PUBLIC BONUS: Estranged Parents, with George Daniel Lea
Jack is joined by friend (and friend-of-the-show), the writer George Daniel Lea, to talk about the online phenomenon known as 'Estranged Parents' or the 'Estranged Parents Movement'. George did a deep dive and is here to tell us about what he found. It turns out to be a lot more relevant to IDSG than it might seem at first glance! George's site http://www.strangeplaygrounds.com/ George on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:luidqaapyfdytwkv6eivrfid George on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@ExaggeratedElegy In researching this episode, and compiling a suite of clips of the infamous Estranged Parent content creator Diane, Jack made extensive use of the work of Maximmino on YouTube, who has covered this subject at length. https://www.youtube.com/@Maximmmino Here is Maximmino's video on Diane's infamous deleted video, from which Jack harvested several clips. https://youtu.be/SpSRkNYUiAw?si=Af4kRPvMg2PQJ57i Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Children are dumping their parents and it's ripping families apart.
Welcome to a Public Bonus IDSG, one of those episodes in which I, Jack, have a conversation with a guest on a topic slightly off the regular IDSG beat, but still related.
This time I'm delighted to welcome to the show my friend, the writer George Daniel Lee.
To talk about a subject that he has become fascinated with, the estranged parents movement.
Daniel and I will be back with you for another regular episode very soon.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this chat.
You can find George at at exaggerated elegy on blue sky and at his YouTube channel enigmatic elegy where you will find links to his work and his own podcasts some of which even feature me.
It's it's hard to know where one is at the moment I find.
There's so much to process, and it's coming so quickly.
Literally, before we started recording, I got an update that in America, they've rescinded that whole funding freeze thing.
They've already rescinded that.
Yes.
I mean, it leaves you wondering, doesn't it?
It leaves you second-guessing.
Was it serious in the first place?
Was it just like a distraction tactic?
Was it a pressing of the parameters to see just, oh, how far can we get?
It's so frustrating, and there's so much of it.
There's so much shit.
And of course, this is the tactic, right?
This is what they do.
It's designed to deluge you, isn't it?
To obscure and obfuscate, to just leave you despairing.
They even tell you that.
You know, they say our tactic is to, what they call it, flooding the zone or whatever.
We're going to just keep coming at you with one thing after another to keep you.
And how much of that is actual tactics and how much of it is just rationalization for the fact that they're...
They're constantly flailing.
I see a lot of people on the left struggling with this.
Struggling with this, oh, this is a distraction, or no, this is a big plan, or they're trying to do this, or no, they don't know what they're doing.
And I think it's almost impossible from the outside to really know how much of this is.
This is it.
It's actually sort of planned and how much of it is Machiavellian manipulation and how much of it is sheer flailing incompetence.
It's all of those things.
It's one of those things at once.
From the outside, you can't know.
And I think it's kind of a waste of our time trying to work it out a lot of the time.
It's a bit like the whole with the right-wing grifters.
Do they really mean it or are they just trying to make money?
Well, the answer to that question is always yes.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Also, the implications are the same either way, right?
The awfulness, the potential consequences are always the same.
So it's a case of just tackling it regardless.
They are Machiavellian.
They are idiots.
They are clueless.
They are scheming.
All these things at once.
Leave that for the historians to work out the exact nature of what people were thinking at any given point in time.
The point is to...
And I think this is actually this thing with the funding freeze in the States is a really good illustration of the fact that fighting back does work.
Because, I mean, that was a blatantly illegal...
By the structure of the American government, the way it's supposed to work, and it's quite a radical thing to do, to hold these systems to their own account of themselves sometimes, to say, yes, okay, this is how you work.
Okay, we'll work that way then.
So by its own account of itself, it's a blatantly illegal move.
It's a massive power grab.
It's an assault upon democracy in and of itself.
It's an incredible act of inhuman cruelty and so on and so forth.
And we didn't...
You know, I say we, I didn't do anything.
But people didn't stop it.
You know, it has so far been stopped by working out exactly how much of it was Machiavellian planning and how much of it was incompetence.
People stopped it by stopping it.
Yeah, exactly.
And they have, after flailing around with, oh, we didn't mean to include this program or, oh, we didn't realize that it was going to have that effect or, oh, no.
After that, it's now been rescinded.
The OMB have rescinded it.
And that's because of massive, Outcry.
And of course, they'll start chipping away at it again.
They'll learn from this.
And the point is that we learn from it too.
And what you have to learn is to don't let them get away with a fucking thing.
It doesn't matter why they're doing it.
It doesn't matter if they're scheming or they're incompetent.
And it doesn't matter if they're doing it all at once or a bit at a time.
Do not let them get away with a thing.
Because they will.
If we let...
They take it as license, don't they?
The simplest, tiniest little thing.
It's the psychology of the abuser, writ large, isn't it, on a national scale?
It's a perfect segue, because it works exactly the same.
It kind of is, and it's not contrived at all.
I mean, it's not in any way hyperbolic or contrived.
This is how it works, right?
It's abusive systems upon abusive systems upon abusive systems.
I think because of my fascination, With the psychology of abuse and the dynamics of authority, that's what led me to what we're discussing tonight, if I'm perfectly honest.
I think all of us are fascinated by intergenerational politics.
Because all of us are victims of it, right?
Every single one of us, every human being living, it's in its own peculiar way.
It's a great leveller.
We are all involved in it innately by the brute biological reality of what we are.
Every single one of us has it somewhere within us.
We are affected by it in very profound ways.
Our minds are shaped by it, you know?
What we experience in our formative years, it makes us what we are.
We determine things like our perceptions of relationships based on what we experience as children, what we perceive from our parents and our other adult influences.
So it's perpetually fascinating, especially if you are, as I think both of us are, interested in insight and self-analysis, you know, in why our minds take the shapes that they do.
Yeah, and I mean, I'm very politically minded.
Everybody listening to this knows that already.
I'm always going to link these sorts of questions to wider political issues.
It's just my impulse.
I mean, one of the things that struck me in the early part of what you were saying was the way in which these patterns of abuse and manipulation recur at every level of the system.
There's the phrase now, isn't there, DARVO, which stands for deny, what is it, deny, accuse, reverse victim, offender.
That is a strategy that, I mean, we've talked about, Daniel and I have talked about that on episodes of I Don't Speak German in terms of what fascists do, conspiracy theorists do it.
Political parties, particularly political parties on the right, do this all the time.
You know, right-wing propaganda.
If you look at Fox News, if you look at the, you know, right away, you know, all across the entire right-wing grifto propaganda sphere, you know, from Fox News to Tim Pool and all the way across it.
you will find these same strategies recurring and they I don't speak German.
They happen within, you know, at the macro level.
They also happen at the micro level between people, between individual people in rooms who are part of families.
And I think that's the thing that occurred to me from the later part of what you were saying was that one of the ironies of our civilization is that we have this thing, the nuclear family.
And it's a product of, it's a very recent invention.
It's a product of modernity.
It's a product of capitalist alienation.
That's my opinion.
And it's also a generator of it.
Yeah, it's a product of it and also a generator of it in that sort of circular recursive way that these things work.
And the weird thing about it is that almost everybody in our kinds of societies live in it.
It's not just the people at the bottom that live in the nuclear family and the mess that is the nuclear family.
It's the people at the top do as well.
Even as we speak, we've got a really interesting illustration of this.
Of this problem, which is that we're talking as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going through his confirmation hearings.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you know, this is not to excuse the man for anything because he's toxic.
He's a fascist ideologue.
Ruinous human bigot.
Yeah, just absolutely.
He's a bigot.
He's a liar.
He's a profiteer.
He's a grifter.
He's a crank.
He's a conspiracy theorist.
He's everything that they say is.
But this is a guy who is manifestly the product of toxic family dynamics.
Absolutely.
As they all are, right?
I mean, even people like Elon Musk, right?
At the very top of the pile.
What I see in Elon Musk is someone who, because of the circumstances in which he was born and through which he was raised, he is a vacuum of identity.
There's nothing there.
He may as well be...
Like an empty human skin suit.
There is nothing inside of him.
And that is as a direct result of the alienation that you're talking about.
Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it, that he is an estranged parent.
He is the parent of children.
Yeah, yeah.
He has a daughter who is a young trans woman who is very vocal about her disdain for him, his politics, his personal behavior, the way he treated her.
And of course, I mean like...
There you go.
If anyone has insights into who Musk really is, it's going to be her, isn't it?
Yeah, and she's not shy about telling you about it either.
She's pretty awesome.
She is not.
She's eloquent and she writes extensively and very passionately about who Elon really is behind closed doors.
And that aspect of the whole thing I find particularly fascinating.
I mean, for those who don't know, we are discussing...
I don't want to call it a recent phenomenon because it isn't.
I mean, that's actually a narrative that the demographic we're going to be talking about actually invented for themselves.
They sort of spun from whole cloth for themselves as a way of justifying their terrible behavior.
That idea that it's this new thing that's only just started happening is a key part of their own bullshit.
Their own sort of narcissistic, self-justifying, distractionary bullshit.
Yeah, it's a scapegoat, ultimately.
It's a way for them of deflecting.
Blame and responsibility.
Our kids who don't speak to us anymore, who have removed us from their lives, who have established that awful word boundaries.
We'll get on to it.
Oh my god, do they hate that word?
Oh my god.
The temper tantrums.
Build the wall, but not around yourself.
Right, right.
Yeah, it's one of the many narratives that they use to justify themselves and to ultimately just deflect blame and defend the ego.
Defend the ego.
It's interesting that we started talking about how you find these similar dynamics throughout the strata of society and it's so, so true.
This needs to defend the ego.
It's a narcissistic trait.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, one of the things that you will find these estranged parents actually saying in a lot of their YouTube videos and their TikToks and when they're alone in their forums and they don't think anyone is watching, but guess what?
We are.
They will say things like...
That it's a recent phenomenon.
This didn't happen when they were children.
This was, you know, parents were respected, and their children did as they were told, and they were grateful to them, etc., etc., etc.
I actually have an example from my own life.
My maternal grandfather ran away from his family at the age of 15 because his family were abusive.
Ran away, and that was it.
He had no contact with them after that the rest of his life.
The rest of his life, it is complete garbage.
But it's a trait that you find in narcissists, this need to defend the ego at any cost.
There cannot be any insight, there cannot be any accountability.
The moment they allow that crack to open, that's it, that's the end.
It's a kind of apocalypse for them.
And that's what you find in these groups.
In these little clusters that are coalescing on the internet of estranged parents, of people whose children don't speak to them anymore, have established boundaries, they make it about them.
They make it about them throughout, all the time.
They never once ask the question, well, what is my child experiencing?
What is their internality?
What is the emotion?
That they're experiencing that could have made them do this, that could have spurred them to this very extreme behaviour, you know, this very extreme response.
And that's the other thing, by the way.
That's one of the other justifications you will find in these communities.
They seem to have woven this narrative that in the present day, it's easy for children to remove themselves from their parents, to cut off their parents, that they do it arbitrarily.
That's bullshit.
That's complete and utter bullshit.
I mean, one of the other things I did...
It's harder than ever, just on the financial level.
On the financial level, right.
Certainly speaking from here in the UK, it's very, very difficult for people like our age and younger to operate in any functional way without some degree of aid from our parents, right?
Yeah.
They have that financial control over us, and if they're decent parents, then they don't use it as control.
They, you know, they acknowledge the situation and they do what they can, right?
They do not use it to sort of browbeat us later on into doing what they want.
But when you look at the op, I mean, one of the other things I did when I fell down, and I did kind of just fall down arbitrarily, this rabbit hole, I went and looked at what...
This will happen.
This will happen.
It's a complete accident, actually.
It was one of Diane's videos came up when I was doing research for my psychology degree.
It just came up in my feed and I was like, what the hell is this?
What's that line from Fawlty Towers?
There's enough material there for an entire conference.
The guy says about Basil Fawlty.
There you go.
That's Diane.
You can do an entire psychiatric conference just about this one person.
Diane is amazing.
I mean, he is absolutely incredible.
She is one of...
She's quite something, isn't she?
She really is.
She really is.
I can't...
This is one of the things that happened to me when I fell down this rabbit hole and I started to delve deeper and deeper and deeper and engage with these people.
Because, you know, Diane I thought was a satire.
When I first saw her, I thought, this is garbage.
This cannot be sincere.
It feels so irony-laden, and yet it's not.
No, it's real.
It's completely real.
And it was a bit of an eye-opener.
I'll be honest, it's a bit of an eye-opener.
I mean, it's dragging it back a little bit.
I said at the start of this that we're all interested in intergenerational politics.
We all have our own intergenerational politics with our parents and, indeed, our relationship to the notion of family and children, which are very personal, obviously.
I mean, I know for me...
With regards to having children, it's quite complex.
I have never wanted children.
The very notion just...
I cannot, you know?
It's one of those things that just has...
It will never happen.
I cannot allow it to happen.
One of the reasons being, I can't square it morally.
I just can't.
I've tried many, many times to square...
The notion of just conceiving children in moral terms, and I cannot do it.
I cannot find a way of assailing it.
So one of my issues with it is the fact that it is always an imposition, right?
The fact of conceiving a child is always an imposition on the child.
The child has no say.
There's no sort of...
Pre-emptive existence in potential where the child can look down and say, oh yeah, I can see to that.
I can see to being conceived and I want to be born into this world.
It's not a gift.
Again, that's another one of the narratives that you will see not only from these parents, from estranged parents, but from generally parents in general.
This is actually a cultural narrative that we've invented.
But conceiving and giving birth to children is a gift to the child.
It isn't.
In any rational terms, in any objective terms, it is not.
The child has no say.
The child cannot consent to that gift.
It's an imposition, always and forever.
You are imposing consciousness onto an entity.
Yes, and the assumption is that the parent is therefore entitled to gratitude.
And it's amazing how often, I mean, usually...
It's the other way round.
Yes, yes.
But certainly when you listen to estranged parents talking, they're entitled to gratitude.
And what they mean by gratitude is not actually gratitude.
What they mean is repayment in material terms, usually in terms of, you know, giving the parent your time and your obedience and your emotional support and stuff like that.
You owe them that.
They mean deference.
Deference, yeah.
What I've noticed about...
Yes, service, absolutely.
And don't get me wrong, I mean, I do want to put a little disclaimer here and just say I know that relationships are always complex, particularly between parents and children, and there are any number of permutations of these relationships.
And yes, there will absolutely be children who estrange their parents who are bad people and who do it for bad reasons.
That is absolutely the case.
There are going to be narcissistic children, there are going to be children with personality disorders, there are going to be children with this problem and that problem, who themselves are abusive to their parents.
That is absolutely the case.
But that doesn't really have any application here.
We're talking about, specifically, children who estrange their parents because they cannot function anymore with their parents in their lives.
Yeah, so we're talking about a specific group of people, which is the people who choose to go online and visibly identify themselves on TikTok, YouTube, so on and so forth.
Estranged parents, TM. We're talking about that group of people.
As an identity, as a group, and inherently, despite the disclaimers, and inherently political, and 99% of the time, politically reactionary group identity, and also a commercial grift, and so on.
We're talking about those situations, and in those situations, I think...
We know what...
This isn't, you know, swings and roundabouts, is it?
We know what's going on here.
Diane, for instance, the infamous Diane, she reveals, without any awareness of the fact that she's doing it, she reveals in her own videos, in her own addresses to the audience, exactly what was going on in that relationship.
This is it, right?
You watch these videos, you watch these people, these parents, these estranged parents who have...
Children don't speak to them, and often multiple children.
That should give them some clue, shouldn't it?
Yeah.
Okay, there may have been, you know, there may have been circumstances that it just may be something there that's very peculiar to that relationship, and it just hasn't worked.
You know, that happens.
Fine.
Multiple children.
I think it's both of Diane's daughters are now estranged from her.
Well, one of Diane's daughters ran away and joined a convent to get away from her.
Jesus.
I mean, that should be some clue, right?
That should be some clue.
That's what young women in the Middle Ages used to do when they wanted to have some degree of independence in life from male patriarchal authority.
In the medieval period, a young woman that wanted to have some kind of independent identity, an independent life, life of the mind or life of the spirit, she didn't want to be a wife or something in the patriarchal feudal medieval system.
That's what she would do.
She would declare that she wanted to be A nun, a novice, a bride of Christ.
So we've gone back to that.
A segment of the population have now been driven to that extreme.
We've gone medieval, basically.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's absolutely incredible.
And that fact alone should give you some clue.
But again, Diane is almost like the poster child.
She's the iconoclast of it all.
You see it throughout the strata.
You see it in every single forum and medium in which these estranged parents operate.
You will see comments all the time, things saying like, well, my five kids don't talk to me.
Or I have this experience with my three sons or whatever.
And it's like...
You don't have any self-awareness at all, do you?
And also, the fact that they say it publicly on a public forum and they don't expect people to step back and say, hang on, all of your children, all of your children do not speak to you.
They will not allow you access to their lives because you have damaged them so profoundly because your influence is so dark and toxic.
All of your children.
Won't have anything to do with you.
Does that not make you step back for one second and think, I must have done something wrong?
Or even just entertain the possibility.
Does it not give you pause?
And they get the same thing from their audience as well.
Diane talks about this, and you've looked into this more than I have, but I've looked a little bit at the infamous Diane.
I've looked a little bit at this other woman, Laura Wellington, who goes by Doormat Mom.
They both do this thing where they talk about the overwhelming amount of hate that they get from commenters.
It's like, is that not a clue?
Most people who are watching your videos are telling you you're at fault here.
Your behavior is bad.
No, it's their haters.
haters they've been brainwashed etc etc there are a whole load of narcissistic adult children just like my narcissistic adult child and that only goes to prove their contention that this is this new epidemic of narcissistic entitled young people who have been brainwashed by therapists etc etc right and And of course, the reality is that young people and children just have access to more information now because of things like the internet, because they have access to therapy.
And so on.
It is not that they've been brainwashed into leaving.
Also, what is the end game here?
That's the other thing.
They go on about how it's this conspiracy to separate children from their family.
Why?
If you allow that, what's the end game?
What do you think the conspiracy is?
And where do you think it's coming from?
Where's the centralized authority that you think it's coming from?
And what's the end?
What's the goal?
Because that doesn't make any sense at all.
This is how you end up on the specific grievance to fascist conspiracy theorist pipeline.
Because you will start with your specific grievance, whatever it is.
Let's say you're an estranged parent.
Let's say it's that.
It could be one of several others.
And then if you're a little bit more thoughtful than some of the others in your group of people, you will...
Questions like that might occur to you.
And you will, of course, your correctness is a given.
That's an a priori truth.
So you don't question that.
So the questions that arise from it have to be answered in a way that's compatible with that underlying truth that you already know.
You rationalize.
This is where intelligence is deadly, because if you're a little bit more intelligent, you can find very sophisticated, persuasive ways of convincing yourself of bullshit.
So you come up with all these arguments that plug exactly these logical gaps in your own worldview without undermining the central assumption of your own correctness and moral perfection.
And this is how you end up, and I think Elon Musk is a perfect example of this.
I don't think it's the only thing going on with him, but I think this is part of it.
You end up at...
Fascist conspiracy theories about shadowy groups of people that are controlling education and controlling the therapy industrial complex, which is a phrase that Diane uses in her infamous now-deleted video.
Anything she doesn't like, she just calls it the X. You end up with these conspiracies.
If you chase it far enough, if your narcissism is so great and your ability to bullshit yourself is sufficient, you end up at the international Jewish banking conspiracy and the Great Reset and all this stuff.
That's how you get there.
You see that in real time in Diane's infamously deleted video where she goes from...
At the beginning, talking about very personal experiences, about her estrangement from her children, and then by the end, she's got to all black professors at universities, and this is going to lead to another holocaust.
Diane, what are you talking about?
One in three consider their therapist their friend.
Aww.
And who's churning out all these therapists for your kids?
Why, that would be the University Industrial Complex.
The colleges that charge you $200,000 for four years of diversity, equity, and inclusion, where they confirm that your gender is anything you want it to be, that others must celebrate your personal view of self.
And if they don't, they're transphobes.
XY chromosomes?
Pfft, that's old school.
UCLA Medical School has a bit of a history admitting underqualified racial minorities.
According to faculty members, they say the school has prioritized diversity over merit.
Meritocracy is out the window as colleges ditch standardized testing for screening students.
Instead, they look to skin color as a primary indicator of who's in and who's out.
Can you read?
Write?
Do math?
Eh!
Who cares?
What's your ancestry?
Ooh, bonus points if they were oppressed.
Unless you're a Jew.
Nobody cares about the Holocaust.
Kids become dependent on these third parties who are telling your kids what?
That your child is struggling with toxic masculinity and might be better off female?
That your white privilege gives you an unfair advantage and therefore you must kowtow to all of the races?
Your parents are clearly toxic for causing you stress, so you should just cut them off.
Abigail Schreier analyzes the potential harms of psychotherapy in detail.
Schreier criticizes our reliance on mental health experts over parental instincts and suggests a more balanced approach, one that encourages self-reliance.
It's creating real divisions in society.
As people get angrier and more extreme, where do you think that leads?
To the precursor of human atrocities.
Cancel culture, loneliness, isolation, and social contagion.
These four phenomena are deeply intertwined.
Cancel culture, which collectively ostracizes individuals or entities for any perceived transgression.
Loneliness and isolation, already significant concerns in our society, are intensified by the fear of being canceled.
This fear prompts us to self-censor and express dissenting views or showing empathy toward the canceled individuals, which leads us to stage four of this communal cancer.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
I said earlier that these four phenomena are the precursor to human atrocities.
This is not hyperbole.
This is history.
In Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, and Stalin's Soviet Union, authoritarian regimes exploited social contagion to spread extremist ideologies.
Fostering environments where individuals were isolated from dissenting viewpoints and community bonds.
The fear of being ostracized or punished drove people to perform crimes against humanity.
Is this the kind of America we want to live in?
The tyranny of the fringe is taking us there.
We cannot let extremists of any kind take over civilization or it will lead to ruin.
We need to turn away from cancel culture.
It's amazing that video.
It really is.
I think people should watch that.
I think people should watch that.
Because you are watching the process of somebody talking themselves into one of these species of fashy conspiracist bullshit in real time, almost.
I mean, I know it's scripted, but that's what it's like.
It's like you're watching a brain in the process of fooling itself into these conclusions.
Because, as you say, she gets from my daughter when no contact via...
Therapy Industrial Complex and University Industrial Complex and Abigail Schreier, the gender critical bigot who wrote the bullshit book about trans kids and then wrote another bullshit bigoted book about how Gen Z are all mentally ill and it's all the therapist's fault.
She goes through that, Abigail Schreier, through to...
College campuses are hiring unqualified people because they're black, DEI, the oppression Olympics.
She starts talking about surgery at one point, doesn't she?
She starts talking about how hospitals are hiring unqualified people from ethnic minorities.
And it's like, Diane, how have you got here?
Well, she's talking, as I say, it's like she's talking herself into it as you go.
And it's so...
It's so familiar.
You're hearing the same stuff that you hear from all these people.
As I say, she gets to DEI, and then you get to the idea of the Oppression Olympics.
You get stuff if your ancestry is correct, if your ancestors were oppressed.
The infamous bit where she says, unless you're a Jew, because nobody cares about the Holocaust.
So there's the whole left anti-Semitism.
Conspiracy theory.
And then it's, they're telling you that you need to transition to be a girl because you've got toxic masculinity.
Cancel culture.
And then by this point, I'm watching this open mouth because it's like a checklist.
I'm just checking them off.
These things I've heard a hundred times before in the fasci subcultures.
We get to the fake Voltaire quote about those who can make it.
I mean, it's not quite fake, but you know what I mean?
They all come out with this crap.
And then it's, oh, somehow we've gotten from My kid went no contact to America is about to have a new Holocaust or a new Mao's Great Leap Forward or a new Holodomor from all this.
And she's got, in her video, she's just putting it on screen, all this dreadful old footage of dead bodies.
You are morally deranged.
You are absolutely deranged.
What I love is she is, to a degree, she is conscious of it because she did take that video down when she started getting backlash not only from the usual suspects, i.e.
from us, but from everyone.
Even from people who were originally her supporters, who are maybe not quite as deranged as she is.
She's not hiding her power level, as the fascists say.
No, she definitely isn't.
She's just coming out with it.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Jack, by the way.
Guys, if you really want to understand what we're talking about, if you want to see this derangement in real time, if you want to see almost like a microcosm of it happening in real time, go to YouTube and type in, Diane, estranged parents deleted video.
Well, I mean, this is – you will be watching somebody from within MAGA, from within the American fascist movement.
And we know she is because in the very first video she did about this, she talked about – well, she did the my daughter broke off contact with me and it was just about politics.
Just about politics.
What the hell is politics?
I'm not a political person.
Right.
I'm not a political person.
But it was – she says – We saw loads of this after the election.
We saw a backlash of women telling their husbands, I want a divorce because you vote for Trump and stuff like that.
It was all over social media.
I mean, it's obviously being exaggerated for clicks and stuff like that.
But it was happening.
We had...
People uninviting their relatives from Thanksgiving because they voted for Trump and stuff like that.
And you had this rash of people going, I don't understand why she wants a divorce or they don't want to know me anymore.
It's just politics.
Politics is who lives and who dies.
Politics is who eats and who doesn't eat.
This is not a just thing.
She does that at the start of the first video.
And then she says, she said she didn't want to have a relationship with us because we voted for that guy.
We're obviously talking about Trump.
She's putting little clips of the daughter's email, the severing of contact email, up on the screen.
And she's got a voiceover that's reading it in a sort of petulant child voice.
And all the clips are overlaid upon each other to make it sound like this great big incoherent jumbling mess of complaints.
But you can just...
If you look through it, you can see some of, you can get glimpses of what the daughter is actually trying to say.
And she's not saying, I hate you, because she vented for Trump.
She's saying, you gaslight me.
You invalidate my emotions.
Stuff like that.
And Diana's just steamrolling all this, and she's just making it, oh, she just doesn't like that we're Trumpists.
So she is definitely, her and her husband, they're definitely MAGA, they're definitely Trump.
Seriously, if people want to see how white America, middle class white America, Talks itself into supporting 21st century fascism.
You could do a lot worse than watch that video because she's laid it out for you.
She's laid out the thought process from personal grievance through all this extrapolation.
The defining atrocities of the 20th century for her are just an expression of the fact that her daughter doesn't want to talk to her anymore.
Yeah, right.
And it's bound up with this notion of dominionism and control, isn't it?
That's ultimately what it is.
Her daughter, in every element of her videos, and this is why she gets so much backlash, he thinks she's being subtle in these videos.
She thinks somehow that he's going to...
And she hates, by the way, she hates being called a narcissist.
And okay, yes, I'm studying psychology at the moment.
You cannot diagnose someone with narcissistic personality disorder from a video.
However, what you can do, Diane...
Look at your videos and you can say what you are expressing and exhibiting through those videos are pronounced narcissistic traits, which you do constantly.
For example, she thinks she's being very subtle.
These videos are really cultivated, by the way.
Diane makes videos.
She's got multiple channels across YouTube.
She does all sorts of stuff.
She does arts and crafts.
She's jack of all trades, master of none.
So she cultivates these videos.
She knows how to edit.
She knows how to utilize video to elicit emotion.
Yeah, they're very produced.
There's lots of beat-roll and sound effects and stuff like that.
Music, you know.
Including, I just want to mention this, I'll let you finish, but in the original video where she's talking about this, her and her husband are re-enacting scenes.
They're filming themselves acting, getting the email.
Wow.
What is wrong with you people?
What is wrong with you?
I mean, you know, I have no problem per se with someone whose children have estranged themselves going to whatever forum they like and expressing it.
Because yeah, I'm sure it's awful.
I'm sure it's a terrible, terrible thing.
But what Diane demonstrates, and again, she is like a microcosm of the entire culture of estranged parenthood on the internet at the moment.
Is that they do it not because they are confused, which is bullshit.
That's something they love.
We don't know why this happened.
This has come out of the blue.
We have no idea.
They're not confused.
They use it as a weapon.
That's the other thing.
And Diane is very...
She thinks she's very good at it.
She thinks that what she's doing is...
She's demonstrating that she's the reasonable party.
She's the victim.
That it's awful for her.
When with every word she says about her daughter and every time she refers to her daughter, she is passive-aggressively assaulting her.
Absolutely assaulting her.
She is demonizing her to the nth degree.
That section that you spoke about where you've got the daughter's emails all laid on top of one another, all coming up too quickly to follow, and she's got that sort of babbling, petulant voice over it.
What she's doing there is demeaning her daughter.
She is basically doing, again, what a lot of these estranged parents do, which is she's taking agency away from her daughter.
He's basically saying, my child, and thereby every child, by extension, every child that chooses to put boundaries in place to estrange from their parents, they cannot have made a considered decision because they are not people.
They're not real people.
They don't have minds of their own.
They cannot possibly make a considered real decision for their own lives.
It must be X and X. It must be because of this exposure, because of this influence.
It must be because of this or that.
It cannot possibly be, Diane, anything that I've done.
It cannot possibly be.
I can't, you know, people like Diane can't even consider it.
Can't even consider it.
I mean, you know, one of the other.
People will be talking about a little later.
Dr. Joshua Coleman, who is an estranged father who wrote a book about it.
He's made a whole and unfortunately very successful grift on providing seminars and therapy and counseling, such as it is, for other estranged parents.
She read Coleman's book and she says in one of her videos that She couldn't finish it because it obliges the estranged parent to take too much responsibility.
Now, I've read Coleman's book, and I've watched Coleman's seminars, and Coleman is a fucking grifter.
He is nothing but a fraud.
The man is a complete fraud.
And everything he says, and I mean everything, all of his seminars are up online, by the way, so you can go and watch them if you want.
I wouldn't advise it because they're awful.
In every single one of his seminars throughout his book, what he actually does, he doesn't like talk to estranged parents and get them to consider their actions or to develop insight or give them means of maybe healing the rift between them and their children.
What he actually does, he comes at the situation from the position that all you're trying to do is gain access.
That's it.
That's it.
All you're trying to do is a main goal.
It's all strategic and tactical, isn't it, about getting what you want?
It's awful.
Awful.
I mean, and this guy, he is a doctor.
He does have a PhD by all accounts.
I mean, God knows from where, but that's all it is.
The base assumption that he provides in every single one of his seminars throughout his book is that the parent is automatically always in the correct.
Always.
It doesn't matter what the circumstances are.
Parent is always in the correct, and the child is reacting in an unreasonable way.
And what he says to the estranged parents is, These children are so entitled and so unreasonable and so damaged by modern society and by therapy and by university and by internet culture that you're never going to win.
So what you should do to gain access to their lives is lie to them.
You should pretend that you are in the wrong.
And he says this in his fucking book and his videos.
You should pretend...
That you are in the wrong and it gives you language to use.
This is what you say when your child comes to you with this grievance.
This is what you say to gain access to them.
Has your child gone no contact with you because you're a manipulative abuser?
Here's how to manipulate and abuse them more effectively so that you can get them back and do it more.
He doesn't seem to see that the whole dynamic under which he operates, the base assumptions with which he is approaching the dynamic of parent-child is objectifying.
He is basically saying that children are the objects and the property of parents.
And you are allowed access.
The whole assumption is you should be, under an ideal situation, you would be given unrestricted access regardless of what you do or say, and the child would have no option.
However, because we live in this basically Babylonian fallen society where everything is inverted and wrong, not like the good old days, by the way, which is another thing he harkens back to, you know, when parents could do whatever the fuck they like to their child and get away with it.
Good old days, right?
The good old days.
We don't exist there anymore.
So here's what you've got to do.
You've got to lie.
You've got to put on this pantomime where you pretend contrition.
Because all you really want is access.
That's it, right?
Once you're in, you can start working, yeah?
To get control back.
You can start getting control back, exactly.
And he hates it, but the whole dynamic is narcissistic.
It is the language.
Of a narcissist.
This person is my property.
And I'm not just going to let it go.
I can't let it go because my ego won't allow for that.
I am going to find a way in.
I'm going to find a way back.
And by the way, anyone who has ever been involved with a narcissist, whether they're a parent, whether they're a spouse, you know, right?
You know what they're like.
I mean, my last relationship was a narcissist.
He was an awful, awful human being.
And yeah, this is what they're like.
They are so petty and spiteful and cruel, but they can be very sly.
They will find a way.
They will find a way to sort of worm their way back in, even if they have to lie and pretend to do it.
But you know what?
The lies and the pretense and the pantomime doesn't hold up for long.
This is the other thing Joshua Coleman doesn't really understand.
Narcissists and abusers in general, people who operate from this authoritarian dynamic, they can't maintain the masks.
They just can't.
It will come out.
And what's going to happen, by the way?
They fundamentally don't think they should have to, do they?
So as soon as they think they've got control, they drop the mask because they think, I shouldn't have to pretend.
You should just do what I want and do as I say, whatever.
Regardless of what I do or what I say.
Also, doctor, what is going to happen when the parent...
Let's say the parent succeeds using your techniques where they haven't changed.
They haven't developed any insight or they haven't looked back and said, well, you know, maybe I shouldn't talk to my child like this.
Maybe I shouldn't have done this.
Maybe I can approach this from a different perspective.
They won't have done that.
Not with your therapy.
They bloody won't anyway.
Or taking your advice, they won't.
What happens when they get back into the relationship, when the estranged child looks at them and says, oh, maybe they have changed because they're putting on this pantomime?
They allow them back into their lives, and then suddenly they start acting the same as they always did.
They start being abusive, entitled, etc., etc.
And then the child says, what was that?
When you were acting this way, was that just a lie?
You are just a manipulator.
That just reinforces the reasons why the estranged child went away in the first place, doesn't it?
Yes, but this time you can gaslight them better, can't you?
This time you can do it so well that they'll never get away again.
Oh, right, yeah.
Well, here's the other thing, right?
They see things in transactional terms.
Everything.
Everything they see in transactional terms.
So what they will say is when they're following the advice of a good doctor, And they're putting on this pantomime of being decent people.
Well, I was very nice to you here.
But what are you talking about?
Look, haven't I been good to you?
Haven't I erred a little bit?
You know, it's like, no, no.
You can't, you know, you can't say to someone, oh, well, I'm sorry that I spoke to you in this terrible way.
But don't you remember that birthday when I got you something really nice?
That's not the way it works.
We look at each experience in and of itself, yeah?
You don't earn points.
It's not transactional.
And abuse, manipulation, control, that outweighs kindness.
Because it shows the kindness for what it is, opportunistic and fake and transactional.
That's why it outweighs it.
It shows that it doesn't actually mean anything.
If you give somebody a card that says happy birthday, and then later that day you punch them in the face, you didn't really mean the card, did you?
That's one of the two things.
For these people, it is worse than that.
One of the things you see again and again and again in almost every single expression is that their children have said to them, I don't want any contact with you at all.
I don't want any text messages.
I don't want any cards.
I don't want any money.
I don't want anything.
I will, if I feel healed enough that I can approach you, I will on my own terms.
What they all do, every single one of them, they keep texting.
They send them texts on their birthdays.
They send them cards.
They send them things.
And it's not because they're kind.
It's not because they want the relationship healed.
It's a way of maintaining contact, access, and control.
It's a way of saying, I can still get into your life.
I'm still here, regardless of how you reject me.
Some of them, and this is amazing, some of them I came across.
This one mother I came across, it really was a case of, no, you need to get a restraining order.
This woman's a psychopath.
She bought burner phones to send her estranged son.
messages from alternative numbers, you know?
And it's like, you don't see what's wrong.
I mean, that's stalking.
That is flat out stalking.
And that woman could be arrested, you know?
I mean, it's the same dynamic as stalking, isn't it?
Because men stalk women because they think they're entitled to own them.
So it's like continually applying to the authorities to be granted custody of the thing you bought.
That's what guys that do that think they're doing.
I saw, again, I haven't looked into it as much as you have, but I saw one instance of this woman, she did a video or a post or something in one of the forums, and she said, well, every time I send a message or every time I like one of his posts, he blocks me.
And I remember thinking...
That must mean that you keep on making new accounts.
That can't mean anything else.
So you've just confessed to cyberstalking your son.
There was another one where a woman kept on sending messages and she was sending them, I can't remember the term, but she was sending them in a way that the person she was sending them to had to sign for them.
So they would know that their parent knew that they'd had the message, the letter.
And even that is clearly...
It's them inserting themselves back in, isn't it?
It's showing I still control this little bit of your life.
I still know that you were in on this day and that you got my message.
That is it.
Right.
That is all it is, isn't it?
When you boil it right down, it's all about control.
It is all about control.
These people do not see their children as real people.
That is the bottom line.
Don't get me wrong.
As you said, they see them as property.
That's what this is all about.
This is the toxic side of the nuclear family, because it's a property relationship.
It's a property relationship.
People can rise above that, and people sometimes can't.
That's it.
That's it.
It's the most amazing thing.
It is not exclusive to abusive or narcissistic or damaged parents.
This is sadly something that's innate to the way we presume the politics between parents and children.
It is that way.
The child belongs to the parent.
They are their property.
And again, it's part of the reason why my own relationship to the notion of having children is so complex, because I don't believe that.
I don't believe I own people.
I don't believe I own people when I'm having relationships with them.
I mean, I'm polyamorous, you know.
Part of the reason is I have issues with the notion of owning people.
And it extends to that element, too.
I do not own anyone, and I cannot be responsible for people in that way.
I just can't.
It doesn't work for me.
I find it immoral, at least amoral, by its very nature.
Well, sadly, you're very much at odds, then, with our culture, because it's raining the idea.
At least in terms of, you know, sex and relationships and marriage and family is ownership, isn't it?
It is organized as a property.
I mean, you were talking about, on a deep structural level, we're talking about patriarchy.
A lot of these very toxic estranged parents are women.
We're talking about...
We're talking about the structure of patriarchy being extended because of the nuclear family system to sort of include women to a certain extent when it comes to ownership and control over children, particularly, not exclusively, but particularly female children.
And I think that's why we see so many echoes in all of this with so much just reactionary politics, other reactionary political movements in general, but particularly misogynistic and sexist ones.
I mean, you were talking about Dr. Joshua Coleman just now.
Wow.
And the way you were describing him, and when I looked at him myself, I was thinking, yeah, this is a pickup artist.
This is pickup artistry.
This is PUA. That's what this is.
It's the same.
This is Roush V. It's the same grift.
It's just, it's a bit more allowed for because of the innate objectification of children in our cultures, right?
It's a little bit more legitimized somehow.
I mean, Coleman has appeared on very prominent television shows in the US. He has a fairly significant following, unfortunately, and a platform for this stuff, which is really, really worrying, because he is a reactionary, and he is a grifter, and you are absolutely right.
Right.
When you look at it dynamically, when you step back, the dynamic, the language, the assumptions with which he approaches it are exactly the same as the pickup artists, as the incels and so on and so forth.
It's the same.
It's that same objectification of other human beings.
Right.
Other human beings don't exist.
They are not real people.
They exist to serve me, my ego.
That's what they're there for.
And if they don't, if they step outside of those prescriptions, then they are evil or they are damaged or there is something wrong with them.
And is it?
I mean, have you actually have you looked at some?
The alternative videos and accounts from the estranged children.
I haven't at all, no.
Now, that is very revealing.
That is very revealing indeed.
Because for the most part, they don't do it half as much as the parents do.
They just don't.
And not to the same degree.
They kind of want to get on with their lives.
They want to be left alone for the most part.
But the ones I encountered...
It wasn't Diane's daughter's choice to become an online personality by default, was it?
She didn't want to do that.
That was something her mother foisted upon her.
It's basically thrust upon her because her mother won't leave her the fuck alone.
And again, that's another reason why Diane made these videos, by the way.
It's this desire.
It's bullying.
It is bullying.
I am going to insert myself into your life.
I am going to get what control I can.
It's like, you know, it's like when, I mean, this is an extreme example, but it's like when serial killers are eventually apprehended and they play games with the legal system and with the detectives and they won't tell people where the bodies are or how many victims or they'll lie, they'll distort, they'll exaggerate.
That's the reason they do it, because it's that tiny little bit of control that they've got left.
And that's everything.
To these people, control and manipulation, whatever gives the narcissistic supply, ultimately, it is everything.
And they're going to do whatever they can with whatever materials they have.
In order to facilitate that supply.
I mean, Diane...
Well, you saw the same thing, just parenthetically, you saw exactly the same thing with the defendants at Nuremberg.
You saw Hermann Göring, and in a completely different way, but it was the same basic thing, Albert Speer, both doing exactly the same thing.
Gaming the system for attention and games.
That's all it is, isn't it?
All the way down.
And what I love about Diane is you can see it.
Anyone with...
I mean, you don't even need a massive degree of insight.
I mean, a lot of the people who have really come at her online, and if you do go looking for Diane, by the way, most of what you'll find are people basically taking her apart.
They are not people who have any particular qualifications in psychology or anything like that.
You don't need it.
You don't need it.
You don't need to be, really, do you?
No.
It's fairly obvious.
Again, she thinks she's being subtle.
She thinks somehow that...
And again, this is a thing...
But again, you don't need a degree in politics or government to see that Tim Pool or Jimmy Dore are talking crap.
They still have this insidious influence over many people.
Yeah, that's it, right.
And Diane certainly does.
I mean, Diane's very particular because she's made a grift out of it.
What she's done, she is such a...
I mean, I would...
I would go out on a limb with Diane, and I would say she is an absolute narcissist.
I think she has all of the 11 points for narcissistic personality disorder.
I think you could go down the checklist with her easily.
Easily.
She has made these videos for a number of reasons, and one of them is that she wants supply.
One of the things she says in one of her videos is her daughter has replaced family.
With subscribers, with viewers, and it is the most flagrant projection I have ever seen.
I have ever seen.
No, Diane, that's what you've done, and that's what you are doing with your little cultivated, scripted, directed, assiduously edited videos with the soft, sad music in the background and so on.
That's what you're doing.
It's all manipulation in order to cultivate supply.
You thrive like a vampire on blood.
You thrive on sympathy.
That's what you want.
Yes, and she is also just grifting for money now.
The most recent development with her is that she's back to hawk group chats and counselling sessions and shit like this.
She is now actually trying to turn it into a lucrative business as well, as many of these people do.
I mean, Joshua Coleman is bad enough.
At least he has some actual qualifications.
He does actually have a qualification.
Diane is nobody, and she is not someone you should be taking any advice from whatsoever.
We mentioned Doormat Mom earlier.
Now, Doormat Mom is different.
Doormat Mom, I think, was probably very abusive.
I think Diane was probably passive-aggressive.
She was demeaning.
She was emotionally abusive.
Doormat Mom, I think, could have possibly been physically abusive.
There is something about her demeanor.
There's the way she...
Her videos are so aggressive.
She's very aggressive.
She actually calls her children ungrateful bastards and stuff like that in the book and in the videos.
And again, she's...
Very, very right-wing.
She's far right.
She's been on Fox and Friends.
She's been on Sean Hannity.
She's been on Dr. Phil, who is something of a Nexus figure here, because he's also played host to Dr. Joshua Coleman, and he's currently, as we speak, inserting himself for clicks and views into Trump's racist ethnic cleansing, ice raids, and deportation methods.
And she's very, I believe, anyway, maybe you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but she's a very right-wing evangelical Christian as well, isn't she, Dormat?
She is exactly that.
She is of the opinion.
I mean, she is one of those particular, and this is quite common amongst evangelical Christians, but she's one of these people who's made God out of her own ego.
That's what these people are talking about.
When these people talk about God, and this is not Christians as a whole, I'm talking about these specific people, these sorts of people, when they talk about God or Jesus or Christianity or the church, they're talking, A, about white supremacy, and B, about the almighty me.
That's what they actually mean.
That's exactly it.
That is exactly it.
He calls her children.
I mean, Diane, okay, she at least attempts subtlety.
She attempts some subterfuge.
Dormat mom doesn't.
Her whole shtick is, I'm the parent.
It doesn't matter how abusive I was.
It doesn't matter what I did or what I said.
I can do what I like because I'm the parent.
And also, I am God, right?
In my own head, my ego is...
Diane is pagro.
Dormat mom is just aggro.
Yes, exactly that.
Exactly that.
And again, I mean, she gets this thing all the time, as Diane does, as a lot of these people do, where people comment and say, yeah, just from these videos, I can see why your children don't speak to you.
And they hate that.
Well, you can.
They absolutely hate that, because it gets to the nub of it, right?
They've exposed themselves, and they...
Somehow, they cannot get over the notion that they're not in the right all the time.
So they think when they put themselves out there in a public forum, people are going to agree with them.
They seem to think that people are going to actually feel sympathy and agreement and just say, oh, you were right the whole time.
Yes, your children are ungrateful little bastards.
And when they don't, when they don't...
The reaction is quite profound.
It's quite profound.
I mean, Diane did a very infamous reaction video to people calling her narcissist, where she was basically, she revealed herself completely.
The narcissist came out, and it was, I don't give a shit.
And it's like, yes, Diane, that's the most honest thing you have ever, ever said in any of these videos.
That was honest.
That was honest.
You don't.
You actually don't.
You don't give a shit about what any other human being says, including your children.
You care about yourself.
You care about your own ego.
You care about what feeds the supply, and nothing else.
And it's obvious.
It's obvious to everyone.
Yeah, and they're so intent upon, because these comments...
They confront them with the fact that they're not normal.
Their behavior is pathological.
And they're so intent upon insisting that that's not true.
That's why they end up with these gigantic conspiracy theories about, I mean, Diane, in her infamous sort of now deleted video, she comes up with figures about how much family estrangement there is that are...
Ludicrous.
Ridiculously inflated.
If you believe these people when they talk, most people now in America are estranged from their kids.
And it's all because of this, because their kids are ungrateful, spoiled, petulant, mentally ill and so on.
And that's all the fault of therapists.
They have to come up with this.
Essentially, again, another right-wing conspiracy theory to cover up the fact that they are pathological.
Their dynamics are abnormal.
They can't stand the fact that what was normalized in their household is actually completely abnormal.
They cannot abide it.
So they come up with these justifications, these narratives in their mind where what's actually happened is their children have...
They've gotten wider contexts.
Maybe they've gained insight.
They've maybe got a spouse or a partner, and they've seen the way their partner's families are.
Because that's the other big thing as well, by the way.
That's the other narrative.
Oh, my child was poisoned by their partner.
And their partner's family.
Well, actually, all that really happened was their child saw a better family dynamic.
A more sincere, a more loving family dynamic.
I was like, oh, this can be.
It can operate this way.
This is the other thing.
And this is heartbreaking, by the way.
It's absolutely heartbreaking.
When you read the accounts, again, of the estranged children or when you watch their videos, one of the common things they express is they have this...
It's all on the road to Damascus moment where they go away to college, they get a partner, or they just have a friend whose family they're around that is different from their own.
And they realise the way I'm being treated is not normal.
Yeah, that you hear that over and over again.
I thought it was normal.
I thought all families were like this.
You hear that over and over again.
Over and over and over again.
And it's like...
Wow.
And that, of course, that takes, that is a lifetime's work, honestly, of therapy.
That is a lifetime's work of, you're never going to get over it, but of learning to deal with that.
Because those normalizations come up in your own mind again and again and again.
There is, of all, I mean, I went, I've watched so many videos, I've read so many posts and books.
At this point, and I've come across a grand total.
When it comes to the estranged parents, I've come across one.
One out of all of them, who is actually really quite good.
I can't remember her name offhand, but she's on TikTok.
And she says in her videos, I was damaged by a very toxic relationship with my parents.
And this is not an excuse.
But I did not deal with that damage.
I didn't have the opportunity to deal with that damage before I had my children.
And as a result, I brought that poison and that damage to my relationship with my children.
And as a result, they don't speak to me anymore.
And she's very good.
She's very open and eloquent about it.
She says, and that is on me.
That is on me.
Well, she's the exception that shows up all the others then, isn't she?
She shows that it is possible to do this.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, I mean, what I loved about her was she talked about how in order to have a relationship with her children, and she said, like, this is up to them, by the way.
This is not up to me anymore.
If they want to come to me, then they will.
And it's up to them, you know?
But I am preparing for that.
I am looking at what is wrong in me and what I did wrong when they were children, when I was rearing them.
And I'm trying to do it better.
I'm trying to be better.
And that's brilliant.
That's wonderful.
That's what you should be doing.
But she is the exception.
She is absolutely the exception.
The vast majority, unfortunately, certainly if the...
The little forums and cultures and covens and cabals where these people are coalescing, if they are anything to go by, the vast majority of them cannot allow for that degree of insight.
Not even an iota of it.
They cannot allow for it.
Because to allow for it would be to bring the whole house of cards down, of course.
It would just destroy the ego completely.
And we can't have that.
Unfortunately.
We cannot have that.
Yeah, and you can tell that that's what's going on because they say that about their children.
As always, it's projection.
The accusations are confessions.
They say the same thing.
You know, the children cannot question their choices because if they did, their whole house of cards will fall down.
They say that about their kids.
So, I mean, that's incredibly revealing in itself.
They don't just say it.
They want it.
They want it.
This is the other thing.
They're vengeful.
These people, they cannot move on.
This is the other thing.
These people, they are at a particular arrested stage of development.
We all know, we all have in our lives those people who are sort of stuck at a teenage level.
We know those people.
These estranged parents, they cannot accept that...
Their relationship with their children will inevitably change as their children grow older.
They want their children to be like six or eight years old forever, where their child is absolutely dependent upon them for everything in their lives, including the way they act, the way they speak, the way they dress, the way they think and feel, and so on and so forth.
They cannot accept.
That their child isn't a child anymore.
That their child has developed into their own identity and their own personality.
And I'm sure it is painful.
I'm not a parent, but I'm sure it is painful when your place in that child's life shifts and changes and you become a different person to them because that's inevitable.
That is always going to happen.
The minute your child hits those teenage years and they go through that very, very painful metamorphosis where they're working themselves out, Where they're determining their own identity.
That's when your place in their life is going to change.
And if you're healthy, if you're a decent person, then you roll with that, right?
You roll with that.
You help them and you try to work out what your new place is.
And hopefully that develops into something good when they're an adult, you know?
These people, these are strange parents.
They cannot have that.
They hate their children for growing up.
They hate their children for not being children anymore.
That healthy dynamic is dependent upon viewing the other person, the child, as fundamentally another human being, or be it a child, etc., etc.
The problem is precisely that they don't view...
I mean, probably anybody in their lives, but of course the child is the one over whom they have the most direct personal control and power.
They don't view them as a person in their own right.
They view them as an extension of themselves.
They view them as a thing that is there to provide them with something, be it material or emotional or psychological comfort or pleasure or whatever.
Again, it's viewing people as property.
It's viewing people as things.
It's viewing people as commodities, relationships as transactions.
Again, that's it.
They see their child as expressions of who they are and just factors by which their sense of identity can be fluffed up.
That's it.
That's it.
And when their child doesn't do that anymore, doesn't serve in that way, then that's it.
They are dead to them.
They are emotionally dead to them.
They are evil.
They are wrong.
They must be punished as well because they've dared to transgress, to slip the bonds of control.
And this is exactly...
this is exactly the same psychological and fundamentally political dynamic that is at the heart of you know organized ideological misogyny in the form of men's rights activism and PUA and all that sort of stuff it's exactly the same and inceldom one of the things that is striking when you read these people's message boards and chat boards they sound like incels I was looking through some selections
connections and time and time again, they're talking firstly, like pickup artists.
Like we said, with Dr. Joshua Coleman being the, the, uh, example, they also sound like incels.
They're entitled.
It's not fair that I haven't got this person doing what I want them to do in my life.
I'm entitled, and it's this great cosmic injustice that this thing that I'm entitled to has been taken from me.
Yeah, I mean, this is something you hear all the time, which is, and it's so common, the language is almost exactly the same across the board.
I gave you life, I gave you shelter, I fed you, and this is the thanks I get.
Sorry, guys.
Whoever's parents are there, you are not entitled to thanks for that.
That's the bare minimum.
That's the obligation.
You brought the child into the world without any say from the child.
That's the bare minimum.
You don't deserve kudos for that.
I'm really sorry.
You don't.
You don't.
Not from the child.
Not from the child you don't.
You are not entitled to have the woman come home with you and sleep with you because you paid for her dinner, which is the same psychology again.
It's the same psychology.
Or if it's the nice guy because you helped her move house.
It's a gift.
Do you understand the difference between a gift, between something that you do for somebody out of kindness and fellow humanity, or because you love them, or just because you like them as another person, and a transaction?
Do you understand this?
No, you clearly do not.
Clearly not, because they confuse the two.
They will say all the time, Diane says this in a couple of her videos, oh, it was a gift to give birth to my children.
It's a gift and these children are ungrateful for it, but I want repayment for it.
Also, again, going back to the fundamentals, it's not a gift.
Here's your birthday card.
That'll be $3.99, please.
Right.
It's not a gift if the child doesn't ask for it and the child can't consent.
That's the bottom line.
That is bottom line.
It's not even transactional.
It's an imposition.
No.
You're wrong on both counts.
You know, they are wrong whatever way they look at it.
They're wrong.
It is an imposition always.
Always.
It ties in directly with all sorts of right-wing ideology about natalism and, of course, you know, the Christian, the right-wing.
Christian idea of the family, parenthood, all that stuff.
It ties in directly with it.
And that's probably part of the root of it, because American society is fundamentally conditioned by its roots in that kind of family structure, which is part of how that civilization spread across that entire continent through a sort of colonization program of those little...
Christian patriarchal family units right the way across the, you know, that's the human basis of the entire settler-colonial project.
It's being replicated in every household.
It is one of the more interesting aspects of the wider situation, isn't it?
When you look at the notion of the nuclear family and you look at the way our cultures enjoin us to engage in these particular narratives, i.e.
especially if you are, by the way, straight, this heterosexual.
You have to do this.
At this point in your life, you seek after, you get your job, you get your house, you get your car, and then you have children.
That's just the way it is, right?
That's the way things are.
But we are not.
And the reason we're not given these contexts or this language is because it's corrosive to the entire structure.
We are not enjoined in any...
We're not even given the context to question that, to ask, well...
A, do I want to do this?
Is this what I want to do?
And B, why?
What is the imperative to have children at this point in my life?
And also, am I good enough to bring a consciousness into the world and be responsible for its shaping?
Again, this comes back to my own perspectives on having children and the innate immorality of it.
Am I good enough?
No.
No, I'm not that arrogant.
No.
I wouldn't have them, you know.
I suppose you could say nobody ever is and nobody ever has been.
Yes, I think that's quite true.
Is that an extinctionist argument when extrapolated to its utmost?
Kind of, yeah.
But I think, you know, my perspective is, if we could do away with this bullshit, patriarchal, sort of pseudo-Abrahamic, honour thy father and mother bullshit, Where, you know, all the power, all of the onus is on the parent, where everything, you know, the parent is God in the eyes of the child, basically.
If we could do away with that and we could look at it in a more objective sense, which is children are always, their existence is impositional.
They don't ask for it.
None of us do.
None of us do.
We don't ask to be conscious.
We can't because of the way we work as life forms.
And as a result, The power dynamic is always skewed towards the abusive, whether it's subtle or not, right?
It's just the way it is.
If we could look at it in that way, then I think we would have a healthier perspective on...
What family is and the way we interact with our children.
We wouldn't be coming at them as though, oh, well, they're just arbitrary things that just happens in our cultures.
You know, you have children and that's it, and this is the way they are, which I hate, by the way.
That's another thing I fucking hate, the arbitrariness of it.
But also, we wouldn't be looking at them as though they owe us things.
You know?
Yeah.
Oh, you should be grateful for the house and for the fact that you exist.
No.
Sorry.
From the perspective of someone who is not a parent and never will be, I mean, this is the other thing that's going to be thrown at us, by the way, Jack, and I'm sure it will be.
Well, you're not a parent, so how can you possibly know?
What right do you have to comment?
What right do we have to comment?
Well, we are children of parents.
We've existed in that dynamic, so we know what it is, and we experience it in every aspect of our culture every single day.
You know, you can see it.
And by the way, being outside of it, to some degree, gives you scope.
It gives you some perspective on things.
I mean, I do have a very particular perspective on this because I work with families whose children are made in such a way that they often can't operate in what's considered to be a normal nuclear family dynamic.
They are by their very nature sort of deviant and corrosive to it because they're not The same as everyone else, right?
And part of our job is reorganizing parents' assumptions of what parenthood is so they can cope with that.
And that gives us a very particular perspective.
Also, queer.
Being queer gives you a really interesting perspective on this dynamic because queer children are really interesting.
We are always sort of outside because of our nature.
We're forced outside, right?
We're outside the fishbowl looking in.
The narratives that apply to our cis and heterosexual cousins and siblings largely don't apply to us.
And that is both a good and a bad thing.
It's a bad thing in the sense that it leaves us flailing for identity throughout much of our lives.
We suffer with that quite profoundly.
But it's a good thing in the sense that it gives us perspective on what those narratives do and the more negative aspects of them.
I think it's often more difficult for people who are engaged in and involved in those narratives.
So people who are parents, obviously, they're too close to the situation.
They're already invested.
They already have bias.
Because when you're a parent, you identify as a parent, right?
That's what you do.
It's the whole thing.
It's so fascinating to me.
I tripped down this rabbit hole, by the way.
As I say, I encountered Diane on my feed, and I encountered a couple of the others, and then that was it.
That was it.
And it's fascinating to me on a number of levels.
I mean, there is that prurient sort of like, oh my god, how awful can these people get?
Yeah.
I have to confess, my own fascination is a good part.
You know, lucky Lou at a road accident.
I have to confess.
And it is, I mean, it's one hell of a road accident because there is no bottom of the barrel.
When you think you've seen the most awful thing a parent can say or do to their child, it gets deeper.
It gets deeper and deeper.
What you want to do, guys, you really want to see them with their masks off.
You want to go into the forums or the Facebook threads or whatever where they think people aren't looking.
When they think they're in one another's company.
Yeah.
What they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
Wow.
Wow.
They would absolutely have, for the most part, they would absolutely have an authoritarian state.
They would have it mandated in law that children cannot leave their parents, cannot, unless their parents kick them out, obviously.
Then they can go.
This is how these, I mean, my answer to the challenge, you know, what right have you got to comment?
You haven't got children, you don't know, would be you people are choosing to try to have an effect on the world I live in, a political effect.
You are putting out videos, making political statements and political, you know, putting forward your political theories and you're trying to influence people.
Apart from the fact that I just, I have a right inherently because I live in the same world as you and you don't have to earn your rights.
They're just yours.
By definition, they're not natural phenomena.
They're not in the genes, but we create them.
So they exist.
So we all have them.
Apart from that, you are trying to affect my world.
I mean, you had children.
That affects my world.
You have the right to have children, but it does give me the right to say things like, I think we should have universal free education because I don't want to live in a world that's full of children that other people chose to have that haven't been educated.
And I don't want to live in the world that you people put forward.
I don't want to live in the world that you want to make.
And as you say, they have an almost, overwhelmingly, they have a reactionary authoritarian view.
I think Wilhelm Reich talked a lot of shit, but I think there's a core of what he wrote about the mass psychology of fascism, which is, there's still some value in it, and I think what he wrote about the authoritarian personality coming from the authoritarian family,
you know, being, and Eric Fromm as well wrote about this, I think these things as being part of, I think Deleuze and Guattari wrote about it as well actually, these are part of the sort of The basic cell activity of how you get to authoritarian right-wing societies.
And you people are actively involved in this is where you come from and this is what you're trying to do.
That gives me the right to comment on it.
And you talk like incels.
You talk like QAnon.
You talk like MAGA. You talk like anti-vaxxers.
You talk like all these people.
Because you are.
That's just what you are.
You're just a different species of the same thing.
These people have all the right-wing narratives.
The thing about, oh, it was the new partner or it was the therapist, that's just the outside agitator's narrative, isn't it?
That's just their version of that.
It's just their version of teachers are indoctrinating our children into critical race theory and into trans ideology.
It's just their version of the same.
And in fact, they hold those exact same views as well.
The exact thing.
They say that.
I mean, those narratives are so overlap.
They may as well be existing in the same place at the same time.
They're the same thing, right?
But yeah, that's one of the things that surprised me so much about it.
Well, it didn't surprise me, but it was interesting the degree to which it was so overt that it is just another pipeline.
Rather, it's another expression of authoritarian ideology.
It obviously, therefore, aligns directly with fascism and with other movements.
This is how fascism works now.
Fascism is not a monolithic, single-party phenomenon now in the 21st century in the way that it was in the places where it took power in the early 20th century.
It's different now.
It's the same essential phenomenon, but now it's diffuse and rhizomatic because we live in the age of digital tribes and social media.
It's changed.
It's adapted because that's what it does.
It mutates to fit its social situations.
It's the same thing.
Yeah, and it's the lack of insight that is so fascinating to me.
It's the inability to, even when they tell on themselves, and they do it consistently, consistently, they express why their children don't speak to them.
They express why people are constantly criticizing them and taking them apart.
They do it themselves.
I mean, you would think almost that there's like a subconscious part of them that's trying to confess.
Yeah, probably.
That's trying to exorcise itself.
They do it that consistently.
But it never makes...
They are not able to progress.
They're not able to develop or grow up.
Because that would result in the destruction of the self, wouldn't it?
It would result in the ego death, which they just cannot allow.
But which is an essential kind of growth.
The narcissistic self is an overinflated balloon, isn't it?
It's big and bloated, but all it takes is a tiny pinprick and the thing explodes.
That's it.
That's it.
And by God, oh wow, they cannot take criticism.
One of the other things I love about them is that they have this thing about, this obsession about going through the comments on their videos, their threads, and they respond really aggressively to them.
Really aggressively.
They never engage.
They never actually engage.
They just respond with aggression and denialism and the usual stuff, you know, the scapegoating, the distractionism.
Again, it's exactly like fascist content creators.
It's exactly like all the MRA content creators that used to be all over YouTube and the Gamergate.
They act like Gamergate.
They act like Gamergate.
And this is why we can't afford to be too complacent about these people because, I mean, I don't see in the estranged parents movement and sort of imminent threat of massive influence.
It's one thread of, as we were saying, it's one thread of a very thick rope that our culture is trying to hang itself with.
But, you know, everybody thought Gamergate was just this ludicrous, disgusting harassment campaign.
You know, just, I don't mean that, but they're in government now.
Gamergate is now in government in the United States.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And of course, the other thing about the estranged parents, unlike Gamergate, the estranged parents movement has potentially a really catastrophic influence because you can see Other parents or potential parents finding them and their perspectives on parenthood being corrupted and the potential fallout there is huge.
It's absolutely huge.
And again, you also get the automatic alienation of younger generations.
These guys, the estranged parents, they are going to be way more active than the estranged children are.
The estranged children...
They just want to be left alone.
They just want to get on with their lives.
They want to get on with their new lives.
But the estranged parents, they are active.
They are going to do everything.
If it means getting involved in politics, that's what they're going to do.
If it means trying to influence culture or going on Sean Hannity or whatever, that's what they're going to do.
It is already commercializing.
It is already turning into a grift mill, an industry.
As we say, you know, Diane Zatter, Dormant Mom, Joshua Coleman, in exactly the same way that Pizzagate and QAnon turned into this gigantic content mill of alternative influences and stuff, you know, the kind of stuff that the Conspirituality podcast covers.
This, in its own still, at the moment, small way, is doing the same thing.
It's converting itself into an online industry, an online content stroke propaganda.
Yeah, and that makes it particularly dangerous because, of course, when you're going to get the other types of psychopath and grifter coming in who have no real emotional investment in the movement at all, one way or the other, but just see a way of making money and gaining influence, of which I'm sure there are already quite a few out there.
Yeah, we kind of opened the show talking about the forlorn nature of the Enterprise of Time trying to pick this sort of stuff apart.
You know, how much of it is cynicism?
How much of it is fanaticism?
The truth is they're just aspects of the same thing.
You can't pick them apart.
Cynicism and fanaticism are two sides of one coin.
They always go together.
It's the heads of the same hydra, ultimately.
Which is an unfortunate metaphor, because of course when you cut the head of the hydra off, two more grow.
It's a case of porterizing the next stump, if you want to torture the metaphor to the nth degree.
I always think with the Hydra, the thing to do is to maybe not try and kill it by cutting heads off, maybe attack a different part of the body.
I'm not a classical hero, so maybe I just don't understand these things.
But it seems like cutting the heads off isn't working, so maybe it's time for a change of tactic.
Maybe so.
Maybe so.
I mean, it's easy to despair, isn't it?
One of the things I will say to anyone who, as a result of this video, goes looking into the whole estranged parents thing, be aware.
It can be triggering, especially if you have experience of something similar.
The other thing I wanted to talk about, actually, one of the other tactics they used.
Is they love to reframe the parameters of abuse.
One of the things you'll hear them all say is...
Just like right-wing white people redefining racism so that whatever they've done or said, they're never guilty of it.
Exactly.
You'll hear them say, well, we may have been this or that, but we were not abusive.
And it's like, well, first of all, define your terms.
What do you mean?
When you use the term abusive, what do you mean?
And also, when you say we may have been this or that, what do you mean?
And also, I mean, just throwing it all out there, you don't get to define the parameters of abuse.
You don't get to define the parameters of abuse.
The victim gets to define the parameters of abuse.
The person who is harmed gets to define the parameters of abuse.
And if what they say was, you were this damaging, you were so damaging that I can't even be around you anymore, I can't even have contact with you anymore, then that's abuse.
It doesn't matter whether you like the word or not.
What they often do is they will...
They don't perceive themselves as abusers, so they can't be, can they?
Of course, of course.
And they will categorise abuse in these very narrow parameters.
For them, it's got to be physical abuse and or sexual abuse.
If it's not that, then it's not abuse.
It's not abuse.
Again, exactly like, well, I didn't join the Nazi Party.
You know, Trump isn't actually the leader of a party called the National Socialist German Workers' Party, so he's not a fascist.
I didn't actually burn a cross and call you the N-word, so I'm not a racist.
I'm not a racist, yeah, absolutely, yes.
Oh, my God.
It is, again, dynamically exactly the same.
The other people who get to not define, but sort of thrash this out in a conversation and put it forward for us as a society to make our minds up on the question of what is or isn't abuse are, of course, people that study it.
Scholars and academics and therapists who study it and actually engage in therapeutic practice, which is why these people hate those people so much and blacken them and slander them and lie about them and say that they're all engaged in this conspiracy to attack parents.
To destroy the family.
And for no reason, by the way, they're just demonic.
It's a bit like the satanic panic, isn't it?
This is something I wanted to mention because, again, it ties directly into all these reactionary narratives, the anti-electualism and all that sort of thing.
They will attack therapists unendingly.
Now, you and I know therapists are very far from perfect.
You only have to look at the thing you just...
Raised the satanic panic.
It's a complex story.
It wasn't just therapists.
And of course, it wasn't all therapists, but there were some therapists who wittingly or unwittingly.
Again, we can't pick these things apart necessarily cynically or fanatically or some combination of the two manufactured false memories of abuse, manufactured false charges of satanic sexual abuse and stuff like that.
There's there's an extensive literature about this is a fascinating subject, but it did happen.
But the thing is, people will raise that as a way to attack therapy as a as a as a discourse or a profession or an institution.
Again, if you look at what happened there, the people driving that hysteria, the people driving that paranoia, they were the people, the same people that we're talking about now.
Yeah, the people of the same groups, the same attitudes, the same viewpoints.
Totally.
These people, the estranged parents type of people, they are the people who back then were driving the satanic panic.
Absolutely.
They were.
And, you know, they managed to manufacture an entire hysteria out of whole cloth.
Like literally there was nothing happening.
Yeah, there was their conspiracy theory.
In exactly the same way that these people are flogging conspiracy theories now that did this.
It's exactly that.
I mean, you know, their narrative with regards to therapists is that therapists are, for some reason, for reasons, by the way, they will never define.
These people are masters of vagary and implication.
They will never give you specifics about anything.
They will never give you specifics.
They will allude to things.
They will sort of passive-aggressively reference things, but they will not give you specifics.
So they will say that therapists are somehow conditioning.
Children or young people who go to therapy to abandon their parents.
What's that?
It's a different form of the grooming conspiracy theory, isn't it?
Kids are turning trans because they're being groomed or because of social contagion.
Again, social contagion, another right-wing conspiracy theory about trans kids and stuff like that, which Diane specifically talks about in her video, along with the DEI anti-wokeness stuff that she goes on about.
Again, it's the same theory.
It's the same paranoid theory.
It's Disney indoctrinating your children to be gay.
It's teachers indoctrinating white kids to hate themselves because they're white.
It's just the same thing in a different form.
And why?
I mean, they can't even be straight in their own narratives.
If you pin them down and ask them, well, what is the end game then?
If this conspiracy exists, I'm going to allow you it.
Let's just allow it for the sake of argument.
What form does it take?
Where does it come from?
Why are they doing it?
And what is the endgame?
I said, didn't I? This is how the people ask themselves that and follow that paranoid logic, that conspiratorial logic to its conclusion.
They end up with it's George Soros and he wants to destroy Western civilization because he's a demon and stuff like this.
This is where they end up.
They end up with Alex Jones shit.
You've got to end up at like...
Like a metaphysical explanation.
You've got to end up, oh, it's Satan.
Oh, it's the influence of demons.
Because it doesn't make any sense at all.
And of course, just to be clear, therapists are not doing that.
Counselors are not doing that.
What they're doing is they are giving people who probably lack wider context.
They are giving them the language and the context to perceive what they've experienced in different ways.
That's all they're doing.
That's all they're doing.
And by the way, I'm studying to be a therapist and a counsellor.
One of the things we would never fucking do, you are prohibited actively from doing, is saying to anyone, you should leave this person.
You can't do that.
You absolutely cannot do that.
Yeah.
No, I've seen that again in so many of these things.
The therapist told my child.
No, no, they didn't.
No, they didn't.
And I saw one where somebody who'd estranged from their parents was getting emails from somebody who, without naming themselves, was claiming to be their estranged mother's therapist and saying, oh, your mother has done therapy with me and she's done great work.
And it was so obvious that these were fake letters being written by the mother.
It might as well have been one of those Nigerian Prince scams thing.
I mean, for a start, No therapist would do that, even if they agreed with them.
Of course not.
They would not do that because they would be struck off.
Their license would be revoked forthwith.
They would be done.
Of course.
They would have no career anymore.
That would be it.
The other thing I've seen, and this is the most amazing thing, because again, it's the way this uto manifests.
The whole world revolves around me.
They do videos or they produce lists.
They're talking directly to This mythical sort of projection of therapists that they've conjured in their own minds, which is basically like this corrupting demon.
And they give them lists of things.
When you're talking to these young people, do you ever think that, do you ever say to them, well, maybe they're wrong?
Or do you ever think that maybe they're lying to you?
And it's like, well, no, they don't, because they're their fucking therapists.
They're not yours.
They're their therapists.
No, they don't consider that because that's not what they're paid for.
That's not what they're there to do.
If you want a therapist who will listen to you, go and fucking get one.
Yeah.
Again, it's an exact mirror of a classic right-wing narrative, which is the thing about defense attorneys.
How dare you defend your own client from the prosecutor?
It's like, what are you talking about?
Of course they're going to defend their client.
That's literally their fucking job.
I mean, it's the most, again, the ego.
They think, somehow in their own heads, they think that the therapist knows who they are outside of the therapy sessions.
They think that somehow the therapist should be aware of them and what they're thinking and they're feeling because they can't conceive of other people as real.
Everyone must know because they are the centre of the fucking universe.
They are God, right?
I'm not a paranoid narcissist.
It's just that everybody's out to get me because I'm so great.
Yes!
Because I'm brilliant and they're all jealous of me because I'm God.
Everyone's out to tear me down.
It's like, wow!
Wow!
That's part of the attraction to the whole thing, to be honest.
It is.
It's a massive ego stroke, isn't it?
It really is.
It's that incredulity, that reaction of, I almost can't believe this.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, if it wasn't coming direct from the horse's mouth, I wouldn't have believed it.
There was one woman I found, and it's quite incredible.
She's actually, she's a German lady, and she's much more softly spoken than Diane or Normat Mom or whatever.
But the things she says in her video are horrific.
Her son and their spouse left Germany and went to California to get away from her.
Total no contact.
Did not want anything from her.
But she talks about how, but I still sent him Christmas cards and texts and whatnot, and I didn't get anything back, obviously.
Terrible, terrible son, obviously.
And then, after three years of estrangement, without her words, he took the plane.
California and turned up on his doorstep.
And she did a video after, because she was turned away and sent packing, obviously.
And she did a video after where she talks about how aggrieved she was about being turned away from her son's doorstep and how she had to stay in a hotel after paying for this flight to go and see him.
And she could not see.
She sincerely, you could see from the video, she sincerely could not understand why that happened.
And why?
Wow!
Wow.
That is scary.
That, to me, is actually quite frightening, I've got to say.
I can put myself...
And you're running that risk if you show up at anybody's house unannounced and unexpected.
And it's not like she doesn't know that she's doing that, because that's the whole point.
She's going there to ambush them.
Yes, of course.
I can feel what that son would be feeling.
I can sort of project myself into it.
It's such an invasion.
Guys, it's an evil thing to do.
To me, that would be...
If he wasn't absolutely certain before of who this woman is and why he went no contact, that would just seal the deal.
It would be a case of...
In fact, I would actually be...
Sort of thinking about going to the police at that point.
Because I wouldn't trust, I would be actually quite scared, especially if there were grandchildren involved.
And this is another dimension, by the way.
This is a whole other dimension.
When there are grandchildren involved, when these people become grandparents, they think they're entitled to access to their children, who have told them no.
Their adult children, who have told them no.
Their grandchildren, all.
Oh, they think they have rights.
They think they have rights with regards to their grandchildren, who they've often never met, by the way.
Who they've often never met.
And again, it's all about weaponization.
They are looking for a way in.
It's the whole dynamic of the abuser.
They are looking for a way in.
And it doesn't matter what it is.
The grandchild is just another piece of leverage.
It's just another weapon.
Yeah, it's a pawn on the chessboard, yeah.
Exactly that.
There are accounts of, like, strange children or children who have placed boundaries with their parents, but who have allowed their children some access to their grandparent because they want them to have that relationship, you know?
And I totally get that.
I've done that.
But what's happened, inevitably...
Inevitably, what happens, the grandparent oversteps their bounds.
They weaponize that access to the child.
They attempt to weaponize the child against their own children, against the child's parents, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I was going to make a little joke, which is that for a while now, this has been feeling...
It's been feeling like a companion piece to our discussion of the film Hereditary that we did with our friend Elliot Chapman because it's all in that movie, isn't it?
Isn't it?
The horror of families, right?
That's what Hereditary is.
It's the horror of family and that boils down to its essence.
And all the political stuff as well, because as we said when we talked about Hereditary, that film is a, it's all about how these dynamics are mirrored, you know, and we have the whole metaphor in that film of the houses within the houses within the houses, so we have like the levels repeating at every stage.
It's, you know, the dynamics of cult, religion, MLM, right-wing political movement mirrored all the way through this story.
Down to the family dynamics.
Abuse at every level, organized in fundamentally the same way, whether it's interpersonal or political.
But the thing that makes it so clear that this is about...
Ownership and property and control and commodities and transactions is the number of times that these people will attempt to blackmail or extort or weaponize inheritance.
The number of times you catch them saying stuff like, I'm cutting him or her out of my will or, you know, I'm going to leave the money to the grandchildren instead and stuff like this.
They do that all the time as well.
All the time.
And, you know, what I love about that very often, it's clear that the estranged child doesn't give a fuck.
You're out of their lives already.
They've already made that calculation in their head.
Well, not only am I not getting it, I don't want it.
I don't want it because it's weaponized.
It's just another means of control.
In fact, money in general is a big one.
I came across multiple examples of this where the estranged parents has They've thrown an epic temper tantrum because their child isn't budging on the boundaries or the no contact thing.
And they've sent them letters with itemized bills for when they...
Oh, I did this for you when you were a kid.
I spent this amount.
I didn't take this job because of this.
I didn't marry this man who's rich now, so you owe me this.
And it's like...
Wow.
I mean, if you want to reinforce absolutely in your estranged child's mind, and also the rest of the fucking world, by the way, the rest of the sane world, why?
Not only should you not be around your children, but probably not around people in general.
People shouldn't form relationships with you.
That's it.
You get that letter and it's like, sorry, this is supposed to be the case in your favor?
This is why I should want to know you?
It's incredible.
It's absolutely incredible.
I mean, and again, I mean, this is what they do.
They weaponize absolutely everything.
They will weaponize the rest of the family.
I mean, one of the really sad things, one of the calculations that children who are considering going, like, complete no contact or going completely estranged have to make is they are likely going to lose more than just the parents, unfortunately.
Because they will.
The minute you make that decision, they're going to be on the phone, they're going to be texting, they're going to be emailing, and they're going to be giving long litanies about what an ungrateful little bastard you are and how you did this and did that and said this.
They are going to try and send their flying monkeys after you because that's a standard tactic.
That's what they're going to do.
They're going to try and turn.
Everyone against you.
And sadly, it is often quite easy.
It is often quite easy for them to do because, again, it's very close to the way narcissistic abusers work, domestic abusers work.
They try to portray a public image of themselves, a mask of themselves, which is wonderful.
The people who would do anything for you, oh, they're so nice.
It's behind closed doors where they think people can't see where all this happens.
So sadly, it is often quite easy for them to do this.
Yeah, yeah.
And again, I'm a broken record, I know, but it's mirrored almost exactly on a different scale at the political level, isn't it?
I mean, the application is easy to see.
The leader who pretends to be one person in public and then is different in private, the people that vote for them, projecting their own dreams and hopes and desires onto the leader and thinking, he has my best interests at heart.
He's going to look after me.
He's going to make my country great again.
They're not coming after him.
They're coming after me.
He's just stood in the way.
He gets into power.
He takes away their Social Security.
He takes away their Medicaid.
Because he wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire, literally.
Because they're not human, right?
And then if anybody that talks against it, the flying monkeys are sent.
It's exactly the same.
These things work exactly the same at every level of the system.
They do.
They absolutely do.
And that's also the really difficult thing about it.
What children who are going estranged, going no contact, are doing is they are fighting history.
They're actually fighting the mechanisms of society.
And that's what makes it so difficult.
That's what makes it so difficult.
That's often why, again, why the power dynamic is so skewed.
These parents, these are strange, you know, and I use that in quotation marks, parents.
The power will always be with them because they're the parents.
They're the fucking, that's the other thing I want to say to them always, you know.
Whenever they're whining about what their child said or did or whatever, you're the parent.
Sorry.
That's the bottom line.
You're the fucking Clarence.
Yeah, and then that's exacerbated, as we were saying earlier, by the generational thing with the way the economy has changed.
You know, they're going to be the ones with the money.
They're going to be the ones with the property because they grew up in a world that allowed them to accrue a certain degree of, you know, in a class position and a race position, etc., and an economy that allowed some people, including them, to accrue a certain amount of property and money as opposed to generations of people now who have grown up in the shadow of the Great Recession.
And everything after it.
Constant collapses, right?
Absolutely.
It is just a scrabble to survive, right?
Whatever little comfort you can get, you take.
Yes, that conversation.
I reconnected with a lot of my cousins recently who are of a similar age.
And that conversation is something almost all of them have had with their parents at some point.
And they all come out with the same conclusion, which is they can't see it.
They can't see it.
Their parents were born into a time of relative economic prosperity where there are loads of new markets like the computer market and whatnot.
There were booming industries.
There were largely very sound and solid structural safety nets.
There were things like free education, etc.
Houses were very easy to get on a single income.
And the outgoings were just nothing like.
What we're paying now.
Just like having a rental property on your own.
They cannot see it.
They cannot wrap their heads around it.
Things are different now.
Yeah, so there's just that inherent power imbalance just on the material level.
On the material level, they're going to be occupying all of the better spaces because, again, the job market was completely different when they were young.
They're going to be occupying the better paid jobs just by, not universally, you know, obviously, but generally speaking, they are going to have property.
They're going to have, not only are they going to have the property, they're going to have the better properties, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, certainly, I mean, the high profile estranged parents in the movement are, you know, it's a solidly upper middle class phenomenon.
It's solidly, yeah.
And I don't think...
That's not an accident.
It's not.
It's primarily white.
Again, not universal.
And actually, one of the other more interesting wrinkles in the whole thing is when you have different cultures of parenthood coming in.
That's very interesting because that throws in a whole other dynamic, which I don't feel qualified to speak on in any great detail.
But obviously, there are different...
There are different assumptions of what parenthood means in, for example, Korean families or in Chinese families or in black American families and so on and so forth.
In the same way, there are different assumptions of what gender roles mean.
Well, I mean, there's been a great deal of social and cultural change in people's attitudes over the last few decades.
You know, and it's been the result, you know, in many respects, we're living in the gigantic backlash against it now.
But it's been the work of activists and ordinary people, you know, fighting for change and so on and so forth.
And they have shifted attitudes, attitudes on a great many, you know, nowhere near enough and imperfectly and so on.
Absolutely.
I mean, one of the things I wanted to get to was that there has actually been research, there have been studies into this now.
And, you know, lest anybody should think where you and I are taking too much for granted, the studies into the test what estranged children say against what estranged parents say show very comfortably that there is an extremely telling mismatch, the studies into the test what estranged children say against what estranged parents say show very comfortably The estranged parents narratives are not accurate.
They say, oh, suddenly out of nowhere, my child decided to sever contact.
No, you talk to the kids.
They talk about years of trying to get their parents to hear them.
Years of explaining to them, trying to get them to understand.
The parent says, he's never explained.
She's never told me.
Nope.
And they talk about, I never did anything wrong.
You ask the kids, they have a litany of things that the parent did wrong, including not being there, not protecting them from abuse, abusing them themselves.
And third-party influence, again, the kids say, no, it's nothing to do with my partner.
It's the fact that my parents wouldn't accept my partner or whatever like that.
We've covered the therapist thing.
And one of the big things that estranged children, adult children, talk about is...
Discrepancies between their beliefs and values and the beliefs and values of their parents and their consequent lack of acceptance of their, the kids' beliefs and values.
The kids feeling that they need to hide their true selves, that they can't be their true selves.
This is one of the things they say to people studying this.
And that is obviously going to be bound up with stuff like strides towards acceptance and visibility made in recent decades by queer people, trans people, etc.
This is, on a fundamental level, this is what this is about.
I think it's about a mismatch between progressive or progressed attitudes on the part of younger generations crunching up against this gigantic reactionary refusal on the part of the older generation.
You will not be that.
You will not think that.
I will not hear you.
You cannot be that person that you say you are, that you feel you are.
No, no, no, no, no.
Fingers and ears.
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
That's exactly it.
It's a conflict on that level.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's something that I think, again, we all experience, isn't it?
To one degree or another, even if we have a fairly decent relationship with our parents, which is very often, it is like we are talking past one another.
Well, this is another thing.
It takes a lot for people to get to the point where they sever contact.
It's not just normal family ruptures or disagreements or misunderstandings.
I mean, this is the other thing these people do.
They try to reframe the entire dynamic, right?
Like you said, when they look at the accounts of the estranged parents, again, this is almost universal.
They will say things like, it came out of the blue, we don't know why it happened, everything was normal one day and then it wasn't the other.
The accounts of the estranged children say the exact opposite.
And not only that, but the estranged children often have documentary evidence where they can show you the text, the emails, over years, right?
Over years and years and years, where they've tried to say to their parent, look, you are not listening to me.
You won't even try to understand.
You won't even try to listen.
And this is the other thing.
There is no possibility of dialogue.
There is no possibility of dialogue because whatever the child attempts, because the parent doesn't see them as a real person, they will not even engage with them.
They will just say, I'm not talking to you.
I'm not talking about that.
You are talking.
I don't like the way you're talking to me.
And they'll throw a temper tantrum.
They'll throw a temper tantrum and shut down the conversation and that's it.
And it's built up over years and years and years.
Children do not go completely no contact arbitrarily and just on a whim.
It doesn't happen.
It's against every sort of biological imperative in our breast.
We rely on our parents, and that doesn't go away.
That just doesn't go away.
That idea makes no more sense than the bullshit, reactionary, bigoted conspiracy idea that kids are turning trans because it's trendy.
It's the same argument, and it's just as bullshit.
It's just as bullshit, yeah.
And there's as much really dark psychology underlying it, isn't there?
It's so complex.
It's this desire to deflect any kind of responsibility.
And to invalidate the identity of the person that has an identity that you think is invalid.
That you think is valid, right?
That they shouldn't have, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
You say you're trans.
I don't think you should be allowed to be.
Ergo, you're not.
Ergo, you are not.
You are not.
Transforming what I expect of you, what I demand of you.
You are my toy.
You do what you are told.
You be as you are expected.
So people react the way they do when their hoover stops working and they're in a temper.
They kick it.
It's like, well, it's only a thing and it's mine and it's supposed to do this thing and it stopped doing.
It stopped working.
I paid for it.
Why isn't it doing what I want it to do?
They behave towards their children like they're malfunctioning machinery.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely that.
Exactly the same way that MRAs do to women.
You know, I put helping her move house into the slot.
Why isn't sex coming out?
Why isn't this machine doing what it's supposed to do?
I'm entitled.
It's the same thing.
It's the way they try to, I mean, in their own heads, they try to cope with it as well.
I mean, I know that doormat mom.
She released her book, and this is the most narcissistic thing I have ever seen.
She released her book.
She timed the launch of her book on the same day as her daughter's wedding.
Bitch, right?
Evil.
I mean, that's just evil.
That is just petty, malicious, controlling cruelty.
There is nothing good about that.
There is no reason.
It's just pure spite.
It's absolute cartoon villain level malice that is.
It's childish as well.
It's playground bully level malice.
And yet another demonstration of your children are well shot of you.
They are well shot of you.
Oh my god.
They cannot seem to...
There's just no ability in their minds to accept their children might be better off without them.
That can't be.
That cannot be.
And yet, from every expression, clearly is.
Clearly is.
I wouldn't want to be near them on the streets.
I don't really want to be on the same planet as them as a human being.
They're scary.
These people are scary.
Well, he's scary in the same way that abusive spouses are, or, like, obsessive spouses are, you know?
They're scary in the same way.
And they often, if they don't actively breed, like, anti-stalking laws, they come damn close.
Yeah.
Some of them do.
I mean, some of them absolutely do.
Turning up on, you know, someone's doorstep when they've told you not to.
You know?
Hanging around their workplace, trying to get to them through their colleagues, like turning up at your granddaughter's pantomime, which is another thing doormat mom advises, by the way, because it's like, you know, I would go spare.
That would end with someone getting arrested.
Well, it should.
But of course, we've been talking about this is largely based in the white middle classes.
These are people who, to a huge extent, they just enjoy a kind of de facto presumption of innocence on the part of the authorities, don't they?
Of course, they do.
And of course, because of the class they occupy too, yeah?
Yeah, exactly.
You look at Diana, she's the picture of it.
She is the picture of that sort of middle American...
Conservative, done reasonably well for themselves.
You know, they occupy a particular class bracket.
She's the very picture of it.
She's almost like an archetype or a stereotype, isn't she?
Well, as you say, she's almost like a parody.
You would think it's, you know...
Oh, that's what I thought.
When I first started watching her videos, I was like, this is a subtle comedy.
This is a very...
You know, it's a well-written satire.
It can't be real.
It cannot be serious.
It took a while.
It absolutely is the 21st century American social media age version of Wilhelm Reich's authoritarian family.
It just is.
It's right there on the screen.
They show it to you proudly.
It's amazing.
Sincerely as well, right?
That's what they believe.
That's what they feel.
It's like, wow.
Wow, Diane.
And you wonder why they don't want to talk to you.
You wonder why one daughter ran away to join a convent and one just will have nothing to do with you.
I mean, I know if I were the younger daughter, who is the one Diane concentrates on now, by the way, for some reason she doesn't reference the older one almost at all.
I wonder why.
I wonder if there's some legal proceedings there or something.
But if I were the younger one, I would be looking at getting a restraining order or something because the degree...
The way she keeps churning out videos about it, that alone is creepy.
The fact of it is just creepy and obsessive and strange.
Putting it all up there on the internet, it's like, why?
No, Diane, this is not the way a healthy person operates.
It's not good for you.
It's definitely not good for you because all you're getting is abuse, you know?
But it's attention, isn't it?
She's got her place in the attention economy.
She does.
She does.
And again, I mean, she does this thing of cultivating her space as well, so she will obsessively go through the comments and delete all the ones that are critical, especially the ones that make a point, especially the ones that are quite coherent and will take her videos apart piece by piece.
She will delete those, and she'll only leave the ones that are fluffing her up.
Oh, you're so, oh, you know, don't listen to your terrible, ungrateful children.
You did everything you could, etc., etc., etc.
Well, on the off chance that she's listening to this, fuck you, Diane.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know we've looked at this in some nuance, but yeah, absolutely.
Fuck you.
I have absolutely no time for...
I have a problem with parents who are just disinterested.
I think parents who are just disinterested are terrible people.
I cannot...
I cannot wrap my head around that.
I cannot wrap my head around that at all.
You brought a consciousness into the world.
You are responsible for sculpting it.
I cannot abide that.
It doesn't owe you anything.
It's the other way around.
It's the other way around.
Always and forever.
That's the way it will always be.
You know what the funny thing is?
Bastards know it as well.
They know it because they actually will react.
They react against this.
A lot of people say to them, obviously in the comments and the videos aimed at them, your child owes you nothing for the fact of their birth.
They owe you nothing.
And they will not attempt to tackle it.
They'll just do that petty playground thing.
Oh, there are loads of people out there who say, oh, your child owes you nothing.
But I did all this.
Cough, Diane.
You know?
Fuck off.
You know this.
To a certain degree, you are aware of this.
All of you are.
And you just don't like it.
You don't like the fact that...
One of the other interesting things is, and to a degree, I have an ounce more sympathy for this.
A lot of them clearly didn't want to be parents.
A lot of them clearly didn't want to be parents and probably didn't have the opportunity not to be, right?
Considering the generation they were from.
And I get that.
That must be an awful thing.
I get that.
That must be an awful thing.
But, ultimately, you are.
Bottom line, innit?
You know?
It happens.
An unwanted child.
My God.
I mean, an aborted child.
I mean, that's...
Yeah, it's a sad situation.
But that's where it stops.
An unwanted child.
The ripples go on forever.
Throughout human history, at the end of time.
It's so preferable to having a child if you don't really want it.
Absolutely.
The amount of human misery that would be avoided if we could change our world so that people that, for whatever reason, they don't want children, they don't have them.
Absolutely.
That would be such a wonderful change.
I think that what we're talking about...
It's a microcosm of a much wider problem, as we've discussed.
And changing it is very, very complex.
Combating it is very hard.
But, I mean, children who choose to become estranged, it's part of it, right?
It's part of the fight back.
Yes, that's it.
Yeah.
Just the recognition, you know, that there's something, the way...
The way I'm being treated is not right, you know?
And I do not have to subject myself to it.
That's in its own way.
It's a big...
It's that acknowledgement that it doesn't have to be this way.
What is normalised in my household, in the family I was born to, is not normal.
And it doesn't have to be normal.
I mean, again, you are the one that's crazy, not me.
I know you are lowering the gaslight.
I know.
I'm not crazy.
It's you.
You're doing something with the lights.
That's very hard.
Again, the accounts from the estranged children.
Because, of course, you are conditioned in this culture.
The parent is God.
The parent is God in the eyes of all children.
They are always right, right?
Up until a particular point.
They still...
The estranged children still suffer that guilt.
They still question.
They always, all of them always still feel, did I do the right thing?
Was there another way?
Was there something else I could have done?
Could I have handled it differently?
Parents don't.
Well, that's another disjunct in the narratives that the research...
Lays bare.
The parents always say, oh, you know, my daughter cut me off or my son cut me off and they're off having fun.
They don't care about me anymore.
The researchers ask the estranged kids, the adult children that have estranged themselves from their parents, and they say, you know, I feel bad about it every day.
I feel remorse every day.
Yeah, and the loss.
The loss, right?
The other thing they say, which again is pretty goddamn heartbreaking, is I miss parents I wish I had.
I have an ideal in my head of how my parents could have been, and it conflicts totally with the reality.
It conflicts totally with the reality, and I feel bad that I couldn't have that, you know?
But yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, that is something children are entitled to.
They should have decent parents.
By the way, that doesn't mean perfect, because there's no such thing.
All parents want mistakes.
That's something the estranged parents always say, isn't it?
Oh, I wasn't perfect.
Nobody was calling upon you to be perfect.
Nobody expected you to be perfect.
They were calling upon you to be decent.
To be halfway decent human beings.
Not perfect.
But children are entitled to good parents.
They should have good parents.
And that's something we should take on board culturally as well.
You know?
They should have good parents.
If you bring a consciousness into this world, you damn well have responsibility to make it the best it can be and to give it the best that you can.
And that doesn't mean materially, by the way.
That just means emotionally.
You are obliged to give it the best that you can.
And again, I don't mean to be didactic or finger-wagging about it, but yeah, I do feel that way.
I do feel that way.
I agree.
It works very much the same way as the solution to the paradox of tolerance.
Famously, the paradox of tolerance is how does a tolerant society tolerate the intolerant?
Well, the solution to that is...
Several people have put this forward in different forms, is to view toleration as a contract.
You know, you assume if people want to be part of society, you assume that they've signed up to the contract of mutual toleration and therefore it's extended to them.
And then people can default on the contract by being intolerant, by being racist and bigoted and authoritarian and so on and so forth.
You've defaulted on the contract and therefore you are no longer bound.
You know, the other people are no longer bound to consider themselves bound by that contract.
As regards you.
Well, it's similar to this, isn't it?
If you decide to have children, you've de facto entered into a contract to be the best parent that you can.
And you are not entitled to have that child always bound by the contract.
You can default on it, and the child can say, you've defaulted on the contract, so I'm off.
So I'm off, right.
That's it.
It is always a reaction to...
It is not arbitrary.
You know, this is something...
Again, it's hammering at home.
Children do not leave their parents arbitrarily.
They just don't.
I mean, I'm sure there are some strange circumstances out there where, yes, where a child has some sort of personality disorder, they have maybe a neurological problem or something like that, or some external influence, like maybe drug addiction or something, has.
Distorted their perspective somewhat.
It's a big world.
Everything has happened once.
Absolutely.
But again, the fact of that circumstance does not in any way mitigate what we're talking about here in any way.
And it doesn't allow for these people to apologize and to justify what they've done and the way they are.
And like all reactionary arguments, it's just a word game.
Yeah, of course it is.
Of course it is.
It's a way of...
It works on so many...
Like all reactionaries, they have this superpower, don't they, where they don't have to care very much about what they say.
They don't really have to put that much thought into it or to consider things like truthfulness or complexity.
They can just throw shit at the wall and see what happens.
It's an absolute superpower in all of our systems.
Again, it's reminiscent of what Sartre said about the anti-Semite.
They don't make sense, and they know they don't make sense.
They know their arguments are ludicrous.
They don't care.
They don't need to make sense.
We're the ones that are bound by sense and reality.
They come out with their bullshit and giggle and then power through.
Yeah, it's exactly that.
It is exactly that.
When you watch Diane's videos and you step back from them and compartmentalize the pieces of them, that's exactly what she's doing.
It's like this escalating structure of justifications.
How many can I throw out there to befoul the entire conversation, to obfuscate everything?
And again, it's a superpower.
It's an absolute superpower, particularly on the political level.
It works.
If you are amoral and you don't care...
And you have no notion of detecting tomorrow or of a society of tomorrow or next year or next decade.
And all you want is power and control and dominion.
Wow.
It's such a brilliant tactic.
You can just spew whatever bullshit you like.
You really can.
And see what sticks.
See what works.
Yep.
Absolutely.
I've always said if I had no morals whatsoever, if I were completely materialist, I know exactly what I do.
I know exactly how I do it.
I would create an online space called The Reformed Leftist.
And it would start with this subtle like, well, I used to be very strongly of the left, but then I started to notice this and that.
And then it would gradually escalate into...
Introducing the sort of conspiratorial thinking and so on and so forth.
And eventually it would end up on the far right.
Because this sounds awful and demeaning, but the people who are manipulated by far right rhetoric are manipulated happily and readily and they just open their fucking wallets for you.
Oh yeah.
They are the sacrificial lambs that just lay down, put their head back and invite the knife.
Yes.
Well, they know that they're not actually buying truth.
They know that what they're buying is having their prejudices confirmed, their ego stroked.
Their intuitions, somebody saying, yes, everything you feel in your gut is actually, even the shitty, rotten, mean, selfish stuff that you feel in your gut that you're secretly ashamed of, it's all absolutely right and true and correct, and you shouldn't be ashamed of it.
And you should actually be proud of it.
And all you have to do is give me X amount on Patreon every month or whatever, and I will just tell you this over and over again.
Because I'm Jordan Peterson or whoever.
That's all it is.
They are buying...
The feeling of having their prejudices endlessly and repeatedly confirmed.
And it's so easy to do, because the vast, vast, vast majority of people, and this is not just true of the right, but it is endemic on the right, they don't have the tools to understand that because something feels correct, that it is correct.
They can't discern between those two things.
You can listen to someone's rhetoric.
We know from psychological studies, people don't necessarily listen to what people actually say.
They listen to the patterns of speech.
They listen to their eloquence.
They listen to their passion.
They listen to the music of what they say.
But very rarely do they sit back and actually half what they're saying.
So if you know that, if you're aware of that, oh my god, again, it's another superpower, right?
Yeah, you can hack the system.
You absolutely can.
If you say something that you know is absolutely false, but you say it passionately, eloquently, and convincingly, you're about three quarters of the way there.
And if someone comes back at you, well, you can befuddle it, can't you?
You can muddle.
As long as you're very careful with your language, like Jordan Peterson sometimes is, like a lot of the right-wing grifters are.
Yeah, you can get away with it.
You can get away with it so easily.
Well, this is, I mean, it's so easy for them because they, as we've been saying, they don't have to make sense.
They don't have to have facts on their side.
They can just burble prejudices and intuitions into a microphone all day.
And somebody else that they pay will cut it into 17 videos.
And all those videos will be released on their 14 YouTube channels that day.
And the money will just roll in.
And it doesn't matter how many people make response videos just completely destroying everything they say.
They don't know about it because they're sitting there burbling into the camera or into the microphone making another 17 videos for the next day. - Yeah.
That's how it works.
That is how it works.
It's an industry, isn't it?
It's brute and it's incredibly cynical and dark.
But yeah, that is the truth of it.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Well, this has been a great chat.
Yeah, this has been really good fun, man.
I had to chat to somebody because it was like burning a hole in me.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
It was really interesting.
I mean, it was really fascinating.
This whole rabbit hole, I was a little bit low-key obsessed with the whole thing.
If I'm perfectly honest, I couldn't quite leave it alone and it was becoming a bit of a distraction.
I might leave it alone for a little bit after this and go and obsess about something else for a little while, you know?
The last...
I know exactly, because I've been there.
The last negative thing like this that really got me was that little weasel Jimmy Dore.
For some reason, that guy just got himself lodged in my head, and I just, I had to get it out.
And poor old Daniel, I had subjected him to what ended up being a two-part episode on that guy.
But it just had to be done, because I had to exorcise it for some reason.
I know the feeling.
I mean, when Elon did his...
Fucking Nazi salute.
I could have gone off on one.
I could have very easily delved into his entire background.
That fucking guy.
Jesus Christ.
He is handsome.
He is more dangerous than Trump.
Much more dangerous than Trump.
For one thing, just on a timeline level, Trump's going to be dead before very long.
Just on a pure timeline level, you know?
Trump is also much more...
He's deranged.
He's absolutely deranged.
He's senile.
His brain is porridge at this point.
Absolutely.
And the only thing...
He cares about two things.
Getting out of legal trouble, which is now done.
He's done that.
And ransacking the American government for as much money as he can with the con.
That's all he cares about.
And he's got a cabal of people, the Heritage Foundation and all that bunch of cunts, frankly, Project 2025, who said to him, Mr. Trump, we will get you elected.
You won't have any legal problems.
You can spend four years just...
You know, holding the American government upside down, shaking the coins out of its pockets.
All you have to do is sign every piece of paper we put across your desk with that little Sharpie of yours.
And Trump, of course, said, yeah, fine, fine.
Yeah, evil is as evil does, right?
Yeah.
But Musk?
Not smart.
He's a fucking imbecile.
But he is the kind of imbecile who has influence and power.
And he's a true believer.
He's a true believer, yeah.
I'm adamant on this.
He is genuinely pilled.
He's a proper Nazi.
He is an absolute fucking fascist.
That is what a Nazi looks like in 2025. Well, I don't know.
Because?
Because he's insecure about his jawline.
Yeah, exactly that and his potbelly and whatnot.
He's insecure about everything.
He's not got any identity.
He hasn't got any identity.
You can see it when you look at his life.
All he's ever done is try to use his money to put out this PR bullshit about who he is.
I'm a futurist tech bro.
I'm going to get us to Mars.
There's nothing there except image.
That's it.
And what could be more fascist than that?
Because that's what fascist politics is.
It's all images.
It's all aesthetics.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's it.
And he is that.
He is the manifestation of it.
He's mistletoe.
He grows on other plants and he kills them and strangles them as he grows.
And if anybody eats one of the pretty little berries, they die of poison.
