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Dec. 21, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:13
3537 Who Screwed Western Civilization? | Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
Back with our good friend Lauren Southern.
She is the host of Standoff on the Rebel Media and the author of...
Ah, I just read this.
You have to, have to, have to read this book.
It's great.
Barbarians!
How the Baby Boomers!
Immigration and Islam!
Screwed!
My generation.
You can follow her on Twitter at Lauren Underbar Southern, just like it sounds.
And of course, therebel.media slash Lauren Southern.
We'll put all the links in the, I guess, encyclopedia of our favorite guests below.
How are you doing tonight, Lauren?
I'm doing wonderful.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
So, it is a traditional question, which I'm not going to escape the cliche of asking the author, what prompted you to want to write the book?
Did it come flowing out?
Was it a big planned thing?
We'll get into the content in a sec, but, you know, like any good director asks, Lauren, what's your motivation for the book?
What drove it?
Um...
A lot of it was just an absolute frustration and sympathy for my generation and what's been done to them.
I'm very angry with what's been done to them and how just absolutely lost and clawing in the dark everyone my age is.
And I wanted to kind of write a manifesto for them on how we can fix this situation.
It's more optimistic than pessimistic, but I think every chapter in the book is how this group ruined everything.
So it seems pessimistic, but it does have a good end.
Your description of, and I sort of was in, I was at U of T in the 90s, and I was just like, you know that the, when there's a tsunami film, there's always like the hero is like just running and the tsunami is boiling after him and like frogs and fish are flying through the air and you're just running it.
I just was getting out.
When I finished my master's, I could almost smell the social justice warrior wave that was coming in.
So my memories are actually not too bad of university.
There were a lot of old school guys and men and women there who, you know, were very sort of foundational to Western Civ and all that kind of stuff.
And a fantastic teacher, this woman who taught me Aristotle, like no relativism, none of that kind of nonsense.
And she was very strict and very great at teaching this stuff.
But man, the description, and if you could sort of just touch on the story of this professor, I know we're going to use a pseudonym.
The quote, and this just is fantastic that he said, he said, I see no difference between the actions of the Nazis in World War II and using offensive rhetoric.
How on earth do people get to that perspective?
Right.
Well, that's what this whole book is about.
It's exploring how did this happen?
What is the origins of all this?
Because I was curious.
A lot of people think it just started with, boom, all these crazy SJWs were just entitled, and they're the snowflake generation out of nowhere.
We both know that.
Since you've read my book now, that is not the case.
It started a while ago.
It was the damn French again.
This professor of mine, I'll give a quick overview for everyone what happened.
He was obsessed with a poet named Bill Bissett.
And Bill Bissett believed in spelling everything wrong.
Everything is a social construct.
Language especially needs to be deconstructed because it's progressive.
And all of these systems of society that have been created to make the world function are actually systems created by powerful people and are therefore oppressive.
So we have to deconstruct them.
And this was my English teacher who believed that language needed to be deconstructed and to not exist.
So he would spell things wrong.
It was insane.
He worshipped that.
But also he believed language was super powerful at the same time.
It's this weird double think that was going on.
And we did a lecture where he said, He called me a moron in one of our earlier lectures because I disagreed with him on something.
And then a later lecture we had, he stated that...
Yeah, what you said.
He sees no difference between mean language and violence.
And that great comparison he had between the Holocaust and calling someone an idiot.
And I... Backfired and was like, you called me a moron and I don't think you're an SS officer, sir.
And he got quite angry.
But this wasn't just one crazy professor out of nowhere.
No, this came from the insane mind of French philosophers Foucault and Derrida, who were both kind of Derrida, who started the deconstructionist movement, quite literally, deconstructing all of these systems of oppression.
And Foucault, who promoted mental illness as being a positive thing.
And everything you see today, coming from social justice and crazy teachers like my...
I called him Frank Moran in my book.
It came from these philosophers.
I don't want to spoil too much of my book, but it'll give the history of where it all started.
I had one of these guys when I was – I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger and sort of self-published my own poetry books.
And there was another guy who was doing it too.
And he's one of these guys who's like, well, I don't want to be confined by like mere syntax and grammar, you know, like commas or Nazis or whatever it was.
Nonsense, right?
But the funny thing was is that he always would tell you exactly how to spell his name because, you know, otherwise people just can't find you.
And it's like, well, if spelling is oppressive, why don't you spell your name with wingdings and fish heads and, you know, like a watermelon just sitting on a table, and that's my name.
No, no, no.
It's this, this, this, and this, because you've got to be able to find me.
And it's like, well, that might give you some idea of the utility of a common set of language.
But yeah, this stuff is really dissolving.
And I also remember when I was in theater school, we were there for a little while doing some pretty flaky stuff at the beginning.
We got more regular later on.
But one of the things was, go out and find some poetry.
You know, like you had to go and assemble a poem out of like graffiti that you found, maybe an ad or a piece of magazine paper that you found, found poetry.
And it's like, why?
Why?
Why do you have to find poetry?
Why can't you just write poetry?
I mean, do you think that Shakespeare was out scouring 16th century London for leftover teabag ads so that he could put together Hamlet?
Just write something.
But it's always got to be this crazy, found, invented, garbled, Dadaist nonsense.
Oh, it's hilarious.
And you know, I look at the philosophers who started this and I think they didn't expect to be taken so seriously.
I mean, both Foucault and Derrida, they were both...
Everything is a power structure.
Everything that exists, our systems of government, how we say hello, good morning, good night, that is all created by people who...
Are powerful and therefore are using it to oppress us.
It's a very paranoid philosophy that has been passed on.
It's for very, very paranoid people.
And I was listening to a more recent video of Derrida speaking about deconstructionism, and he was kind of doing typically what the French do.
No, no, they just did not understand me properly now that it's all kind of gone to shit.
Hon, hon, hon, they did not understand me.
But no, he messed up a whole generation quite a bit with deconstructionism and postmodernism.
There was a real veneration of insanity in the 60s into the 70s.
I mean, I remember the echoes of it sort of when I was a little kid.
And you think of some of the sort of leading intellectual luminaries, and we can put a sort of list of them below.
Some of them pop into my mind.
But I mean, there's a lot of really crazy people who had severe entanglements with the law, who had very exploitive relationships with those around them.
The left is kind of well known for promoting insanity as a way of wearing down women's defenses so that you can basically have sex with them.
I mean, it's just a really crazy, crazy thing.
And this aspect of the deconstruction of sanity itself, I don't know if you've ever had someone like this in your life.
It's the, what do you mean by that kind of person?
You say, good morning.
What do you mean by that?
No, no, no.
It's just good morning.
Would you like a coffee?
What do you mean by that?
And what do you mean by that, people?
Oh, so exhausting.
Like after a while, you can barely lift your head off the desk.
Oh, you can't lift your head off the desk.
What do you mean by that?
It's like, no, I can't take it.
Not everything has extraneous meaning.
Yes.
Well, no, quite literally, if you read Foucault, he believed that we were completely...
When we started bringing mentally ill people to hospitals and treating them, he believed that was just a terrible, terrible act of us to do, and really it was better way back when, when crazy people would roam the streets and would...
He said they were able to live as they could and they were able to contribute to society and just be more interesting people.
So he said all mental illness is a social construct, meaning to celebrate mental illness, which is kind of where you get all of these people that are kind of with the whole transgenders, these are them, all genders.
There is no mental illness aspect to it.
It's all a social construct and power structures that are trying to tell us that this is an illness and if you say it that is evil and terrible and oppressive...
Foucault.
But the big problem with him, sorry, I'm getting way too into it.
I'm going to spoil the book.
But he was gay, and that was labeled as a mental illness at the time.
So he kind of compared it to all of the rest of them, right?
And was like, well, I don't feel that mentally ill, so all the rest of them might not be as well.
Well, and this is a little outside the scope of the book, but I think sort of ties into the general thesis that, you know, World War I, one of the great unravelers of civilization around the world, but of course, particularly in the West, one of the terrible things that came out of World War I was this concept of shell chakra, right?
Like this idea, because there were these very brave men who had medals and had done, but they just were shattered and they couldn't get out of a mental hospital and nobody could figure out why.
And they called it shell shock because they thought the brain had been jellied by approximate shell explosions and so on.
But because they couldn't figure out how to cure these guys, get them back to the front, and because it was not very good propaganda to see these formerly brave guys with lots of medals just turning into mental goo around everyone, this brought a huge level of interest back in Freud.
Now, Freud, of course, is a very, very big topic, but one of the things that he talks about in Civilization and its discontents is this idea of the sort of the raging id, you know, the primordial lizard brain that just wants to take and eat and have sex and all that.
And somehow it's sort of confined in by Civilization, and it's just a terrible thing, and we're kind of blunted down and shaved down by Civilization so that none of our primordial essence sort of lasts.
And I personally have never found it a very, very compelling view at all.
I think Civilization is a wonderful thing, and I really don't feel entrapped by things like central heating and cars.
It's all a power structure.
Yeah, no, I mean, if it's a power structure that gets me to Los Angeles in five hours, you know, I'm down with that because, you know, I hear it was quite a haul on a horse-drawn carriage and, you know, kind of rutty all over the place.
So this idea that somehow civilization is the antithesis, this goes all the way back to Rousseau and the noble savage that, boy, you know, back when we died of tooth decay at the age of 23 and women died regularly in childbirth and, you know, only one out of five kids got to the age of five, we were so authentic.
And it's just this worship.
The left seems to, they call themselves progressives, but it's this giant boomerang into the past.
Like all they want to do is go back and venerate medievalism and all kinds of god-awful things.
I touched a rat!
I'm dead!
I mean, how can they be taken seriously as being any kind of progressive kind of thing when they're worshipping primitiveness and mental illness and the bad habit of abandoning their children, but that's a topic for another time.
And this infection in the higher halls of learning just seems to, I think, have scrubbed the last vestigial respect, which you talk about in the book, that, you know, they used to be Marxists, but at least they used to respect reason and expect evidence to support their arguments.
But it seems to have just gone like...
Electroshock therapy in the brain style these days.
No, they're the real anarcho-primitivists.
They're the initial ones.
Yeah, so that's most the beginning of my book, but I'm curious what you thought of...
Oh, I don't want to spoil the end, but I will say that this book was also a coming-out book for me to kind of say...
I don't know if libertarianism is the movement to preserve the most freedom, and I kind of moved towards more conservative nationalism, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on that, of course, without spoiling the very conclusion.
Lauren, why are you trying to get me in such trouble?
Why?
What did I do?
I thought we were friends, and now you're trying to...
Look, I mean, it's an old argument, and of course you touched on the book, though expanded on it, I think, very well, which is that you can have a welfare state Or you can have open borders, but you can't have both, right?
Because you've got a high IQ population, the welfare state is bad enough, but then if you start getting low IQ populations coming in, the whole thing just falls apart, like, you know, Infinite-style Jenga bringing down civilization with it, too.
So I am quite concerned about libertarianism's focus on open borders, and it seems to me that they focus a lot more on opening borders than they do on closing down the welfare state.
Because as I've said a million times, if we have a truly free society, and, you know, I'm an anarchist at the core, but I recognize that's a multi-generational project, and we've got a few more important things to work on in the here and now, but I'm very concerned that libertarians are unrecognizing cultural differences.
Like we're all just general market blobs that we can all assimilate and so on.
And it's really, really not very easy to assimilate to disparate cultures, disparate ethnicities and so on that nobody's been able to figure out how to do that successfully.
So I'd really like it if we could slow down the experiment until we figure out whether it's going to work or not.
So that to me would be important.
But they focus more on opening borders than on closing down the welfare state.
And to me, that is a very, very dangerous, like potentially civilization destroying approach.
So I have some tensions with libertarians at the moment.
And I think, yeah, both of us at the core certainly want as small a government as humanly possible.
And I have a deep, deep respect for libertarian philosophy and anarchist philosophy.
I was just debating a man named Walter Block.
Have you heard of him?
I have debated with him as well.
Have you?
I'll have to watch that.
But we were talking about open borders when I was at a Students for Liberty meeting, and I brought up the fact that earlier, a couple years ago when I was with him, he stated that libertarianism is kind of like the rock of Sisyphus.
You're forever pushing it to the very top.
Just for it to fall to the bottom, and you can never quite achieve it.
You're always trying, trying, trying, but you can never quite achieve that libertarian society you want.
And I asked him when we were at this meeting, so how do we achieve this libertarian society?
And he quite literally told me, I think the only way is for people to mutate, for there to be some sort of mutation that makes people more likely to not be collectivists, because naturally we're collectivists.
Naturally people They have this preference for government and socialistic systems and all these things.
So he was saying, maybe in a thousand years we'll have enough mutations that people will all want to be libertarians.
And I was saying, well, my biggest quarrel with that is I don't have a thousand years.
I have my lifetime and I have the lifetimes ahead of me and my generation that I worry about that are going to exist within that time of...
Terrible governments if we don't do something about it now.
So that's what's kind of turned me more towards how can I preserve the most freedom possible right now?
Not necessarily how am I going to virtue signal that I am a purist the most right now.
I'm not interested in virtue signaling.
I'm interested in actual change and helping my generation which is suffering so much right now.
Yes.
To me, it is very much a time – in a time of plague, if you're a doctor with a cure, you've got to be out and busy.
There's not much point doing a bunch of R&D that is going to pay off generations from now because people – minds are dropping like flies all around us.
I think that it's been – Probably not since high medievalism that rationality in the West has been under such perpetual and continual assault and reason and evidence being just blasted from every conceivable angle, from the media, from the newspapers, magazines, television shows, from academia in particular.
And, you know, I'll start taking free market academics a lot more seriously if they give up their non-free market privileges by being in academia, you know.
Everybody should submit to the discipline of the free market, except me.
I like tenure, and I like sabbaticals, and I like four months off in the summer.
You know, there is an internet.
You can go out and make your case there, and then you're actually in the free market that you claim to love.
No!
Absolutely not.
And of course, if there are genetics involved in collectivism, which may...
I guess conceivably be true.
I don't know.
But the welfare state is not exactly causing the least collectivist people to breed the most.
So I don't think that's exactly working in the direction that he's going in.
But I think I've focused a lot on childhood in my show.
And I actually wanted to ask you about yours because I have a few theories and you can tell me if they make sense or not.
Sure.
So we're not all collectivists genetically, but we're all born collectivists.
You know, I mean, what is a family but from each according to their ability to each according to their needs, right?
I mean, the baby doesn't work, the toddler doesn't work, and the parents who can provide resources.
And I think if people have happy and complete and great childhoods, then they can leave their childhoods behind and move to adulthood without that feeling that somebody should still be taking care of them.
They should exist in a structure that is defined from outside, that controls and monitors and pays for and subsidizes their every move.
Socialism or collectivism is a form of infinite childhood.
And I do have kind of a theory, which you can take for a test drive and see if it makes any sense to you, that if you have a pretty good childhood, or if you don't, you at least have worked on it through therapy or whatever it is that gets you past those issues, that you can become an adult and then treasure what it means to be an adult and strongly resist paternalism, that you can become an adult and then treasure what it means to be an adult and strongly resist paternalism, which is an
So, and seeing the pictures of you and your lovely Danish family and all of that, it seems to me that you may have had a very positive childhood.
That sort of seems how it shakes out to me.
In which case, the fact that you enjoy adulthood is like, well, yeah, once I was a child and now I'm not.
And please don't put me back there by being overly paternalistic.
What's your childhood like as far as that went?
I had a wonderful childhood.
I had amazing parents.
My father, I had a phenomenal father.
He helped me question everything.
He's been one of my biggest influences in my life and I couldn't, I could tell you right now, you're absolutely right, I would not be the person I am today, not even a fraction of the person I am today without my father and his influence in my life and it really hurts to see what's happened with especially in the UK single motherhood being on the rise or higher than married parents there at the moment.
These kind of Traditional nuclear families that are now being deconstructed today, I agree, were something that promoted some of the best people.
And I don't mean to be a narcissist, oh, I'm so great because I had two parents.
No, it certainly helps a lot, but you can still be a wonderful person with one or being adopted.
But it definitely makes life harder, and I think most people would agree with that.
Right.
So if there's an attempt to say to you, because your mother and your father raised you to be an independent, competent adult, and therefore the idea that you would need some big mothership of state power to protect you from, you know, to bubble wrap your soul and protect you from the vagaries of life and the risks and the chances and so on, you know, you take chances in life when you have a robust and solid personality and you have people around you.
I'm sorry.
I just...
Sorry, my elbow.
I've been skiing.
I'm just kidding.
That's it.
It's another mic stand.
We'll obviously leave this in.
Sorry.
Let's continue.
So you take chances, but you have a welfare state around you of people who love you, people who care about you.
You know, if you fail, I remember when I was in theater school, there was a guy there who was, he wanted to be a director.
And he said that one of the reasons he felt confident going out into the world was his parents said, you know, you always have a place to sit.
You always have a place to come and recharge.
You always have a place where you can land, a soft place to land.
And that gave him a lot of confidence.
But people who don't have those kinds of solid relationships in their life, I think, feel kind of naked to the elements.
They feel kind of chilled to the bone by the risks inherent in all human activity.
And they feel the need for that bubble wrap because they don't have the sort of soft tribal cushion of people who will move heaven and earth to support you just as you would for them.
Yeah.
Absolutely, and this is why you see a lot of Marxist feminist philosophers attack the idea of the nuclear family and saying, in order to get a perfect Marxist state, the first thing we need to deconstruct is the nuclear family, because that is the first foundation of people's lives.
And then, whether you're religious or not, the church and the community were things that were also foundations of people's lives that were more local.
Instead of going to your government office to get help from the federal government, provinces or states and states away, you would go to your church and the community would help you and lift you up or your direct family would.
But once that's gone, you're left bare and naked and your new family has to be the government.
You need a daddy, quite literally, I know the term is kind of cliche, but daddy government to take care of you once that nuclear family system, the community system and those things are destroyed.
And this is the whole concept of globalism on a much larger level, They want to get rid of the sovereignty of the state itself.
So after the family is destroyed, the community is destroyed, and then the state itself, and then you get Brussels, then you get the UN, you get these large governments that they don't get to hear a single thing the little person says.
It's all, everyone has lost their sense of control, identity, and they just look to the state for help.
Well, and I think that's a great point.
And it's another thing not to sort of circle back on the libertarian thing too much, but libertarians prefer local governance to distant governance.
And so clearly nationalism is better than globalism.
Because with globalism, you get nationalism or national government plus a global government.
I mean, it's not like when they put the EU in that all the local governments vanished, right?
I mean, so it's an additional layer of bureaucracy, and therefore, of course, libertarians should be fighting that tooth and nail, just as they fought in the past, the expansion of federal powers over states' rights in the US or in other places, and that kind of drives me a little nuts.
Another question.
It's always tough, you know, when there's a great book at hand and, you know, we'll put links to it below and people should just go and read it.
It's fantastic.
But not giving away too much.
I try the spoiler thing.
But let me ask you a question because I haven't been in the hallowed halls of academia for quite a little while.
But it seems to me that people aren't very good at debating anymore.
And to me, like there's an old Indiana Jones movie where, you know, this guy comes up in this Moroccan marketplace or something.
He's got this scimitar and he's wielding all these big sword moves, right?
And I think Harrison Ford, the actor, had a bad cold that day and he just pretended to shoot the guy because they had this big whole choreographed fight scene.
Just shoot the guy, right?
Yeah, it's very famous, and I think Spielberg was the director or something.
He thought it was so good, they just ended up with that, and it was one of the great things.
I even remember very vividly the preview and saying, oh man, that's...
Because everyone thinks that, you know, some guy comes out, right?
And the way that that sort of pops into my mind, Lauren, is that...
The leftists who just want to shut things down.
You know, they just, they want to pull the fire alarms, they want to scream, they want to, you know, bullhorn in your face and all that kind of stuff.
Do whatever they can to shut down the communication that's coming from the people who they disagree with.
To me...
That's sort of like someone comes out with a scimitar and you just shoot them.
If you're good at debating, why wouldn't you enjoy having people with different opinions around?
You're not going to lose because you're really good at debating.
But this idea that someone is around who's got a different opinion...
And all you can do is sort of scream them down.
It kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, like everything's a power structure.
Well, then you don't have to actually debate anything because you can just call things power structures.
And what happens then is you end up with a power structure like this professor and you, where he can just sort of bully and mock you down.
And that's a power structure.
Because everyone thinks being called a power structure, therefore there's no need for reasoned, evidence-based debate.
People get very bad at it.
And the left at the moment, to me, is spinning out of control because the right is coming in hard.
They're finally punching back.
They're coming in hard with good arguments, and the evidence has accumulated.
Like back when I was in college 25 years ago, you could still say, well, you know, socialism is working-ish, you know, like you could sort of make the case.
But I think now it's pretty clear of what's happening with Europe and all over the West, how terrible it is.
So the evidence has gotten worse, their arguments have gotten worse, their capacity to argue has gotten worse, but their power lust has remained the same or even increased.
So what option do you have other than just shout people down?
So when you're in college and you're bringing these arguments or bringing arguments to your contemporaries who disagree with you, what is their capacity to debate?
It seems to have decayed a lot.
I think the scariest part of that is, to go back to your analogy, when you find yourself out of bullets, when you find yourself you've lost your gun and now you have to fight the guy with the scimitar and you don't know what to do.
And that's happening today as we've got people that are incapable of defending their ideology and incapable of defeating extremist ideology today.
Certainly, I don't know what to do if they actually allow people that are very, very far-right Nazis to argue on a local or on a large stage.
I was watching a video the other day of some guy who does a very far-right podcast, and he was arguing with a leftist on the street, and he kept asking the leftist, he's like, So why is democracy a good thing?
And the leftist is just like, because it is.
Because it is.
And he's like, why should everyone have to vote?
And he's like, because that's fair.
But he just kept egging him on.
But why do we have to be fair?
Why do we have to treat everyone?
And the guy had no arguments because he'd never been asked these tough questions.
And that's kind of why I liked going into university as someone who was more on the right, because I got to have all of my ideas challenged and dissected constantly.
And I loved that.
And I love being wrong because that means I have the ability to learn something that I didn't know before and perfect my ideas.
We've lost that sense of wanting to be wrong.
We've lost that sense of wanting to be corrected and wanting to constantly, constantly correct and Yeah, it is a cancer on campuses today that rather than try to improve yourself, know you are perfect and a decent and perfect human being in a beautiful world and anyone that tries to disrupt that is obviously an evil bigot.
And it's failing for them right now.
Look at what Milo has done to campuses across the states.
My God, he's just torn through them and they have nothing.
They have nothing at all and the crowds are just getting bigger.
Because they can't argue against it.
Not that there aren't good arguments.
I think that someone from the left could potentially beat Milo in a debate, even though I agree with him.
They're just bad at arguing because they haven't done it.
Well, that, you know, I think Milo's rampage through politically correct snow banks of American universities is beautiful because it also is not just harming their reputations, but I know at some of the universities, alumni are like, they're teaching what now?
They're doing what?
And they're pulling their support.
And I think in the long run, one of the great goals of the right has to be to cut some of the funding away.
The government funding for these universities because it's inviting way too many incompetent people into realms they're just not suited at.
Look, there are so many things I'm bad at.
I don't try and elbow my way into ballet school because I'm barely confident to sell popcorn at a ballet theater.
And if you invite everyone in, you just end up with the lowest common denominator and you've destroyed the entire purpose.
It's supposed to be elite.
When I go to see opera, I don't want to hear karaoke.
I want to hear the very best singers, the most passionate, the biggest-throated, the biggest-ass singers around.
I want there to be lots of elitism.
You know, whenever we buy something, we want there to be elitism.
And what's happened in universities, they've opened their gates so wide that a lot of people are kind of wandering in who aren't good at it.
Now, could they become good at it?
Well, maybe if the universities had really kept...
Their dedication to reason and evidence and if they'd shut people down who were using ad hominems and if they had not bowed down to starting in the 60s, all the snowflake, you know, the cry-bully demands for, you know, weepy fascism and so on.
But they didn't because that would have, you know, they had to mock people rigorously and really teach them how to think.
They'd blow a lot of people out of school and they'd lose a lot of their tuition money.
So I think that the wonderful thing with the books that you're writing, the book that you wrote, and the arguments in it is...
I think people don't really know what's going on because a lot of people on the right don't want to go to college.
I mean, I've had these conversations with people on the show.
A lot of people on the left already agree.
Yeah.
So, I mean, what would you say to people who are, you know, on the right or conservative or libertarian or whatever who are thinking of dropping the, you know, in Canada, of course, it's quite a bit cheaper, although it's more expensive later in your taxes.
Soon to be free where I am for people who make under 50K. Wow.
With Kathleen Wynne.
And that's a big thing is I don't think everyone should be getting degrees.
I think it's absolutely insane that everyone is getting degrees.
Way to devalue something that is supposed to be for a very specific group of people.
Oh, man.
Well, no, they do that because they can't allow employers to use a simple IQ test, and so you have to have this big, giant, massive, expensive four-year nonsense because IQ tests are considered discriminatory, even though they're pretty accurate.
No, but then they lower, they end up just keep continuing and lowering the value of the degree, and then everyone's stuck with all that student debt, and we're all screwed.
We are all so screwed because of this.
But hopefully we can change things around quick enough, as I suggest in the end of my book.
You'll have to read it.
Yes.
Keep digging through the treasure chest to get hope, the Pandora's box to get the hope at the bottom.
And I guess the last question I wanted to ask you...
So here's a quote from the book.
He said, It's really happened,
you could say, sort of the Trump phenomenon, the Brexit phenomenon, just over the last 18 months and so on.
Did it take you by surprise?
Were you shocked?
Or did it seem more like the pendulum, well, it's about time?
I was completely shocked.
I mean, I was ready for it to all come crumbling down and for the phoenix to come out of the ashes, hopefully.
But no, I was not expecting the course correction at all.
But I guess people, thankfully, and this is what makes me more optimistic in this book, thankfully are...
A little more in tune and questioning things than I thought they would be.
And I mean, if you really look into what conservatism was before, you'll start realizing, as I point out in my book, especially the third chapter, we have been deceived.
We now have liberals running our entire conservative party.
It's all these neocons.
It's all these people that were never conservatives in the first place and still aren't today.
And they have now gone and rewritten history.
They don't want us to look into what Bill Buckley actually was like.
Yeah, Buckley.
More liberalized version of conservatism, and they say they're the real conservatives, they're the real conservatives, but no.
It's a lot of the people that are more alternative right, more libertarian than them, that are far closer to what real conservatism used to be, and that's why this is a course correction back to not this evil, bigoted, crazy Nazi thing, but no, what a lot of the conservatives people praised before were like.
Well, you know, we've gone so far to the left that the center looks like a swastika to a lot of people.
I mean, we're not even saying, let's go.
I mean, Trump isn't out there saying, let's eradicate the welfare state.
I mean, that was, I guess, Bill Clinton's big thing to end welfare.
But so much of the leftist agenda has been so entrenched in the West that there aren't any people on the right who are fundamentally saying, no more Social Security, you know, let the old give him a spear and, you know, give him hunting rights.
And so the middle now looks...
Like, far right to people.
And I think that just shows how wild the perspective has gotten.
And I think...
I'm really glad to know that there's a backlash or a sort of course correction is probably a better way of putting it.
And I think that the book is a good...
is a great introduction to people.
And, of course, you write in a very engaging and funny, funny...
Well, this is true, of course, of your video work as well.
It's absolutely hilarious.
And that, you know, spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down is great.
So I really wanted to remind people, of course...
Follow Lauren on Twitter at twitter.com slash Lauren Underbar, Southern S-O-U-T-H-E-R-N. The book is Barbarians, How the Baby Boomers Immigration and Islam Screwed My Generation.
And of course, on the Rebel Media, you can watch Lauren as the host of Stand Off.
I'll put all the links below.
Thank you so much for a great book and all of the work that you do, which is hitting a slightly different demographic that I can get my Crypt Keeper hands on.
So I really appreciate all the work that you're doing.
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