Dec. 22, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:04:40
3538 Stefan Molyneux's Five Hour Christmas Spectacular
Merry Christmas everybody! The first annual Stefan Molyneux Christmas Spectacular features discussions with Paul Joseph Watson, Vox Day, Duke Pesta, Scott Adams, Charles C. Johnson, Lauren Southern, Bill Whittle, Ben Garrison, Dave Rubin, Alex Jones, Bill Mitchell, Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes and a special musical surprise from Stefan Molyneux. 1:53 - Paul Joseph Watson26:23 - Vox Day53:17 - Duke Pesta1:15:11 - Scott Adams1:48:36 - Charles C. Johnson2:15:37 - Lauren Southern2:35:10 - Bill Whittle2:58:22 - Ben Garrison3:14:37 - Dave Rubin 3:38:21 - Alex Jones3:43:58 - Bill Mitchell4:11:32 - Mike Cernovich4:38:20 - Gavin McInnesPaul Joseph Watson: http://www.infowars.comVox Day: http://voxday.blogspot.comDuke Pesta: https://www.fpeusa.orgScott Adams: http://blog.dilbert.comCharles C. Johnson: http://www.gotnews.comLauren Southern: http://www.therebel.media/laurensouthernBill Whittle: http://www.billwhittle.comBen Garrison: http://www.grrrgraphics.comDave Rubin: http://www.rubinreport.comAlex Jones: http://www.infowars.comBill Mitchell: https://yourvoiceradio.com/Mike Cernovich: http://www.dangerandplay.comGavin McInnes: https://www.compoundmedia.com/show/the-gavin-mcinnes-show/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
And Merry, Merry, Merry Christmas to you, my friends.
Welcome to our Christmas special.
Yes, the runtime could be considered a tiny, tiny little bit excessive, but hey, what about the show is not excessive.
We've broken down these interviews with some of my favorite people in media and in my life.
We've broken down the interview list below.
You can click on We're good to go.
To have the Christmas spirit.
What does it mean to think of peace and goodwill and love and connectivity and good food and good conversation, good wine, good friendships, all of that sort of stuff.
So this is a little bit of a view into the private lives of public people, what happens to them over Christmas and what do they love most about the season.
I'm enormously pleased.
I look forward to seeing all of your comments below.
And, by the by, if, in the midst of your Christmas generosity, you feel like helping out this show, We would most appreciate it enormously.
You can help us out by going to freedomainradio.com slash donate to sign up for a subscription or to give a one-time donation.
Really, really appreciate that.
If you've got shopping still to do, ooh, naughty person, get your shopping done.
You can use FDRURL.com slash Amazon for that.
And without any further ado, please, please enjoy the Freedomain Radio Christmas special and stay tuned at the very end.
for a surprise.
And, my friends, we now join Paul Joseph Watson, the editor-at-large of Infowars.com.
You can find him on YouTube at youtube.com slash prisonplanet and also on Twitter, twitter.com slash prisonplanet.
Paul, how are you this holiday season?
Hi, Stefan.
Good to be back.
I'm looking forward to getting one day off out of the entire year.
You are a work machine.
I mean, I don't think that they can crank that hamster wheel fast enough to make your legs tired, but given your prodigious output videos and interviews and articles and so on, what is your day or how has your day been in general over the last 12 to 18 months?
Well, especially over the last six months, it's been absolutely exhausting.
This is without doubt the hardest I've worked in any year out of my entire life.
The burnout, I started to feel the burnout a little bit before the election, obviously got a bit of a boost after that for obvious reasons.
And now I'm looking forward to a holiday.
I haven't had a holiday since January, so almost a year now.
But, you know, it's all been worth it.
Now, what does a Paul Joseph Watson Christmas look like to people, of course, as you disappear from the internet into I don't know where?
What sort of stuff do you like about Christmas?
Does Christmas have any meaning to you outside of, you know, good food and good friends and good family times?
Well, I mean, it's a time of reflection, because as I said, it's the only day of the year that I actually get off, but it's just a time to, you know, you never get the time to just sit back and absorb what's happened, absorb any kind of information properly, reflect and plan for the next year, so that's what I plan to do.
Obviously, it's a time for family, you know, my Parents live in France.
I don't really get to see them that much unless I go over there, so that's going to be good to see the family for a week.
And I've purchased, at great expense, a virtual reality headset because I wanted to get into the minds of liberals because, you know, all these virtual reality games are about, you know, being in a shark tank where the shark's attacking you.
I'm having shootouts with gangsters and stuff.
And I think it would be a good insight to get into the minds of liberals who freak out about things that aren't really happening.
So that's why I bought this virtual reality headset and that's going to be part of the Christmas fun.
Now it is a kind of funny thing to me that people, we're going to loosely characterize them as being on the right, sort of pro-freedom, pro-freedom of speech, small government kind of people.
They tend to, or we tend to, freak out about things that statistically are occurring and are disastrous.
And, of course, all of that is poo-pooed by the left, as paranoia and conspiracy theory crap and all that.
But on the left, they seem to freak out about things that don't strike me as particularly important at all.
That seems like a pretty big bridge to try and cross between these two cultures.
No, I mean, I'm still getting emails from disabled people, from Muslims, who are freaking out, and they still actually think that Donald Trump will put them in concentration camps.
Of course, the reason for that is the real fake news, the mainstream media that has created this hysterical narrative, Over the past 12 to 18 months about Donald Trump, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
We still get LGBT people, again, freaking out that they're going to be putting Labour gulags by Donald Trump because of this narrative, despite the fact that he's been the most LGBT-friendly presidential candidate, Republican at least, in history.
So it's complete hysteria, and they're still pushing it to this day.
It's all part of what we're going to continue to see up until January 20th and probably beyond, which is Trump derangement syndrome.
Everything that's happened in the aftermath of the vote has been Trump derangement syndrome.
And that's why I actually think there will be at some point another attempt on Donald Trump's life, unfortunately.
That was one of the most underreported stories of the year, when I think it was Michael Sanford was his name, this British citizen, tried to grab a gun at a Donald Trump rally and tried to shoot Donald Trump, completely buried by the media.
He's just been charged.
He only got seven years in prison.
But again, he was radicalized by the hysterical narrative of the mainstream media that Donald Trump was, you know, literally Hitler and all this kind of propaganda.
So unfortunately, that's going to continue at least up until January 20th.
And, you know, that's why Donald Trump wears a bulletproof jacket, because he gets death threats like no one else in political history.
And it's because of this hysterical agenda that the media is pushing every day.
Well, that's funny, because Bill Gates, of course, went to Trump Tower and came out saying that he thought that Donald Trump was – he compared him to JFK. And my first thought was, ooh, I hope that's not the same ending, because that was not particularly good.
That was the last guy who tried to take on the Fed, right?
Right.
No, I mean, it's been a concern of ours for many months.
We've written articles, done videos about it.
And again, it all goes back to the fact that the left this year, 2016, has lost the argument on pretty much everything.
So now they're starting to resort to, you know, having exhausted all their other options, they're resorting to censorship.
And we see this with the whole Russian hacking propaganda, completely baseless, no new evidence whatsoever.
There was a poll yesterday We're good to go.
People who try to make serious content are being discouraged from making videos in favor of mindless, advertiser-friendly content.
We see it with Twitter banning people.
Leftists now think that disagreeing with them on Twitter or tagging them in a tweet is harassment.
People are being banned for that.
Now we've got Facebook with the Ministry of Truth literally recruiting Snopes We're good to go.
Oh, this fake news thing is not too shocking.
I mean, this was going to happen whether Trump won or not.
I think that the alternative media is far better positioned because of the Trump victory.
But the leftists, of course, they may be corrupt, but they're not dumb.
And they knew, of course, that it was alternative media outlets that did a lot to undermine their chances of getting Hillary into the White House.
And rather than take us on in the realm of ideas with debates, with arguments and so on, this idea to just sort of, you know, two wet fingers together on the candle of intelligence and just snuff it out is kind of inevitable.
I do think it's going to backfire.
I think that it's too far down the road.
And I think people are going to say, oh, this place is fake news.
How interesting.
Let me go and check it out.
And I think it's going to be a bit of a Streisand effect.
But of course, that remains to be seen.
Well, I mean...
It's different battlefronts, isn't it?
Some of this censorship is going to be easier to combat than other forms of it because, you know, if Twitter wipes out your account, that's it.
You're not getting back.
I mean, look at what happened to Milo.
But as you said, they're going to have the Streisand effect.
Of course, the irony about this is that the Washington Post is one of the organizations tasked by Facebook with overseeing this ministry of truth, this fake news police.
The Washington Post's supposed Russian propaganda fake news list, the one they put out a couple of weeks ago, was completely exposed and eviscerated as basically being pulled out of thin air by the shadowy neocon group.
The Washington Post itself had to back away from the fake news list that they put in front of everyone and base their entire story on, saying that they couldn't vouch for its validity.
So that was completely debunked.
The first fake news list they put out was from this far left social justice warrior feminist professor.
The media all picked up on that, again, without question.
So, again, it's the fake news.
There are fake news websites, Stefan.
I was bitching about fake news websites five years ago when it was, you know, Saoirse Fall and insiders in the Kremlin say this.
It was obviously just made up, and we were talking about that.
We were saying, don't trust these sources.
But there's a difference between people who deliberately put out fake news to make advertising dollars and people who have a conservative opinion.
And yes, we don't get things right all the time.
We cover a lot of stories.
But we're not deliberately putting out fake news, unlike the mainstream media, with, you know...
Fake explanations for a YouTube video being responsible for the Benghazi attack.
You know, weapons of mass destruction.
Hands up, don't shoot.
The fake narrative that caused an uprising against the police.
Dead police in Baton Rouge and Dallas and so on.
But, obviously, they're going to do guilt by association.
They're going to say these fake news websites are harming journalism.
lump us in with them to silence their competition because we're kicking their ass.
And does that ever work?
I mean, outside of a purely totalitarian regime, I can't think of a time where unjust attacks upon the integrity of others does anything other than discredit the attacker.
And that, of course, is my hope.
I've been enormously impressed this last year by the wisdom of the crowd.
You know, there's always this idea that the more people you get together, the lower the IQ tends to get.
But in the reach that you've had, the reach that I've had, and many other people have had, I have found a shocking, or at least to me, very surprising amount of wisdom and intelligence and skepticism of the media and skepticism of authority in the masses.
And that has been a really beautiful thing to see.
No, I mean, for me, whenever I get recognized, it's always people who are even younger than me.
It It's kids in college and university, basically.
So not only are we winning, we're reaching younger and younger people.
I mean, at the start of this year, I started out with, I think it was around 10 million Twitter impressions a month.
At the height of it, about a month ago, it was 260 million Twitter impressions a month.
You compare that to someone like the BBC. Which has 27 million followers on Twitter.
You go and look at their amount of retweets.
I get double the amount of retweets compared to the BBC. And I mean, that has got to frighten them.
You've got the New York Times just coming out today and saying they're going to have to clear out, I think it's eight floors of their building and rent them out.
Because again, they're cratering.
This whole lie about, oh, we've We're selling so many subscriptions.
It's so brilliant.
Again, proven completely fraudulent.
They're dying.
They're in trouble.
And that's why they're lashing out.
That's why they're having to partner with the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter because the empire is going to strike back.
It's still this idea of there's a total lack of introspection on behalf of the mainstream media.
They're still spinning this yarn that they didn't win the election because everyone was racist, you know, because the Russians hacked it.
The Russians controlled everything.
This massive conspiracy theory that had been floating.
You know, they tried to have a recount.
Jill Stein, that completely failed.
There's a total lack of introspection.
They're not listening to people like Bernie Sanders who are saying, look, identity politics doesn't work.
Calling all your ideological adversaries bigots, misogynist, sexist, Islamophobes doesn't work.
Let's look in the mirror and see how we can get this back.
They're not doing that.
Still, what are we now?
More than a month after the election, they're still on this same narrative.
And it's like getting up every day, Stefan, and saying, oh, this old narrative yet again.
It's like you talk about, you know, You have to combat the ideology of communism and explain to everyone why it has failed throughout history and always will.
Kind of every ten years or so, you have to make that argument.
Now it seems every single day we have to make the argument why Donald Trump won the election and it's not because of why the mainstream media is saying.
And they still don't get that.
So now they're turning to censorship.
But as you said, it's never worked in the past and it won't work again.
Yeah, it only works if you escalate to, like, North Korean-style censorship, and that, of course, is not about to happen in the West, and we're going to do everything we can to prevent that kind of escalation because the free market of ideas is where the best ideas come to play and to be refined.
And I genuinely do believe that if it wasn't for...
I hate to use the phrase alternative media because it sounds like there's this main line of the train station and then there's this kind of weird one off in the field somewhere.
It's the unfettered media.
It's the listener-focused media.
It's the uncontrolled media.
But I think that did have a huge sway in things like Brexit.
I think it's going to have a huge sway in what goes on with Marine Le Pen in France and in Italy and so on and, of course, with Donald Trump.
And the powers that be...
You know, they see the disruption of easy-to-access, uncontrolled conversations and a true meritocracy.
Like, the Internet is a true meritocracy.
It's whether you can make good ideas.
It's whether you can put them forward in a way that is enjoyable for people.
This is where the real meritocracy is.
And all of the fenced-in, controlled, and shielded-from-the-marketplace kind of media, I think it's kind of freaking out, knowing that there's a bustle of ideas outside their gates that they really can't join in at the moment.
No, precisely.
I mean, I see it on my own Twitter when everyday mainstream journalists, a new form of virtue signaling for them is to highlight and respond to my tweets.
That never happened in the past.
They just ignored us.
Now they feel the need to respond to us as kind of a virtue signaling mechanism, but also to attract all these other mainstream media journalists to pile on and try and attack us.
Because it's becoming harder and harder for them to hold their narrative together so they're having to coordinate more and more which is what you saw with the WikiLeaks emails dozens and dozens of journalists literally going to John Podesta's house for dinner because that level of cronyism that level of coordination needs to get deeper and deeper for them to maintain the same narrative because simply they just don't have the audience that they used to have and we see that across every sector but as he said in in 2017 The
battle, for me, definitely will move on to Europe.
We've got a French presidential election in April.
We've got one in the Netherlands coming up in March.
Gert Wilders looks like he's in a good position.
He's leading, according to the recent polls, in the Netherlands.
In France, you've got Marine Le Pen, of course.
They basically selected a faux-conservative to go up against her to try and sink her in Francois Fionn.
You know, I've watched...
Ten-minute videos of him waffling on about Islam and how dangerous it is, yet he doesn't have a single policy what he's going to do about it, what he's going to do about the migrant influx, what he's going to do about the fact that Paris is now virtually an open-air migrant camp.
But the recent polls show that he's ahead of Le Pen.
So that's going to be a battle in France.
You've got a German election in September where Merkel at the moment still has 59% of the support.
So again, that's going to be another battle.
Sweden is a little bit later in 2018, but the Sweden Democrats are now level as the second place party in Sweden.
So from Brexit to Trump to Italy, now the battleground for me will focus on the Netherlands, France and Germany.
You once posted on your Twitter feed a completely adorable picture of you when you were a little boy.
And you mentioned you grew up, I think it was in a council flat, I think as it was called.
Now, I think both of us grew up in, I guess you could say, less than privileged circumstances.
Do you think that there's anything to do with that that has constituted you for these kinds of fights?
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a council estate.
My parents never had very much money at all, and at times it was a struggle.
It wasn't a really high standard of living.
And I guess that makes me immune to the kind of criticisms that other people will constantly get, you know, that they're bigots.
I mean, look at Brexit.
Most of the people who voted for Brexit, who ensured that victory, were working-class people in northern cities.
I mean, that's my background.
That's where I came from.
So to have this kind of London-lovey intellectual elite who have never had to struggle at all, suddenly browbeating everyone that they're bigots and racists, when it's literally just hardworking people in northern cities who have seen their communities devastated, who have seen their jobs shipped when it's literally just hardworking people in northern cities who have seen their communities devastated, who have seen their jobs shipped abroad or replaced by low-wage immigrants,
It also makes you sympathize more with why people voted for that, because that's the background that I came from.
And in terms of does it prepare you for the battle, then I would say, yeah.
I mean, I'm not really hurt by words and, you know, mean tweets and mean comments on YouTube.
I don't really give a damn about that.
Other people would be far more sensitive about it, far more sensitive about speaking out in public.
But, yeah, it does kind of gird you for the battle, the background that you came from.
So, yes, I'd say it definitely has had a massive influence.
And certainly for me, sort of growing up poor, Christmas couldn't really be that much about stuff.
I mean, because you couldn't really afford much stuff.
And so there was, you know, homemade presents and stories.
You know, when you can't afford to go to the movies, you sit around and tell stories, which of course improves your verbal skills and your ability to command attention from others with verbal dexterity and so on.
And so it's funny in a way how impoverishment early in life can lead to great wealth later in life.
And Christmas always sort of reminds me of that because that's where some of the disparities occur.
And it also, to me, spurred ambition because, you know, I didn't just know the poor kids.
I also knew the middle class and the rich kids and liked some of the stuff that they were able to get their hands on, especially around Christmas.
What was your experience in terms of ambition and connection around Christmas when you were growing up?
Well, it definitely instilled that mindset.
I mean, I wasn't impoverished, but, you know, I came from a working class family all the way down the line.
But it definitely instilled that work ethic.
I mean, you know, now I live in London.
I'm surrounded by people who...
Some of them still live with their parents, some of them don't, but basically they have a safety net.
Their parents have built up some savings.
Back when I was growing up and still to this day, there's no safety net whatsoever.
Everything I built up, everything I worked for, I did it off my own back.
Because there was no alternative.
It was either that or failure or working behind a checkout for the majority of your life.
I mean, they were able to put me through university.
It wasn't a great university, but they never had the opportunities that I had to excel myself because, again, they were locked into different economic circumstances.
But yes...
Coming from that kind of background, not having anything handed to you, not having a safety net, inevitably makes you work harder to the point where it becomes completely second nature.
Like, I can't relax anymore.
That's the problem.
You can't switch off at any point.
I mean, especially with social media.
So that's what I'm going to try and do over Christmas, at least for one day, and just try and sit back and reflect on this year, which, let's be honest, it's been a massive success.
The battle is not over, but we've certainly had, we've made huge strides in 2016.
And I wonder, you know, this phrase of the special snowflakes or the people who can't handle criticism or the people who view disagreement as harassment and need a safe space whenever they encounter an opinion that hasn't been sanctioned by their elders.
I wonder if, you know, growing up with a very sort of safe and secure and perhaps a little bit too bubble wrapped of a childhood where, you know, you can't fail and everyone gets a prize and there's a participation trophies and so on.
I wonder if that has just made people very fragile, you know.
you know, like hothouse flowers unable to get out into the hurly-burly of social discourse and if, in a sense, being overprotective of your children is part of what is undermining the robustness of the West as a whole.
No, I would completely agree.
I mean, when I was growing up, I would be left to my own devices.
And you can say, oh, it was a more innocent time.
If you actually look at crime stats...
You know, abduction and rape before the migrant crisis back 20 years ago was really no worse than it is now.
But, you know, I was able to go out and roam free for hours and hours.
I had basically autonomy when I was a child.
My parents weren't that worried about me.
They would let me go off and do what I wanted.
Now, you've got children literally on leashes.
Literally on leashes.
You know, I live in an apartment block where they don't let their kids leave the tiny little garden that's in front of the apartment block for fear of what would happen.
So...
Yeah, there is that bubble wrap mentality.
Also, there's this idea that, you know, the lowest common denominator, everyone gets a trophy mindset.
And that is harming young people.
And that is manifested in things like the fat pride movement.
You know, this idea that being lazy and entitled and making terrible lifestyle choices It should not only be respected, but they should make you respected.
I mean, criticizing it is a hate crime.
So that's what I'm going to shift into.
You know, we've won the argument politically for the time being.
Now we have to start winning again in the culture war.
We have to make conservatism the new counterculture because the current culture that we've got, the sewer pipe Hollywood culture, celebrates vulgarity.
It celebrates conformity.
You know, it denigrates true beauty and talent.
Whether you're talking about music, art, fashion, or whatever.
Two of the most popular videos that I made this year were about popular music and modern art.
Because people are hungry for that.
They're hungry for an alternative narrative.
Because again, what they're being fed on a consistent basis through the Hollywood tour pipe, through the music industry, through modern art, is vulgarity.
It's poison.
People are...
Thirsty for an alternative to that.
I guess Trump is starting off in that direction with his alliance with Kanye West.
Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture.
That's what I'm going to shift into, at least to some extent in 2017, is trying to make conservatism, trying to make true art, true music that has actual talent and beauty at the forefront and make it accessible to young people.
Because what they're being fed at the moment, as I say, is vulgarity and conformity.
That is what is exalted in the entertainment industry on a regular basis.
Yes.
And of course, we know from the Weimar experiment where extreme decadence and degeneracy in art can lead, which is to a very significant backlash that, well, could be described as a significant overreach in terms of dealing with the problems.
So I really, really wanted to say, of course, thanks for your time today, Paul.
Thanks for your time before on this show.
It's always been a great pleasure to chat.
Really, really want to wish you, it seems very sad, have a nice day off.
Have a nice day.
Good luck unplugging.
I know it can be a challenge.
There's always something happening on the internet that is worthy of your attention.
But I really wish you a wonderful, happy day with friends, with family, with good food, with unwinding and unplugging.
And maybe it'll take more than a day to get you rested, tanned, relaxed and ready for battle again.
But I hope that you get the regeneration that you so richly deserve after a very, very hard-fought year.
And thanks so much for your time again today, Paul.
Okay, and your achievements have been absolutely fantastic in 2016, Stefan.
Everybody's noticed them.
Everybody's cheering you on.
And have a great Christmas too, and thanks for having me on again.
All right, take care.
All right.
Hi, everybody.
Stefan Waller, Newfound Freedom, Maine Radio, back with Vox Dei.
As part of our ongoing Christmas extravaganza, we're going to be doing a song and dance routine.
I'm afraid that's going to be off-camera, though.
What we're actually going to do is just chat about Christmas and our year, 2016, the most remarkable year.
Of my life, you know, sort of outside of friends and family, and even outside of sort of what it is I do for a living, just the most amazing year.
And I think 2017 is going to be just astounding.
You know, when we get out to 2016, 2017 is going to make the 60s look like the 50s.
And I think what we're sort of doing is just sort of going around to the people that we've done great shows with and asking how was your year?
Was it remarkable?
What are you looking forward to the most over next year?
Do you have any predictions you're keeping close to your chest that you'd like to reveal to the planet as a whole?
So here we go.
How was your 2016, Fox?
It was fabulous.
It was a relief in many ways, and it was productive.
And, you know, I'm just grateful for how things have been, both personally and professionally.
What were the highlights?
What was the stuff that if you'd said, here's how it's going to be at the end, if you'd said that to yourself at the beginning, you'd have said, like, no way, no way, it can't be.
Well, I think, you know, for me, the single most important thing was we've had a family member who has been, you know, fighting a A chronic disease.
And this year was really a big turnaround year.
And so seeing them able to resume their previous activities and that sort of thing, it really makes you realize how little time we have and how important it is to make the most of it.
And most of all, how important it is to just persevere and not quit.
Right.
I mean, there is something beautiful around Christmas in that life tends to slow down.
And the relationships, which often we can slough off a little bit like water off a duck's back in pursuit of often noble and world healthy goals and so on.
The fact that it slows down and that you enjoy, you know, wine and food and company, there's something wonderful, particularly up here in Canada, where it actually looks like Christmas as well as sort of feeling like Christmas.
There is a wonderful amount of slowdown that happens and helps you to really do really appreciate that, you know, you have relationships, you have your health, you have love in your life.
And that is something I think that ambitious people can sometimes take a little bit for granted.
And Christmas is great to circle back and remind us of that.
Oh, there's no question.
And, you know, for me as a Christian, one of the things that I enjoy most is just the sense of connectedness.
You know, it's really...
I like to go to a midnight service.
I like to turn on the TV and see that when they've got pictures of Christians worshipping everywhere from Jerusalem to Moscow.
And it really gives the believer this great sense of...
I sometimes envision this almost golden web that connects the entire church body as one.
Which is very utopian and idealistic, but for those of us who tend to be inclined towards the more realistic and pessimist when it comes to our politics and ideology, It's nice to be able to feel that even if it's just for one brief shining moment for once or twice a year.
Isn't that a wonderful thing, though?
And I think everyone has that sense of love and connectedness around Christmas.
And we want to stretch it out like an accordion that goes 365 around the world.
And it's the same sort of like you wake up, if you do New Year's resolutions, you sort of wake up on Christmas.
January the 1st, full of willpower and good intentions and so on.
The challenge, of course, is to keep that going throughout the year.
Have you found any good tricks or tips for people on how to keep that simmering cinnamon brew of love and connectedness going throughout the rest of the year?
I wish I could, but I'm probably the...
I'm probably the equivalent of the guy who gets a gym membership, goes for the first two days, and then never shows up again.
It's a beautiful thing, but if every day was Christmas, then we wouldn't appreciate it the way that we do.
The thing is, like you said, it is something that is for everybody.
It is something that everybody feels.
This year is great because this year people are done with the whole happy holidays, let's elevate Kwanzaa and the minor Jewish holiday of Hanukkah to pretend it's something as societally significant as Christmas and that sort of thing.
That's one more thing that the whole I think it's great because I think that it is more returning to our Western roots and returning to our traditions.
The thing that's so important about tradition is that they matter whether you believe in the basis for them or not.
Because it's part of what brings us together.
You know, you don't have to believe that the baby Jesus was laid in a manger and born to a virgin and that sort of thing to share in the love, the joy, the passion, the togetherness.
I mean, even just the spectacle.
You know, I mean, what does a Christmas tree, what does a decorated Christmas tree have actually to do with the Christian tradition?
Nothing.
But just as the The Christian can appreciate the wonderful beauty of the decorated tree.
We have the best tree we've had in years this year.
Everybody was excited about it.
It's like this fat monstrosity.
It's wonderful.
Whether you're listening to the American mid-century carols that are very secular, silver bells and all that sort of thing, that's my personal favorite, or you're listening to the older Christian-inspired stuff like the Hallelujah Chorus and or you're listening to the older Christian-inspired stuff like the Hallelujah Chorus
I mean, all of it is just, it's such a relief to be able to allow yourself to, you know, just for a short period of time, wallow in the beauty and the love and the joy.
And then come January, we can worry about how they're going to attack the alt-right next and how they're going to try to delegitimize Donald Trump and how long it will take for the Grand Inquisitor Sessions to launch his purge of the heretics.
All of those things – well, wait.
For now, let's celebrate Christmas.
Well, I don't mean to indicate that your history or knowledge of history is in any way deficient.
But of course, one of the things that Christmas trees help me to remember is just how many spruce trees there were in Bethlehem.
And I think that's sometimes underestimated by most people.
I love that tradition, you know, going out to the country and finding a farm where they sell trees and then pretending to my daughter that I could karate chop it down.
I just choose not to.
Welcome to my show!
The wonderful thing about Christmas for me, Vox, is it really helps remind me what I'm fighting for.
You know, what I'm fighting for.
And that does have to do with tradition.
That does have to do with all of the inherited beauty of these...
Activities that kind of sharpen by time, you know, like an old guy with high suspenders whittling away on the back porch.
They're whittled away by time so that the most essential beauty remains.
and the aggregation of family and friends, the feasts, the love, the presents, the desire to delight others with creativity, and the games, the activities that go on around family times, charades and stuff like that, Scrabble games, and the things that happen where you come in for refuel. and the things that happen where you come in for And this is what I fight for.
And I think that's where it sort of goes into tradition.
And I was less enamored of that stuff in the past, but maybe it's just having a family, being a father, whatever.
But this stuff really, really means something to me now.
And it is my refueling station as to like I sit around a table, I look at family and friends, good food in the belly, happy songs in the radio, singing together or whatever.
And you're like, yeah, this is worth fighting for.
This is worth getting up and putting on the gloves for.
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
If you don't mind my segueing a bit, one of the things that's been very important to me this year was developing my relationships with people like you, with people like Mike Cernovich, with people like Milo, with some of the other social media allies that I've made over the last two years.
Because We're really seeing something that really changed in 2016 is that more and more men, in particular, and a few women, stood up and said, you know, here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.
And the great thing about the internet and the social media stuff, even though you've got all the nonsense on Twitter and Facebook and so forth, is People are finding each other.
People are making connections.
People are realizing that they're not alone.
I'm really grateful to have my vile faceless minions behind me.
You can see I'm wearing my rabid puppy shirt.
I love the rabid puppies and the Dread Elk.
But it's also really great to make connections with guys who have their own Social media armies or whatever you want to call it because the world is an increasingly challenging and increasingly difficult place.
We're hanging on to those traditions and we value those traditions because our culture and our civilization is threatened.
I'm just really, really glad and really, really grateful to have met men like you Who are standing up for those things.
We don't all believe the same thing.
We don't all agree on everything.
But, you know, that's irrelevant because at the end of the day, we're all standing up and doing what we can to the best of our understanding to preserve our culture, to preserve our society and to preserve our civilization.
Well, this is the real diversity, isn't it?
That we can be friends and allies while holding different opinions on things.
That's kind of what we're here to defend, isn't it?
I mean, because the other cultures out there in the world are kind of monocultures.
This is what you have to believe.
And if you don't, you're a bad person and you might get thrown in jail or lashed.
You know, so for me, this is the real diversity that we're working to protect.
Not this PC garbage of the lowest common denominator.
The real diversity of thoughts and opinions and connections without conformity, that to me is the real plus of having this kind of connection.
It is not great that it's online, but it sure is better than not being there at all.
And I think that is something else that I'm very interested in defending, the multifaceted nature of the West.
The fact that there are a wide variety of thoughts and perspectives and opinions that are Clashing in a way that produces heat and light like a disco ball.
It's got many different facets, but it produces real magic on the walls.
And that is something that I'm fascinated about and really want to continue to defend our capacity to disagree and remain in a rationally positive state of mind and to have allies in diversity rather than requiring the conformity that the left wants, that other religions want, and so on, that is just...
To me, brutal on the entire human experience.
I absolutely agree, although I think we need to really develop a different word than diversity because that one has been co-opted.
It's been so just rendered totally antithetical to everything that we stand for and that we value, that we really do need to come up with our own vocabulary.
But yeah, in terms of 2016 and moving into 2017, I think that what People are going to see is that Castalia House is going to continue to become...
It's going to go from being a very minor player into a much more important player in science fiction and in fiction in general.
We've got some great new authors coming on board.
You may even have heard of a few of them, Stefan.
I was just on the phone with two guys tonight who, when you look up their...
When you look up where they stand in their sales, they're a lot closer to George Martin and J.K. Rowling than they are to, say, me.
I think that 2017 is going to be a real game-changer in the world of publishing, not just with Castelli House, but also with what's going on with the major publishers.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was another merger Or, you know, the big five somehow became the big four one way or another.
I'm sorry, but aren't they all just committing left to side?
Oh, absolutely.
And the thing that's going to do them in, I mean, what people don't realize about publishing is that it's a negative sum game.
So every time, you know, the overall market is shrinking.
It's a huge market, but it's shrinking.
And so every time somebody buys from an independent publisher...
Every time somebody subscribes to Kindle Unlimited and downloads two books from Kindle Unlimited instead of buying a mainstream book, every single time that happens, that is a blow to the mainstream publishers who are counting on it.
And so what's likely to happen is when Barnes& Noble or when Borders goes down, and they're both teetering at the moment, that's when you're really going to see a big, big shakeup I'm really excited about the opportunities that it's going to afford us to work with new authors.
The opportunities it's going to give us to start reclaiming some of that ground that has been gradually claimed by the SJWs over the past 20-25 years.
Yeah, I mean, when a high-flying bird has a heart attack, it does take a while to hit the ground.
And I think that the publishing houses, yeah, they're going to consolidate.
But once you've been infected by that leftist rot, as you point out, they always double down.
There's a great book, which we'll link to below, Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police.
They always double down.
And I didn't really believe this as much.
I thought the only crazy people who...
Who always double down, which is deep in my sort of social or familial rear view, but they will not back down because for them it is a perfectly platonic ideal moral crusade and there's no possibility of compromise or even retrenchment.
The old leftists used to retrench at times, but they become so seized with the imminent nature of their perceived victory that they can't back down anymore.
There's no strategy left for them.
It's all just to hit the gas no matter what.
And this is just creating a massive opportunity.
You know, like whatever it was that took down the dinosaurs, left a hell of a lot of food over for the mammals to eat.
And I sort of feel there's this giant opening in media and opening in people's attention that was kind of unforeseen for me, even like as recently as two years ago.
I kind of knew it was dying.
I didn't know it was going to be that quick.
I also didn't know that Donald Trump was going to kick it over as well, like a sky-high pile of rotten Jenga blocks.
But this is something that is quite fascinating and presents an opportunity, of course, for Castellia House, for what it is that I do, and a lot of the other stuff that compatriots and allies are doing in this world.
Massive opening, especially as this whole fake news thing takes down the last vestiges of any kind of moral authority or legitimacy.
That these guys have.
I think it's going to be a fantastic opportunity.
People are going to start jumping ships in record numbers looking for new places to land.
Well, that's the big thing in 2017, is 2017 is going to be the year of the alt tech.
You're going to see Brave picking up lots and lots of users.
Gab is already capitalizing on Twitter's blunders left, right and center.
Info Galactic has been a little quiet lately because we're focusing on improving our performance stuff, but we're days away from putting in significant speed improvements, and once we have those, then we can go toe-to-toe with Wikipedia on performance, and then we can start adding the features.
All of these things are going to happen in 2017.
The God Emperor will ascend to the Cherry Blossom Throne, and it's exciting, and you can tell That the left senses this because they are freaking out.
They are flipping out.
They are terrified because they know that we are no longer on the defensive.
We are now on the offense.
We're on the advance.
More and more people are subscribing to your channel.
They're visiting my blog.
Following Cernovich on Twitter.
They're moving to Gab.
Andrew Torba of Gab, he's got so much energy.
He's got more energy than Cernovich, which I didn't think was possible.
These are the guys, and there's going to be more of them.
There's going to be more Torbas, and there's going to be more of the young guys who are seeing what we're doing and realizing, hey, I can do that too, but I can do it better, or I can do it over here, and that's going to be great.
I can't wait to see these guys coming up and passing us up and showing us what it's like.
To get something going when you've got that much energy as a 25-year-old.
Well, then people aren't going back.
You know, it's sort of like the mainstream media strikes me like this kind of unstable girlfriend and you try and break up with her and she just goes completely nuts, thinking that this is like, okay, I'll follow you down an alley.
I'll key your car.
I'll try and hack into your social media accounts.
It's like, okay, that's why I didn't have anything to do.
I didn't get married to you.
I didn't sort of settle down with you.
Because the mainstream media, I mean, we're reeling these people in, left, right, and center.
And people get their news from the mainstream media, sort of the last place you'd look for it these days.
And so you'd think they'd sort of have this crisis of conscience and say, man, you know, we really blew everything with Trump.
Let's reform.
Let's revisit.
Let's recommit to...
It's like, no.
No, now it's just like every other crazy narrative they can pull out of a deranged coke-added rat's ass.
They're just spraying all over the internet.
Like, this is just not going to drive people away.
Like, they're stalking their...
They're skeptical listeners, and what a fantastic opportunity.
I thought it was going to be a bit more of a fight.
I didn't realize I was going to show up with a sword, and they were just committing seppuku in a corner, but that does seem to be how it's shaking out.
If I had just one wish this Christmas season, it would be that you and I could suddenly start having a conversation in fluent Russian right now.
That is the nuttiest...
I mean, they used to make fun of us for being conspiracy theorists, and now you've got them, Trump is a Russian agent, the alt-right is a Russian agent, Stefan is a Russian agent, everybody, it's like, look, I mean, if I'm a Russian agent, where's my check?
You know?
I don't see any rubles.
Well, the left, man, I mean, you know, the left has so much covered up the crimes of Russia for so many years that the idea that they're now blaming Russia for something, you know, they covered up the crimes.
The guy who wrote for the New York Times, Durante, I think his name was.
Walter Durante.
Nobel Prize for his reporting, which is all complete lies in the Potemkin villages.
They covered up the crimes of the Soviets like crazy.
They even covered up the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was like a Soviet spy who trained in Russia.
So when the Russians were actually doing stuff like infiltrating the State Department like crazy, this was all covered up and denied when there was actually infiltration and Russians were doing crazy stuff like, what was it, the aptly named Hiss, right?
Alger Hiss.
Alger Hiss was like one of the chief advisors at the Yalta Conference when the West handed over the entire reason for going to war in the first place, Poland and the associated countries, to Stalin and Russia.
Stalinist dictatorships for the next couple of decades.
And so the left didn't have anything to say about Russia, but it genuinely was an evil dictatorship bent on taking over the world and manipulating and destroying vast swaths of the culture and integrity of Western governments.
But now that they're nationalistic and couldn't care fundamentally enough to try and hack into voting machines that aren't even connected to the internet...
Now they're responsible for absolutely everything.
A spider landed in my soup.
Putin's up there with a fishing rod, lowering it down.
And it's like, man, oh man, what planet are these people living in?
Like I said, they're scared.
I mean, they thought they had won.
They thought that they had taken over the culture permanently.
And what they didn't realize is that They were just riding the baby boomer wave.
Now the more cynical Gen Xers are in positions of influence and that sort of thing.
We're post the optimism bubble.
We're still at the crest in general, but I think we're past the peak.
Now the world is becoming a much more realistic place.
You know, there's a good chance that there's going to be a lot of ugly aspects around the world.
And, you know, certainly the mess that has been created means that there's just a shocking amount of detritus that needs to be cleaned up.
But at least events are beginning to move in the proper direction.
Hopefully, you know, the Front National will come to power in France.
In Italy, you know, Italy will probably be out of the euro by the end of the year.
You know, possibly out of the, I mean, you know, the whole European Union could fall next year.
It's going to fall sooner or later, and hopefully sooner rather than later.
These are interesting times, which can be a curse, but it's exciting too.
I think that the important thing to do this year is to stay true to your principles, stay close to your family and loved ones, and keep your eyes open.
We can hope for the best, and we should.
But we should also be ready for the challenges that lie ahead.
And most importantly, remember that we didn't get where we are now by giving up.
We got here because we're stubborn, because we don't quit, and because even when we're down, we get back up off the mat and we go back at them again.
And so I'm excited for 2017.
I'm really glad that 2016 has turned out the way that it has so far, and I just want to wish Stefan and And Michael and everybody with Free Domain Radio, and especially the subscribers, Merry Christmas and have an excellent 2017.
And remember that hard times give you the opportunity to display great virtue.
And I, for one, love the idea of lighting up like a fireworks display on the darkened horizon of human history, visible for thousands of years to come.
That's my particular mojo.
So hard times do give you the opportunity to display great virtue.
So I just wanted to remind everyone, since I neglected my hostly duties at the beginning, Vox Day, of course, has got some fantastic books.
The before-mentioned Social Justice Warriors Always Lie and Cuckservative, How Conservatives Betrayed America.
Fantastic reading.
Also, he's a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs.
Vox Populi and Alpha Game averages three or more, I think, million page views per month.
And, of course, you want to check out Rabid Puppies, his...
I don't know.
How do we describe this?
His legion of the damned?
What was it?
Something like that?
No, it's the evil legion of evil.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, and actually, if anyone's interested, we've got all kinds of cool t-shirts from Make Europe Great Again to the SJW's Always Lie cover shirt and Rabid Puppies.
It's fun, and if you're interested in joining in the great SJW hunt, Hop on board.
Beautiful.
And also, please check out the Next Generation Wikipedia replacement, now with facts, Infogalactic, and also Castalia House Publishing.
They, of course, recently released Mike Cernovich's new book, MAGA Mindset.
We'll put links to all of this below, Vox.
A great pleasure.
A very, very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family and friends.
Thanks a lot for your friendship.
It's a great pleasure to have these interactions, and I wish you all the best.
Likewise.
Hi, everybody.
Okay, so now we're chatting with our good friend Dr.
Duke Pesta of the Freedom Project Academy, and we are continuing with Christmas.
Now, for myself, I was quite confused as a child because it's a silent T. I couldn't figure out why this guy, Chris, was so important and why he had to give presents in honor.
Once somebody explained to me the missing tea and it's the Christmas part of it that cleared up a few things for me and I took massive leap forwards in my theology that was only matched by my learning of ancient Aramaic.
So what are your thoughts around this Christmas season?
What do you particularly love about the season and what does it mean to you?
Well, yeah, it's a very great question.
And, you know, if you go back to all the way back to the Charlie Brown Christmas special in the 1960s, There's this tendency to have – people tend to become very depressed at the holidays, and there's always this missing thing.
When I was a little kid, I felt it too.
I opened all the presents, and you have that initial adrenaline rush, and then there's something missing.
And I think that that's by design.
I think the missing thing is the piece, is that, like you said, it's the Christ in Christmas.
And as we become more commercialized, more Santa Claus-ized, more winter holiday-ized now, you can't even say the word Christmas in university campuses – As we do more of that, I think this gap in us is growing bigger as a culture.
We're becoming more lost, I think, a little bit.
And whether you believe in Christ or not, the idea of Christmas, I think, is one of hope.
It's one of great hope.
It's one of, what I love about it, it's that moment when whatever the divine is chooses to enter material reality and take up life alongside us.
The beauty of that image, right, where you have The great gospel stories in Luke where you have these powerful angels and these lowly shepherds, these wise men and these innkeepers who take a pause to contemplate for a moment the possibility.
What would it mean philosophically?
What would it mean if indeed the Creator God became encased in human flesh to walk amongst us for whatever period of time on this earth and the birth of Christ, the Incarnation, One of the most beautiful ideas human beings have ever dreamt up or that ever happened in reality, the idea that the divine...
You think about paganism, and I'll get off my little intro here.
You think about paganism and how you find God exclusively within the system, God exclusively within nature.
God becomes rapidly anthropomorphized as the mountain or the brook, the nymph.
And now with global warming, you see how these modern so-called progressive atheists...
I have really become re-paganized by glorifying Gaia, the Earth Mother.
What I love about the Christian story of the birth of Christ is it definitively argues that God transcends nature.
God transcends this universe.
But for this 33-year period in human history, you had a perpetual miracle.
33 years of a miracle when the divine actually walked in the confines of nature.
For me, it offers hope.
It fills that hole in me that the presence could never fill.
That the carols and the cookies could never fill.
There is that idea that Western culture revolves, and for the last 2,000 years at least, Western culture almost revolves around the Christmas holiday.
You think about the great works of art, literature, culture, how many Madonnas were painted in the Middle Ages, how many Christmas specials do we still see today?
So kind of long-winded, but it's a great topic.
What do you think about it?
For me, what I've always loved about Christmas is so much of life feels a little bit, sometimes like a repetitive hamster wheel.
And what I love about Christmas is the downtime and the chance to match your life with an ideal.
That, to me, is something that we don't do enough of in general.
Ideals for a lot of people are kind of tortuous because they don't know how to get there, so they just scrub themselves of higher goals, of higher ideals, of higher aspirations, of higher virtues, and they just live, you know, like that bare-forked animal that King Lear rages about in the storm scene in King Lear, of course.
And what I love about it is, for me, when my relationships are great, they're really enhanced by Christmas.
You know, having the time to sit and chat with people I love and who love me and share good food and good stories and good conversation.
So Christmas enhances that which is good.
But Christmas, for me at least, always shredded that which was deficient.
Because if you have, you know, unsatisfying relationships or you have friends that you don't really care about, or maybe they're just friends you kind of go to parties with and drink with and so on, that, I mean, of course, there's a lot of drinking for some around Christmas, but there is such a beauty to the season.
That it does create an ideal for human relations.
For me, the divine has always been more horizontal.
You know, if you're going to worship something higher than yourself, you do it with the ideals, but you manifest it with the people in your life.
And Christmas with that ideal of peace and love and goodwill and positive behavior, that to me is wonderful.
And I think there's a reason why unhappy families are more unhappy around Christmas.
But happy families are more happy around Christmas.
It is a way of reminding us that To try and close the gap between what we are and what is the best within us or the best we can conceive of.
And that is sort of a spur to our ambition to improvement, I think is a wonderful aspect of Christmas.
And it certainly helped align me in terms of improving relationships, ditching bad relationships, adopting better relationships.
That constant reformulation of the ideal of Christmas has been a good touchstone for me in that way.
I think that's beautifully phrased.
For me too, I'll add one thing too.
The Incarnation is an idea.
Christmas as an idea.
Philosophically, I'm speaking now.
What always appealed to me as a thinker is it's the moment in time where time and eternity absolutely intersect, the story of Christ.
It's that moment where that which is timeless and eternal actually intersects in a very permanent, positive, tangible way with the world of time.
And so the axis kind of goes like this, doesn't it?
The eternal...
And the time-bound, they become cross-sections of each other, and it's kind of a glimpse into a whole other reality.
I mean, the tremendous hope and positive energy that you generate from the ideas behind Christ, the carols, particularly the Christian carols, the secular ones not so much, particularly the Christian carols, they're all redemptive.
They're all buoyant in the dead of winter, at least in our climates, right?
This idea that you have this absolutely regenerative festival that centers around infancy birth, centers around poorness, right?
I mean, we've talked on previous shows we've done together.
One of the things I like about the Christ story is, theoretically, he who was strongest becomes weak.
And there's something really absolutely endearing about a God, potentially, of absolute power, who checks it all at the door.
And fills his diapers with human excrement and cries and has to deal with the cold.
In other words, Christ begins his life like we do.
So you mentioned King Lear, one of my favorite lines in King Lear.
Very anarchic, right?
When Lear says, the first time we smell the air, we wail and cry.
And that should teach us, right?
That the road of life is not necessarily a road of joy.
It can be Very often a road of suffering too.
And to think that the God of the universe who created the universe began crying and shivering in the cold, it's really a moving idea.
And the idea that the greatest that we are capable of passes into human form and we celebrate that, isn't that an invitation to aspire to the greatness that is within us?
I mean, if God himself makes himself manifest in human form and we celebrate, not the death, of course, not that you would, but you celebrate that intersection between perfection and mortality, what a great reminder.
Without all that platonic, you know, before we were born floating in the ether nonsense, The intersection of the greatest and most beautiful aspects of thought and of virtue and of integrity intersecting with human form, that to me is a very powerful reminder that we of course do inhabit this messy meat machine of a body and we have this, I don't know if you'd say it's a war, but there's a tension between what we can dream of and what we can imagine ourselves to be and what the physical limitations are
or the, you know, I want to be a really happy person today, but I have a headache, you know, this kind of stuff that I want to do good today, but, you know, my knee is hurting or something like that.
And a reminder to just continue to elevate ourselves to the greatest, to the most abstract, to the highest virtues, without at the same time denying, right?
Yeah.
God didn't become divine after he left the body.
He was divine in the body.
And this union of the highest ideals with the messy meat machine who are trapped inside, I think, is a beautiful thing to remember because the machine is going to die.
Now, of course, if you're a Christian, you're going to get to live on in your spirit form, in your soul.
If you are not a Christian or if you're a materialist, then the greater your Dedication to virtue, the more you're going to live on as an inspiration to those after you.
In the Socratic form, we still talk about him 2,500 years later, although he was, of course, not a Christian being born before Christ.
But his commitment to integrity and virtue and abstract goodness is something that is inspired.
So you get to live on either way, and that seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I love it.
The hypostatic union, if we get all theological, right?
This union of body and soul of divine and mortal.
I love what you said, that gap between what we aspire to be and what we can be, that recognition in the meat machine that there are so many things we could be if we were able to somehow access it.
I think that gap is exactly the role that Christmas fills, right?
It's exactly the role that Christ fills.
It's grace.
It's this idea that what is imperfect in you, you can straddle.
One philosophical way of straddling that divide is is the story of Christ and the grace that he brings.
And the other thing I love about Christmas is it is one long series of epiphanies.
As human creatures, you mentioned this gap between what we aspire to be and what we are, and inevitably, what we need, whether it's intellectually or emotionally, sexually, or any other way, what we need sometimes in our lives are epiphanies.
These moments when we realize, oh, there is that beyond the horizon.
Or I could actually, you know, you see yourself bumping up a step, leveling up as the video gamers say, right, in terms of your consciousness and awareness of how approachable some of these things are.
And what I love about Christmas in that regard is the epiphanies.
It's one epiphany after another.
You get the impression that the angels themselves were kind of startled when they were sent on that mission to tell these poor shepherds just what happened.
The shepherds have an epiphany.
The wise men have an epiphany.
Herod has a nasty epiphany.
I mean, and the whole story of Christ, it starts in that manger, but the whole story of Christ throughout the course of his life is this continuing epiphany.
It's conscious racing, right, that you can live.
You don't have to live with, you know, we're the only – humans are the only animals who have evolved so that our heads look forward, right?
All other creatures, mammals, their heads tilt down.
You don't have to live like the animal.
You can live in reason and faith and hope and love in ways that bump us up in an epiphany way, bump us up to getting closer, to closing that gap between what we could be and what we sometimes settle for being.
And right after Christmas, of course, comes New Year's, which is where the sort of fishhooks of the higher self kind of hang down.
And some people will come in.
I go to a gym, so for me, New Year's is always a bit of a crabby time because there's so many people clustering up the gym with their New Year's Eve resolutions.
Now, you know, of course, that in a couple of weeks, they'll all be cleared out again.
But it would be wonderful to take, and I think this is always the challenge that we have when we sort of stand neck deep in the beautiful treacle of Christmas happiness, to try and find a way to extend that and to extend that into the busy work of life.
Because, you know, life has a lot of busyness.
It's got a lot of paperwork.
There's administrative you left, right, and center.
But it is in the relationships with ourselves, with our highest ideals, with virtue, with each other, that we really, I think, find the great grace of living and the great beauty of living.
You know, as the old saying goes, there aren't a lot of people who are on their deathbed said, wow, I wish I'd spent just a little bit more time at work, maybe, if they're dying in poverty.
But for the most part, we look back and we often feel or think that if we had spent more time connecting, you know, E.M. Forster, the novelist's admonition to humanity, only connect, only connect.
And when we get that connection, when we're honest and open and vulnerable, there is a special kind of unity and a tribalism of truth that occurs between and among us that does seem to flare up like a geyser around Christmas and then seems to fade away like morning fog in the new year.
And trying to find a way, do you have any tricks to sort of find a way to retain that connectedness that we have with friends and family over Christmas further into the new year?
Charles Dickens made that point, right, that we need to try in the Christmas carol, we need to try to carry Christmas in our hearts all year round.
Charles Dickens made that point, right?
think it separates the optimist from the pessimist, the realist from the dreamer, that part of us that is mired in mortality and that part of us that in spite of all that, even in the most hard-hearted atheist, that part of us that still dreams.
I mean, whatever else we are as human beings, and even if materialism is everything, if that's true and we're all imprisoned in materialism, you know what?
We're the only creatures as far as we know ever to have been We're thrust into this universe who can dream about a world beyond the universe.
We can dream about a reality.
We can dream about life extending beyond materialism.
What prisoner, Plato said, isn't allowed to think about life outside his jail?
We can, too, and I think that's nice.
For me, I honestly think the fading of the Christmas feeling, though, again, my turn back to the star of Christianity, Jesus.
He made it clear that these moments of epiphany, these moments of connection, even with me, you're going to have me for 30-some years.
That's it.
This moment of connection, it has to fade.
Because if you had it here permanently, the Marxists would be right.
You can make a heaven of earth.
If you could have it all year round, all day, every day, why would you ever need to leave here?
And certainly, why would you need a savior?
Why would you need a connection between this world, if it was perfect, and that one?
And so it's the longing.
I think the flip side of that coin of epiphany, that increasing recognition, is the missing of it.
It's the emptiness.
It's when he goes away, when he left his disciples, when Christmas leaves us, there's a gap there.
We face the long, cold January-February nexus, and we start to get our Christmas bills.
The bills for all the money we spent come rolling in.
And I think that's good for us, though.
We get a little taste of what the high countries can give us, C.S. Lewis said.
Get a little taste, charge our batteries.
Maybe in those times of darkness and despair, we'll recall them, but I think it's kind of good it recedes.
If God didn't recede from us, if that feeling, if you want to call it that instead of God, if that feeling didn't recede from us, we'd never seek it anymore, and we would become very comfortable here, and I don't think that we were meant to be.
We're meant not to be happy here, contented completely anyway.
We're meant to be made complete there.
And so in the great divorce, right, when people go over those mountains, they get off the bus in heaven, they go over those mountains, they find, and without being too Lewis-y here, love what he said in the great divorce, you will not know how to assess time and death ultimately until you're beyond them.
That until you're beyond on the other side of time and death, in a timeless place where there is no death, until you're there, you can never fully explain time and death.
And I always kept that with me in the sense that, right, I mean, that's one of those epiphanies we're going to have, hopefully, if we do manage to escape this prison house of materialism.
That's interesting, yeah, because for me, the tension between the ideal and the manifestation has always been a challenge.
I mean, this goes all the way back to when I was a kid, and I had a...
I remember this very clearly.
I was in kindergarten and I had an image in my head of the picture I wanted to make.
It was a child going down a snowy hill with fir trees.
He was on a toboggan.
His cheeks had rosiness.
His red scarf was flying back in the wind and so on.
And then I picked up these, you know, they have these big, like you'd paint a wall with them, these big giant brushes and this terrible paint and this thin leaky paper.
And I basically just ended up with some Jackson Pollock vomit on the page.
And it's the same thing when I do shows.
Like, I do shows, I'm like, this, I want this show to be the very best manifestation and expression of human consciousness and articulation that has ever been manifest.
And then I do the show, and I'm like, yeah, that was all right.
And the funny thing is, though, so I go from one extreme to the other, and then when I listen back to it, as I sometimes do, I'm like, that's actually pretty good, you know, that's actually pretty good.
Do you have this or how do you close this tension between the ideal and the actuality of your life?
Because that to me is one of the greatest challenges to contentment.
Now, as you say, I wouldn't want to achieve it permanently because then I would get lazy.
If you think food is going to fall into your mouth, you don't go out setting traps in the woods and then you end up starving to death.
But this ideal, and I think for a Christian it's even stronger in some ways because at least I can achieve the ideal from time to time in a materialistic sense, but you can never achieve the virtue of God while in mortal form.
How do you live with that tension?
I mean, for me, you've answered the question.
I mean, the only answer is Christ.
I mean, the only way you can bridge those two worlds is if you think about the birth of Christ, but then you think about his ministry.
And his ministry was one constant reminder that We can have spurts and fits of it.
We can try to live better, but we can't live best.
We can try to love more, but we can't love all.
We can try to help people as much as we can, but it won't be enough.
You're always going to have support with you.
Suffering is a consequence of this world.
You can't erase that.
The desire to fix, to help, to love, to save, that desire unfulfilled, that's exactly why my theology tells me you need him because everything that is incomplete in us was complete in him.
Every ideal we fell short of, he fulfilled.
Every sacrifice we make that comes back to bite us or that we make for the wrong reasons, he made for the right ones.
And so again, I see him as the perfect conduit, in some ways the only conduit when I look through the historical theology of world religions.
The only really meaningful conduit between our imperfections and his perfection and what redeems us, what validates our failed, weak, and incomplete attempts at being better, what validates that is our recognition that through him, philosophically on this world and ideally metaphysically in the next, through him and through his perfect sacrifice, our failed efforts become made whole.
In other words, there's a piece missing from us.
There's a piece of the puzzle missing.
I believe this devoutly.
There's a piece of us missing.
No earthly thing is going to make us happy.
Whether there's God or not, earthly things just don't make us completely content.
We never are.
I don't know if you've ever read – I know you're a Renaissance guy.
I don't know if you've ever read George Herbert's great poem, The Pulley.
In the poem – and of course, think about what a pulley does.
It takes something much heavier and lifts it.
And in the poem, God is creating the universe.
And he gives man all the blessings he can possibly give him.
Beauty, strength, power, agility, grace.
But there's one little thing as God is creating man that he leaves out.
And that one little thing he leaves in the glass is contentment.
For if I give this to my creature, God said to, then he will be content to live in this world without me.
And so I will give him everything else.
But with suffering, with discontent, so that if all my blessings do not turn him to me, maybe his despair will cast him to my breast.
This idea that for the love of us, he leaves that one little blessing off.
That always stuck with me.
Yeah, I mean, we are a pendulum drawn by the thirst for virtue and the fear of vice.
And those two are a very challenging thing to balance.
And the great thing about Christmas is this is a time where it doesn't feel to me too much like I have to balance perfection with actualization because it's as close to a perfect season as I've experienced in this life.
So thanks so much, Dr.
Pesta.
Wonderful, wonderful chat.
I really, really appreciate the overlapping of different worldviews in this particularly beautiful season and in this particular challenge of being good Can I leave you a quick quote?
My Shakespearean brother.
I don't get to do this very often.
Absolutely.
At Christmas time, one of my favorite Christmas quotes.
Some say that ever against that season comes, wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated.
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.
The nights are wholesome.
Then no planets strike.
No fairy takes.
No witch hath power to charm.
So hallowed and so gracious is that time.
Merry Christmas, Stephan.
Thank you.
I'm not going to improve on that.
Thanks a lot, Dr.
Pastor.
Thank you.
Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
We are here now.
It is time to chat with a good friend, Scott Adams, famed creator of Dilbert, the wonderful cartoon that skewers pomposity and inefficiency in the corporate realm.
And he's been on the show a couple of times before, but we're doing, of course, a Christmas conversation.
And Scott, of course, not only is a great cartoonist and a great writer with some wonderful books, How are you doing today, Scott?
I'm doing terrific.
Life is good.
Fantastic.
So how's your year been?
It's been a year, I guess, of some fairly big changes where you kind of emerged, I guess, since you were fairly early on in calling for Trump, emerged as a sort of prognosticator, a new role for you to some degree, maybe in the public realm.
So how's the year been for you in terms of changing your profile and updating what people think you're capable of?
Well, it's by far the most fun I've ever had in one year.
And of course, if Trump had lost, things would have gone quite differently for me, I suppose.
So on a personal level, it was amazing.
Best year ever.
But on a professional level, there were some puts and takes.
So certainly, I took a hit on my speaking level, the speaking business I do.
So I've got exactly zero speaking events on the books for the coming year, which is unheard of.
And you used to do quite a few every year, right?
A dozen sometimes.
Yeah, I took several years off because I had a voice problem.
But other than that, I always had been doing it.
So that was pretty big.
But I did just sign a book deal.
So I'll have a book deal in this that will be based on the master persuader ideas.
So that's good.
And I got invited on a lot of podcasts and TV shows, and I did raise my profile a little bit, but I'm not sure people take me quite seriously yet.
I'm a little bit of the blind squirrel that found a nut, I think, in a lot of people's opinions.
But your hypothesis, you know, if you have a hypothesis and it has testable outcomes and then the events match the hypothesis and the outcome, it's not random then.
So what is it that you would like people to get out of your process and methodology that can give you some more credibility?
Well, certainly there was no control group here.
So, you know, there was no real science involved.
And others have pointed out that there's a survivor's effect.
There were millions of people all over the world who had crazy ideas about who would win and what would happen.
Somebody was going to be right.
Now, what I did to ramp up the risk is I said it publicly and often, so that set me apart.
But the truth is, I'm sure a lot of other people got it right, and they think their reasons for getting it right were the reason.
I've heard people have lots of explanations, like somebody said that the change, actually it was a Cialdini just said this in an article that the change candidate has about an 80% chance of winning just automatically just all things being equal and I'm thinking well that's something I didn't hear the day before election.
Did you hear anybody say, well, 80% chance Trump's going to win because he's the change guy?
Nobody was saying that.
But after the fact, that looks obvious, right?
Well, no, to be fair, there's one guy, Bill Mitchell's been on the show a couple of times.
He was saying that as a change candidate, it wasn't 80% and he had lots of other reasons, but he was saying that, you know, when incomes are stagnant and declining and when tax burdens are increasing and national debt doubles in eight years, yeah, people are looking to wrench the wheel no matter which way because they can see where the bullseye is down the road.
Right.
Yeah, so there were individuals, and Bill was one of them, who had good reasons for why they were predicting things.
But the truth is, there were different reasons and different predictions, and someone was going to be right.
So you can't automatically say, okay, that's the valid one, and let's use that forever.
But, to my credit, what I recognized a year in advance is that everybody would have a hindsight explanation of why he won, if he won.
So I wanted to get out front and say, look, Hindsight is going to be useless, and there's going to be a lot of it, so I'm going to make predictions, and I'm going to show you the mechanism under the hood, the entire process, so you can see that this has a structure and there's a reason for these predictions.
I would have to do it a lot more to get some reasonable level of credibility, but I think I at least got people's attention.
So I think I've at least gone into the conversation, which is a big step.
Because remember, a year ago, I was telling people that facts and policies wouldn't matter at all to the outcome of the election.
And everybody laughed at me.
Everybody laughed at me at that.
It was 100%.
Oh, no, that's just crazy.
You've gone too far.
But I would say that almost everybody agrees with that point in some fashion now.
That the reason that one candidate won and one lost probably wasn't the quality of their policies.
It probably wasn't that.
Well, of course, you've seen a million YouTube videos of people going out to Hillary supporters and saying, well, what is it about her that you like?
What are her policies?
What laws did she get passed?
What social things do you agree with her on?
And they have no idea whatsoever other than, you know, has history and vagina.
Like, there was nothing in particular that people got.
And I think for a lot of Trump people, you know, you would ask him in general, They just wanted to trust someone they viewed as competent, and there's lots of ways of persuading people on that, even if you don't have it, whereas I think Trump actually does.
There was a lot of, who do you vote against this year, so there was a lot of that.
This is a whole different process of decision-making.
Although I don't think anyone really predicted the degree to which Russia, of course, was going to hack the entire election.
Although I guess we could have guessed that some crazy narrative was going to come out of the left to explain away their loss in a way that did not involve any, say, I don't know, personal responsibility.
For their choices of candidates or their choices of approach somehow.
Putin managed to put a force field between Hillary Clinton and the Rust Belt states that just kept her from doing the job that she wanted to do.
You'd think you would have noticed this big sickle and hammer showing up, shimmering wall that you couldn't penetrate, but I think that's one of the stories that is becoming a little less credible as we go forward.
So I'm trying to understand this idea that it's common sense or that it's obvious that Putin would have a reason for To interfere with the election.
Now, if he was trying to get Trump elected because he thought Trump would be friendlier, that wouldn't make sense.
But there are other people who seem like serious, credible, well informed people who are saying, no, it's not that.
They were just making our system less credible for some weird reason.
They wanted our election process to be viewed as less credible by our own citizens.
Right.
So I look at your face and my face looks the same way.
And apparently there's some revenge or payback to that because there's a thought that we did the same thing in Putin's election, which I'm sure probably was the case, at least at some level.
And I'm thinking, how does any of that benefit Russia?
Now, in our case, I could see if we were trying to depose who we thought was a dictator...
But really, what were the odds of that happening in Russia?
I mean, Putin has such a hold on it.
It doesn't seem like we necessarily would have even tried, because it doesn't seem like, first of all, we would get a better result with the next dictator, or democracy.
That didn't seem likely, right?
And what are the odds that he would have something to gain by just messing up our system and destabilizing the United States?
I don't know how that's connected to some rational argument.
I think it's not.
But I think that the mainstream media has a big problem in that almost all of their predictions went violently the wrong way.
And rather than say, what did we get wrong?
They'll say, well, we had it down pat.
We just didn't know about all this hacking.
And that's why we got it so wrong.
That's why the New York Times had a 96% chance of Trump losing on election night.
He didn't know about the Russian hacking, you see.
So that's the reason why.
Well, they certainly knew it by then.
I mean, right?
Maybe not the extent, though.
Maybe not how far it had gone.
Yeah, I guess that's always, we didn't know how bad it was.
But certainly all the revelations that came from that were certainly completely public by then.
So the pollsters should have seen it.
Right?
Right, right.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit.
So you've had a very interesting year, and I think advancing the persuasiveness aspect of things, you know, from sort of traditional classical philosophy, there's this idea that being persuasive is somehow cheating, you know, that the great enemy of Socrates were the sophists, the people who could make the worst arguments appear better through appeals to emotion and through ad hominems and smearing and all that kind of stuff.
So a lot of sort of classical philosophers or people interested in that approach have said, well, I eschew being convincing because I would prefer to be right.
And my argument is, okay, well, if you're a really fast runner and you've got a jetpack, why not use both?
You know, I mean, what's wrong with being right and persuasive at the same time, which is why I've, you know, studied quite a lot about how to convince people without feeling like I've made a pact with some smoky, sophisticated devil.
And so that, I think, is something that people need to have more respect for.
It doesn't matter if you're right.
If you can't convince anyone, your truth dies with you.
There is a feeling, and people are saying this to me a lot, that being persuasive is similar to being immoral because they conflate it with being manipulative.
And I try to explain to them that persuasion is a tool like any other tool.
You could use a hammer to build a house for Low income people, or you could use it to kill somebody with a hammer.
So the tool is neither good nor bad, but people are certainly good and bad.
Well, you don't want to bring only reason to a feels fight.
You know, that's important, you know, because it is, you know, reason is the knife and persuasion is the gun.
And, you know, why not be armed in two hands rather than just bringing a knife to a gunfight?
Because if the left is all the people who are your enemies are really good at persuasion, you can go down with the ship of reason and evidence and never be seen again while they dominate the high seas.
Yeah, I think the big perceptual shift that I'm trying to To see if it will take hold, because this is what I saw coming a year ago, is that the common view of the world is that the world is 90% rational, but every once in a while we get a little crazy, you know, 10% of the time maybe.
Manious.
But mostly we're reasonable people doing reasonable things and trying to work it out.
The hypnotist's point of view, which is the school that I come from, is the opposite.
It reverses that.
It says we're irrational 90% of the time, if not 100% of the time.
But once in a while, there's something that has no emotional content.
And in that case only, we can make a rational decision.
But as soon as you add anything of emotion to it, that overwhelms.
So we saw that in this election as clearly as you could possibly see that effect.
But if we don't also see it in other parts of our life, we're going to lose that mental model.
And I think that mental model of, no, we're irrational most of the time, And we're just rationalizing it after the fact.
Explains everything.
But it also predicts really well.
Now, I don't take the view that my view of the world or the persuasion view of the world is the correct one.
Because I think we did not evolve to have the ability to understand base reality.
We never needed it.
All we needed was to be able to survive and reproduce.
So if you and I go to a movie theater, and I'm sitting next to you and next to us is a Clinton supporter who believes that right now they're living in 1930s Germany and Hitler has risen to power, and you and I are sitting next to him thinking, hey, looks like the stock market's doing great.
We're in a completely different movie, but we're sitting in the same theater and And both of us have at least the biological ability to go reproduce.
So as long as we can reproduce, it doesn't matter that our movies are completely different movies.
So if we could kind of understand that and then embrace it and make decisions based on that knowledge, it could change everything.
I mean, it's the reason that I made money on this election, because I got the bet on Trump, because I could see it coming from a mile away.
Because I have the different training that says the world is irrational, and the person who's best at dealing with an irrational world, the best persuader, There's a wonderful line, of course, from Hamlet.
There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And this is an old idea that we live in a matrix of our own confirmation biases.
And it is important for people to understand that.
Maybe we'll evolve at some point beyond that.
But right now, you know, you go to war with the army that you have, not the army you might wish to have.
And I was reminded, we talked about this in a presentation called The Death of Reason, a wonderful experiment that just showed how fluid and subjective, when it comes to morality, I think morality is one of the most emotionally invested things.
It's how people raise their kids.
It's how they live their lives.
It's how they make their fundamental choices.
It's who they choose to marry and the business they go into.
I mean, a million things are bound up in morality.
So what these researchers did was wild.
They got a piece of paper with a moral argument on it, and they asked for people to make the moral argument.
And they did, right?
I can't remember what it was.
It was a moral argument.
And then they had them fold the piece of paper over, and there was a little special glue that caused another piece of paper to come back.
And they said, oh, can you turn back and just make that moral argument again?
And it was the exact opposite moral argument.
And people very fluidly made the exact opposite moral argument.
And then they said, was there anything different between the first and the second?
No, not a thing, right?
So they completely convincingly made one moral argument, and then within a minute or two made the complete opposite moral argument with no conception of the difference.
And that is a level of fluidity that is almost terrifying, but is something to be aware of.
The only way you can sort of rise to the next level of awareness where the thing that you just described is normal instead of some kind of weird exception that just, you know, appeared in a laboratory somehow, you have to see lots and lots of examples.
And so that's the advantage that the hypnotist has, is that you're dealing with this all the time.
So you're seeing people acting irrationally because you're causing them to act that way.
So my sense of how rational people are is far different than the average person because of my experience, not because of any special faculty I have.
Let me take that idea a little further because this is something I've been playing with.
I believe there's an epidemic of anxiety in society.
In other words, people claiming that they have anxiety and they need drugs for it, they've got to take time off of work, whatever.
I've never seen this much anxiety when I was a kid.
People just didn't have it.
I think the cause of it probably has to do with our technology and complexity and smartphones and screens and too many decisions and things like that, which is a slightly separate argument.
But what I say to people who have anxiety is I say, can you think of a situation in which you don't have this feeling?
Like, let's say you're making love with the person you really care about, you're doing your favorite thing, your favorite sport, you're engrossed in something.
In those moments, do you feel these bad feelings, whether it's depression or anxiety?
And they'll say no.
And I'll say, that proves to you that there's a user interface for your mind.
These feelings of anxiety and stuff are not internally produced, and therefore there's nothing you can do to get at them, except take a pill that goes right through your bloodstream and right into your brain, because that's how we think of the world.
We think of this mind as making decisions, and then we do stuff.
The hypnotist view, which I also call the moist robot view of the world, is that our brain is really extended into all the things we touch and feel and all of our senses.
And the user interface for your mind, the way you think, your anxiety and all that is just what you're doing.
So if you're exercising, eating right, getting the right sleep, you have the right kind of friends, you're having the right kind of sex.
If you're doing all that stuff right, suddenly the opportunity for anxiety just sort of shrinks because you're replacing the 24 hours with stuff that always works.
It's like, you know, you're never unhappy when you're having sex.
Like, if you remember that, then you also know that there are things you can do with your environment that cause your chemistry to change, and that changes your brain to whatever state you'd like to put it in.
So once you understand that dynamic, your helplessness goes away.
You know, you suddenly see I can develop a system for getting all my health and everything else online.
And I think that that's just an enormous mental transformation for society that is happening right now.
And I think Trump is part of it just accidentally because he allowed people to see how irrational we are.
And that's sort of the crack in the universe that allows you to say, well, if we're not rational, how does this stuff work?
And how it works is the environment is part of our mind.
We have to think of it as one system, not separate systems.
Right.
And I think that we have to walk that line between sane and crazy, sadly.
You know, it is the reality.
Societies that get too crazy tend to fail, you know, like Jim Jones in Ghana.
They just went too nuts, you know, the guys who cut their balls off to go and join some comet, you know.
That's going a little bit too far in the, you know, let's deviate from reality.
On the other hand, of course, because we had to reproduce within a tribal environment that had irrational beliefs, anyone who was too sane would get ostracized from the tribe and those genes wouldn't.
So if you're too sane, you didn't get to reproduce.
If you're too crazy, you didn't get to reproduce.
So we kind of got this Aristotelian mean going on.
And I think society was recognizing with the lefty social justice warrior, like race hysteria, race-baiting, class-baiting, massive debt, that we were just getting a bit too close to the ball-less comet, guys, and we needed to take just a little bit of a pendulum back towards the middle.
That's sort of my theory.
I collect sentences that have never been spoken before because, you know, there's so many people saying so many things that that must be rare.
I think that's going to go down as an original.
So, Scott, I know when you do your, and I would really recommend people check out your Periscopes, the coffee with Scott Adams, it always makes me want a cup of joe.
I do see you've got family wandering around in the background and so on.
And most people, when you have a sort of public face, people don't know about everyone else who's around and in your life.
So what is Christmas like for you with regards to sort of friends and family?
Is there a kind of special magic to the season or is it just a time to, you know, maybe skip a gym visit and eat some pound cake?
Well, we're in the middle of December and I've purchased no gifts and I have no decorations and Christmas is kind of sneaking up on me.
So I have, you know, two stepkids and an ex-wife who live a block away.
So our lives are kind of connected.
I have a girlfriend and we'll figure out what we're going to do with her family or whatever.
So it's sort of up in the air.
I haven't figured it out yet.
But Christmas doesn't have the same kind of joy it used to for me.
And why is that, do you think?
I think Christmas is for kids, and if you have kids in your house, you embrace it because it's part of the fun.
And at the moment, I don't have kids in my house.
I think that's the big difference.
Right, right.
So what, if you could sort of give a present of where you think things are going to head in 2017?
I think 2016 was a radical year, but I think it's got nothing on what's coming in 2017.
You know, 2016 was like, how far can we draw back the bowstring?
2017 is going to be how far can the bow go, I think.
But what is it you think is going to go down with, you know, a radical relative to sort of trends of the past, a radical presidency?
Possible radical shift in culture, crazy stuff going on in Europe.
Where do you think things might go over the next year?
Well, I think the stock market is already pointing toward optimism.
And optimism is generally what drives an economy.
In the old days, your economy suffered from lack of resources, lack of trained people, lack of stuff.
But now the resource part of economics is largely solved.
Because you just get on the internet, you can find whatever you need to make a company.
As long as it's a good idea, it'll work.
But now, if you have all the resources, the biggest thing missing is the attitude.
So if your optimism is high, you'll invest today.
Because, hey, tomorrow is going to be great.
I'm optimistic.
And that investment actually causes tomorrow to be great.
So this is something that Trump understands.
And you see him executing this with Pence saying, Even before he's sworn in, he's going out to Ford, he's going out to Carrier, and he's setting a mental example.
Now, forget about how many jobs were or were not saved or whether this was real or just smoke and mirrors.
It doesn't matter.
He's setting a mental expectation that these guys are going to negotiate, claw, and try to grab every American job back because that's what matters to America.
Okay.
And I think that's changing people.
So you saw that IBM just announced, hey, 25,000 people are going to stay, or whatever.
Now, people, again, are going to question that and say, is that real?
Or maybe those people are going to stay anyway, or, you know, that's not real.
Again, doesn't matter.
Because what's changing is our attitudes.
Our attitudes are, hey, maybe I could make an announcement about the people I'm going to keep.
Or maybe I'll try to keep some people and get some of that Trump complimentary goodness coming at me.
Because imagine what happens if If Trump calls out your company and says, hey, these guys are good guys.
They just saved a bunch of jobs that they didn't have to do.
You, I, everybody who's sort of a Trump supporter, sees that name, sees Trump endorsing them, and we absolutely give that company a little bit more consideration.
While, and here's the important part, nobody else is giving them less consideration.
In other words, there's no trade-off.
This is pure gain.
And he's created a situation out of nowhere.
He's created a Psychological economic asset already Which is if you can get in the news and do it soon and say hey I found a way to keep some jobs in the United States He will shout you out and your profit will go up Guaranteed because so many people will care about you and be happy about you and give you some attention That's what companies need so he's literally created something out of nothing already so the the the the potential I think way
bigger than people realize.
I'm not predicting that his result will be so emphasized, but the potential is really enormous and I think completely overlooked because he's mastering that third dimension of emotion and that does drive the economy.
It does make us safe or less safe if you do those things right.
And nobody's ever had this level of skill At the only thing that matters, which is how we think about things, because we've solved the physical asset problem, at least in the civilized world.
And it is a remarkable set of activism that is undergoing prior to even becoming the president.
I mean, that he's making his phone calls.
I mean, we all knew he was going to produce a cabinet and all that, but he's making the phone calls.
He's keeping jobs in America.
He's promising this.
He's threatening that.
It does, of course, make Obama look a little bit like a guy who improved his golf game during the presidency, seeing somebody so active coming in.
And you're right.
He doesn't have to call every company.
He simply needs to create the momentum.
And most companies not infested by social justice warrior morons are going to read the tea leaves, are going to read the writing on the wall, and are going to say, you know what?
We were going to move that plant...
Let's just hold off for now.
Let's see where this goes.
And that is, you know, these public events, he's not going to have to sit there like 24-7 phoning companies.
He just has to create the impression that changes economic decisions at a great distance.
Yeah, and I think people like to get on board with anything that's working so people follow success.
So Trump is creating this narrative, partly out of, you know, persuasion and smoke and mirrors and, you know, a little bit selective data, that sort of thing.
But he's creating the impression that things are already going well.
And it just makes everybody else say, hey, how can I get in there?
I'll give you a perfect example.
I personally feel inspired to figure out how I can help make America great again.
I mean, I hate to use the phrase because it sounds too corny, but I literally feel different now because there's something about the potential Trump presidency which makes me feel that entrepreneurial thinking and good ideas now have a space to go to.
There's somebody who will listen.
Somebody will say, I don't care how we did it before.
This is just a plain good idea.
Because think about some of the people around him, like Newt Gingrich, for example.
Think of Peter Thiel.
Think of that kind of mind.
They care about a good idea.
They're not as dogmatic as politicians in general.
So suddenly I feel like if I just had a good idea or I had something I could offer, I could do that.
And so, in fact, I am.
So I work with the UC Berkeley startup ecosystem.
So I asked them to put together a list of the healthcare startups that could change the cost structure of healthcare in the future.
I mean, one of our biggest problems, here's some people who just need some attention, right?
They need some funding, maybe extra eyeballs to get going.
But if some number of these companies succeed, it has this huge future impact on all of us, right?
So I'm putting this list together.
I can blog it.
I now have the type of audience that I know is connected, at least to the administration, through some levels of people.
And if these ideas are good, and the idea of promoting this type of startups, and you can do the same thing, say, in education.
You know, find the education startups that would have the biggest impact and just give them some attention.
And I think this could make a difference because there are people in the administration who will see ideas like this, and the good ones will survive.
So there's almost an evolution of ideas that can happen now where the fittest survive, where I just don't think that was the case before under traditional politics.
You would think that the money would stop everything from happening, right?
Because as soon as you butted up against some other company's best interest, your idea was done.
But that doesn't seem the case. - Well, this is the funny thing.
I mean, Hillary versus Trump was public sector versus private sector.
And I know enough about, you know, Friedman-esque economics to know that you bet on the private sector every time.
The other thing, too, is this is the first time I can remember maybe a little bit with Reagan.
This is the first time, Scott, that I can remember that somebody's got the helm of political power whose entire career was trying to get around government or get past government.
The government was an interference into what he wanted to do, you know, build his buildings and run his empire and so on.
Whereas, of course, all the politicians in the past and all the people to the left and right, that infinite line of contenders on the Republican side, all of these people, government was how they got things done.
Whereas for Trump, government was in the way of how he got things done.
And I think most of us who are entrepreneurs feel like government is in the way of what I want to get done, you know?
Build me some roads.
Fine.
I'll take the roads and all of that.
But it's kind of in the way, all the regulations, bureaucracy, red tape and tax system and so on.
And I love the idea that somebody's in there who has spent his lifetime fighting against impediments and knows just how difficult it is to get around them and wants to remove those impediments for other people.
And the amount of creative energy that could be unleashed from that is nothing short of nuclear.
Yeah.
When he first announced his idea that before any new regulation could be implemented, you have to get rid of two, my first impression was, oh, that is way too simplistic.
You can't get rid of these regulations just because you want to.
But if you consider how many there are, there have to be so many unimportant ones that have not enough impact.
That just reducing the complexity of how many things you have to worry about is probably a really good thing to do.
So I think that's probably an entirely practical thing in the short run, to get rid of two policies for every one.
In the long run, of course, you would drive to zero and remove the government.
So you can't do it forever, but it's a good idea in the short run.
Well, and I also think his willingness to call people out is very refreshing.
One of the old examples that's used in economics is the sugar industry in America.
They've really teamed up to give a lot of money to politicians to make sure that foreign sugar imports are diminished or heavily taxed so they can raise their prices.
And every regulation has the benefit of some company involved somewhere, which is why they multiply so much.
So when he wants to get rid of a regulation and some particular company that has economic interest in that regulation is going to raise a stink, I mean, he's going to go on Twitter, he's going to tweet their webpage and he's going to say, these jerks are in the way of you getting cheap goods.
And that is like an amazing thing.
He's the kind of guy, like he's 70 years old, but he's the kind of guy who makes everyone's grandpa look completely incompetent with technology, even if the grandpa is Bill Gates, because he's so good at it.
I love the people who are saying that he should stop tweeting.
These are people who got everything wrong for a year.
Everything.
Just everything wrong.
But this time, they're pretty sure they're right about this tweeting stuff.
And I think you and I and the people who saw this developing early are thinking, no, he found a way around the mainstream media.
And as the master persuader, this might not work for every kind of president.
But for him, he's the master of simplification and I mean, there's never been a technology and a human being who are so made for each other.
Right.
And all the people who say, well, you know, his tweets are not very complex and they're not very sophisticated, and they don't understand how much intelligence it takes to communicate complex ideas to an ill-educated population.
You know, there's this wonderful Churchill letter, which has always reminded me as a writer about discipline, which is, you know, I apologize for the long letter.
I didn't have time to make it shorter.
And that pithiness, that impact, this arrow that hits the bullseye of people's hearts and minds almost every time, that is a mark of genius, not of somebody who can't do sophisticated things but is smart enough to boil it down to people's perceptions.
So here's another piece of genius, and this is so subtle that I'm not sure everybody will appreciate this, but you may have noticed that a number of Trump's tweets have misspellings in them.
Have you noticed that?
Now think about it.
He's president, you know, he will be president of the United States, and he's not planning on having somebody edit his stuff.
It sounds like it's just something he does at night when he feels like it.
I love the fact that they have spelling errors in them, because first of all, it just makes him look human.
It also tells you that it's not going through some kind of filter.
You know, it came right from Trump.
And I think just people relate to it.
It's just this amazingly relatable thing.
And it also says, and I just love this fact, this is the hidden message, That bullshit is bullshit.
And spelling things right on Twitter is bullshit.
It's just bullshit.
It didn't really change the message.
He's still president.
You still understood what he said.
And that's more of an internet way of thinking.
When I first came up and it was manual typewriters, you could not have a spelling error in an official document.
That would be career-ending stuff if you did it three times in a row.
But in the internet world, we just say that doesn't matter.
Trump's on the internet, so he says, well, I'm president, but hey, I'm on the internet.
Doesn't matter.
I love that.
Well, and it makes him look very busy.
You know, like he's not repeatedly rereading everything.
He's written and making sure it's perfect.
He's a busy guy.
He's in motion and gets the essence across.
Well, Scott, I really wanted to say thank you so much.
Of course, I want to wish you and yours a very, very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and a great New Year.
I wanted to remind people, of course, I grew up reading Scott's comic, the Dilbert comic, which is fantastic, but he's also an excellent, excellent writer with fantastic and great ideas to get across.
In particular, it's a little bit long in the tooth now, but incredibly relevant.
Had a fail at almost everything and still will win big.
Kind of the story of my life.
And of course, you want to check out blog.dilbert.com.
We'll put links to all of that stuff below.
Scott, always a great pleasure to chat.
Thank you so much.
And once again, Merry, Merry Christmas to you.
Merry Christmas.
Thanks so much for having me.
Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio here.
Here with our Christmas special, we have head elf Charles C. Johnson, an investigative journalist, author, and founder of both Got News and Researcher.
You can find out his excellent work at gotnews.com and Researcher, that's S-E-A-R-C-H-R. Next year they're affording the last E. But Researcher.com, I'll put links to those below.
Charles, how are you doing?
Great.
So, what was your year like, 2016?
We're going to be closing it out relatively soon.
How was it for you, the big picture orbital view of your year?
And then we'll talk a little bit about what you're looking forward to in 2017, which still, to me, feels like a science fiction year.
Definitely.
Well, I went to the RNC, broke a lot of stories.
Michelle Field A lot of journalism.
A lot of breaking stories and having other people take credit for them, but that's, I guess, the way it goes.
Moved into a new house, personal note.
Knocked up my wife, so I'm looking forward to my daughter being born on Inauguration Day, of course.
And other than that, totally uneventful.
Launched the Business Researcher, got news, did record We'll probably hire more.
And got into a big fight with Gawker, a legal battle with Gawker, which we are currently wrapping up now.
There's a question of whether or not I'll get a six-figure or a seven-figure settlement from Gawker, the original purveyors of fake news.
So I'm feeling pretty good going into Christmas.
And frankly, I really, really, really hope Christmas comes sooner just so I can actually sleep and we don't have to keep staffing the administration.
Oh, by the way, I'm doing a lot of the vetting for the administration and the Trump transition.
So it's been a big year.
It's been a huge year.
And I think it's important during the holiday season to sort of stop and take stock of everything that has been achieved, which I think you could argue two years ago was practically unimaginable.
traditional classical liberal tropes or ideas were kind of on the ropes, kind of on the way out.
It felt like we were kind of circling the drain culturally.
And then boom!
And not just Trump, but a whole internet movement has begun to turn this around in ways that, you know, it's sort of like the last act of a movie where you think there's just no way the hero can survive.
And then a miracle occurs, which is a combined willpower of, you know, thousands of people.
What a turnaround it has been.
And it's something to, you know, toast our eggnog to and remember just how close to the edge we were and how much we've pulled back so far.
Yeah, I mean, meme magic is real.
I mean, a whole bunch of teens and stay at home moms and shit posters on 4chan changed the fate of the free world and went up against corporate media and a lot of corrupt Wall Street and beat them with the help of a formerly bankrupt reality TV star who has run beauty
I mean, Donald Trump will be the first president that is not a general ever to not have had any political experience whatsoever.
And people are freaking out about this, but I see this as like the beginning of something exciting.
I mean, if we can meme a reality TV star into the Oval Office, if the comment section It feels totally electrifying.
And to think about how much we did with so little, it's truly astounding.
It sort of feels like 2016, the current year.
It sort of feels...
It feels like this is the year the internet found its muscle, that the internet found its capacity to have an effect.
And that was something, I mean, I've been working on trying to change people's minds on the internet for, I guess, a little over a decade now.
But it felt like there was lots of wheels in motion, and then the car was sort of jammed onto the tarmac.
The wheels got traction, and it turned into a tank, an unstoppable tank.
And this was the year the internet found its muscle.
I think that's right.
I think this is the first year that we had a whole generation of people.
So if you think about the people who are 15 now, they grew up post 9-11, post first dot-com bubble.
There's a whole generation of children who essentially come about living online.
Pop culture and internet culture are one and the same to them.
And this is, you know, they live their lives online, they have their accounts online, they worry about being docs.
And there's a whole culture that's developed, a whole youth culture that's developed, right around the same time that Trump, who is our oldest elected president, at least for his first term, all of this stuff sort of came together all at once.
And it's extraordinary.
To think that we have a guy who mastered reality TV plus Twitter, and that he used that to build a credibility with people, and then used that credibility to defeat It's really astounding.
It feels like we've stepped into Bizarro World, or Narnia or something, and we're taking up residence, or everyone got unplugged from the Matrix all at once.
I heard kids the other day at Walmart call each other cucks in a majority of ways.
There's this weird thing going on, and it feels like So many of the same old people are just not in power anymore.
And the question is just how far is this revolution going to continue?
And how much are the people who end up in power, who were formerly in power, you know, people who have come in from the Bush world and the Reagan world, how much did they get with the propaganda?
Or how much does Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and Mike Cernovich and this show just roll them right over?
I mean, it's pretty great.
But we have to be kind of, you know, there's this quote by Abraham Lincoln that I like, which actually is in my, pinned up on the computer behind me, which is, you know, this too shall pass, right?
It's pretty consoling in times of great affliction, but it's also quite humbling in times of great success.
But yeah, it's pretty awesome.
And to think about how many people were telling us it wasn't possible.
We just really showed them.
It was awesome.
Now, you're talking about kids worrying about being doxxed.
Kids so young, they don't even know what MySpace was.
I wondered the degree to which seeing cyberbullying happen, which happens to a lot of kids, seeing that online directed against Donald Trump.
I think it's kind of interesting.
I think it's one of the reasons why they just didn't believe all of the shitposting that was occurring from the mainstream media and other places against Donald Trump and against Steve Bannon and against the sort of other people involved in their camp, that kids have known the negative power of hostile narratives online, falsehoods online.
And I think that, having grown up with that, I think it made it easier for them to look at that and say, that's just, they're just trolls.
I think what happens is that in economies of ubiquity, credibility is the ultimate coin of the realm.
You build credibility on this show by basically spending a decade on the internet talking to people and trying to educate them and trying to turn them on to good ideas and good books and good thoughts.
The mainstream media, if you watched cable television, A world in which you can download anything through various torrenting sites, which I won't name.
But a world in which you can do all of that is a world in which the consumer has ultimate power.
And the whole unbundling effect of communication At least for our purposes, is you watch cable news, you know, at the gym or whatever, or the airport where you're stuck.
You watch it, and it's just, TV is, like, four-hour delayed internet.
Or three-hour delayed internet.
And there's, like, nothing interesting that happens there.
And then you see the commercials, and therefore your denture is hurting.
We'll tell you what happens right afterwards.
and it's like, no, fuck you, I'm going to Google it on my iPhone.
Like, what are you going to do about that?
Nothing.
There's nothing you can do.
And so, that whole culture of, you know, breaking news and news that's edgy that breaks rules that forces you to think outside the box, like, that's just going to continue.
What I think is the most exciting phenomenon is seeing all these journalists now who realize, no, I don't really need a big brand.
I can go out on my own.
At the same time that all these journalists who spend all their years working up to be at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times essentially realize that they are And I think that's basically what they do.
I mean, if you think about it, I was made fun of for leaving the Wall Street Journal editorial page after I won all these awards because I didn't want to make $60,000 a year and live in New York City.
And I was like, oh, this is a prestige job.
This is great.
And now I run a network of nerd researchers and trolls from my pajamas in Fresno, and I'm richer and happier and healthier, and my personal lives are better.
This is just going to keep on continuing.
It's fantastic.
There's really no other way to describe it.
Well, and you can't inherit credibility from institutions anymore.
In fact, I think it's fair to say that anyone who tries to attach themselves to an institution in order to gain credibility loses credibility in the eyes of many people.
It's sort of you, your naked arguments, your research, your sources, who you talk to, how you speak, your consistency, your ability to correct course based on new information and arguments.
That's what builds up your credibility, the idea that you've attached yourself to some I agree, and I think the real question is...
To what extent are people going to just tune out the arguments to authority?
You've got to understand, I'm 28.
If I concentrate really hard, I can think of a time pre-internet, but it's really hard.
I have to really think about it.
I vaguely recall this time...
You know, I remember the, you know, from AOL and all that stuff.
2400 board, baby.
You can watch the characters like a really fast typist come up on your screen.
Right.
So, like, the thing is, like, every week now there's, like, a new Internet company that's coming along.
Like, as I was growing up, it was, like, Google and Wikipedia and Facebook and Yelp and all this stuff.
It was just, like, every week it was, like, there's some really cool gadget on the Internet that's free that's going to change your life, and you're going to love it.
But now the big fight is how do we keep those things free?
How do we stop them from becoming corporate?
And how do we stop them from becoming the man that suppresses speech, that suppresses people's content on YouTube and on Twitter and on Facebook?
And the notion that at any moment YouTube could just turn off this show with no explanation given is a pretty terrifying concept.
And, you know, I think it's something that people who are more liberty minded, you know, they're used to the government infringing on their liberty and hating that.
But they're not yet ready for a world in which we also have to raise those questions about corporate power.
It doesn't neatly fit into this left-right divide question.
But yeah, there's so much stuff.
The number of people that I meet who are 20-year-olds, To see the number of people who are like, yeah, you went to Harvard?
Fuck you.
Like, that concept of how, like, the fact that you went to Harvard is suspicious now for a lot of people.
That is just so encouraging.
I mean, we have, I mean, I said this earlier, like, we have a government that was designed by polymaths, which is, like, anyone who's actually, like, followed the real story of Alexander Hamilton knows that he's, like, I mean, a lot of the founding fathers were geniuses, and yet our society is run by people who couldn't hack it in the business world and were MBAs and then went into government, or were JDs, basically lawyers, who wanted to rule over us.
us like that's our society now and we were pushing back against that and it's fantastic i hope it continues i hope it spreads to other countries like i mean it's it's remarkable to me just how many people at god news uh...
you know how many people send us out at god news or researcher who are australians who are kiwis uh...
more part of this like larger anglosphere who are swedes It really makes you feel like you're actually a part of real globalism, not this fake, turn us all into multicultural mush, but where we can actually share ideas and actually make the world a better place.
Now, let's talk briefly about sort of predictions for 2017.
I'll just go out on a tiny limb here.
One of my favorite quotes that helps me plan ahead is that old thing which says, they say to the rich guy, how did you become bankrupt?
And he said, very slowly and then very quickly.
And that's sort of like you think of a satellite kind of falling its way to earth, you know, it's a high atmosphere, it just gets a little warm and then suddenly, boom, you know, it breaks into a thousand fragments.
I have some sort of inkling or intuition that this is the path for the mainstream media, which I view as the biggest block to rational conversation in the world.
You know, it's like trying to do, like having the mainstream media around is like trying to work on a math problem with people screaming random numbers into your ear You can't concentrate, you can't make them go away, and you can't get done what you need to get done.
And so this massive straw man verbal abuse that goes on with the mainstream media I think is going to really fall out of favor, and I think 2017 is going to see significant collapse of mainstream media, not just in terms of credibility, which I think is already happening with Mauritian narrative, But also with the income and so on, it's going to be a big change.
No, I think that's right.
I mean, people are not...
I mean, people are just laughing at the media, right?
Like, so Phil Kirpin found out the phishing attack that led to the, you know, at Kirpin, K-E-R-P-E-N on Twitter.
He found the phishing attack that was used to get John Podesta's emails.
These were not Russian hackers.
This was like a...
No, this was like one of these situations.
And the IT... The IT director ended up giving him, you know...
Post Iraq war, opposed Sony claiming to be hacked by North Korea, even though we all know it was insiders.
The FBI knows it's insiders.
That world, it's over.
You just can't fuck with the public anymore.
It's done.
And the thing that's so exciting to me on the prediction side of it is I think the big thing that's going to happen is page views are going to be just one measure among many others.
So I think basically as page views, you know, as people are trying to monetize their content, I think, you know, you are an innovator in this of, like, just have people pay for what they like.
I think that's the right approach.
And I've experimented with all kinds of different ad networks.
Frankly, I don't even really know what kind of ad networks I have right now on the site.
But, like, it doesn't matter, you know, you know, God News is one of the businesses.
But the basic thing that I have, I've kind of I think we're good to go.
too if you produce really good stuff, especially if you educate them.
Because in the grand scheme of things, like $100,000 in debt to a college that didn't really educate you is kind of not that much.
A hundred bucks to the Stefan Wallenu show is not that much.
It's a pretty great differential in terms of actual learning.
So I think what's going to happen is people are going to start spending a lot more money on the internet, particularly as cryptocurrencies increase and as volatility increases worldwide.
People are going to put a lot more of their money into cryptocurrencies internationally, which is going to see spikes, just like we saw with Cyprus back in the day.
And what's going to happen is there's going to be a lot more money online, and that's going to lead to all sorts of interesting new businesses.
So right now, if you think about the last 10 years, they were about laying out the We're good to
to see some of those get pioneered.
I'm excited to be a part of that.
And I hope to launch at least, I think we're going to launch a few verticals, you know, larger researcher verticals, but stay tuned on that.
So it's going to be a fun year.
What do you think is going to happen in the political realm?
I mean, you're more plugged into that than just about anyone I know, and certainly more than me.
But what do you think is going to happen politically in the biggest change candidacy, I think that has ever occurred outside of a direct coup in Western society?
I think the real question is, does the empire strike back or not, right?
To what extent will Trump be co-opted?
Enoch Powell, the great British philosopher and politician, said all political lives end in failure.
We need to not forget that Trump is mortal and he'll be I've known him for, I guess, eight years now.
He'll win most of those fights.
But the lobbyist class And we will have to, you know, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
And we will continue to have to be aggressive.
And we'll occasionally have to fight Trump on things, on dumb ideas that he has.
I mean, he's already the best president we've had in my lifetime.
But, you know, he's still got to be aggressive.
I think the big thing that I think will be really transformational is There's really no such thing as an Obama Democrat.
I mean, what is it?
Basically, spend the debt, institute race war?
These are not winning strategies in the long run, politically.
So what's going to be the Trump Republican brand?
And is there going to be a whole new generation of people who are, you know, Generation Trump or whatever, who then enter politics?
And that, I think, is just a really open question.
And I know, like, all my establishment friends are like, oh, Trump is just a black swan event.
It's back to business as usual if he, you know, if he, you know, after he's gone and we'll just get back to everything as we did and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And no, I think once people like, once the cracks in the Berlin Wall form, like, you're not putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I think the fact that Trump was able to pull this off suggests to all these other people out there who maybe didn't go through the traditional route of governor, senator, whatever, it now suggests that they too could have political power.
So you're just going to see a lot more exciting people come onto the stage I think the big question of the media and the education, you know, the media is collapsing, but what needs to happen next is the education war.
And it's, you know, we're still in an environment in the States, right, where it's $1 trillion in student debt.
I mean, we basically have, we don't call it slavery, but we basically have people Well, it's terrible because they're lied to about the potential of their education.
They come out less intelligent than when they went in.
They have massive debt which they can't discharge through bankruptcy.
It is basically like the endangered servitude that got a lot of people from the old world to the new world.
No, and what, you know, part of like what led to this, you know, in part what led to slavery and what led to the Civil War, right?
I mean, so, yeah, there's some serious problems structurally.
I think it's a good thing.
And I'm not particularly happy about all the Goldman Sachs employees that are finding their way into Trump's administration.
But, you know, in fairness, there are a lot of people who work at Goldman So I'm not totally going to begrudge people there, former employer, but it does make me a little nervous that the suits might be back in town.
But I don't know.
I mean, there's a lot more optimism.
I think the extent to which the meaning and all that has contributed, I mean, it's just going to keep getting turbocharged.
And I think, I mean, when you see the effect of, like, street art, the political discourse, the effect of these You know, these random incidents.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
And the media is doubling down on bullshit.
They have no other tactic.
They're stuck.
And so I'll be very curious to see to what extent Trump goes after the Carlos Slims of the world for basically engaging in human trafficking, for sending Mexicans to the United States and basically taxing their wages as they go back.
Or to what extent he goes after Jeff Bezos, who's essentially running a giant trust online, which we call the Amazon Stores, that's integrated in this really weird way, in which he can basically use a profitless company to go after other in which he can basically use a profitless company to go after
So I'm very curious, like, will Trump go after these tech, you know, will he go after people who are really bad, the Soros's, or will he just sort of let them escape?
And this is very much an open question.
And if we win this election and we fail to safeguard the Internet going forward, it's not going to matter.
And so that's going to be where my focus is.
And I'll say it here, if the settlement with Gawker goes through, I'm going to use some of that money to go after some of these social justice-run companies in a more serious way.
But we've just got to keep pressing on this stuff because it's not going to stop anytime soon.
And thank God for that because this is part of what makes life rewarding is to have fun challenges.
Yeah, I mean, the people on the left are largely dependent upon the power of the state.
So where you and I have other things going on, this is their particular and sole focus.
The parasite is always more focused and dedicated than the host, because the host is going about their business, but the parasite.
So this is, you know, getting Trump in is the beginning.
It's the beginning of the beginning.
A lot of people feel like, oof, done and dusted, you know, we've done our thing.
But getting the general you want elected to head the army does not win you the war.
All it does is give you the chance.
To do that.
So I wanted to say, of course, thanks for your friendship.
Thanks for your participation in this show.
Always have the most fascinating chats.
The world is a more interesting place because of your voice.
And I really, really, really invite people.
No, you know, I'm just...
Order!
I order people, I urge people to go to gotnews.com and wesearcher.com.
I'll put the links to those below.
You can't have a bad day of enlightenment if you wake up listening to Charles and what he's got to say and what his researchers have to say.
And I appreciate your voice in the administration.
I think the world is going to end up a better place.
I appreciate your friendship.
Wanted to say Merry Christmas to you and to your wife and to your baby-to-be.
I can't wait to see what it's going to be like watching you as a father.
It's going to be wild.
I'm watching the Peaceful Parenting stuff.
I highly recommend it.
Thank you for having me.
It's always good to chat.
Let's keep it going.
Let's keep it rolling.
Absolutely.
I'm having a great time.
We've got other countries to make great again.
Thanks, Charles.
It was a great pleasure.
Talk to you soon.
And now we move to our good friend, Lauren Southern.
Now, Lauren is a Christmas aficionado, somebody who is a big fan of Christmas, a Danish background, and of course I think of Christmas as a kind of northern European phenomenon, so you come right from the epicenter of things, and as we sort of continue our conversation about things Christmassy, we wanted to touch base with you, Lauren.
How are you doing?
I guess it's very close to the season.
How is it all coming together for you?
I'm wonderful.
It just came together last minute.
Luckily, I got a 1am flight back home.
My family lives in Vancouver and I'm on the other side of Canada, so I got a 1am flight on Christmas morning.
I'm going to be playing The Terminal that morning, eating ketchup packets and sleeping on chairs in the airport until I can get over to their house.
But It was worth it.
And I don't care if I have to sleep in the airport for two days to see my family on Christmas, because that's what is deeply meaningful to me, is to be with them on the...
Such an important day.
I think I was listening to, when I was looking for flights and looking at the horrible prices in the 1 a.m., I was listening to Frank Sinatra's I'll Be Home for Christmas, and I was like, I have to find a flight or I'm going to cry.
Don't make me hitchhike.
And just for those who don't know Canada's geography, B.C. is, most people think, of course, Canada, you get the white Christmas and so on.
B.C., you get the damp Christmas, occasionally the foggy Christmas.
It's basically a British Christmas.
So all the people who left England or Wales, I guess, or Central Ireland who wanted the similar kind of climate went over to BC.
Even if I remember rightly out in Victoria, there's a newspaper called The Times Colonist, which should give you some sense of how old school it is.
So you grew up in BC, right?
What was a BC Christmas like growing up?
Well, I grew up in a...
What would I say?
I was born in the countryside growing up, and lots of snow, lots of trees, lots of Frank Sinatra.
Very nuclear family-esque.
I don't have any crazy stories of how I lived in the ghetto and had to fight for Christmas gifts or anything.
No, I had a pretty traditional Christmas life, and I love that.
I love that.
I wouldn't change a damn thing.
I think traditional Christmas is such an important thing.
No matter, like, we've got so many different cultures in Canada, and luckily Christmas is one of those things that a lot of people have assimilated to.
I mean, unfortunately they want to assimilate to the language and all these other things, but a lot of people are assimilating to Christmas, and that makes me happy.
Yes.
enjoy the Christmas traditions.
The music is staggeringly beautiful.
And the frivolousness of all the gifts, like the moment I get a utilitarian gift for Christmas, the first moment, the first day I got a utilitarian gift for Christmas, I knew childhood was over and it was going to be like socks and underpants from here on in.
But that aspect of things, the sort of frivolity and the fun, when you are going home for Christmas, do you have the extended family?
Are there going to be kids around?
Because, you know, that is a pretty essential part, I think, of the Christmas experience for a lot of people.
Oh yeah, I have younger cousins and a bigger family out on that coast, so it'll be nice It's going to be a little hectic, but you're right, that's part of it.
Even if you do have to have one evening where you have an extra glass of wine because there's so much screaming, it's nice.
It's part of the process.
And then you get the relaxing morning the next day drinking hot chocolate and listening to Nat King Cole.
Do you have any family members who still can't quite figure out what you do on the internet or on media or anything like that?
Not necessarily even that they disagree.
You speak on the internet.
Can you do that?
Do the people really follow it?
Is it understood what you're up to?
I think my family mostly gets it.
I have an aunt, too.
I love her to death, but we are not Facebook friends anymore because she's very, very liberal.
My political spectrum of my family is all over the freaking place, and it's wonderful.
I'm far more abrasive than my father.
My father is right-wing, but even when I was younger, he always just...
When I'd come home and I'd say something ridiculous that I had learned in school, like, Dad, I think that native culture, we need to go back to curing people with voodoo and smoke because that's the right thing to do in Canada.
And in fact, being primitive was superior.
I'd come home and I'd say something.
I remember this exact conversation.
And he's like, but why?
He'd just question.
He'd ask me to go further.
But what about people who died of all these diseases, though, Lauren?
Explain this.
He was always very kind when he questioned me, whereas I'm very abrasive, so the dinner table is a lot of my dad agreeing with me, but also telling me to tone it down so we don't piss off the family and not get invited next Christmas.
Do you have hand signals?
Like, is it something subtle?
Yeah, something subtle like that.
Oh, oh, I'm having a heart attack.
Stop the conversation.
And is there any sort of real tension?
Or do people just sort of debate in an abstract way and it's not like, you know, forks and knives don't come out in threatening gestures?
It's hard to get mad when there's so much good food around.
I don't think I know anyone that can be angry when there's turkey and cake and wine.
It's...
Almost impossible.
And those northern European climates, you know, I think the basic idea is, well, it's December.
We're going to be seeing a lot of each other over the next few months because nobody wants to go outside except maybe to get firewood and drag down a caribou or something.
And so, you know, this idea, like, let's give gifts, let's have great food, let's tell each other how much we care about each other, because, you know, we're basically in a space station for the next couple of months, and you can't go anywhere.
And I sort of, I've always thought about that.
It's a wonderful way to start this sort of historical confinement, particularly on farms, you know, there really wasn't that much to do in the winters.
I think that's something that's really important for people to remember.
You know, we do have our differences and I've certainly been part of stoking people's differences in the past.
And I think some of that is legitimate.
But I do think that Christmas is just one of those times where, you know, the peace on earth, the goodwill to all men, asterisk, you know, including socialists, maybe just for one day, I think is an important thing for people to remember that the sort of peace on earth, goodwill to all can be part of the ritual, even if there are some significant political differences.
Absolutely.
It's the only holiday that I've really got that my parents remembered my Danish history, too.
We make something called lefse and satsuppa around Christmas.
It's just little Danish snack things that we have, and that was all I really had.
I've learned a lot more about it recently, talking to my family, learning about our history, but I thought that was kind of cool that it was the one holiday that kind of kept one tradition going on for a long time.
Now, 2016.
Good for you.
Good for just about everyone we've had on this show.
I'm sure this show isn't the only reason.
But what do you see coming up for you and also for the bigger movement, I guess you could say, in 2017?
Let's put our prognostication hat on and see how we do.
Well, what do I see for the bigger movement?
Alright, well, I'm focused on Canada right now.
You should be too.
You're a Canadian.
You owe Canada.
We have to save us because Europe is, at least the UK, they're going on the right trajectory.
America saved their asses and now Canada.
We've got the conservative leadership race coming up.
We've got Trudeau in office.
He has got to go and we've got to join the rest of society, of civilized society that wants to save the West since we were One of the first people to start ruining it with Trudeau's state multiculturalism in the 70s.
So it's our duty to come back as well.
How did he win, Lauren?
I mean, is it just the name?
Is it the prettiness?
Is it the sit-ups?
Is it like, what is it?
What is it?
He's the kid.
He's like a drama teacher.
He was a snowboard instructor.
What is going on?
If he were bald, he would not have won that election.
I I'm just saying right now.
No, it's not just the hair.
It's good hair, too.
You know, because there are guys who've got that kind of mop or whatever, right?
I mean, to me, it's like commit one way or the other.
Have the hair or don't have the hair.
That, to me, is the way to go.
But it's really nice hair.
It's, you know, it's tously.
It's floppy.
It's not quite Hugh Grant glossy, but it's a nice, nice head of hair.
Now, do you think it would be bad to prompt people to, like, maybe prankingly shave Trudeau's head?
Is that illegal to shave someone's hair?
I think if it's the source of their political power, if he's Samson and it's the source of his political power, then I think you're taking away the ring from Gollum, and I think that's considered to be a violation of the non-aggression principle.
But he's not doing hugely well these days.
I think the Castro thing did not go so.
Once you get memed, and a lot of the older people don't understand this, which is why Hillary's, you know, Crypt Keeper cadaver stack of advisors are like, I don't know why we lost.
There was a frog.
What happened?
But I think once you get memed, That's tough.
That's because every time things come up, right?
You know, all of these jokes about, you know, well, Pol Pot introduced lots of people to agriculture and so on, right?
I think that...
And there was also another thing I was hearing about recently, just about he's meeting with a lot of people who've paid to see him and Chinese investors and so on, and...
You should really know that that's not really done as the Prime Minister, but that seems to have really escaped him.
You know, maybe the gel drips into the...
I don't know, but it just didn't seem to...
So it seems like he's doing the exact kind of staggering that we would expect.
Now, I know a lot of Americans watch this, but I'm curious.
What is your opinion on the Canadian leadership rights?
I know many Americans are going to be like, what are you talking about?
Canada has politics.
They don't just fight polar bears and then whoever's polar bear wins, they get to leave the country.
No, all we do is open our gates to disaffected liberals fleeing Donald Trump's apocalypse.
Well, you know, I... I have voted conservative in the past, and there were certain things about Stephen Harper that I appreciated.
I appreciated that when he wanted Middle Eastern migrants, he focused just a smidge on Christians.
I think, arguably, a Christian country can accept Christians a little bit more easily when it comes to that.
I think that his fiscal leadership managed to steer Canada through the 2007-2008 recession very well.
You know, because people say in the U.S., well, you know, there were all these regulatory problems.
You know, they allowed the investment and other real estate aspects of banks to get together and all of that.
And, well, the same thing is true in Canada, but I think there was that sail through.
And he did inherit some pretty good stuff.
You know, only Nixon goes to China, and it was the liberals in the 90s who really began to cut back on government and cut welfare like 30% and closed entire government departments, and nobody could scream at them because they were the liberals.
I don't think that's going to be happening with Trudeau.
So I think the NDP to me has always been a complete, like, how can this be a serious candidacy outside of Whoville?
But the liberals are, to me, they just keep sliding.
The liberals when I was your age?
Different kettle of fish, different philosophies than the conservatives for sure, but still reason and evidence-based.
But this massive infection of this truly helium-based social Marxist justice warrior crap has just like cut the moors of the Western mind free of any historical dedication to reason and evidence.
You know, they keep drifting leftwards, and they're trying to drag the right with them, but I think now the right...
They've done a good job.
Yeah, they've done a fantastic job.
In Canada.
Yeah, the right is seeing, you know, okay, we're now three minutes from the end of Thelma and Louise.
I want to get out of the car.
I want to get out of the car!
So I think that there is that pullback, and I certainly am going to start getting more involved in Canadian politics.
I got a little sucked into the Trump thing, as you may have...
Look into Maxime Bernier.
He's got some pretty small government.
He's really good on paper for small government.
I think a lot of libertarians are leaning towards him, and he has a real shot at the conservative leadership.
He needs to work on his English a little bit.
I do think, well, I mean, you're in Toronto more than I am, and that is, you know, to some degree.
It's not the capital, that's Ottawa, but of course the epicenter of a lot of political thought in Canada.
My sense is that there's a lot of hidden conservatism, just as there was with Trump.
There's a lot of hidden conservatism in Canada.
But people don't like putting their heads up much because, you know, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
It's a tall poppy that gets cut off with a Japanese sword.
So I think that there's a lot of frustration with the way things are going.
There's a lot of anxiety about the future, and there's a lot of love for smaller government and less of this hysterical snowflake social justice warrior stuff.
I think if they can find the right leader to manifest that, who's going to march unafraid into the whirling blades of disastrous Canadian horrible media nonsense, I think if they can find the right leader, I think that's going to...
We do have the potential, and maybe it'll be this guy, maybe it'll be some other man, some other woman.
But I think if they can get the right leader in Canada, if we can get the right leader in Canada, I think enormous strides could be made.
But where our Farage is?
Where our, I don't know who you could call it, where our Trump is?
We're waiting.
Yeah, or even Thatcher.
It'll be a Christmas miracle.
Yeah.
But I think whoever is out there, you know, if you're listening to this, and you might be that person.
You might be very surprised.
I mean, you will, of course, face a lot of hostility, naturally, because the powers that be don't want to give up their ring of power.
But I think whoever's out there who's thinking about this kind of stuff, I think would be enormously surprised at the amount of groundswell of support that will occur.
And it won't show up in polls, and it won't show up in the media.
Lord, the last place it'll show up is in the media.
It might show up a little bit on the intranet.
But people are self-censoring on the internet a lot these days.
I mean, you know, Google is hitting out at people, Facebook is hitting out at people, Twitter is hitting out at people, YouTube to some degree.
People are self-censoring a lot, so it's really hard to see all of the conservatism and small government thinking that's out there, but I really, really do believe that it's out there, and whoever grabs that is going to be able to do remarkable things.
Rebel Media is one of the, we are one of the only media companies in Canada right now that isn't dying.
You look at Post Media, you look at McLean's, you look at Vice, all of these very left-wing Canadian sites, they are cut in staff, cut in staff, cut in staff because no one wants their clickbait anymore.
No one wants that.
The only reason the CBC survives is because it's Government funded.
It's, yeah, certainly, but people are quiet.
They don't want to lose their jobs.
But they'll vote because no one can see that.
I will occasionally turn on the car and let's just say some previous occupant has tuned to CBC. I can't listen to it that much.
Man, it's hypnotic.
You know, it's so mellow.
You know, hi, this is so-and-so from the CBC. Trust in me.
I feel like I'm in the Jungle Book.
It's like, can you people break cadence a tiny bit, a little bit of vocal animation?
Are you literally doing this in quaaludes in an isolation tank?
I mean, is there any way to break this?
Hi, this is so-and-so from the CBC, and today we've got a...
It's treacle.
Maple syrup is coming out of my car speaker and then slipping all over it.
My boss just had the best interview with them the other day.
We had a rally for people that were against the carbon tax in Alberta.
Oh, this is Ezra?
Yeah, Ezra.
The CBC went and took one of the conservatives that spoke there and paused him on doing a salute...
To make him look like he was a Nazi.
Just ridiculous stuff like that.
They started slandering the rally, saying it was all anti-gay people that wanted to kill journalists.
It was just ridiculous, the slander that came out.
And Ezra was doing an interview on the CBC, and they were asking about it.
And I just hear him at the back of the room yelling, you're lying, you're lying, you're lying.
And then the last one, I think he told us after, he's like, they told me, Ezra, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show.
And he's like, you're lying again!
Bye!
Oh, it's just too funny.
It's true, though.
They just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, and completely get away with it.
And they're baffled that their numbers are dropping, and same with the liberal media that are following suit.
They're baffled that people aren't taking it anymore, that they're tired of it.
But thank God they are, because finally I can have a little bit of optimism and a little less wine.
Well, you know what they say, Sun Tzu from the Art of War, never interrupt your enemy when he's making fundamental mistakes.
So I just hope they double down, and they will.
And it's just sort of picturing how CBC would describe this Nazi salute.
It's like, ah, there he is.
Appears to be given a Roman salute.
No, no, could be a Nazi salute.
I'm not sure.
Because, you know, it's just got to be hypnotic.
And don't even get me started on McLean's.
McLean's used to be, used to be, to me, somewhat empirical.
And now it's just like, oh, man.
Does it always metastasize this way?
I'm waiting for you to show up with blue hair.
Now, I know that's never going to happen, but...
Yeah, yeah.
What's the meme?
They're always like, this is the paper that broke Watergate, and now they're reporting on how dog costumes are sexist?
A lot of these places have just completely lost their credibility.
It's very, very sad to watch.
Ancient, ancient papers, not ancient, but papers that are hundreds of years old that used to be a pride of communities, just to be completely bastardized by these Completely boring, falling in line journalism students.
They're all the same.
Every journalism student is excruciatingly boring.
Well, and you know exactly what their opinions are going to be on every conceivable topic.
You know what their opinions are going to be on indigenous populations in Canada.
You know what their opinions are going to be on fracking.
And you know what their opinions are going to be on pipelines and trade.
It's so boring.
It's so ridiculous.
How do people...
Well, I think intelligent people crave variety and dumb people crave repetition, and I think that's one of the problems that's happening as well.
But, you know, for me, if the dinosaurs are dying off, let's not have them start experimenting with becoming warm-blooded.
You know, let's just let nature take its course.
You know, the wheel of life will continue.
And the young...
Let the young get strong and the old get weaker is an old door song about that.
So yeah, I think it's going to be a great year and I think it's going to be a pretty pivotal year.
To me, this was the year of positioning and next year is the year of direct action.
So I want to say thanks, of course, for all the work that you're doing.
Thanks for our great conversations.
It's always been a pleasure.
Please, of course, though I've never met your family, wish them a wonderful...
And a happy new year.
And praise them.
Praise them to the skies for the great job of parenting.
If we can get more parents doing that kind of stuff, I think we'll get a free world that much sooner.
Lauren Southern, of course, everyone, thanks so much for your time.
Check out her links below.
Thank you so much.
much.
Always a pleasure.
Hi, everybody.
Now we move on to Bill the Whittle.
It's not just a last name.
It can also be the occupation of your grandfather.
Bill, nice to chat with you.
We are, of course, fast approaching the victory lap of 2016, known as Christmas, for those who were pro-freedom, civilization, liberty, the continuance of Western culture.
So how are you doing this Xmas season?
I'm doing fine.
Turns out I'm engaged.
That's some happy news for me.
Otherwise, I'm not aware that much happened this year.
I know about the engagement thing, but the rest of the year is just kind of a blur.
Did something big happen that I might have missed?
Nothing bigger than you getting engaged.
That's all the world is talking about these days.
And I'm obviously completely thrilled about your engagement.
It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
The only thing I have mild concerns about, Bill, is the degree to which it's going to give the mainstream media fuel to think that Russian connections are closing in on Trump.
That's my only, only issue, that you're handing so much ammo to the enemy.
My fiance is a photographer from Russia.
The nice thing about having somebody from Russia in the family is you get the inside story of what actually happens over there and how they feel about things and some of the things you knew and some of the things you didn't know.
I've always been a big Russophile to some degree.
I think they're certainly an amazing people, great people.
When I first started talking to her, I said, there are elements of Vladimir Putin I admire.
I admire his patriotism and I admire his strength in defending his country.
Eight years of Obama, we don't know what that looks like anymore.
And she said, Putin loves Russia, but he just doesn't like the people.
And I think that's probably about as well put as it could be said, you know.
Well, and of course, the wonderful thing about Russians is that, I mean, there's no point building a wall or having any kind of barriers because their computer techniques are so powerful and so sophisticated.
All they need to do is squirt themselves across the TCP IP wires to get into America.
So there's no need for any, like, because they can actually hack voting machines that aren't even connected to the Internet.
So that level of power is truly astounding.
Has anybody been commenting on the fact that if the Russians did in fact get this information and did in fact leak it, that the most likely place for them to have gotten this information is from Hillary Clinton's unsecure email server?
Has that not dawned on anybody that Hillary Clinton is complaining about cyber security?
Because God knows it's not a big deal if we give away intelligence assets or launch codes or our diplomatic standing or our military posture, and it doesn't really matter if intelligence operatives are going to die, but is this going to affect me politically?
Now all of a sudden we've got a real problem on our hands here.
Well, I don't believe for a moment that Russia did any hacking of the election.
But if they did, if they did, then to me, given that Hillary seemed to be very hot and bothered for a giant war with Russia, shouldn't we give Putin the peace prize for whatever he didn't do with regards to this election?
You know, if it turns out that Putin or WikiLeaks or Assange or whatever released information that they obtained illegally but that was true information, my opinion on this has changed quite a bit since the absence of a news media.
Seven, eight years ago.
Probably longer, really.
But, you know, this is the job of the press, and the press hasn't been doing their job.
So if we're going to get the truth from somebody, let's just get the truth, you know?
And they talk about all these fake news sites, you know, Stefan, all this fake news reporting.
These amateurs out there, you know, basically broadcasting the news very unprofessionally when if the news were broadcasted by professionals, it could be safely suppressed.
And so, yeah, I think they're in a lot of trouble.
Well, Snowden and Putin, I guess, in releasing information that turned out to be true and relevant.
I don't think Putin did, but certainly WikiLeaks was involved in that.
There's just one more example, Bill, of foreigners doing the jobs that Americans just don't want to do, but really should.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So, no, it's been a year of – it's just been an amazing year.
I said before this election, I wouldn't have been surprised if Trump won 50 states.
I wouldn't have been surprised if he lost 50 states.
I just didn't have any idea.
But when it was becoming clear that he was going to win this thing, I just had this really kind of a calm sort of, okay, this is going to make life a lot more interesting.
And since then, the magnitude of it is still not completely sunken into me in terms of the wrench that it threw into the big progressive march to the The thing with the Russians, the thing with the recount, the thing with the emails, all of it, is an attempt to delegitimize Trump before he even takes office.
The constant harping about the two million popular votes.
It's all designed to make him look like he's not a legitimate president.
And I think Trump's done more in four weeks than Barack Obama's done in eight years for this country, and it's been an amazing thing to watch.
Well, this really helps me rethink the Obama presidency, because when you look at the phone calls that Trump has been making, getting people to invest in America, preventing companies, or at least encouraging them to not leave America, IBM just saying they're going to invest in 25,000 new jobs, the stock market going through the roof, it makes me think of one thing and one thing only, that I think the American government should have really chipped in to buy Obama a phone.
I think if he'd had a phone, then he would have been able to make these calls.
Now, I know that they got him golf clubs.
I know they got him lots of tickets to Hawaii.
I know that they spent more than $100 million flying his family around on vacation spots.
You know, you can go down to your local store, you pick up a phone for $20.
You know, maybe they just, you know, after the $100 million, they thought, well, the extra $20 for him to make a phone call and actually do something to help the country, that's just a bridge too far.
Since they're handing out Obama phones, you think Obama can have gotten them.
And by the way, one of the most remarkable things that I hadn't really considered before, needless to say, I was not pleased with all these executive orders, and executive order is just an unconstitutional way to circumvent Congress.
It's just plain dictatorship.
It's all there is to it.
But now I realize that executive orders are legislation written in pencil, and they can be erased very quickly.
If they go in very easily, they can be erased very easily.
I'd like to see them eliminated completely, obviously.
But Donald Trump could come in and say, I'm issuing the executive order that will void all executive orders of the Obama administration, and it's all gone.
What's that great line from Blade Runner?
These orders are like tears in the rain.
Tears in the rain, exactly.
Watercolors left in the backyard.
Now, go ahead.
I'm just going to say, I think the thing that's going to surprise us the most in a year or two is how totally the Obama legacy has just disappeared.
We're going to look at it as like some time where we've been hit on the head or maybe we've been injected with a tranquilizer dart in the neck and that we wandered around for eight years and we didn't do anything and things got worse and There's nothing left of his legacy.
The only thing he did actually was Obamacare, and that's disintegrating under the weight of its own ridiculousness.
All right.
So Christmas, what is it for you?
Does it have a sort of special magical time?
I mean, some of the people I'm talking to say, well, you kind of need kids to the mix.
I didn't really find that to be the case.
I think it's one of the most beautiful times of the year, not just because it gives me an excuse to stay indoors in Canada and eat fruitcake.
But also for, you know, connectivity, for sharing great times with loved ones, and for slowing life down, you know.
This last year and a half in particular has sort of felt like I'm a human cannonball combined with a pinball machine, you know, just get shot out of bed every day, bounce around like crazy, and end up collapsed back in my mattress at sort of 2 a.m., So slowing things down, really reconnecting with loved ones, with friends, with family, and so on, that's always been a wonderful part of Christmas for me.
And the wonderful idea of goodwill, peace on earth, and all of the larger abstract goals that we work for in our minuscule ways, but sometimes can lose sight.
In the detritus of the everyday, we can lose sight of the big goals.
And Christmas sort of helps remind me of that.
What is it like for you, I guess now that you're a...
A fiancé of someone.
What has Christmas meant for you and what do you think it's going to mean for you going forward?
Well, previously this slowdown that you're talking about was something I always look forward to and every year I would tell myself during the Christmas break I'm going to get that next screenplay written.
I'm going to spend the two weeks and do nothing but catch up on the writing and get completely caught up.
And the next thing I know, it's like, oh look, a WKRP in Cincinnati marathon.
I think I might have to watch this all the way to the ground.
And the next thing you know, it's January 3rd.
This has obviously been the best Christmas I've had since I was a kid, maybe the best Christmas ever.
I know this is one of these old wax nostalgic kind of things, but I do constantly feel terrible how badly these younger generations are ripping themselves off on so many things.
And I just happen to be lucky enough to have grown up in the golden age of toys.
I mean, the toys at Christmas For me, were just magical.
They had to be done mechanically.
Just very quickly, the best thing I ever got for Christmas ever was called Johnny Astro, because I was a big space kid, you know, into the whole astronaut thing and the fighter pilot thing.
Johnny Astro was basically a platform with a joystick, and the joystick was connected to a fan, and the fan was shaped like a radar dish.
And you would blow air at this balloon with a little landing pad.
You'd blow air on this balloon, and if you did anything even normally, it just blowed the balloon away.
If you put the air directly over the balloon, Bernoulli's principle creates a little bit of vacuum out there and you could lift this balloon off and fly it around the damn room, for real.
I just couldn't believe how cool that was.
It just doesn't seem like there's that much of it.
I don't think today that there's nearly the kind of friendships that you just talked about a few moments ago.
You know, getting together with loved ones and old friends and people who have been there for you at 4 o'clock in the morning.
I feel so sorry for the connections that people are not making today, and I think we're going to pay for this in a big way.
But yeah, this has been an amazing Christmas for me, and obviously the engagement is a big deal, but the Trump thing is just a gift that keeps on giving.
Every day I wake up, and I think, oh my God!
Look at them wailing and crying.
That's probably not very Christian or Christmassy of me, but it is the truth.
It's very satisfying to watch them talk about things like secession now, which I think is good for the country.
Let's have that conversation.
Well, you know, I think it's all right sometimes to hide a few teeth of your enemies in the tinsel that goes on your Christmas tree.
That's funny, those physical toys.
I remember, I guess, two lessons from Christmas.
Number one was getting on Santa's lap and getting a periscope.
You know, no, no, not the modern one with the webcam, but the old one.
Perfect.
Two mirrors, baby.
The magical ability to see around corners.
I am a wizard.
I am a god among men.
And the third thing I did was I tried to see what wonders I could visualize inside a cup of milk.
I don't know what I thought.
Milky Way?
I thought I'd see atoms or something like that.
What I did was wonderfully fog up my periscope for the rest.
So curiosity can be a dangerous thing sometimes that leads you the wrong way.
I had a very simple periscope with just two flat mirrors, and I would hide underneath the car's door, and I'd have the periscope up over the window, and I felt like, you know, you feel like you can see everybody and no one can see you.
I figured the next one would just allow me to see through time.
And the other one, you're a flight guy.
And so the other one was you got this like cheesy aircraft carrier, a long string and a plane with hooks on it.
And you had to sort of tie it to a handle and it would fly down the string and you had to try and land it on the aircraft carrier without shattering it into a million pieces, which was usually the fourth thing that happened.
So you really had to be careful of your toys, you know, because they could break pretty easily.
Well that's what they're going to be training on if these budget cuts continue, but I get the feeling that with Trump in office these things are going to improve.
I think actually of all the things that, I know this sounds like I'm trying to squeeze this into it, but in terms of the things that I'm grateful for at Christmas as a Christmas present, I think Mattis by far is the best Christmas present I've ever gotten.
The main damage that Obama has done to the military in the last eight years has not been to defund it.
It's been to create policies that cause honorable warfighters to leave.
That the warrior culture has to now deal with things like you have to inspect your men for tattoos that might be found objectionable to the trans community here in Air Force Base.
And to a point, a guy like Mattis is as clear a signal as you can get that, no, we're serious about getting back into this game.
And I just feel a lot better about that.
We've had a bunch of soldiers calling in, both current and ex, who've decried the political correctness in the military.
And that, of course, is the last place you'd ever want it.
I just want mean people doing stuff that is terrible to the enemies of civilization.
He's the guy who said about, I think it was in Iraq, he said, you know, be professional, be courteous, and have a plan to kill absolutely everyone you meet.
And this is not to split hairs with you, but this is exactly what I like about Mattis.
He's not a mean person who wants to go out there, is prepared to go out there and kill everybody.
He's a nice person who's prepared to go out there and kill everybody.
He basically said, when he was negotiating with some Iraqi leaders, they had a bunch of the elders in this room, and he came in, this is almost a direct quote, and he says, I come in peace, I didn't bring any artillery, I want to solve this problem with you, but I'm begging you, I'm begging you with tears in my eyes, Don't fuck with me because I'll kill every single one of you.
And to liberal heads, it's like, what?
But to people that live in a power-based society, like most of these Islamic societies are, that's a very clear message.
They completely understand how it works now.
My favorite quote is just a meme that's attributed to him.
I don't actually believe he said it, but you know, that's an old thing.
You should always carry a fork with you in case someone has cheesecake and you want some.
His reframing of this was, you should always carry a fork with you in case someone has cheesecake, then you can stab them in the throat and have some cheesecake.
He is a powerful personality, and anybody who looks like he needs that much sleep has obviously had a very, very busy life.
So, yeah, there is a lot to be grateful for.
This pause that we've been given in the slow death march of Western civilization is something that, you know, there's a temptation to sort of relax.
Ah, we've won.
It's like, no, no, no, we just have begun.
We've gained access to the battlefield.
Now we actually need to go out and win.
It's a reprieve and not a pardon, is how I put it.
And yes, the fact is that every day more and more kids call themselves socialists and this top of the bell curve of this politically correct, indoctrinated group of so-called children, these SJWs, this is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on.
And we've got to get in there and grow new crops of conservatives.
In two years, really.
And that means going after 16, 17, 18-year-olds who are going to vote the first time in 2018 or 2020 and get them before they're completely indoctrinated.
And that's certainly where I'm going to be taking my work in the years to come.
My wish list for 2017 is for the complete revamping of the media, which, of course, we're participating in by drawing as many eyeballs as we can from the mainstream hate and fear and falsehood factories.
But a reshaping of media and a complete reshaping of academia because, you know, I like to dream big.
And, of course, a lot of this can happen.
You know, eyeballs move away from the mainstream media.
Their revenue collapses.
They either reform or go extinct.
And when it comes to the academia...
Well, if you stop federally funding all of these massive and bloated bureaucracies and stop giving all these loans to students so that they can go in and pay to come out dumber than we went in, but with $100,000 of debt that they can't even discharge through bankruptcy...
There's a lot that can be changed that way.
And to me, Trump has always been a great methodology for getting those things into place.
And what is your wish list for 2017?
Like when we have this conversation a year from now, what are you going to look back and say, yay, yay, yay, tick, tick, tick?
The Trump win to me is the triumph of Trump.
The individual over the media, over the news media.
Andrew Breitbart, I knew pretty well, and he said, the enemy is the media, always.
If there was a news media, we wouldn't have Obama.
We wouldn't have Hillary Clinton if there was an active news media.
So the fact that he won is great.
He's been tweeting stuff directly to the American people.
White House correspondents say it's the end of democracy.
I say it's the end of White House correspondents.
And that's nothing but good news.
As far as the academia goes, though Trump win has emboldened, I've worked a lot with conservative Republicans, CRs and Young Americans for Freedom and Turning Point USA, there's a lot of brave conservative kids out there.
Libertarian kids who had always had to keep their heads down and were just vilified.
But this Trump one has given them a great deal of courage and hope.
My personal feeling, Stephan, is that we should start suing these universities.
If I enroll my son in an engineering class, let's say, or a biology class or whatever, and he gets a recording of that professor spending 20 minutes of that hour You know, bitching about Donald Trump, then I think I've got a right to sue that school for fraud.
I didn't send him there to be indoctrinated.
He's supposed to be a biology class.
What are we talking politics for?
I think if you do that a couple times, the word will get out to the universities that this is legal exposure for us and you need to tone it down or get rid of it.
And I just say, record him and sue him.
Well, that is a fascinating thing because there's also I've had people call in saying, you know, I went to school for engineering, but they're forcing me to take this social justice warrior crap.
And that is also to me, I just want to know how to build a bridge.
I just want to know how to build something that doesn't fall down.
I don't want to hear about the patriarchy and white cisgender scum privilege.
That is not going to help me to build a bridge.
And the fact that all of these indoctrination courses are trying to sort of piggyback on legitimate fact, reality and math based classes just again shows the extent of the parasitism on legitimate disciplines.
That's exactly right.
So I think it's an incredible opportunity.
The question will be whether or not we take advantage of it, and it really means whether or not people will put money into it.
I mean, it's just that simple.
We watched George Soros just as an example.
Forget about Zuckerberg and Gates and all the rest, but you know, they're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into this indoctrination every year.
It's billions of dollars now.
And I don't know why it seems to be so hard to convince conservatives that this is something that is just an investment.
Well, where's our return?
There's no financial return, but the return is this.
If we win this fight, you may get to keep some of your money.
And if we lose it, you're going to lose all your money.
So the ability for people to step up and realize that this second American Revolution is not about bullets and battleships.
It's a war of images and ideas.
And that's where the fight is.
It's the fight of the narrative.
There's not going to be a civil war the way we think about the civil war.
There is a civil war going on right now.
And you and I happen to be soldiers in that war.
But we need some ammo.
Well, the civil part is not brother against brother.
The civil part is that it remains largely A war of words.
Now, some of those words can be ugly and smeary and vicious and so on, but, you know, it's the old thing from childhood, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.
And as long as we can keep it in the realm of ideas, and now we have this platform to get through to the world without gatekeepers, without filters, without manipulation, without approval, I think that we'll win the civil war by keeping it civil and keeping it away from violence.
It's a war of narratives.
It's a war of two stories.
It's the progressive story of America and the world, and it's the conservative libertarian story of America and the world.
And maybe just a fun thing to close on in terms of kind thoughts, being engaged to somebody who comes from Russia, when we went and watched the first debates, and when Donald Trump was starting to score points on Hillary Clinton, we were just cheering like it was a football game.
She was amazed, because there is no politics in her country.
It doesn't matter whether you're – there's no parties in your country.
You just do what Putin says.
And then as we got close to the election and it looked like Trump was really down, I said, I don't know if he's going to be able to do this, honey.
And she said, oh, you're so pure and you're so idealistic and nice and everything, but you can't beat money and you can't beat power.
These things exist outside of your control.
They're outside of anybody's control.
And the night the election came in and she began to realize that actual individual citizens could actually stand up and stop these swine, just actually pull it off and do it.
It was amazing to her.
And I'd be embarrassed to tell you that it was quite a bit amazing to me, too.
I'd written a, now it's time we're really getting serious kind of a speech, but it was an amazing, remarkable, astonishing thing that happened.
And with the Brexit and with Italy and everything else now, I do get the chance, the feeling that we are really starting to start a counterattack against these bastards.
I hope this election was midway or Stalingrad.
It's not the end, but it might be the beginning of the end.
Yeah, and I mean, it's fascinating to see what happens to these seemingly omnipotent bullies when the right starts to punch back, you know, and gains the confidence.
You know, the Trump thing, I recorded a song for the Trump victory and, you know, a bunch of people emailed me and said, well, what did you record if he lost?
It's like, I didn't.
Why would I? I'm just going to take this time to really go and get down to the grassroots and start teaching people what this country is about,
reintroducing Americans to America.
That's the job, I think.
Yeah.
2017, the slogan for me is, Activism, now with added hope.
And so that, to me, I think is a wonderful place to sit.
I wanted to wish you and your bride-to-be, your family, your friends, and everything that you stand for a very, very...
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Thank you for your friendship.
Thank you for your participation in the show.
It's been a great pleasure having these conversations.
I look forward to more of them in 2017.
Absolutely.
And I would just like to add to that, in addition to congratulations and best wishes to everybody on your staff, I'd like to add to that that this was a very difficult election for conservatives, that there was a tremendous amount of animosity between these two sides.
And Reflecting the truth about this is what civilized, rational people can do.
We're on the same team.
We had disagreements about certain things, but that's behind us now.
Now it's time for us to really, really run these communist bastards into the river.
And that would be my New Year wish for 2017.
I'm sure you can find that sentiment at a Hallmark card store near you.
Thanks a lot, Bill.
Please, everyone, go and check out Bill's work at the aptly named BillWhittle, W-H-I-T-T-L-E, BillWhittle.com, and on YouTube.com slash BillWhittle channel.
We will, of course, put the links to that below.
Thanks again, Mr.
Whittle.
Always a great pleasure, and Merry Christmas again.
You too, Mr.
Manuel.
You too.
You too.
Take care.
Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Waller from Freedom Aid Radio here, joining us in our Christmas festivities.
Ben Garrison, cartoonist, meme maker extraordinaire, one of the high acolytes of perhaps Pepe or Keck or something like that.
You can, of course, find his wonderful work at grr.com.
Graphics.com.
We'll put a link to that below.
He also has a Patreon account, which you can check out as well.
We're having him on because he's one of the very few cartoonists in the entire planet who's mastered the difficult art of drawing my hair.
Ben, great to have you with us.
How are you doing today?
Hi, Stevan.
Greetings from Montana.
So, how has 2016 been for you?
I mean, I see your stuff pop up everywhere.
It's shareability, the artistic content, the humor, the grabability, the little details, like after Hillary fell in the van, all of your cartoons had one of her shoes off.
Just nice little details, very shareable, very compelling, very funny.
Has this been a fairly big year for you in terms of exposure?
Well, it has.
It's been a turnaround year, and...
Last year, about this time, we came to Loggerheads.
My wife and I got together and said, either we're going to stop doing the cartoons or we're going to do them right.
We're going to do more of them.
Well, we decided to do more of them.
And so 2016, our goal was to, well, essentially try to make a living from the cartoons.
And that's an extremely difficult thing to do.
And so, but we succeeded.
And November was our best month.
And we succeeded.
We couldn't have done it without all the Patreon members and our supporters, and people who bought prints in the original cartoons, and so it's been great.
And this is the first year that I've actually made money on cartoons, and because all the other years I did them, about five years before that, they cost me money, and it cost me a lot of grief, too.
It caused me a lot of grief and lost commercial work, because My cartoons weren't politically correct, and HR departments are filled with social justice warriors these days, and they're not going to hire somebody like me who's controversial.
So I was almost like forced, almost dragged, kicking and screaming, hey, you've got to make your life's dream of becoming a cartoonist.
You have to do it!
So I did it.
And it's funny because this has been called the meme election or the elections, meme warfare.
And because your cartoons are so fantastic and so shareable and so immediately recognizable, both to those sort of in the know, but also those who just follow politics as a whole, do you feel or did you feel the momentum of the sort of meme wars building as you were doing your cartoons this year?
Well, I did.
and it's also the momentum was shifting toward alternative media it's it's it's it started out well if you look at newspaper cartoonists for example there are like a hundred hundred top hundred newspapers in America All of them supported Hillary.
Now, all the editorial cartoonists tend to be liberal, and the few that are conservative, even they were more status quo establishment cartoonists who didn't like Trump.
And I was like Besides a man named Bronco, I was like the only one drawing pro-Trump cartoons.
So I stood out.
And I caught a lot of flack for that, too, because I'm standing out like a nail and they want to hammer me down.
But the more I did them, the more momentum that we got.
And lo and behold, I'd never been published in a newspaper.
My cartoons would not be published in any kind of mainstream media or newspaper.
But we're able to stand out on our own as a citizen muckraker, as someone who...
You know, sees the Republic in dire straits, and I want to, as a citizen muckraker, point out the problems via my cartoons and hope that other people will see them and be inspired to also speak out against the corruption and the rigging that was taking place.
So we really gathered a lot of momentum, and the cartoons were more of a success than I even had imagined.
So it was very satisfying.
After the years of All the trials and tribulations and running through, you know, circles of hell.
I finally made it a success and it's been very gratifying and I can't thank all my supporters enough for helping my cause.
Ben, how far back does the dream of being a cartoonist, were you like the doodling guy as a kid, were you sending away, you're old enough, they had those little, if you can draw Sparky, you know, in the back of the comic books, then you can be an artist.
I mean, how far back does this go for you?
Well, I started cartooning, like, in the fifth grade, and I would, as I was growing up in school, I was one of those kids who would draw caricatures of the teachers, you know, really nasty drawings of the teachers, and pass them around to the other students.
And I would draw my classmates and everything.
That's the only way I hadn't had any kind of acceptance or popularity in school, is because I could draw.
Now after I graduated from college, I started working at a local newspaper and I did draw a few editorial cartoons.
But when I tried to make it into a bigger venue, an editorial cartoonist's job is almost impossible to get.
You have to wait for one of them to die.
They're not going to relinquish their jobs voluntarily.
So I quickly got frustrated.
I got a job working at the San Antonio Express News and I did a few cartoons there.
But the other cartoonists that I talked to, they all didn't think very highly of my work.
They said, the main thing was I wasn't funny enough.
I said, I wasn't funny enough, and I wasn't mean enough.
And I kind of realized in myself that I wasn't, yeah, you're right, I'm not a mean guy.
I don't even enjoy lambasting these politicians.
So I stopped doing them for many, many decades, but in 2008 when the banks got bailed out, that's when I just got very upset.
I was mad.
I've got to do something because voting isn't working.
Writing my congresspeople, that's not working.
They're ignoring us.
Over 90% of Americans did not want this banker bailout thing to pass, and it passed anyway, of course.
So I decided to draw a protest cartoon starting in 2009.
That's how it all began.
I just was happy just to reach a few hundred people, and I never imagined it would have snowballed from there.
So that's the story.
It's like I wanted to be a cartoonist from an early age, but it was like impossible to get the job, and now I'm doing it on my own, and I don't have an editor.
And that's wonderful, because at a newspaper, you always have an editor to...
Make sure that your work is politically correct.
And that's the problem with cartooning and its decline today is that everybody wants to draw mostly like cheap gags and funny.
They think, you know, I'm not a comedian.
But cartoons do not have to be funny to be effective.
Satire isn't necessarily funny.
So satire is designed to evoke an emotional reaction out of the viewer, make them angry.
And I don't want to make people who see my cartoons, I want to make them as angry as I am and say, look, this is what's going on.
This is the justice.
This is the corruption rampant.
You know, we have to start resisting this.
And so that's what my cartoons are doing.
My cartoons aren't designed for a politically correct, cheap child that doesn't really offend anybody.
And it's not memorable.
A cartoon has to be memorable.
So even if I make somebody mad, they're still going to remember that cartoon, and that makes it a success.
Yeah, I mean, every night our emotions crystallize some of our perspectives into dreams that are very vivid and powerful.
And I've always sort of...
Art is kind of like a frozen dream that's supposed to reflect back some of the instincts that you can't verbalize and give you a structure by which you can legitimize the frustration that you're feeling in a corrupt system.
Now, I don't mean to sort of imply, Ben, that you were sort of milking any kind of niche, but at some point your pro-Trump perspective...
You must have realized that there was some significant motivation and momentum behind that.
And also looking to the left and the right, so to speak, you must have also noticed that there really weren't a lot of competitors vying for the same spot because a lot of the cartoonists were like, oh, Trump has funny hair.
Oh, he can be a little orange.
Like, it's really banal and really, really boring.
But the way that you approach things, at what point, was it this year or maybe even last year, at what point did you realize that That you weren't alone in this particular perspective and that there was a huge momentum behind what you were doing.
Well, Trump got my attention when he came out speaking out against political correctness.
Yeah, finally, somebody.
Whereas Jeb was his polar opposite.
Oh, we must love everybody.
We need...
Open hemisphere, let all these poor people in, their family.
Well, if they're family, why doesn't he invite them into his house and let him feed them?
Well, but the point is that Trump finally was able to break the spell, this mind control of political correctness, and it was almost like, you know, that's such a relief.
We don't have to be afraid of being called a racist.
And then if you tune into CNN, that's all it was.
It's just this drumbeat, steady drumbeat of racist, bigot, misogynist, oh, just name-calling over and over.
That's the heart of political correctness.
It's not about debate.
It's about smearing your opponent, and then you don't have to debate him.
So that was one thing that got me on his side fairly early, but also he said some things.
For example, he expressed some interest in auditing the Federal Reserve.
Now, I'm a big Ron Paul supporter, and I supported him in both areas.
And it was obvious how the corrupt Republican establishment stole primaries from him outright, just as Hillary's corrupt DNC stole primaries from Bernie.
So that was going on already, and plus their gross disrespect of people who were really the Republican base, they got smeared as teabaggers, etc., and ignored.
So you have this Democratic elite, and you have this Republican elite, and they're basically the same party, which is the globalist You know, collectivist party.
And so this is not only a Republican...
The Democrats, too, have to start throwing off the yoke of the tyranny that has infested their party.
Now, I don't know if they want to...
I don't really know how that's going to happen.
And, you know, I don't even know the difference between a liberal and progressive.
I keep saying, what's the difference between a liberal and progressive?
And I finally realized, well, it's like, you know...
Global warming wasn't working, so they changed the name to climate change, and so now the liberals had such a bad connotation that they changed it to progressives.
But anyway, so both parties were corrupt.
Both parties at the top were connected to the central banking globalist system, and they wanted Jeb or Hillary.
Well, they didn't get Jeb, did they?
We got Donald Trump, an alpha male who...
spoke his mind and it was very refreshing to have somebody such as that who is a success in business and also a person who understood that both parties were ignoring the people and so that's why he got all the Rust Belt boats too or people are tired of having jobs going overseas and NAFTA and so it was very gratifying to me to see him win even though I have some, you know, market disagreements with him.
I mean, because he still supports the NSA and the NDA and all that garbage.
But he's a man that changes.
He changes his mind when he realizes he's wrong.
So I'm hoping he'll realize he's wrong.
And he really does really want to audit the Federal Reserve, which to me is the heart of darkness.
Our system of money is completely immoral.
And it's based on deceit and trickery.
And it benefits those at the very top who...
And Trump even said this.
He says, why aren't these banks loaning out to entrepreneurs instead of just pocketing them themselves?
That's why the market keeps going up because there's an endless QE and they don't have to lend it out so they put it into their stock market and they get richer.
So we're seeing this grotesque distortion based on a sick and immoral money system and it has to be It has to be taken down, and the first step is audit the Fed.
And I hope Trump does that.
It's not a good sign that he has appointed three Goldman Sachs members, however.
But maybe he did that because they know where the bodies are buried, or they know how to turn the gears.
I'm going to give them a chance.
But if Trump does not come through, I'm going to be one of the first guys to hold his feet to the fire.
Of course, yeah.
And I mean, it's easy, you know, perfection is the art of the spectator, not the doer.
It's not my fault he doesn't do these things.
You know, I did my best because everything he was saying, I said, yeah, that's good.
Yeah, let's do it.
But now he has to come through, and we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
Well, I think we'll more than see.
We'll keep his feet to the fire if he doesn't.
Now, how do you see you've had your breakthrough year in 2016.
You're going to retire to a wonderful Christmas feast, I'm sure, with friends and family, and then look forward to 2017.
So, Ben, what do you see rolling out for you and for what you do and for the movement as a whole in 2017?
Well, what are your hopes for us, and what do you think is going to happen?
Well, I hope I can continue the momentum that we already have.
I mean, I'm going to keep drawing the cartoons as many as I can, and I've got a hardbound book planned so people can see it.
I got an e-book out already, but the hardbound book is preferable so people can see the action.
My cartoons don't translate well into small pixels, so it needs to be in print so you can see all the fine detail.
And so...
You know, I could not have done this without my wife, either, because she is the one who really does a lot of the work, a lot of the mailing, a lot of the marketing.
She makes sure my cartoons get on all the social media branches, and it's like a full-time job for her.
And I could not have done it without her.
I just couldn't.
We're very encouraged, and we just want to keep it going, and I'm going to speak out, and I'm also going to return to drawing more liberal cartoons.
I'm going to return to my roots, too.
It's not going to just...
I concentrated on Trump and anti-Hillary, mostly, for the election.
And it wasn't just Trump.
It was like Hillary was the very face of evil, and she could not get in there, and I was just going to make sure that she got the shellacking she deserved.
So I was really determined to help wake people up What did she have to counter it?
All she had was empty platitudes.
She thought she was just going to get coronated by default.
That attitude was very off-putting to many Americans, too.
It was a success.
I congratulate you, too, and people such as Mike Cernovich and all the other people who were called deplorable by Hillary Clinton.
Right.
So if you're anti-Hillary, Ben, all I hear is that you work for the Russians.
But, you know, I hear they pay well.
So that's, of course, a great positive.
So I wanted to say thanks so much for, of course, all the work that you did to help wake people up in an engaging and funny and moving and powerful way.
You know, there's great emotional power in cartoons.
And I think you've captured that, distilled it and broadcasted it in a way that is very powerful.
I wanted to remind people.
Ben is available for commission.
As I found out privately, he mostly does male nudes.
But you can go to grrgraphics.com.
You can also support him on his Patreon account.
I just wanted to say thanks.
A great pleasure to chat and have yourself a very, very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Ben.
To you and your family, of course.
Thank you very much, and Merry Christmas to you, too.
Merry Christmas to you, too.
Now we turn to our good friend Dave Rubin.
You have heard of him, of course, as a comedian, a TV personality, and the host of The Rubin Report.
First off, thank you for spelling Reuben because, you know, right now, Subway, the sandwich shop or whatever the hell that place is, They're pushing the Reuben right now and it's spelled differently and I think it's been screwing with our algorithm.
It's either that or the CIA. I'm not sure.
As a guy with a silent X at the end of his name, I know that it's very important to get these things spelled out because otherwise people might as well just type with their foreheads and try and find you using carrier pigeons.
Whose idea was the silent X? You know, I've got to think that it's sort of like in Old English, the word plough, you know, like the thing you dig through the earth with, it was pronounced plough, you know, probably because they were trying to out-throat the Germans.
But, you know, so the spelling is, I think, retained.
So I assume at some point, you know, given my French background, Molyneux was Molyneux or something like that, and then they just felt that kind of annoying.
But, you know, you can change the pronunciation.
You don't change the spelling.
That's the only...
The thing that I can understand about this kind of drift, like why is it Christmas with a silent T? Why is it Christmas?
I mean, who's this guy Chris?
What does he matter?
I don't know.
Interesting.
You know, for the record, I have no problem pronouncing your last name because my audience knows I'm a big Golden Girls fan and Blanche Devereaux, but it was spelled Deverox.
So I'm well versed in this.
It's not going to be a problem.
Right.
It's folks' pronunciation.
So, Ruben, Dave, how was your year as a whole?
It was a pretty tumultuous year for you.
Some kind of bridge opened up between the left and the right, and you were kind of like a conduit for a lot of that cross-pollination of ideas, which I certainly appreciate, and I know a lot of other people have appreciated as well.
Was that a new thing for you?
How was the year for you overall?
Yeah, I mean, I can tell you just first at a personal level, this was by far the craziest year of my life.
I mean, without question.
Not just in terms of everything that I was doing professionally, but in the last couple months, I moved, bought a house, built a home studio, the show blew up, you know, just my...
I walk down the street.
People know me now.
That's a difference.
You know what I mean?
Sometimes it's weird and sometimes it's great, but just my whole thing, my whole sort of ethos and existence kind of changed.
I turned 40, so maybe the universe was waiting for me to get a little older, I guess, get out of my 30s.
I would say in terms of the political side, which is obviously the more important side in terms of what I actually care about, something crazy happened in that Trump and Hillary and Bernie and this whole thing and the online media versus the mainstream media and all of the stuff that you talk about, that I talk about, that a bunch of other people in this space talk about, it all came to a head at once.
This election brought together everything at once, the free speech stuff and the social justice stuff.
It was as if you couldn't have written it any better.
This is what we all needed to happen.
Now, we're in a great moment right now where there's a lot of opportunity.
And that's what Scott Adams said, that, you know, after Trump, it's going to present a lot of opportunity.
Now, the question is, which way does it go?
Well, that's what we have to kind of wait and see.
And that's what I've been saying to my audience.
But in terms of the year and sort of where everything's going to go and what happened, I would say that there's a beautiful thing happening right now, which is that if you are an old school liberal, like I consider myself, if you are a classical liberal, which means that the things that you care about most are personal which means that the things that you care about most are personal liberty and choice and free speech
you've suddenly realized, although it's taken a lot of work and I have a lot of work to do still with the left, you've suddenly realized That an old school conservative is actually not your enemy anymore.
So five years ago, we're liberals and conservatives.
We're just fighting about everything.
Now, actually, there's a new center developing.
And I think both of us are sort of in that, not in the exact same political part.
But to me, that's irrelevant, whether we agree on everything or not.
I would prefer not to agree with anyone on everything.
And the point is that if we can get to the tenets of what are most important, Liberty, free speech, individualism, those type of things, which are liberal things.
Every time I say it, people say, wait a minute, you're not a liberal?
No, those are the real liberal things, but the left has confused you.
Progressives have tricked you into thinking those aren't liberal things.
So if we can get to that, there's something beautiful brewing right now.
And I think 2017 is going to be one of the most defining years in American history as to which way our country is going to ultimately go.
Well, that's, of course, the big question.
2016, I think, has poised us for transition.
It hasn't achieved it, of course, right?
I mean, for those who thought that getting Donald Trump into power was sort of the end of the road, it's not.
I mean, in terms of keeping a conversation going about liberties and free speech and what it means to have a self-sustaining national economy, an economy that grows and lifts people out of poverty by creating opportunity rather than just reallocating an ever-shrinking slice of an ever-shrinking pie.
2017 is going to be where the conversation is going to get very intense about what is going on because there was kind of a momentum that was going on that the left and the right were kind of both participating in, which was, you know, let's just keep turning to government to solve more and more problems.
And then those problems didn't usually get solved, but rather got kind of entrenched.
And the idea of turning things over to a sort of vigorous conversation about something that can be changed.
Now, people, I think, gave up on politics because you sort of feel like you're shouting into the wind in a canyon in the middle of nowhere on the dark side of the moon.
But now that there does seem to be some potential for real change, for real alteration of the slowly decaying social contract, I think there's going to be a lot of ferocious, intense, positive, powerful, and...
You could argue civilization-changing conversations that are going to occur in 2017.
I don't think they're going to occur much in the mainstream media, but in venues like yours and mine, I think that's where the lightning's really going to strike.
I absolutely agree.
And that may be the most important piece of what happened this year, is that for a long time, the mainstream media was way ahead of us, right?
We were out here on the frontier of online stuff.
You're really doing it longer than I am, in this space at least.
And they were ahead of us, and we were growing, we were growing.
Then, because we were actually doing good work, and I don't mean just us two, obviously.
There's many, many more people.
But because the online thing started growing, The mainstream was being exposed.
And then it seems to me that literally on election night, we hit parity.
And now we're starting to win, which is why they're pushing everything that they don't say is sanctioned is now fake news, which is utter nonsense.
These are the people that designed fake news.
So the bullshit news is now telling us about fake news.
But as far as the opportunity, you know, think about what's happened just in the last couple of days over at Trump Tower.
And I say this as someone that I did not support I really thoroughly enjoyed our conversation on it, and I said at the end, I said to you, you know, my issue more than anything else is that I don't know where his moral center is, so I have to wait and see what happens, and that's still the position I find myself in.
But I will say this, look at the opportunity that's presenting right now.
Bill Gates was at Trump Tower in the last couple of days, said that after his conversation talking about technology and removing some restrictions and things like that, he thinks that Trump could be the next JFK.
Those are Bill Gates words, not my words.
He was there with Jim Brown, who gave a fabulous talk on why social justice is awful and that you should be judged by the content of your character, not by the color of your skin.
Kanye was there.
You know, he's sitting next to Peter Thiel, who's openly gay at the tech summit in Trump Tower.
So all of this doesn't necessarily mean anything, but to me, it's putting the pieces in place for massive change that could be good.
So if you're just going to scream that he's racist while he's talking to Jim Brown, and you're just going to scream that he's a homophobe while he's talking to Peter Thiel, well, that doesn't work anymore.
And make an argument if you've got one, and that's great, and I love that debate, and I'll sit down with those people gladly.
But at the moment, it seems like it's going all right.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, if we could rise above this horrible, bloody, muddy mess of public, quote, debate that society has degenerated into, I think to some degree is the result of degradations in academic standards and academic rigor and to some degree in sort of just the general I think to some degree is the result of degradations in academic standards and academic rigor and to some degree in sort of
If we could actually sort of say, OK, let's accept the dictum of Socrates that slander is the tool of the loser and say, let's focus on content, let's focus on reason and evidence.
I think that the alternative media has sharpened its teeth in that particular form of combat and has, you know, been working out and limbering up for a couple of years while the mainstream media is, you know, sitting on a couch, slowly gathering Cheetos dust like an orange snowstorm.
And I think that potential is where society has to go.
If there is to be a civilization, we must use words, not swords.
And we have been prevented, I think, from doing that by a lot of the hysteria coming out of academia and the mainstream media, and to a smaller degree, the sort of entertainment industry as a whole.
Yeah, you know, you're hitting a couple great points there, but I think most interesting, the way you describe the mainstream media, that they've just been sitting there getting fat, I think is so on point.
If you look at the people that are moving the dial right now, whether you agree with them or not, again, you know, you take a Milo, you take a Shapiro, you take Crowder, yourself, whoever they are, all of these people, we've all built real audiences because we've talked to the people and listened to them.
The mainstream media, you know, that's the other reason that they're pushing against fake news.
They are so threatened by us right now.
It's crazy.
It's actually crazy.
And I'm here in LA. I have a little insight into meetings with LA people and producers and things.
They know it.
The talent that's on a lot of that cable news, they know they're out the door soon.
They know there's wholesale changes coming.
And that's why we have positioned ourselves so beautifully here.
And the key is now our next threat, I think, is that we have to make sure we stay ahead on the algorithms because they're going to screw around with that.
They're going to screw around with subscriptions and banning people and all of those things.
And I'm not saying it's some grand conspiracy because my favorite quote, as I love to say all the time, Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
So I'm not saying there's a grand conspiracy, but if you generally look at the trends, every time we kind of move up the ranks here, algorithms change.
Someone gets banned.
There's just some other thing that keeps happening.
Now, I don't know.
Is it some coordinated thing?
I don't know.
There's only so much brain power I have to spend on that kind of stuff.
But the point is that they've gotten fat.
Nobody's listening to them anymore.
Nobody cares.
They failed.
Now, there's huge risk also in that All of us, you know, the barrier to entry online is nothing.
Anyone can get in on this.
That's great on one hand.
On the other hand, you've got to really figure out who to trust.
And just because someone puts up a set and puts a desk there doesn't mean they're trustworthy.
And there's many, many examples of that.
So it's becoming more about you personally figuring out how to pilfer some truth through the noise.
And that's a challenge for people.
And I don't know how many people are going to take that, but I think it's our job to keep doing the best we can.
Oh, I love the low barrier to entry.
You know, the more people in the race, the faster I'm going to end up running.
And I just love that.
I mean, that level of competition is absolutely fantastic for me.
And I think one of the things that has come out, and when I watch your interviews and your shows, I think this comes off in spades from you, Dave, is the fact that you are not...
Committed to controlling or manipulating your audience.
You talk about topics that are important to you, but you don't have any kind of hidden agenda.
Or, you know, in the case of the mainstream media, elect Hillary, you know, sort of a not-so-hidden agenda.
And I think that that commitment to bringing the most authentic and important information to the audience, wanting to inform them rather than to control them, I think that's something that people get instinctively.
You know, if someone's talking to you because they want to sell you something, then you know, you kind of know that there's an end goal that's not just about conversation.
I think that level of authenticity and connection is so important from, I guess, what are called still alternative media personalities and so on.
And that, I think, is something that...
And once you get that, it's really tough to go back to what you know is a heavily dogmatized, ideological, and manufactured kind of pseudo-information from the mainstream media.
You know, from my old stand-up days and from the stuff that I've done on cable news when I've done little hits here and there or been on some of these shows, there's a certain type of person...
That you see that they act one way when they're off camera.
The second the camera goes on, they become someone else.
This is exactly who I am.
You didn't tell me what we were going to talk about until we started this and here we go.
I'm just telling you what I think and people can agree or disagree.
My feeling about when I sit down with someone, look at some of the people that I sat down with over the course of the past year.
I saw Mike Cernovich online, for example, and I thought, I didn't know who he was, but I saw this guy who was hitting on some interesting things and people were responding.
And at that time, when I first sat down with him, Trump was still sort of a joke, but he was all about it.
So I thought, all right, let me sit down with this guy.
Let's see what he says.
Now I get hate.
People think I'm a white supremacist because I even sat down with him.
You know, Milo.
Again, a guy I don't, I really, really like Milo.
He's been to my house for dinner.
We've hung out in West Hollywood.
I disagree with him on some stuff.
I think some of his tactics are over the top.
That's fine, but I sat down with him.
At the same time, I sat down with Sam Harris, who's one of my personal heroes, who I credit with my awakening as a free-thinking, logical person, who was a Hillary person, who would disagree with Milo and Cernovich on 99% of stuff.
And all I try to do is sit there, and I hear them.
I'll give you the best example that I can possibly give of that.
Just this week, I had Ben Shapiro on.
Ben is against gay marriage.
I am gay married.
My studio is in my home, which means I invited him into my home where I live with my partner.
And we sat there and he told me what he thought and I said what I thought and it's okay.
It's actually okay.
We don't have to agree on everything.
And the truth is that I actually like Ben.
And I think he likes me.
And...
That's all you have to do.
Of course I have an agenda in that I have thoughts, so my audience knows what my thoughts are, but I don't need to push my agenda on them.
Generally, it seems that I talk to more people along the classical liberal or libertarian side, because I also think those ideas really need strengthening in society.
So I can help push that.
But at the same time, the week before the election, I had Hillary Rosen on, who is a hardcore progressive, was a Hillary campaigner.
And I'm happy to have those conversations.
So yeah, people just want to hear ideas without screaming.
If you want to scream at me now, just for effect, you know, feel free.
Now, what are you going to do for Christmas?
I mean, to me, it's an absolutely beautiful time of year.
I mean, particularly up here in Canada, because we get, you know...
Real, authentic, freeze-your-nuts-off kind of Christmas.
And you're shopping for the tree, putting up the decorations, friends and family, great conversations, great food, great wine.
How do you approach Christmas, and what does it mean to you?
Yeah, well, I love Christmas.
First off, for this particular year, because I've been on such a crazy run that we were talking about, I'm going to do an online shutdown from December 21st is the last interview I'm taping for the year, and I'm going to go dark until the new year, so until January 2nd, basically, which I desperately need.
It's so important for people in our space especially.
This is on constantly.
This thing is here.
No matter how much work we do, there's always more work to do.
There's always something else to say or some other email to respond to.
So I desperately need that shutdown.
I love the fact that it's coming around Christmas, which is not a coincidence.
It's the end of the year.
Because I think generally people are a little better at this time of year.
I think they actually try to find a little good in their common man.
I think whether you look at Christmas from a religious perspective or a secular perspective or a completely anti-theist perspective of just it's a cultural event in this country...
People are a little nicer, I think.
It's a little bit more about food, a little bit more about family.
I'm Jewish, my family's Jewish, but I have only good memories, great memories actually of Christmas because it became a holiday that had nothing to do with religion.
So we'd put the Yuletide thing on and we'd have family over and people would be drinking wine and having food and it was a pleasure.
We'd go to the movies.
I'm pretty sure I saw Spaceballs on Christmas in 19...
89 or so, or 87, something like that.
So I think it's a beautiful way of ending the year, and it's one of these things, I am not offended if someone says Merry Christmas.
It's such an absurd, this is another fake outrage.
No one's trying to offend you when they say Merry Christmas, you know what I mean?
It's just such silliness.
So I love this time of year in general, and I think particularly this year, just because of what's been going on, I'm going to enjoy it doubly.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that it's hard to object to anything that helps, at least for me, my day is sort of like a pig in a trough, you know, eating through the day and doing more slop coming down, eat through the day, eat through the day.
Whatever it is that causes you to pause, to slow down, to remember that there's more to life than work and saving the planet and you get your relationships going and has you look up to some sort of ideal, some sort of improvement in yourself, in your relationships with yourself, with others, with the truth.
Anything that gets you kind of out of like the jackal-like tearing off the meat of the everyday, gets you to look up to the horizon, look up to the skies, look up to something higher and better, I think is really hard to be churlish about.
And that's another thing that I love about Christmas is it really does give us the time to pause and reflect on the stuff that is really important.
You know, I try to make the world a better place because I'm a family man, I got a daughter and all that.
But I don't want to be working to the point where I'm not having as much fun with my daughter.
Christmas is a great time to remember what in life we're doing it all for, if that makes sense.
Absolutely.
And that's why we need these things as a nation.
That's why you need these things.
So again, as I said before, if you're totally secular or even if you're anti-religion or whatever, and I consider myself an atheist, but people can believe whatever they want.
If you believe in something that gives you comfort and you're not hurting anybody, then in my opinion, more power to you.
I know some in the atheist community don't feel the same way, but that's totally fine too.
But the idea that because of this religious thing, we take a little time really as a nation to kind of shut down.
A lot of businesses are closed that week.
And people get to sit at a table, and especially in a year like this.
I'm sure you had something similar, but you know, at Thanksgiving, you know, I love Thanksgiving because it's a true national holiday where we just give thanks for what we have.
And you can sit with family and friends who you agree with, who you disagree with, and the hope is that you can talk about anything, You're going to do it again next year, even if they're a far lefty and you're a far righty.
And that's what we need more of.
So I think this year it's particularly important, and I actually do believe that a lot of people will be viewing it in that manner.
Dialogue is everything.
All our relationships are based on language.
Until we get that Spock mind-belt thing going, all of our relationships are based on language, on a willingness to be honest, and a willingness to listen to other people's perspective.
And it is through that negotiation, of course, that we find out what we have in common with other people striving for.
for a better world.
It's not like everyone on the left is completely opposed to everything on the right.
I mean, everybody wants, you know, a secure country, a reasonable chance of achieving success.
Everyone wants the poor to be taken care of, but not trapped into poverty.
Everybody wants sick people to get health care.
And so there is so much that we have in common.
And I think remembering those ideals really helps facilitate the discussion.
If we agree on the destination, but we're disagreeing on how to get there, that's a lot further than, there's a lot better than thinking we're just heading in opposite directions innately.
Absolutely.
And look, that's why I'm trying to do this work with the left.
And, you know, I get emails every day that people say to me, you know, you can't win this fight.
Sometimes people say you've lost already.
It's honorable what you're doing, but you've lost.
And yeah, at some level, look, my allies now in this space are much more people like you than they are that are standard leftist people, right?
But I think that for me, if I can keep talking to the left, it's not just that I'm talking to the left, but I get emails every single day, every single day from Christian conservatives and from ex-Muslims and all kinds of people saying, you know, I never really thought about this stuff.
I don't know.
I'm sharing the ideas of that person sitting across, but at the same time, I'm getting my ideas across, sometimes even just in a question, just by phrasing in a certain way.
So there is a real play here, and that's where conversation and really humanity will move forward, and that's why we've got to keep doing this, and that's why it's working.
I don't even mind telling everybody the secret.
The special sauce has been revealed this day, on this location, on this season.
Well, thanks a lot, Dave, of course, for this conversation for our previous show, which has done very, very well.
And thanks for everything that you're doing in terms of building bridges and having people understand, you know, it's a lot...
Easier to hate a caricature than it is to hate a human being.
And you humanize people's perspective to the point where I think people do find a lot of common humanity in people who they may have assumed were just sort of natural or inevitable enemies.
And that kind of bridge building is really important.
There's no shortage of radical extremists who yell and insult, and there is a definite shortage of people willing to build the mind bridges between people and bring them together.
You play an essential role in that while still having, of course, your own I appreciate it.
I wanted to say very happy holidays and Merry Christmas to you and yours.
I hope you enjoy the new place and I'm sure we'll talk again in the new year.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you for that.
That's very generous and nice of you to say.
And I feel the same way.
I love that this bridge has been built.
I lost some friends this past year.
Absolutely not.
Mostly not because of my own choice.
But I built some new bridges, and that's a beautiful thing.
There's a rumor you're going to be out in L.A. in February, so we will get you in studio.
And even if you had just said Merry Christmas and not Happy Holidays there, although I appreciate it, I would have been okay with it.
But Merry Christmas to you, and yeah, let's keep this thing going.
Yeah, come February, I will be crawling on my hands and knees across the Canadian border in search of vitamin D. And I believe that the Mecca is out in California.
So thanks again, Dave.
Have a great and happy new year.
I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks so much.
So let's talk just a little bit about this Christmas season, I think is important because it is a chance for us to sort of recharge with good food, good friends, love and support of family and loved ones.
Because, you know, we're kind of heading into the trenches come the new year.
And what are your thoughts about Christmas, Alex?
What does it mean to you?
Of course, there's a very powerful religious and ennobling aspect to Christmas when we do think of sort of Peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and the higher virtues that sometimes escape us in the hurly-burly of the everyday.
So I'm just wondering if you could share some of your thoughts around Christmas and what it means to you.
Sure.
There's been a lot of distortions, obviously, of Christianity.
A lot of bad people have used it for bad things.
But the beauty of, which is Germanic, it's not even Christian, of the tannenbaum and the lights.
And it's a winter ritual of, you know, going in and having food and being with friends and hurling up by the fire and sharing the bounty that you stored up.
You know, kind of like squirrels in a tree, nuts.
I mean, it's very mammalian.
And it's a winter ritual.
And then it has Christianity tied into it.
It's very beautiful.
And you bring lights, you know, into the cave in the middle of the winter hoping for the sun coming back.
So it's remembering the evergreen.
It's remembering the bounty of the spring and the summer in the depths of winter.
And it's about family.
And it's about culture.
And it's Germanic, really, when you look at our modern Christian system.
So everybody around the world likes it because it's a very beautiful Ice Age ritual beyond Christianity.
And so you have people demonizing it and attacking it because if they can pull that down and kill something that's archetypal in Western culture, they have wounded basically one of our ancient epigenetic systems that Carl Jung wrote about that is meant to trigger so many of these ancestral memories they have wounded basically one of our ancient epigenetic systems that Carl So it's a very important ritual.
And when I was a kid, I really loved it.
And, you know, the candles and family.
And it was a time when you kind of played, you know, the classical, you know, music.
And it was very uplifting.
It was a very beautiful time.
It's turned into a very corporate time.
And I'm not against buying things, but it's not my God.
And, you know, traffic and problems and, you know, people getting drunk.
It has its bad end.
But the good part of Christmas, I notice, is under attack now.
Now they say in colleges, don't say even Christmas.
Don't even say holiday because some people don't have a holiday.
So you see what a cult it is and you look at other cults.
They don't let you have Christmas.
They don't let you have friends that aren't in the cult.
They don't let you have the own language you want.
You're given a little handbook and here's how you talk and here's how you dress and here's what you do and we're being inducted into a cult.
So I think now more than ever it's important to flaunt Christmas and We're good to go.
Yeah, and I couldn't imagine moving to Japan and then asking Japanese people to stop using the phrases associated with their religion.
Because I moved to Japan.
I obviously liked Japan.
If I moved there, I wanted to stay Japan.
Or I went to Vietnam or Japan or China, and they have those rituals where they launch the lanterns into the sky.
Yeah.
I wouldn't go, I'm not Chinese or Japanese, so I don't like the beautiful lanterns.
We all love lanterns at night, lights at night.
What the hell?
I love driving around downtown and seeing Chinese and Korean and interesting things on the walls.
It doesn't piss me off.
But then they shouldn't come here and tell me I can't have my symbols.
Well, I think that's important as well, because the whole question, if you say to everyone, immigrants won't assimilate, then that is a kind of important information to have.
The guess is that there is assimilation that's going to be happening to some degree or another.
And if immigrants come in and then say, well, you can't say Merry Christmas, you can't even say Happy Holidays, since I don't want to see a candy cane, I don't want to see a Christmas tree, I don't want to see any lights.
But it's not even the immigrants are saying it.
It's the ruling class dividing us, teaching the immigrants to get pissed about it.
Right.
And that, again, opens up all these sorts of questions around cultural compatibility and maintaining your own culture and so on.
So I do think it is important to love the beauty and the happiness that is associated with Christmas, with Christianity and the Christmas tradition, and the reminder to...
Savor the relationships that we have, you know, in the battle that we have for Western civilization.
We're having to fight for this and look at the ugliness of Orthodox Islam and the sexual mutilation and the cutting of themselves and the blowing things up and killing each other and just look at that and realize, no, not all cultures are equal.
Right.
So, yeah, I just wanted to get your thoughts about that to say congratulations on a breakout year.
I'm sorry that it's been so exciting for you.
I mean, it is a challenge when you're facing that.
It's a little bit horrifying, to be quite frank.
It's more of a mission, I tell you.
It's like, congratulations!
They're out to get you.
But we are having an effect, and it does show the little guy can do something.
Well, and that is, of course, you know, be careful what you wish for.
You just might get it, right?
I really want to have an effect on saving Western civilization.
Oh, what are all these laser targets on my forehead?
Well, that's what you get.
But I do want to say thank you, of course, for bringing so much powerful information to people and, you know, having me on the show, which has always been a great pleasure.
I want to thank you, Stefan.
You're kicking butt.
All right.
So have yourself a wonderful, wonderful Christmas, my friend.
Happy New Year to you and your family, and thanks so much for joining us today.
Back at you, Stefan.
Come on.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Next up in our queue of delightful and charming people we've done shows with over the last little while is Bill Mitchell.
He is the host and creator of Your Voice Radio, which has exploded this year.
And he is one of the most influential non-candidates in social media.
This entire election cycle, close to 150,000 Twitter followers.
I tried watching that go up live, but I got whiplash looking at the numbers go up the screen.
And millions of impressions daily.
Please go to yourvoiceradio.com.
Bill, how are you doing today?
I'm great.
It's actually 167,000 followers now, so it keeps going up.
We'll put a little counter in the bottom of the screen here.
It'll be a blur.
Yeah, and on election night, that 24 hours, election night and election morning, my Twitter feed did 88 million hits in just one night.
It was unbelievable.
I didn't even know that was possible.
I was like, oh my gosh, you know.
I thought maybe it was a glitch in the system, but yeah, about 88 million hits.
So yeah, it's been an amazing, amazing 18 months, Stephen.
It's just so exciting to be all a part of this.
So, yeah, give me a sense.
We're going to talk about Christmas in a sec, but, you know, in terms of things that have happened, things we can be grateful for, how's your year been?
I mean, watching your meteoric rise has been wonderful and exciting, and I'm perfectly thrilled, but it must be from where you're sitting.
I know you've recently gone full-time with your media, a growing nascent media empire.
And how's it been for you emotionally, and how's it been for you professionally over the last 18 months?
Well, it's exciting.
It was actually kind of a big sacrifice for me because I had a successful executive recruiting business, and I kind of started going more and more away from that to do this because, as you know, it's very time-consuming.
The time that people see us on video is just like a tiny portion of the time that goes into making this look like a slick production.
Making it look easy is actually very hard, and so it's time-consuming.
But I tell you, I felt like this was...
Just a turning point in our nation's history.
And it was important to put other things aside and go into this 100%.
And I've been very fortunate that I've gotten a big voice on Twitter.
And that, you know, if anybody out there wants to know how to become big on Twitter, find one thing that you're known for and be the go-to person on that during a hot cycle on those things.
And you can grow quickly.
And my thing was polling.
You know, pulling everybody off the ledge, they would see the top line poll numbers and freak out, and I would give them analysis of the insides and help to give them hope.
And then I felt like, when we were about two or three months out, that Everybody was just feeling very paranoid and the media was just pounding on us every day.
So I said, you know, it's time to go big or go home.
So I just put out there, I am 100% guaranteeing that Donald Trump is going to win this election.
So my philosophy was that if you go all in or if you had your bet, if you lose, you still lost.
But if you win and you go all in, then they'll never forget you.
And that was how I went at it.
And we won.
So it was just, I don't know, just amazing, amazing experience.
Being there on election night, knowing how initially everybody was freaked out and worrying because Florida was blue and Ohio was blue and North Carolina was blue.
And then watching those turn over the night was just such a thrill for everybody.
And being a part of that and having people follow my feed to lead them through that was just a remarkable experience.
This was not a fight to leave any ammo in the clip, to use a martial metaphor.
I mean, this was all or nothing.
This was the future of Western civilization, the fate of the world, and there was no point holding anything off until next time, because I think if there hadn't been a this time, there probably wouldn't have been a next time.
Right, right.
This was it.
This was it, yeah.
This was where you were, you know, you fire all the bullets, all the missiles, load the silverware, everything.
Just let fly.
And the media...
Release the hamsters!
We're down to the hamsters!
Release the hamsters, yeah.
And the media, you know, think about this.
Donald Trump was up against the media, the DNC, half of his own party, and all this.
And basically he had his own wits and us, the ground troops out there, making it happen.
And, you know, people just rose up.
When he said, I'm your voice, he was right about that because people were living vicariously through him.
People that had never had a voice.
People that, you know, for decades have been trying to call the Rush Limbaugh show and just got a busy signal.
You know, they had something to say and they never got a chance to say it.
And Trump was finally saying it and he was speaking truth to power for them.
And that's why I think the little scandals and little blips along the way never shook us loose because we weren't just voting for Trump.
We were voting for ourselves.
You know, we were getting our self-actualization through the whole movement.
It was us that we were backing.
So, yeah, it was really amazing.
And to defeat the media, to defeat the DNC. And, you know, they're so damn smug, you know, about everything.
And just to wipe that smug look off their faces to the look of absolute abject terror as the results were coming in.
On election night was definitely worth it all, so very happy.
Well, there's a funny thing that people on the left don't understand about the right, and particularly because they don't understand Christianity, or maybe they just refuse to or avoid it.
on the left, and this is continually documented in these sort of groups that coalesce, and then there's some little split over dogma, and you go from like the greatest guy in the world to the worst person ever, and they split, because it's perfection or destruction.
That's the sort of polarity that the left operates on.
And so when they would point out, you know, flaws or things that Donald Trump said that were unsavory and so on, they would imagine that it would work the way it works in the left, where you point out something bad, and everyone turns like a bunch of feral jackals on that person and rips them limb from limb, where of course, on the Christian side, it's like, imperfection, that's the name of the game.
Of course we accept imperfection, we're all imperfect, we all sin, and therefore to expect perfection is to go insane, and to assume that you can be just as Jesus rather than follow in his footsteps.
Jesus, of course, the only perfect mortal who ever lived, and reconciled.
Recognizing that besmirching someone does not damn him in the eyes of Christians, as long as there's acceptance and repentance, which Donald Trump portrayed in spades.
You know, his apology for the coarse remarks he made around women and that Billy Bob bus thing, I mean, I thought was very powerful, very genuine, very sincere.
And I think that that was a huge miscalculation, that they thought that if they showed negative things about his character that everyone would turn on him.
That's a leftist tactic.
That's not what happens in Christianity.
Right, right.
Well, Donald Trump was going through a classic redemption curve, and this is a literary device, where you go from being the anti-hero to the hero.
A classic example would be Star Wars with Han Solo, where he went from a smuggler and guy that was going to abandon everybody and just leave and go off on his own to the guy that came back and saved the galaxy.
So that was kind of what Trump was growing through.
And one of the nice things about a redemption curve is It makes people root for you.
You start off as an anti-hero, and people are like, oh, geez.
But then as you grow, people get excited, and they kind of get the popcorn out, and they start watching.
It's like, wow, he's growing into something special, and they start rooting for you, and they get emotionally involved in what you're doing, and they love to see you moving ahead.
And one of the things that Donald Trump has mastered is timing.
His timing is remarkable.
He peaks at just the right moment.
In the primaries, he peaked just at the convention.
In the general election, he peaked right on election day.
You know, this is the sign of a great strategist.
They peak at the right moment because they're not thinking about what's right in front of them.
They're thinking about what's in the future and what's right in front of them is just a piece in a bigger Puzzle.
And this is why the media never gets them, because they tend to be linear thinkers.
These are people who are teleprompter readers.
They read one line after another.
They don't tend to think deeply or think ahead.
And that's why they didn't get some of the things that Donald Trump did.
That's why they didn't get some of these cabinet appointments, because they don't see the big picture and how it all fits together.
If you have one puzzle piece that's blue, you can just assume, well, this is a blue picture of the sky.
But really, maybe it's just one petal on a blue flower in a picture of a building or a car or something like that.
You don't know.
And this is why the media always misreads them, because they don't see the big picture.
And Donald Trump's able to use that to his advantage.
You know, this is the Christmas season.
So to make a biblical reference, if you look back at the Bible, the heroes of the Bible, you know...
I believe it's Saul who became Paul.
And then you had Peter who denied Christ and then became the rock of the church.
And you had Samson and you had David and you had Moses and you had Abraham.
All failed character people that God redeemed and used them to save the world.
And this is exactly what you've got with Donald Trump.
God in the Bible doesn't use the righteous and the pious.
Those are the bad guys in the Bible.
The Sadducees, the Pharisees.
I almost got it wrong.
Sadducees, the Pharisees.
Those are the bad guys.
The good guys were the ones that were broken and God fixed them.
And people say, well, why would God do that?
Well, because that way we know he's God.
Because, you know, if he just used the people that were already all set and perfect, you know, where's the miracle in that?
So, it is really remarkable to see all this happening.
And I tell you, Stephan, I'm amazed that we're sitting here and talking about it in hindsight.
You know, we hoped and hoped and hoped, and now we're actually talking about the fact that it really happened.
It's like we stepped into a time machine and went into the future, and now we're here, you know?
So here's something that struck me when you were talking about the move to doing what you do full-time and just reminding people at yourvoiceradio.com.
Another thing, I don't want to sort of over-characterize the left and the right as more secular and more religious and certainly more Christian, but I think the general trend holds.
One of the things that I've noticed is that in Christianity, if you are given gifts, there is an obligation.
And no, bless the please, you could say that if you've been given great gifts, that you should most strenuously use those to the benefit of humanity, that God gave you those gifts in order to benefit the world as a whole.
Right.
Now, on the left, though, it seems like their gifts are more manipulative.
Like, I'm going to use these gifts to manipulate people into serving my vanity, my needs, my power.
There's more of a selfish greediness in the expression of gifts of eloquence or gifts of reasoning or gifts of charisma or whatever you want to call it.
Maybe even just the gifts of good looks.
Who knows, right?
Right.
But on the Christian side, I think there is a humility around how can I be a vehicle to serve the world's interests through the gifts I have been given?
And that humility of saying, well, look, I didn't earn all of these gifts.
Some of them I'm just born with or granted.
Do you think that plays out in the way that you approach the world that you want to take the gifts and the obvious gifts of eloquence and intelligence and charisma that you have to use those humbly to serve the world's best interests?
Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing.
If the Democrats worked hard at actually governing well, as they do spinning the fact that they govern poorly, they might govern well.
That's their problem.
You know, they're focused on just spinning, spinning, spinning.
Everything is spin.
And, you know, spin has a short shelf life.
It just wears out.
And unless you can strike quickly with it and get people to make changes they're stuck with based upon the spin, It's just going to wear itself out.
You know, the old saying is the devil always overplays his hand.
And this is what the Democrats have done constantly with the recount, with the silly Russian hacking stuff now.
They're overplaying their hand.
They're overplaying their hand.
And what they're doing is they're setting themselves up to a Republican supermajority in 2018 because they're just digging.
I mean, the whole they're digging now, we finally found the shovel-ready jobs.
It's Democrats digging all the way to Russia, as they would say, to try to bury their own party just with their flailing.
But anyway, in response, directly in response to your question, yeah, you know, I tell you, fortune favors the bold.
And if you have some gifts, if you have some abilities, just go for it.
You know, don't be a fool.
You know, have a plan, have a strategy.
But just really, you know, go for the boldest thing that you can do.
Because, I don't know, it just seems like if you do that and you use your gifts to the best ability, things kind of...
Fall in your lap.
They kind of work out for you.
This is one of the ways that I can always tell when I'm doing the right thing for me because I believe that everybody has a sort of a path or a river in their life.
And the interesting thing about a river, if you imagine a rushing river, is that when you're swimming in the direction of your river, not only are you swimming forward according to your own efforts, but it's the power of the river that's pulling you along.
Your results tend to be greater than the sum of your inputs.
That's what's happened for me with this, with my Twitter feed and with Your Voice Radio.
My results have actually been greater than some of my inputs because this is what I was meant to do.
This is what I'm drawn to do.
The problem with being in a river is it's fast and it's scary.
There are rocks.
Some people want to get off in the tide pools on the side and say, oh, this is nice and peaceful, but the problem is you can only swim so far in a tide pool before you hit the bank.
And then you turn and you swim and you hit another bank.
So it might be peaceful, but you never get anywhere.
So that's what I would encourage people to do.
Find your river, get in the river, and just go for it.
And you can tell that you're doing the right thing because not only are you getting the results of your efforts, but your results exceed your efforts.
That's one way the universe is telling you, yeah, you're doing the right thing.
And this is one of the things I think is wonderful that, of course, after you die, you're going to have to give an accounting of your life.
And this, I think, is part of – so to move to the Christmas topic, that's partly to me Christmas – this is like the worst promo for Christmas ever – but Christmas is like the little death that causes us to remember that we have to account for ourselves.
Now, if you're a Christian, you're going to account for yourself to St.
Peter.
You're going to account for yourself to God, who's going to say, I gave you all these gifts.
What good did you do with them?
If you're more secular, you're going to have to account to your friends, to your family, to history.
You know, we leave this big trail in the world now before you could live a quiet life.
And if you're offline, I guess you still can.
But everyone leaves this big trail that's open to judgment from here to eternity.
And Christmas is a wonderful time for me, at least, to sort of pause and say, okay, in the hurly-burly of the everyday, how have I been doing relative to the best I could do?
How have I been doing relative to my goals?
Have I been as effective as possible?
Have I been as gracious and as generous and as kind and as strong as possible of the virtues that I know I need to exercise and the virtues I know I need to work on?
How am I doing in the exercise of those virtues?
And that's kind of something that has to be done.
But you put out a tweet saying, you know, well, from five in the morning until midnight, it's like, you know, just all I do is run.
And that's, it's tough to pause, but Christmas is that wonderful pause that helps Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I was talking to a good friend of mine, Bill Pulte, who you may know, Pulte Holmes.
And he's on the board of directors.
For them, it's like a $7 billion company.
We're very good friends.
And you would think a wealthy guy like this would be very into selfishness and so on and so forth.
But we were talking and he was saying, the happiest times in my life, the happiest moments in my life were when I made someone else happy.
And that's really true.
And that's what the Christmas season is all about.
Is, you know, finding happiness and helping and making other people happy.
You know, when you have that, you see the kids around the Christmas tree and they open that present they've been waiting for and waiting for, you know.
You see that smile on their face.
There's just nothing like that.
You know, where you give gifts to your friends.
And I tell you what, at Christmas, I'm much more excited about my friend's reaction to a gift I've given them than whatever it is they gave me, you know.
So, it's just, yeah, it's a season of...
Giving, of remembering what's important, of celebrating Christ's birth.
It's just a great time.
I love all the Christmas carols and the decorations.
When I was in high school, a lot of people don't know this, but I was a singer.
I used to be a singer.
When I was in high school, I was in a madrigals group, and we would go door-to-door Christmas caroling a cappella, Christmas carols.
And it was just amazing.
You know, it was cold out.
You had your mittens and your coats on.
You're sitting there and you're all singing these beautiful, you know, songs and stuff.
So I've got a lot of great memories from my youth of Christmas.
I should do a duet sometime.
I did put out the American National Anthem the night of Trump's victory.
And people were a little surprised that I have some not-too-rusty pipes in the old throat bucket.
I actually sang at the Kennedy Center.
I sang at Carnegie Hall.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Yeah, let's see, but I could probably get it back.
We'll have to put out a duet or something.
I'll get my jingle guy.
We'll make some jingles.
Fantastic.
So, what do you hope for the world as a whole?
And I know that you're going to be playing your part in bringing whatever you envision about.
But what is your ideal for 2017?
Because it feels to me like 2016 was the gathering, and 2017 is the venturing fourth.
And what is it that you would like most to see, you know, if we have this conversation, as I hope we will sort of next year, when we look back on 2017, what would make you feel the most fulfilled?
Yeah, one word, results.
I think this is going to be a year of results.
I think that the way Donald Trump has structured his cabinet, and a lot of people don't realize this, the vice president is actually a cabinet member, people don't know that, but...
You know, that he has structured people who are very results-oriented, who have had long track records of succeeding in life.
Not in government, but in life.
Where, you know, your success is measured by the profits that you make.
You know, that you have to make a profit.
This is the problem.
People that come up in government, their job is not to make a profit.
Their job is to spend every dime so that next year their budget doesn't get cut.
You know, whereas with Donald Trump, you know, this is a profit attitude.
And that America needs to start profiting.
So I think that what's going to happen in this cycle is that Donald Trump really sees himself almost in some of the Secretary of State's typical roles, where the Secretary of State is the face of the nation to other countries, the traveling around the world promoting the American brand.
I think Donald Trump is going to see a lot of that as his role, to be out there constantly promoting the American brand.
So my prediction is Donald Trump will travel more in his first year of the presidency of any president In our history.
A lot of traveling.
And that's why it's great that he's picked Rex Tillerson, we call him T-Rex, as his Secretary of State, because here's a guy who has run a huge international organization.
Okay, so Rex Tillerson can of course go and travel to other countries and that sort of thing, but he can do the operational side of making the State Department work really, really well.
I had Robert Charles, who's a former assistant Secretary of State on my show last night.
And we were just talking about how he was talking about the State Department is probably the hardest organization to run because you've got a lot of egos.
You've got a lot of desperate parts that are working.
It's very hard to measure progress and success because diplomacy is a long, slow process.
You don't have quarterly reports on diplomacy.
So, you know, a guy like Tillerson is going to be really great.
And I think that I like the fact that he's picked Pence, because Pence is a real strong operational guy.
So Pence can, you know, having been a governor, so Pence can run the operations.
He can interface with the Senate and the House, because he was in that as well.
And this frees Trump up to be the guy who stands on the hill with the wind blowing, and he points and he says that away.
You know, because that's important.
You know, Trump needs to save that away for America.
He needs to provide the strategic vision for America, be out there meeting these world leaders.
People say, why does Trump have all these former enemies into Trump Tower to meet with him?
Because he's so good.
People come in hating him and go out thinking, damn, that guy was amazing.
He really knows how to turn on the charm with his people, so he wants to travel around and do that.
He wants to rebuild the American brand.
Make America great again.
Half of being great is making people believe it.
More than half is making people believe it.
And I think he's going to go around the world making people believe in America again.
So it's going to be a rebranding of America.
It's going to be Trump, I think, traveling extensively.
It's going to be Pence running the day-to-day operations.
All the cabinet people rebuilding and not just doing their job in the cabinet, but fixing their organizations.
And results.
The first 100 days, a lot of results.
It's going to remind us of, I remember when the Contract of America, in their first 100 days, man, they just got so much done.
It's going to be like that, only on steroids, I think.
I can't think of a better person to make this pitch, and I've mulled it over.
Somebody, as I know, you've been a born-again Christian since the age of 12.
And so the love your enemies aspect of things is very, very important.
The left is freaking out, and they're not going away.
And there are, of course, some hardcore leftists who are going to be almost impossible to reach, so deeply buried in ideology that they can't see the sun anymore.
But there are a lot of people who want the same things that Trump supporters want.
You know, we want jobs.
We want an improved standard of living.
We want a clean environment.
We want healthcare for people who can't afford it.
We want charity for those who've made mistakes and can be helped with it.
And what would you say to the people on the left who are being tempted into this wild polarization?
You know, the extremists on the left.
I think all the extremists are on the left these days.
The extremists on the left are trying to pull the middle out of American society, to polarize people at two ends, which seems a particularly devilish maneuver, to use devilish in its proper context.
What would you say to sort of calm and reassure and perhaps even invite people who are currently freaking out and think that the apocalypse, the Trump-opalypse, is sort of upon them?
What would you say to them to help them understand what's possible for what they want as well?
Right, right.
I think that Trump is really the first post-ideological president in at least modern times that I've been aware of.
I don't think of Trump as a conservative or as a liberal.
I think of him as a resultist.
He's a guy...
That is just about results.
Now, why did he run as a Republican?
Well, after eight years of Obama, he realized that the best chances, you know, after looking at Reagan and then looking at Obama, he looked at those two, and he said, you know, of these two philosophies, conservatism seems to get more results.
Therefore, I'm going to run as a Republican.
Once again, his strategic thinking.
You know, looking at the goal, working back, what should I run as if I want to get the most results?
Well, who's gotten the most results in the last three decades?
Ronald Reagan?
Okay, he's a Republican.
I'm going to run as a Republican.
So, this is what people need to realize that have been regular, everyday Democrats out there.
There aren't far-left liberals.
One of the things I said on Twitter a long time ago was, America is 20% far-right, 20% far-left, and 60% that just want America to be great again.
And if you're in that 60% that just wants America to be great again, then don't think of the fact that, oh, I'm abandoning the Democrats, I'm joining the Republicans.
Think of the fact that you're joining the resultists.
You're joining those people in the middle that just want a great America.
And, you know, watch Donald Trump.
And if it looks like he's getting results, look at what's already happened.
He got the carrier deal, saved a thousand jobs, okay?
We just found out, and a lot of people think that China controls most of our debt.
No, they don't.
Japan now controls most of our debt.
And this is why Trump is taking a tough negotiating position with China, because they're like, you know, you're not the only game in Asia.
And he's developing close relationships with Japan.
He got SoftBank from Japan to come to America and promised to invest $50 billion and hire 50,000 people in the United States.
He's got U.S. Steel saying, we're going to rehire 10,000 people.
IBM with 25,000, right?
You know, these are real results.
This is not just political speak.
This is not hope and change.
You know, Michelle Obama just gave an interview and she said, you know, we're seeing the death of hope.
You know, Barack Obama represented hope and now he's gone and America doesn't have hope.
And I'm like, sweetheart, It's been eight years.
I think it's time for some results.
You can't buy groceries at the store with hope.
When you check out and they say that's $135, I'll go, let me write hope on a piece of paper and hand that to you.
You need results, right?
And so that's the thing, that Donald Trump will be about results.
And like I said, nothing crosses the aisle like results.
Once people see results, they're going to want to get on board with this.
So don't think of Trump, I'm talking to Democrats when I say this, don't think of Trump as Ideologically opposed to you.
Think of him as a guy who's just getting things done.
If you look at the things he's getting done and you like those things, then get on board with us for that.
Because I'm telling you what, your leaders, the Democrat leaders, they haven't learned a lesson from this.
They're not going to triangulate back towards the middle.
They think the reason they lost was they didn't go hard enough left.
Don't get it.
And the Russians!
Democrats out there, if you want to join us in this movement, we call it the Trump train.
If you want to join us in the Trump train, then you're not leaving the Democrat party behind.
They left you behind.
They went screaming.
They went screaming.
They don't get it.
Here's the thing.
The average age of the senior Democrat leadership in Congress is in their mid-70s.
They don't have any bench anymore.
This is the problem.
Two-thirds of state legislatures are all controlled by Republicans now.
That's where the bench comes from for future Democrat leaders.
There is no bench now.
They did a poll and I think 13% of Democrats were enthusiastic about their future as a party.
So, you know, their leadership is dying out.
Their ideas are dying out.
Progressivism doesn't work.
It's not progressive.
It's not new.
It's an old idea that's failed over every time it's been tried.
Come and join us in the middle.
Come and join us on results, and I think you're going to be very happy you did.
That's my message.
Beautiful.
Beautifully put.
All right.
So I just wanted to remind people, please, please check out what Bill is doing.
It's fantastic stuff.
I mean, I'm pretty convinced that you type...
Tweets in your sleep.
I assume that's the way your productivity is.
And please go to yourvoiceradio.com to check out the radio show.
It's fantastic and very insightful and very powerful.
And it started off great getting better all the time, which is a beautiful thing to watch.
Bill, very, very merry, merry Christmas to you, your family, your friends, your purpose, your joy, your bliss, your desires.
And I really have appreciated your friendship this year.
And I will catch you in 2017.
Absolutely.
We'll talk to you soon.
Thank you.
you.
Bye.
All right.
Now we are going to turn to chat with our good friend and proud new papa, You can check out his blog at DangerAndPlay.com and of course you can follow him on Twitter at Mike Cernovich.
We'll put links to all of that below.
Mike, you're looking surprisingly refreshed for a one-week post-baby new father.
Are you basically propped up with coffee?
How's your sleep doing?
How's life?
Yeah, actually it has been great.
Saira, she sleeps four hours in a row.
And then eats once or twice, sleeps another three or four hours.
It has been great.
A lot of people told me, Mike, babies aren't fun the first three months.
And I go, okay.
Well, I'll decide.
One thing I've learned about life is I will decide for myself.
And I vehemently disagree.
I think it's pretty cool to just...
It's weird.
It's enchanting just to kind of stare at this new life force, life entity, whatever you call it.
I find it quite cool, actually.
Do you know, interesting baby fact, that the only part of your body that remains the same size from babyhood to adulthood are your eyeballs.
And this is the one thing when you're around a baby, they're like these Disney characters of like Roger Abbott eyeballs.
And there's so much that's going on in there.
So much curiosity about the world and so much individuation.
Like I sort of think back, my daughter's now almost eight.
When she was a baby, so much of who she is now, I can see absolutely from there.
And so much of our character, we're just kind of born with.
And the idea that they're just these undifferentiated blobs until they become individuals later on, I didn't find that to be the case at all.
Yeah, it's humbling to realize as a parent, you can only do so much.
So just don't mess them up, is sort of my mindset.
Don't do anything catastrophic or allow them to be traumatized.
But already one thing that I have noticed is...
The baby forces you to slow down and be more mindful, which has helped me a lot because I could feel last year all the adrenaline and cortisol.
I could feel some heart problems kind of coming on, just kind of an unconscious way I kind of sensed it.
Because it's go, go, go, intensity, this, this.
With the baby, you're like, well, no, I better walk here.
I don't want to bump against the wall.
I don't want to trip.
So she's probably lowered my blood pressure by like 20% already.
Fantastic.
And there's a funny thing that happened to me pretty early on.
I was fortunate enough to be able to stay home, I guess, like you are with your daughter.
But I'm sitting on the couch.
My daughter never liked it when we sat down.
Believe it or not, Mike, coming from my loins, she's a bit of a stimulus junkie.
Hard to imagine.
I know.
So she always liked to see things in motion.
She wanted to see pictures.
She wanted to look out the window and so on.
So even when she was a little baby, I'd try and sit down with her.
And she'd sort of cry.
And then she'd get up.
And then she'd reach for something.
She wanted to grab something on a shelf.
And I'd take her over there.
And then she'd say, you know, reach for like the window.
And I'd take her over there.
I actually realized that I was not so much a father as a giant flesh airplane that responded to her commands.
Like this big giant bald remote control airplane that flew her around to where she wanted to go.
And that was pretty cool because that's immediately a relationship that when she's, you know, months away from being verbal, there's a very strong relationship that occurs.
And also finding ways to keep a baby engaged and interested without really using any language is a really primal and powerful place to be.
Yeah, Shauna goes, Saira does that thing you do.
And I go, what do you mean?
She just stares out into space now.
Because Shauna sometimes will be like, what are you thinking about him?
Saira already does that too, so we'll put her on her back and she'll lean over a little bit and she's just zooming away.
So she's definitely got a lot of my DNA, my genetics, which the good thing is that comes with pros and cons.
I always say, as a young kid, I had an early understanding.
I knew that we were poor.
I could empathize with my father and what that must have felt like.
So I had more probably worldly wisdom, which is cool when you're like 39.
But when you're four or five years old and you're contemplating the human condition, you're not necessarily emotionally equipped for that kind of heaviness.
So Saira is going to have the good and the bad of having my brain.
And realizing just how much is embedded gives me a sense of both humility for my own strengths and weaknesses, that's just something I'm born with, to some degree.
I think there's tweaks, of course, that you can make, but stuff you're born with.
So it gives me a strong sense of self-acceptance and also much more tolerance to what I would consider to be the foibles of others.
Because other people who had sort of what I would consider negative personality traits, I used to in the past just describe that, well, they have faults and they should fix them and they shouldn't be like me.
But realizing just how much of personality is, It's genetic or it's born with.
You're born with.
Helps me to accept myself and helps me to be much more, not even tolerant, but open and accepting of other people.
And that, to me, was a very surprising thing that came out of parenthood.
Yeah, well, even in growing in life, a lot of times I think back in ways that...
I had a messy desk when I was in first grade, and I had the messiest desk, and I would be reprimanded.
And we took handwriting class, and I had terrible handwriting.
Of course, I'd be reprimanded.
I didn't know I had undiagnosed dyslexia because nobody really knew what dyslexia was back then.
And today, to this day, I have a messy desk.
I can mitigate these...
Character foibles, and I realize, okay, if I'm kind of on this path too, how much can other people change?
And people can, of course, change and can improve, but I'm much more sympathetic to human weakness and human frailty than I used to be.
Now, the birth was at home, if I read your Twitter feed correctly, and you had a midwife.
Now, for a lot of people, this is like you stepped through a portal back to, I don't know, 1322 or something like that.
But how did that go, and was it what you wanted?
Did it work out the way that you liked?
Okay, quick nuance, and then we'll go full circle.
The quick nuance is it was at a midwifery.
So it was a replication of a – the next one will be a home birth.
It will be at a midwifery.
And I'll tell you a cool story about what happened at midwifery before I describe – and before I read people and their truth about birth, okay?
So when you go to a midwifery, they only take low-risk pregnancies.
So people say, oh, you can't just go to a midwife because what if something goes wrong?
Man, we had to do mandatory education, mandatory classes.
They're measuring things.
they only take low risk bursts.
So here's the funny story.
We're at one of these mandatory classes on child rearing where they teach you, "Okay, if your kid has a couple pimples, don't freak out.
Here's what diaper rash is.
Here's how to prevent it." So I'm in the class.
I come right outside, of course, on break, and I have to go on Twitter.
And a guy comes up and says, "Hey, Mike, I just want to say thanks to what you do." And I go, "Oh, hey," he goes, "I saw you and Stefan Mauling you." So talk about it.
I measure it from branding and marketing.
Talk about impact where a Stefan Molyneux guy is watching me on the video and then we're at the same midwifery.
How many of us are out there?
How many people are out there?
We're all over.
I thought that was really cool.
What are the odds of that?
That's how we're everywhere.
The midwifery is they're all trained.
They're all educated.
We don't use any kind of drugs, but use self-hypnosis.
So Sean and I took a course called Hypno Babies, which was pretty good, but a little hokey at times.
We had a doula in the room.
And then, of course, I was in the room coaching Sean through the process the whole time, of course.
So I was in there for it, which was pretty cool.
And you realize that a lot of...
And this is another thing that kind of blew my mind about going through the whole process, is that how much of what we know...
Came from television.
An example is when you watch a movie or a film or whatever, a TV show...
Everything goes, oh my god, her water broke.
We better rush to the hospital.
Emergency.
911.
Whoa, it's freaking out.
But the water doesn't even break for most women.
And oftentimes when it does break, it isn't even a big deal.
It might be a sign.
It might be not.
You actually need to measure contractions and time the contractions is what matters.
And I go, before these education classes, here I was, just another idiot, Thinking that your water breaks, you better rush to the hospital because she might get birth in the car.
You know, wow.
It's actually not that chaotic.
It isn't that hectic.
But we've been conditioned by television.
Then I thought, how much of what I believe about the world is just fake stories and nonsense from TV and movies?
Oh, I think we're finding that out quite a bit at the moment, just how much of our reality is manufactured.
And was it a relatively short labor?
How long did it go on for?
We got there at 6.02 and she was still with her doula.
So for those of you who are listening, if I'm boring people with inside baseball, I won't.
A doula is kind of like a birthing coach.
Whether you have a hospital delivery, a home delivery, a midwifery, get a doula.
They are incredible, especially because Shawna had her contractions early on, and the doula's with her for like 8, 10, 12 hours through the whole process.
So she had contractions early on, and then as they got closer, as you know, 3-1-1, the 3-1-1 rule.
And the contractions are three minutes apart, and they're one minute in duration.
Then it's time to head to midwifery.
We arrived at the midwifery at 6.02 p.m., and we were holding Zyra at 8.38 p.m.
Wow.
Well, congratulations.
And this, for me, becoming a father really stretched out my time preferences as far as what I was willing to risk to make the world a better place.
You know, if your life's going to end with you and your bloodline ends with you, you just don't look that far down the tunnel of time and you don't plan that far.
Of course, you want the society to stick around until you retire and die, but after that, you're in the ground or whatever it is and it doesn't really matter.
But for me, like, and I think this is one of the reasons why those who would want to take over the remaining freedoms of the West try and convince us not to have children because when you have children, you become a pretty fierce defender of the freedoms you inherited because you have so much more of an important legacy than, you know, the writings you left behind or the videos.
It's a human being who's going to have to live in the future that they have no power to shape but you do.
It's hard to be a hedonist when you have a child, right?
So occasionally when you're a man and you're in a relationship, occasionally you can think, well, I could go out and be doing all that kind of stuff, right?
Why am I investing time in another person?
You just think I just want to be a baser human than I was.
was.
That's why stuff I wrote five years ago, I was just like, well, I don't disavow it, but that's definitely not who I am today because you can't be a hedonist when you're holding a child.
Your priorities change.
Your view on civilization changes.
Your view on society changes.
You start to think, well, one day I might have a daughter and she might have children.
I have grandchildren, so I really need to think about that.
You think in terms of what you want the world to look like globally, instead of just thinking, how can I maximize my pleasure sensations on a daily basis?
Yeah, and if you have a son, you start thinking about war and the draft and And if you have a daughter, you start to think about feminism and the resentment and exploitation of women for political purposes and mining the grievances of history and so on.
And you really do want to create a sort of shield around the sort of poisonous doctrines that sometimes seem to infiltrate.
You need to create that safe space.
You know, there's certain things about the world I'm embarrassed to introduce to my daughter.
You know, like she says, well, what's this?
I'm like, well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, but this crazy stuff goes on in the world.
And whatever we can do to reduce the amount of crazy stuff going on in the world and make it a better introduction between innocence and history, I think is a very, very good step to take.
Exactly.
And also, I've started to think in terms of So when I teach men and women who watch me and give a lecture, give a talk, give a podcast, ultimately they're adults and my take is if I give quote-unquote bad advice, it's up to each person who listens to me to make their own decisions.
So people might call that passing the buck.
I call it just everybody has to own their own life.
But with a child, you're really thinking, man, I better get this right.
I better not give bad information.
I better make sure that everything that I'm saying is true and helpful and beneficial and will help her grow.
It's caused me to re-examine a lot of my assumptions about the world, which I still think are true and I still think are right.
But I'm not going to be...
Reckless with what I teach her and how I teach her.
And it's balanced too because you want to educate the child about the evils of the world without making them living in fear of the world.
How do you strike that balance?
I try and tread that tightrope every day and I don't have a clear answer.
Now, because we're doing this sort of a bundled sort of Christmas experience, I sort of wanted to ask you, Mike, what are your ideas around Christmas?
Do you have an emotional experience of Christmas?
I knew that you grew up in a religious home, as did I. And how does it sort of play out as an adult for you?
And do you think it's changed by becoming a father?
Good question.
I think Christmas didn't mean anything to me for the past maybe five years.
It's just another – things are closed basically.
Christmas for me would be like, oh man, I fell on a weekend.
I can't go out to the clubs and try to meet girls.
What a disaster.
We need to abolish Christmas kind of thing.
But as a child, you think in terms of – it gives people an opportunity to be around all the family that you like in your way.
The grandchildren, the grandparents, it's a time to spread love and joy.
So in that regard, it's a great kind of secular holiday.
Right.
I mean, people do sort of decry the materialism of it, but I can certainly see the argument that the materialism is one of the most fun aspects of it, that there is a sort of pleasure in thinking about what will make someone else happy, going out and buying that perfect present and seeing the joy in their face when they open it on Christmas Day.
It is a lovely sort of break.
Well, I mean, you're in L.A. and making me – I'm trying not to cry during the whole interview because you're outside and I'm not.
It's like blisteringly cold.
We're going to blizzards all weekend.
But certainly in the depths of winter, which is where I think a lot of the symbolism and the timing of Christmas evolved, it was a nice bit of fiery cheer in the middle of what could be a bit of a death march to a hungry spring.
And I do really like the fact that the world slows down.
And for a lot of people who are chasing a dream, as you and I often are, we get to slow down and focus on our relationships, which sometimes can be a little bit in the rear view as we drive our ambitions forward.
I'm going to go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, that's another delicate balance, too, is you want to make the world a better place for your children, but you still have to have high paternal investment.
The same thing with, you know, you start to think of your wife or girlfriend or partner or whatever as the mother of your child, so that relationship sort of changes, and how you treat that person definitely changes.
Even after a week, I'm definitely a little bit softer on Shauna than I used to be.
The way I figure it is, When you're in a relationship, especially early on, and you're a man and you have options, you need to just be who you are unapologetically.
And if they cry and they want to leave and they don't like what you're doing, then, hey, they're free to leave.
You got to be a little bit more hardcore.
But now you have to think in terms of, okay, this is the mother of my child.
The way I treat her is going to leave an emotional impact on her.
That is going to mutate the emotions that she's going to have.
For the child and the way you treat your partners, of course, the way that the child is going to interpret her own interpersonal relationships, it becomes a lot heavier.
So in terms of, yeah, how being a workaholic, as you and I both are, and it's easy to rationalize it, too, because we're saying, well, we're making the world a better place for our children.
So we can work 14 hours, but that's a rationalization.
Ultimately, they do need one-on-one time.
So there are three phases to masculinity, at least as you're an adult.
The first, of course, is your romantic or sexual relationship with your girlfriend or your wife and so on.
The second is your productive relationship in the world, right?
Your production of value that has monetary impact in the world, working for money and so on.
But the third, which is really undiscoverable until you become a father, is that your model for masculinity is as a father.
And...
That is a challenge to navigate because you know, especially if you have a daughter, that you are the template for what masculinity is going to be for that daughter as you get older.
And of course, if you're just some workaholic, you're fulfilling that role, but you're not providing the kind of intimacy that your daughter needs.
So it becomes multifaceted.
I kind of like that challenge.
I like having a lot of balls in the air, so to speak.
But it is something that does catch you a little bit by surprise, this sort of third phase to masculinity.
Right.
It's ultimately, you know, as we always say, mindset really is everything.
I know people who have had children and they view children as getting in the way of what they really wanted to do.
And of course, kids can sense that.
So my commitment is just to, instead of saying, oh man, I could have done all these other things, but I can't.
For example, I would like to go to Syria right now.
Right?
Right.
I want to be in Syria periscoping in Aleppo because the media is lying about Aleppo.
So I want to be there.
I have a daughter.
Can't do it.
So one side of me says, man, you know, you would be doing the great coverage of Syria right now, but that's a mindset thing, right?
That is focusing on what I am missing out on versus the other side to that is say, wow, this child gives me a great opportunity to have an impact on the world, to make a difference in her life.
And also selfishly, it'll probably save my heart, save my health, because my blood pressure will lower.
So everything is ultimately mindset and how you view a child is a great opportunity to grow, to learn, to grow together with whoever your partner or partners are, to really, what do you want to say, imprint something on the universe.
As you kind of talked about in that message you sent me, which was beautiful, You're leaving a ripple in the universe if you raise a child right.
Now, we can talk about Christmas and New Year's, and going into 2017, that is sort of the big question for me.
And what do you think, 2017, I think it's going to be one of the most interesting years in human history ever, and I'm thrilled to be a sort of front and center in watching it and participating in what's happening in the world.
How do you think 2017 is going to play out, you know, culturally, politically, economically, and so on?
This is a hard question because right now we're in the era of nationalism and populism.
And watching the crowd, the crowd's here one day, the crowd...
Because, you know, you and I, both our philosophies are a little bit...
How do you want to say it?
We're definitely not populist philosophically, but at some point there is a movement and you have to figure out what the movement is going to do because crowds can do great things and they can do terrible things too.
So you want to kind of keep the crowds.
I'm trying to just watch what the crowd is doing and trying to move that crowd in a positive, inspiring way for people and the way for humanity.
But I have no—last year, if we'd had this conversation, I would have said, oh yeah, we're going to be talking about Trump as president.
If you said, Mike, what is next year going to look like?
I couldn't tell you.
I can barely see a month in the future, and I used to be able to see very far in the future.
But when you're dealing with the movement of crowds, it's hard to anticipate what's going to happen.
I do think that we will— On a positive note, companies are going to start bringing more jobs to the West.
That's one prediction that I would be pretty firm in making because economics is ultimately a social construct.
It's about mood, buy-in from the people, optimism.
People are feeling more optimistic right now in America, more hopeful.
I sort of call it where Trump is kind of like the imagination president.
And by that I mean people are just saying, I have this idea.
And I want to tell Trump, or I want to tell you, Mike, or I want to tell Stefan, I want to tell you guys these ideas.
A year ago, people would call you a crank for that.
So in that regard, we're entering a new age of optimism, of idealism, of invention.
So I bet we'll have more inventions next year than we had this year because ideas are everywhere and our collective mindset has entirely shifted.
So in that regard.
On the other hand, The evil forces, the dark forces are really going at work now and really fighting very hard.
That's why I'm not comfortable making a solid prediction because we now know that the moderate rebels in Syria are ISIS, but our fake news media is telling us that they are moderate rebels.
Well, that isn't true, though.
So they're trying to – our CIA is trying to topple foreign regimes, and not only that, the CIA is trying to topple the Trump administration.
So we have traitors.
We have an entire government agency plotting against its own people.
And trying to fund the evil terrorism and training ISIS soldiers in Syria.
So on the one hand, we're entering an era of great optimism and imagination and vision.
And on the other hand, the dark forces have been taking their lines, taking their marching orders.
So it's hard to say what is going to happen.
Ultimately, we want good to prevail.
We will see.
Yeah, I mean, where the dark impulses of the crowd can pull them in the wrong direction, you have to pour in massive amounts of charisma and good humor and willpower and leadership in order to keep them from their baser instincts, just as we have to do with our own selves.
And yes, the backlash from the left is going to be huge.
You know, all victories pave the way for the counter-revolution, so to speak.
And the great danger of victory is the relaxation of one's guard.
And the other thing, too, I would say, I think in 2017, it's going to be a bit of an anxious time because one of the things, one of the ways that people deal with giving up hope is they say, well, okay, if I don't have hope, I don't have anxiety.
Like, if I think everything's going to be a disaster, I don't have anxiety.
I may have depression, but I may prefer that to anxiety.
With the resurrection of hope and, you know, like...
Trump is like this Frankenstein genius who's bringing hope to life with calling down the electricity of the heavens to the American and Western spirit.
As hope begins to reemerge, there will, I think, be a considerable amount of anxiety and anxious crowds can act a little randomly so.
I think they will need some very helpful feedback during the next little while.
But it is a wonderful tightrope to walk because the way things were heading, we won't even get a chance at victory.
And now having to maintain a lead is a lot easier than getting out in front.
And I think that's going to be one of the great rewards of 2017.
But yeah, it's important for people to remember.
That there is, you know, the counter-revolution will always be brewing.
The left never sleeps and the parasites are always more focused on the host than the host is on the parasites.
And that is going to be, I think, one of the big challenges.
Yeah, and what you're saying adds a useful addenda to the three parts of masculinity, you know, relationships, your job, also the polity and leadership.
Because what you're talking about implicitly suggesting that Because the crowds can move certain ways, because there are dark forces in the world, part of masculinity is leadership and trying to direct people into the right direction, direct people towards good.
And that is something we don't grow up in society, but it's by design.
Of course, you realize this now at our age.
You realize why we're not talking this, right?
You got to read the ancient Greek text.
You got to read Plato, Aristotle.
When you go way back...
Or even Cicero in the Roman times, you go way back, everybody talked about your duty as a man to provide leadership, the duty of a man to be involved in politics.
So what I always think is, isn't it interesting that that message is not sent down to the people anymore?
You never hear anybody say, well, as a man, you have a duty to be politically engaged, to be involved in any local communities.
You don't get that message anywhere anymore.
And of course, that is by design.
The The very dark forces that work in the government, they want...
I mean, ultimately, when I look kind of back at it, I go, I've kind of fell for their con.
They want people like me in your 30s just partying it up, having multiple partners, viewing yourself as having no connection or responsibility to the broader world, only chasing another orgasm.
That is what they want, because that's how you enslave people.
That's how you take people out of the game, and then you can put your own people into the game.
Quite right, quite right.
Well, I just wanted to touch base with you during this wonderful Christmas chat I'm having with all of my favorite people and, of course, to wish you the very happiest of congratulations to you and Shauna on Saira, who is a beautiful child and a lucky child, I think, to have you guys as parents.
Wanted to remind people, please check out Mike's work, dangerandplay.com.
I think that's the only Nietzschean-named blog that I'm Yeah, I feel like we bait and switch the listeners because we didn't really talk about Christmas.
So I will say Merry Christmas.
Ho, ho, ho.
May your stockings be filled with what you want.
And we will see you on the New Year's Eve.
And he is wearing reindeer underwear.
You just, you can't see it right now.
But, you know, the Christmas spirit is very close to his nan.
So thanks, Mike, for a great chat.
We'll talk soon.
Merry Christmas.
So now we turn to our good friend, Gavin McGinnis.
Now, Gavin has had a scintillating, vagabond-style career.
He is now the host of The Gavin McGinnis Show with Compound Media.
He's a contributor to The Rebel Media and was an original co-founder of Vice Media.
And you can, of course, get his information at compoundmedia.com and therebel.media.
Gavin, how are you doing today?
I'm great.
How are you, sir?
I'm well, well, thanks.
So we're going to talk a little bit about this year, how it's been for you.
It's been quite a year for those of us not stuck in the dinosaur amber of leftist ideology, and I'm just wondering how it's been for you.
I've certainly seen your name pop up in greater and greater prominence over the year as alternative viewpoints seem to become more accepted in the mainstream, at least of society, if not of the media.
So how's it been for you over the last year in terms of prominence and growth?
I'm exhausted.
I'm just tired of winning.
And I thought I would get a little tired of winning, but now I have winning AIDS. I feel like I'm dying of winning.
I need a defibrillator because it just keeps getting better and better and better.
With Mad Dog Mattis, I thought, okay, we're done now.
And then he starts pulling in all these people who hate the departments they're running, like an anti-public school woman for education.
And an anti-Obamacare guy for Obamacare.
And you just go, stop, Don.
Stop.
I feel like I'm walking on air.
I was at James O'Keefe's Christmas party recently, and I go, how are you doing?
Because now we all talk to each other about, like, winning cancer.
You know when you're at an old folks home, and they go, how's your arthritis?
We all Trump people say, how's the winning going?
Are you tired?
And James goes, I want to get down.
And I look down, and his feet are floating an inch off the ground as he just sort of glides around like the ghost of Christmas future.
See, what I thought you were going to go with there was James said, I want to get down and boogie.
But I like your way of taking it as well.
Oh, there was boogieing.
It's the only Christmas party I've been to, office party, where there was a massive dance floor and everyone dancing their asses off.
It was euphoric.
Well, of course, there is this old myth, this myth that the left are like joyful, fun, happy, spontaneous people, and the right are like, you know, stiff-collared Christian duds.
But I actually find quite the opposite to be true.
I find that the people on the right in an enormous pandemic of fun that they've been having for the last sort of year, year and a half, I guess you could say post-Gamergate when they finally learned that there's something good in punching back once in a while, And the left have become these sort of sour church lady, pursed, anus-lipped kind of people who just can't, you know, it's that old saying.
The left is now like that old saying about, what is it, Mormons haunted by the fear that someone somewhere is actually having a good time.
And that, to me, has sort of become the left and the right has become the party of pan, so to speak.
Yeah, and I think Milo was a big part of that, too.
I think a lot of people sort of conscripted to the left, and they went to war against all the evil racists, and then they turn around and go, wait a minute, you're not racist, and you're fun.
Why am I on the church lady's side?
I'm not a fuddy-duddy.
How did I end up here?
And then they get pissed off, and they go, I want to ruin you.
I want to ruin your fun.
And they're shutting down comedy shows.
They're canceling concerts.
They're ruining movies.
Like, they just...
Romance, all that's ruined.
Everything has to be consent and regulated.
And you go, that's not what the West is about, I'm afraid.
I really feel that they've got this equation, which is that happiness is oppression and must be fought tooth and nail no matter what the cost to one's personal joy.
It really is.
I call them the new Victorians because they don't want to debate.
They just want to tell you what not to do.
And the thing that's frustrating about it is they don't have a solution.
They don't have anything better to replace it with.
In fact, with Catholicism, for example, they're constantly sort of hobbling a new version of Catholicism that runs parallel to it.
Well, that does seem to be coming out of the Vatican these days.
Sorry, you were going to say?
Yeah, like they go to rehab.
That's just Lent.
Or they want to meditate.
That's Latin Mass.
Or they go see a psychiatrist.
That's confession.
They keep trying to fix this thing that didn't need fixing in the first place.
Well, and what is white guilt but original sin revamped and made racist?
Yes, yes.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what...
Christmas means to you.
Now, I, of course, have talked to a whole bunch of people about Christmas, so you don't need any of my thoughts.
You can see them when the show comes out.
But, of course, as a practicing Catholic, ex-atheist, if I remember rightly, but as a practicing Catholic Christmas, I guess you focus on the silent T, whereas for a lot of people it's just this guy named Chris.
But for you, it's Christ, of course, Christmas.
So what does it mean for you with your family, with your career, with your friends, and this season of reflection, and hopefully, of course, dedicating oneself to a better world and a better life?
I think the most important thing in Western culture is the family.
And that has to be paramount.
And that is intricately tied to the church.
I used to call church mom's revenge because everyone gets together and goes there.
But it really is the family getting together for just an hour a week and focusing on good and being better and loving each other and wishing peace upon each other.
And Christmas is a time where you just forget about everything else and recalibrate your priorities.
And your priorities are being with your family, loving your children, listening to your children and spending time with them.
And we bring in the rest of our family too.
I'm not just talking about my immediate family.
The in-laws come in, my brother comes in.
I always say, you know, when I find out that the two brothers aren't speaking, it just breaks my heart because you have to, despite all your differences, you have to figure it out.
If it takes booze, if it takes a card game, you have to overcome that.
Because once you start ripping the family apart, which is ultimately what the left is about, that's really what the New York Times is going for.
They want to shatter the American family.
Once you take that apart, everything else starts to deteriorate.
So, I love this time of year, and it's my favorite time of year.
And I also see it as a Christian tradition.
But America, for example, is, what, 70-75% Christian?
You live in a Christian country, okay?
So, at least recognize that.
Now, I'm not saying you have to have a baby Jesus on your front lawn.
But you should say Merry Christmas.
If you lived in Japan, you would follow the customs there.
This is this country's custom.
It comes from Yule and all kinds of other pagan mishmash and Greek gods and Greek saints and all this other stuff mashed together to create this culture.
So acknowledge it.
And that's why I'm pushing like crazy this year for Jews to embrace Santa.
Jews to embrace Santa.
I'm intrigued.
Please tell me more.
Santa's not Christ, okay?
He doesn't bring Jesus anywhere.
He's most closely, I think, linked to Odin.
And yes, by all means, celebrate your religion, have Hanukkah and stuff.
But the fact that you don't do the cartoon guy who comes from outer space and gives free presents to the kids is ridiculous.
And I talk to a lot of Jews in California.
They seem to do it in Northern California and have done for many years.
Include it in your thing.
It seems spiteful when you don't.
It seems like you're being a grump.
You're being a Grinch.
Have a Jewish holiday.
You don't have to call it Christmas, but your Jewish celebrations should include Santa.
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're going to do Halloween, which is dressing up with free stuff, I mean, it's not that far a swing, and it's not like there are big theological implications.
There are huge physics problems with Santa, but not giant theological implications.
That's my exact point.
It's got very little to do with theology.
You're already taking the time off.
You're already celebrating the holiday to a certain extent.
Avoid Merry Christmas if you want, though I don't see why you would want to do that.
But bring Santa in!
He's a jolly guy!
He's a friendly guy, and the kids love it!
It's child abuse, by the way, to just do Hanukkah.
And they get these crappy gifts, they get a subscription to a peach service, and they get some little thing for charging their iPods, and then they see their Christian friends getting all this awesome stuff.
Take the good...
You know, we stole Odin from Yule.
We ripped it off.
So rip us off!
Well, and stole Jesus from the Jews, you could argue, as well.
So let's just do a little bit of cultural appropriation back and forth.
Didn't we steal the whole idea of December 25th from pagan sun gods?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, deep in the heart of winter, and you've got a long way to go.
You know, it's no accident that Lent, which is when you deny yourself calories, occurred at the end of a long winter in a cold climate when you've got nothing to eat anyway, so you might as well make a celebration out of it.
So...
Yeah, this idea that you're going to get together, gird your loins for the winter, put on some fat with some fatty food so that you can make it through the blustery snow and ice of the northern European winters.
Yeah, I mean, this is all adopted.
And this idea that everything we say comes with massive theological implications, I think, has kind of paralyzed a lot of the goodwill and the season between different groups.
I think, look, Puritanism has left the right and shifted to the left, and that's a good thing.
I want to embrace that.
I'm that way about everything.
Even reading.
You know, this whole idea that you have to start on page one and end the book, maybe for fiction, but if you're reading nonfiction, which you should be, fiction is lame, hop all over the place, read the middle chapter, then throw it away!
You know, I started going to church.
I didn't go to a Catholic church.
It wasn't nearby.
I went to a Methodist church.
It doesn't matter.
When I was a vegetarian, too, it's like, you can't use glue, because glue, they use horses and stuff.
I said, no, I'm just trying to do better.
So I didn't eat meat.
And then I would start having fish and stuff.
Now, I eat meat like a lunatic.
But my point here is, you don't have to be 100% perfect about everything.
Just try to be a little bit better.
Try to improve.
And that's what Christmas is all about.
Relaxing with the fam.
Having some fun and saying, thank you, West.
Thank you for this wonderful family that is the greatest gift anyone could ever have.
Now, how do you reconcile?
Because, of course, in a lot of Christian theology, and particularly in Catholic theology, there is, I think, frankly, a fairly unattainable standard of perfection.
Jesus was the only perfect mortal who ever lived.
So how do you balance the desire for perfection with the natural errors that the flesh is prone to?
Well, that's the whole game.
That's what life is.
Striving.
And we've sort of had that hammered out of us.
We have this sort of apathetic, slacker mentality.
And I talked to these millennials.
I was with one yesterday.
A 22-year-old virgin male.
I mean, if I was a 19-year-old virgin male, I'd call the police.
Hello!
I need naked ladies now!
We have an emergency here!
He was totally apathetic about it.
He just said, well, you know, it hasn't come around.
And I go, well that could be pornography, it could be video games, it could be pod, it could be a bunch of different soul-killing things.
But the big picture here is that we've lost this sort of need to strive.
And what's great about Christianity and traditional Westernism is it's about, look, I know you screwed up, but let's sort of get back on the horse here.
Let's try.
It matters.
You want to have a family.
Your chastity does matter.
These women who are told that they can just be colostomy bags for our bodily fluids until they're 50 and then thrown in a trash heap and then tricked into thinking it's empowering is damaging.
Get better.
Improve.
Yeah, I mean, the control of sexuality has been a sort of fundamental part of religion.
And in the past, of course, when I was younger, I viewed that as, you know, Victorian and repressive and so on.
But as I get older, and I see the wreckage of promiscuity around me, it's sort of like circling back and saying, yeah, I guess some of those old rules really did make quite a bit of sense.
Yeah, we've just got too much apathy.
I don't know how many couples that have split up, including I can think of actual marriages that have ended in divorce, and then the woman finds him later and goes, why didn't you fight for me?
I mean, we're so flippant now that you have a one-year-old kid, and they go, this isn't working out, we're falling out of love, and they split up.
And you go, you've got to struggle, you've got to work, you've got to invest in things.
Maybe it's this instant gratification.
That's made us weak.
But the beauty of Christmas, I find, is it sort of reattaches Christianity to tradition.
And we see that, like it or not, Jew or atheist, Christianity is a huge part of the fundamentals of this country, and so is the family.
I'm not forcing you to jump on board with either of those things, but at least recognize that's the spinal cord of our culture, and that's what Pat Buchanan was screaming in Death of the West.
He said, stop attacking Christianity and the family.
If it's not your bag, it's not your bag.
But when you chip away at it, you're chipping away at the floor beneath you.
We're all going to go collapsing down.
Well, that's the remarkable thing, and that's been sort of my enlightenment or painfully achieved wisdom over the last couple of years, is that when you look around the world, the Christian countries, particularly those that have had to wrestle with the challenges of Greek philosophy,
of Roman philosophy and Roman law and have tried to achieve that synthesis between otherworldliness and worldliness, those have tended to produce, and I don't know if that's, is that friction between pragmatism and idealism or whatever you could call it, but it's those societies that have produced the very best societies the world has ever seen. but it's those societies that have produced the very best And it has, of course, become increasingly and painfully aware to me that as atheism ships away at Christianity, it's not like the West is getting stronger.
It's not like the West is becoming more secure.
The West does seem to be cracking in its foundations, and I think we need a fair amount of basement work these days to prevent the whole damn thing from coming down.
Yeah, just show some reverence.
You know, we're in a nation of ingrates here, and it gets downright embarrassing.
I've been embarrassed for eight years.
When I see Barack Obama get up there and say, the Redskins ought to change their name, or he has some defector up in the garden with some giant beard, you're saying Allah Akbar in the Rose Garden of the White House, and I see him using NASA to promote Muslims, Arab input in mathematics, it gets downright embarrassing.
And when someone goes to Afghanistan to die, and they come back here, they made it, they lived, and we're going...
Screw you, you racist.
I sort of, I cringe.
I want to run up to him and go, oh, we don't all feel that way.
I was just watching this trailer for this new show coming out on ABC called When We Rise.
You've got to check it out.
It's got Whoopi Goldberg in it and Rosie O'Donnell.
It's all about this racist, homophobic...
You've got to check it out.
Wait, wait, wait.
It has Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O'Donnell.
Those are not usually a sentence structure that I will hear in sequence and take with any seriousness, but I'm open to hearing the case.
Go on.
Oh, well, it's so bad, it's good, is what I'm saying.
And they're rioting in the streets to fight this racist, homophobic country and says, we belong in this town.
Like, Trump America is going to ask all gays to go back to Africa or something.
It's bizarre.
And you're watching it going, you are living in a fantasy land.
And they're singing Hallelujah in the trailer.
And then they show this cop car blowing up as they go, Hallelujah!
And you go, you are the least self-aware people in the universe.
And you're why Trump won.
Right.
And, you know, if there's one present that I would give to those on the left who are still capable of rational thought, it's that they need to stop freaking the hell out as much.
They need to stop panicking and thinking that the sun isn't going to rise tomorrow and that, you know, hordes of, you know, insect, robot, alien overlords are going to emerge from chump eyeballs and lay waste to civilization.
I mean...
What a terrifying existence to live in, this kind of paranoia that because someone you don't like is in power, everything about your life is going to be laid waste.
I mean, good Lord, what a terrifying existence and how many bad decisions are going to flow out of that kind of freak out.
Well, it's got to come from all this anti-bullying, safe space, all this don't debate.
Remember debates?
I want to debate you.
They don't do that anymore.
It's just, I want to get you fired.
And you'll see this at rallies, too.
There'll be a Trump supporter at an anti-Trump thing, and they'll have one of those bullhorns and go, in his face, or those little alarm things.
And so he'll go, look, I'm just...
And so you keep doing that, you keep promoting that culture, and by the way, you keep having illegal aliens do their jobs, so they never clean pools or mow lawns, so they don't experience conflict in the workforce.
They come on at 25, all of a sudden the red carpet that they were promised isn't there, and they just have a complete meltdown.
I think this started around 2005, where Larry Summers said, I'm not sure if women are predisposed to STEM. And that was the first time I heard of a woman, she was at Harvard I guess, he was fired for this.
She said she had to step out of the venue because she was starting to black out.
And that was the beginning of this whole apoplectic, I can't, I literally can't.
Literally shaking.
Literally shaking.
And debate is very healthy and it's also very healthy to lose.
That's the real thing that these lefties need to come to terms with is...
Victory is all about losing.
You want to be Michael Jordan?
You have to lose a lot of games.
You want to be rich?
You have to have a lot of failed business ventures.
It's not a lottery out there.
The other thing that I forgot to mention in the previous thread was they want to create a world that's bad for them.
See, the beauty of all this fighting for free speech stuff is you're trying to lay out a system that is fascism free.
And I'm reminded of this.
I saw this Mexican woman who was crying because she said in a video that she walked by a Trump supporter's merch table and she rolled her eyes.
I doubt that she just rolled her eyes.
But anyway, let's take her word for it.
And he went like this.
Ah!
And she goes, the police didn't do anything.
They just ignored the whole thing.
And I want to tell her, in your world, in your version, in your utopia, where the police arrest fist shakers, you'll be the first to go.
So I'm actually protecting you from you.
I don't want the police to arrest you when you fist shake.
I want you to have the freedom to be a complete imbecile and scream about racist, sexist America.
Go bananas.
That's your prerogative.
But if we go by your rules where you need consent for every time you touch a woman's knee and you can't have this kind of comment and this has to be regulated, you guys are going to be turfed first.
We can handle it.
Well, this is the thing, right?
I mean, the left has become soft.
And the left, you know, when they were pushing against the mainstream culture, you know, they got like all swimmers who swim against the stream, their muscles got stronger, their bones got stronger, their resolution got stronger.
But they've been kind of floating down current for the last couple of decades, and they've gotten weak.
And this is the natural situation.
churning and turning and creative destruction of the marketplace of ideas.
You know, the people who are coming in from the right now are battle-hardened.
They have been pushing against the leftist current for so long.
And so all that's happening is that the stronger people are winning.
The people who train the most, the people who are the strongest are going to end up winning.
And the people who are lazy and the people who didn't go to the gym but instead sat on the couch eating bonbons and watching soap operas Well, they're losing.
And you can tell the losing from the screaming, from the personal attacks, as you say, the ear horns.
So, you know, this is good.
You know, the fact that they're losing means that they've got to up their game and bring more to the table than insults and slander, which is in the long run going to be better for whatever it is that they treasure as well.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like Ann Coulter says, our blacks are better than their blacks.
I'm starting to think our everyones are better than their everyones.
Because they haven't been working out.
Like, when we lost to Obama, you know how many people, you know how many Obama supporters we got fired when Obama was the president-elect?
Zero.
We just went, oh, for crying out loud, he's not the messiah, you idiots!
Ugh!
But we didn't start trying to sabotage.
We didn't make videos imploring the Electoral College to do something.
Or we didn't have songs where we said, This is our fight song!
And freak out trying to reverse history.
We didn't do that because we've been here before.
We're better at this.
And you guys have just...
It's like you were saying about the cold weather, you know?
Strong men make great civilizations.
Great civilizations make weak men.
Weak men make bad civilizations.
Bad civilizations make strong men, and we keep going in this cycle, and we're just watching them go through what we went through, I guess, in the 80s or something.
But with a little more grace.
I think arguably so.
So, Gavin, what do you see coming down the pipe after the New Year's?
You know, when we waddle out of, in our sort of full-body PJs, we waddle out with the fruitcake still stuck in our beard and so on.
What is it that we're going to be looking down the road in 2017, do you think?
Oh, it's a very exciting time because the free market of ideas has finally been liberated.
I know this seems a bit rockier.
My friend Sam Hyde just had his show shut down because they founded He Supports Trump.
That's the death knell of the social justice warriors.
They're still screaming and scratching as they die like that witch in the puddle in The Wizard of Oz.
You know, we have CNN and all these mainstream media forces appealing to alternative media and going, what are you guys doing over there?
How are your numbers so big?
And we're just going, we're not talking to you.
You're not invited.
And all of a sudden they're saying, well, Trump's insane.
He's tweeting and I can't control him and I'm not able to filter the information.
And we go, yeah, you lost.
It wasn't just your candidate lost, but the entire media class has been shattered.
The whole paradigm has shifted.
And all of a sudden, we've been sort of downtrodden for so long that we can make our own revenue streams and we don't need you and we can get to our audience without you.
We have paywalls.
We have ads on YouTube.
We have a million different things.
And you can try shutting those down or regulating them, Mark Zuckerberg.
We're just going to find another way around it.
So, it's our time.
It's our time to step in front and take advantage of this beautiful country.
Yeah, like I just, as usual, got another invite this morning to come on someone's television program and I'm like, why?
The way it strikes me is, you know when you were a kid and you cut that box out and you made a television, you put the little dials on and you put it over your head and you pretended to be on television because you were in television.
So it's sort of like somebody's kid saying, hey, would you like to enhance your media presence by coming in my cardboard box and speaking to my stuffed animals?
I mean, no!
So I can see how it's going to benefit you, the television station.
I just have no idea how it's going to benefit me more than just going to do another show with you or a solo show or something like that.
Yeah, I saw your ratings.
If I had those ratings, then I would be really disappointed in myself.
If you had Anderson Cooper's ratings on the internet, you'd go, what am I doing wrong?
I got 70,000 views on that.
I gotta work on my game.
Something's not right here.
Meanwhile, they've got an entire building in Manhattan with people running around with earpieces.
I mean, there must be hemorrhaging cash.
Well, yeah.
New York Times has just shut down eight floors, which they're going to turn over to rental income.
Not a moment too soon.
Isn't it beautiful?
It's so fun.
And it's just going to be fun letting these...
And I'm not just talking about America, too.
We've got a whole trend going here.
Canada's going to be last because they have to do their terms with their Zoolander PM. But we've got Brexit in Britain.
We're talking about a TAL exit.
I have fundamental faith in Western man.
And seeing him freed like this...
Where he can just generate revenue and jobs and technology and real bonafide free market progress.
It feels so cathartic.
It's such a relief.
Yes, no, I absolutely agree.
And the fact that we can talk directly to the people and hear their comments back without any corporate interference, without any government controls, without any dependence upon fickle advertisers in the moment is a beautiful liberty.
Free speech has never been so free, and I have full faith, even with people programmed to not think well by terrible government schools and so on, I still have faith in the instinctual rationality Of the West.
And when presented with better arguments, it may take time.
But I think a lot of people will come around the right way.
So thanks so much, Gavin.
Wonderful chat.
Just wanted to remind everyone, it's M-C-I-N-N-E-S. No, no, that A is not silent.
The Gavin McGinnis Show on Compound Media, compoundmedia.com.
And of course, therebel.media slash Gavin McGinnis.
A great pleasure, my friend.
I hope you have an absolutely excellent and wonderful conversation.
Merry Christmas to you and your family and thanks for everything that you're doing out there to stimulate the marketplace of ideas.
And if I could just throw in a plug for TackyMag.com where I do my column there.
I've got a Christmas column up right now.
But thank you very much, Stefan.
T-A-C-K-Y? No, T-A-K-I-M-A-G.com.
TackyMag.com.
We will put a link to that too and thanks again.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Stefan.
Well, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones we used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen To hear those sleigh bells in the snow Well, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas With every Christmas card I write May your dreams be merry and bright.
