3340 The Rise of Patriotism - Call In Show - July 6th, 2016
Question 1: [2:08] - “Is the song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen the ultimate ballad of male disposability? Is the truth of the song hidden and obscured just enough, so that it could safely pass through to the masses, without being a "message" or political song (like 'Feed The World'). Is there a correlation between Freddie Mercury and someone like Milo Yannopolous - gay dudes coming out (no pun intended) and speaking about the issues of men, because the ordinary cisgendered can't or won't speak from their hearts?”Question 2: [18:48] - “The recent War on Men show with Suzanne Venker was a major wakeup call for me. While I am a woman, my whole life I have most admired masculine ideals - toughness, courage, rationality - and my interests and hobbies reflect that. Have I subconsciously sabotaged my sexual market value?”Question 3: [1:43:38] - “I’m a 29-year-old Hispanic male and want to have a discussion about – patriotism. I think I’m experiencing it for the first time ever in my life – like a new emotion – a brand new feeling to explore. With the turmoil happening in our country and monumental events happening in Europe with immigration, Brexit, and an inept European Union seemingly on the verge of turning into a more sinister version of its current self – I do not find myself becoming more disillusioned or confused. What I find is the birth of wholeness and light – a heaviness of weight that feels love, gratitude, and fury for this land I call home. I would only call it patriotism.”“I would like to hear your thoughts. What is patriotism? How does a people or a society become patriotic or develop a deep-deeded love for their country and its well-being? How is patriotism lost as a society - that feeling, that passion, diminished over time? What are the consequences? Finally, are these global rumblings simply the catalyst for reigniting one’s love for country and kin - is this the natural order of things?"Question 4: [2:31:58] - Throughout history, there has been a drive towards the strengthening of property rights as nations have become more industrialized. However, there is an ever growing push for social justice and economically egalitarian policies throughout the West. What are some of the falsities of the prosperous European Socialist state, and to what extent is progressive culture and social philosophy destructive of both civilization and the rights and liberties of individuals on personal and economic grounds?”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Don't worry, we've got that fixed and sorted out right for you.
A guy, a fine fellow, called in and asked about not just a song, but really, frankly, let's be honest, the song, Bohemian Rhapsody, written by Freddie Mercury and performed by Queen.
Does it have something to do with the wee concept called male disposability and male self-sacrifice?
Yes, yes, I think it does.
And I think I make a pretty good case with the lyrics.
Don't worry, I only speak them.
And we had a great chat about male disposability.
And then a delightful young lady called in to ask about the degree to which her worship of male ideals has made her undateable, and why don't men like women who like male ideals?
And I think we had a very powerful conversation about that, and hopefully will clear her way to a future filled with love.
And, I don't know, maybe babies.
We'll find out.
Now, patriotism.
I know, I felt you chill yourself, because patriotism and voluntarism not always go hand in hand, but we live in extraordinary times.
We must adapt.
So I had a conversation about why I think you can make something of a case for patriotism for a virtuous country and talked a lot about heroism and our capacity to do great things if we're inspired and why people want to keep heroes as far away from us as possible, how dangerous they are to those in charge.
A very great speech.
I was very happy with it.
And the last caller, well, we were talking about some of the civilization continuance challenges posed by the European Union, what the hell is going on over there, and how it might change for the better.
So it was a great conversation, great set of callers.
us thanks everyone so much for bearing your heart and mind and souls in these astoundingly productive conversations freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show please please just put a pause on now go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out and now on with the show all right well up first today is oscar
Oscar wrote in and said, Is the truth of the song hidden and obscured just enough so that it could safely pass through to the masses without being a quote-unquote message or political song like Feed the World?
Is there a correlation between Freddie Mercury and someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, gay dudes coming out, no pun intended, and speaking about the issues of men because the ordinary cisgendered scum can't or won't speak from their hearts?
That's from Oscar.
Hi, how are you doing tonight?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
Tell me a little bit about your history with The Song of Songs, as it is rationally known.
It's one of these songs that I can remember hearing on the radio from a very early age.
And it always struck me as being very emotional and very...
Empathetic, probably before I even knew what that meant.
And, you know, dramatic, but there's also a tremendous amount of sadness, I think.
Right.
Was this the first Queen song that you'd heard?
I can't recall specifically, but I do remember that, you know, from the age of seven, eight, I started hearing it on the radio every now and then and every sort of pop up.
And I heard it the other day and it sort of clicked in with me with the whole male disposability thing that you so often talk about.
And it's kind of made sense to ask this question of you.
Right.
Well, I've done one analysis of it before on a show previously, so we can just touch on the male disposability aspect of the song.
Yeah, so he, you know, in the story, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead.
And his first concern in the song is with mama, didn't mean to make you cry.
His concern is not with his future.
He's facing the death sentence here, or life in prison, or whatever.
And his first concern is his mother not crying.
And of course, isn't that sort of a...
Oh, male disposer.
No, my feelings aren't at all important, but I just want to make sure that everyone else is doing okay as I shuffle off into the sunset of eternal prison.
And that's important.
And he says, if I'm not back again this time tomorrow, carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters.
Now, that's interesting, because he doesn't say carry on as if I don't really matter, as if nothing really matters.
And this degree of self-sacrifice barrels so firmly into the realm of deepest, darkest midnight nihilism, and that's how the song grows, right?
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow, carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters.
And there's no comfort that comes to this man at all.
He says, too late.
My time has come.
Send shivers down my spine.
Body's aching all the time.
Goodbye, everybody.
I've got to go.
Got to leave you all behind and face the truth.
Mama, I don't want to die.
Sometimes I wish I'd never been born at all.
And nobody's returning his mother.
Thank you for your words of comfort.
You know, I feel better.
It's, you know, it's great.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Nothing like that.
Nothing like that at all.
Now, the chaotic bit in the middle, I mean, it's the flurry or the scrabble for life, the creativity that erupts during the last seconds.
There's an old saying that says, nothing sharpens the concentration like the prospect of an early execution or something like that.
So there's this flurry of mad creativity, this yearning to leave, right?
Just got to get right out of here.
Well, where is he leaving?
He's leaving life, because he's going to die.
And when he says, nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters, nothing really matters to me.
That is the final conquest of nihilism, and that's, of course, I would assume his life slipping away as he's hung, or poisoned, or shot, or whatever it is that's his bleed-out phrase.
So there is a lot of male disposability here.
And I think it's, I'm just a poor boy.
I need no sympathy.
I need no sympathy.
But of course, if sympathy is not a value, then why would you offer or grant sympathy to others?
Right?
And that's important as well.
So he says, I don't need any sympathy, but mama, mama, you need sympathy.
Not me, you need sympathy.
Women need sympathy.
Men need.
Don't.
Now, I don't know if there's any particular proof on this, but based on my understanding of the timeline of Freddie Mercury's life, he seems to have gained a fair amount of creativity through the use of cocaine, and I think this came out of it to some degree as well.
And so the fact that he gained creativity by...
In a sense, annihilating the true self, which is what a lot of stronger kind of drugs will do to a personality, I think is important.
But the concern for the feelings of others, the lack of concern for the self, lack of self-empathy leads to a kind of life exhaustion and leads to a kind of A not wishing to continue that manifests itself in a wide variety of suicidal behaviors among men.
I mean, men are much more prone, of course, to physical accidents, much more prone to car crashes, much more prone to dying on the job, like nine or ten times more likely to die on the job than women.
Self-destructive behaviors of every kind, excessive drinking, drug use, promiscuity, and so on.
And so this lack of self-empathy, this focus on the needs and feelings and preferences of others, you know, it's always, oh, the women, all we do is, you know, there's this kind of...
Annoying self-criticism slash self-praise that women engage in.
I've got to start spending a little bit more time thinking of my own needs rather than just catering to the needs of everyone else.
It's like, yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's why malls only cater to men's needs because women are just all focused on everyone else's needs.
That's why there are decorative throw pillows.
That's why I learned about something called a bolster.
That's why all the women do is care.
That's why there's this...
Huge and giant industry of interior decorating because women are only concerned about what men's needs are and other people's needs are.
Never themselves, which is why women control 80-90% of domestic spending because all they're doing is building man caves with giant televisions and neural net PS4 link-ups for their men.
No!
Go to a house and 90% of the spending is for what women prefer and what men put up with.
So, But the real people who have a problem, the real gender that has a problem with self-sacrifice, the real gender that has a problem with what might technically be called codependence, the focus on the needs and feelings of others at the expense of oneself, that is the male gender.
It is the male gender that desperately needs to stop caring about everyone and everything but themselves.
There's an old saying in the Manosphere, That men developed labor-saving devices for women before they developed life-saving devices for men.
In other words, they came up with washing machines and dishwashers and dryers and vacuum cleaners and all of that before they came up with masks to keep Black Death from entering into their lungs when they were down the coal mines.
War, of course, is a focus on this and That happens quite a bit.
Of course, men go off to war and risk life and limb and then are not supposed to complain too much, you see, when they get back.
And if women gave two and a half ratchets about men, you know, Hillary Clinton tweeting about, you know, women need free tampons because it's a female issue and women's health is so, so, so important, you see.
See, that's Solipsistic selfishness that staggers the imagination.
Because if women really cared about health issues, they would be protesting the appalling conditions that mostly male veterans are experiencing under the Veterans Administration, where they're lying in their own filth, being fed cockroach-infested slop, waiting months or years to get procedures, waiting months or years to get psychological help, and dying en masse after wars.
No!
The important thing is...
Do you have a sponge to stick up there or not?
No.
Forget the fact that men, male soldiers, mostly male soldiers, are killing themselves at staggering rates, and I think that the suicide rate for veterans is higher now than the combat rate of death in the Middle Eastern theaters in America.
What women care about is Oh, wait, can I get a free abortion?
Can I get free birth control?
Because, you know, otherwise it's going to cost me nine bucks a month at Walmart.
Oh, can I get free menstrual pads?
Because, you know, I'm leaky.
And is there anything that goes into, well, you know, men are killing themselves a lot.
The mostly male veterans of wars are getting terrible treatment under the government.
Maybe we can shift a few resources away from women's need for tampons and Fetus slaughter.
And maybe we can just move that a little bit more towards where men need issues with their healthcare because, of course, women are still living a lot longer than men.
But apparently, all we do is we focus on everything but the women.
And to figure that out, you can just look at how much money goes into prostate cancer research versus breast cancer research, and you'll get a sense of just how much men sacrifice for everything and everyone around them.
Aren't even appreciated for it.
Aren't even appreciated for it.
In fact, what do men get?
Let me ask you a quick question here.
What do men get for the massive amount of labor, death, sacrifice, war, clearing of...
Nature's hardy remnants in order to create a civilization.
The building of bridges, of dams, of ships, of the creation of air conditioning, the creation of computers, the programming of computers for the most part.
The very foundation, brick by brick, building yourself up from the cave to the current civilization that we have.
What do men get as a whole?
As thanks.
Well, you see, we're just patriarchal, rape-obsessed people.
Evildoers.
That's the thanks we get.
And this is what comes out of this kind of self-sacrifice.
So I do understand where you're coming from.
I understand the impulse that men have to go on strike, to not get married, to not have children, and to say, no, no, no, no.
Enough is enough.
If, you know, you give...
Sometimes I think you give...
You give men a pile of bricks, they'll make a city.
You give women a city, they'll make a pile of bricks.
So I understand.
And it is one of the great things that needs to change in society is for men to stop self-sacrificing, for men to stop putting up with bullshit, to stop putting up with insults.
Don't put up with insults.
Don't put up with insults.
You know how if you offend some group who's not male, or white male or whatever, if you offend some group, what do they do?
They raise a hot and holy stink about it.
Oh, they get on Twitter.
They talk about how terrible it is.
They organize boycotts.
They hit people in the wallet.
That's what men need to start doing.
Identify the people who talk trash about men, particularly white men, and stop and do business with them.
That's what you don't do.
You don't give your money to people who insult you.
The leftists understand it.
The social justice warriors understand this.
They organize boycotts.
They hit people in the wallet.
They fight hard.
They fight dirty.
They fight deep.
They fight darkly.
And men don't because, you know, suck it up, be a man.
Man up!
Man up means lower yourself into the grave of having no personal expectations and surrendering everything you have for the need and comfort of others.
Now, again, biologically it makes sense.
Men have a lot more sperm than women have eggs.
You know, the men's involvement in procreation, speaking from personal experience, is only about three and a half days.
Whereas for women, you know, it's nine months plus.
So, It is, biologically speaking, male disposability is a very real fact, but so what?
Aren't we supposed to move beyond biology?
Isn't this what the women have always been telling us?
That we're not supposed to, you know, judge things by biology?
Yeah, women have a lot of children, and if you want to be a halfway decent mom, it's kind of important to breastfeed, stay home with your children.
But that doesn't mean that women can't be just as good as men, unless it's tennis, in which case we really need to split those out.
Oh, wrestling, too.
Split that out.
Oh, hockey?
Split that out.
Golf?
I could go on and on.
But women are just as good as men, except when they're not, in which case we'll split them off.
But it's equal, except when it shouldn't be.
So, men need to get organized.
And, you know, men need to recognize that we're hated for everything we build.
We're hated for everything we do.
We're hated for, you know, and of course, I understand that.
I mean, the dependents or the parasites often have a lot of problems with the host because it's kind of humiliating.
But, you know, everyone Goes crazy when they're insulted, except for white men and Asian men to some degree.
And it's just time to stop that.
You know, if there's a university that has some sort of racist against white males or Asian males admissions policy, don't go there.
Call them racists, because that's what they are.
If there's a company that's, the BBC recently in England, no white males need apply.
Okay, well, I know it's the BBC, so you've got to pay them.
But don't give them any web clicks and get people to boycott as much as possible because even though it's a government-paid institution, if you staff them, if they're watching eyeballs and their listenership and so on, at some point, they'll have no mandate to continue because it would just be too ridiculous.
They can't take billions of pounds to serve information to four and a half eyeballs.
So just get organized.
Talk to your male friends.
Get on mailing lists.
Get on Twitter.
Figure things out.
Who's insulting white men today?
Stop giving them money.
Stop applying to work there.
Shame people who work there.
Shame is a beautiful...
Beautiful thing in society.
It works fantastically.
It works on poverty.
It works on fat.
It works for fat people.
It works with single moms.
Shame, shame, shame, which is why the social justice warriors are so, don't trigger me!
It's because I might change and become a better person.
So, you know, just get together with your men and say, listen, if people insult us, let's not give them money.
Let's call them out for who and what they are, which is civilization-destroying bigots and sexists and racists because, remember, as Vox Day has written about, social justice warriors of the left always project whatever they're attacking you, whatever they're accusing you of, They're actually doing.
So, there's my analysis, and there's my recommendation.
What do you think?
I think that's basically the male dispute.
I mean, that sums it up.
All right.
Well, I won't attempt to do better with something that sums it up perfectly, so I'm going to move on to the next caller.
But thank you so much for a chance to speak about Queen.
Always a plus!
And for a great, great question.
Thanks, Oscar.
All right.
Thanks.
Take care.
Alright, up next is Madison.
Madison wrote in and said, The recent War on Men show with Susan Venker was a major wake-up call for me.
While I am a woman, my whole life I have most admired masculine ideals.
Toughness, courage, rationality, and my interests and hobbies reflect this.
Have I subconsciously sabotaged my sexual market value?
That's from Madison.
Well, hello, how you doing tonight?
I'm doing well.
How's it going in the great white north?
It is white with Tatooine-style sunshine these days.
Yes, I got a Star Wars reference.
That's right.
I didn't get a bad camera.
I'm just slowly turning orange.
So, how old are you, Madison?
I'm 27.
27.
All right.
Okay, what's the evidence you think that you might have sabotaged your sexual market value?
Well, I've...
So I've only had one boyfriend in my life.
I haven't...
I mean, I've done...
I wouldn't say a lot of dating.
I've just...
I've done a lot of first and second dates.
And I just...
I don't know.
So, you know, I'm getting...
I'm 27.
I've been listening to your show.
I'm starting to...
And like I said in the email, you know, the show with Suzanne Vanker was just like...
It kind of hit me with a ton of bricks.
Like, oh my gosh.
You know, because she talked about how women are becoming more masculine and men are becoming more feminine.
And I listened to that and I thought, oh man, that's me.
You know, so it's all of that.
And then just little things like also what I said in the email, just my hobbies and interests, they're all masculine.
And so I'm starting to think, Have I scared away men?
Am I seen as a competitor and not someone to be desired?
So I've got all these questions in my mind.
Yeah, and listen, I've heard these same stories as well, these same theories.
I was just talking about this today with some friends just about how there was some commercial on Canada, on the Canadian.
I think it was on YouTube.
And the commercial was, you know, this little girl saying, all my life I've wanted to play rugby and everyone told me I couldn't because I was a girl.
And it's like, that never happens.
No, it doesn't.
In fact, I think sometimes it could happen a little more.
You know, like, okay, has anyone ever said to you, you can't because you're a girl?
Never.
Never.
No.
Never.
I asked my daughter, any happened?
No.
Right?
I mean, yeah, occasionally.
So, you know, women who, I don't know, like doing construction might get a couple of funny jokes or condescending things from time to time.
Well, so what?
I mean, every time I cry on camera, you know, there's six million comments of, man up!
Stop being leaky!
You're making me uncomfortable!
It hits me right in the feels!
So, I mean, it's not like men don't get these, you know, I really wanted to have emotions and everyone told me I couldn't because I'm a man.
It's like, no, no, it's all about what imaginary conversations happen with women or girls about rugby, not what happens every single day to every man who has a shred of passion beating in his heart.
Anyway.
So, there's this myth out there that's really always been annoying to me, which is, you know, men, what do we want?
Well, we want a kind of empty-headed, pliable little Barbie doll that we can pose and who'll make us sandwiches.
And I've just...
I've never met a man like that.
I've never known a man...
I mean, maybe they're...
I'm sure they're out there, right?
But I've just...
I've never met a man...
Who says, well, you know, I went on a date with this woman, and man, she had great stuff to say.
She was a really good conversation.
She's a very interesting woman.
Well-read, articulate, intelligent, curious.
So I never want to have sex with her at all.
I never want to have...
Now, if she had a friend who stared vacuously at me while aiming a glass of water at her mouth but weirdly hitting her eyeball, that would be the one for me.
I've just never...
And this is...
I don't know where it comes from.
I think it's women who are nasty.
You know, smart and nasty.
And they say, well, men don't want me because I'm smart.
It's like, nope, it's the nasty thing that you've got going on.
It's the aggressive, you know, like if you're the kind of woman who thinks that a man isn't going to like you because you're intelligent, no intelligent man is going to like you.
Not because you're intelligent, but because you have that opinion of men.
Right.
And so there are a lot of nasty, insecure, aggressive, volatile bitches out there who've created this myth that even though they're nasty, volatile, aggressive, manic bitches, the only reason that men don't like them is because they've read Virginia Woolf.
Nope!
Not really.
So, this myth is nonsense.
Look, any man with any intelligence knows that dating, you know, in the sort of natural scheme of things, in the domino of things, dating leads to boyfriend-girlfriend, leads to fiance, leads to marriage, leads to a lifetime together.
Now, a lifetime together, that's a mighty long time.
That's a mighty long time to watch someone accidentally put water into their eyeball and not be able to answer a simple question about current events.
You spend a lot of your time not having sex in this world.
I'm telling you, it is decidedly less...
Of a wall-to-wall bang-a-thon that magazines I discovered early told me it was going to be.
Never happened.
You spend a huge amount of time not having sex.
In fact, you spend a huge amount of time, well, you spend more time having sex until you get the point of sex, which is kids, and then you spend a whole lot of time not having sex.
So, it can't be sex appeal.
That can't sustain a marriage.
And so what happens?
You've got to have some ability to have a conversation.
You've got problems to solve in this life.
You have financial challenges.
You have big career decisions.
You have quit your job and be a podcaster, you lunatic decisions, right?
And you need somebody who's got some brains because you spend a lot more time talking than having sex in a relationship.
And so any man with any brains knows that he wants to hire someone or Wants to settle down with someone.
Sorry, I was thinking about turning it into a sort of a hiring analogy, but I won't.
Any man with any brains knows that he wants to settle down with a woman who's going to have some brains herself.
And a roughly equivalent amount of brains, right?
If you go with someone who's super smarter than you are, they're going to get bored.
If you go with someone who's dumber than you, then you're going to get...
So, you know, somewhere around parity is where you want to be.
So you can grow together.
And also...
That person is going to share your genes in raising a child and, of course, and making a child.
So you want somebody who's kind of smart because that's going to be the genetics that mix into your kid.
And given that there's a lot of genetics in intelligence, you kind of want to mix that good sauce in with your good sauce, not some piece of oil and pigeon dropping that mixed with your good sauce does not make a very tasty dish.
So, you do, and that person is going to be raising your child, and that person needs to have intelligence, good verbal skills, so you can negotiate.
The one thing that's true about dumb people, they're really bad at negotiating, because negotiating requires verbal skills and intelligence and so on.
It doesn't mean they can't, it just means in general, on average, they're not as good.
So, if you don't want to get divorced, you want a smart woman.
Because the higher the IQ, the less likely...
There is to be a divorce.
And should there be a divorce, she's going to be smart enough to know she shouldn't just nuke the whole thing and call in all the lawyers and accuse you of all these terrible things and so on.
So any man with any brains is looking for a woman with brains.
And that's what I was doing.
You know, I was like the guy wandering up and down the beach with a metal detector just looking for silver quarters or something.
I'm like, any brains?
Any brains?
Nice cleavage.
No brains.
All right, you're tall.
Still no brains.
Nice hair.
No brains.
And then the moment I found a woman with brains, I fastened on her like a shark on a Florida swimmer.
Just don't let go.
And, you know, so I dated a lot and went out with a lot of people and then When I found a woman who had real brains and real integrity and real virtue, met her.
We got engaged in a couple of months, we got married in 11 months, and we've been together ever since, and that's where we're going to stay.
And I'm sure she was just relieved to find somebody who had some brains as well.
This myth...
And it's a terrible...
It's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing.
You know, there's so much that feminists say that is so unbelievably destructive.
And, you know, I'm right with Milo Yiannopoulos when he talks about this to give credit where credit is due, where he's saying, you know, feminists teach fat women to sort of accept themselves and be fine with being fat.
And he says it's...
Men are visually attracted creatures.
And obesity, we recoil from obesity in similar ways and using similar biological mechanisms that we recoil from disease because obesity is, well, it is anti-fertility, right?
It makes you a lot less fertile, a lot less able to raise kids, a lot less able to deal with the strains of raising kids and so on.
And so, yeah, this like be as fat as you want and you should just love yourself, that's terrible, terrible advice.
And it's miserable people wanting to spread their misery through the meme of fat acceptance.
And another one that is, I don't know about equally dangerous, but another feminist myth that's put out there that is horrible is, you know, the one that we're talking about now.
Which is that men don't want an intelligent woman.
I mean, dear God alive, what is that supposed to say about men?
And what does that do to women who constantly get the message, not from men, not from men, but get the message from feminists?
Well, you know, you can't ever show that you're smarter than the man.
You can't ever show that you can beat him in chess.
You can't ever show that you know more than he...
You can't ever out-argue him.
Because he's going to get weird and freaky and defensive.
It's like, yeah, if he's a loser, he will.
In which case, move on.
But this is a terrible...
Because it is such a...
It is such a slander against the character of men to say, well, I don't want a woman who can out-argue me.
I don't want a woman who can do things better than...
Listen, let me tell you something, ladies.
As men...
We can do so many things better than women.
We don't need you to be dumb.
Now, to be fair, women can do so many things better than men, but any man is like, hey, let's have an arm wrestle.
Hey, let's run up a mountainside.
Hey, let's win a war.
Hey, let's build something.
Hey, let's hook up a stereo.
Hey, let's program a computer.
Hey, let's build civilized...
I could go on, so I won't.
But, you know, there's so many things that men can already do better than women.
Hey, let's inhabit both wild ends of the IQ scale.
No.
Women will cluster around the middle.
Men will be super smart.
Welcome to my show!
So men can already do...
You know, I don't need to dominate my daughter because I can already do so many things better than she can.
Now there's some things she can do better than I can for sure.
But men don't need to dominate women because we're already so good at so many things that women are just not as good at.
And again, vice versa.
I don't think women need to dominate men because there's lots of things that women are better at than men as well.
But the idea that, you know, I need to always feel...
Superior to or smarter than or whatever.
That's all projection.
That's just crazy people thinking that other people are crazy because they're crazy.
That's all.
I mean, who is intolerant of competition?
It's not men.
It's feminists.
You go into a women's studies classroom and you start bringing up the actual facts about rape statistics...
Do they welcome your contribution?
Do they enjoy the challenge?
No, not at all.
Hell no!
They'll try and destroy your life!
You know, that's like you beat your boyfriend in chess and he sets fire to your car.
I mean, that's not good!
At all!
So when feminists say, well, you know, guys don't really want smart people around them because they're so insecure that they'll just hate you for it.
It's like, no, no, no.
That's not men.
That's a mirror.
Now, it's true that they may both have mustaches, the men and the mirror, but that doesn't mean that the mirror is the man.
These are feminists.
Feminists can't stand it when people challenge their narrative.
That's what they either lash out, trickly puff style, or they have to run and sob screaming into their huggy pants.
Pet rock, armchair, beanbag, hug rooms.
It's the feminists who can't handle intelligent challenges to their theories.
It's got nothing to do with what men want in women.
It's what feminists don't want in anyone around them, which is any kind of brain and assertiveness.
I mean, because they've got a narrative that can't stand even the light of the moon, let alone the light of day.
So no, I mean, I wouldn't...
And you've heard this, right?
Have you ever had that impulse?
You know, that sort of the movie Mean Girls where it's like, oh, I can't be a mathlete because then the boys won't like me.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
Absolutely.
Men never want to play chess with women.
No, of course not.
Because you can play, I guess, chess where every piece you lose, you take off a piece of clothing.
But men never want women to play their video games with.
I mean, the whole ideal of a gamer guy is to get a gamer girlfriend who'll play games with him in the nude or whatever, right?
This idea, like, when I was an objectivist, I'd go to these objectivist meetings and, you know, we'd chat about how tough it was sometimes to find a woman who was into Ayn Rand.
And then a woman would walk in and, oh, whoa, everybody stop knocking.
You might scare her off.
There's a woman in the room who likes Ayn Rand, who's not actually Ayn Rand, although I'd probably still bang her, but there's a woman in here who likes what we like.
Nobody make any sudden moves.
Okay, I'm going to make a sudden move.
So, I mean, so there wasn't anything like, oh man, I can't believe there's a woman in here who likes Ayn Rand.
She's going to compete.
Like, everyone was like, go to a libertarian meeting and, you know, look for the attractive libertarian females in the room.
Well, you won't be able to see them because there'll be eight or nine neck-bearded guys around them, well-armed, trying to get them in conversation.
And this happens pretty regularly.
Once, once, It is confession time.
Once I went to a Dungeons& Dragons convention.
Hey, no judgments here.
I mean, I play tabletop games now and then, so...
No, ma'am, I'll ever date you.
I'm kidding!
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
But I did, and there were a few women there, and the guys were all like, hey, come play at our table.
You know?
Come play at our table.
I'll give you bonuses.
Whatever, right?
And it just doesn't happen.
When I was a manager in a tech company, I interviewed and hired so many people, it was crazy.
But anyway, I just remember one time there was a woman who walked in and physically she was very, very attractive.
And she was also a very good coder and she had good marks in school and all that.
And the guys weren't like, hey man, don't hire her because she's a woman and we don't want her...
To be equal to us in coding.
What do you think they said, Madison?
Oh, like, hire her now.
I will give her my salary!
Just bring her eggs into proximity!
So, I've just, I've never, you know, I've never, I mean, how many guys are into objectivism, Ayn Rand, or whatever, and how many of them say, wait, that's a woman?
Oh, my God!
I can't possibly, I was like, oh, I don't care.
I don't care.
And so, this myth that boys don't like intelligent, assertive women is It's ridiculous.
It is feminists in particular who don't like intelligent and assertive women.
And look at how they treat intelligent and assertive women.
Go and ask a feminist what she thinks of Ayn Rand or Margaret Thatcher or Ann Coulter or Sarah Palin or X, X, X. Christina Hoff Summers.
Go and they'll be.
It's like, no, no.
So you're the ones who don't like intelligent and assertive women who have good arguments.
You're the ones who don't like intelligent and assertive women because they will unravel your whole feminist fantasy.
Of victimhood and patriarchy and all that bullshit.
It's not men who don't like intelligent, assertive women.
It's feminists.
But because all leftists doers ever project, they imagine that their own hostility to the unraveling of their Marxist fantasies represented by intelligent and assertive women, they imagine that that's just men out there.
Everything that the feminists accuse the patriarchy of doing is exactly what these pear-shaped women in comfortable shoes are always doing, other than Not shaving or bathing.
You can just go through.
I won't do it now.
Now, do you mind if I draw that round to a close and start actually asking you questions like this is a real conversation?
Thank you for your patience.
So you said, my whole life I have most admired masculine ideals, toughness, courage, rationality.
But you talk about admiring or embodying.
And those two things...
I can admire a dancer without joining him on stage and dancing, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So when you say you admire masculine ideals, but your interests and hobbies reflect not just an admiration of them, but an embodiment of them.
So I wonder if you can help me unravel that.
Yeah.
So just to give kind of an example, you know, I'm interested in science my whole life.
You know, when I was a kid...
All of my favorite books were about dinosaurs in space and stuff like that.
I'm into war history and guns and politics.
Heck, I listen to your show.
Martial arts, that kind of thing.
I went to what essentially could be called trade school.
I have a job that has been more traditionally A male-dominated field.
So these are...
Sorry?
A sausage fest.
Yeah, yeah.
You could say that.
Yeah.
You know, so those are just some examples, you know, of things that I do.
And like, for instance, I'm very close with my father.
And so a lot of the things that he's interested in, I'm interested in.
And, you know, and I... I have always loved his type of humor.
You know, he's very sarcastic and I'm sarcastic.
So, yeah, like different things.
Yeah, just different things that I am interested in and things that I do are more masculine.
And what's your relationship like with your mom?
Oh, it's wonderful.
My mother is a terrific person.
She's great.
Great.
So you have a great man who's a husband who chose a great mom who's, yeah, that's great, who's his wife.
That's a good combo.
I never like it when people say, oh, I love my father to death.
He's a wonderful man.
My mother's completely insane.
I'm like, whoa.
Whoa, hang on.
Those don't add up.
So, yeah, there's something funny that men insult each other all the time but don't mean it.
And women compliment each other all the time.
And don't mean it, but...
Topic for another time.
I stole that from someone.
So...
What's your...
What are your mother's sort of gender stereotypical interests like?
Oh, she's into...
Quilting and...
Crafting.
I mean, I'll give you...
Like the best example is...
So in my parents' house...
I mean, they built the house, oh, probably 12 or 13 years ago.
You know, worked with an architect and everything.
And my mom, in the basement, got an entire craft room that's just dedicated to, like, scrapbooking and stamps and, you know, her sewing machine and everything.
And it's, like, I'm not even joking.
It's an entire room and she has two closets just full of decorating stuff.
Like, just, you know...
All of that.
Oh, and she was a hairdresser before she started having kids, and she's into clothes and doing her nails, stuff like that.
I hate to say it, Madison, but your mom sounds kind of gay.
Just kidding.
Okay, so she's very much a fembot as far as that goes, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and so my whole life growing up, Especially once I became a teenager, she would say things to me like, why do you try to be tough?
Why do you try to be like that?
And I'd be like, I don't know.
I'm just tough.
This is just who I am.
So she kind of thinks that I try to be masculine.
Does she have any theories as to why?
No.
I'm not saying it's true.
Obviously, you're saying it's not true.
I'm going to accept you at your word.
No.
Does she have any idea as to why you might be doing that?
You know, I've never asked her that.
Because usually, I mean, if you want to know why people are insulting you, if you want to know why people have theories about you, ask them what purpose those theories would serve.
Yeah, yeah, I should do that.
And that can be quite revealing.
Yeah.
You know, she actually listens to this show, so I'll, yeah, I'll have to ask her.
I like quilts.
That's just something in case she's falling asleep.
She has an urge to send a quilt somewhere.
Anyway, and it's, you know, it's an odd question to ask and it sounds kind of Freudian, but if you were to get married, would you like to marry a man in the personality vicinity of your father?
Yes.
Right.
Of the men that you've met, how many would you say are in the personality vicinity of your father?
You mean just men in general or like men that have the potential of like dating them?
Men roughly in your age group who might be potential dating material.
You want a man like your dad, and listen, he sounds like a great guy.
I mean, I'm projecting, but it sounds like a great guy.
Manly and sarcastic.
Maybe I could find a way to...
He's not bald, though.
I'm sorry?
He's not bald.
Look, I didn't say he was perfect.
Obviously, he has some shaggy flaws.
But, see, because I'm bald, I don't have to worry about doing my hair, which allows me to spend more time focusing on my ladies.
So, not that I'm saying your dad spends a lot of time doing his hair.
Please don't have him beat me up.
Or wall me in somewhere.
So zero.
Oh, come on.
27, you've not met any contemporary.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
I mean, you could well be right, but that's a little surprising, don't you think?
Yeah.
And I don't mean to say that there's zero.
It's just I have to think about it because, yeah, I mean, I've grown up in the generation of men that have been told not to be masculine.
So...
I don't know, probably 50-50, you know, if I think.
And I actually grew up in a culture that's quite conservative, and so traditionally it's leaned more away from the feminist stuff, but it's definitely out there.
Is it, you said conservative, does that mean, and I don't mean this in a negative way, does that mean sort of churchy?
Oh, yes.
I'm a Mormon, actually.
So that would be churchy.
Yes.
I'm not an expert.
Yeah.
Wait, are you saying that post-Donny Osmond there aren't a lot of masculine Mormons?
You know, it's funny you bring up the Osmonds because, like, they're a little bit of a joke, kind of.
No, no, they're a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.
Sorry, go on.
A little bit of a joke in the Mormon community?
I might say so.
Well, I mean, just any Mormon that gets national exposure, I mean, we all kind of bite our nails a little bit.
Like, oh, what are they going to do that's going to make us look like we're crazy weirdos?
You know.
Glenn Beck!
Sorry.
Go on.
Oh my gosh, Glenn Beck.
Something you wanted to mention about GB? Oh, just, you know, I used to listen to his show.
He used to make a lot of sense.
And just in recent years, man...
He's gotten weird.
And I think he's just surrounded by all these yes men that build his weird ego and now he's rubbing his face in Cheeto dust.
That was not a good call.
No.
Listen, I'm not obviously anywhere near as famous as Glenn Beck, and I'm not really that super, super savvy about his level of public interaction.
But I gotta tell you, If someone can gift something that just makes you look completely retarded, it's usually a good idea to not do that thing.
Yeah.
Not an argument!
Cheetos are not an argument!
Yeah.
Alright, listen, sorry, I don't mean to get dragged off into that.
So, because I always sort of thought, like, on the religious side, on the churchy side, dudes would be, you know, a little more...
Case-elected, a little more Stanley Kowalski, a little bit more...
No?
Yeah.
Oh, no, that's definitely true.
And I think part of how my thinking has changed in recent years is just because I moved to a more liberal area, moved to a more metropolitan part of the country.
And so even like...
The men I go to church with, they lean more to the are-selected side, just because of the politics of the region.
But in general, I'd say most of the men in my community are case-selected.
Especially where I grew up, in the town I grew up in.
Everybody's into hunting and camping and stuff like that.
If they were into hunting liberals, anyway.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, so the guys, do you mind, Lexan, I bestowed a rant upon thee, Madison.
Is there any chance I could ask you for a tiny rant about, you know, I think a lot of women share this, and maybe you could give voice to some of their frustrations.
Modern men.
Modern men.
That's interesting.
Especially given my perspective, because I grew up...
And just let it all hang out.
Leave nothing in the tank, as they say.
No holds barred.
Because, you know, you've got 27 years of, you know, certainly 10 years of dating frustration.
I mean, it's got to be annoying as hell.
You know, it really is, because I've seen what it could be.
You know, I have my dad, and I have all of these wonderful men that I grew up in my congregations that epitomized...
You know, I have grown up wanting to be married and wanting to have a family my entire life, and I had all these fantastic examples.
You know, all of my uncles.
I've got a gazillion uncles because, you know, stereotypical Mormon family.
You know, I've got gazillions of great men in my life, but they're all older.
And so when I go to church, and In the Mormon Church, there are certain congregations that are geared toward the young single population.
They're called young single adult wards.
Single people from 18 to 30 go together.
Sometimes it can be a little bit of a meat market, but generally you get together and get to know people your own age.
And so when I go from the traditional congregation with families and, you know, everybody all mixed in together to these singles wards, there's such a difference.
And especially where I live right now, like I said, it's a little more liberal.
You know, these guys, oh, you know, we have these guys that are, you know, that believe these ridiculous, you know, leftist lies, you know, and we have these people Men, you know, boys, they're not even men.
These boys my own age that are, you know, talking about feminism and safe spaces and, you know, we need to, we need to, you know, I don't even, I don't even know.
It's just ridiculous.
And so when I, when I actually find somebody my own age that, you know, doesn't get offended because I've Because, oh my gosh, like today, for instance.
So on the 4th of July, my family and I, we went shooting, because that's what you do around here for fun.
And so my mom took this really awesome, like, ultra-patriotic picture of me.
I've got an AK-47, and I'm wearing my Donald Trump hat, and it was awesome.
And so I made up my Facebook profile picture.
Good lord!
It's like you've got an atomic cuck repellent in your profile photo.
Oh, I know.
It's going to come across their screen and there's going to be this cock shadow against the wall, you know, and your profile picture will be standing over them doing a victory war dance and beating them with a Donald Trump hat.
Oh my goodness, I sort of vanished.
Yeah, so, well, and it was funny because when my mom took that photo, I was like, oh, I've got to make this my Facebook profile picture so I can offend all of my SJW friends.
And everybody kind of laughed, but in my heart, I knew it was going to happen.
And sure enough, sure enough today, there's been this huge explosion on my Facebook.
Most people have been like, yeah, great photo.
This is great.
This is cool.
But then my SJW friends, I had this one in particular, she was like, this hurts me personally.
Oh no, don't tell me you heard the word troubling.
Or troubled.
That is the giant cuck calling cry of anti-matingness.
I'm troubled.
I'm disturbed.
I'm upset.
Not an argument!
Sorry, go on.
Oh, yeah.
Well, so she brought up, I mean, of all things, she brought up Sandy Hook and was like, you know, because she's from around there, and she was like, it reminded me of all the victims and, you know, glorifying guns just says that You're saying to the victims that their lives don't matter.
What?
I know!
Madison, quick question.
Quick question, if you don't mind.
Just indulge me in a hypothetical.
Let's say that your entire bloodthirsty clan was at Sandy Hook well-armed.
Might that day have gone just a little bit differently?
Ugh.
If your friend was in Sandy Hook, would she want your Facebook photo to come to life and save her sorry ass?
Oh, no doubt.
She'll never admit that.
So there was this huge blow up on my Facebook page about that stupid thing.
And I can think of I had to stop checking it because it was getting me so worked up that I was like, I'm going to be all hyped up and nervous and I've got to talk to Steph today.
So I just quit checking it.
But I can tell you just off the top of my head without having looked at it for the last few hours, I can tell you exactly which of my friends are taking offense.
So...
I don't know how these leftists, I don't know how they imagine taxes are collected.
I'm against guns, great!
Let's disarm the police and then nobody has to pay their taxes.
Oh wait, no, you need that for your social programs now, don't you?
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all.
So this is an interesting thing, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is a very interesting thing that you did.
There's two things you did.
One is you totally left me high and dry when it came to a rant about men, but that's alright, we'll come back to that.
Oh, I know, I'm sorry.
I knew that I was going that direction, but...
You make me look like a straight arrow when it comes to getting to the point.
Let's have you go in that direction.
I'll come back about the other thing.
That's pretty much it.
When I say I can think of the friends that are going to be offended that I hadn't seen were offended yet, I can think of a couple of young men my age that are going to fit right into that.
I have this one guy that I know in particular, and he's always posting stuff about just weird passive-aggressive feminist statements.
And it all is cloaked in this weird twisted veil of self-righteous, holier-than-thou, You know, like, if you don't agree with me, then clearly you're uneducated or anti-women.
You know, just little things like that.
And so, ah, it just...
It's the feminist lies.
They're...
Like, I... Oh, you've got to have a lot of sympathy for...
For my generation, because we've just been surrounded by it.
You know, we hear it in school every day, and it's all over the internet.
And if you dare breathe a word against this narrative, then you just get absolutely trampled, you know?
No.
No, you don't.
You've got to be careful with your language, right?
I mean, people type stuff.
No, yeah.
So...
You're still not going to talk to me about men, so we'll come back to that.
So why do you think you posted this picture?
You're a smart young woman, right?
Yeah.
Why did you post this picture?
What are you doing?
I posted it in part because I wanted to have a vehicle to say what I believe.
Nope.
No?
Sorry, no.
No, your ex needs you to clean house, young lady.
Oh.
Your eggs need you to clean house.
My passive-aggressive social justice warrior Marxist leftist friends.
Really?
Friends, you say?
You need to clean house so you can get a good man.
Who is going to look at your circle of friends and go, Well, this is a rather confused young lady.
Can I say something in my defense?
I'm not sure I can stand a lifetime with her and her cuckie friends.
Yes.
Can I say something in my defense?
You can say anything you like.
So, when I say friends, I mean more acquaintances, because they're not the people that I spend my...
They're not the people that I spend the majority of my...
They're not your Siamese twins.
I get that.
Honestly, they're just mostly Facebook friends.
See them now and then.
Do I care about that?
No.
Did I say they were all joined at the hip with you?
No.
No.
But they're still your Facebook friends.
So you're cleaning house with this picture.
You knew that, right?
Come on.
Come on.
You knew you're cleaning house.
So why are you cleaning house?
Because you know that there's something about you that is not attracting the man you want.
And just because, and I'm sorry to be so shallow, but because men will be wondering whether you're some kind of interstellar ham planet, no.
Senior profile picture?
Attractive young woman.
So, that's important.
So, you're 27, which means that you're a couple of years away from hitting the wall, right?
Yeah.
And I saw a picture of myself the other day.
I'm like, wow, that lens was dusty.
And then I'm like, well, no, actually, everything around my face seems pretty clear.
Maybe there was a thumbprint right where my face was.
Nope.
I'm just going to be 50.
You know, you get this kind of like, just a little dusty.
It's like, I feel solid, but I'm vaguely lunar.
I'm just covered in this moon dust called aging.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
So, you know, you've got to get moving on this project, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you've got to seriously get yourself busy.
Because, you know, you want to meet a man, you've got to date a man, you've got to figure out if you want to marry a man, you've got to marry a man, you want to have a year or two together, and then you just start having kids.
It's now, now, now.
Yeah.
When I talk about believing feminist lies, like, I'd started to kind of settle into that, you know, oh, delay marriage, it's okay, you've got to find yourself, go travel, you know, being single is great.
Later, later, later.
Yeah, and as soon as I started listening to your show, this was a couple of months ago, you started peeling the scales away from my eyes, and then it was just, oh, wow, wait, wait, I need to do this.
You said once, 40 to 80 is a long time to be alone, and that was like, oh...
Yeah, I've got it.
I love provoking estrogen-egg-based panic among the fertile.
That is my major mission.
Find fertile people who aren't panicking and help them to panic.
You know, like a good financial advisor would be like, ah!
Like if you're doing something, panic!
I remember years ago, I had a call with a guy.
He was in his late 40s and he was living in his brother's garage and he's like, ah, you know, I don't want to panic.
And I'm like, you can to do.
Yeah.
You kind of do want to panic at this point.
Yeah.
So, because it's important to know why you're doing what you're doing.
And in my opinion, I can't prove or anything, but Madison, you're getting busy.
You're getting busy.
You're making the nest.
You're, you know...
Stuff in your bra?
I don't know what I know, right?
But you want to get the right kind of man, and you've come out of this weird, timeless daze that feminism injects.
It's like this weird venom, you know, like this snake venom that just makes your legs slow down so you walk in a circle?
There's this weird, timeless, feminist venom that gets injected into women when they're young, which is like, oh, later you can get a man, it'll be fine, get your career going, get educated, go travel, do this, do that.
Let all those sedimentary layers of dust settle on your valuable treasured dying eggs.
And don't worry, you'll have a great time settling down when all the good men are taken and only the weirdos and freaks and divorcees and broken smashed up wreckages of masculinity are left.
And you're really busy and you got a lot of student debt and you got a career.
Oh yeah, that's when it's a great time to settle down.
Not Find a man when you're in college, say, or when you're young, you've got lots of time to hang out and get to know each other and no particular panics or freaks or anything like that.
I mean, they put you in this weird, numbed, envenomed state of timelessness that a lot of people don't wake up from until it's too late.
Now, of course, feminists are well-funded by the government to do this because does the government want you having children now or getting a job and paying taxes now?
Oh, yeah, they definitely want that tax revenue.
Yeah, government doesn't want you off there having kids.
If you're off there having kids, not only are you not contributing to the taxes, but the government's going to have to provide service for your kids.
Because, you know, that's going to mean, my God, in a couple of years they're going to need kindergarten or school or healthcare or some damn thing, these parasitical future of civilization beasts.
Right?
So the government doesn't want you...
To make babies now.
Because that just costs them money.
And by the time your kids in a quarter century are off there paying taxes, those politicians are long retired.
They want you to postpone having children because that postpones their costs.
They want you to go to school and get a job because that increases their taxable income.
And so, of course, feminists, where do they live?
They live in universities.
They live in colleges.
Of course they want you to go to college.
And then of course they want you to frip around and frap around because that allows governments to spend less and tax more.
It's beautiful for everyone except you and the future of everyone.
Other than that minor detail, it's a great scheme.
So you're cleaning house because you know deep down that you got to get your shit organized so that you can get the man That you want and need and deserve.
Which means you gotta de-cock.
You gotta get the lefty freaks, the hypersensitive, the hysterics, the neurasthenics, all of the Blanche Dubois of endless social hysteria about nothing!
Nothing!
I mean, good God almighty!
Child in the Middle Ages!
Oh, is that diphtheria?
Ugh!
Child in the 10th century!
Oh, does that rat have fleas?
Oh dear, my armpits have exploded and I'm dead!
Child in the 19th century!
Oh, I have to work 14 hours down a mine!
Young person in the 21st century!
I saw a picture of a gun!
People, please!
What happened to our spines?
Oh, it's horrendous.
Anyway, so you've got to get these wishy-washy drip-draps out of your life.
Because any man who's going to come along and look at you is not going to judge you.
He's going to judge you by the company you keep.
A man doesn't marry a woman.
A man marries her tribe.
Her tribe.
Her tribe.
And a man is going to judge you by the company you keep.
He's going to friend you on Facebook.
And he's going to see, oh, she posted a picture of herself in a gun and a Donald Trump hat.
And hopefully that's all.
But now, maybe I'm going to go and have a look at what her friends say.
I'm going to read down through these.
Oh, my God!
These are her friends?
Oh, man.
I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her and this quagmire of hysterical nonsense?
Hmm...
And then he's going to say that there's no one around you who's telling you to get your stuff organized, to get your values consistent.
You put this out there saying, hey world, this is who I am.
I shoot guns and I wear MAGA hats, right?
And you're doing that so that you can unfriend all the people who don't like you for who you are, who don't love you for who you are, so that you can have someone in your life who you're not going to take a starter pistol full of red flags and shoot it up their nose the first moment they see you online.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
In hearing you talk about that, I'm starting to realize that's exactly what I was doing.
I've just started to realize that I'm getting so sick of Of not being honest with some of these people.
This one particular friend that kind of started the whole crazy thing on Facebook today, we went out to lunch, a couple of us, not long ago, maybe about a month ago, and just during the course of our meal, she was saying stupid things.
She was talking about how she went on a date with this guy, and she had to explain to him, like, What mansplaining was because he was doing it and how offensive it was.
And I was like, oh.
And I didn't say anything to her.
And after the lunch, I looked back and thought about how frustrating it was for me to just sit there with my mouth closed.
And she's there just taking it for granted that everybody agreed with her.
Oh, I gotta tell you, I mean, if you can't have a sense of humor about that stuff, you're just no good to anyone.
So my daughter's just, I just taught my daughter how to ride a bike.
And I was taking her out for a bike ride.
I keep my helmet on my bike to make sure, because when I was a kid, we never had any helmets, right?
So I keep my helmet on my bike, so when I get on my bike, I remember to buy my helmet on, right?
I'm walking towards my bike with my daughter, and my wife says to me, do you know what she says?
Don't forget, your helmet is on your bike.
You understand why that's insane, right?
I mean, it's lovely.
It's like I'm walking towards my bike.
I put my helmet right on my bike.
It's on my bike seat.
I can't get on the bike unless I think I've got the world's largest hemorrhoid.
I cannot get on my bike without sitting on this helmet.
And my wife says, don't forget, your helmet is on your bike.
I love that about her.
You're girlsplaining!
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's beautiful.
She cares.
I love it.
And this happens...
I'm not going to say how often, but let's just not say...
It's not something we pop champagne over because of its rarity.
And so, yes, I... When people are around you, they will tell you entirely redundant things.
Yeah.
They will.
They absolutely will.
You know, every time we do a show, Mike keeps telling me, stop screaming Hail Satan, because it's a lot of editing.
Now, obviously he's wrong about that, but I'm just trying to give you an example of something that makes no sense to me.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
So, this mansplaining thing, it's like, oh my god.
No, it's exhausting.
Well, and how is feminism not chick-splaining?
Which is wrong, even, right?
The hypocrisy is just unbelievable.
We are going to lecture men all about masculinity, merely because we have hairy cleavage.
I mean, the idea that the whole feminist thing is explaining to men everything about being a man.
How is feminism not chick-splaining?
No.
I'm going to use that on her next time she says something.
No!
Don't use it on her!
No, why not?
Okay, Madison?
Yeah.
Can you turn the lights down low?
Can you put on a little romantic music?
Okay, pretend that you can, alright?
Okay.
You and I are on a date.
How's it going?
Oh, it's the best date ever.
Absolutely.
That's right.
Every time I go on a date, I put 14 candles on each shoulder.
I can do that because I got no hair to burn.
Well, a little ear hair, but not too much anymore because it all burnt off.
But, Madison, explain to me, as your date, these Facebook friends and comments.
Explain them to you.
Yeah, I noticed you posted a picture and I was looking at some of the comments and some of your friends seem to have significant problems with who you are.
Can you explain that to me, please?
Oh, well.
Well, so I moved to this more liberal part of town and, you know, just got to know some different people that share these different views.
And so when I posted that picture, they came out of the woodwork and I... And so it made me realize just how ridiculous some of these people are.
And I'm really grateful that I have all these other friends that are sticking up for me.
And actually saying things that make sense, it's really opened my eyes to what insanity I'm surrounded by.
Not bad.
Not bad, but can I tell you what I would say?
Yes.
Hi, I'm Madison.
And I can tell you what was going on on that Facebook thread.
See, I have these extra special gold-plated Fabergé eggs.
And I realized that I was surrounded by people who didn't respect me or my eggs.
And, you know, deep down, Steph, I was really hoping to meet a man like you.
Virile, fertile.
Almost unbearably sexy.
Don't laugh.
I'm just kidding.
Sorry.
Okay, I get that.
No, it's...
You can't see the video with the 14 candles, so I understand why you might giggle at that point.
Anyway.
There was a time in my life where nobody would laugh!
Anyway.
But, yeah, I mean, I want a man, you know, who's strong, who's masculine, who's assertive, who loves me for who I am.
And I kind of realized I had lowered my standards to have people around me who didn't respect me for who I am.
So this basically was a big get lost to all the people who can't respect me for who I am.
And it was cleaning house.
It was cleaning house.
You know, like when you're pregnant and before you come home with the baby, you scrub everything in the house.
Well, this is like that.
I want to get married.
I want to settle down.
I want to have kids.
You know, I want a man like you.
And I realized a man like you with brains and perceptiveness is going to come along and see this kind of weird Facebook wall and say, what the hell is going on with this woman?
What kind of values does she have where she has people who she call friends who seem to disrespect everything about her?
So I wanted to clean house because I'm focused more on having kids than having false friends.
You're a better me than me.
No, I'm just a more honest with you.
So this is the challenge, right?
If you want the masculine ideals...
You've got to be so straightforward.
It sounds insane.
We're so used to all this circuitous stuff, right?
Yeah.
And this is true for men and for women.
Directness, honesty, wins.
What do you want?
Say it open.
Say it clear.
People can really respect that.
I was chatting with a friend the other day who was saying that she was talking about how where she works, it's so hard to get people to say what they want.
You do want to do A or B? Oh, I don't mind whatever you feel like.
Now, I'm not putting you in that category, but you did give me a bit of a circuitous thing, right?
Hey, I accumulated some bad friends because I was thinking I had forever to have integrity.
And now I realize that if I want to get married and settle down, I got to have ultra-integrity, so I got a clean house.
I don't want any potential date like you, Steph, to be confused about my values.
I don't have time to dick around anymore.
Time is marching on and I need to make my values clear so that I appear in my maximum integrity light to a man who's going to come along and hopefully choose me.
And choose me without confusion and choose me without complication and choose me without reservation.
I do not want to be like a bird whose tail and wings are composed entirely of red flags that crashes into a creek.
Right?
I want to be the kind of girl that Ted Nugent comes along and says, yeah, consistently badass.
Or whatever.
I mean, that's, you know, you know what I mean.
Substitute Geddy Lee and I'll agree with you.
Geddy Lee!
Alright.
Squeaky voice, bad looking Canadian millionaires.
I'm in it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that you want to put out clearer signals about who you are in the world, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I'm starting to notice that more...
I think I've been doing it subconsciously for a little while, in part because of your show.
Like I said, I started listening a few months ago, and I've just gotten so sick of having to, or not having to, because I don't have to.
I'm getting sick of just holding back when I talk to people about things, about the way I The way I believe and what I'm passionate about and, you know, my philosophies on life.
And that's important.
Listen, authenticity or what they call individuation, which sounds like a subjective process.
I think that individuation is a universal process where we surrender our whims to reason and evidence.
But whatever you want to call it, being thoroughly who you are.
Which means being honestly who you are.
Everybody wants to go through life without causing offense.
Because it's easier.
And we all want to live in a world where being good doesn't cause offense.
But we don't live in that world.
We don't live in that world yet.
We're working on it, right?
But authenticity, honesty, individuation creates two Explosive and opposing forces.
One is attraction, the other is repulsion.
You understand?
Yeah.
When you are thoroughly who you are and honest about who you are, Madison, you will, like a gravity well, like a black hole, you will attract the right kinds of people.
And what will you do to the wrong kinds of people?
Hopefully they'll get the heck out of Dodge.
You will repulse them.
They will flee.
Throwing back insults designed to make you feel knee-high to a grasshopper.
They will flee, but because they don't want to process why they're fleeing, because you're being honest and truthful and authentic about who you are and what you believe, they don't want to know that they're fleeing honesty.
They don't want to know that they're fleeing integrity.
They don't want to know that they're fleeing authenticity.
They want to imagine that they're fleeing pettiness and meanness and vindictiveness.
Why?
Because they always, always, always project.
Now, we don't want to go through, you know, you've let some big Band-Aids settle on your skin.
But they're actually making the wounds rather than covering the wounds.
And you've got to peel them off.
And nobody wants that process of individuation because...
The first thing that happens is the false friends leave your orbit, taking massive verbal dumps on you designed to make you feel as horrible as humanly possible as they break orbit, right?
Yeah.
Well, you've just changed.
You used to be approachable.
You used to be polite.
You've just become this, like, weird, Trump-obsessed conservative.
I didn't even know how to spell that word.
I had to look it up.
You become this like...
Weird, anti-emotional, gun-toting...
I don't know what...
And that's just the nicest of the things that you'll get.
There'll be uglier stuff still.
When you become thoroughly who you are, and you're honest about it, without apology...
You have to do it without apology.
Well, I'm sorry if it offends you.
No, I'm not sorry if it offends you.
I'm sorry that you were raised in a culture where you think that offense matters.
I'm not sorry to offend you.
And...
That process of individuation creates this detonation that drives away the bad people, but they leave you like Band-Aids coming off hair or like fishhooks coming out of soft flesh.
It's painful because they leave and you feel alone.
Because they leave before the other people come in.
Right?
Yeah.
And you just set off a detonation on your Facebook photo and I think you need to know what's going on is you're driving the bad people away or the false friends away, to put it as nicely as possible.
And of course, false friends is an oxymoron.
They're not real friends.
Not really friends.
They're not friends at all, right?
They are conveniences.
And you're driving your false friends away so that your real love can arrive.
Wow, I didn't realize that I'd been doing that, but it makes so much sense.
And now looking back, I can see other things that I've been doing the past little while that all fit in with this.
As always, I am more than happy to hear additional evidence from my wild theories, so please go ahead.
Oh, well, let's see.
Not long ago...
Okay, well, I guess it was the day that...
Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee.
One of my cousins who actually listens to your show, one of my cousins posted something about it and about how Donald Trump isn't, he's not racist, he's not all these horrible things, and if you just take some time to read and educate yourself, then you can see the man for who he truly is and what he's trying to do.
And so I just shared that post, you know, read Sent it out.
And another one of my cousins just came unglued and started attacking me personally.
She said some really horrible things.
And so I defended myself.
My cousin that I talked about before and my brother, we all responded to her.
But I was just amazed that...
And this is...
I mean, this cousin...
Sorry, the cousin who attacked you...
Sorry to interrupt, Madison.
Oh.
Was she saying that Donald Trump was not a good person?
That Donald Trump was a bad person or a mean person?
Yes.
Yes.
Now, who...
Again, remember, they always project.
Who was the only person being mean in that conversation?
Was it Donald Trump?
No.
It was her.
Right.
Right.
So she's saying, basically, Madison, you are a ghastly, horrible, terrible person because Donald Trump is mean.
Yes.
Well, Donald Trump is not in the conversation.
The only person being mean is you.
And then, you know, the tendency is to want to defend.
Oh, no, it's not about Trump.
99.9% of what people talk about with Donald Trump has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
In the same way that 99.9% of what people talk about with Brexit has nothing to do with Brexit whatsoever.
Oh, so true.
Donald Trump, I mean, in the 90s, he struggled for the golf courses that he had control over.
He struggled to make sure that they allowed women and blacks and Jews in.
Yeah.
I mean, some tweet went out.
He used a sheriff's star to talk about how corrupt Hillary was.
You heard this, right?
Oh, it's anti-Semitic!
It's a star of David!
It's like, well, the only person obsessed with that anti-Semitism are the people reading into that.
It's a sheriff's star.
It's a default shape in Microsoft Paint.
It's got nothing to do...
There was nothing Jewish in it.
Oh, wait.
There was a picture of money in the background.
Okay.
So, anything that has a sheriff star and money in the background is somehow about Jews.
Huh.
Okay.
Yeah.
I don't understand that remotely.
But so they're saying that Donald Trump is obsessed with Jews.
It's like, nope, the people who are thinking that the Sheriff's Star default clip art picture from Microsoft Paint on money has something to do with Judaism.
They're the ones obsessed about Jews, not Donald Trump.
Whose daughter married a Jewish guy and whose grandchildren are Jewish and she converted to Judaism.
Very bad antisemitism, Donald.
You're excellent, excellent at building stuff.
You're excellent as a politician.
You're a great author and you run a very successful TV show.
The only thing you suck at is antisemitism.
So you're clearing house and Donald Trump is a wonderful mechanism for clearing house.
Now, In your profile picture, Madison, with the gun, was your family in there as well, or was it just you?
It was just me.
Yeah, although I did consider making my cover photo, you know, like the longer one, the picture of the whole family, because we did take some of all of us.
Right.
And I was saying you should or shouldn't, but what was your decision process around that?
Well, I mean, I'll be honest.
I'm a little bit vain, and I thought the picture of me looked good.
Why is that vain?
What do you mean by vain?
You're focusing on your material appearance rather than your spiritual virtue.
Sorry, my spirit don't age, but my eggs do.
Gotta advertise, right?
Yeah, rules of the trade.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I guess...
Yeah, no, you're right.
No, it's nothing.
Listen, be attractive, make yourself attractive.
I don't work out for three or four hours a week just for health.
I mean, I'm glad that the health, you know, but whatever, right?
Yeah, you want to look good.
I want to look good.
I want to be healthy.
I need to be strong for my daughter.
I want to stay healthy and all that.
But yeah, I mean, I was doing that long before I ever got sick, so I look good.
I look good.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
You know, people are judged by their appearance, and there's nothing wrong with that either.
We've got very little time in this life.
We've got to make quick decisions.
And I think what you're saying, Madison, in this profile picture and in this very conversation, is you're saying, I need to put forward an image and an impression and a circle around me.
I need to put forward something that will help people make better snap decisions about who I am.
Because the more confusing, the more complicated, the more contradictory my social circle is, the harder it is for people to make snap decisions.
And we need people to make snap decisions about us.
When we're young, we can maybe have the luxury of, I don't know, circling around people and seeing what they like and what they don't like and so on.
But you're 27.
You meet the man of your dreams.
He says, where do you see yourself in six months?
You say, under you!
With no protection!
Sperm boy!
No prediction, but definitely rings.
I'm still Mormon.
Oh, absolutely.
Listen, get married.
For God's sakes, get married first.
Get married first, absolutely.
Now, if he can't commit to you, he can't commit to kids.
But, yeah, you want things to be less complicated when a man looks at you, right?
A man looks at you, he looks at that picture.
That picture speaks volumes about who you are, where you came from.
And you've got to look at your pictures in your whole Facebook thing, in everything.
What does it say about me?
Get someone who you don't know that well to look at it and assess what it's saying about you.
Is it a consistent and clear message about your deepest values or is it a complicated mess of people-pleasing and other people who you kind of like but have reservations about it?
Clean it up.
Make it consistent.
Yeah.
So someone looks at you and says, I know who that woman is.
It doesn't mean that they've got to put you in a peg and you can never change it.
It just means that they can make a snap decision and get the essence of who you are.
Yeah.
That's very interesting.
And I think what that also comes back to is my moving to this more liberal area.
Because people just assume...
I've found that people just assume that you are...
Part of this weird leftist feminist, you know, cult.
And I think part of my need to, you know, differentiate myself is because of that.
You have to, look, especially if you're in this kind of environment, listen, you might want to think about moving.
You might want to think about, but certainly at the very beginning, you need to figure out who your friends really are.
Whether they share your values.
To what degree your friendships and your values have to coincide?
And they have to, to some degree.
Right?
And to me, my standard is...
I'm happy to be friends with people.
We certainly don't have to agree on it.
It's one of the most boring things on the internet.
Oh my god.
Steph, I don't agree with everything you say, but...
Oh, shut up!
Shut up!
Oh my god!
What a terrible, terrible thing to say about yourself.
Or anything, or anyone, or anything composed of matter and energy.
I don't agree with everything.
You're not supposed to agree with anything, Ice Bay.
You're supposed to think for yourself!
I don't agree with everything you say, but in this instance, you're spot on.
It's like, not an argument, not a thought.
Complete waste of time and energy.
Please go back to cats playing pianos because this is not the place for you.
So you don't agree with everything.
No, of course not.
Hell, I don't agree with everything I said last year.
But what matters is the methodology of how the disputes get resolved.
You and I can have a dispute and we both agree to reason and evidence.
Then we're friends.
Now, what you're doing is you're putting out stimulus there, and what you're doing is you're sending out the great echolocation called Are You Curious?
Right?
Yeah.
There are people who say, yeah, AK-47, love it.
Good stuff.
Big Trump fan.
Love it.
Right?
I'm not meaning to mock them, but that's fine, right?
And then there are other people to whom the picture is surprising or shocking or whatever, right?
Can they be curious about you?
And I've had...
Many people, actually, just in the last few months as I've been posting more political things, I've had a lot of people message me personally saying, can you explain this to me?
You know, I saw that you posted this.
You know, I've got some questions.
It's been actually kind of cool.
It is.
And this is the other, again, not to harp on Donald Trump, it's just he is the weathervane du jour for figuring out which way the wind blows.
Which is, there's a very mainstream narrative about bad Donald Trump, and then there are the facts, right?
Which is why we've put out a series of videos.
The untruth about Donald Trump.
Which, thanks Reddit!
They have been very helpful in helping a lot of people to change their minds.
Or think, just think, just get the facts, right?
So there's a mainstream narrative, and then there's the capacity to think for yourself.
And Donald Trump Is the dividing line for most people between that, right?
Yeah.
And that's another reason why he's so helpful is he helps you to differentiate.
It's the great sorter, you know?
He helps you to differentiate between people who swallow the mainstream narrative and get defensive when questioned.
In other words, idiots.
Or people who are like, well, this is what I heard, but these appear to be the facts.
I'm willing to listen.
Or people you want to have in your life, right?
People have curiosity.
And because you are not fitting a stereotype, you need someone who's going to think for himself, who's going to be curious about who you are.
Yeah.
Right?
Because, I mean, if you were some, I don't know, I'm sorry to pick such a ridiculous cliche, right?
But if you were some, I don't know, gap-toothed, yokel redhead, sorry, redneck who just loved guns and, you know, a Confederate flag, well, okay, then that would be a stereotype and you'd find another stereotype and breed more stereotypes, right?
Yeah.
But you're not that, right?
I mean, because, I mean, if you listen to this show and we deal with a very wide variety of topics, some of which are delicate and sensitive and other of which are just making fun of idiots, right?
And a lot of it is around self-knowledge, and a lot of it is around thinking and reason and evidence and all that kind of stuff.
So, this is what I mean when I say that when you become individuated, you break free of cliché.
You no longer are predictable.
Because there are douchebags out there in the world.
Oh, you see them occasionally on the videos.
Let me guess.
I haven't watched it yet, but I bet you that he blames single moms.
They want to put me as a cliche who gravitates back to the same explanations for the same useless explanation for stuff based upon some weird personal prejudice, right?
Or it's like the mommy issues people, right?
Oh, yes.
He's really got mommy issues.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
Why don't you go under the feminist sites and say that they've got daddy issues?
Oh, wait.
I'm sorry.
Are they a little less nice than me?
You're very brave.
So, yeah.
Because you've individuated, you need people who can think for themselves.
And thinking for yourself means being curious, being humble.
Not assuming that what you're being told is the truth, which is lazy.
And being able to process new information and remain curious.
People who've become wedded to their conclusions are very dangerous and volatile people to be around.
They've got a conclusion which they have infused and invested their entire personality structure into.
There's a patriarchy.
We're victims.
The rich always exploit the poor.
White people are always bad.
Slavery is entirely responsible for X, Y, and Z. So they've got a conclusion, which they've invested their entire personality structure into, and therefore they must viciously attack reason and evidence.
Because reason and evidence is the opposite of wetting your personality structure to a conclusion.
Reason and evidence is having a personality that is flexible and willing to submit the vanity of opinion to the facts of reality.
And what you're doing is you're putting out stuff about Trump or about politics or about guns or about hunting or about your life.
And people who've become emotionally wedded to a conclusion, guns are bad.
No thought, no process, no facts, no understanding, no nothing.
Well, when they come across something that is counter to their bigotry, they become extremely volatile and dangerous people.
And Madison, you cannot have these people in your life.
I hate, I mean, I'm just, from a practical standpoint, Volatile, aggressive, manipulative, bullying people who've wed themselves to conclusions.
In any conflict between cops and minorities, the minority is always a helpless victim who didn't do anything wrong and was just about to graduate as a neurosurgeon, and the cop is an evil white racist no matter what, no matter what facts.
Some black guy got shot the last day or two.
Oh, it was terrible, he was a victim, he was a nice guy, didn't do anything.
Oh dear, turns out the facts came out and he's a pedophile and a gunrunner and ugh.
Oh, wow.
People who are wedded to conclusions, they're time bombs.
They're landmines and they're set off by an honest leg stepping on their prejudice.
Boom!
And When you're around those people, you either lie or you lose them.
There's no other choice.
You either lie or you lose them.
And I'm telling you, if you want good people, great people, wonderful people, a great man in your life medicine, you cannot be around people that you have to falsify your existence in order to prevent them attacking you.
That is not going to draw the people you need and deserve.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
Looks like I have some thinking to do.
Well, or just an acceptance of what process is already underway.
Yeah.
Would you keep us posted about how it goes?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
Was the call helpful, useful, valuable?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah, I knew that you were going to get into some You know, that you'd be able to pull out some subconscious stuff.
And so it's, yeah.
It was kind of surprising, but great.
I'm glad.
And listen, Madison, if you've got an adverse childhood experience of zero, please give your parents a hug for me and tell them I hugely respect and appreciate everything that they've done as parents.
But don't do it.
I mean, your parents have done it.
They did something successful.
I know it's a different time and all that, but it's not like completely.
It's not like they did it in the ancient Greece or something.
And tell them what you need and tell them what's going on and get their help.
Yeah, that's excellent advice.
You know, they probably want some grandkids too and, you know, they can help, right?
Oh, they do, yeah.
I have two younger siblings that are married and my mom's starting to chomp at the bit.
Right.
Well, I think that, you know, I hate the phrase tomboy because it sounds like it's a girl who somehow got, I don't know, Testosterone up or something, but you are, listen, you are every, in my opinion, and I think that there's lots of reasonable evidence for this, you are every bit as feminine as the girliest girl with a quilt factory in the basement that you could conceivably imagine.
Because listen, there's this thing about women now, like, they can't be practical, they can't be productive and rational and I mean, America in particular was settled by incredibly tough,
practical, strong women who knew how to wrestle pigs, who knew how to plow the back 40, who knew how to dance and how to organize and how to weed and how to do just incredibly strong and powerful things.
And you're part of a tradition of femininity that is essential to the foundation and building of a civilization.
Not all this, you know, I have to go work in an office and be a lawyer.
That's fine.
That's, you know, oh yeah, built your civilization.
Okay, do your part to tear it down usually as a lawyer these days.
But don't let anyone tell you that you're not feminine.
Femininity is, if you're attracted to a man, you're feminine.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And there's nothing that is not feminine about you, nothing that is masculine about you, nothing that is anything other than a delightful, intelligent, self-confident, and deeply aware human being.
You are as feminine as they come, and a man is Who's going to really build something is going to really need your pragmatism and your common sense and your capacity for hard work and your lack of willingness to be absorbed into whatever stereotype of womanhood is floating around.
There's lots of different types of men, lots of different types of women.
They're all as masculine and as feminine as each other.
And don't let anyone tell you What femininity is and what your relationship is to it, we could not ever have anything worthwhile in this world without very feminine and powerful women like yourself.
Wow.
Thank you, Steph.
That's the best compliment I've had all day.
And I have been compared to Milo Yiannopoulos' younger sister today.
Wow.
I guess he'd be your big sister then.
That's great.
Listen, I appreciate that and a man will be lucky to have you and just, you know, clean house and put yourself out there and the right people will find you.
And you will continue as your virtue and honesty will continue to draw the right people in and push the wrong people out.
Wow.
All right.
Well, thank you.
This was really helpful and enjoyable and And, uh, and I'm doing my part to, to spread the word.
I share your podcast with the people that I think are, are amenable.
And, you know, I've got a couple of, couple of it.
And I don't know about dedicated listeners, but I've definitely had a couple of friends.
As long as they're willing to taste the buffet, I'm happy.
And I appreciate that.
And, uh, call in back someday and, uh, give us your rant about men, which I'll let you off for tonight.
Cause I got into the next caller, but I'd like to hear it.
Yeah, I am sorry for that.
That's all right.
That's all right.
We got to where we needed to, and I appreciate your time.
Have a great evening, Madison, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
Thanks.
Same to you, Steph.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Okay, up next we have Andrew.
Andrew wrote in and said, I'm a 29-year-old Hispanic male and want to have a discussion about patriotism.
I think I'm experiencing it for the first time ever in my life, like a new emotion, a brand new feeling to explore.
With the turmoil happening in our country, and monumental events happening in Europe with immigration, Brexit, and inept European Union seemingly on the verge of turning into a more sinister version of its current self, I do not find myself becoming more disillusioned or confused.
What I find is the birth of a wholeness and light, a heaviness of weight that feels love, gratitude, and fury for this land I call home.
I would only call it patriotism.
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
What is patriotism?
How does a people or society become patriotic or develop a deep-seated love for their country and its well-being?
How is patriotism lost as a society?
That feeling, that passion, diminished over time.
What are the consequences?
Finally, are these global rumblings simply the catalyst for reigniting one's love for country and kin?
Is this the natural order of things?
That's from Andrew.
Well, hey, Andrew.
How are you doing tonight?
Hi, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm well.
I'm well.
I appreciate these questions that get me into endless trouble but are incredibly productive.
So thank you for bringing that up.
Do you want to talk more about your sort of thoughts and experiences with patriotism?
Yeah.
So like I said, I was born in Texas, grew up in Texas, come out to California.
I've been here since November.
And I've experienced a lot of changes.
Not only is it 2,000 miles away from the place that I grew up, it's culturally different, societally different.
It's just really different.
Anyway, I really feel like some of the things that are happening or that have been happening over the past few years, and I've been in tune with it, I feel like I've left a place where I was safe and didn't even know it.
And now I'm in a place where I am being, you know, accosted or put through the flame or I'm being tested for kind of maybe the very first time in my life based on my ideals, my virtues, what I believe.
I don't sense that sense of kinness or brotherhood or what it was that I came from, the place that I came from.
And I see it across our country and I see it around the world now.
I see people against people and brother against brother.
And we're all inhabiting the same space, but we seem like we're worlds apart.
So yeah, the idea of patriotism.
I'm a Hispanic male, but I was born in the United States, and I consider myself American.
And I had someone very close to me just the other day that said that those things don't matter.
They're saying, why don't you speak Spanish?
Or why don't you...
Why don't you learn how to dance salsa?
Or why aren't you more in touch with your culture?
These are important things.
Sorry to interrupt, but who was asking you that?
My girlfriend was asking me that.
And is your girlfriend Hispanic as well?
Yes, she is.
She is, okay, right.
It doesn't sound like something a white person would say, but all right, go ahead.
You got me.
Couldn't slide that one past you.
But yeah, not just her, but others since I've been here.
Viewed me as kind of a fish out of the water in a way.
well you look a certain way and you enter a certain place but you don't seem like you are from here and uh and um but yeah um i a lot of the people that have impacted me as far as like this feeling that i have now towards our country um uh i've always been like i've always gravitated towards
um i've always had really good relationships with older with older people so So, people who are 10, 20, 30 years my junior.
I, throughout my life, I feel like I've learned so much from them.
You mean senior?
Sorry, you said 20, 30 years.
Senior.
Okay, go ahead.
My senior, I'm sorry.
I've learned so much, even from when I was very young.
I remember I used to mow lawns around the neighborhood, and I used to mow lawns for this really old elderly man in his 60s and 70s.
And I learned so much from him.
And I've learned so much from people in my senior throughout my whole life.
And And that may be me too, a little bit, right?
I mean, older and all.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
And I've always approached people my own age and people younger than me with a little bit of skepticism and I've always felt like I've had the cheat sheet when I form relationships with people that are my senior.
And when I've done that, one of the things that has come out has been...
Will they talk about the way things used to be?
Or they talk about politics?
Or they talk about how things were different when they were?
And it gets into this idea of what happened to the country we used to know?
What happened to the sort of people that we used to call our neighbors?
What happened to being able to depend on those around you?
What happened to our society?
Why are we so fractured?
Right.
Well, those are big questions, and I guess the first question that I would ask, Andrew, what has your experience been with beauty?
I don't mean like pretty sunsets and all that, and that's nice, and nature can be very compelling and beautiful in those ways, but I mean...
Moral beauty, heroism, dare I say spiritual excellence?
I would say that I've definitely experienced it.
Not only through spiritual means, but through Through art, through music, through...
I love being outside in nature.
There's a wholeness.
There's this truth.
I guess...
I once described that I earnestly seek after truth.
I want it more than...
I want it more than almost anything else, you know?
Okay, but sorry to interrupt.
So we talked about nature and art and so on and your own personal desires.
Sorry, I should be more clear on the question.
Is there anything outside of yourself that you've looked at and been inspired with moral beauty, moral excellence, Moral courage, moral innovation, people who you consider to be heroic or noble or grand or great in the realm of that.
Yeah, yeah.
I was talking kind of about this.
One of the earliest things I can remember as a child was seeing the movie Braveheart, one of the very first movies I ever saw.
Now you can say, like, wow, why would a child be watching that?
But my dad let us watch it.
And I remember the epic battles.
I remember, you know, trying to, you know, follow the characters and everything like that.
But what really captivated me about the movie, even at a very early age, wasn't so much the battle and the blood.
It was this man at the end.
That would not give up, that wanted freedom for a country, you know?
That stood with me more than anything else, to the lengths at which he went.
And from then on, yeah, like, I was just reading the other day about a Roman ruler I never knew, Cincinnatus, and heard about what he did when...
When his land was being attacked by a neighboring country, he was a farmer and they met him at his farm and all he did was tell his wife, go get my toga, and they elected him ruler and he went out, led the army, defeated it, and was back home in two weeks and he was a farmer and he gave up all power.
And there's stories like that where I'm just true men of nobility, true men of Of virtue.
Just impeccable leadership.
Right.
Right.
And that these are fictional I mean, all history is fiction to one degree or another, and this Braveheart character is a fictionalized version of a fictional history.
Again, it doesn't mean there's no truth in it, I'm just saying that there's license for creativity, to put it mildly, in those kinds of depictions.
But in your life, was there anyone that you saw, and this doesn't have to be in your personal life, but any real person that you saw that You found extremely or extraordinarily inspiring from a moral standpoint.
Yes.
There was a man named Tony that I used to...
I used to be a ranch hand in college, and that's how I paid my way through college.
I lived on a ranch and I worked, and he gave me a place to stay.
And I spent three years there, and...
I don't know if anyone's ever impacted me more in my life than this man.
He was an ex-Special Forces.
He was an ex-US diplomat.
He had just lived such an incredibly diverse and colorful life.
And the discipline with which he lived his life was just something out of this world with clockwork.
The man works every day.
He didn't have to work.
He was retired, but he worked hard every day around the property.
And he would never let me get away with anything.
Nothing.
At all.
Okay, so you did know somebody whose strength of character you admired.
Yeah.
Work ethic.
And again, that's not unimportant, but it's not quite moral courage, if that makes sense.
I'm sorry I'm not.
No, no, listen, you're being honest with your responses, and I appreciate that.
There's nothing wrong with anything that you're saying.
Because when I was thinking about this since I got the question, I was thinking, I grew up with a lot of patriotism growing up in England.
And, you know, England's finest hour and Churchill and Second World War and all of that, it was...
It was prior to the Marxist massive skydump on the supposed evils of colonialism and so on.
But there was a lot of...
I went through a lot of patriotism.
I knew all the components and why the British flag and all that.
And the contribution of Great Britain and specifically England to world culture and civilization was relatively undisputed when I was growing up.
The Marxist rot had yet to set in.
And I think what I was starving for for a lot of my childhood was heroism, courage, nobility, larger than life, bestride the world like a colossus, great souls.
And certainly, I think since the late 70s into the 80s and onwards, there has been this relentless teardown of everything and everyone.
And this teardown of everything and everyone, it's called critical theory.
And all it is is basically a paralysis of everything that interferes with collectivism.
*laughs* Thank you.
There has been this teardown of everything that is beautiful, everything that has a potential for greatness or nobility or to inspire.
Because the groups that control us want us to feel small, and in order to make us feel small, and therefore worthy only of being ruled, they must take care to never expose us to anything great, to anything powerful, to anything noble, to anything inspiring.
Because there are great souls buried across the world at all times and in all places.
Like seeds.
Waiting for the rain.
And I got a sense in reading your message, Andrew, that you, if you have a great soul, need only to see an example in order to potentially rise to full flower.
For great souls to manifest themselves, Only the implicit permission of exposure to other great souls.
And the constant division of humanity from anything which might inspire it is how people are reduced to compliance, to nothingness, to helplessness, to victimhood.
Victimhood!
They stole the treasure of our historical heroes and gave us back The sick nothingness of victimhood.
All who were great were bastards.
All who were tiny were Brechtian semi-heroes.
And they gave us nothing back and stole from us everything.
Everything that was great, everything that was great In our lives was taken away.
Was everything that was told to us that was great always true?
No.
But it doesn't matter whether it was always true.
It doesn't matter whether it was always accurate because there is no such thing as perfect truth and perfect accuracy in human history.
What matters is the essence of the story.
What matters is the motivation of the myth.
Because if you're motivated by myth, you can achieve real things in the real world.
It's not like World of Warcraft where you get nothing except lost time and digital half-memories.
When you are motivated by a hero, you can achieve great things in the world.
world think of all of the Christians who are motivated by the nobility as they see it of Jesus Christ of his sacrifices of his wisdom of his courage and who then go out to achieve great things in the world who help people set up charities belief in the myth of nobility creates genuine power in the present and I'll see you next time.
Because when you see nobility and it is accepted as a value, and by this I mean the founding fathers, by this I mean Galileo, by this I mean Churchill, by this I mean Shakespeare and his stories, by this I mean the potential for great souls to turn the tide of history and change the course of mankind's trajectory.
Without the interference of great souls, human history is like a rock just bouncing down a hill, just following prejudice and inertia, decay, corruption.
But if a strong enough soul stands, it cannot just stop the rock, it can move the mountain.
And that example used to be provided to us, and I still had the fading remnants of that when I was a kid, which has helped fuel my goals and my ambitions in the here and now and into the future.
Of course I wish to be a great soul.
Of course I wish to change the course of human history.
Why not?
Because everyone says it's impossible.
Everyone says it's impersonal forces.
And everyone says that the great souls are deadly and dangerous and corrupt and vilified and vile.
Unless those great souls are Marx or whoever serves the leftist collectivist narrative.
But there are great souls in human history.
There are men and women of great courage, of great integrity, of great ambition.
And of truly spectacular achievements.
And they have kept this precious light of civilization alight and handed it down across the generations, across the thousands of years.
They flourished in Rome.
They fled from Rome.
They hid in the monasteries.
They grew in the cities.
They spread in the colleges and universities.
They spread in the agricultural revolution.
They spread and grew in the industrial revolution.
They survived the wars.
They have fled to the internet from academia in the same way that knowledge had to flee from the fall of Rome into the monasteries.
It's the only place where it remains safe and rewarding to think aloud and in public, openly and passionately, with deep and abiding dedication.
Patriotism!
Philosophical patriotism, which is less of a contradiction than it sounds and certainly less of a contradiction than I would have said five or ten years ago.
But patriotism, philosophical patriotism, is the recognition that the will to virtue has not manifested itself equally across the lands of men.
The will for equality before the law.
The will for limited government, the will for freedom of movement, the will for property rights, freedom of trade.
The will for egalitarianism of opportunity for the races and genders, which is not to say egalitarianism of outcome, but of opportunity.
These have not manifested themselves equally across the lands of men.
It is a wildly uneven plateau across the world.
Where virtues have most manifested themselves geographically, we have patriotism to the manifestation of virtue in a geographical area, to the expression of virtue and consistency and integrity and rationality across the land.
We do not love the land.
The land is merely dirt.
We do not love the institutions because virtue is generally that which defies institutions.
We cannot be patriotic towards a state because virtue is that which defies the might of the state and limits and controls and minimizes it.
We can be patriotic to the degree to which universal values Have manifested themselves against all expectations of history and all momentum of prejudice and against all the institutions that so feed on the lack of virtue that almost all states and religions throughout human history have felt and appeared little more than carrion crows and vultures feeding on the eternally regenerating liver of
bound and chained human freedom.
Where good men, great souls, great women have fought to the very limits of their endurance, have tied their spine into sweaty knots attempting to lift the sepulchre of mankind's human history and open it to the skies and bring light to the bodies of the crushed.
Where that has manifested itself in geography, we worship the shadows of virtue that manifest in a country.
America was a philosophically designed country, informed by the Renaissance and in particular the Enlightenment, corrupted by the ancient shadows of slavery and taxation, which are two sides of the same coin.
America has gone through.
The traditional 250 years from its height collapsed down over 10 generations to its current diminished state, yet it remains, along with most of the Western countries, France and free speech to some degree accepted.
Sorry, Brigitte Bardot, but it And its sister nations remain the pinnacle and height of freedom that remains in the world.
I can speak this.
In Turkey, one man posted a picture of how the head of Turkey looked like Gollum, was charged with a crime, lost custody of his children, narrowly escaped jail.
There are freedoms that have manifested in particular geographical regions as the result of an acceptance and commitment to great men who are not mere mystics.
In other words, you do not need to be chosen by God to be a great soul in the West.
You need to choose your virtues and choose your actions.
and then you become like God in your capacity to affect human thought and your capacity to change the direction of human history.
That is very rare in human history, and the light of philosophy shines down blindingly in certain areas and at certain times.
It's not random.
It's not accidental.
It's the result of some environmental factors and an acceptance of the capacity for human beings to do great things.
When I grew up, all the giants were dying.
All the great souls were deflating like an old hot air balloon wrinkling its sad plum-like way to the empty grass.
All the heroes were dying.
They weren't being killed by heroes.
They weren't being killed by great beasts and they certainly weren't dying of old age.
They were being poisoned like Hamlet's father by Whispering tiny deaths being sunk into their ears time after time after time.
All the great souls were reinvented as evil clowns, great only in their capacity to delude themselves that they were doing good when they were in fact serving power.
All the pillars that exist to inspire the present to change the future were all falling.
All of these grand statues, these great souls, were all falling like the granite had been Turned to dust, to sand, they all slid and fell, their swords drooped and slid and fell, their shields fell, their helmets, everything.
The blank eyeballs that statues have, where you can't see the irises because they're impossible to carve, seemed sightless.
Everything faded and fell over.
It was...
As if humanity and greatness was a giant tree, an oak tree, that had lived for thousands of years and whose roots seemed to go so far into the ground that they became the very earth itself, the very planet.
And it fell not from the strokes of a giant's axe, not from a titanic storm, but from termites that ate and burrowed and undermined Until it lost its water, it lost its photosynthesis and fell into nothingness.
We can rule ourselves if we are willing to be inspired.
This doesn't mean everyone, but enough people to be inspired that we can maintain the pantheon of great souls, the religion of human potentiality.
We can survive and flourish in self-rule if we allow ourselves to be inspired by heroism.
Because a hero is bigger than any institution.
Who do we remember?
From ancient Greece do we remember the senators?
I bet you couldn't name but one or three.
Or none.
We remember the warriors.
We remember the emperors.
And we remember the philosophers.
The warriors.
Because war is a constant human danger.
The emperors because tyranny is a constant human danger.
And the philosophers because they are the defense against both.
We remember the disease and we remember the cure.
Because the disease will come whether we have the cure or not.
We must know the cure.
We don't remember the petty politicians.
We don't remember the bureaucrats.
We don't remember the lawyers.
We remember the founding fathers, we don't remember the names of the members of parliament in England in the 18th century.
And the future is a wide and thunderous river full of bottomless dangers, predators, crocodiles.
And how do we cross the river?
We have to cross the river because The land of the present is always crumbling and we must always move to a new future.
Everything decays.
Entropy takes down civilizations where there's a state in particular.
We must forever be condemned to lose the ground we stand on and we must cross the river to get to the future.
How do we cross the river?
It's too fast to swim.
It's too deep.
And there are too many predators.
Well, there's only one way to cross the river to get to a better future and that is stone by stone by stone by stone.
And what are those stones?
Those stones are the transmitted memories and future possibilities of human greatness.
Those are the stones we cross the river to get to the new land.
Not the promised land, I've always hated that, but the earned land, the fought for and won land.
And if you want people to drown and if you want people to be subjugated, you must make them feel small.
How do you make them feel small?
You tell them that the planet is crumbling and they can do nothing about it.
The earth is heating up.
There's a hole in the ozone layer which is now healing itself.
You make institutions so massive that people can do nothing to change them.
Until Brexit, at least.
If it should be fulfilled.
You take government, you make it larger and further away and much more responsive to anyone but the people.
And that way the people feel small and the people feel helpless.
And you tell them that there's institutional stuff floating in the air that people are unconscious of that will block and bar them from their progress.
Institutional racism, institutional sexism.
Insurmountable barriers of unconscious prejudices that nobody can navigate or manage.
You're helpless.
Helpless, helpless, helpless.
What is the antidote to helplessness?
Maybe it's something like not having to raise your goddamn arm to go and take a shit when you're in school.
Oh, can I please go and poop?
Don't see a lot of that among the great apes.
I need permission to go poop.
But how do you...
What is the antidote to smallness?
The antidote to smallness is exposure to greatness.
And this is why there's this relentless tininess.
The social justice warriors of the left of the cultural Marxists, this relentless tininess.
Oh, it's all economic forces beyond your control.
Oh, there are all these giant unconscious prejudices.
You need to monitor yourself.
You need to check your privilege.
Check your privilege means stop moving!
Don't breathe.
You're going to do wrong, no matter what you do.
No matter what you think, no matter what you say, it's wrong.
Use the wrong clipart, you're an anti-Semite.
Use the word watermelon, you're a racist.
Refer to a woman's appearance, you're a sexist.
Don't do anything, don't think anything.
Freeze!
So we can do a home invasion and pillage the treasures of your ancestors from your frozen tiny statues.
Of self-panic and self-contempt of saying or doing the wrong thing.
Heroism, as we talked about recently and previously with regards to civilization, heroism is the willingness, nay, dare I say, the eagerness to cause offense and discomfort to others.
That's what heroism is.
All heroes disrupt.
As George Bernard Shaw said, The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment.
The unreasonable man expects his environment and demands and works for his environment to adapt itself to him.
Therefore, all progress is the result of unreasonable men.
It's an awkward way of talking about an essential truth that all progress relies upon offense, disruption, frustration of that which exists.
And when People see heroes.
What they see is people who are willing and eager to cause offense in the pursuit of the good.
It's the pursuit of good that they want.
You don't drive a boat to create a wake, but wherever you're going, you're going to make one.
And damn it, we've got to cross the river.
It may be upsetting to those who get left behind who don't have the courage to do it.
But we have to.
Because where we are is crumbling.
Where we are is failing.
Where we are is falling apart.
Where we are is turning to dust, to ash, to sand.
Sinking.
Sinking.
If you want...
Progress, if you want greatness, you must be willing to accept that you will offend and upset people.
Which is why, in order to destroy a civilization, you must elevate a fence to some sort of moral epistemology.
You must elevate a fence to that which can never be provoked, so that no one can do anything, no one can change, and by God, when you make a fence, The greatest evil.
Offending people.
The greatest evil in the world.
You kill heroism.
You kill greatness.
You kill the capacity for heroism.
If you cannot offend people, you cannot be heroic.
And this, like Gulliver in Lilliputia, where he wakes up, He's a giant and they're tiny and he wakes up and he can't move because they've cast 10,000 tiny spider webs of ropes over him and they're all holding him down.
And he could break one, he could break ten, he could break a hundred, he might even be able to break a thousand but 10,000 tiny spider strands across his body held down by tiny people have rendered him as impotent and as helpless and as supine as if he were dead already.
The opposite of heroism is paralysis.
Because paralysis is helplessness.
And when you can make people self-conscious and you can make them focus on whether they're offending other people rather than when they're pursuing and achieving the good, you have stripped heroism from them as surely and deeply as certainly as possible.
So why can you not be patriotic?
Because to be patriotic is to recognize the manifestation of virtue in a country, which means to recognize that that virtue was achieved by offending everyone who predated that virtue.
The end of slavery offended racists.
The egalitarianism of women offended sexists.
Everyone gets offended.
By better ethics because they didn't have them beforehand and they invested in the conclusions of the bad ethics they thought were good in the past.
To be patriotic is to love virtue as it manifests in your country.
When you love the virtue that manifests in your country, you must ask yourself then, how did it manifest?
It manifested Through the will and strength of great souls who were inspired by the great souls who came before them and in turn, through their great actions, hope to inspire those who come after them.
Patriotism leads to heroism, leads to being inspired, leads to becoming bigger than the institutions around you.
And since nobody wants to tell you to be small and to be tiny and to be ruled by termites, by Lilliputians, by nothing-burgers posing as people, nobody wants to tell you to shut up and be ruled.
That's too direct.
So what they do tell you is, don't upset people, don't offend people.
That way, because you avoid offense, you avoid greatness.
And because you avoid greatness, you avoid progress.
And because you avoid progress, society decays and falls.
And the termites grow in size to tower above us.
And I dare say, feast on us forever.
Well, those are my thoughts, Andrew.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, totally.
Kind of what you just said there at the end about progress, you know, heroism.
Patriotism leading to heroism leading to progress.
And I guess I join a lot of other people when I say that there's this disillusionment that I feel.
I feel like we're so fractured because we don't know what we're going after.
We don't know what we're striving towards anymore.
And so we're like rudderless.
We're directionless.
We're like That's because we have no one of nobility to fight.
Who do we have of nobility and power to oppose?
Cowards and bullies and anonymous internetters.
Who do we have to fight?
Fighting people who can't think is like punching children.
If you have a great soul, you recoil from such tiny, embarrassing, humiliating pseudo-combat.
Nonetheless, that is the fight.
Not the punching children, but we have to drive the people who can't think away from the public sphere.
We have to.
We have to attack them verbally.
We have to humiliate them.
We have to drive them from the public sphere.
In the same way that if your blind 11-year-old is driving the car, you must remove him from the seat and take his hands from the wheel.
We have to reclaim the public space for great souls.
We have to drive the tiny people away from the public space back to the burgers and fries joints where they belong.
They're taking us off a cliff.
They don't know what they're doing.
They're petty.
They're retarded.
They're stupid.
They're offended.
And they think that matters.
Automatically disqualifies them from public discourse.
I'm upset!
You've just revealed that you cannot be part of public discourse.
Yeah, it's absolutely...
It's a mind-lumbingly...
It fills me with an anger because one of the favorite things that you've said that I've been saying a lot and sharing with people is when you say we do not have the right to throw away...
You say it so much better, but we don't have the right to throw away everything that people have fought and died for to give us today.
No one thinks that way nowadays.
And you talk about these great souls that have come before and I know that they have existed.
I've read about them and they're the kinds of souls that, you know, I look out into the world and I say, where are you?
Where are you?
you know well right now they're waiting for allies You can't be a great soul alone.
I mean, I'm for the great soul theory of history, but you can't do it alone, and we're waiting for allies.
This is what the internet is doing, is the internet is allowing for great souls to erupt and be visible to other people so we don't feel alone anymore.
Find the right people to follow on Twitter, you got a tribe!
You got your gang, you got your army!
There are people I see acting in this world that I admire so ferociously.
I can't even tell you.
They inspire me with courage, with nobility, with purpose.
And I don't feel as alone.
I mean, it was a little lonelier 10 years ago.
When I was doing all this stuff.
Now, not so much.
Yeah, and that's why part of my preface and my question was, you know, are things happening around the world, things like Brexit and stuff, I feel like within the past couple of years, there has been this I feel like people are coming out of the shadows and you're like, hey, like, I didn't know you also believed the same thing.
It was almost as if people were sort of afraid to talk at some point.
And now I'm seeing people forming little groups over here.
People kind of coming out and saying, hey, you know, I don't believe in that or I do agree with that.
And part of why I'm sort of, I feel like this I feel like this new feeling that I would call patriotism, or I feel this excitement, I feel this new kind of hope, because I feel like, like you said, people are starting to sort of come and band together, and I can kind of feel it.
Yeah, it's just really fresh.
I've never really felt this way before.
I didn't know that you could...
Feel this way.
That's good.
Then I think that you are on the verge of aiming for greatness.
Acting on greatness.
And that's what we need.
Any one of us can be taken down.
And vanish.
But together, we can't.
I look forward to what you're going to do.
Whatever it's going to be.
It is too late to aim small, Andrew.
You have to aim big.
You have to aim big.
The reason why the left and the petty tyrants of...
Ever-expanding institutions, the reason why there's such a push right now is because they failed so badly they want to take over before everyone figures it out.
It's too late to aim small.
It's too late to merely post things on Twitter or, you know, I think if you have any capacity or desire to join the Pantheon, If human demigods who've changed the course of history, now is the time.
The mechanism is there.
The communications infrastructure is there.
You can do anything.
You can say what is on your mind.
You can make the greatest arguments.
You can work the hardest to be as eloquent and as passionate and as committed as possible.
There is no barrier.
You don't have to have a TV network.
You have a radio network.
You don't have to be governed by the FCC. But this is not just for you, Andrew.
This is for everyone out there.
It's literally now or never.
It's literally now or never.
You need to aim big.
You need to screw your courage to the sticking place.
Because we go big or we go down.
Yeah.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
The time is now.
You know, that's what it is.
All right.
I'm going to move on to the last caller, but I really, really appreciate your call, Andrew.
And it was a very, very thought-provoking question that you came up with, and I hope that at least my take on it as it stands was of some value.
It definitely was.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thank you very much.
Alright, up next is Gega.
He wrote in and said, Throughout history, there has been a drive towards the strengthening of property rights as nations have become more industrialized.
However, there is an ever-growing push for social justice and economically egalitarian policies throughout the West.
What are some of the falsities of the prosperous European socialist state?
And to what extent is progressive culture and social philosophy destructive of both civilization and the rights and liberties of individuals on personal and economic grounds?
That's from Gega.
Hi, Stefan.
How are you doing?
I'm well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
I've been a longtime fan of For maybe about a year and a half sort of encompassed my transition from somewhat of a conservative to a minarchist.
Good for you.
I appreciate that.
Still not an anarcho-capitalist yet, I presume.
Well, that has been slightly downgraded in immediacy for the time being, as I've talked about for the last little while, so I have no problem with that whatsoever.
I appreciate you calling it.
All right.
Social justice, economically egalitarian policies throughout the West?
I mean, this is not newest.
It's not new at all.
It's the oldest thing in the world, that the king steals resources and gives it to those who please him.
Those who support his power.
That's all it's about.
Progressivism is like the ultimate regressive.
That's the reason why it's called the regressive left.
It's the oldest thing in the world.
The king takes resources from the population and then hands out those resources to people who support his power.
in the land and those resources have gone to churches and they've gone to nobles and they've gone to the police and they've gone to the prisons and they've gone to whoever it is that is the fist in the velvet glove of state propaganda to make sure that people obey that they comply or die and so this idea that it's really important for there to be a lot of taxation that accumulates money And resources to the state.
And then the state then redistributes those resources.
It's the oldest idea of the state that exists.
So the idea that this is progress, that the EU or the modern state is progress, is not.
It is entirely inappropriate to progress, which is why progress has stopped.
And progress is largely falling back.
I mean, look at the income of the shrinking middle classes.
Stagnant declining for decades.
Look at birth rates declining for decades.
Look at national debts exploding for decades.
Look at economic controls, regulations exploding for decades.
Size and power of the state exploding for decades.
When you put a very old idea on a very new society, you end up with a very old society.
And that is why primitive societies are overtaking more advanced societies, because the more advanced societies have put very primitive notions at the very center of their social organization.
All the money to the king!
The king will decide where the money goes!
Well, that was exactly how most of human history didn't work.
Didn't work.
This is why population didn't grow.
This is why slaves were never replaced with machinery.
This is why capital could never accumulate.
This is why freedoms never expanded.
It is a very old idea that the West was entirely founded to oppose.
The idea that the state uses force to gather massive resources to itself and then hands it out in order to maintain its power.
This is a very old, very tragic, very destructive idea.
It's sort of like saying, hey, you know what would be a great idea?
For most of human history, the crops were all planted and harvested by hand.
That was great stuff.
You know what we need to do?
Ban all farm machinery.
Ban all fertilizers.
Ban everything.
That enhances all this stuff.
Well, what's going to happen?
Well, your food production is going to drop by like 90% to 95%.
What happens then?
Well, your population is going to fall back down in gruesome starvation fashion.
Your population is going to fall back down to the level of population you had before you had farm machinery.
When everything was done by hand.
That's where your population is going to end up.
Because when you get rid of new stuff, you end up with old stuff.
And so we have this population that was originally sustained, nurtured, and grown by economic and political and social freedoms.
And now, for the past 50 or 60 years in particular, we have grafted this incredibly old, horrible idea that the state...
Grabs the majority of resources in society.
The state controls the currency.
The state controls the population.
The state controls the majority of the resources in society.
The state organizes and controls and price fixes and licenses everything.
And what's going to happen is we either find a way to change that to bring back freedom or the population and the society as a whole is going to fall back down to where it was before we had economic freedom.
Economic freedom is why most of us are alive.
The free market, volunteerism, the resources of society in the hands of private citizens acting on their own self-interest for the maximization of their own resource acquisition and expansion, that is why 90% of us are alive.
If you take that away, I'm telling you people, you may not believe me, 90% of us are going to die.
You just can't sustain this population level without the free market.
And I think that the one term that's been used very frequently, especially by the lower age group, by the millennials, the group that I am a part of, and this word has been equality.
I dislike the term specifically because it's used differently than what it truly means.
The idea of equality was equal rights, equal protections under the law.
Everyone has freedom of speech.
Everyone has freedom of religion.
Everyone has the right to bear arms and the right to property and so on in any free society.
But now the term equality has become the term equity.
They just don't understand it yet.
This is what they mean.
This is what they want through social justice.
This is what they want through progressive ideas.
And this is taught specifically by very liberal, presumably.
And that's another term that's been destroyed in the 21st and the late 20th century, the term liberal, going from classical liberalism to liberalism.
Practically socialism to progressivism and so on.
But you have these presumably very leftist educators in the high schools and in the colleges and the universities and so on that preaks the idea that there is some sort of starting sin.
It's the idea of natural sin in Christianity, which is supposedly something that these people are very much against.
And they use these terms to justify why we need equality.
But that's not what really happens.
They use the term of white privilege, which is essentially a metamorphosis of the same thing that these people are very much against.
and that happens to be original sin, natural sin.
And they use the terms of billionaires or millionaires that are not specifically self-made, which has never been an empirically justifiable argument, because the vast majority of them are self-made.
And that's what you were talking about with the previous caller of heroism and so on.
And I think this ties into the fact that these...
Successful individuals did so through their own hard work and government and entrepreneurship and so on.
And the idea of equality has sort of been pushed in terms of income equality as well.
But that's never been the case.
You can never take out income inequality.
You can never get rid of income inequality unless you get rid of effort inequality.
If people strive Equally the same.
For the same amount of hours.
They work just as hard.
They pursue the same education.
Oh, good Lord.
I'm sorry.
I just can't.
I mean, of course, unequal efforts, unequal abilities produce unequal outcomes.
The government has no interest in equality.
They only say that so they can take stuff from people and give it to other people who support their power.
Mm-hmm.
If the government had an interest in equality, it would be shrinking its own size so we'd all end up with more rights, closer to the government.
The government keeps expanding its power at the expense of the individual.
That's completely unequal, and it's the worst form of inequality is political.
Who cares if some guy is richer than you?
What matters if some guy has the power of life and death in an arbitrary political context over you?
The government doesn't care at all about income inequality.
What they care about is creating this spectrum called income inequality.
In order to take from the rich and give to the poor so that the poor will support the power of the state.
Or take from the middle class and give to the rich in the form of the military-industrial complex so the rich will support the power of the state.
And we don't have as much time.
You know, this is why I keep urging.
There's a blog called marginalrevolution.com.
This is written by a guy I used to know back in the day.
He said, freedom in the world is in decline.
And he wrote, my thoughts on Independence Day are more muted this year than they have been in the past.
In the first half of my life, I saw the Berlin Wall fall and I watched as democracy, trade and greater freedom spread around the world.
There was still plenty wrong, of course, especially for a libertarian, but the world was on an upswing and it seemed like the ideas that led to the economic, political and social destruction of the first half of the 20th century were in decline.
Now, following the second Great Depression, illiberalism is on the rise, much as it rose during the first Great Depression.
All could yet turn out well, but there is no denying that the world is no longer on an upswing.
In Freedom in the World 2016, Freedom House reports, quote, the world was battered by crises.
That fueled xenophobic sentiments in democratic countries undermined the economies of states dependent on the sale of natural resources and led authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent.
The number of countries showing a decline in freedom for the year, 72, was the largest since the 10-year slide began.
Just 43 countries made gains.
Over the past 10 years, 105 countries have seen a net decline in freedom, and only 61 have experienced a net improvement.
Ratings for the Middle East and North Africa region were the worst in the world in 2015, followed closely by Eurasia.
Over the last decade, the most significant global reversals have been in freedom of expression and the rule of law.
Freedom in the world has now declined for the 10th year in a row.
10th year in a row.
Anything to do with the war on terror?
I would think it has something to do with it.
But things are urgent.
The patient is in decline, which means we have to act decisively.
I agree, and that's one of the...
A novel that I'm currently reading called Rights of Man, which I'm sure you've heard of, of course.
And Paine outlines somewhat in the middle of the book.
It's not a novel.
You mean Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man?
Mm-hmm.
It's a pamphlet.
It's a political pamphlet.
It's not a novel.
I think you referred to it as a novel.
Yes, I did.
Okay, sorry.
I just want to check.
In case people don't like novels, go read The Rights of Man.
He's a great writer.
And...
Essentially, he is arguing that it's government that has always profited from conflict.
It has never been people, because people don't sow conflict.
People, they have a mutual way of coming together through trade and through spread of intellectual ideas and so on.
And it's always been government that constrained freedom through making conflict with one another or with An outside force.
And that's one of the things that I wanted to ask about the European socialist state in the first half of my question and the sort of myth of the prosperous European socialist state.
And it seems to me that when you compare the freedoms that were given to these individuals and these nations and Western European nations years and years before with the start of the Industrial Revolution and so on, and you compare it with the freedoms given today.
And some basic freedoms haven't changed.
But it seems to me as if the general populace in the West is, like you said, on a downward spiral, specifically because they find that they've been wronged somehow by those more successful than them.
And because they find that the state should use forks, but they never they never explicitly state that this is what what happens.
They simply just think that this...
Sorry, man, I've got to ask you to get to a question, because we can't both be doing speeches, because then it's not a conversation.
Well, I just wanted to ask, what are some of the falsities of the prosperous European social state?
Well, it's got nothing to do with prosperity.
I mean, the reason why...
The reason why people are keen on an ever-expanding government is because there are lots of people who are pathologically insecure or self-hating and one have nothing to do with voluntarism.
You know, the ugly guy with the club foot and the body odor who's got no money, he wants a situation of arranged marriages, right?
Right?
So the people who can't compete in the free market but who want stuff Who want to become wealthy but can't compete in the free market.
They just want to create layers of bureaucracy where they can go and hide out and get money.
You know, so if you are some town and there's like 50 people in the town and there's one mayor and he sucks, everybody knows that they can get rid of the guy.
There's still a kind of quasi-free market in small local governance.
But when it's in another country, in some unelected Brussels-based court or parliament or something, you can't do anything about that.
I mean, I know the Brexit's going on and all that, but they want to create additional laws of bureaucracy to be further and further away from the people they're supposed to be managing, so the people that they're supposed to be managing can't toss them out.
I mean, it's nothing to do...
Like, okay, they make all these stories where we want...
We want to have free movement of people.
Okay, then have free movement of people.
You don't need a Brussels parliament.
You don't need the EU to have free movement of people.
Just everybody to get rid of their visa requirements and let people travel freely.
You don't need any central institution to do any of that.
But they want to create additional layers because the truth is always catching up with the local rulers.
And so the local rules are screwing everything up, so they need to climb up one level.
In business, it's called FUMU. Fuck up, move up.
The worse you do, the better, the more you get promoted.
Because everybody wants to get you away from themselves.
They can't fire you if you've got political power, if you've got, I mean, within an organization, even if it's not political, if you've got some pull, some mojo.
They'll just promote you to get rid of you.
Go deal with that other division over there and get away from me.
So all they're doing is creating more sedimentary layers for the parasitical bureaucrats to hide in because the last thing they want is to have anything to do with the free market.
Because they have nothing to offer.
People will want to have nothing to do with them.
They'll be viewed as people you wouldn't even finish the interview with, let alone hire.
But they don't want that.
They want stuff without work.
Who doesn't?
That's why we have machines that do things for us.
That's why we have a remote control changer so we don't have to get off the couch.
Everybody wants stuff with no effort.
But in the free market, you have to work to achieve that.
And you have to provide value to people, and you're going to fail a lot.
And so, don't listen to any of this stuff they say.
You know, we want to diminish income inequality.
We want to regularize trade.
I mean, the point of the European Union also is to reduce competition among countries for capital, right?
And they want to regularize and normalize things so that there's not this competition to lower corporate taxes.
I mean, I know that there's still a lot of discretion among domestic companies and the countries and so on, but still.
By having one currency, they don't have to deal with all these jostling currencies that are all striving to out-compete each other and devalue and be more stable or maybe even, God forbid, go gold-backed or something and then be a real haven for investment and savings.
All the stated goals is completely meaningless.
Have a Coke and a smile, okay.
They want your money to sell you sugar water.
And, you know, we want this, we want it.
It doesn't matter what they say.
I mean, they just, they want to create government further and further abstracted from the people so that they can continue to prey on the people without even the vestiges of the free market called local governance anywhere nearby.
I mean, everyone's focused on, and again, this is from March and Revolution, people focus on Brexit, and it's important.
But in Italy, 17% of the bank's loans are sour.
Now, even in the worst of the 08-09 financial crisis in the US, it was nowhere near that bad.
So, right now, in Italy, 17% of bank loans are sour.
That's 10 times the level in the US. And even in the very worst of the 08-09 financial crisis, only 5% of US banks' loans were sour.
So it's more than triple that.
Among publicly traded banks in the Eurozone, Italian lenders account for nearly half of total bad loans.
This could bring the entire Eurozone to its knees.
I mean, they've already discarded the idea of a bail-in.
Because that's just crazy unimaginable runs on Eurozone banks, right?
Now Italy is the third largest economy in the entire Eurozone.
A little bit different from Greece.
You can't bail that out.
Germany and France, they've got their elections coming up.
They're not going to be bailing out Italy.
Not after what happened in Greece.
In per capita income, Italy has not seen any real growth in over 15 years.
It's mad!
Yeah, that's essentially because these nations can't necessarily...
The euro is a real burden on them.
They see it as a boon, the politicians.
But it truly is a burden, especially when the EU sort of makes trade deals and their entire...
The European economy, the Eurozone, is based on a mutually and collectively beneficial deal rather than each nation having the sovereignty to make their own deal.
That's one of the reasons that Brexit was a good thing economically.
Sure, the stock prices fell, but that was a knee-jerk reaction.
Oh no, they're back up now to 2% higher than they were before.
So all the people who said it was going to be disaster in Armageddon and Ragnarok, they'll just reveal just scaremongering, wolf-crying liars.
Well, they forgot the idea that, of course, it was going to fall initially because the investors have knee-jerk reactions.
It went up right after, and it's been higher than it's been in years and years and years, especially because now investors realize that Britain has the sovereignty to decide its trade deals with 2.2 billion more people that it couldn't trade with before.
And it's harder to compete in trading with these corporations in Europe that have so many taxes and regulations living on them.
Right, and this of course is another reason why Italy is lending so many migrants in because that's going to create social conflict which they can then Blame economic decay on and all that sort of stuff.
So yeah, I mean, the natural tendency of governments is to grow to social collapse.
To my knowledge, there's not been a particularly significant exception to that rule throughout history.
So you choose governments, you choose increasing tyranny until social collapse.
That's one of the issues of why the Romans fell initially was because of poor monetary systems.
It's not poor monetary systems.
It's because of the state.
Because the state constantly needed more and more and more money and so debased the currency to the point where the soldiers couldn't get paid so they came and sacked Rome.
Okay, that's 10 seconds.
I've got a whole thing going on the Roman Empire and its history so I won't get into that in much detail here.
But it's the same story over and over again.
Something coalesces, a small government which increases trade, and the government grows and grows and takes control of the currency, debases the currency, destroys trade, taxes people into oblivion, and then collapses.
And then the population returns to a terribly earlier state, right?
And then you've got the population of Rome going down from a million to 17,000 in a few years.
Because that's what happens when you don't have an infrastructure anymore.
Alright, I really appreciate the call.
Thank you so much for calling in.
Thank you everyone so much for this platform and this opportunity to reach, wow, gosh, so many of you.
It really is quite an honor and an enormous privilege to be able to speak about these important issues with you, to help out the show.
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