May 24, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
34:59
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The day started out actually at an MSNBC live taping that was taking place a couple blocks away from the Trump rally. | ||
| And I kind of went there first because I was very nervous about going to the Trump rally. | ||
| And I went there first because it was more of a comfort zone and just started chatting with people. | ||
| And everyone I told, I was like, I'm thinking about going over the rally. | ||
| And they were like, don't do it. | ||
| They're horrible people. | ||
| They're the lowest of the low. | ||
| They're going to harass you. | ||
| One woman actually offered me her pepper spray to take with me. | ||
| And I was like, no, I think I'm going to be fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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It'll be okay. | |
| Quick reminder, everybody, you can get all our shows days early and totally ad-free at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And joining me today is a psychologist, an author, and a contributor to Forbes Magazine, Dr. Karlyn Borysenko. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I am glad to have you here. | ||
| Unfortunately, due to social distancing, we are not doing this in person. | ||
| You are all the way in New Hampshire, so we are roughly 3,000 miles apart. | ||
| As I told you right before we started, we're going to be holding this interview for just a little bit because there's so many moving pieces in the world right now. | ||
| But how is lockdown treating you? | ||
| Lockdown's treating me quite well, honestly. | ||
| I work out of my house. | ||
| It's not really that different. | ||
| The only difference is that my husband is now working from home, and so we'll see if our marriage survives this. | ||
| But he's a good guy, and so I think we're gonna be just fine. | ||
| Yeah, and you just told me that he took the dogs outside, at least while you're doing this. | ||
| So, you know, he's making himself useful. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| He is. | ||
| You know, that's why you keep him around, right? | ||
| Yeah, I assume so. | ||
| All right, so a couple months ago you really got put on the map with a piece that you wrote that obviously we're gonna spend a lot of this interview talking about. | ||
| But before we get to that, you're a psychologist first. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your background, the types of things you're interested in, and then we'll get that to what sort of brought you to my attention. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm actually an organizational psychologist. | ||
| So I focus mostly on helping businesses to create positive working environments. | ||
| And the bulk of my academic research has been in the area of workplace bullying, which played into what we're going to talk about quite a bit. | ||
| So I've studied it quite extensively. | ||
| I help organizations tackle those types of challenges, and just to make work better for people so they don't have to stress out all the time. | ||
| Yeah, which probably is coming in very handy these days as everybody's kind of working from home and figuring out new ways they have to do things and all that, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And I actually think this is going to fundamentally change the relationships that a lot of organizations have with flexible work. | ||
| So in some respects, it's actually going to be very exciting for people once I think things get back to normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense that we'll get to a whole new way of looking at, I think, not only just looking at the world as a general idea, but looking at work, that people are going to realize they can telecommute and work from home and maybe spend more time with their spouses and maybe don't want to be on the road two hours a day getting to work and commuting and the rest of it? | ||
| Well, I think it's going to have to because so many organizations now have staffs that are completely working home and a lot of them kind of went there kicking and screaming and they got pushed off the cliff. | ||
| Now their staff is seeing, well, we can make this work and we don't necessarily always need to be in the office. | ||
| And so it's going to have to change the relationship. | ||
| I think it's really funny. | ||
| I'm actually working with a group of managers right now who are transitioning their teams to working virtually. | ||
| They almost have to go back to basics. | ||
| They have to build their workspaces and teach their teams how to function in these virtual environments. | ||
| But once they get there, they're going to be okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think most people actually are better left to their own devices? | ||
| Or do you think because we're social creatures, a lot of us need to actually show up somewhere and put on different clothes and behave differently with other co-workers and things like that? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both, to be honest. | ||
| We still need those social interactions. | ||
| But also, one of the keys to working at home well is to have a routine, to get up, to take a shower, not sit around in your PJs all day, have a dedicated workspace. | ||
| And so that's part of what's going to help people maintain work-life balance and really be able to focus their energy on the things that matter. | ||
| And so I think people are figuring it out. | ||
| And working from home is weird. | ||
| I mean, you know this. | ||
| It's like sometimes you forget to eat. | ||
| Sometimes you forget what time it is. | ||
| You forget to stop working at 5 o'clock. | ||
| And so people are having to tackle that as well. | ||
| Yeah, when I was writing my book, I would go into our green room here, which is a bedroom, and I would just start at about 7.30 or 8 a.m., and I'd be writing, writing, writing, and then it would literally be 2 p.m., and David would basically slide a plate of food through the door. | ||
| He would open up the door, slide it in, not even bother me, because I would legitimately forget to eat, because I was so just in that zone. | ||
| Oh, the same when I wrote my book. | ||
| I was up here at 1, 2 a.m. | ||
| in the morning and I would go downstairs. | ||
| My husband would be like, what the heck happened to you? | ||
| Where did you go? | ||
| And it's just the way it is when you get into that flow of work. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So you're a psychologist and you're doing some interesting stuff that obviously is very relevant as we're talking about to the way we're all living right now. | ||
| But what sort of put you on the map here was this piece that you wrote that all started, well, you were part of a knitting community and we can all imagine how radical the knitting communities are. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about the knitting communities online. | ||
| I'm not in the knitting world. | ||
| I don't know what's going on over there. | ||
| I have respect for the knitters, but tell me about the knitting community. | ||
| Oh Dave, prepare to have your mind blown what's going on in the knitting world. | ||
| Because this all started about a year ago. | ||
| And in the knitting community I'm talking about, this is not a knitting circle of little old ladies. | ||
| This is mostly people of all different ages, Instagram, kind of sharing their projects and sharing their yarns and all these things. | ||
| Well, about a year ago, these roving gangs of social justice warriors started infiltrating different parts of the knitting community and really started going after and bullying and mobbing people very severely. | ||
| So it started with a woman named Karen Templar who wrote a blog post about her upcoming trip to India. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And she was so excited about going on this trip and she thought it would never happen and she was always scared to travel and all these things. | ||
| And the SGWs mobbed her so badly because they said, you're othering them, you're colonizing, all this stuff. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| And she had to write this full retraction and apology and point out every single thing that was wrong with her blog post. | ||
| It was several paragraphs long. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So, another woman, Maria Tuscan, was watching that, and she does these beautiful hand-dyed yarns, and all Maria did was post a video on YouTube saying, I'm not comfortable with what's going on, and I'm going to take some time off of Instagram. | ||
| Well, they didn't like that, and they went after her and mobbed her, tried to destroy her business, destroy all her partnerships, | ||
| who would post horrible pictures of her on Instagram, like Photoshopped into Klan uniforms and things like that. | ||
| And so that was crazy. | ||
| But the thing that really got my attention was this one guy, Nathan Taylor, | ||
| he goes by the name Sockmetition on Instagram. | ||
| And all he did when all of this was going on was to post a poem on a hashtag called Diversnity, | ||
| asking for kindness, asking for people to be nice to each other. | ||
| The worst of all things. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, the ironic thing about him, too, is, like, he's a gay man in the knitting community. | ||
| So he's, like, got a couple minority cars in this instance working for him. | ||
| But for his efforts, he was thanked by being mobbed by hundreds and hundreds of people to the point where he had a nervous breakdown and went into the hospital on suicide watch. | ||
| And I'm kind of watching all this happen. | ||
| And like I said, my background is in workplace bullying. | ||
| I've studied adults bullying other adults extensively. | ||
| And I just thought, this is not what I signed up for. | ||
| And these are people that I was aligned with politically. | ||
| And it really, that was my wake up moment to say, what is going on in the world? | ||
| And do I want to really be a part of this? | ||
| Okay, so there's a lot there, but the sort of bones of your story is the type of story that I hear all the time. | ||
| I've had many of my guests, I've been through my own version of it, that you're basically, I think you can describe your own political positions, but you think of yourself as sort of a good lefty, you're knitting, this is sort of apolitical. | ||
| Next thing you know, some bizarre thing happens and everyone's a racist and a bigot and we're destroying lives and all that. | ||
| Did you have no sense that any of this was going on within the community? | ||
| Or you actually used the word infiltrated. | ||
| Were these outsiders that were coming in to suddenly wreck havoc? | ||
| Or were these people from within the community themselves? | ||
| And I ask you this because a lot of people these days are now we're spending more and more time online. | ||
| One of the things that I'm Trying to do with my new tech company, Locals.com, is create protected communities. | ||
| And people are trying to figure out, how can you gate a community and make sure that all these bad actors don't get in there? | ||
| No, I think a lot of them were actually part of the knitting community. | ||
| And all of this, too, was surrounding the site Ravelry, which is one of the most popular knitting sites on the internet. | ||
| And what Ravelry did, I think midway through last year, is they banned all support for Donald Trump. | ||
| So you were not allowed to say anything in the forums about supporting him. | ||
| You were not allowed to post patterns with, like, Trump 2020 or anything like that. | ||
| And that fed into all of this as well. | ||
| So what would happen is they would, like, coordinate on Ravelry, and then they would go forth and bully people on Instagram, I think. | ||
| So what were the types of things that you were seeing besides just, oh, you're evil, you're racist, you're a bigot? | ||
| Like they were actually trying to go for people's jobs. | ||
| And as you said, I mean, at least one guy had a mental breakdown because of it. | ||
| But can you talk about that? | ||
| Because I think a lot of times people that don't pay that much attention to this stuff, they're always like, oh, well, it's just some trolls on Twitter and there's no real world consequences, you know, toughen up. | ||
| It's what is happening in the knitting world at least is these people are not just leaving nasty comments on people's images. | ||
| They're actually going after their businesses. | ||
| So what they do is first off they pick out high profile people to go after because you don't want to just go after like Susie Q with like two followers. | ||
| You're not going to make an impact that way. | ||
| So they go after people that are influencers in the knitting world. | ||
| And then what they do is they direct message all of the major knitwear designers or knitting stores. | ||
| And they basically say, if you do not denounce these people, we are going to come after you too. | ||
| And so there are very detrimental effects on people's businesses. | ||
| And this is, this is what their livelihood is. | ||
| And knitting, you know, like spoiler alert, Dave, knitting is not like a lucrative business, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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And so when we're talking about going... You're not getting that big knitting money? | |
| No, I mean, I don't make my money from knitting, but no, I mean, they're doing what they need to do to get by, and so it really does have a horrible impact. | ||
| Okay, so what's interesting about this, because this is sort of a world, it's a very niche world that a lot of people don't understand about, but politically, now you mentioned the Trump thing already, that one of the sites said, okay, no more pro-Trump stuff. | ||
| You can't knit a Trump sweater or anything like that. | ||
| But politically speaking, this is a pretty female-dominated, lefty, basically, right? | ||
| Lefty, ideologically-dominated arena, So were you shocked? | ||
| I mean, these are the people that are supposed to be tolerant and diverse and open and all of those things, and you considered yourself one of them, at least at the time. | ||
| Were you shocked? | ||
| And then how did that then lead to, I think, what you would now consider your political awakening? | ||
| Yeah, so it was very shocking to me. | ||
| This was not what I perceived the good, tolerant liberals to be doing. | ||
| And, you know, I frankly hadn't been paying attention to a lot of this stuff that was going on in the world. | ||
| I was busy. | ||
| I was living my life. | ||
| And so to see how this played out, it really did make me question everything about my belief system and the people I had aligned myself with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you just go through a little bit of what your political leanings were beforehand? | ||
| Yeah, I've called myself a liberal for like 20 years. | ||
| I've been a Democrat since I was 18 years old, since I was able to register to vote. | ||
| And frankly, I never really saw myself leaving the Democratic Party up until all this started happening. | ||
| So then this all happens and you did the scariest, most evil thing someone can do. | ||
| You went to a Donald J. Trump rally. | ||
| I did, but we have to back up a little bit because it didn't actually start there. | ||
| It started several months before the Trump rally. | ||
| And when all this was going on, I basically said, you know, I need to get out of my echo chamber. | ||
| I need to get out of my liberal echo chamber because that was the only people I was hearing from, not just liberals, but progressives and all this. | ||
| And I made this concerted effort to start listening to voices that I thought I would disagree with. | ||
| My husband, who has always been a little bit more conservative than me, said, Karlyn, you should listen to Ben Shapiro. | ||
| You should watch Ben Shapiro. | ||
| You'd like him. | ||
| And I said, no, Victor. | ||
| I'm not watching Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Ben Shapiro is Satan. | ||
| And then, I mean, my husband's a pretty smart guy. | ||
| So eventually I listened to him. | ||
| I waited until he was out of the house because I didn't want to give him that point. | ||
| But eventually I listened. | ||
| And, you know, turns out, as you know, Ben Shapiro is not Satan. | ||
| He is just like a conservative guy who is also really funny and really smart and I just happen to disagree with him on some things. | ||
| And from there it was kind of down the YouTube rabbit hole where I just started listening to all these different people and discovering Conservatives are really not what I thought they were. | ||
| It wasn't the perception that I had. | ||
| And, you know, living in New Hampshire, I'm very lucky. | ||
| I get to see all the political candidates up close. | ||
| And at one point or another, I had seen every other political candidate. | ||
| And I thought, you know, Donald Trump's coming to town. | ||
| Well, why not? | ||
| This is like my big graduation exercise. | ||
| Yeah, so alright, so you go to... well, first off, tell me a little bit more about those sort of what I describe as factory settings, that you were a liberal for 20 years. | ||
| Did it have any real meaning to you, or it was just sort of like... | ||
| Where I think a lot of somewhat apolitical people are, where it's sort of like, oh, Democrats good, Republicans bad, Democrats care about poor people, Republicans care about money. | ||
| Like, you know, for the person that's not purely political, it's just sort of the stuff that you kind of get culturally. | ||
| Is that basically where you were? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, kind of. | ||
| I think I was very active politically when I was younger, and then growing up I kind of—and really, after Obama was elected, I kind of shut it all off. | ||
| I was like, okay, he's got it, a Democrat's in office, it'll be fine. | ||
| But really, what I didn't realize is how much Democrats have changed Since, you know, between W and what we have now. | ||
| And that was really the big shocker for me because I became a Democrat because I didn't like, I didn't like people telling me what to do. | ||
| I didn't like people telling me what music I could listen to or trying to legislate their religion or what I could wear or all these things. | ||
| And that was what, and who to love as well. | ||
| And that was why I joined originally. | ||
| And it didn't occur to me that the Democratic Party had changed so much from the thing I joined. | ||
| Oh, I have heard this story before. | ||
| What did you think intuitively about the Republicans? | ||
| So you thought they wanted to tell you what music you could listen to and what video games you could play and the rest of it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there were horrible, evil people that just wanted to control everything I said and did was my perception of the Republicans. | ||
| Okay, so then Trump comes to New Hampshire and there we are. | ||
| There I am. | ||
| So the day started out actually at an MSNBC live taping that was taking place a couple blocks away from the Trump rally. | ||
| And I kind of went there first because I was very nervous about going to the Trump rally. | ||
| And I went there first because it was more of a comfort zone and just started chatting with people. | ||
| And everyone I told, I was like, I'm thinking about going over the rally. | ||
| And they were like, Don't do it. | ||
| They're horrible people. | ||
| They're the lowest of the low. | ||
| They're going to harass you. | ||
| One woman actually offered me her pepper spray to take with me and I was like, no, I think I'm gonna be fine. | ||
| It'll be okay. | ||
| And so then I went over to the rally and you know you have to get there early because the line is really big and long and you're just kind of hanging out and chatting with people and Discovered these are not bad people. | ||
| There was not a Klan uniform in sight. | ||
| I didn't meet a Nazi that I am aware of. | ||
| There's normal everyday people like veterans and school teachers and small business owners that just had different ideas about how the country should run. | ||
| How shocked were you? | ||
| I mean, it sounds obvious, right? | ||
| The way you're saying it now, it's like, of course it's obvious. | ||
| These are regular people. | ||
| They just happen to have different political thoughts than what is sort of more mainstream accepted. | ||
| But for you, as someone that wasn't part of this bubble, you get there and you start seeing this. | ||
| Like, were you just like completely blown away? | ||
| I think I was more relieved than anything, honestly. | ||
| I think I was just like, oh my god, these are people that I can have a conversation with, because that's something that is very void in the democratic space, is you have to agree with everyone, and if you don't agree with them, you're a horrible person. | ||
| And so I had, for a long time, kept some of my... I've always been a centrist, really. | ||
| I've never been terribly far left. | ||
| And I'd always kept my views to myself, whereas, like, these people, I was having robust conversations with them, even in line, and I let it slip a couple times, you know, oh, I'm a Democrat, and they were like, oh my God, welcome, you were so glad you're here. | ||
| And that was very different than what I was expecting. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I know the feeling. | |
| So then you go and you hear Trump talk, and okay, there's some agree-to-disagree stuff, no Nazis, all good. | ||
| You decide to write about it. | ||
| How'd that work out? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Well, I almost didn't even write the article, to be honest, because I was like, this is not my lane. | ||
| I don't want to talk about politics. | ||
| I'm going to get in trouble. | ||
| I'm going to make someone mad, whatever. | ||
| But then I sat down at my desk the next day and I just I had to get the article out of my system. | ||
| And so I went on to Medium because I was like, I don't really use Medium. | ||
| I hadn't published there in over a year. | ||
| It's like no one's ever going to see this. | ||
| And so I wrote the whole article about it. | ||
| Yeah, surprise. | ||
| Um, I wrote it in about 20 minutes and didn't even proofread it before I posted it and just threw it up and kind of posted it on a couple like Twitter and Facebook and all that and really thought nothing of it after that and it got about 200 views the first day and then the next day it was like a bomb went off on my life. | ||
| Yeah, so you put it up, you're not really expecting much of anything, and then you just can't control the viral nature of these things. | ||
| Do you know where the energy behind it started? | ||
| Was there a specific person that caught it that set it on fire? | ||
| I still haven't been able to figure that out, honestly. | ||
| It started going viral in the morning, and then I know a whole bunch of people from Fox News tweeted it, and Glenn Beck tweeted it, and at some point in the afternoon, Trump Jr. | ||
| tweeted it, and that was when it all really started going out of hand. | ||
| But, I mean, I haven't been able to pinpoint what exactly happened. | ||
| Okay, so the thing goes viral. | ||
| You're getting support from people that maybe you traditionally wouldn't have thought would have supported you. | ||
| The president's son. | ||
| I mean, this is getting weird. | ||
| What kind of reaction did you get? | ||
| And why don't you just lay out a little bit more what you said in the article? | ||
| I mean, it's sort of what you've laid out here, but maybe a little more specifically, so that when we talk about the reaction, it'll be a little better framed. | ||
| Yeah, so basically what I said in the article was that, you know, we need to start taking steps towards one another and to start healing the political divides. | ||
| And that, that I think was the big message I wanted people to take away from it is that Trump supporters are not bad people. | ||
| And, you know, hopefully a liberal writing this article, if Trump supporters think that, you know, I'm a bad person, they're going to see that, you know, someone, someone has your back. | ||
| And I think that that was what a lot of Trump supporters really appreciated about it was there was this person coming and saying, "You're not a Nazi. I know you're not a Nazi. We just have | ||
| different ideas and let's talk about those ideas." And so, yeah, and then it was off and | ||
| running. And the response from the Trump supporters or the conservative community, and | ||
| those are not always the same thing, I've discovered, it's been amazing, right? | ||
| They embraced me, and so many of them said, you know, I don't agree with you on a lot of political issues, but I'm so glad you wrote this, I'm so glad you're speaking your mind, and let's have those conversations. | ||
| And a lot of them too, I mean, I was overwhelmed with the amount of notes I got from people saying, you know, my husband is a Republican, I'm a Democrat, I don't know how to make our marriage survive, or You know, people who have lost family members over this, and so a lot of people really appreciated that. | ||
| I think they saw in me someone that said, you know, it's possible to get over your Trump derangement syndrome, and that gave a lot of people hope. | ||
| Yeah, and then, you know, you find yourself on the other side of this, and then suddenly all the people that you might have thought were bad guys are being nice to you and agreeing to disagree and the rest of it. | ||
| There's a moment there where you have to kind of be like, oh, was I really wrong? | ||
| You have to do a little self-reflection, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I've been actually pretty transparent since then that I, you know, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing. | ||
| I had it for years. | ||
| I regret so many of the things that I've said to people over the last couple years now that I've seen the other side of it. | ||
| Can you tell me some of the types of things that you would say to people? | ||
| Because when people talk about it as being a real thing, it's sort of this knee-jerk response that people just go to. | ||
| So I think hearing you sort of say the type of things that maybe you would have said to somebody would be kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah, so there was one person specifically that was a Trump supporter that was always posting on my aunt's Facebook page like these crazy things and I would say horrible things to this woman because my aunt wasn't a Trump supporter and she was obviously annoyed by it so I was trying to defend her a little bit. | ||
| And I would call this woman every name in the book. | ||
| I would say anything I could that I thought might hurt her to try to get her to stop. | ||
| And I look back on that now and I'm like, oh my God, like, what were you thinking? | ||
| Because it just skews absolutely everything. | ||
| The way you see everything. | ||
| I thought this was completely okay. | ||
| I was like, she supports Trump. | ||
| That means she's a horrible person and she deserves to have these things said. | ||
| So in that relationship specifically, I'm very regretful of many of the things that came out of my mouth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| So now you're agreeing to disagree with some people, but I'm guessing that you get this article out there and it didn't just become a love fest on all sides, did it? | ||
| No, it did not become a love fest on all sides. | ||
| And there was definitely, I mean, all the blowback that you typically hear from the left, I definitely was on the receiving end of that blowback. | ||
| I have gotten more hate mail in the past two months than I ever thought I would get to experience in my lifetime. | ||
| It's been super fun. | ||
| But I mean, the hate mail, like whatever. | ||
| The overwhelming love from the conservative community has kind of balanced out the hate mail, but the thing that really has been impactful in my life is that I lost clients over this. | ||
| Clients that I have served well, clients that they would even say when they emailed me, you know, you've always been great for our team, they've always loved you, but we can't work together anymore. | ||
| And, you know, and also my friends. | ||
| I mean, I lost so many friends over this. | ||
| I actually came from the world of higher education. | ||
| A lot of my friends were in higher education. | ||
| And over time, I had watched them become pod people and didn't really understand it. | ||
| And I think when this all happened, the rubber kind of met the road. | ||
| And I've lost friends that I was friends with for decades, people that I was in their weddings, or people that, you know, I've always been there to get on a plane and go see them anytime they needed anything. | ||
| And so that's been that's been the most difficult piece of it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the part that I think people can't really believe because, you know, every few months a story like yours bursts forth and the way I get to it is that suddenly on Twitter everyone's like, Dave, Dave, there's another one, it's happening right now, and then, you know, then you came to my attention and it happened before you with James Damore, Brett Weinstein, or a plethora, Lindsey Shepard, a whole slew of other people who are all lefties, in some cases academics, You know, I've been very blessed to have made a lot of new friends in this experience and the old ones I have kind of just let go away because if they're going to break off a friendship of years or over a decade in some cases | ||
| Then, really, are those people that I want in my life anymore. | ||
| And, you know, not all friendships or relationships are meant to last forever. | ||
| Maybe you can appreciate the things that were good, but, you know, the thing of it is, is a lot of them, too, it's, it, they didn't even say anything to me. | ||
| It was just, like, one day they stopped talking to me, and one day I noticed they unfriended me on Facebook. | ||
| And, and so if they want to go over something so silly, then fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about the ones that did talk to you though? | ||
| Because I had similar things. | ||
| I mean, I had at least one friend who was invited to my wedding that, you know, told me I was a racist and that was it. | ||
| Even though, you know, she couldn't point to anything racist I said, but it was enough to just say it, that it's self-evident, you know what I mean? | ||
| What were the types of things that people were saying to you? | ||
| And did you, were you ever able to walk anyone back off the ledge? | ||
| Because that's what I think a lot of people are always curious about. | ||
| They're afraid that if they come out, so to speak, out of the political closet, that they're going to lose friends and they won't know how to react when people say all these horrible things about them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'll start with the good news. | ||
| The good news is that there were people that maybe they were never like the Uber lefties that stuck around and I was able to have conversations with them. | ||
| I actually just had one earlier today with someone who was just asking my opinion on the federal judges that Trump appointed and all that. | ||
| And we had a good conversation. | ||
| It was a good dialogue. | ||
| And so there is hope that some of your friends will stick around. | ||
| But the other things that happened is I have this one in particular and I've been very transparent about documenting what's been going on in my experience. | ||
| And I actually posted a video to my YouTube. | ||
| The other day of me reading something that one of my friends posted on my wall and like crying and all that stuff. | ||
| And it actually reminded me of something I think I heard from you, which is you had a conversation with a friend and you asked him, do you think I believe what I do as strongly as you believe what you believe? | ||
| And he said, no. | ||
| And it was exactly the same thing. | ||
| Exactly the same thing. | ||
| And I was so angry at her because she was like, you're just pandering and doing all this stuff for the left for ego stroking and all this. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm really not. | ||
| This is actually what I believe. | ||
| And I just could never tell you what I believed because this would happen. | ||
| Yeah, and just that concept, though, that you wouldn't grant someone that you're friends with the belief that they might believe what they purport, what they say to believe. | ||
| It's so profoundly offensive. | ||
| It's really something. | ||
| You know, you'll find this interesting. | ||
| I haven't even said this publicly before, but I have a friend who's a public person in the political space. | ||
| Well, I can't say he's a friend. | ||
| A former friend who has publicly gone after me many times over the last couple years, who called me in the last few months to apologize because he heard me say that exact line that you just quoted and he got it used against him by someone that was further left than him. | ||
| And then he thought, whoa, maybe I've been wrong about Dave all these years. | ||
| We've been trying to figure out how we can have a public mea culpa. | ||
| But that's the thing that I always say. | ||
| It comes for everyone. | ||
| So the people that are using these tactics on you, if they ever have a flicker of an original thought, it'll come for them too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what I've been telling people is that the only thing that you can really do for people like that in your life is create the space for them to change and create the space for them to come around. | ||
| I can't force my friends to do anything. | ||
| I can't force my friends or former friends, I suppose, to see me in a certain way. | ||
| But someday they might have an aha moment, just like I had the aha moment. | ||
| And if that happens, then I'm not going to make them feel bad. | ||
| I'm not going to make them grovel on the ground to get back in my life. | ||
| I'm just going to say, I love you and I accept you. | ||
| And, you know, I'm glad we can move forward. | ||
| So are you a card-carrying Republican now? | ||
| I'm not a card-carrying Republican. | ||
| I did, an interesting epilogue to my article, is I did actually end up going to CPAC right after it came out, because everyone was telling me it was about a week and a half afterwards, and they were like, you have to go, you have to go, you have to go. | ||
| And I had a really great experience at CPAC, actually. | ||
| Again, like, liberty-loving people, and I'm a fan of that. | ||
| But no, I am I deregistered from the Democratic Party a couple days after my article came out. | ||
| I became an independent. | ||
| I was very excited to do that. | ||
| And I'm just going to sit in the middle for a while because fundamentally, my perception of both parties is that they're like two sides of the same coin. | ||
| They act exactly the same and neither of them wants to admit it. | ||
| And I have, you know, Democratic tendencies. | ||
| I have more conservative tendencies. | ||
| And so I'm just going to sit back with my popcorn and let them fight it out. | ||
| So using a little bit of your educational training, the psychological aspect of all this, have you thought, I'm sure you have, about perhaps the psychological makeup that leads someone to be a lefty or that leads someone to be a righty and why it would be that right now, like this moment we're at right now, why the lefties would be so hysterical and authoritarian while the people on the right, broadly speaking, are much more open and decent? | ||
| Do you have any theories behind that? | ||
| Yeah, I think that people on the left tend to be much more focused on emotions and how people feel, whereas people on the right are just like, just the facts, please. | ||
| Just the logic. | ||
| And I think that that plays into a huge role. | ||
| And I think a lot of people on the left, with their crazy hysteria, I think for most of them, it comes from a good place of wanting to make the world better. | ||
| for people to be accepted for exactly who they are and they don't realize that the folks on the on the right are already much more open than they have probably ever been to people who look differently or speak differently or think differently or live differently and they don't realize that shift has taken place and so they're doubling down on the left because they think it's the only way to create this more fair just world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think the biggest fear for the people that were trying to destroy you and make sure that you couldn't maintain business relationships and the rest is that partly what it is I think, I think at least, is that their ideas have become so thin that they fear that if they let you walk, if they let me walk, if they let any of this endless amount of people walk, That everyone will walk. | ||
| And when I now go to events or most of the public speaking that I do, which is I'm only invited by conservatives and libertarians really, and I tell them what my differences are and it's all good, I see a truly diverse group of people. | ||
| Now, it may be because of their gender and sexuality and skin color. | ||
| I don't really care about that, but there is some of that, sure. | ||
| But I see people debating and nobody's angry at each other. | ||
| I mean, that's the weird thing. | ||
| So that welcoming thing, it's like the lefties can't really let you see that, because if you see that, well, that's pretty attractive to know you could go into a room and say what you think and not be harangued for it. | ||
| I think that that's giving a lot of lefties a little bit too much credit, to be honest, for where a lot of them are right now. | ||
| I don't do that too often. | ||
| Well, and I think, you know, I mean, and I had the same experience as CPAC. | ||
| One of the most surprising things to me about CPAC was it was such a diverse audience, and some of the people that were the most celebrated were people that the left would say are in these marginalized, oppressed communities. | ||
| And so, no, I mean, I really think that they just see, I mean, just like I did, they perceive Republicans as being this closed group that just wants to keep everyone that aren't old white men down. | ||
| And I think that, you know, what's what's fascinating is that the left can't articulate arguments. | ||
| They can't even have debates. | ||
| They can't just have they can't have discussions. | ||
| They don't know why they believe what they believe. | ||
| And once you start analyzing that, you really start to see that, oh, this isn't what I thought it was at all. | ||
| So I think you're right that if you let people analyze these things, they are going to walk. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So has business all worked itself out and you're doing okay, not under threat? | ||
| And where is the knitting community at the moment? | ||
| I mean, did this, was this the gamer gate of knitting? | ||
| Did it blow apart the entire thing? | ||
| Well, what's funny is that this is actually still going on in the knitting community. | ||
| So there's actually, this just happened this week, where there is a yarn store in New Zealand | ||
| that actually creates some of Sockmetition's yarn, who we talked about earlier, who had the nervous breakdown. | ||
| And they've gotten actually special permission from the government to stay open during this, | ||
| to continue to supply people. | ||
| It's a lot of people using knitting for mental health purposes. | ||
| And so what's happened is the SJWs are now mobbing them and trying to get them shut down. | ||
| And they've actually called the police on them, and now they're trying to get | ||
| their government permission rescinded. | ||
| And so this is still going on. | ||
| But I think what's unique about the knitting world is that a lot of us are now pushing back. | ||
| And it actually really started with, I mean, when my article got so much attention | ||
| and they had this giant spotlight on them, so many new people started speaking up | ||
| and started posting videos to say, "This is not okay. | ||
| I am not okay with this." | ||
| And I actually think that this could be a model for when this happens in other communities for, you know, people can speak up, people can organize, people can say, no, you're mobbing and bullying is not all right. | ||
| And if you get enough people to do that, then you can start to take their power away. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that and I don't know that anyone has ever been better equipped to deal with it than a psychologist who specializes in bullying. | ||
| So you survived, you made it to the other side. | ||
| Do you have any other, you know, pieces of advice or wisdom that you would share with anyone going through their own version of this right now? | ||
| What I would say is that the freedom that I have discovered in being able to speak my mind without fear is just something that I wouldn't trade for anything. | ||
| Listen, like, I was terrified when my article went viral. | ||
| I was like, this is gonna destroy everything. | ||
| I'm gonna lose my business. | ||
| I'm gonna lose everything I've worked for for years. | ||
| But that hasn't happened. | ||
| And there is some temporary pain to go through this type of experience. | ||
| However, I'm so glad it happened because now I feel like I completely lost my filter. | ||
| Now I can say whatever I want and they can't come and hurt me. | ||
| And so I wouldn't trade it for the world. | ||
| That is how you end an interview. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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