Nov. 12, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:51
3495 Never Forget Never Trump | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
There has been a call for reconciliation following the end of the United States Presidential election, but it's important to fully understand the situation before you start singing kumbaya. Mike Cernovich joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the fallout from Donald Trump being elected president, the anti-Trump riots and why we should never forget Never Trump.Mike Cernovich is a lawyer, mindset expert and the author of “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms” and “MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again.” He is also the producer of the film documentary “Silenced. Our War On Free Speech.”Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CernovichRead Danger and Play: http://www.dangerandplay.comFollow Mike on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/CernovichOrder Gorilla Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/gorilla-mindsetOrder MAGA Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/MAGAFreedomain 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
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, back with a good friend Mike Cernovich, a lawyer, a mindset expert, and the author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, Making You and America Great Again.
He is also the producer of the film documentary Silenced, Our War on Free Speech.
Mike, I just have one question for you today.
Are you tired of winning yet?
Is it enough for you?
Does your cup run over?
Well, what was funny is that, and by the way, MAGA Mindset is narrated by Stefan Molyneux.
That's free on YouTube, and it's going to be on Audible soon.
You know, the funny thing is that yesterday, I woke up and I had like a massive adrenaline dump.
And people, that's, they're like, let's celebrate, let's celebrate.
So I had to kind of show my face, but it has been such a brutal, you know, 18 months that all I wanted to do yesterday was hide.
And of course, I couldn't sleep the night before, so I woke up, I wasn't able to sleep.
I go, alright, I gotta...
So yesterday I was tired of winning.
Today I'm ready to win again.
It's not...
I was just...
I was doing a show with Bill Mitchell and it's not leaving me.
The feeling is not leaving me.
The positivity, the enthusiasm, the excitement, the what's next.
You know, I mean, of course you celebrate when something that you have worked hard for comes to pass and we should always enjoy that.
Um, But it is, of course, you know, now I'm sort of orienting myself to what's next, and what next seems to be riots, violence, setting fire to things, and what happens when you take the left's abusive language away, which the Trump presidency has largely done.
When the abusive language becomes revealed as impotent, you get the physical abuse, always follows the verbal abuse if it's blocked.
And, boy, are they ever confirming what everyone voted for?
Wouldn't you think so?
Yeah, they're a violent mob.
And the irony of this election is that everybody said Trump supporters are violent.
False.
It was the Clinton supporters who were.
Then they said, well, if Trump loses, his people are going to be violent.
Well, Trump won.
Not only did he win the Electoral College by a landslide, CNN's latest projections say he might actually have won the popular vote as well.
That's still too close to call.
But point is, Trump didn't barely edge out the Electoral College.
He won the popular vote, basically 50 50.
And their reaction is violence ain't.
And what I'll say is that while I do not encourage violence, I believe in the non-aggression principle myself, if they want a little dust-up, then I would be more than happy to meet them on their terms.
Well, I think this aspect is something not to be underestimated.
Everyone should really see clearly how much the left is projecting because, of course, yeah, they were saying, well, the people on the right, they're not going to accept a valid electoral outcome.
They're going to try and undermine the process.
And now, of course, we see regularist clockwork, as sure as sunrise tomorrow, that that's exactly what the left is doing.
And this is a reminder, whatever the left accuses you of is what's next in their playbook.
Yeah, the projection, the issues...
They're a violence.
I mean, I call them feral.
They're not rational.
I've talked to so many of them.
I tried to debate them.
I did this documentary called Silence, about free speech and the war on free speech.
And I went to people who are social justice warriors and they're Twitter warriors, and I go, I will give you a legal contract saying that you can put a 90-second monologue into the film stating your position.
I won't edit it.
I'll let you watch it.
They won't do it.
They have no interest in civil discourse.
Right.
It's all about getting their way through tantrums, emotional manipulation, physical abuse, verbal abuse, whatever godforsaken tools they can get their hand on to get their way.
And man, I can really see, Mike, how they would be afraid of the free market.
I mean, you show up to work anywhere.
I mean, I got my first job when I was 10.
You learn this stuff pretty quickly.
Your employer cares about your professionalism, cares about you being there on time, cares about you pleasing his customers.
That's what you're hired for.
Tantrums don't work in the free market.
They just don't work.
So I can really see why these people want jobs in academia or the government or wherever they can not be market-facing and have voluntary interactions because these kind of tantrums get you fired within three minutes of walking in and they're so woefully unprepared.
I mean, I'm sort of wavering between the sympathy and the horror.
Well, I vacillate, and that is why I... Hate the media.
I take pity.
You know, there are people who genuinely believe that Trump is going to try to round people up and put them in concentration camps.
These include my in-laws who are educated, intelligent, sophisticated people.
And Shauna is telling them, Mom and Dad, like, you know better than this.
Why do you even believe this?
But anybody who still watches that media is being bombarded with lies, propaganda.
So in a way, I... There are that segment of the left, the protesters, the rioters who are completely hopeless losers, but I've seen some otherwise decent, intelligent, good people who are really concerned, and I think that that is a travesty, and that is why I'm not trolling or overstating it when I say that I believe that the American media is a terrorist organization, because they intend to incite terror among the people by lying and by giving them propaganda.
And they also intend to incite violence against Trump people like me by telling people, hey, you know, that guy, he's probably another Nazi.
So wink, wink, nod, nod, you know what to do.
Yeah, this is something that if you're not in the public spotlight and disliked by the media, it's really, really tough to understand.
I think people get it instinctively, which is why they keep non-politically correct opinions to themselves, because they know that there's this sort of roving band of enforcers out there, you know, like the fundamentalists with clubs in some crazy Islamic state.
There are these enforcers out there, and the media is pumping these noxious, hysterical fumes into the cultural atmosphere in the hopes, I believe, that someone is going to just act out their crazy, aggressive impulses.
And violence from the left is something that if you study history and you look at presidential assassinations, you look at how the left has taken power in various countries, you know, they are polysyllabic, barely concealed thug merchants at base.
Well, what actually got me into this political stuff, because I hated it, and I just wanted to write about mindset, is I read a book called Surviving the Killing Fields about the Cambodian genocide.
the Cambodian Holocaust, That was all done, the Kramer Rouge, that was all done by the left.
The most of the mass, because a lot of, like a lot of people, if you don't think and educate yourself, you think, oh yeah, the right wing had been responsible for the genocides, but actually, it was the left wing.
It was the left wing in Mao, it was the left wing with Stalin, it was the left wing in the Cambodian Holocaust.
I saw a lot of those same forces at work in the U.S., that same social justice warrior mindset, that same, people would talk about trying to send me to a re-education camp.
Which is just a step below a concentration camp.
Well, that aspect of things where the left's intolerance of free speech is something really, really foundational.
And it comes, as you point out, with your movie, Invitation.
It comes because they're bad at debating.
They have no facts.
They have emotional manipulation, bullying, aggressiveness.
And hyperaggression is always, to me, a marker of a lack of capacity.
You think of an excellent...
Fighter.
The fighter looks effortless, right?
Think of an excellent swordsman or an excellent taekwondo fighter or jujitsu fighter.
They appear to be effortless.
You know, someone runs at them and there's barely a movement and that person goes down because they're very, very skilled.
Therefore, they don't need all the screaming.
They don't need to come in with a two by four.
But the people who are bad at fighting are the ones who get hysterical and aggressive.
And these questions of where society should go, how its resources should be allocated, these should all be debated in the public sphere.
But people who really want their way and who don't have the humility to learn the necessary skills to become a good debater.
I mean, I was debating when I was in junior high school.
I started in my first debating team and I went and was in the debating team and vice president of my debating society all the way through college and all that and debated around Canada and internationally.
So you just – you have to work to become good at it.
And they haven't worked to become good at it because they're not smart enough.
Maybe they're not verbally dexterous enough.
Maybe they just lack the humility that you need in order to improve your skills.
So people have to understand that slander is the tool of the loser.
Verbal abuse is the term of the incompetent and violence is the last confession of complete incompetence in the realm of public debating.
And anybody who moves to these tactics on any kind of regular basis, or who initiates these tactics, eh, immediate disqualification.
You know, if I show up to a fencing match with a 2x4, I'm not allowed to compete anymore.
Yeah, a lot of it, what you touched on, it is that narcissistic mindset, where I'm a professional writer.
I've written a few books.
I can string a few sentences together.
You know what is on my bookshelf right now?
Books on writing.
How do I write?
How do I become more effective?
Because I don't believe my own hype.
Nobody told me from when I was a little kid, you are special, you're precious, there's never been anybody like you.
If you only learn to love yourself more, then the world is going to open for you.
I kind of grew up and had to figure out, okay, my life is actually going to be trash unless I do something about it.
So we have an entire generation of people who have been coddled and nobody has told them, look, you're not special.
You're not good.
You have to work at it.
Even people like you, I bet you're still, before you do a show, you're still doing your homework, aren't you?
Absolutely.
And I'm watching the greats.
And I'm trying to figure out how I can become better.
I mean, I'm always trying to be more spontaneous without being random.
You know, that's a real challenge, you know, especially when I'm doing interviews.
I want to be spontaneous, but I don't want to end up with some sort of tossed word salad spreading itself across the internet.
So...
I'm always trying to improve, always trying to find better ways.
I work on analogies.
I work on metaphors.
People think you just open your mouth and this stuff happens.
It's like, no, it's a massive amount of preparation.
It's the tip of the iceberg stuff.
And the fact that, you know, you or I are gaining some prominence now, well, I've been doing this stuff for 30 years.
I've been a public figure for 10.
Don't tell me about overnight success.
It's a massive amount of preparation.
And if you haven't done it, you haven't done it.
And there's simply no way to pretend that you have.
Yeah, there's no, the cultural sort of mindset shifted away from just put the work in.
When I was younger even, that was just put the work in.
Life isn't fair.
These are the kind of things you heard.
Life isn't fair.
Put the work in.
And with these newer generations now, from the teachers all the way down, I guess their parents too is a parenting failure.
People aren't saying, look, you have to put the work in.
You're not special, but you can become special.
There's even been research showing that Never tell a child you are talented.
That is actually going to disrupt their growth.
What you tell them is that you have an ability to learn and to grow and to achieve great things.
You have that ability, but you have to apply it.
Well, that's how people like you and I think.
Boy, if we really work hard, we'll hit it maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years, we'll finally make it.
If you tell these kids, which is what the culture tells them, you are unique and you are talented, Their mindset is going to be completely damaged.
Well, that's, I mean, moms versus dads, right?
Moms are encouraging and dads are realistic.
And I think that's a yin and a yang.
And both, I think, are very important.
You know, you climb your ladder, you know, one rung, then the other rung, one leg, then the other leg.
And you need, I think, that masculine and female energy.
But the reality is, I think one of the big problems, Mike, is that in the 1960s, basically teachers unions took over and you could no longer fire teachers.
And there are many, many people I've talked to in my show and research that I've read and books that I've read saying that teachers are generally the least competent people around.
I mean, they're at the bottom of the educational standards.
You know, at the top is like physics and philosophy.
And then at the bottom is all the people who go into teaching.
And the moment you put incompetent people in charge of children and no longer allow them to be fired, then you're giving narcissistic entitlement to the teachers.
And of course that's going to flow down to the students.
How can teachers criticize students and encourage them when the teachers don't apply that to their own lives?
They're there to hide out from reality and we expect them to prepare children for reality?
It's madness.
Well, I remember one of my first awakenings was when I actually went to college and then I looked at who the elementary education majors were and they were all the party girls and everything.
And I go, wait, my whole life as a kid I was told that I had to respect these people and But they were basically the people that are just getting wasted every weekend and aren't studying, you know, 10 years from now.
And I started to really question what is an authority figure.
I started to question the whole social constructs of legitimacy, power, authority.
And as you said, there are some good educators out there, but many people go into education because it's an easy major.
Right.
And they don't want to be market facing and they don't want to have the capacity to be fired.
And of course, if you never have the capacity to fail, you never have the capacity to succeed.
I mean, that sounds like a deepity, but it's actually kind of a real phenomenon.
If you play it safe, you're probably never going to do that badly, but you're never going to do that well either.
And that I think is the real tragedy that we've got people in charge of our children who are unwilling to take risks and who are trying to avoid risk as much as possible.
And that is great tragedy.
So this, everybody gets a trophy, everybody's special.
It's like, no, in the real world, you have to bring value to people.
Don't you think about that every day?
I mean, I think about that.
I've been doing, I've done 3,500 shows.
I've got, I don't know, like six or seven books out there.
I've done a bunch of public speaking, and every day, it sounds cheesy.
I wake up in the morning and think, what new insights, what new value, what new information can I bring to bear on my audience?
How can I make people want to watch me today?
Who watched me yesterday?
And I can't offer the same stuff over and over again.
I mean, that would drive me crazy, drive my audience crazy.
How do, you know, after 10 years and 3,500 Joes or however long it's been for people out there, how do you bring new value to people?
That is the real challenge.
But, you know, you've got to be like a shark.
You know, the shark, they stop swimming, they sink, and they die.
And that's just not how it works with the people who educate our children, or rather, miss educate our children.
So they're out of reality.
The kids hit reality, as we can see.
So they, you know, their favorite candidate lost an election.
Well, get used to it.
It happens.
But they're just woefully unprepared for it.
I don't, it's hard to know exactly why that is.
I mean, the teachers, the parents, I don't know.
Well, it's the over, it's the over-feminization of culture.
It's what it comes down to.
I mean, you do need to encourage children.
I can't remember.
I think it was a Gavin McInnes kind of sketch where he did.
He said, you know, the mom and the dad is he was in a he went in the bathroom at a baseball game and he saw the kid had like kind of had an accident.
The child was older than you would usually expect the child to have an accident.
And the dad was being just like a little bit too mean to the kid.
But then they went back to the stand and the mom was like hugging the kid.
And you need both of that.
You almost need the dad who's a little bit too much of a dad.
You need the mom who's a little bit too much of a mom.
But with single motherhood, the way it is with absentee fathers, with society telling men that they're trash, with society telling women that men are trash and you treat men like trash, it's been a completely over-feminization where now we're seeing the end result.
We are living in a feminine world.
Well, we're living in a feminine West.
The cultures that have more masculine energy seem to be spreading and dominating pretty considerably, and that should give us all pause.
Now, there is something that's going on.
I want us to get your thoughts on it.
It's one of these, I'm sort of ambivalent about it.
I knew it was going to come.
After years of verbal abuse against the right, when the left's Now there's all of this.
Let's build bridges.
Let's reconcile and all this kind of stuff, which to me is complete bullshit.
Like, I mean, it's absolutely unbelievable.
Of course, you know, I mean, it's the old thing.
Like the guy, when he's got the knife, he's going to kill you.
When you've got the knife, he's like, hey, man, peace, pacifism.
I mean, it's just been a shift of power.
It's not a shift in ethics or any kind of awakening.
And I know that, I mean, I'm sure that politicians have to do this while I'm president of everyone, not just the people who voted for me.
They need to work with the people and so on.
I don't feel that at all, deep in my heart, my spine, my balls.
I don't feel that at all.
I feel, sorry, you chose the wrong side, and I'm not going to forget it for a second.
Yeah, I feel that way, especially with, like, the National Review wrote an article, President Trump, now that you are president, congratulations, and I hope that we can work together.
No, you went after President Trump.
All these...
Megyn Kelly went after Trump.
All the never-Trump cucks, they're over.
They are done.
So I have two worldviews of thinking of this.
One is that the media, the pundit class, they are all done.
We have to push the advantage.
We have to utterly crush them if there's a way.
I know a lot of them are donor-funded, so I've been attempting to sabotage donors and saying, hey, look, these people actually tried to get Hillary elected.
If you're giving them your money...
You are actually being cheated.
So I am working very, very hard to cut off the financial lifelines of these cucked organizations.
Now, as far as the people go, we do have to find a way to chill them out just for the sake of living in an orderly society.
Now, what that means, I don't know.
How we get all these people who have been brainwashed into thinking that, you know, I'm a Nazi KKK guy and I'm going to go out and kick the door down and try to kill them.
I don't know what that looks like yet.
So I'm sympathetic to the idea that we need to figure out all these people who are having nervous breakdowns.
We need to figure out something about them.
We need to utterly crush and destroy the people who have led them to have a nervous breakdown.
That includes the media, and that includes most of conservative media.
And that is where I have the least amount of sympathy.
I mean, the left is the left.
You know, leftist is going to left.
What are you going to do, right?
I mean, and, you know, I think that there should be negative repercussions.
They're never going to learn because of ethics or empathy.
I don't think they have a shred of those things, but they can learn from consequences.
They're not dumb necessarily.
But the people on the right who mouth the platitudes of small government and who mouth the platitudes of, I mean, on the right, they've said for decades to a lot of skepticism, but turned out they were right.
Oh, you know, the media is just the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and they're hand in glove and they're deep in the pockets and they're colluding behind the scenes and so on.
Well, here you get a guy, I mean, of course, along with heroic people like Julian Assange and all of that and the people who It's proven now.
It's proven.
Because of the Trump presidency and because of his platform and because of him standing after the media, A, they've been revealed as a paper tiger.
Even with all of the amount of weight that they put behind Hillary, they still lost.
All the lies added up to, I think, even more support for Trump because people empathize with being in that kind of spotlight and having that kind of crap flung at you.
The media is a paper tiger.
The collusion between the media and the DNC is pretty clear.
The collusion in the DNC, pro-Hillary, all been revealed.
I mean, people who are conservatives who want smaller government, they should be cheering at all of this.
Their great enemy has not been the Democrats but the media.
And the people who attacked Trump, look, I get that maybe people make big mistakes.
Huge.
Okay, then do a big mea culpa.
Look into your heart of hearts.
Figure out what went wrong.
Look at your friends.
Look at your paycheck.
Look at your social circle.
Look at whatever.
Figure out what the hell went wrong that put you in such a terrible, negative, destructive position, and then figure out how to make it right.
But it just seems like people are either flipping and not...
Right, so there's a lot there to unpack, and I'll start where you ended, which is that people do make mistakes, but what nobody is taught is that What process led you to make this mistake?
That is the only way I believe in redemption among friends, people I work with.
People have done things that I would consider kind of wronging me, and I'll occasionally forgive them not out of a sense of Christian guilt or obligation, but I would just say, well, what process led you to believe that this was the right outcome?
Because a lot of times their mental model was skewed.
There are ways that you can correct that.
That's why I'm a big fan of what Charles Munger called like mental models of the world.
Learn economics, learn philosophy, learn psychology, learn social media, learn marketing, learn writing, learn everything you can.
Update your mental model of the world to make better decisions.
So I always say, you know, what led you from here to there, okay?
Now, what led the media is not an error in process.
Their process is that they're duplicitous, they're evil.
So I've suggested that Trump disband the White House press corps, and people can't tell if I'm really...
Genuine on that.
I'm 100% true.
There's no reason to have the White House press corps.
After the Michelle Fields hoax where all of the media said, oh yeah, Corey Lewandowski beat this poor woman up.
You can't let them.
You can't let them into the White House because who knows what they're going to make up.
It is, again, the issue that I've realized this election.
I've always been of the mindset that we're trapped in this world together, right wing and the left wing.
Let's talk.
Let's find reconciliation.
Let's find compromise.
interest, the reality of living in a pluralistic society.
But the media isn't biased now.
They are just hoaxers.
They are just liars.
They are frauds.
So Trump absolutely should disband the White House press corps.
That would be a great start.
And we must not let the National Review, the Blaze, Glenn Beck, the Shapiro types, none of them can come home.
There's no prodigal son coming home.
They betrayed us before.
They will betray us again.
And what have they learned?
What have they learned that they're confessing to as part of this process?
And again, what happens is if somebody wrongs you and then writes before the great crisis, then okay, yeah, it's fine.
I mean, people forgave Trump for his indiscretions that were recorded on the bus 11 years ago.
And because he said, I hate what I did.
I am sorry about it.
I'm going to be a better person.
I'm a better person now.
He owned it.
He said he was sorry and he worked for improvement.
And of course, I mean, the head of his campaign, she's like the first woman, not that it hugely matters, but for those who are into the gender stuff, like she's the first woman to head up a successful presidential campaign.
And of course, the left doesn't care about it because she's on the right and therefore she's the enemy, even though they claim to be pro-woman or whatever.
But we forgive people, you know, forgive those who have trespassed against us.
It's the same prayer that I said many, many times when I was a kid.
But it has to be before the Reconciliation appears to be more self-serving, self-interested, narcissistic garbage.
Like, now that Trump has won, and the people who say, well, now let's reconcile with Trump, they're just bending to power.
They're adapting to circumstances.
It's not like a sudden attack of conscience.
Yeah, you don't get to dictate the terms of engagement once the engagement's over.
That's what I've been telling people.
We won, you lost, you don't tell us what we need to do now.
That isn't the way it goes.
And I love all these articles now.
Well, now that Trump's won, here's what he needs to do.
No.
No.
Just no.
You don't get to.
You get to do what we tell you to do.
And if you don't want to do what we tell you to do, it is a free society.
You don't have to do anything that we don't want to do.
But we are dictating in the terms of the engagement.
We have to press the advantage.
We have to overcorrect it.
So yeah, specifically, again, we've got to disband the White House press corps.
I'm reminding people...
Who betrayed Trump?
I'm reminding people, everybody who signed that article of the National Review cover against Trump, I'm reminding people of that.
I've even told people, hey look, if you want to read these people at the National Review, I do not want you reading me.
I have enough readers, enough viewers.
I don't want anybody who is so stupid, they're so idiotic, they're so foolish, they lack judgment, that they're going to read the enemy and read the saboteurs and allow the saboteurs in.
I've told people, I don't even want you reading my stuff anymore.
You go read their stuff.
Get the hell away from me.
Don't waste my time.
Well, people on the left will always lie and people in the center will always stab you in the back.
This is something that's real.
You have to take a stand and you have to take a stand based on reason and evidence and virtue.
And tribalism and loyalty is very, very important to me.
It wasn't so much in the past.
I was more of a sort of a free agent, you know, radical individualist or whatever you want to call it.
But I've recognized now that there is essential good that needs to be done in the world.
That needs a tribe, that needs a strong band of brothers and sisters, a strong-minded community of like-minded people.
And betrayal is so time-consuming to have in a community.
Fears of betrayal, what's going to happen as a result, the schisms that result.
It's so emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually draining to have wavering people who you're not sure if they're going to hand you ammo or stab you in the back.
It's not even worth having the potential of it, I think, in a particular community that has a very strong goal, as I think a lot of us do, who are working in this particular area.
And people have fortunately revealed themselves.
And this has been the great sunrise of Trump, right?
Which is that he has revealed so many things that formerly were only somewhat guessed at, media collusion and DNC corruption and so on.
But what he has revealed is false friends.
And false friends are worse than enemies because you know who the enemies are and you can make your decisions.
It's the false friends who are the great betrayers.
And you're right.
Now they're going to try and wallpaper over the great hole in credibility they had.
And it's really, really important to not forget.
Yeah, that's a great point because a lot of people don't understand because they see me being very friendly with liberals and people on the left.
And they go, but Mike, you're so mean to like the National Review.
Yes, because...
If I'm in a competition, I'm in a competition with the left and we're going to compete and we're going to see whose ideas are good.
To me, that's fair.
That's ethical.
I believe that you have the right to be a liberal and I believe that you have the right to share your liberal ideas and I believe my ideas are better.
Let's compete.
With the cucks, as you said, they're just going to stab you in the back.
They're going to betray you.
There is no competition.
There is no, okay, it's mano a mano.
No, they're going to say, oh yeah, I've got your back.
And then you turn around and the knife is what they actually have on your back.
So I have more respect for liberals than I do these right-wing cucked rights.
Yeah, like if you're playing doubles tennis and your partner is dedicated to your loss...
You can't fight that.
You can't win because they're on this side of the net.
The people on the other side, you know what the deal is.
They're going to try and win.
You're going to try and win.
You have a great contest and whoever wins, fantastic.
But if the person on your side is subtly undermining what it is that you do, sending balls into the net, hitting you with the ball and serving bad, what can you do?
There's no rule.
There's no law.
You can't do anything other than sink into a grim kind of defeat.
They nearly won.
I mean, the Never Trumpers, they worked very hard.
And the fact that they were bedfellows with the left-wing media, I mean, should give you something.
That's a pretty gross situation to wake up in.
I don't care how drunk you got the night before.
You wake up next to a reptile, you've had a bad night.
They're bedfellows who they allied themselves with and so on.
I mean, the people who were in the Michelle Fields story, I mean, aligning themselves with these people.
Man, at what point do you wake up and say, what have I become?
And if you don't do that, can you ever be trusted again?
And I don't believe ever.
Well, I talked about this in MAGA Mindset and I go, the goal of most people in conservative media is to write for the New York Times and people go, Mike, you're wrong.
Well, we proved it.
We have people who are so-called conservatives writing columns at the Daily Beast.
You would never see my byline at the Daily Beast.
I would never in a million years go, I want to write an article for the Daily Beast.
Never there.
A lot of times I don't even answer when they call.
I usually blow off the reporters.
There's only one guy there I kind of – he's all right.
He's a little bit sneaky, but he cracks me up.
So occasionally I'll talk to him.
For the most part, I don't talk to media.
I just blow them off unless I know the guy or have an existing relationship.
And I know that you're even more Firm about that than I am, or you just don't talk to them at all.
So I only talk to maybe 10%, and I don't talk to 90%, but I'm sure not pitching stories to the New York Times and Washington Post and Daily Beast.
Please, please write about me, or please let me write for you.
And that's what we saw with conservative media.
They were running to the New York Times.
Oh my God, I'm like Dave French's wife.
I'm a conservative woman, but I can't be in the Republican Party anymore because Republicans are a bunch of misogynists.
And she's writing that the New York Times throwing bombs at us.
There's no coming back from that.
Here's what I say.
Go be a liberal.
Go be a liberal.
You can go be with the liberals and then we can talk again.
But you can't say that you're part of the right now and say that we're on the same team and say we're going to work together.
No, you go be a little liberal.
Go hang out with the liberals.
And now we're across the table and then we can negotiate as free people.
But you're not on our side anymore.
Yeah, this I mean, the amount of damage that was done.
By this basic equation.
I mean, if you go to some leftist and you say, what do you think of Donald Trump?
And he says, oh, I hate him.
Okay, that's accepted.
We all understand that that's in a certain party category.
It's in a party line.
But you go to a Republican and you say, what do you think of Donald Trump?
It has a special, it's like poison on the knife.
To be in the Republican camp and to trash talk the nominee on his way up or especially after he gets the nomination.
And there's a special kind of evil banquet that is set out for those people because they're basically like spies with poison rather than honest fighters with swords.
And the left opened their gates to invite all of these wonderful Republicans and we're going to write great things about you and you're going to be loyal and we're going to love you and all you have to do is slip the shiv in in the shower.
And you're going to get into the shower because they think you're on the team.
And that, to me, the amount of damage that was done by the left publicly trotting out conservatives who were anti-Trump gave it a special kind of bitterness and a special kind of vitriol in those attacks.
And that is...
to a fight because there really wasn't any, what were the policies?
I mean, they would either make things up and it's like all the people who say, well, Trump doesn't have any policies.
It's like, just because you don't go to his website doesn't mean his website doesn't exist.
This is not Schrodinger's cat universe here.
You know, it's like the kid who's like, hide and go seek.
I've got my hands over my eyes.
You can't find me.
It's like, no, just because you refuse to ignore something doesn't mean that it's not there.
And that special kind of betrayal, there can't be any home, in my view, in the Republican Party of those people moving forward and And they, you know, like how when you drive away, you just got married, you got the tin cans tied to the tailpipe of your car.
All of their history needs to follow them everywhere they go on the internet.
And people need to constantly remind everyone what happened the last time so that when they do it again, nobody should be surprised.
Yeah, exactly.
I had an interesting thought as you were talking.
In warfare, actually, you hate the people who betray you more than you do the opposing army.
Benedict Arnold, Judas.
The idea is that even if we're at a war where we're trying to kill each other, we have more respect for the guy across from me trying to kill me than I do the guy on my side who's being a spy.
The same thing with the passage in Thermopylae.
One of the Greeks who sold the secrets to the Persians so that they were able to go around the hot gates and were able to ultimately defeat the Spartans in that battle.
That person was hunted down.
It's in our DNA. That's what I'm telling people.
There's a reason that we hate traitors so much.
These people are traitors and there is, again, you can never let the traitors back.
The enemy army, you defeat the enemy army, you can actually work with them because At least they're following honorable principles.
The honorable principle is I'm going to beat you, and my honorable principle is I'm going to beat you.
And then we clash, and then there's winners and losers, and that's life, and then you get some kind of reconciliation.
But with the trader, they have no honor.
There's no negotiation.
There's no deal-making.
There's no ever letting them back in.
Well, and I think this is why in most societies there is no greater crime than treason.
Treason, you know, the old adage, beware of Greeks bearing gifts, which I always try and forget every time my birthday comes around and my wife comes into the room.
But it is something that's really foundational.
You know, the Trojan horse stuff is really important to understand.
And the reason for that, I think, is kind of simple, which is – and I want to elucidate it, though, if people really understand the principle – You know, there's an old argument that goes all the way back to Socrates that immorality is just a form of ignorance.
You know, people think they're doing the right thing, but once you educate them into the reality of the world and its situation, once you align their mindset closer to reality, then they can make better decisions.
They can say, well, you know, I thought the wrong thing.
And, you know, if you have an effective compass and it's pointed the wrong way, you're going to go the wrong way.
But, you know, you're just following the compass.
Correct the compass, they can go the right way.
So you can educate people who oppose you.
No matter how strongly they oppose you, you can educate them into something better and they can come around.
The problem with the people who betray you...
Yeah, exactly right.
And Socrates is definitely more optimistic than I am.
But there is truth that a lot of times people are just confused.
People don't know.
When you educate people, there is some hope.
With a traitor, there is no hope.
And I think that's all absent massive financial incentives.
And I think that's an important point to touch on as well, because this is going to be, you know, we've now gone from the, quote, civil political war to the civil war on the right between the people who got it and the people who can get it and the people who got it and use that knowledge to betray and harm the Republican Party and the Republican voters.
I think they were actually kind of pro the Uniparty, We need to talk about financial incentives because, of course, the big question is why would people do this?
I mean, Trump's platform accorded with a lot of what the Republican voters, the Republican constituents wanted.
So what would be the incentive?
You can't educate someone.
There's an old saying which says you can't convince a man of an idea when his very paycheck relies upon him not understanding that idea.
The financial incentives sway all because we're fundamentally biological creatures who don't live on ideology but live on resources.
And when ideology clashes with resource acquisition, 99 times out of 100, it's resource acquisition that will win.
Although a lip service may be paid to ideology, you can't eat it, you can't use it as shelter.
I mean, you need your base needs met.
So let's talk a little bit about what the hell was going on with these people who betrayed the Republican Party and the Republican voters.
What was driving them?
What was motivating them?
Behind-the-scenes money, that's the reason.
Although I like to troll...
The cucks about, like, oh, how are book sales and everything else?
What most people don't know and what I've been educating them on is that I live on book money, like, the end.
You know, if people want a movie, we crowdfund it.
You are supported by your readers.
These big publications, they're not supported by the readers.
They are supported by big billionaire sugar daddies.
They were supported by—they're paid.
Now, I don't have a problem if you're the mouthpiece of some billionaire somewhere if you disclose that.
If you say, hey, just so you know, you're where you're sponsored right here.
I'm sponsored by the Wilkes Brothers in Texas and they like Cruz and they don't like Trump.
In Shapiro's case, in 2011, he goes, we need Donald Trump.
All the National Review, they were pro-Trump.
And then I go, well, what knowledge did you acquire between then and now?
To make you think that Trump was somehow like a bad guy.
You didn't know about The Apprentice.
You didn't read his books.
You didn't know that he was kind of a billionaire playboy.
You didn't acquire any different knowledge that caused you to change your mind.
So there was a massive amount of money going under the table.
And although I can't prove it yet, I'm investigating it.
I think that money came from Hillary's people actually and has been funding people, propping up people who are in the Never Trump conservatism.
People thought that was crazy.
Look at Glenn Beck now.
Glenn Beck went all in for Hillary.
He went 100% in for Hillary.
And now he said he's pro-Black Lives Matter.
You know, that's not a change of heart.
There is something going on there.
So my belief is that Hillary's people actually funneled money into most of these conservative media outlets.
I'm sorry, my mind is just recovering from the deep orbit you just spun it into.
I mean, I thought maybe it was money coming from the sort of wealthy Republican donors who want to externalize the cost of their cheap labor and who want the H1B1 visas because they're basically serfs who can't negotiate for better salaries.
And I thought that there was that aspect of things and Trump was going to interfere with that.
that all the lobbyists who had their hooks deep into the claws of the establishment politicians seeing Trump come in like he's an icebreaker breaking up the sort of frozen, entrenched power structures.
I thought maybe it was that.
But the idea that it could have been coming from Hillary or Hillary supporters, right?
It could be coming through a big labyrinth to get there.
It's truly astonishing.
And I wish you Godspeed in the pursuit of that information, because that would be quite stunning.
Well, you'll notice now that conservative media, as they were opposing Trump, they quit talking about Soros, which is what kind of tipped me off.
There's one thing, because there's a lot of pieces to put together.
One is that I wasn't pro-Mit Romney.
I thought he was basically a cuck.
But I'm not going to go all in and try to destroy Mitt Romney's campaign.
To me, it's like, ah, Romney or Obama, they're both globalists.
They're both going to do what they're going to do.
So what I noticed with the right-wing media websites like National Review, Glenn Beck stuff, Shapiro stuff, is they not only were criticizing Trump viciously, But they quit talking about George Soros.
And Soros is funding riots.
They let up on a lot of those issues.
And I thought, well, you can oppose Soros and Trump.
If you're a man of principle and I'm integrity and I will never betray my honor to support Trump.
Hey, I get it.
But if you're not going as hard on Soros and as hard on Hillary as you're going on Trump, then you can't claim that there's some kind of principle behind that.
And you notice they went harder at Trump.
John Nolte said this.
They went harder on Trump than they ever went on Hillary or Soros.
That is something I had noticed as well, Mike.
And that to me was just astonishing.
I mean, that is astonishing.
Is there stuff to criticize Trump about?
Sure, I've done it myself.
And, you know, where there's course correction, I think all of those who are positive towards this movement, you know, we'll all help each other course correct.
And we all make put our foot wrong and all of that kind of stuff.
But that you would focus your vitriol.
And this happened to me from a very surprising variety of sources in America and overseas, that you would focus your vitriol so much on Trump and not think that that reveals some kind of bizarre fetish or pathology on your part.
To me, it's always like it's so obvious from the outside that you just fixated onto something and you're pumping vitriol at it, not out of any particular principle, but rather.
And Trump, you know, if you just take one example of his desire to extricate America from its endless foreign wars and invasions and obligations and so on.
Well, first of all, the left should have been all over that.
I mean, if the left is anti-imperialistic, dear God above, the idea that anybody on the left who's anti-imperialism and anti-empire and anti-foreign interventions that they would go for Hillary Clinton of all people over Donald Trump is to me absolutely astounding that This to me was the great revelation of this entire electoral cycle, which I'm still processing in these conversations, very helpful.
I think it is true for a lot of people, is that people said, well, these are the principles that I have.
And this is how I'm going to guide myself.
This is my compass.
I'm against this.
I'm for that.
And then you compare their relationship to the platforms of the candidates.
And there was, like, not only no matchup, but almost a complete anti-matchup.
People say, well, we want lower taxes and a simplified tax code.
Well, Donald Trump's going to provide that.
I hate him!
Well, I'm against imperialism and globalism and I want America's army to come home and I don't like 740 military bases all over the world.
Well, Donald Trump is going to start doing that.
I hate him!
And it's like, then what the hell is all the point of this frou-frou bullshit that you call ideology?
I mean, what is going on under the cover?
I care about the Supreme Court so much, you've got to have true constitutional conservatives who don't legislate from the bench on the Supreme Court.
Hey, Donald Trump, did you read that list?
Oh, well...
Hillary, Trump is bad.
Ultimately, the way I look at it, it's like, uh...
They are...
That's again why I think they were taking money under the table.
Either they were taking money under the table from Hillary, or their minds are completely defective.
Because there's no middle ground.
There is no principle.
I would always put the question to these never-Trump people like this.
I go, well, if you claim to be a true conservative, and that's why you oppose Trump, Why then did you support Romney, define Romney as a true conservative?
You could go back to the articles in 2011-2012 where the National Review said, you know, Romney isn't really a true conservative, but we have to unite as Republicans to get him elected because of the Supreme Court, because of da-da-da-da-da, right?
McCain, same thing.
I always say it's helpful in life to have a good memory about what people have said.
They hated Reagan, wasn't a true conservative, and now he's their hero.
Right.
Right.
So they always said, well, they might not be true conservatives, but you got to get the Republicans in.
And then suddenly Trump runs and they go, well, yeah, don't bring up any of those columns that we wrote about McCain and Romney.
Don't mention that the Supreme Court matters.
We got to have Hillary.
And what was interesting, too, that I thought was beautiful is, and this is why Hillary ultimately lost, there was no case for Hillary.
Here's why we need Hillary.
She's a visionary.
She's going to change America.
There was no case for us.
Even the people who hated Trump couldn't say, this is why we need Hillary.
Well, she had a resume of endless disasters.
And not just disasters like, oh, we spent a lot of money on this policy and it failed.
Like entire countries and regions ripped apart, turned into civil war.
Foreign leaders deposed and murdered in the streets by being bayoneted up the ass.
I mean, just unbelievable destruction.
I mean, I've been talking about this to people who, you know, I'm meeting lots of new people with what I'm doing now.
And they had no idea.
Hillary's resume was like a complete blank to them.
They had no idea what she did as Secretary of State.
And the fact that this wasn't just trotted out, it's like, oh, yeah, oh, Donald Trump, does he lack experience?
Oh, okay.
I'm fine with that if he doesn't have that on his resume.
But Hillary was like this blank cipher where people just didn't really talk about much that she'd done in the past, just talked about this vague experience.
Well, you know what?
A hitman has experience too.
That doesn't mean I want him babysitting my kids.
Yeah, exactly.
It was beautiful.
A lot of liberals, a lot of people on the left actually did figure that out, though.
And I knew that from going to the DNC and the RNC, which I did in the film Unconvention, which is there were enough people at the base who said, I'm not going to support another Hillary Pierce person.
And that is, again, a lot of people have said, because here's what I say.
This is my promise to you, to the readers, to everybody.
I take personal responsibility for voting for Trump.
And working to get Trump elected.
So if Trump goes off the rails somehow, to me, I have to own it and I'll do my best to correct it.
Hillary wanted World War 3 with Russia, though.
That is the baseline with which I'm going to measure Trump.
Hillary wanted World War 3 with Russia.
If there's no life on the planet!
Yay!
We win!
So I'll hold Trump accountable for sure relative to what Hillary wanted, which was World War 3 with Russia.
So let's do a bit of, I guess, pat on the back, victory lapping as far as this goes.
And I don't know what your thoughts about this, Mike, but I've sort of seen that The people who are successful in independent media have, I think, generally tended to be more pro-Trump.
And the people who have not been successful in connecting with and getting resources from the audience, whether it's donations or book sales or speaking fees or whatever it's going to be, if the audience isn't going to pay you for whatever it is that you're doing, but you still want to keep doing it, well, you've got to find someone else to pay you.
It's not going to be advertisers in general.
There's not much money on the web in ads anymore.
And of course, if you do controversial stuff on YouTube, you're going to get your defunding or whatever it is.
So if you want to keep doing stuff but you can't get the audience to pay for you, where do you go?
So I think that the...
The sort of drug of choice of going to some centralized sugar daddy funding source, wherever it's coming from, we're still exploring.
But if you can get your money, as we do, talking directly to the audience, providing value to the audience every day as we work to do, then you're not tempted.
Someone comes along and says, I'm going to write you a big check.
It's like, thanks, I already have a job.
My job is working well.
So I think the people who are successful – and I think the cause and effect is correct.
It's not like, well, if you were pro-Trump, you were successful.
No, lots of people working against the people who were pro-Trump.
But if you're successful already, you have the liberty to evaluate information more objectively rather than being tied to a single funding source.
And people who are tied to a single funding source – That's not their own work.
I always find, yeah, you've got to follow the money.
They're always going to be puppet strings.
Everything comes at a price and a cost and a shackle.
And the money shackles, the gold shackles, are, I think, some of the worst of all because they're hard to see.
And so have you noticed this?
I mean, I'm sort of trying to figure out the pattern here that if people have not succeeded in the free market, they're more susceptible to that sort of single donor being dragged by the truck to wherever the donor's driving kind of money.
Oh, I mean, 100%.
They're...
Reality is we all have to make our money somewhere.
And if you can't make it going directly to the people because you're a fungible good, then you have no other choice than to work for something like National Review or the Daily Beast or these other left-wing publications.
I always think it's funny that the establishment will try to make fun of me.
Oh, you're a self-published author?
Wait, you mean that I didn't go beg Simon& Schuster to publish my book and get taken advantage of and I actually make A generous royalty for my books that no authors can even believe that I do.
I didn't get an unnecessary overhead in order to get my books out to the people.
Self-published.
That means no gatekeeper.
That means direct communication to the people.
Right.
So those of us who go direct to the people, and that is, again, another, it's like a microcosm of what is going on.
The people in the elite are completely divided now.
So people like us, we can go directly to the people.
They're glad to have us.
They're glad to support us because they have no other alternatives.
And the great thing for us, and that's why I encourage other people, is there's still room for people who want to raise hell and tell the truth.
Well, this is the thing, too.
I mean, there is that old saying, what one man can do, another man can do.
And of course, the people who see that Trump walked through the media, and I know he took his arrows, and I'm not trying to diminish that.
I mean, that was a harsh experience for him, for his family.
And just imagine, imagine you've got thousands and thousands and thousands of people combing over your public life of 40 years for every last detail of anything they could use to smear you.
I can imagine that's a pretty unnerving experience.
But he did walk through it and it ended up being like one of those, you know, they got the paper and then the football team runs through it.
I mean, he just blew right past it.
And I think that didn't kill him.
It made him stronger as a candidate and as someone to respect for that kind of resolution.
So more people can follow in that way.
The mainstream media has been crippled, crippled.
And this is what people don't understand yet.
You know, it takes a while for someone who's bleeding out to die.
And it takes a while for the financial hemorrhaging that the mainstream media is undergoing and is only going to continue to undergo.
Yeah, they'll get infusions from their sugar daddies and all that kind of stuff.
But they are crippled and there is a great opening, a great opening in what needs to be said to humanity.
And, of course, the costs of getting started.
You got a webcam.
You don't even need a great mic to start with.
I mean, so there is a huge opening.
There is – the dyno media is falling and there's a huge opening.
And I really, really invite people – The more competition, the better.
The competition is only going to make you better.
It's only going to make me better.
I want the greatest geniuses of language and thought and philosophy and humor and communications to step into the space with us to make us all better.
But there is a massive opportunity for people out there.
And I really hope that people will try and make that leap.
We need as many voices in this fight as possible.
We need as many allies as possible.
And we need as much improvement as possible.
And that can only come through rigorous competition.
And what an amazing opportunity for people out there to change your life, change the world, grab a mic, grab a webcam, and talk to the entire planet.
What an incredible opportunity to do so.
And I would love it if more people took up that opportunity.
Well, moreover, here's what I always tell people.
I go, let's say that you're so good that you out-compete me and it costs me money.
Great, because I have to live in this world anyway.
I have to live.
That's what got me involved in all this stuff.
There are many, many things I could be doing to earn my living.
I would love for there to be 100 more Mike Cernovich's, 100 more Stefan Molyneux, 100 more people just making things happen because a rising tide is going to lift all boats.
So the more people like us, the more people are waking up, the more opportunity for everyone else.
I don't even view it as competition.
That is why you're good about this too.
I promote the hell out of people, young people.
I'm promoting...
In theory, my competition, I'm trying to build up their branch, trying to boost them up because the more people we have speaking truth and the more people we have making the world better, the more opportunity everyone's going to have.
Fantastic, fantastic.
So I want to make sure that people get your vital statistics to follow what it is that you're going to do.
Mike's tweets are fantastic and his website is great.
So you can follow Mike on twitter.com slash Cernovich, C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. And Danger and Play, great quote from Nietzsche.
Dangerandplay.com is Mike's wonderful work, his wonderful writing.
And Periscope, he's a U-boat commander, king of the Periscopes.
And it's periscope.tv slash Cernovich.
We will put all of the links below.
A great chat.
I hope that we're motivating people to grab life by the horns, to go out and communicate to the world.
It is a fantastic and exciting and challenging and beautiful thing to do.
And this way, you know, you make the world a better place.
