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July 23, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Exposing Why Even Red States' Schools Are No Longer Safe | Liz Wheeler | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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liz wheeler
I think one of the interesting things to observe is in the past couple years, since COVID really, a lot of people, and this, I don't want to tell tales on my husband, but my husband is included in this category, didn't believe that some of this radical gender ideology was in their local public school, right?
Like you believe that it was in California.
You might've believed it was in New York.
You believed in an isolated incident that you read on the news here or there, but you didn't believe that it was everywhere.
That it could be in your own neighborhood, in front of your own child.
And I think parents have really been awakened to the fact that this capture of our education system is complete.
This capture of our education institution is total, and that your child will not be able to avoid it.
You can't opt them out of social emotional learning.
It's too integrated into Everything about schools and social-emotional learning, a lot of parents know what this is and they find it to be questionable.
I talk about this in my book because social-emotional learning is another name for the critical consciousness that Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist, wanted every child to be brainwashed with.
It's disguised as, oh, this is how we teach children values, this is how we teach them morals, this is how we teach them to behave in a manner that reflects right and wrong.
But We should all be asking, well, what is your definition of right and wrong?
What is your definition of a value?
dave rubin
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the host of the Liz Wheeler Show as well as the
author of the new book, Hide Your Children, Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on
America's Kids.
Liz Wheeler, welcome back to The Rubin Report.
liz wheeler
Hi, Dave.
Thanks for having me.
dave rubin
Liz, I think, if I'm not mistaken, this is your first solo appearance on The Rubin Report?
You've been on like a thousand panel shows, but is this our first one-on-one?
liz wheeler
It is, it is.
It doesn't seem like the first time because I'm so often on your Friday show, but yes, this is basically what it's like when you and I hang out.
dave rubin
We shall see, we shall see.
A lot of pressure, sister.
Alright, just real briefly for the, most of my audience of course knows you, but for the people that do not know you, you want to give a minute recap of who Liz Wheeler is and why it is that she's trying to save our kids from the Marxists?
liz wheeler
Yes, indeed.
I'm Liz Wheeler.
I host The Liz Wheeler Show.
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you watch or listen to your pods.
I'm a political commentator.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
Maybe not YouTube.
head over to Rumble if you value free speech because we talk about a lot of topics that
are not allowed on YouTube. But what I'm most dedicated to, I'm a mom, I'm dedicated to
preserving this country, this great country of ours for my family, for my two and a half year
old daughter. I see what's happening before our very eyes.
I see the capture of our institutions.
I see the degradation of the fabric of ordered society and I don't want that for my daughter.
The best part of this country is it gives us the opportunity to live virtuously, to worship the God
that we want, to say what we want, to live our lives according to the tenets of our viewpoints.
And if we don't stop the assault against those things, then we're not going to have the country that we have.
So we talk about everything from COVID to transgenderism to election integrity to the administrative state, really pushing aside the establishment republicanism that has actually led us to where we are.
And taking a more based view of reality in trying to solve the crisis that we're facing.
dave rubin
When did you realize the level of the craziness that we were fighting?
Meaning something that was beyond just, oh, we're arguing about tax breaks and we're arguing about, you know, little this and that issues, but sort of the big cultural stuff that of course leads to all the stuff related to kids.
liz wheeler
Yeah, that's a good question.
I'd like to think, and maybe this is too self-flattering, I'd like to think I've been based for a long time because the way that I got into politics and got into political commentary was kind of by accident.
In late high school, I was diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease and I spent a lot of time Well, being sick with that and recovering from that.
And during that period of time, you know, when you're sick, you're kind of bored.
There's not a lot that you can do physically.
So I started reading a lot of books and getting involved.
This was like at the very beginning of political Twitter, getting involved in political discussions on Twitter.
That was one of my interests.
I liked sort of the adrenaline that went with politics.
But I also, at the same time, given what I was dealing with personally, came to a realization that these so-called institutions
that we trust, the quote-unquote experts aren't always dedicated to being an expert in their
field.
They're not always dedicated to science.
For example, there was no pharmaceutical solution to the autoimmune disease that, you know,
I still manage, I still deal with.
And what does big pharma do?
They just kind of brush you to the side.
They aren't interested in saying, well, maybe if you manage your diet differently, maybe
if there's some kind of natural supplements or something that you can do alternatively,
that this would help you have more chance of living a normal life.
They don't give any of that advice.
They're only interested in profiteering off of people's problems.
So I think that I was.
For better or for worse, red-pilled at a relatively early age because I saw that the only reason that I was able to actually pursue those alternative means to health was because my dad is a small business owner and he used the money that he saved to pay out of pocket for these alternative treatments Whereas, if we were in a socialist nation and he wasn't free to enjoy the fruits of his labor, if we had a socialized healthcare system, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
So I think I was red-pilled and kind of cynical about institutions from the beginning, and then once you realize that that's the case in one institution, you see it happening in the other institutions as well.
dave rubin
And isn't that ironic because some of the positions you were talking about being, you know, sort of leery of, say, Big Pharma, those would have been thought of as lefty positions, say, 15 years ago.
Yes.
And now, especially since COVID, that has just completely flipped on us.
liz wheeler
It's so funny because for the majority of my adult life, I'm 34, and for the majority of my adult life, I've lived in two different worlds.
I live in the, I would say, very conservative world in politics, and then I live with a bunch of, I live in a world, not literally, not like a commune, but with a bunch of Crunchy leftists who also go to the chiropractor and also try to eat plant-based.
And these people are generally, like, really woo-woo, hippy-dippy, crunchy people.
And they're leftists in their politics for whatever reason.
But now it is funny.
It's even like questioning things, like questioning vaccines.
That was always a leftist position until the COVID vaccine and now the right has adopted that.
It's funny to be in my position where I've always been on the line of conservative politics but leftist, if you will, health views because now it's like, well, yes, join the club.
dave rubin
Right.
You were also much like me.
You were in Cali for COVID.
You fled California.
You did not make it to the free state of Florida.
You went elsewhere.
But you want to talk about how you were based in Cali during a time of COVID?
liz wheeler
Yes, yes I will.
And by the way, for everyone watching and listening to this, this is an ongoing, this is bullying from Dave to get me to come to Florida, which I appreciate.
I appreciate, although the humidity might be a little high.
I love California.
Here's the thing, I don't, I don't hate California with this, this visceral, this visceral rage that a lot of people feel towards it.
I think California is paradise.
I think there's a reason that historically the Golden State was the land of opportunity.
This is where you would go, California, to seek your fortune, really, to find the American dream.
And it actually breaks my heart to see what's happening in California because California is still paradise in a sense.
It's beautiful.
There's so many resources.
It's like nowhere else in the United States.
My heart is in California.
And it really is just crushing to see what leftist politics do to a land that is so beautiful and so prosperous and somewhere that it used to be everyone desired to move to, but with the open border and with Gavin Newsom at the helm, with his technocratic dictatorship, In California, with his dedication to quote-unquote climate change, with cracking down on free speech.
They have a law right now that they're trying to pass.
It's a bill, I suppose, that they're trying to pass into law that would actually define parents who decline to put their children on a gender-affirming, quote-unquote gender-affirming model as child abusers.
You can't raise a family in a climate like that.
You risk losing your child, the thing around which your entire life revolves.
I mean, We are fighting in politics, Dave, you and I, because we want what's best for our children.
It's not even about us.
We're adults.
We're halfway through our lives already.
This is about what's best for our families.
And you can't raise a family in that circumstance.
You have to leave.
And it makes me really sad because I didn't want to leave.
dave rubin
It's so interesting, because for me, you know, as a relatively new father, like when that thing was being passed in Cali, which passed the legislature, by the way, right?
I mean, it's passed already.
Now it's about divorced families, but they're going to expand it, obviously.
I kept saying on the show, it's like, you must leave now.
now if you're a parent because you're sending your kids to schools where they
will be brainwashed into this stuff and you don't want to be there that day when
they come knocking at your door and you know we're calling your your daughter a
boy's name and if you don't accept it we're taking the kid but it's real yeah
liz wheeler
it's it's real And this is what I write in my book.
I mean, the left is actually waging a deliberate and relentless assault on our children.
This is not hyperbole.
This is not bombastic.
This has been going on for the last century.
For a century, the left has attempted to re-engineer society.
They've actually captured and co-opted four of the five foundational cultural institutions
in our nation, the media and religion and education and law, and they've just about
destroyed the family as well.
There's one element that is remaining of the family and that is children, and the left
now has their sights set on our children.
And meanwhile, while all of this was happening, what were conservatives doing?
We were complacent.
We were blind to this.
We were blithely unaware as this was happening.
And now we have a new.
We face what we're facing.
We face a literal assault on our children.
And so in the book, I name the names of the people behind not only the capture of these institutions, but behind the attack on America's kids.
If we don't acknowledge the reality of the political enemy that we're facing, we'll lose.
We will not win.
And it's not just a matter of fighting for the sake of children's individual souls.
If the left successfully captures children, our nation is done.
dave rubin
So one thing that I thought was interesting in terms of the title is that you said Marxists.
You didn't say Wokesters.
You didn't say Communists or Socialists.
You said Marxists.
I wonder, what was your thinking on that?
Do you want to define it clearly and maybe contrast it to some of those other terms?
Because everyone's sort of using them interchangeably these days.
liz wheeler
It is, and it's actually interesting because when I started writing this book, I wasn't looking for Marxists.
It wasn't a fishing expedition.
I acknowledged what almost every person in our country has acknowledged, that there is this sustained assault on our children from all of these different angles.
And I thought, why?
Why now?
Why in this coordinated way?
And it turns out the answer to that question isn't a why, it's a who.
Who is behind this and why are they doing that?
And it turned out that there was a pattern of ideology behind each of these assaults.
So, for example, what I found is there is a Marxist by the name of Antonio Gramsci who essentially brought back from the dead original Marxism.
He revived it and turned it into 21st century Marxism.
And he twisted it from purely economic Marxism, like, oh, the working class is going to revolt against the ruling class.
He turned it into, well, wait a second.
The working class isn't going to revolt against the ruling class if they rely on the cultural institutions of the working class.
So he said, before we stage an economic revolution, we have to stage a cultural revolution.
We have to go after these five major foundational civil institutions.
The media, education, religion, the law.
And the family.
And what we are seeing now, it's so interesting, Dave, what we're seeing right now is not new.
It's not a new idea.
It's not a new ideology.
It's not a new enemy.
It's actually sometimes hundreds of years old.
It's just been repurposed for this moment.
It's why I say if we don't acknowledge what we're facing, we're not going to fight well against it.
But once you see who's behind the assault on each of these institutions, I mean, you can certainly put a stop to it, because you can simply thwart their strategy, which these old Marxists lay out maybe even more clearly than the new leftists do today.
dave rubin
Do you make any meaningful distinction between some of those terms?
Woke, Marxist, Communist, Socialist?
At this point, does it matter to delineate that any further?
liz wheeler
Yeah, it does matter.
So the word woke.
A month or two ago, there was a debate.
It crossed over from conservative media to liberal media about what the word woke means.
What's the definition of the word woke?
What does this mean?
And it's a great question.
It's a question we should all be asking.
dave rubin
So I actually traced back... Can I do mine in two sentences and you tell me if I'm doing it all right?
Because everybody was asking.
Can I do mine?
liz wheeler
Lay it on me.
dave rubin
It's believing in equity over equality with a dash of racism and a little gender confusion.
How's that?
liz wheeler
That's exactly how it's manifested and applied.
The ideology underneath it can be traced directly to a Brazilian Marxist named Paulo Freire.
Paulo Freire applied this idea to the education system in Brazil.
He actually experimented on peasants in Brazil.
He ran these like 45-day experiments on peasants, teaching them only leftist things in school so that they would then go out and vote for leftist politicians.
And he said that teaching knowledge in school was oppressive.
He said knowledge, there's no such thing as knowledge, there's no such thing as truth or objective reality.
It's just, he said, he defined knowledge and fact as just the prevailing political ideology, right?
He said children, instead of being taught knowledge, should be taught critical consciousness, which is a way of thinking about the world.
Now, critical consciousness is just a euphemism for teaching children to view everything through the lens of Marxism.
That's what wokeness is.
Wokeness is just a rebranding of Freire's critical consciousness.
So if you look at wokeness in our country, whether it's corporations, whether it's in the classroom, whether it's DEI, whether it's gender ideology, it's all Freire's critical consciousness.
It's training this young generation of American children to view everything through the Marxist lens of oppressor versus oppressed.
That the oppressed have to revolt against the oppressors, overthrow the civil institutions, For what purpose?
For the purpose that Marxists have laid out from the very beginning to overthrow Western civilization.
dave rubin
As evil as you think the ideology obviously is, are you ever impressed with their ability to have had it spread and how quickly it's destroyed so much?
And also how no matter what happens, it always causes them to double down.
So, you know, for example, if we reverse systemic racism through the Supreme Court getting rid of affirmative action, somehow now that actually is proof to them that the courts are corrupt, thus more fuel for their fire.
liz wheeler
Listen, you know what impresses me and what I actually paused when I was writing this book because it hit me as a revelation?
It impresses me that the Democratic Party today always operates as a cohesive unit.
They never have any significant dissenters.
They always are marching in lockstep.
And you compare that to Republicans in Congress or in the Senate, and Republicans seem kind of haphazard.
They're not always cohesive.
They can't always move as a unit.
And sometimes conservatives are like, oh, that's because we allow independent thinkers in the Republican Party.
That's not actually why Republicans don't operate in lockstep.
It's because Democrats are committed to their ideology.
They know what their ultimate goal is, and they know the tools that they're using to achieve their ultimate goal.
But Republicans have lost sight of what our ultimate goal is.
If you ask any Republican in elected office, any Republican commentator, a Republican voter, But what is the ultimate goal of our society?
What do we hope to achieve with our society?
Most of them can't answer what that is.
They can't answer, well, is freedom the means to something greater or is freedom the ultimate end?
Those two things are radically different and radically change what our governing philosophy is at the state level and the federal level.
And if we don't, as Republicans, have a cohesive definition of what we want for our society, then of course we're not going to agree on how we achieve that.
And then we're just going to be a chaotic party like we are.
And what happens when we have a chaotic party?
It leads us to the cultural crisis that we're in right now.
dave rubin
Yeah.
Do you sense some of that shifting with the Republicans at all?
liz wheeler
I sense a new and I find delightful tension in the Republican Party where some people are waking up to the fact that the old guard of Republicanism isn't effective.
I think a lot of people don't know why the old guard isn't effective.
We oftentimes ascribe it to just being corrupt, and don't get me wrong, there's plenty of corruption in politics, even on the Republican side, but it's not just corruption.
It is the lack of ability to define that the goal of a society should be human flourishing.
We want human beings to flourish.
That's what we want from a society.
That's the goal of the United States of America, our experiment in liberty.
The goal is human flourishing.
Maybe we define human flourishing differently than the left does, which just begets another conversation.
How are we going to define?
What's the base level here?
The reality that we will all agree on to build our society off of towards something.
Towards what?
What are we going to order it for?
What's the purpose of liberty?
And I'll give you a concrete example here.
So, David French, we all know him.
He was at the National Review.
He's now in the New York Times.
He now writes for the New York Times.
He made an argument once that drag queen story hours where grown men dressing as sexualized stereotypical versions of women gyrate in front of children in scanty outfits.
It's horrendous.
He once made the argument that that was one of the blessings of liberty guaranteed in our constitution.
And I actually think that this is a perfect example of a disordered view on whether liberty should be the means to something greater or whether liberty is the end in and of itself.
If you define liberty as the ultimate goal, Then yes, David French is correct, because just the liberty to do something like that, even if you and I find it to be horrendous, would be moral because they have the liberty to do that.
But we understand, everyone understands, that this is not a moral thing.
This is an abjectly immoral thing for men to act in that sexual manner around children.
It's horrendous.
We all know this at a gut level, a visceral level, which should Bring us to the question, okay, well if liberty is not the ultimate end, then what is the ultimate end?
Is liberty but the means to something greater?
And if so, we should pass laws and order our society from the local, state, and federal level, our institutions such as the education system and our religious institutions, towards that which liberty allows us to achieve.
dave rubin
So would you say that our institutions can actually be reverted back to something more sane, or can change at all, or do you think they all need to be blown up?
Or maybe it's case by case, depending on religious institution versus governmental, etc.
liz wheeler
Both.
I mean, there are obvious examples of institutions that should just be razed and rebuilt in some form, like the FBI or, you know, the Department of Justice or the public school system that have just been captured beyond recognizable, beyond what is recognizable.
They've been completely hijacked and weaponized and are being used for evil and they should be abolished.
We should get rid of them and we can then discuss what comes next.
But we can recapture our institutions.
It's possible.
It's not easy, and I don't want to be one of those Republicans that says, oh, you know what?
If you just pray a lot, or if you just make good decisions in your personal life, that will have a trickle-down effect to politics.
I'm not degrading either of those things.
I'm a devout Christian.
I pray every day.
I try to order my personal life and my family life towards what I think is good and right and beautiful and just.
But that's not enough.
Conservatives have fallen for this idea that government in and of itself is bad and therefore any use of government is somehow tinged with stigma, right?
That only liberals use government to achieve their ends.
This is not true.
This is not how our constitution was set up.
We actually have a responsibility and a duty to use government to properly order our society towards I would argue that freedom is a means to justice.
We should use our government to order our society towards true justice.
In fact, I don't believe in neutrality.
So I don't believe that if we withdraw from government because we don't want the stigma of using government to achieve our ends, I don't believe that we can keep a neutral playing field.
Either the left is going to occupy it or we're going to occupy it.
Right now the left is, but we can.
There's nothing holding us back except ourselves.
dave rubin
Would you say the best current example of that is what's gone on with Disney over the past year where DeSantis actively decided to fight the culture war and then suddenly Republicans, like Mike Pence, like Chris Christie, like Nikki Haley, all were suddenly saying, whoa, whoa, this isn't what we use government for.
And it's like, If that's not what you use government for, to get rid of prony capitalism, to save our children, etc, etc, then I don't know, then I guess you're all anarchists more than, let's say, Republicans or Conservatives, I guess would be your point.
liz wheeler
Yes, that's a perfect example.
That's a perfect example.
DeSantis, Governor DeSantis, used his just power as governor to order society to hold accountable an organization that had special privileges from the government when it benefited the people of the state and revoking those special privileges when that entity no longer benefited the state.
He had an absolute right to do that.
It's not even controversial.
Another good example is the bills in states across the country.
Some of them are laws.
They're basically in litigation right now on whether states can prohibit transgender surgeries for minors.
You have a lot of Republican candidates, even candidates for president.
I think Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson both said, you know, that's not the role of the government to ban that.
That should be a parent's decision.
And my response to that is, You don't, you don't understand reality here.
We already use government to prohibit parents from abusing their children, right?
You're not allowed to physically or verbally abuse your child as, as that's, that's correct.
That's exactly what the government should do is, is prevent that type of abuse.
And we use it culturally and societally too.
A child, for example, is not allowed to go in under the floor of a casino.
Why?
Because as a society, we agree that that is not a moral thing, a proper thing for a child to be doing.
A child's not allowed to go into an establishment that primarily serves alcohol.
We already use the government to, not to supersede parental rights, I'm all about parental rights, but to protect children from abuse, to protect children from abject immorality.
If it is not the role of the government to protect these young children from exploitation, from pharmaceuticals and cross-sex hormones and surgery that will ruin their bodies for life, Then, my goodness, what is the purpose of government?
Like, why do we even bother?
dave rubin
How much of the stuff related to kids, as you mentioned, you have a two and a half year old, you've given us a lot of sage wisdom as new fathers over here, but being a new mother, how much of that affected how clearly, passionately you feel about all of this?
And what do you think you'll do going forward in terms of schooling and all of that?
Because these are decisions I'm going to have to make as well soon enough.
liz wheeler
Yeah, definitely.
And just for everyone watching, you should know that the majority of our texting threads are like crunchy parenting advice being sent back and forth.
It's a constant.
No, it's already impacted my decisions about how my husband and I have begun to raise our two-and-a-half-year-old.
We don't defer to the experts.
You know that I'm kind of anti-pediatrician because I don't trust best pediatricians who are beholden to the American Academy
of Pediatrics.
If they don't operate by the standards of care that the American Academy of Pediatrics
lays out, then they can be held legally accountable or they're liable legally.
And so they don't give their best judgment.
They just say what the AAP says.
The AAP recommends transgender surgeries.
I mean, it's one thing to question the vaccine.
They don't even want you questioning the schedule.
I had RFK Jr.
on last week.
with a 74 vaccine schedule for children and the questionable efficacy and safety of that vaccine
and the fact that you're not allowed as a parent to question it.
I mean, it's already impacted how we raise our daughter.
dave rubin
You're not even allowed to question the schedule, right?
I mean, it's one thing to question the vaccine.
They don't even want you questioning the schedule.
I had RFK Jr. on last week.
That's what we were discussing.
liz wheeler
Yeah, I had to fire my first pediatrician that I had for my daughter
because he was just giving me the business about questioning or spacing or doing anything
that differed just slightly from the CDC and the AAP's recommended schedule.
And I'm like, I'm not about this.
Like, I'm the parent here.
I don't want to co-parent with the government.
I don't want to co-parent with a corrupted institution.
Going forward, I mean, we're planning, she's only two and a half, so she has a few years, but we're planning to homeschool.
There's no way that I'm going to send my child to a public school, no way in this world.
I think one of the interesting things to observe is in the past couple years, since COVID really, a lot of people, and this, I don't want to tell tales on my husband, but my husband is included in this category, didn't believe that some of this radical gender ideology was in their local public school, right?
Like you believe that it was in California.
You might've believed it was in New York.
You believed in an isolated incident that you read on the news here or there, but you didn't believe that it was everywhere.
That it could be in your own neighborhood, in front of your own child.
And I think parents have really been awakened to the fact that this capture of our education system is complete.
This capture of our education institution is total, and that your child will not be able to avoid it.
You can't opt them out of social-emotional learning.
It's too integrated into Everything about schools and social-emotional learning, a lot of parents know what this is and they find it to be questionable.
I talk about this in my book because social-emotional learning is another name for the critical consciousness that Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist, wanted every child to be brainwashed with.
It's disguised as, oh, this is how we teach children values, this is how we teach them morals, this is how we teach them to behave in a manner that reflects right and wrong.
But We should all be asking, well, what is your definition of right and wrong?
What is your definition of a value?
And if you dig into that, social-emotional learning, which is in every public school, most private schools too, in our country, it's just Marxism.
It is a Marxist worldview.
It's critical consciousness.
It's wokeness.
Whatever term you want to use to describe it.
And I cannot expose my child to that.
So I'm sitting here waiting for the Hillsdale homeschool curriculum to drop.
Hint, hint, anybody at Hillsdale.
dave rubin
I can't say too much but I know that a couple people in Florida are working on a couple solutions to this stuff that might work out because you know you've got a two and a half year old so there's a little time to play with there.
I think a lot of people are sort of on board this idea that the secular institutions have failed, but maybe they're not quite realizing how badly the religious institutions have also failed.
And I would say that probably goes across virtually all of the religious institutions in the country, regardless of denomination.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
liz wheeler
Yeah, it's quite sad.
I'm a devout Catholic, I'm a practicing Christian, and it was quite sad doing the research for this part of my book, because I looked at some of the surveys about not just religious participation, like attendance of church, that's obviously down and it's been trending down for a long time, but if you look at what people actually believe, there's only three out of ten young Americans, this is Gen Z and Millennials, if Millennials can still be termed young, and as a Millennial I still claim that term, Only 3 out of 10 believe in the God of the Bible.
That means that the overwhelming majority of young people in America don't believe in anything greater, in anything bigger, in God, in that aspect of reality.
And it explains somewhat why there's so much confusion about terms like justice and right and wrong and morality and empathy and love and compassion and tolerance.
Because if you don't have some kind of fundamental belief Then everything emanates out of that, right?
Like, even in our society right now, we have laws against homicide, we have laws against assault, we have laws against rape.
Why do we have these laws?
Why do we have them?
Why are these laws different for human beings than they are for dogs or horses?
Because at the base level, whether you're a practicing religious person or not, our country's foundation acknowledges that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and as such, should be treated with dignity.
We recognize, our Constitution recognizes, the definition of what justice is.
So, not to get too nerdy and historical here, but if freedom is not the ultimate end, if freedom is the means to something greater, we should ask the question, well, what is the something greater?
What is it?
Well, our founding fathers, the framers of our constitutions, actually defined what it is that our society should be ordered to, and what it is, is justice.
James Madison said in Federalist 51 that the definition of liberty is justice.
But what is justice?
The framers of our constitution defined that along Judeo-Christian terms, that the definition of justice was God's original justice.
Again, you don't have to be a practicing religious person This is not a theocracy, but there is a necessity for some kind of agreement on what these words mean, or else you're going to beget chaos, and I don't need to describe for everyone that we are currently living in this chaos.
dave rubin
Right, so I think most people watching this agree with that for sure.
What would you say has to happen to the institutions?
I mean, for the church, for example, since that's your denomination, I mean, what do you think actually has to happen?
liz wheeler
Well, I think the Catholic Church I'll speak to personally because I'm a practicing Catholic.
The Catholic Church has been extremely lax in their catechesis, which means the teaching of the faith to the faithful.
They have not explained and defended the tenets of the faith.
And when you don't have a good grasp of what you believe and why you believe it, you are very vulnerable to that That which you think you believe being twisted by someone else.
So, for example, we're told by AOC that the Green New Deal is environmental justice.
We're told by Planned Parenthood that abortion is reproductive justice.
If you don't have a good understanding about what justice means based on your religious belief, then you're going to be very vulnerable to falling for people that are lying to you, people that are false prophets.
So, first of all, the church needs to be very clear about their responsibility and their duty to catechize their faithful.
If we did this in a better way, if we did this in a more effective way, then we would have more culture warriors like you and I who were unafraid to stand up against the Marxists assaulting our institutions.
The Church actually, and I know this is getting really nerdy, but this is the part of my book that might be my favorite part, the Catholic Church as an institution has been one of the strongest bulwarks against communism and Marxism and socialism in the modern world.
The popes, especially like around the time of Marx and Engels when they were writing the Communist Manifesto, around the time of the Soviet Union, it was Catholic popes who were saying, listen, communism is satanic.
Communism is, this is not just a political battle, not just a secular battle, not just an economic battle, this is a battle of good versus evil.
That communism comes from the devil and that no Christian should or can be both a Christian and a communist, Marxist, or socialist.
They have fought at the institutional level from the beginning of communism and Marxism against it, but recently they've lost their way.
Recently they've become a little less based and a little more squishy, not doctrinally, but in their communication and their willingness to fight back.
So I of course, I mean you know me, I have strong opinions, I'm not afraid of I guess confrontation.
I don't want to think of myself as a confrontational person, but it's necessary sometimes to challenge what is wrong, even if it's uncomfortable.
And I feel like this is true for evangelical churches and Protestant churches, as well as the Catholic Church.
They've forgotten that sometimes love is, you know, Jesus flipping tables.
It's not always, let me just scratch your back and pat your head and tell you that you're pretty.
And if we get back to the true definition of love and compassion and justice,
then it's going to equip a whole generation of people to fight back against essentially the
anti-Christ in the anti-Christ of communism.
dave rubin
How worried are you that the machines, that AI, the algorithms, big tech, that they will
put their foot on the scale, they obviously have been already, but if we were just having
an ideological battle, Marxism versus say capitalism or freedom, individualism versus
collectivism, if we were just battling that out, I think we win, I think the human spirit
wins and all that.
But now, on that scale, also comes AI, also comes manipulated information, also comes search engines that will tell you the reverse of the truth when you search certain things.
That makes this battle much more difficult.
liz wheeler
It does.
It does.
So AI, I think a lot of people mistake AI.
AI is not like an autonomous entity.
It's not like a sentient being.
AI is an algorithm.
It's a piece of code that was written by somebody, and that somebody or somebodies are very politically biased people who have an agenda.
All you have to do is go into ChatGPT.
I actually did this this weekend.
This past weekend, I spoke at the Young America's Foundation Conference, and beforehand, I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem on the dangers of the transgender ideology.
And ChadGBT told me that it was discriminatory and hateful and that they couldn't do it.
So then I asked ChadGBT to write me a poem about the dangers of the gender binary and it did write a poem about the dangers of the gender binary.
So you can see the obvious bias inherent to these systems and the biggest danger of them all is manipulation.
It's manipulating people, it's disguising the truth and instead redefining words so that people accidentally or unknowingly Fall for your ideology, meaning the Marxist ideology?
I agree with you.
On a level playing field, capitalism would defeat communism every time, but that's why the Marxists are targeting our children, because they know if they wait till they're adults and they allow them to experience reality, no one's ever going to choose to be a communist.
But if they can indoctrinate them, If they can erase or twist and warp, pollute the natural law that exists within all of us as our conscience, as our reason, then they will be able to convince these people, these young children who in 10 years won't be children anymore, to be Marxist, to be communist.
That's why they're attacking our kids.
dave rubin
So all that being said, are you hopeful that we can actually turn this thing around?
I mean, a whole bunch of us can try to red pill people, we can try to, you know, get some more based people out there and sensible people and all that.
But it does seem like we still lose a lot of the mini battles.
We win little ones like Disney, or maybe that's a big one, but overall the tendency, especially if you look at the polling of young people thinking socialism is cool, like, it does seem to be going the wrong way.
liz wheeler
Well, listen, I wouldn't be sitting here if I thought it was a losing battle.
That'd be too depressing.
I wouldn't fight this battle if I thought it was already lost.
So my presence in this battlefield is an indication that I think that we can win.
You have to remember that this is not something that happened overnight.
It's not something that happened since Obama took office or since Biden took office or during the Trump years.
This is an assault on our institutions that's been going on for almost a century.
A century.
100 years.
Conservatives didn't recognize it.
We were so drunk with our own prosperity and our nation that we just sat by and didn't recognize the spiritual battle, good versus evil, that was raging around us as these Marxists went into our education systems.
First, you know, Ivy League teachers' colleges and disseminated this poison into all of these institutions.
Into even the administrative state, right?
Dr. Fauci being like, you listen to me, I'm an expert.
He's acting as a technocrat.
dave rubin
I am the science.
liz wheeler
We all use the word technocrat.
I am the science and you shouldn't criticize it.
I worry if I'm criticized, Fauci says.
But what he's doing is he's acting as a technocrat.
We use that term.
But what we should do when we say that term is we shouldn't just say, oh yeah, he's a technocrat.
That's an insult.
That's a bad thing.
We should say, what is a technocrat?
What is technocracy?
It's ruled by the experts.
But I trace this back, actually, in my book.
To the origin of technocracy and the origin of technocracy, one of the founders of technocracy was a Russian scientist who admitted in his writings that technocracy is nothing but a stepping stone from capitalism to communism.
It's how you trick people in a capitalist society to So, yes, we can undo this.
This first step to undoing it is recognizing and acknowledging the reality of the political enemy we face, understanding all of this ideology and the people behind it.
And the second part is not quite as easy.
I'm not going to pretend to be one of those Republicans that's just like, Paul Ryan, if we get our fiscal house in order, everything will follow.
Or if you just mind your own business in your own house, everything will, it'll be a downstream effect.
No, we have to be comfortable as a Republican party using the government to ban DEI, to ban ESG, to ban transgender surgeries for children.
We have to abolish the administrative state.
We have to actively, once we've played defense in that way, we have to play offense.
We have to mandate that children in public schools are taught about the horrors of communism, that they are, that they are taught the science of, of, of sex.
And I'm not talking about sex-like reproduction, I'm talking about, I don't want to use the word gender because it's been co-opted, but talking about biology and DNA.
The biological reality of male and female.
We have to be able and willing and understand that this is our heritage.
Our constitutional heritage is a heritage of ordered liberty, not this absolute liberty.
I don't even want to call it libertarianism because it kind of is, but it's a little bit further than libertarianism.
It's ultimately just going to turn into social anarchy if we embrace that, even if it sounds cool on its surface.
We have to be cohesive as a Republican Party and use government where we have the just authority to do so.
It's not easy, but it can be done.
dave rubin
You're basically saying by day three in Burning Man, it's time to, you know, go home.
I think something like that.
liz wheeler
Um, yes.
I, what I wrote in my book is I was like, listen, the first half of this book can be somewhat depressing.
Not that you should come away from it depressed, but like it's heavy stuff to realize exactly how the left, this huge plot behind, I mean, we talk often about George Soros and how he's behind so many things.
I don't talk about Soros as much in this book because some of the, um, institutions and people behind the attack on our nation's
kids and on our institutions take the form of these shadowy, complicatedly named groups
and institutions, but what they're propagating is the ideology of Marxism.
So what I want people to come away with after they read this book is a thorough understanding
of the ideology so that you can look at social emotional learning.
You can look at teaching for social justice.
You can look at technocracy and you can say, wait a second, I recognize that.
I recognize the elements of Marxism inherent to that and it gives me strength and the capacity
Uh, to utterly reject it.
So the first half may be heavy, but the second half, like, listen, you are going to come out swinging after you put this book down because it is, my editor actually told me that the last chapter was intimidating for a president of the United States, let alone a flustered parent.
And I was like, thank you.
I take that as a compliment.
That's what the Republican party needs.
We don't need soft establishment leadership.
We need someone that's like, it's not going to be easy, but if you actually want to win, here's a blueprint for how to do it.
dave rubin
Liz, as I always say to you, but how do you really feel?
If I could only figure it out.
If you could just be a little clearer in your language and tell me how you really feel.
We are going to link to the book down below.
It was a pleasure to see you, my friend, and I will text you some children questions after this.
liz wheeler
Thank you, Dave.
I really appreciate it.
Everyone, just go to Amazon or wherever you want to buy your books if you hate Jeff Bezos.
And make sure you subscribe to the Newswheeler Show on Apple Podcasts.
Right down below.
Thanks, Dave.
dave rubin
She's a podcast pro.
Alright, thanks, Liz.
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, 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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