is that?
Is the problem that we don't produce enough at home?
It's like, okay, well, who made it so expensive to produce things at home?
Oh, that's right.
Our government did that.
So my main thing is just like, look, the Chinese government is absolutely the enemy of the Chinese people.
But the enemy of the American people is our government in Washington, D.C., and the corporate press that props them up.
That's the enemy of the American people.
All right.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show.
Puberty Blockers and Conformity00:15:19
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All right, let's get back on the show.
So anyway, I just, I thought that was interesting and worth talking about.
Okay, moving on, another thing that I saw over the last few days that I thought was very interesting.
There was this clip from Bill Maher's show from politically incorrect real time with Bill Maher.
And this clip has gone super viral.
It's blown up all over the place.
He did a piece on the LGBTQ plus underscore community.
And this is blowing up.
Now, I thought there were several things that were interesting about this.
Bill Maher at this point has kind of, he's kind of carved out for himself this space of being one of like the anti-woke liberals, which is a growing segment of the left half of America.
And there's something interesting about that segment, something to kind of keep our eye on.
So anyway, let's play this and we can pause at certain points and kind of break some of it down.
So let's play.
Let's hear from Bill Maher.
And finally, new rule, if something about the human race is changing at a previously unprecedented rate, we have to at least discuss it.
Broken down over time, the LGBT population of America seems to be roughly doubling every generation.
According to a recent Gallup poll, less than 1% of Americans born before 1946, that's Joe Biden's generation, identify that way.
2.6% of boomers do, 4.2% of Gen X, 10.5% of millennials, and 20.8% of Gen Z, which means if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2053.
And then who's going to buy this chair?
I'm just saying that when things change this much this fast, people are allowed to ask, what's up with that?
All the babies are in the wrong bodies?
Was there a mix-up at the plant, like with Captain Crunch's oops, all berries?
It wasn't that long ago when adults asked a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?
They meant what profession?
In the wake of America about to lose abortion rights, the ACLU recently tweeted a list of those who would be disproportionately harmed by this.
You would think women might top that list?
No, wasn't even on the list.
Second on the list was LGBT.
Really?
Abortion rights affects gay and trans people more than, you know, breeders?
I'm happy for LGBT folks that we now live in an age where they can live their authentic lives openly.
And we should always be mindful of respecting and protecting.
But someone needs to say it.
Not everything's about you.
And it's okay to ask questions about something that's very new and involves children.
The answer can't always be that anyone from a marginalized community is automatically right.
Trump card might drop, end of discussion.
Because we're literally experimenting on children.
Maybe that's why Sweden and Finland have stopped giving puberty blockers to kids because we just don't know much about the long-term effects.
So let's pause here and kind of...
So one of the things that's interesting to me, right?
And it's not when it comes to the LGBT, you know, all this stuff, and particularly with the transgender stuff, it's really, it's not even about the issue itself, okay?
It's about this kind of bigger picture that I've, as I've mentioned before, I think like underpins wokeism in general.
It underpinned the entire rise of the COVID regime.
It underpins the current conflict in Ukraine.
And it is the culture of conformity.
The idea that we could embark on these really like big societal changes and oftentimes like government, governmental changes.
And you are not allowed to dissent or even ask questions.
That you simply, and when I say not allowed, I mean, okay, maybe not in the strict legal sense of the word, but I mean that there's enormous pressure against the people who are not with the program.
And what it does is it breeds this culture of conformity.
And you see that throughout all these things.
But it's just kind of like, you know, 15 days to slow the spread, 15 days to flatten the curve.
That's it.
Everyone repeat, repeat, repeat, and everyone falls in line.
And that's kind of the thing with the whole woke culture.
Like we tell you what the new rule are, everyone falls in line.
Every single TV show will be this way.
Every single commercial, everyone will nod along.
Yes, we agree, we agree.
And same thing with the war in Ukraine.
We're all switching our profile picture to the Ukrainian flag.
We all know that 99% of the people who do that don't know anything about Ukraine.
They didn't know anything about the history of the country.
They didn't care about it one day before they were told, now you care about it, but they follow.
And that is an incredibly dangerous thing for a society to have.
That is always, if you read a novel about a society that's completely conforming, it's always going to end bad.
If you look at an example through history where the society was completely conforming to the will of their government, it's always bad.
That's never good.
And it's the biggest threat to individualism and liberty and all of that shit.
So that to me is what's interesting.
And this is the reason why the transgender conversation is important has nothing to actually do with transgender people who I have nothing against.
And, you know, go, hey, man, live your life.
I'm a true libertarian.
My attitude is like, who the hell am I to tell someone else how they're supposed to live?
That's different with children.
But with adults, you own your own body, do what you want to it, live how you want to.
But the demand that we all must agree that biological reality doesn't exist and repeat it over and over again, that's where I draw the line.
That's where I go, now, sorry, you don't get to enforce that on me and on others.
And so, what's interesting here is that there is this portion of liberals who are backing away from this.
Now, the other thing here is that it's also years after it was so obvious.
Like, it's so that's kind of like insane.
It's like, oh, yeah, after kind of like everybody else has been completely demonized for pointing out this obvious truth, which is that it's really insane to start just like giving puberty blockers to kids for anyone who claims to be down with this new fad of saying that they're transgender.
That's insane.
But it starts from the kernel of where it's like, look, you, if somebody requests, you know, if someone is biologically a man and they request that they'd like to be called she rather than he, and they're like, I'm going to dress like a woman and do all of that, then okay, they have a right to do that.
They have a right to make that request.
And if you decide that you're going to call them what they wish to be called, which in most situations I would do, then okay, fine.
That's one thing.
But to start, but when you demand that someone says no, more than that, you have to acknowledge that this is reality.
It is reality that a trans woman is a woman.
That is a fact.
That is reality.
When you demand that, then you go in some really bad places.
Anytime you reject objective reality, you're going to go into very bad places.
Okay.
And I think this is something that libertarians get really wrong.
Some groups of libertarians, not the good ones, but some libertarians get this really wrong because they have these goofy ideas that it's like, well, we're all just for individualism and people should be able to do whatever they want.
And, you know, there's kind of like, you know, even like something like Mises said, hey, look, that value is subjective.
So maybe all of this is subjective and blah, but that's just a misunderstanding of like when Mises said that value is subjective, he was making an objective statement.
He's saying objectively, value is subjective.
Okay.
So in other words, there might be something that I value that I would pay $10,000 for, but you have no need for it.
To you, it's worth nothing.
That's subjective.
But it is objectively true that we have different values on that thing, right?
If you overthrow the idea of objective reality, you also overthrow the idea of objective morality.
Because how can there be objectively right and wrong if there isn't anything that's real anyway?
So, this is a very dangerous game to go down.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So it's while it is a little bit frustrating that some of these anti-woke liberals are so late to the party, I think it's a good sign that they're coming here.
Basically, what the sign is, is that they see that this woke train is headed toward a brick wall and about to crash.
This is Bill Maher basically saying, I'm going to get off at this stop, and I'd like it to be noted for everyone that I got off this train, that I'm not on this train as it goes into Crazyville, okay?
Which is where you are when you start having 20% of kids claiming that they're transgender.
And then we're talking about how once they make the claim, you need to have puberty blockers or some type of surgery or something like that.
You are in crazy town now.
And there's nothing wrong with normal people mentioning that.
Now, some of us have been talking about this for a while.
Bill Maher is just more recently getting on this path.
But anyway, all right, let's keep playing.
Just don't know much about the long-term effects.
Although common sense should tell you that when you reverse the course of raging hormones, there's going to be problems.
We do know it hinders the development of bone density, which is kind of important if you like having a skeleton.
Fertility and the ability to have an orgasm seem also to be affected.
This isn't just a lifestyle decision, it's medical.
Weighing trade-offs is not bigotry.
Yet, when a book questioning the sudden uptick in transitioning children was released, a trans lawyer with the ACLU named Chase Strangio tweeted, Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.
How very civil liberties of him.
Chase, by the way, has just been named one of the Grand Marshals of this year's New York City Pride March, along with three other trans people and a lesbian.
Huh, what's missing here?
Oh, right, a gay man.
That's where we are now.
Gay men aren't hip enough for the gay pride parade.
Compared to trans, gay is practically cis, and cis is practically Mormon.
And this is a phenomenon we need to take into account when we look at this issue.
Yes, part of the rise in LGBT numbers is from people feeling free enough to tell it to a pollster, and that's all to the good.
But some of it is it's trendy.
Penis equals man.
Okay, boomer.
Remember, the prime directive of every teen is anything to shock and challenge the squares who brought you up.
It's why nobody gets a nose ring at 56.
And if you haven't noticed that with kids doing something for the likes is more important than their own genitals, you haven't been paying attention.
Dr. Erica Anderson is a prominent 71-year-old clinical psychologist who is herself transgender and who now says, I think it's gone too far.
The LA Times summarizes, she's come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media.
If you attend a small dinner party of typically very liberal upper-income Angelinos, it is not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid having a conversation about that.
What are the odds of that happening in Youngstown, Ohio?
If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional?
Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.
It's like that day we suddenly all needed bottled water all the time.
Empowering People to Speak00:13:28
If we can't admit that in certain enclaves, there is some level of trendiness to the idea of being anything other than straight, then this is not a serious science-based discussion.
It's a blow being struck in the culture wars using children as cannon fodder.
I don't understand parents who won't let their nine-year-old walk to the corner without a helmet, an EpiPen, and a GPS tracker.
All right, let's pause it here.
So this is basically, I think, Bill Maher.
And of course, he's got writers and stuff who help him with these segments.
But he's delivering in a very well-put way, what is a very common sense truth that basically all people who are not ideologically possessed by wokeism have known for a very long time.
And some of us have been willing to say it publicly for a very long time.
That, yes, this trans thing is not as simple as saying it's objectively true if someone identifies as a woman that they are a woman.
And in fact, it's objectively not true.
Biologically, it's not true.
Now, whether they have the right to live that way or not live that way, that's different.
I believe they do have the right to do what they want with their bodies as adults, not as children.
And so, but the fact is that the rise in children identifying as trans is absolutely related to the fact that it's been made trendy.
And so now you have more and more people claiming this thing.
Now, from my perspective, there are people who I think really are trans, if you want to put it that way.
Like there are people who really truly are uncomfortable in the gender that they're in and are more comfortable identifying as the other gender.
And in fact, and I've talked to like a family friend of mine who's like this really brilliant psychoanalyst who's dealt with patients in this situation.
And she's like basically told me, and she's like, look, there are real situations like this.
Now, it's still not the case that that's that objectively speaking, that is a woman in a man's body.
That's just objectively not the case.
It is a man.
That's the biological reality of the situation.
However, this is a man who usually has, they are usually very troubled and they don't do very well.
They don't have good outcomes.
But all things considered, they're probably going to be more well adjusted living as the opposite sex as the one that they are.
Still don't have great outcomes, still don't do very good.
But all things considered, it probably is better that way.
But then, and this is what this woman who's a really, she's like an incredibly well-respected person in our field.
I won't give out her name because it won't help her any.
But she said, the problem is this now, what Bill Maher is saying, the problem is now it's become this trend.
So it's just like a ton of people are identifying as this who aren't that.
They don't even fit into that group.
Now, for that group, it wasn't ever an objective reality.
It was always just kind of like a look.
There might be that some people have theories that there is actually some like difference like physiologically in those people versus versus cisgender people.
But that doesn't make it objective reality that they are the opposite sex that they were born as, like, obviously, the opposite gender, whatever you want to call it.
But now there's a bunch of people who are just jumping on the trend.
And now, of course, because it's become so politicized, a whole lot of the other psychologists will just as soon as you say you identify that way, then yes, of course, we must go down this path.
And so they're actually pushing puberty blockers on kids who don't even fall into this category to begin with.
It's like the most insane thing in the world.
And again, back to my other point, it's not just like, obviously, the issue of abusing children is a huge, huge issue.
That's very important.
So that's that's one thing.
But the other thing that I also think is very important is that when you train a society to look at something that they obviously know is objectively wrong, but tell you it's correct because of the social pressure, that's very dangerous.
Then what the hell else can't they tell you?
It's like they've trained you.
Like this is the problem.
This is why the wokeism falls right into, you know, it launches, it leads into the rise of the COVID regime.
It leads into this undying support for the democracy of Ukraine.
And think about how much like reality is ignored during this whole process.
Like Ukraine is a democracy.
It goes, I've literally just tweeted something out the other day about Ukraine.
I get this all the time back in the threats, people actually saying this.
Well, America has to be on the side of democracy.
You're like, they literally just abolished all the rival political parties.
And that didn't slow down the talking point of democracy.
Just think about that.
This is what happens when you train people to conform without dealing in objective reality.
It doesn't even matter.
It doesn't even matter if they could fucking call off elections.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter.
Zelensky could declare himself king.
They'll still be saying democracy because they've been trained to not even think about what's actually right.
What they're thinking about is following orders.
It's a devastating blow for people who want to live in a free society.
So it's important that people be empowered to say what they actually think.
It's like the emperor has no clothes.
You know what I mean?
It's like, as soon as someone says it, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we obviously all knew that.
And that's exactly what this issue is going to be.
Yeah, we obviously all knew that.
We obviously all knew that if some little boy says he's a girl, that doesn't make him a girl.
That's like, obviously, it's the most obvious thing in the world.
Just think about how bizarre it is that that's a controversial statement to make.
Just think about how crazy that is.
Think about how crazy it is that Bill Maher coming out and saying this was even a big deal.
It's nuts.
All right, let's keep playing.
And God forbid their lips touch dairy.
But hormone blockers and genital surgery, fine.
Talk about a nut allergy.
I guess penises are gross now, but one might come in handy later on.
And if you're a man who wants to experience life without a pair of balls, you do not have to get surgery.
You can get married.
Holy joke.
And never forget, children are impressionable and very, very stupid.
Kids don't know why mom drinks every day or why dad has two cell phones.
Maybe the boy who thinks he's a girl is just gay or whatever Frasier was.
Maybe the girl who hates girly stuff just needs to learn that being female doesn't mean you have to act like a Kardashian.
Maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes and there are other solutions besides hand me the dick saw.
And look, I'm sure the vast majority of parents do not take this lightly.
And that is very hard to know when something is real or just a phase.
And I understand being trans is different.
It's innate.
But kids do also have phases.
They're kids.
It's all phases.
The dinosaur phase, the hello kitty phase.
One day they want to be an astronaut.
The next day you can't get them to leave their room.
Gender fluid.
Kids are fluid about everything.
If kids knew what they wanted to be at age eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses.
I wanted to be a pirate.
Thank God nobody took me seriously and scheduled me for eye removal and peg leg surgery.
So, okay, so that's the segment.
And so I, okay, I thought this was interesting just for a lot of reasons, a lot of the reasons I've laid out so far.
But one of the things that I think, if you're like kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of where the country is going and where all of this stuff is happening, what's interesting here is like, look, Bill Maher is a show.
It's a, with a progressive audience, a liberal audience that is, you know, he gets like a million views an episode.
This clip going viral got millions more views online.
It's not an insignificant number of people who are on primarily the left half of the American political spectrum.
And they are, there's a huge audience there who is like, they're fed up with the woke shit.
And the, you know, so one of the things that I see is like, and this is why part of the project of the Mises Caucus, the project to be completed this weekend, has been to kind of de-wokeify the Libertarian Party, to strip all of this insanity out of libertarianism.
And there are these people, it's not a very big group, but there are like a lot of the kind of more Beltway regime libertarian types who are like, well, no, we should embrace the woke shit because, well, really what we want is like individuals to be able to live their life the way they want to.
But my point is that training people to be conformists and deny objective reality is much more dangerous than, I don't know, trying to err on the side of like individuals being able to do whatever they want to.
I mean, we can still believe that individuals can do whatever they want to and also believe in objective reality and also believe that you're allowed to think for yourself and tell the truth and not face enormous penalties for doing so.
And that is what we're really dealing with here.
The truth is that the entire right half of America hates woke mobs and a pretty big portion of the left half hate them too.
It's becoming a smaller and smaller portion of Americans who actually like this stuff.
And a lot of it is propped up by the most powerful in our society.
And those people who like it are the most anti-libertarian people you could imagine.
So libertarians need to wake up about this shit.
And that's part of the Mises Caucus project here: is that we're like having a complete decoupling of the woke insanity with a belief in liberty.
That we're here because we believe in sound money and we're anti-war, we're anti-COVID regime, we're anti-police state, anti-spying apparatus, all of these things.
We're anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.
Okay.
That has nothing to do with any of this.
That has nothing to do with you must believe that, you know, objective reality doesn't exist.
That stuff is completely gone.
Now, it's also worth noting that this kind of false dynamic where, like, if you, you know, the woke tactic now will be what?
To say, Bill Maher is anti-trans.
You hate trans people.
You're some type of a bigot.
Or as they'll often do, oh, you're against trans rights or something like that, which is bullshit.
It doesn't have to.
Everyone who's being honest here knows Bill Maher doesn't fucking hate trans people.
I don't hate trans people either.
I don't, I honestly, I can't imagine what it's like to be a trans person.
And I think it must be really, really hard.
And I'd like their life to not be hard.
Who roots for someone else's life to be hard?
You don't like my point is that you can believe that we shouldn't have a culture of conformity.
You can believe in objective reality.
And none of that in any way, shape, or form implies that you're a bigot, that you hate any group of people.
And so what we have to get better at doing is like laughing off all of those labels.
Some people have been a little bit more used to this than others, but all of these labels of you're a racist, sexist, homophobe, when it's all bullshit and based on nothing, you got to just laugh it off and move on.
Because the thing is, we're talking to the people who are fucking either not so ideologically trapped or so fucking stupid that they can't see the distinction there.
All right.
That's the episode for today.
Looking forward to seeing a whole bunch of you guys out in Reno.
And yeah, we'll have that live podcast out for you as soon as we can.