April 2, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:43:24
3639 True News: Week In Review - April 2nd, 2017
0:00 – Elephant Starving In Venezuela6:33 – Venezuelan Government Coup10:35 – Jeff Sessions on Sanctuary Cities22:56 – Noam Chomsky: Conspiracy Theorist29:19 – College Man Up Event, Masculinity Confession Booth38:44 – “Analyzing Whiteness” College Club44:57 – No Evidence Microaggressions Cause Harm47:57 – Suspended From Kindergarten For Playing With A Stick54:24 – Ivy League Schools Receive $41 Billion In Funding1:03:57 – School Budget Cut Due To White Students1:06:32 - Michael Moore: ‘Extinction of Human Life on Earth’1:16:06 – Tomi Lahren/Glenn Beck Update1:27:36 – HIV Positive Migrant Rapes Children In Sweden1:31:55 – American Attitudes Towards Communism1:53:40 – Video Game Playing Is A Mental Disorder?2:08:17 – Shocking Info on Psychiatric Drugs2:32:59 – Mike Pence Non-Scandal Scandal2:38:00 – Chicago Pension Plan DisasterSources: http://www.fdrurl.com/true-news-april-2-2017Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Stefan and Mike back for a true news ad infinitum, a roundup, a philosophical corralling of current events in the world.
Mike, we've got a lot of stories.
I feel the need for a lengthy intro, but I'm ambivalent about it.
What do you think?
Let's just dive right in.
And there may be a Venezuelan elephant that won't make it through this entire show of all horrors.
Yeah, we start off with Venezuela because no one else seems to want to cover Venezuela.
So apparently an elephant is starving to death because a zoo in Venezuela near the capital...
I cannot afford to feed her, and the zoo will not accept donations.
So the elephant is 46 years old, and she should have around two decades of life left, but now she looks to be on the verge of death.
According to the head of Venezuela's National Parks Institute, which, again, Venezuela has a National Parks Institute as its population starves, There is food for the elephant, but not enough variety.
So they are feeding the elephant mainly pumpkins and papaya, which I had heard was Michael Moore's diet at some point in time in the past.
Elephants can apparently eat up to 330 pounds of food a day, usually grass, leaves, and bark.
Wait, sorry.
Was that elephants or Michael Moore?
I just, I lost, I zoned out for a second.
That was elephants.
Okay, got it.
Michael Moore, obviously a little north of that.
I don't think Hostess makes grass, leaves, and bark, but you know, we can figure that out later.
So apparently the country's economic crisis has led to 50 animals dying of starvation in zoos recently, which, given the starvation that is occurring with Venezuela, I'm surprised they're not slowly roasting over an open fire in spits.
The elephant's name is Ruperta.
Ruperta.
And...
Was treated following a fall recently as well, which the zoo said was from non-contagious pneumonia.
No, no, I'm sorry.
The zoo said it was just a simple slip with the media claim.
Did Hillary Clinton been spotted near the zoo at all?
I don't know that she's making trips to Venezuela.
They don't have any money to give her, so that's not likely.
Now, the funny thing about this and the reason why we're talking about it is, well, Venezuela is practically on fire.
The economy is collapsing.
People are starving.
They're nationalizing the bakeries.
They can't make enough bread.
Ruperta's story went viral online.
So lots and lots of people then rushed to the zoo with food to give her, which, interesting that people in Venezuela are more concerned with feeding the damn elephant as opposed to their starving citizenry.
Yeah, because when Venezuelans are selling their own children, you can't find hide nor hair of it in the news.
But you get one hungry elephant and everybody goes insane!
Right.
They actually turned down the food because they couldn't accept donations for fear malicious people would be giving unsafe or even poisoned material for the elephant.
So the elephant is starving.
Worst case scenario, the elephant is poisoned in some way.
So let's just let the elephant starve and not accept this food.
My alternate theory, Mike, my alternate theory is that they did in fact accept the food but just ate it themselves because they were even hungrier than the elephant.
I was gonna say this makes about as much sense as the FDA not allowing people to use experimental drugs because it could be unsafe for them as they are nearing a deathbed due to their illness or disease.
We must protect you from, you know, possibly hurting yourself as you slowly fade away.
All right.
Well, and just for those, like, if you weren't around when Chavez and the socialists got into power, you didn't hear the giant symphonic caterwauling of glee that came from the left.
Ah, they're going to nationalize the oil, they're going to finally feed the people, they're going to take care of everyone, finally justice is coming to...
And now that it's all falling apart, you can't hear anyone.
No one's talking about it.
It's so vicious.
The left does not care about the poor.
They care about power, and they'll use the poor as a human shield.
But they don't care about the poor, because this is where your focus should be if you give a rat's ass about the poor and a half.
Fun activity for everyone.
Go through a bunch of liberals' accounts and search for Venezuela in their tweets from the past.
An old Michael Moore tweet actually resurfaced this week where he was saying, oh good, Venezuela, they're going to end poverty as they know it.
Well, I mean, I suspect in a tragic comic, well, actually mostly just tragic way, he's right in a way.
I think that there's a good chance that poverty is going to be reduced in Venezuela in the relatively near future, just not in the way that anybody would ever want.
Yeah, if everyone dies, hey, no one's in poverty.
Those numbers look a little better.
So, One Green Planet, which is one of the websites that's doing a petition for people outside of Venezuela, they said, please sign this urgent petition asking the Kakaro Zoo to relocate Ruperta and give her the life she deserves and forward the petition to your friends and family.
She is depending on us to be her voice.
Hashtag I'm with her.
No, actually it's not hashtag I'm with her.
But yeah, so Venezuela is descending into chaos, people are starving, and we have to save the damn elephant.
Lefties, I love you.
I love you.
You hang on to the environmentalist nonsense, even while socialism collapses and fails.
Coldness towards people, but sentimentality towards pets.
Coldness towards people, but sentimentality can't be anything to do with women.
Anyway, let's move on.
Oh, since you mentioned the sentimentality towards pets.
Steph, what were the comments like on the story of your enslavement?
There's a clip in there of someone kicking a dog or treating a dog poorly.
Oh yes, it's a guy in an elevator who got, he was caught in an elevator camera kicking his dog.
And you know, I'm talking about the world as tax farms, we're livestock destined for slaughter and slavery and so on, and people are like...
Okay, I can handle all of that, but dear God, I needed a trigger warning for the guy kicking the dog.
Like, what the f...
is wrong with people?
I really, I... Hey, don't get me wrong.
I think it's horrible that people kick dogs.
It's just that on the moral hierarchy of what's wrong with the world, that's what people are responding to.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's dangerous to introduce humanity to human beings with really over-anthropomorphized children's books.
It's not uncommon to see this all over the place where people actually care far more about pets and animals than they do children.
It's like, hey, here's some spanking statistics.
Here's the number of people that are spanking their children, but there's a bird somewhere which may or may not be endangered, and people care far more about that.
The snail darter, you know, why can't North America or the West have energy self-sufficiency?
Because there's a slug that we love.
It's like, yeah, but that's why we've got to shovel trillions of dollars towards dictatorships in the Middle East because snail darters.
Yeah, I think that's going to work out well.
Well, that's not all that's going on in Venezuela right now.
It's more than just an elephant currently starving.
There's some problems with their government.
So Venezuela's Chavista-friendly Supreme Court issued a ruling Wednesday declaring itself the legislative body of the federal government, annulling the opposition-ruled National Assembly for showing, quote-unquote, contempt towards the socialist government.
Question.
Is the opposition a little bit more on the right or a little bit more on the left?
Because we know the Supreme Court's on the left because they're Chavistas.
So who's fighting who?
The democratically elected opposition to the socialists are getting thwarted by the Chavista-friendly Supreme Court, which is annulling an entire branch of the government.
So they're responding, the leftists are responding to criticism or a desire for change, not with reason and evidence, but with a kind of soft coup.
Wow, this is all new news!
Actually, it's not.
This is exactly what they do.
Count one of the ballot and try and weasel your way.
I think we'll see this continuing in the West for quite a while.
The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the National Assembly did not have lawmaking powers, claiming that three anti-socialist legislators elected in December of 2015, the election that turned the Venezuelan Socialist Party into the minority in the legislature for the first time in the Chavez era, had committed fraud.
The assembly persisted, however, continued to be internationally recognized as the lawmaking body of Venezuela.
So everyone outside Venezuela looked at the assembly as, OK, this is the legitimate government, even though the Supreme Court was saying otherwise.
Previous attempts to silence the legislature did not account for the power vacuum that dissolving the lawmaking body would leave.
Now, however, the Supreme Court has granted itself all the legislative powers, solving that issue.
Yay, the issue's been solved, Steph.
Now the Supreme Court will be in charge of everything because they said so.
Fantastic.
Wait, do you think this is the end process of activist judges?
Because there seem to be a lot of that going on in the U.S. these days.
Everything that the media has drummed up as far as the worst fears about Trump is actually happening in Venezuela.
National Assembly President Julio Borges said, This ruling is garbage.
We do not recognize it.
It is a coup d'etat.
This ruling gives President Nicolas Maduro all the power to make whatever laws he wants, sign whatever contracts he wants, indebt the country however he wants, and persecute Venezuelans however he wants.
It is a coup d'etat in its pure form.
It is dictatorship.
And the world needs to help Venezuela in its decision to change its dictatorship with a vote.
Sorry, Julio.
The world may be interested, but the mainstream media in the West won't be interested because the left is defending itself.
And...
It won't be a coup.
It'll be something positive.
Only if the left is attacking the right, which is entrenched.
Then, of course, you will hear all about it ad infinitum.
But sorry, it's not that you're on the wrong side of history.
You're just on the wrong side of the ideology of the mainstream media.
I'm sure everything will be blamed on the oil price collapsing, and that's the whole reason for the problems.
It has nothing to do with socialism as a whole.
Now, the UN Human Rights Chief, the UN is giving some lip service to this.
He said,"...the continued restrictions on freedom of movement, association, expression, and peaceful protest are not only profoundly concerning, but counterproductive in an extremely polarized country that suffers an economic and social crisis.
I firmly encourage the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision." Yeah, that's going to have about as much of an impact as you'd imagine it would.
Well, no, no, no, hang on.
Mike, he's not just encouraging.
He's firmly encouraging.
Firmly.
Quake in terror.
We just pulled off a coup, but the human rights chief at the UN asked us nicely, so, eh, right, let's reconsider this.
Or, you know, if you want to associate it with your teenage years, it's the guy who says...
Guys!
Guys!
That guy.
We may have a Venezuela story every single week because Lord knows it's not looking good.
Moving back to the United States, we have Jeff Sessions making some action on sanctuary cities.
Sanctuary cities are seen as communities that have refused to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, that's ICE, after detaining illegal immigrants.
By federal law, they are required to inform the feds when they have an illegal immigrant in custody, even if he or she has not been convicted of a crime.
Several big cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as dozens and possibly hundreds of smaller counties, cities, and towns have also refused to notify ICE, which will then come and take custody of the illegal immigrant, possibly for deportation.
You know, if their country will actually take them back, which we've talked about in previous episodes.
So, Attorney General Jeff Sessions came out and said, And putting them at risk of losing valuable
federal dollars.
So Sessions is outright coming out and saying, if you're going to be a sanctuary city or a sanctuary town and you have federal grant money that may be coming to you, you're probably not going to get that.
Now, this is not something new that he came up with.
This is actually a policy that started in July 2016 under the Obama Justice Department.
So Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who, when she's not encouraging violence on the streets and viral videos, she's making announcements saying that cities not in compliance with federal immigration law would no longer be getting these government grants.
And at the time, those grants equated to approximately $3.4 billion.
So not exactly chump change when it comes to smaller townships and jurisdictions.
Quick question.
Yes?
Why is the federal government giving billions and billions of dollars to cities?
Do they not have their own tax bases, for instance, in the form of property taxes and sales taxes and hotel taxes?
Why is the federal government giving all of this money to cities?
Well, it's actually very simple stuff.
You see, the federal government has to tax all the citizenry and then it will decide to distribute that money across the United States where and when warranted.
Now, you may ask, why exactly is the federal government doing this instead of just, you know, decreasing the income tax and then letting the local jurisdictions tax or fee or whatever to pay for what the local counties want?
That makes too much sense.
We can't possibly consider that.
Well, and as we see when we'll get to Illinois, it has a lot to do with the fact that cities can't afford their own pension plans and need to be ready for a bailout at any particular time of day.
All right, so Chair of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee on Appropriations, Rep.
John Kubelson said, Today Attorney General Sessions reaffirmed the administration's pledge that cities who receive our hard-earned tax dollars must be in compliance with federal immigration law, and I will continue to conduct the necessary oversight to ensure that jurisdictions who protect criminal illegal aliens do not receive federal law enforcement grant money.
And this money this year is looking to be $4.1 billion in total.
So they're not happy about this, to put it mildly.
And they came out swinging with firmly worded statements to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric, I'm not even going to try to pronounce his last name, said, Slashing funds for first responders, for our port and airport, for counterterrorism, crime fighting, and community building serves no one.
We will continue to work closely with our representatives in Congress to make sure that Los Angeles does not go without federal resources to help protect the millions of people every day.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, oh, he's a beauty, isn't he, folks?
It welcomed my grandfather 100 years ago.
We continue to welcome entrepreneurs, immigrants, and I would like to think of it this way.
Half of the new businesses in Chicago and the state of Illinois come from immigrants.
Nearly half.
Half of the patents at the University of Illinois come from immigrants.
And so we want to continue to welcome people, welcome their ideas, welcome their families to the city of Chicago.
Okay, end quote.
Now, why do you have so many immigrants that are starting businesses?
It might have something to do with subsidies that are available for immigrants only.
So, you know, it's kind of disingenuous to just say that on its head.
Steph, what do you think of what's going on in Chicago, you know, given all the blood that's shed in the streets on what seemingly is daily basis these days?
Well, I mean, since 1965, right, since this big change in American immigration, immigration has added 72 million people to the United States.
I mean, that's more than the entire current population of France, which coincidentally has a huge number of immigrants as well.
72 million people.
Just think of the amount of infrastructure that's needed.
Think of the amount of educational dollars that have to be spent.
Think of the traffic jams and the congestion and think of the healthcare burdens and so on.
And you say, well, yes, but these people work and generate and pay taxes.
Well, yes and no.
There is significant over-representation on welfare roles of immigrant families.
And this didn't used to be the case when immigrants came from Europe for reasons we've talked about in the show a bunch of times, but it kind of is now.
And it's really sad and pitiful and predictable that they say...
And they always touch the most essential taxpayer-facing services first.
Ooh, are we short a dollar?
Well, you know, that's going to cost you a cop.
That's going to cost you...
Anti-terrorism resources.
That's going to cost you first responders.
It's like, really?
Really?
There's no other conceivable place.
How many diversity CTO hires do you have?
I mean, how much bureaucracy could you potentially cut?
What's the bureaucrat-to-teacher ratio in your schools?
It's always—and this is such a weasel mood, and it's so predictable, it's so crappy— It's whoever people feel the most vulnerable around.
Oh, well, we don't have any ambulances.
What if grandma gets sick?
They literally are holding the population hostage.
If that's where you're cutting, you're doing politics right, you're just doing ethics all wrong.
I wonder if Rahm Emanuel's grandfather 100 years ago came to the country legally or illegally, because there is a difference.
That's sanctuary.
It brings...
It sounds nice.
It brings, you know, the church.
You can go and get sanctuary in a church or, you know, if you're Julian Assange, you can hole up in an embassy.
That's sanctuary.
And it's like, hmm, well, it seems that there are two levels of illegality going on.
Number one, being in the country illegally and claiming benefits illegally.
See, this is the thing.
Just being in the country illegally, I mean, I hate to say it because laws are laws are laws, right?
But who cares?
Listen, somebody crosses over the border and goes and lives in a cave in Montana, hunts his own food, you know, drinks his own urine or whatever, has no particular impact, positive or negative.
Nobody's going to go mental over that stuff.
The problem is not people being in the country illegally, although that is, of course, illegal.
It's accessing all of the education and the welfare and the health care and using the roads and all the things which they're basically not paying for.
It's that.
It's not people idling in your store.
It's not those pimply faced shady teenagers at the mall.
It's the fact that they're shoplifting quite a bit.
That's really the major issue.
And this sanctuary city thing, well, they're safe.
It's like, hey, where's the sanctuary cities for people who are sick and tired of high taxes?
So, no, they're not tax sheets.
They're in the sanctuary tax city.
And it just, oh, man, come on.
You want the votes of the immigrants.
You want the votes.
And, of course, votes of immigrants and votes of illegal immigrants are tied in together.
Because if you're a legal immigrant from Mexico, it's entirely possible, if not downright probable, that you are going to have an in-group preference for other Mexicans, particularly if you're nationalistic, particularly if you're swarming to California because you want to take it back to Mexico.
So saying, well, the illegal immigrants don't get to vote, okay, let's say that's true, although it's not.
Let's say that's true.
So what?
It's still, if you start deporting the illegal immigrants, you risk the votes of the legal immigrants who have the same in-group preference.
Just say it.
Just say it.
It's not because you want there to be ambulances on the street, and it's not because you love all of these wonderful businesses.
If you loved all these wonderful businesses, you'd cut red tape, you'd cut regulations, you'd cut taxes and attract all those businesses.
No.
You want...
Votes.
You want votes and you can't make a good argument so you're willing to burn America to the ground to maintain another few days of power.
I just want to know if I'm going to ever be given the opportunity to have a sanctuary pocket for my wallet.
Unthinkable.
Where's the sanctuary city for guys who got shafted by family court and think that the alimony and child support payments are unfair?
Where's their sanctuary city?
Well, it's called jail.
Well, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio added to the pile and said, Here in New York City and in cities across the nation, this executive order could in fact undermine public safety and make our neighborhoods less safe.
And again, folks, keep in mind, this is not just only informing ICE of people that are in the country illegally that happen to come in contact with law enforcement.
This is people that have actually committed crimes.
So you get someone that you know is in the country illegally.
They commit a crime.
And that doesn't always happen.
So it's not just poor, helpless immigrant that just happens to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They're contributing to the economy.
In a lot of cases, these are outright criminals.
And until you're a citizen, right?
If you're an immigrant and you commit a significant crime, my understanding is you risk deportation anyway.
Good God, try doing that in Mexico.
Or try doing that in most other foreign countries.
Mostly outside of Europe, we'll say.
It doesn't go well for you.
Do you know that if you're born in Japan, you don't become a citizen?
Like, you're not a citizen?
The United States is one of the few countries where that is the current understanding of the law.
Even if your parents are both there legally, you're not necessarily a citizen.
It's really quite astounding.
But this is the thing.
So we have people who are here illegally.
That's the first level of illegality.
The second is they've committed a crime.
Second level of illegality, but somehow enforcing those two laws and having fewer illegal immigrants, and of course illegal immigrants by consuming resources from the courts, from the healthcare, from the education, from the police, they make everyone less safe.
Because there's fewer police available to patrol other areas.
So the second level where they actually have committed a crime, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Getting rid of people who've committed crimes will somehow make your neighborhoods more dangerous?
I don't quite understand.
I don't quite understand.
Don't boil your water on a hiking trip.
It'll make you sick.
I mean, no, no.
That's...
What can I tell you?
Well, they just want the votes.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said, if people want to live here, they'll live here.
They can use my office.
They can use any office in this building.
End quote.
I encourage our Boston listeners, if you're near Boston Mayor Marty Walsh's office, pop in.
Say hello and see if they'll let you use his office.
Bring your laptop.
Bring a latte.
Ask for the Wi-Fi password.
I'm sure he'll hand it over, no problem, and, you know, just, he'll be good to go.
You know, because it can be pretty expensive getting real estate in the city, so this guy, just go hang out and get your work done.
Listen, you can set up a schedule with the guy as to who uses the phone when.
I'm sure he'll be reasonable.
Do you want to get a startup going?
Can't afford office space?
Nah, don't go to San Francisco.
Boston!
Just set up in the mayor's office.
You'll be good to go.
So from Sanctuary City Insanity, we are going to Noam Chomsky and his interesting theories.
So Noam Chomsky warned that eventually the people who voted for Donald Trump will realize that, quote, his promises are built on sand, end quote.
And then they will begin to lose faith in his presidency, at which point Donald Trump will need someone to scapegoat.
So he will say, quote, Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it.
And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people, immigrants, terrorists, Muslims, and elitists, whoever it may be.
And that can turn out to be very ugly.
I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act which can change the country instantly." End quote from Noam Chomsky dropping the false flag bomb on President Donald Trump.
Well then, go ahead, Steph.
I have a lot to say, but go ahead.
Well, the only thing that I would say, Noam Chomsky was a very big fan of Hugo Chavez in many ways.
And so if he's concerned about countries losing their rights, you know, I think he might want to shut up about America and start looking at Venezuela, where his pet socialist died.
And I guess a bus driver got put in next, who apparently intellectually was driving the short bus.
And the whole country is falling apart and people are hunting for vermin through the rubble.
It's post-acarpalyptic.
It's escaped from New York, beyond the Thunderdome kind of hellishness.
But he's really, really concerned about people losing potential rights in America.
Why don't you go look at Venezuela, you cryptkeeper of the left?
and I wonder if Noam Chomsky signed the petition to save the Venezuelan elephant.
I'll have to go look.
The idea that Trump will need to create some scapegoats to say, I'm sorry, I can't do X because these bad people are preventing it.
I mean, have you looked at any of the judicial activist decisions that have been going across the country when it comes to, I don't know, immigration?
Has anyone paid attention to that?
How about the media?
The media that has turned a Russian conspiracy theory, of which the evidence for is so damn flimsy, but they continue to trot it out nonstop, ma Russia, ma Russia, ma Russia, ma Russia, nonstop.
There's plenty of legitimate scapegoats that are standing in the way preventing from doing the things that he wanted to do and that he has a mandate to do.
These executive orders, I think we talked about it on a previous call-in show, the executive orders overwhelmingly are incredibly positively viewed by the American populace.
It's more than 50% for just about all of them.
So this is stuff that the people want that he ran on that he's not able to do because activist judges, you get all types of legal maneuverings.
We're finding out now What the president can actually do with fierce opposition?
Boy, I wish some of this opposition would have been around for President Obama, as opposed to everyone just sitting on their hands, shrugging and going, or Bush, for that matter.
Yeah.
Well, this is the terrifying thing, I think, is that Americans voted, I think, overwhelmingly to have borders again.
Americans voted for, I think, certainly cutting back or eliminating, if at all possible, Illegal immigration, I think there was significant interest in restricting legal immigration, like slowing things down.
72 million people, you know, that's an enormous, immense, huge amount of people from radically different cultures than had formerly come into America.
And there are reasons to believe that this experiment may not go quite as well as some people imagine.
And so they put in Trump because they want to have borders, they want to have a sustainable culture, they want to have a country again.
Not a giant youth hostel for everyone who can paddle their way aboard somehow.
And, oh, Trump's dictator, well, you think a dictator would be able to do something.
and the fact that he keeps getting blocked by everyone and their dog under the sun and he can't do anything about it.
He can't yet, right?
I mean, who knows what the long game is and all that kind of stuff, but...
People still think he's some kind of dictator, but the majority of the American people, I think, are incredibly frustrated that they voted a guy to do something which the Constitution explicitly allows him to do.
Full control over immigration.
He's the president.
We gave him a mandate.
He can't achieve it.
And then being afraid that he's some kind of dictator?
At some point, if he can't get done what the American people want done...
Well, they may end up supporting a real dictator.
I mean, they may.
Because there's only so much bureaucratic tangling that you can stand before you just want to get something done.
But you see, Steph, he's going to have to create a scapegoat to explain to people.
Why things aren't getting done.
Okay, Noam.
Now, in fairness to Noam, he did speak some truth regarding the whole Russian conspiracy thing to an extent and the U.S. involvement in other elections and how precious it is that there seems to be this act of election stuff.
Yeah, he's great on foreign policy like the leftists.
They're just, to my mind, deranged when it comes to domestic policy.
I mean, whatever the Russians may have been doing, let's take the most extreme charges.
That barely registers in the balance against what the U.S. does consistently.
Even in Russia, so for example, the U.S. intervened radically to support Boris Yeltsin in 1991 when he was engaged in a power play trying to take power from the parliament.
Clinton strongly supported him.
In 1996, when Yeltsin was running, the Clinton administration openly and strongly supported them, and not only verbally, but with tactics and loans and so on.
All of that goes way beyond what the Russians are charged with, and of course that is a minor aspect of U.S. interference in elections abroad, said Chomsky, adding that the U.S. operates under philosophy of, quote, if we don't like the election, you can just overthrow the country, end quote.
Right.
I mean, for Americans to charge, for any Americans, particularly those with knowledge of politics, to charge other countries with interfering with U.S. elections, you know, could be likened to Charles Manson complaining that you double parked his car.
Next, we move to college, Steph.
Are you ready?
Do you have your backpack?
Are you ready to go?
I'm drunk from beer pong already.
The University of Regina recently hosted a "Man Up Against Violence" initiative featuring a "masculinity confession booth" along with a number of other workshops and screenings to combat "hypermasculinity" and another event which will seek to redefine the phrase "man up".
Man up!
I think there's a great rant on the channel about man up.
Do you have any in you right now, Steph, about the phrase man up?
Well, I mean, it is generally stand up and be a sacrificial dam for the needs of women and children in society.
Sacrifice yourself for the sake of the eggs, my eggs!
and it's man up to be a useful cog in the giant machine of the system, which strips largely men, largely white men, off their resources and hands them out for political power.
Should you speak out about the system and say, this is not really very fair, and I don't really like working to support five families other than my own, and I think we should really...
Change this, well, then, of course, as a non-useful livestock, well, they're just going to verbally take you out back and put one between the eyes.
So, yeah, man up!
Shut up!
Man up and shut up.
Man up means give up your resources.
Shut up means you're questioning the value of giving up your resources under threat of jail to everyone and their dog in society.
Actually, it's usually everyone and their cat.
And, yeah, the idea that this is some sort of masculinity, it's so toxic.
You know, ladies, let me tell you, ladies and everyone else, here's the thing.
Masculinity is so toxic that we rub it on our money.
Now, if we rub it on our money, it's like ultimate juju testosterone manly cooties, which are so toxic that you can't even touch them.
And therefore, in order to remain pure of toxic masculinity, you have to stop touching our money.
Now, if you really believe that men are so bad, Men are so terrible.
Men are so toxic.
Stop taking our money.
Then maybe I'll start to believe you.
You know, like if I'm against the KKK or if someone's against the KKK, they shouldn't be taking money from the KKK. Of course, because they're against it.
It's toxic.
So if masculinity is toxic, keep your hands out of her wallet because that's just all toxic manly cootie money.
And if you can't be doing that, I just know you're screaming toxicity so that men will surrender resources out of fear, alienation, exploitation and a twisted white knight virtue of self-destruction.
But Steph, it's not just masculinity, it's hyper-masculinity.
That's extra scary.
Yeah, that's like the people who say, you're overthinking this.
Yeah, you know, you ever go to the doctor and say, you're overhealthy.
You hand in a perfect math exam, you're overcorrect.
Two and two is four.
That's overaccurate.
Overhyperadjectives are not arguments.
Well, before we move on with the story, Steph, I'm curious.
If we were to, you know, you and I be in a masculinity confession booth, is there anything that you would like to confess?
I confess I'm stronger.
I confess, on average, I'm smarter.
I confess, on average, I'm far more economically productive.
And I confess that this does not make me a better person whatsoever.
But if you try and make me worse for it, we have a huge, huge problem.
The advertisement for the event continued and said, At the Man Up Against Violence initiative, we challenge mindsets and behaviors with regards to the social construct of masculinity and its relationship with violence.
The social construction of masculinity and its relationship with violence.
The social construction of masculinity.
What the hell is the social construction of masculinity?
To be fair, it did take a very large society to construct my masculinity.
It took derricks, cranes, massive guys with jackhammers and stuff to build my masculinity.
It took a village, a very large, heavily industrialized village and a vast amount of Venezuelan oil.
So from that standpoint, I do understand that.
But yeah, masculinity is, it's a social, it's a social construct.
It's just, it's all made up, and that's why there's no differences in brain size, there's no differences in white matter, there's no differences in genital organs, there's no differences in testosterone levels, and men can bear children just as much as, it's all a social construct.
Well then, why do men have to pay so many more taxes?
Why do social constructs are the ones who have to go to war?
Why are social constructs the only ones who do pretty much all the dangerous, dirty, ugly, and debilitating jobs in society?
Because social construct?
I don't think so.
The penis is a social construct.
That's a new one for me.
We will, they continue, it said, we will work together to bring light to the causes of all types of violence related to gender, race, socioeconomic status, ability level, and beyond.
Da-da-da.
Well, I'm also looking forward to when they set up something for toxic femininity because we know that women are in charge of children and the vast majority of women around the world spank, beat, hit their children, yell, scream at it, neglect their children, which is an integral part of the cycle of violence in society and really the only best way, the only and best way to change that is to change the behavior of mothers.
And so I look forward to toxic femininity.
Ladies, let's stop hitting our children.
I look forward to that to infinity.
I'll never see it.
But it's something that if there was an ounce of fairness in the universe would be there.
You can look at our The Truth About Domestic Violence presentation to look at the share of domestic violence that women are responsible for.
But if you look on the mainstream, pretty much it's just photos of men and wife beaters, you know, with a clenched fist standing over women that are crying.
They don't pay much attention to that whatsoever.
But, you know, they're going to bring light to the causes of all types of violence.
So we have hope.
Actually, the word light is not fat positive, so they can't bring that.
They can bring cellulite, which I think is fairer and closer.
And, I mean, I could talk about this for a while, but the sort of brief thing I wanted to mention at the end here, it's just another example of how leftism is just another religion.
You're bad because concepts confess and cough up resources.
Come on.
A confessional booth?
A confessional booth?
Are you kidding me?
I'm pretty sure you're going to get sued by the Pope for some sort of violation.
I mean, for God's sakes, that is the oldest trick in the book.
You're bad because of original sin.
You're bad because Adam and Eve.
You're bad.
I don't care.
Can I just get you to believe that you're bad?
Can I infect you with an imaginary disease so I can sell you an imaginary cure?
Oh!
Masculinity!
Sure!
In the past it was for breathing and the sin in the garden of Edom.
Now it's just penis!
Penis pays!
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Never seen that before in society.
Quote, We have all reinforced hyper-masculinity one way or another, regardless of our gender!
Exclamation point!
Exclamation point!
Come and share your sins so we can begin to discuss how to identify and change our ways!
Exclamation point!
End quote.
Oh, I just love when people sign me up for their nonsense.
We've all done it!
No.
No, don't sign me up for your crazy bat shit.
Please don't.
Well, and if you really want to talk about toxic masculinity, how about the fact that boys are disproportionately drugged with psychoactive drugs?
We'll get to more of this in the show later.
We're going to get there.
We'll get there, but there's an example.
Of this, that seems pretty important.
And I wonder if they're going, say, up to the fine, upstanding young men who are standing staunchly in ghettos known as the Nation of Islam.
I wonder if they're going up to these guys and lecturing them about toxic masculinity or not.
Yeah, I don't think you have to wonder very much stuff.
I think you're right.
Now, this has led to one of the University of Regina football players commenting and saying, We don't have to continue to live in a misogynistic society.
I think, changing this, falls on everyone, and especially men, because quite frankly, we are the problem right now.
Again.
Again, dude, please don't sign me up for whatever you're going with.
We're the problem!
Nope.
I assume by football player they mean water boy.
Because I just can't really picture that.
Too much.
But, you know, maybe football's changed quite a bit since the good old days, but that's some pretty limp-wristed throwing.
I think his balls might be a social construct, but I'm not quite sure.
That I will go with for sure.
And the other thing, too, this is so Soviet.
You are part of the counter-revolutionary class.
You are guilty for existing.
You must confess your sins or be punished.
I mean, it's so predictable and it's such a racket and it's been going on for thousands of years.
It's interesting to see the new one meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.
What?
You're breathing?
You're exhaling CO2? You're evil and guilty because CO2 is destroying our hum-a-hum-a-hum-a-hum-a environment.
Same thing with hypermasculinity and whatever they want to slot in there.
You are guilty for the sin of being born.
Apparently, there's another interesting thing going on on a college campus.
University in Chicago offers a campus club for self-identified white students, not just white students, self-identified white students, to omit their own racist feelings and to complain about the racism they perceive around themselves.
How about anti-white racism?
Are they allowed to talk about that?
Because that's not just around themselves.
That's statistically written into the charters of many entrance exams to get into many universities in the Western world.
That's not just a perception.
That's pretty real.
How about anti-Asian racism if we're talking about college entrance exams now?
The segregated quote-unquote affinity group called Ramblers Analyzing Whiteness allows all students who self-identify as white to talk about their quote, anger and confusion about institutional racism, end quote, and to confess quote, guilt and hope about internalized racism, end quote.
Guilt and hope about internalized racism.
Members can also quote, examine what it means to be white, end quote, and quote, begin the journey of operating in solidarity with others and their privilege, end quote.
Steph, are we operating in solidarity with our privilege?
Currently?
I haven't given that much thought.
When you work until you faint on a couch, it really feels like massive amounts of privilege.
So, I don't know.
I feel my life expectancy decreasing looking at the statistics.
I'm privileged.
All right.
They continue, quote, white as a racial slash ethnic category is difficult to define as there is no one accurate definition for this racial slash ethnic category.
The definition and social significance of white has changed throughout history, end quote.
Any students who, again, self-identify as white, appear to be able to apply.
They also say, quote, you may also identify as biracial and or multiracial, where you may come from a mixed race, mixed heritage family, and where some members identify as white, end quote.
So, white's just a social construct, apparently.
Wait, so it has to be, this social construct has to be genetic in origin.
What?!
Oh, come on!
Oh, come on!
I mean, try and keep your craziness a little further apart.
You put them that close together, it's kind of kryptonite to the Superman of nuttiness that you're trying to get flying in the world.
You gotta put a little few books between these bookends of craziness.
And I just, yeah, it's completely impossible.
It's really, really difficult to define...
But you have to have it genetically in order.
Oh my god.
Well, Steph, they didn't say genetically.
Maybe they're referring to whatever your mother and father self-identify as.
Mixed race!
Mixed heritage!
But race is a social construct as well.
Mixed social construct?
Lord.
Biracial.
That means two races.
That means, of course, you had a mother and father of different races who genetically passed you half the variable components for each race, making you biracial.
It is a good point to remind everyone that the cost of attending this college, tuition, fees, room and board, Is over $56,000 a year.
So I hope people sign up for this class and get their money's worth.
If this class is free or this workshop is free, I mean, it's probably more entertainment than you'll get from a Netflix subscription.
So might as well take advantage of it.
I can't wait until people have less time on their hands.
Wouldn't that be great?
You know when tigers are chasing us?
We don't have time to have ground rules, safe space, and vulnerability workshops.
Just don't you have like a book to write?
I mean, it doesn't have to be tigers.
Isn't there a soup kitchen you can help at?
Can't you go educate the poor?
Can't you get anything done other than stare into your own goddamn navel and tweak all of this bullshit until you explode into a tiny series of puff-adder microaggressions and drift off into the universe of nothingness?
Just do something with your life because somebody sits down, writes this up and draws this all up and sets it out and is earnestly grabbing you by the lapels and saying, well, you have to understand this.
Can you not do something a little bit more positive in the world than preying on people's shattered self-identity and prior scars of anti-white abuse and just go out and contribute something wonderful and positive and great or even decent and basically nutritious to a hungry belly?
Do something.
This is just such a waste of time.
Is going into massive amounts of student loan debt count is doing something?
I am in debt, but I'm also guilty and shattered in my identity, so I guess it's a balance.
Alright, so moving on to the realm of microaggressions.
A professor has claimed there is no evidence that microaggressions cause psychological harm.
That bastard.
Alright.
In a recently published study, Microaggressions, Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence, Professor Scott Lilienfeld...
A fucking white male argues that there is little evidence that microaggressions cause psychological harm and that the recent spike in concern on college campuses over microaggressions may be based on cultural phenomenon that carries little psychological evidence.
Quote!
This is from the good professor.
The scientific status of microaggression research program is far too preliminary to warrant its dissemination into real-world contexts, because they are totally in the eye of the beholder.
Anything you say could be labeled as a microaggression.
In the current literature, if someone is offended by something, it's a microaggression.
You simply cannot progress scientifically in this way or expect to resolve racial tensions on a college campus.
We know that microaggressions are correlated with negative mental health outcomes, but that finding may be confounded with a person's pre-existing personality or mental health condition.
Because microaggressions are determined by self-report, it is difficult to prove that they cause mental health problems.
Concern about microaggressions may make both sides more defensive, you think?
Minority individuals may become hypervigilant to recognize any signs of danger from speech or action.
Conversely, majority members may begin to feel defensive because they have to watch every single thing they say.
End quote.
So, Steph, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of scientific evidence for microaggressions causing psychological harm.
I'm going to tell you, I feel that this claim that there's no evidence that microaggressions cause psychological harm, I actually experience as a microaggression, and that's a kind of challenging conundrum for me.
Autistic screeching.
All right, moving on.
Hang on.
You know, so this question of sort of microaggressions, I mean, we should do a whole other show on that, but here's the thing, that people, let's just say men, right, but people as a whole, growing up without fathers.
Now, if you grow up without fathers, if you grow up in a single mother household, and this is without a live-in father...
Your testosterone levels tend to be lower.
And if your testosterone levels tend to be lower, there is some evidence that this can lead to anxiety.
And so, to me, the prevalence of single motherhood, combined with this sort of growing anxiety about everything, oh, kids don't go and play outside, and there's terrible things in the food, air and water, and there's this generalized anxiety, and this fear and this panic, and Trump got elected, I need to call my therapist, and this inability to just handle basic life stressors, I think has a lot to do with some of the biochemical changes that occur for people who grew up in single mother households.
I'm no doctor, and this is no kind of any kind of medical advice, but, you know, if you are dealing with anxiety, it may not be the end of the world to go get your T levels checked.
Go get your testosterone level.
I think that there is, in general, a lack of testosterone in society, whether that's physical or metaphorical, I don't know.
But I think that's one of the reasons why there is this kind of girly hysteria floating around in society.
It's one of the reasons, anyway, I think.
I wonder if daycare, you know, someone being thrown into daycare practically from the womb would be considered a microaggression, given all the negative outcomes associated with it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, moving on, and I'd like to get the good professor on the show to talk about his study on microaggressions, which I'm sure was just received so positively by everyone at college campuses.
How interesting.
Here are some facts.
Please tell me more.
If he hasn't, you know, descended into hiding in the aftermath of releasing this study, I'd love to get him on the show.
Have a study showing the lack of danger of microaggressions can create real macroaggressions.
All right.
A five-year-old girl was suspended from kindergarten.
Why, Steph?
Why do you think she was suspended from kindergarten?
Ooh, I don't know.
Did she...
Was she slightly orange?
Did...
Did she pick up anything that looked even remotely, like a sword or a stick or a gun?
Did she spontaneously enjoy play fighting with any of the other children?
Was she outside?
Did she see sunlight?
Is she a socially construct that is unacceptable?
I don't know.
Just go on and on.
Did she take the Lord Hillary Clinton's name in vain?
I don't know.
She picked up a stick, which she found in the schoolyard, and pointed it, causing alarm among the staff, who said it looked like a gun.
So we suspended the five-year-old, who presented a, quote, threat to other students!
End quote.
As soon as she made a shooting motion with the stick.
How do you make a shooting motion with the stick?
Oh, I think that's pow-pow.
Like, the kickback and so on.
I mean, I get all of that.
I used to play war all the time when I was a kid.
They didn't say sound, though.
Were there sound effects, too?
You know, if there were sound effects, then maybe I can understand this expression.
But if it's just, you know, the motion, I don't know.
That's a little more debatable.
A school spokesman said, quote, Hoke County schools will not tolerate assaults, threats, or harassment from any student.
Any student engaging in such behavior will be removed from the classroom or school environment for as long as necessary to provide a safe and orderly environment for learning.
End quote.
Assaults, threats, or harassment.
I picked up a stick!
But, you know, the people that may or may not be in the country illegally, that you trust them on their age, put them in school as freshmen, despite that they would be seniors, even by their own admitted age, and then they drag you into a basement bathroom.
She should have just taken refuge in the sanctuary playground and therefore be completely immune to expulsion and to any kind of rules within the school.
Just, honey, go to the, you know, Ecuadorian Assembri sanctuary playground and you will be fine.
Will Pamela Anderson visit her?
I don't know.
It's kind of funny.
Now, notice threats and harassment are not social constructs, folks, for those of you keeping along.
So that's very important.
So the mom was pissed, to put it mildly.
And it is interesting that I read a bunch of stories specifically looking for something, which was any comment or mention of a dad.
Didn't see it.
So five year old in kindergarten, no mention of dad.
I don't know.
The mom said, well, Caitlin is suspended from school for pretending for pretend shooting people with a stick that looks like a gun.
By the way, she's five years old and in kindergarten.
I can see a suspension for an older kid who knows better and who's actually threatening other kids.
Really?
Who the hell?
Really?
Oh, come on.
I can see a suspension.
Well, sure, of course.
Any kid who play fights with a stick, well, if they're older and they know better, you're actually threatening other kids.
No, it's a stick!
It's a...
Nobody's...
You might get a sliver, and that's only in the person picking it up.
There's no actual threat.
The pew-pew...
This is not...
There's new reality.
It's not real.
It's not even imaginary.
It's not a microaggression.
It's play fighting.
Come on.
It's not...
Oh, God.
Steph, can you make that pew-pew-pew sound again for me?
No.
Well, no, but I'll do it randomly later in the show when it's wildly inappropriate.
Unappropriate.
She continued, who the hell felt so threatened by a five year old girl that they thought she needed to be suspended?
When I showed up to get her, she looked so confused and didn't understand why I was there or what a suspension was or why it was happening to her.
It was sad.
And trying to explain it to her that playing like that is wrong was a challenge because it's not wrong to play like a damn kid when you're a kid.
I'm so mad.
Yeah, it's tough to say to your daughter.
I'm sorry.
In general, you're being suspended because daddy's not around.
Or explaining to her why at five years old she's in this place anyway that has these arbitrary crazy rules.
So that could be a bit of a challenge.
She continued and said, End quote.
I wish my kids were raised in a better time period when just being a kid was perfectly acceptable.
No, no, no.
Come on, Mike.
It's this abstract better time period.
That's the only solution.
You could take your child out of school and be a good parent and stay home with your child, or you could put your child in daycare and work on your time machine so that you could then move her to a better time period.
Clearly, I mean, come on.
We have to be practical here.
I mean, work on the time machine.
It's the only clear call.
Where's Doc Brown, dammit?
He could solve this problem.
So she continued and said...
So they're against aggression, so they snatch up the kid, drag her in, terrify her, throw her out of school because they're really against harassment and aggression and making people feel bad.
I think there was a non-microaggression called picking up a stick and then there was a big macroaggression called dragging the kid out of school.
I don't think that they're doing very well when it comes to not harassing or alarming people with aggression.
Well, maybe the five-year-old was just enacting how the teachers actually get their salary paid for.
You know, if you don't pay your property taxes, then men with guns come to the house, knock, knock, knock, eventually.
So she says, it pisses me off that one minute she's running around playing with her friends, and the next minute, her teacher is snatching her up and dragging her to the office to get suspended.
She was so scared and confused.
Child's name is a handful, but I feel like this was blown out of proportion.
I like how she throws the kid under the bus, too.
She's a handful.
But this was blown out of proportion.
Don't put your children in places that have crazy individuals in charge of them that are going to drag them and terrifying them for playing with a friggin' twig.
Good God.
Everyone in this story bothers me.
Well, and then what's even sadder is that the parent was suspended from school for using the phrase blown out of proportion, which is weapon-like language.
So it really just didn't stop at all.
I'm kidding about that last part, just so everyone knows.
Moving on, you know, in the topic of schools and how delightful they are.
Apparently, Ivy League schools receive $41 billion from the federal government in the last six years.
According to a release by the nonprofit organization Open the Books, which seeks to increase government transparency by releasing documents revealing government spending, the eight Ivy League schools received $41 billion between the fiscal years of 2010 and 2015.
Now, just before we go on, I just wanted to mention that the actual original name of the nonprofit organization Open the Books was Open the Books, Open the Giant Books, put your financial penis in the spine, and then slam it shut repeatedly until you ejaculate money for nine generations and end up in virtual slavery to extremely rich organizations that have billions and billions and billions of dollars of endowments and charge massive amounts of money for students to attend there, but still need $41
billion from the government.
Why?
Because you wouldn't want to be teaching any free market principles now, would you?
So the best way to do that is to get you dependent on the state.
I think I'm going to need to go to the masculinity confessional booth to talk about my financial penis and my propensity to slam it in books.
No, no, I won't be doing that.
They continued...
Some are arguing that the spending is particularly concerning considering that the eight Ivy League schools have excessively large endowments.
No, we're not talking about financial penises again.
A different kind of endowment.
Oh, there's a theme.
In addition, universities pay no tax on investment gains on their endowments.
Now, spokespeople from the various Ivy League institutions defended the state funding.
I'm sure that surprises you, Steph.
I had to pick me off the floor after I heard that.
So the Yale spokesman, Tom Conroy, said, quote, Since 2000, over 50 startups based on Yale inventions and located in New Haven have attracted over $5 billion in investment to New Haven and surrounding towns.
Alexon, which employs 1,200 people in New Haven, is a prime example of Yale's impact.
So Yale invents stuff and patents it and then sells these patents to these startups.
So I can – listen, don't get me wrong, Tom.
I get how Yale benefits from this.
This is a great business model.
I totally get how Yale benefits from this.
I'm just not sure how the guy cleaning the toilets at these startups who's being taxed so that you can get money from the government, how he's benefiting.
You say, well, he has a job because he's cleaning toilets and that's good.
No, no, no, no.
You don't need government investment to have jobs because everybody knows who's got any brains at all that when government invests in stuff, they take money from elsewhere creating temporary jobs and then they strip permanent jobs and better jobs out of the economy.
There's no question of that.
That's like almost praxeological in its essence.
So, yeah.
I mean, so this guy says, well, you know, it's really, really great that we get this money because then we can build all these inventions.
We can license them out and we can make more money.
Hey, who's against making more money?
Aren't you a capitalist?
I just like the fact that the argument pretty much amounts to we get smart people and that smart people do stuff, we should get money, right?
The smart people might be doing stuff even independent of whether Yale received tons and tons of federal money or not.
Just, you know, call it a theory.
Might happen.
Now, a statement from Princeton University also attempted to justify the funding by explaining that it finances libraries, laboratories, classrooms, research, and financial aid.
So, a library?
How much does a library cost?
You know, of their share of the $41 billion over six years.
It's an Obama phone these days, isn't it?
I mean, why the hell would you need a physical library?
We have Google, for God's sakes.
Why do we need to fund physical libraries?
Next up is a horse and buggy.
After that, a catapult.
Oh my god.
And also, Princeton University, I mean, as far as understanding, sitting on a fairly big endowment, are they saying that they can't pay for their own stuff with their own money?
So what they're saying then is that they can't pay for their own stuff with their own money.
And so what they've done is they've taken the government money and they've expanded it.
So the government gives you 200% of your income, so you double what you spend.
But that's not because you need to sustain these things.
These things are only created because the government gave you money.
In other words, well, us funding these things on our own, that would be insane.
They're ridiculously unpro...
Oh, is the government giving us money?
Oh, yeah, let's go spend that.
Heaven's sakes.
So it's not like this is critical infrastructure that they need the government to pay for.
This is bullshit that is created because the government gave you money.
It's not essential.
It's not necessary.
And if it can't be justified without the government money, shut it down.
Well, I like the fact, too, that most people probably aren't aware that Princeton and many of these other Ivy League universities have large endelments.
So the statement is presented as, well, this finances libraries, laboratories, classrooms, research, financial aid.
It's like this stuff wouldn't happen.
If not for the federal government.
So in their statement, the context of it, they're like, we're incompetent.
We're really, really bad.
We couldn't build a damn library if we didn't get tons of money from the federal government.
But send your young adult children to our university and we'll teach them how to do things.
You know, we can't build a damn library without the help of the federal government.
A classroom?
Good God, a room?
Have you ever tried to build a room?
Holy God, can't do that.
But federal government money, woohoo, we're good to go.
But send your kids here and pay us Oh, God, I don't even want to look at the average price for Princeton in tuition, but pay us boatloads of money.
Have a quick look while I make the next point, and also look up their endowment as well, because I'm going to go out on a limb here, and I can't speak, of course, for everyone at Princeton, but I'm going to guess that there's...
A couple of lefties in Princeton University who really, really dislike the military-industrial complex.
Man, that's just terrible.
You know, it's so unfair, it's unjust, foreign wars, a waste of tax dollars and so on.
And they're probably really bitterly against...
The raising of the defense budget under Trump.
However, a statement from the U.S. military attempted to justify the funding by explaining that it finances libraries, laboratories, classrooms, research, and financial aid.
Libraries because you need to study war.
Laboratories to create new weapons of mass destruction.
Classrooms to teach soldiers research into new weaponry and financial aid in the form of paying for All right, so Princeton's endowment.
If you had to guess, Steph, what would you say?
I'm going to guess about $10 billion.
In 2016, $22.2 billion US. And don't they get annoyed at Trump for being overly well?
Anyway.
Yale, which we were just talking about, is $25.41 billion as well.
So again, massive amounts of money in endowment, and they're getting...
$41 billion from the government over six years.
That's...
I don't think that's exactly welfare.
Although, welfare finances convenience stores and liquor stores and police salaries for people going in there and electricity consumption.
Anyway, go on.
Well, you know, people, even people on the left get outraged when there's bailouts for companies that fail and that type of stuff, and they say it's welfare for the rich.
Can you explain to me...
How these grants for Ivy League schools is not just welfare for the rich.
Can anyone do that?
But it involves the word college, and it's school, so it's automatically always good, right?
If you're against colleges getting money, you must be against colleges.
Well, actually, I am against colleges, but you just want no one to be educated.
You want everyone to be dumb.
You want everyone to play with a rock in a backpond, and that's the rest of their life.
Well, here's the funny thing, too.
So if you're a student, and I don't know how it is now, but this is some sort of reports of people I knew when I was younger.
So if you're a student and you're applying for college tuition aid or student loans or whatever, they basically say, well, do you have a hamster you can sell?
Do you still have both of your kidneys?
Is there any way you could pay for this yourself?
And if you can prove to them, and this includes like bank statements, if you can prove to them that neither you nor your family nor your extended family nor somebody you brushed up against in the mall three years ago can help you pay for your education, then finally, grudgingly, they will open their books and give you some cash.
Is there any way you could pay for this yourself?
Now, try applying for a student loan when you're sitting on $22 billion.
I think they'll pretty much say, I think you got this covered.
However, if you're a university and you're sitting on that kind of money, well, you just get it all and more.
But then that's because the politicians and so on don't want to be perceived as anti-education and want to keep the intelligent people lashed to the mast of state power so they don't rock the boat.
I'm getting different numbers here for the cost to attend Princeton.
Some people are saying...
$40,000 in annual tuition plus $13,000 for full room and board in a meal plan.
Other people are saying $61,000 for total annual costs.
It could be depending on residency, you know, out of country.
Yeah, income level, all that stuff.
But you're looking for a cost of a four-year degree.
It's over $200,000.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's a small house.
It's a small fleet of cars.
It is all of that kind of good stuff.
So how many students per class?
We can't get a room!
To put these people that are paying this amount of money on an annual basis.
We can't get a room to put them without the federal government sending us some money.
Okay.
All right.
Now, since we're on the topic of schools, budgets, that kind of thing, a school budget was cut And why, Steph?
Why?
Why is the school budget cut?
Because, no, no, I've got this.
I've got this.
Because the teachers were really, really bad.
The students were underperforming, particularly the minority students, where better teaching has a significantly positive effect.
The parents were unhappy, and the school board and the administration and the principals all realized that they had to up their game, and they realized that they should take less money until they do better.
Right.
No, no, that's not the reason at all.
Which particular detail did I get wrong, or was it more than one detail?
I'll just say yes.
Yes, they were all wrong.
Outrage is grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.
Yay!
The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30%.
Huh.
Too much whitey!
Cut the funding!
In a letter to parents, the district noted that the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple of years.
Oh, too many white people.
The racial formula was a condition imposed by a court decision dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.
For many parents, the race-based reason of, quote, too many white students, end quote, has made the cuts more difficult to swallow.
This is a thing.
I have these stories.
It's like, I know it's kind of a trope to say, this could be on the onion, but this stuff is just nuts.
Right.
So, after having the funding cut because too many white kids are going to school, the good news is that there are fewer white kids to graduate from high school and end up in indoctrination centers at other universities complaining about white privilege.
Well, I just look on the bright side of all this.
Since white people have pretty much stopped breeding, soon there's not going to be any white kids in schools.
So they won't have a problem.
They'll get all the funding that they want, and this white privilege thing will be completely eradicated.
I wonder if they'll actually find out how many white people pay taxes.
I don't know about that.
I don't think they're learning that in South Africa or anything.
So, yeah, that's good.
You know, racism will be solved, and all of that excess population will be resolved.
Can I pay my taxes with my white guilt?
Will they accept that as a form of currency?
Is it like Bitcoin?
Or white privilege.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, from schools, we're going to Michael Moore, who, you know, nothing alarming at all.
He just thinks that Donald Trump has caused the extinction of human life on earth.
All right.
This is a quote from Michael Moore.
Who's he talking to?
Himself?
No.
This is the...
Go ahead, read it.
All right.
Quote, historians in the near future, because that may be the only future we have, will mark today, March 28th, 2017, is the day the extinction of human life on Earth began.
President Trump has signed executive orders ending all efforts to stop and reverse climate change.
He is rescinding President Obama's six climate change orders.
He is instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to cease its climate change efforts and do no environmental regulations that get in the way of profits or quote, jobs, end quote.
The EPA is to only concern itself with, quote, clean air and clean water, end quote, while Trump orders a massive increase in the use of coal.
This is a defining moment in the history of mankind.
By signing these executive orders today, Trump is declaring an act of war on the planet and its inhabitants.
The one silver lining here is Trump can't kill the planet.
The planet wants to live and has a long history of wiping out any real or perceived threats.
The planet is going to rebel against Donald Trump.
Is this what we're saying?
Continuing.
With the actions Trump is taking today, the planet is paying attention.
And the planet will make sure it dispenses with a species hell-bent on destroying Earth.
End quote.
Do you know Michael Moore, at least as of 2014, and his wife, they had got divorced and all of that, and there was a settlement, so we didn't get a huge amount of details.
Do you know Michael Moore and his wife owned nine homes?
No.
He's got more than Bernie Sanders.
That seems like quite a lot.
That seems like quite a lot.
In his legal pleadings, Michael Moore blamed his wife for the expansion of the 10,000 square foot home on Torch Lake, which has a value of $2 million.
Now, to be fair, and I'm going to try not to make too many fat jokes because they're fairly easy and kind of inevitable, but...
Okay, for you and I, normal-sized people, that's a 10,000-square-foot home.
I think for him, it's probably in the nature of a shoe.
So, it's a different, you know, we thought, oh, that's too much space.
Well, not if you are, in fact, too much space to begin with.
Does Michael Moore know that the planet is paying attention and that the planet wants to live and it will dispense with the species hell-bent on destroying Earth?
That includes people who make documentaries.
It is always interesting when people who...
Don't take care of their own personal environment, i.e.
their body.
Once I lecture everyone about the physical environment of the planet itself, that is always something which...
You know, I mean, there's two things, two possibilities, both of which to me are equally terrifying.
Number one is he genuinely believes this.
Like, he genuinely wakes up in the morning and doesn't want to get out of bed.
I assume that happens anyway.
But he wakes up in the morning, doesn't want to get out of bed because human life is going to become extinct.
He genuinely believes this 150%.
That's mental.
Secondly, I mean, we survived an ice age, for God's sakes.
You know, I mean, the human being—I mean, anyway.
But the other is that he doesn't really believe it, but it's just kind of stuff you have to say when you're in that mindset, when you're of the left.
Like, you have to say something, and it has to be hysterical.
It's kind of not real, because he doesn't really believe it.
But you kind of have to say it because that's your thing or whatever.
It's like an act.
It's like a show that you have to do, a virtue signaling and all of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, for God's sakes, guys, get your story straight.
I mean, the moving goalpost for climate change is almost a topic of comedy in and of itself.
But have we already passed the point of no return?
Wasn't that, like, last year or a year or two ago?
There's been a bunch of different dates.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what we do now.
But apparently, it's not that we passed the point of no return a couple of years ago.
It's that Donald Trump signed something.
And that's it.
I mean, good Lord.
I'm just encouraged that the planet wants to live.
That's good to know.
I'm not sure if he interviewed the planet.
That would be quite a get if you could actually interview the planet and determine if it wanted to live or what the deal was.
I think it would say to Michael Moore, ouch.
You're stepping on my...
No, and the thing, like, if you care, like, I appreciate people who care about the environment, who are concerned about the environment.
I mean, every sane person, you know, we don't want to live in a sewer, we don't want to live in downtown Beijing and suck diesel exhaust for a living.
Like, I'm fine with all of that stuff.
But for God's sakes, let's have some proportion here.
So if you really care about the future, if you really care about the quality of life for people in the future, okay, fix government schools so that they don't suck as much.
I mean, we had a guy on the—and I really want to remind people of this because it's a big story that I have—I want to circle back and remind people.
You teach kids philosophy, and it's not a big job.
It's not huge.
It's not like you've got to enroll them in Princeton.
You just teach them an hour or two of philosophy a week, philosophical thinking.
They do fantastically.
Scores in unrelated subjects like math and English go up, and they're happier, and they play together better.
So there's something that you could do right now to make the world a better place in the future.
And if you want to help carbon footprints, then you would really, of course, want to cut back, curtail, and eventually diminish, if not eliminate, the welfare state as a whole for reasons.
We just had a big interview with a guy today, Dr. Perkinson.
Perkins, and we'll have...
In the welfare state, you have fewer dysfunctional people, fewer dysfunctional problems, families, less criminality, fewer people with self-destructive habits, fewer people who are unhealthy, who are consuming resources that healthy people don't consume and so on.
So you could do that.
Oh, how about the national debt?
Stop running national debts.
If you care about the environment, if you care about the future, stop running national debts because that's massive, massive overconsumption of resources and precious energy and all the finite resources in the world.
It's massive consumption.
of resources in the here and now every dollar the government spends that it does not have is a dollar's worth of environmental damage and consumption And so, I mean, these are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head of things you could really do to help the environment, help make the world a better place.
How about revisiting divorce laws in family court?
Because, of course, as Michael Moore knows, when you get divorced, you have to double up where people live.
You have to double.
There's a huge amount, a huge carbon footprint on divorces, kids getting driven forth.
Everywhere back and forth, you've got two sets of clothes, two sets of toys, a huge environmental impact.
And so if human beings have to give up massive economic freedoms, political freedoms, massive tax increases and job losses and all of that, surely we can go up to bickering couples and say, you know, we should probably make divorce just a little bit harder.
Because, hey, the majority of people who consider divorce who then stay married— Five years later are really happy they didn't get divorced.
And a lot of the people who do get divorced five years later are really wishing that they hadn't.
So maybe we could make divorce a little bit harder to get a hold of.
That way it would be hugely good for the environment.
But of course that would be to relinquish government power and to minimize government spending.
And Michael Moore cares not one...
Tiny sphincter of a rat's ass about the environment.
It's all virtue signaling because if he really cared at all, he'd be saying to governments, stop spending.
He'd be saying to families, stay together.
And he'd be saying to government schools, teach better.
I mean, imagine if you could get kids out of school earlier, how much better that would be for the environment.
Not to mention, you might want to stop taking people from third-world countries, you know, people that have high birth rates and bring them into first-world countries with that kind of carbon footprint that first-world countries leave as opposed to if you exist in a third-world country.
You might be opposed to mass immigration in some way, shape, or form.
Oh, I've got another one.
How about no giant foreign aid programs that stimulate massive overpopulation in third-world countries?
It's terrifying to think about what's going to happen when the money runs out and all of a sudden these countries that have been getting mass amounts of money from not just the United States either, from many Western nations, all of a sudden it runs dry and the foreign aid that dumped on their local economy, preventing any type of local all of a sudden it runs dry and the foreign aid that dumped on their local economy, preventing any type of It's going to be bad.
It's going to be really, really, really bad.
And again, that's something that no one talks about in the realm of climate change either.
If you raise the cost of energy, what's going to happen to these places that you raise the cost of energy and that's life or death?
There's going to be a whole lot of brown people that aren't doing too well if the cost of energy goes up.
Right, right.
And of course, on the plus side, it will all be blamed on freedom and capitalism.
I've mentioned teaching philosophy to children.
You can find that show.
It's called Philosophy for Children if you search the YouTube channel.
And you can go and find more on the study itself that we're talking about at p4c.com.
The letter P, the number 4, the letter C, dot com.
Alright, well up next, an update on a story that we covered last week, the whole Tommy Lahren, Glenn Beck, The Blaze situation.
Well, Tommy Lahren's one-week suspension turned into a permanent ban from The Blaze TV, and now Glenn Beck and The Blaze are actually holding Tommy Lahren's Facebook page with 4.2 million fans hostage during her departure negotiations,
So if you're a journalist, if you're in this kind of alternative media space and you get an offer from The Blaze, you know, it's always interesting to see how people treat their previous employees, current employees.
I might, you know, take a gander at this whole situation and reconsider any offer that's on the table to join The Blaze's website since, you know, I got to think when a page is branded with someone's name and they have a whole audience that wants to hear what they have to say and you're holding that over their head.
I don't know.
I guess you could say she should have had it all wound up in her contract and had that solid.
That certainly could be said, but it's a pretty big dick move to hold up someone's Facebook page or anything with their name-specific branding.
Well, okay, the blaze, aka how to set fire to your reputation.
But at least this kind of stewarding and navigation, along with being kind of ridiculously anti-Trump and then kind of incomprehensibly pro-Trump, at least this kind of random aggression is helping build the base, right?
I mean, they're willing to do this kind of stuff as long as they're going to increase the number of people who are coming to them.
Is that right?
Let's just say the website attracted people.
29 million unique visitors per month.
But that was back in 2014.
Now it's down to 8.8 million.
So 29 down to 8.8 in a very short period of time.
So you lost two-thirds of your traffic already.
Good job!
Just keep on that business plan and, I don't know, we'll get it down to zero in a couple of months.
Well, there's a trajectory that seems to have only one particular ending.
Wow.
I mean, if Glenn Beck was not so personally associated with the brand, I'm sure there'd be some kind of revolt in terms of, like, we've got to turn this around.
And listen, if you make a big stand, it's win or lose.
You win big or you lose big.
And Mike and I had talked about this in terms of some of the occasional pro-Trump comments we may or may not have made over the last 18 months or so.
If you're going to take a stand, then you're going to win big or you're going to lose big.
Now, you can turn it around.
Like, let's say you're really, really anti-Trump and then you end up being pro-Trump.
If you're really honest, if you introspect, if you figure out what went wrong and you openly state what happened and what you've done about it and how you're going to be better.
I mean, everyone's going to be wrong from time to time and we all have emotional reactivity and all of that.
But this process where you just...
Like, you reverse positions, and then you just kind of pretend that nothing happened.
That's weird.
That freaks people out, and that is not a sustainable model.
You can oppose Trump and you could have criticized Trump even during the election, but good God, bring some criticism and some opposition other than brown shirts are coming and equating him to Hitler.
Once you go there, I don't think there's going back.
Given everything that was on the line and the options on the table and the migrant crisis and immigration and the whole demographic layout, I don't think there were really good criticisms of Trump given the whole situation.
But at the same time, if you're going to criticize him, offer something of substance based on reason and evidence, not just, I don't like him, he's mean on Twitter, that's not going to help.
I don't know why people don't call us more, Mike.
Why don't they call us more?
I'm willing to help people.
Like, I have a text, but we, I guess, together, but me in particular, because I put out my original, like my most famous video for a long time outside of the story of your enslavement was the truth about voting, which was a giant rant about not voting and not getting involved in politics.
I had a whole series of videos.
Don't get involved in politics and voting is worse than a waste of time.
That changed a little.
That changed a lot.
Brexit.
Yeah, with Brexit and with other things.
So we have a public about-face that people could study on how you can navigate what could be termed a massive flip-flop, I know nobody has or conceivably could because, you know, we explained it very well and people always listen to that kind of stuff without prejudice.
But We have a textbook example of how to publicly change your mind about a core value And not end up blowing up two-thirds of your audience.
You know, you can do it.
You just have to be honest, self-critical, explain in detail what has changed, what new information you have now that you didn't have before, how the values are still being served by your new position, and so on.
That is something you can do, but people do this kind of weird flip-flop, don't refer to anything before, and then they wonder why the audience doesn't follow them.
It's because they don't trust you.
You can change your mind publicly on a core issue, on a core value, And you can lead your audience on your volte facie.
You can lead them in your about face.
And they will follow you.
And in fact, people think that this kind of reversal is always damaging.
No, no.
The people who like what you do, the people who understand what you're doing, they can like you more.
If you process new information, change your position according to that new information, and clearly explain why that's happening, they can trust you more because you're not rigidly holding to old positions in the face of new information.
As long as you navigate publicly, openly, and with respect for your audience and respect for your prior position and an acknowledgement of the facts or the landscape that has changed underfoot, you can make these kinds of about faces.
And you can end up with more listener respect.
You can end up with more listeners and with greater impact.
But you have to do it the right way.
And people always do this kind of stuff.
They never call us to say, hey, how did you guys manage it?
Your numbers are bigger than before you changed your mind about stuff.
What did you do?
But nobody ever does.
They just go do their own thing.
Oh, well, if competition wants to make mistakes...
Go to it!
With a vengeance!
...tug at their lapel and go, oh, no, no, you're doing it wrong.
Two points on that.
It's kind of tough when you say Ted Cruz was pretty much anointed by God to be the next president of the United States.
That's a tough one to come back from.
That's a bit of a challenge.
And two, on a similar vein to changing previous positions when new information comes to the fold, one of my favorite and probably one of the more underappreciated videos and shows as a whole that we've ever put out was the An Atheist Apologizes to Christians show.
That had been building for quite a while regarding – you've come out as a really strong atheist.
You have a book called Against the Gods, which is a really, really good and thorough logical breakdown as to why the position of agnosticism isn't even valid.
And yet, I love this interesting position.
Being someone that doesn't believe in God yet has tremendous respect for Christians and just the way we've been treated by Christians compared to atheists who...
I'm a self-hating, self-identifying atheist.
I don't want to be called an atheist.
I don't want to be around atheists.
And the Christians are great.
So having that conversation after coming out pretty strong against Christians in the past with new information, it's like, hey, these Christians are pretty nice.
Hey, there's lots of Christians that believe in small government.
Hey, there's lots of Christians that have values very similar to me.
And these atheists, oh God, oh God, I'm in a pit of nihilistic goo.
So, that was one of my favorite shows, and I think that's like a textbook way, just, hey, this is the new information I've come across.
This is where I am.
This is my thoughts on the matter.
Open it up for public debate, and we've had lots and lots of Christians and some atheists as well call in to debate the subject, and I think it has just added a tremendous amount to the entire public discussion.
I like that we can have respect for each other, even though we hold different positions.
Isn't that great?
I mean, you don't get that with any of the anti-Trump stuff.
It's immediate.
You're the most evil person on the planet who ever lived, if you have a positive thing to say about Donald Trump, because maybe you're a manufacturing worker who would like a job, but somehow you're a brown shirt because you're concerned about trade.
Wrapping it up, I think Tommy Lahren is going to be incredibly successful in whatever she does next.
There's some rumblings that she may go to Fox.
Who knows how that's going to pan out.
But 24 years old, incredibly successful in a short period of time.
Her profile's only going up in the Blaze's profile.
Well...
We'll see how long it takes and hit zero unique visitors in a month, but it might not be too long.
Well, just, I mean, I'm sort of reminded of the steady diet of crow that I've eaten over the last couple of years in terms of altering positions based upon new evidence.
But see, that's the beauty of being an empiricist.
Being an empiricist means you don't judge anything other than the empirical facts of the situation.
And you can draw your logical inferences from the physical facts of the situation.
But experiment trumps theory every single time.
And when atheists tend towards leftism, tend towards socialism, tend towards big government, Democrats, and all that kind of stuff, well, yeah.
They're objectively physically more dangerous than Christians who might try and talk you into their church, but aren't going to throw you in jail for not following any one of their 10 billion regulations and rules and controls.
And when you see the Christians doing the brave things to confront social decay in the West and you don't see the atheists doing as much, or, you know, let's just take an imaginary, because, you know, let's extract the principles, right?
Let's just take an imaginary belief called, I don't know, Hibertarianism.
So let's suppose that I, at one point, was very pro-Hybertarianism for particular reasons, but then empirically found that Hibertarians didn't particularly follow their own arguments when it came to, say, defending culture or the logical conclusions of statism versus Hibertarianism and so on.
And let's say I sort of put out A public video of why I was wrong about Hibertarianism.
And let's say that Hibertarians, some, of course, just ended up sort of, you know, trashing me.
Rather than calling in and saying, listen, man, respect the work you've done.
You've built up a lot of credibility in the Hibertarian community.
Here's where your facts are wrong.
Here's where your data's wrong.
Let's have a discussion.
Let's have a debate.
But no, just avoidance and ad hominems, you know?
I mean, then what we would say is that Hibertarians...
Don't really have the mental integrity and muscle to productively alter society, right, for the better.
Because they don't engage in conversations, they retreat and at home.
And that would be sort of one general example, and if I was wrong about the empirical examples of Hippeterians, as opposed to, you know, sort of where I am now, which is a little tricky to define...
Then I would look at the empirical examples of how they actually behaved and revise my estimation of libertarianism accordingly, and that would be fully in line with reality trumps theory, judge what they do, not what they say.
My favorite thing about Hibertarians, you know, this hypothetical group that doesn't actually exist, is how they may be inclined to, well, talk about the free market, but yet be utter failures in it to the degree that they have to retreat to think tanks to serve propaganda masters that fund those think tanks.
It's funny how that works out, you know, in this completely hypothetical situation.
All right, well, moving on, we're talking about Sweden again.
And when we're talking about Sweden in 2017, it's normally not a positive story.
So, an Ethiopian migrant was charged with the rape of two underage girls in Sweden, and apparently he took steps to deliberately expose victims to, quote, The migrant, who says he's 16, at this point, who knows, Will be prosecuted for two counts of child rape and two counts of attempted aggravated assault after having sex with a 14-year-old and a 13-year-old in spring of last year.
Now what was this life-threatening disease?
Well, he was fully aware he had HIV in the period during the rapes were committed.
The Ethiopian neglected to take the drugs that he was prescribed.
As a result, medical records show a hugely elevated amount of the virus in his blood at the time, greatly enhancing the risk of infecting his victims.
Now, he knew the consequences of not taking his medication and that he was not allowed to have unprotected sex, according to official documents.
He was also aware that the law requires people who are HIV positive to inform their partners, but he failed to do so.
So Sweden, you're bringing in migrants who are infected with HIV.
You have to pay for their drug treatments that they will stop taking when they go to rape various children.
Wow.
I mean, it's also I've seen it referred to after he had sex with a 14 year old and a 13 year old in spring last year.
It's not having sex, right?
I mean, isn't that statutory rape at the very best?
Now, in 2014, Sweden's Red Green Coalition government committed to scrapping the legal requirement for persons with HIV to inform their partners of their status.
After heavy lobbying from the LGBT groups who say the law unfairly attaches stigma to the disease, unfairly.
Unfairly attaches stigma to the disease.
I don't know.
Having HIV isn't a positive thing.
I don't know how you're going to remove the stigma of having something which could conceivably kill you.
I don't know how you remove that stigma, but nonetheless.
Then the vice chairman of the social committee said the society has a moral duty to counter prejudice about HIV. Quote, It's still a serious disease, but the drugs are so effective now that people are still able to live a good life with HIV. Today,
there's a risk that the legal requirement to inform a partner of your status could be counterproductive as it maintains the stigma around HIV-positive people who are in need of help." Well, you know, the thing that comes to mind is philosophy or morality is just about basic common sense.
The idea that removing the requirement for people to tell sexual partners that they are at risk of infecting them with a debilitating, life-threatening, permanent disease, I mean, it's mad.
It's mad.
But Steph, some people might feel bad.
No, I understand.
I really do.
So this is just basic common sense stuff.
But what I find amazing...
This is sort of the big picture view.
And there's so much to say about this, but we've got a couple of other stories.
But I just want people to think about this.
White privilege is real.
Patriarchy is real.
Gender is unreal.
It's just a social concept.
And you can redefine A permanent, life-threatening disease as okay just by changing the law, right?
So things which are kind of imaginary, like white privilege and patriarchy, totally real, and we should base entire legislative initiatives on the reality of this imaginary stuff.
But real diseases can be turned into positives, or at least neutrals, just by changing the law.
This is not a culture.
This is an asylum, right?
I don't know the white privilege is going to show up in a blood test.
Yet HIV, well, that's a little different.
All right.
Well, we're going to move on to something a little more cheery than child rape with HIV in Sweden.
To something that actually, it's not new.
This was a survey in October of 2016.
This blew my mind.
So I have to share it with people.
More than one in five U.S. millennials would be open to backing a communist candidate, and a third believe George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin.
I mean, obviously, communism is the superset.
Joseph Stalin is a subset within one country.
And it depends what you measure, right?
So if you measure sort of wars started by communism, that's one thing.
But communism as an ideology domestically, which is governments killing or starving to death or depriving citizens of essential life requirements, just in the 20th century, we're talking about 150 million, according to too many estimates, 150 million people.
Now, that's almost four World War IIs.
And that is an enormous, enormous number.
And so that is a huge amount.
Now, Stalin himself, definitely in the tens of millions.
Definitely.
I mean, we just look at the holodomar, which is the starvation of farmers and the citizenry as a whole through the forced collectivization of farms in Ukraine.
10 million, according to some estimates.
In the millions, for sure.
If we look at his mismanagement of the Second World War, you know, that you had soldiers out there...
In the snow with no weaponry told to attack the enemy.
And a lot of them, of course, just got captured.
And then when they were captured, after the war, they were sent back to Russia where he threw them into concentration camps where there was a 10% chance of dying every single year.
Mad, mad.
So, definitely in the tens of millions, and I don't think George W. Bush would be, you know, in that ballpark.
Not a great guy, George W. Bush.
Iraq, catastrophic error, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands, if not close to a million Iraqis.
Terrible stuff.
But even if you don't count wars, you take wars out of both equations, well, Stalin is, I mean, infinitely higher in the tens of millions.
And this information is a Google search away, folks.
Alright, well looking at another interesting question, and this isn't just millennials, this is American 16 plus.
So the question is, how likely would you be to vote for a presidential candidate who described him or herself as the following?
Socialist!
38% of the American populace would be likely to vote for a socialist.
Fascist!
8% would be like, who are these 8%?
I really would like to meet these people.
Actually, no.
No, I really wouldn't want to meet these people.
8% for fascists.
59% for capitalists.
Okay, that's better.
Communists!
10%.
So 10% of the American populace will be likely to vote for a communist.
Yay!
Let's move on to another interesting question.
Among those familiar, so these This is a question of, do you know who this person is?
There's also a survey question of, what's your overall impression of this person, even if you don't know who they are?
So we'll go with, among those familiar, what is your overall impression of each of the following political figures?
Now this is interesting.
Net favorable, George W. Bush, 52%.
Okay.
Bernie Sanders, 59%.
Okay.
Ronald Reagan, 72%.
I guess they probably don't know.
About the no-fault divorce thing or the amnesty thing.
Or maybe they do.
Maybe that's lefties, like Ronald Reagan, for the no-fault divorce and amnesty in California deal.
Who knows?
Donald Trump, this is at the time, like I said, October, 37%.
Puts it in perspective.
Hillary Clinton, 45%.
Now, this is where we get interesting on the survey.
Okay, so George W. Bush, we'll kind of look at him as a baseline.
Net favorability of 52%.
Donald Trump again, 37%.
Mao Zedong.
His approval rating in the United States among Americans, 16 plus, 11%.
So 11% of the people who know and are familiar with Mao Zedong, 11% approve of him.
Good God help us all.
Steph, could you just elaborate a little bit on Mao Zedong and why the 11% approval rating is a little concerning?
Well, of course, Mao Zedong was up against Chiang Kai-shek in a civil war in the 1940s in China, and as I detail in the most excellent presentation of Truth About Joseph McCarthy, the American government really helped arm and propel Mao Zedong to the leadership of China.
And he then proceeded to do the usual socialist slash communist freak horror show.
There was concentration camps, mass indoctrination camps, driving people out of the cities, just as happened in Cambodia.
There was forced collectivization of the farms, the starvation of tens of millions of people, the Great Leap Forward, a cultural revolution.
He's like, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Hey, you know, we've had way too much censorship.
Go speak your mind.
and then he used that to find dissidents and, again, mass slaughter, concentration camps.
The usual psychopathic nightmare that happens when you give government control of just about anything.
The only people who want that kind of power are mad sociopaths.
He also barely ever cleaned his teeth and only washed his penis through sex.
So, pretty gamey all around, a black-toothed fellow.
That's why you don't usually see him smiling where you can see his teeth in the pictures.
And, again, tens of millions of people slaughtered under Mao.
He was a repulsive, sociopathic, evil dictator of the First Order.
And, you know, one of the people in history who has the most blood on his hands.
So, yeah, one in ten?
That is really quite an astonishing...
You know, I was just having a conversation with an expert from King's College on...
Neuropsychology and biology and so on, Dr.
Perkins.
And we were discussing sort of the prevalence of psychopaths in society, like hardcore psychopaths.
Some estimates are sort of 1% to 2%.
His was higher.
I'm pretty sure that if you know anything about Mao Zedong and you have a favorable opinion of him, that might be the only psychopath test I'm looking for.
11% of the American populace, familiar with this, approves of tens of millions of people being killed.
Okay.
All right.
They can vote, everybody.
Yay for that.
And it's just testament to the amazing, amazing propaganda infiltration that the Russians and other communists did into American culture.
Now that communism, in the form in which it was when it was trying to infiltrate and successfully did infiltrate American universities, media, culture, and so on, that communism It's gone.
It's been replaced by, you know, some crony capitalism and the usual corruption, but at least the death camps are gone, and the mass starvation, slaughter, murder is gone, and there's some elements of the free market.
And as we were talking about with Bill Whittle, there's a lot more freedom in many areas, economic areas in Russia, than there is in many places in the West.
And so it shows just how incredibly effective this infiltration and propaganda campaign is It was in the West.
They set this up in the post-Second World War period.
They set all the machinery in motion.
And then the originator of that infiltration mechanism fell away, classical communism.
But it's still doing its work.
It literally is like the zombie assassin who doesn't know when to stop.
And even though they themselves have turned away from the very system that they...
Used to begin the infiltration of that system into the West, even though they've turned away from that system, we're still succumbing to that horrendous dictatorial system, the collectivism, the central planning.
I mean, the EU is a socialist super state.
And it is terrifying just to see.
I'm sure they would stop it now if they could.
They would stop it now if they could, but they can't.
And again, this is just another reminder of how precious Americans seem to be, I mean the Democrats in general, how precious Americans seem to be when they complain about Russian bots influencing their election.
Well, you know, at least Russia wasn't even remotely close to directly arming a dictator that was going to slaughter tens of millions of Americans.
And that is not at all the case would happen when American State Department helped bring Mao Zedong to power in China.
Yeah, interfering in foreign elections, interfering in the affairs of foreign nations.
Dozens and dozens of governments have had legitimate elections overthrown or civil wars decided in the favor of the preferred puppet state of the State Department in the U.S. just over the last 70 years.
And ooh, ooh, but it's terrible if there may potentially be a few Russian bots influencing.
Oh my God, it's mad.
Up next on the list is Che Guevara, who is higher approval rating-wise than Mao Zedong.
He's at 27%.
So again, he's only 10 points below Donald Trump.
You might want to check out The Truth About Che Guevara, which is a presentation on this channel, which details His murderous rampage is on the behest of Fidel Castro.
So, very interesting fellow who, yeah, you don't exactly get the facts of him talked about in the mainstream oh so often, but he's a friendly socialist figure who was a mass-murdering psychopath.
Karl Marx next on the list.
20% for Karl Marx.
He's not as popular as Che.
You know, if you put his face on a t-shirt, not gonna sell as well, but 20% of the people...
But more than half as popular as Donald Trump.
So apparently creating a toxic ideology responsible for the death of approximately 150 million people is about the equivalent of having over ornate bathtub fixtures in your extremely well-appointed penthouse.
That's, you know, having a successful show on television, teaching people basic life skills and job skills and so on, which of course the government should be doing but isn't right.
The Apprentice, I think, really helped people understand how the business world works and how you actually create and provide value in the free market.
It was a pretty good treatise on economics in some ways.
So apparently, if you create a toxic ideology that causes the death of 150 million people, if you end up sponging off the workers through Engels, right?
Engels owned a factory and through a lot of the profits of that factory, Marx's way.
If you end up exploiting the workers, which apparently is really, really bad.
If you end up saying it's really terrible when people exploit the working class for sex and then end up banging your maid and throwing her out on the street because you don't want to acknowledge your son.
If you do all of these things, you can be at least half as popular as a guy who's created thousands and thousands of jobs and who has taken on a very difficult task in the late autumn of his life because he believes that the West is an ideal and a value to be saved.
Now, of the hosts of The Apprentice, Donald Trump is not the one that impregnated his maid.
That'd be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So Arnold's got quite a bit in common with Karl Marx.
Donald, not so much.
Moving on, we have Joseph Stalin next on the list at 8%.
So Joseph Stalin, not high in the approval ratings, 8%.
He's beneath Mao Zedong.
Would you like to talk a little bit about Joseph Stalin, Steph?
I mean, a mass murdering psychopath.
Not Russian, actually.
Came from Georgia.
No, not that Georgia.
The other one.
And yeah, a mass murdering psychopath.
He's the guy who said a single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
So he had the usual complete indifference.
oh, they look like little ants from this summit of power approach to just destroying everybody who got in his way and destroyed his army and then sent them off to war and destroyed his agriculture and then had people slaughtered for hoarding food.
Hoarding food being, I want to have something to eat later today.
And just the usual massive mad horror show.
But it is, I guess, encouraging.
It is encouraging that if you cause the deaths of tens of millions of people, and enslave a massive population for a decade after decade, I guess that level of evil at least is enough to push you down into single digits of approval in America.
Oh, good job!
Good job, government education system.
Well, I'm sure if there was video of him kicking a dog in an elevator, we could get that down to 7%.
He starved an elephant.
Oh, I hate that guy now.
Vladimir Lenin, 14%.
So he's higher than Mao Zedong, higher than Joseph Stalin.
Not quite in Karl Marx territory, but 14% of the American population.
Favorable opinion of Vladimir Lenin.
Would you like to give a quick bio on Lenin stuff?
Well, Lenin, of course, was the revolutionary who, with the funding of the Germans, came in through Finland and overthrew the Tsar's, quote, regime, right?
You always know that it's propaganda when the former government is called a regime, because that's just got a negative Pinochet-style flavor to it.
So it's, overthrew a regime!
Now, there was, like, I don't know, a dozen or so in the teens of political prisoners when they liberated the Tsar.
If you were a political prisoner, you got...
Full rights of legal defense, if you had done something against a state or threatened or tried to attack or kill someone in the government, you had a full trial, you had a legal defense, you had all of this kind of stuff, none of which was accorded to any opponents of the communist regime under Lenin.
Now Lenin, well, he initially, immediately started nationalizing everything, controlling the economy, collectivizing the farms and so on, and Very shortly after the revolution of 1917 began instituting death camps, concentration camps, the whole Gulag archipelago that we've talked about a number of times and ended up starving and usually destroying the economy, wrecking the economy, destroying price signals and any remnants of the free market.
And then in the mid-1920s, he realized that the entire system was about to collapse.
And so he instituted something called the New Economic Policy where he allowed a certain amount of liberalization of the economy.
I think he died in 1927 raving about electricity.
And just a thoroughly evil, vicious viper of a human being who set horrifying things in motion.
And the liberalization of Russia that was occurring.
I mean, Russia was basically a slave-driven society, even more so than ancient Athens and ancient Rome.
And serfs were liberated.
There was some extension of common law.
There was a strengthened rights of property.
And this is so often the case.
And we see this with the left right now.
When there is some potential liberalization coming to the American economy, the feral left strike back.
It is the most dangerous time for a country when you are pushing back against historical concentrations of state power.
That's when those who are dependent on that state power or those who functionally cannot exist in any psychological or maybe even long-term genetic sense in a free market, that's when they strike back.
So you have to be most on guard when you are the most optimistic.
I don't mean to make people paranoid, but that's a pretty clear lesson of history.
I wonder if the deep state was on this survey, what its net favorability rating would be.
Please tell me they asked about Hitler.
No, not on this.
Not on this.
But they do ask about Vladimir Putin, who sits at 18 percent favorability.
Now, keep in mind, this is this is September, October of last year.
And the propaganda campaign against Russia and Putin by the American mainstream media has really picked up since then.
So I can't imagine it would still be 18 because I keep it.
You don't hack the election that bad.
I'm sure that mentality is seeping in there and it's probably down the single digits at this point.
But in this survey, September, October, 18 percent.
So only four points higher than Lennon.
Seven points higher than Mao Zedong.
The body count for Putin is a bit lower, we'll say, than those mass murdering dictators.
Well, and under his, I don't know, rule or whatever you want to call it, he's extraordinarily popular with the Russian population as a whole.
and national income has gone up enormously and there are other very positive indicators with regards to Russia.
It is a challenge.
You know, don't listen to people who paint people in a particular way.
Oh, he's good.
Oh, he's bad.
Look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.
Strip away the propaganda.
Look at the facts and draw your own conclusions from there.
But yeah, don't let anyone lead you to a conclusion with colorful language.
I mean, me, anyone, anyone.
Just look at the facts and come to your own conclusions.
Well, an important question to always ask is, compared to what?
This guy's a bad guy!
Okay, compared to what?
Saddam Hussein was a bad guy!
Alright, well as far as leadership in Iraq, compared to what?
Was Iraq better off with Saddam Hussein in power, or worse off?
Well, we know that for sure.
I mean, sorry to interrupt, but the Iraqi population, let's just go with the million figure dead as a result of the US invasion, US-led invasion, it was a coalition.
So there are a million Iraqis dead, and in return they have a shattered country significantly inhabited by ISIS. So the Iraqis, if they had been willing to spend a million of their own lives voluntarily, could have themselves easily overthrown Saddam Hussein, but they chose not to.
They chose not to.
You don't have the right to impose that choice from outside.
If the Iraqi population under Saddam Hussein had been groaning so hideously under the despotic heel of his brutal dictatorship, and it was a brutal dictatorship in many, many ways, well then they could have risen up and they could have taken that matter into their own hands, just as the Americans did.
In the late 18th century with regards to the British government, they could have decided to have their own revolution.
But you don't get to impose that choice from outside.
I mean, would you, whatever country you're living in, let's say that some space aliens, right?
And I wrote a whole story about this called Space Aliens from Luxembourg, which you should check out on YouTube.
Highly recommend it.
It's an oldie but a goodie.
Yeah.
And let's say that some space alien said, well, your government is despotic, so I'm going to invade your country and it's going to cause the death of you and your entire family.
Would you say, yeah, I'm willing to sacrifice myself for that entirely uncertain outcome?
It's very, very challenging.
And...
We don't have the right as a culture to go and invade another country, destroy their dictatorship and say, well, now they're better off.
Well, first of all, the argument as to whether they're better off is highly debatable.
And you can't, I mean, it's a lot of propaganda, but you can see sort of the films and the videos and so on of what life was like in Iran.
Or Iraq or Afghanistan before huge amounts of Western interference.
And there were some significant positives.
There was, of course, no burqas, at least not for those who didn't want them.
And there were women able to go to university, be educated, and so on.
And that has all Well, up next we have a true or false question, which is similar to the conversation we were just having, and we alluded to it earlier.
This is Americans 16 +, so more than just millennials.
The question is, more people were killed under George W. Bush's presidency than Joseph Stalin's leadership.
26% of the American population, 16 +, said, that's true!
Wrong!
Very, very wrong.
Yay, government schools, 12 years of your life, and 26%?
Have no understanding of history.
Wonderful.
And they have Google.
You know, that's very difficult to get that question wrong.
On the plus side, their brains have been stuffed full of algebra they will never use.
So they don't have any basic facts about history.
Moral reasoning.
Moral reasoning.
The death count of communism.
Nothing.
But you know the triangle inequality relation and can probably whisper it on your demented deathbed.
74% rightly said, that statement is false.
So yay, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Alright, next we have a question, fairly interesting.
The question is, over the past 100 years, how many people do you think communism has killed?
Less than 1 million.
8%.
8% of people think less than 1 million people were killed by communism over the last 100 years.
28% say 1 million to less than 25 million.
25 million to less than 75 to less than 100 million, 11%.
And 100 million or more, 25%.
Well, how the hell do you end up with a positive view of any ideology where the number of people killed is at all positive?
If you look at capitalism, I mean, capitalism has vastly improved wages and living conditions and personal comfort and medicine and health.
I mean, it's just massive positive.
And we can see this because where capitalism is implemented, where the free market is implemented, the standard of living doesn't go up enormously to begin with because, of course, what happens is people just make more babies who consume more resources and so on.
But over time, it's without a doubt that the introduction of the free market and legal structures that are somewhat objective and limited government and so on massively improves the quantity and quality of human life.
Now, of course, you know, people say, well, no, that's imperialism.
That's all state stuff.
And that's not the free market.
But to me, it's a, okay, I know a guy Here's the number of people he's slaughtered with his bare hands.
If the number starts with at least one, he's not your babysitter.
That's all I'm saying.
He's not the guy who's going to take care of your pets on a long weekend.
Listen, Bob's only killed 14 people.
He's still a great guy as far as I'm concerned.
Come on now.
All right, we're moving on from millennial surveys and American surveys, which are giving me a bit of a twitch.
We're going to go to the World Health Organization and their push for a gaming disorder classification.
All right, now this is from Breitbart.
Quote, the international classification of diseases published by the World Health Organization would define gaming disorder as a, quote, persistent or reoccurring gaming behavior, i.e.
digital gaming or video gaming, characterized by an impaired control over gaming and Like if your controller's broken or something?
No.
In other words, the lack of self-control regarding video games is being legitimized as a specific mental illness.
That seems like a big step for the World Health Organization, which certainly carries quite a bit of sway in the realm of public opinion and medical discourse.
Now, who are they talking about?
I think it's important.
There's lots of stats out there regarding gamers, who gamers are, and there's lots of propaganda regarding who gamers are.
So take these with a slight grain of salt, but this was the best data that I could find.
In 2016, apparently 59% of people that identified as gamers were men, 41% were women.
Wait, that seems a little specific.
That seems a little binary, Mike.
I mean, can't they break it down to the 12 to 18 dozen various genders along the continuum?
I mean, we should really criticize them for that kind of binary thinking.
But anyway, go on.
I'm triggered.
I was just going to move past it, Steph, but you had to draw attention to it.
I need a moment to get myself together.
Okay, I'm good.
The Pew Research Center found that 19% of Hispanic respondents and 11% of black respondents describe themselves as gamers compared to only 7% of whites.
So if these numbers are accurate, we're talking about primarily men and primarily black and Hispanic men.
So we're going to classify lots of black and Hispanic men as mentally ill if they like video games.
Now, there are some people that are concerned about this.
And Dr.
Christopher Ferguson from the Department of Psychology at Stetson University said, Despite the lack of clarity, we've seen some pushes to institutionalize video game addiction as, quote, internet gaming disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published by the American Psychiatric Association and now as, quote, gaming disorder in the Classification of Diseases published by the World Health Organization.
Oh, and by the way, people, they're not diseases.
This is made-up Dungeons& Dragons ailments with no physical test for them whatsoever.
This is just a bunch of metaphors masquerading as ways to biochemically prey upon children and adults with horrible mind-destroying, quote, cures.
That is in my particular opinion.
But, yeah, just remember, they say diseases, but there's no physical test for these things whatsoever.
Well, we're going to get to some data that backs up your, quote, opinion in a few minutes.
The good Dr.
Ferguson continues and said, the concerns among some scholars are manifest.
It's not clear why video games are being singled out as compared to many other behaviors that can become addictive.
Sex, food, work, exercise, etc., etc., end quote.
So yeah, there's lots of things.
People have hobbies, folks.
They prioritize things that they enjoy over other things.
Are we going to say, well, this person really enjoys reading and they'll take time to read over going to a party, hanging out, they'll prioritize it.
Over other things.
And, you know, maybe it'll have negative social consequences because maybe they're a bit of an introvert.
Maybe they prefer to read other than working 40-plus hours a week at work.
You know, so maybe that's a mental illness.
Maybe they need to be drugged and treated.
Okay.
This becomes concerning very, very quickly.
So Ferguson and a number of his colleagues have published an open letter to the World Health Organization.
Oh, goody.
I'm sure they'll be thrilled.
Quote, the act of formalizing this disorder, even as a proposal, has negative medical, scientific, public health, societal, and human rights fallout that should be considered.
Of particular concern are the moral panics around the harm of video gaming.
That's never happened before, right, Steph?
Never.
First time.
Rock and roll!
It's the devil's work!
Grrr!
They might result in premature application of diagnosis in the medical community and the treatment of abundant false positive cases, especially for children and adolescents.
Okay, just jump out for a second.
The treatment of abundant false positive cases.
Drugging children who like video games!
That's what it means.
And what is a false positive with something that has absolutely no objective definition or biomedical markers of any kind?
You can't do a blood test for it.
You can't do a scan for it.
A false positive?
Aren't they all false positives?
Anyway, go on.
He continues, Second, research will be locked into a confirmatory approach rather than an exploration of the boundaries of normal versus pathological.
Third, the healthy majority of gamers will be affected negatively.
End quote.
Yeah, you don't say.
Dr.
Ferguson notes that the classification could also very easily, quote, end as an excuse to put some kids in harsh treatment camps or perhaps be used in an excuse for media regulation slash censorship, end quote, especially in, quote, non-democratic countries, end quote.
Now, why did he come to this?
Well...
He was corresponding with several doctors who are currently involved in drafting the new international classification of diseases.
And the doctors noted, quote, enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries, end quote.
And, quote, strong request from World Health Organization stakeholders, end quote, to include this definition of gaming disorder.
So, some countries, very, very, very, countries that have problems with people accessing the internet, free exchange of information, They're very interested in this gaming disorder.
That couldn't possibly have negative consequences, could it stuff?
I don't know what the hell anybody means by Asian anymore.
I just wanted to say that.
That's a good point.
I wish, can we just go back to classifications that we can all agree on?
I mean, everybody knows what black means in general, other than the confused people we were talking about earlier.
Most people know what white is.
I don't know what Asian is anymore.
Because for most of us, it means sort of East Asians, right?
Like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and so on.
But for British people, it also includes people like Pakistanis and so on.
So I just I don't know what Asian means anymore.
And that's that's not great.
Now, there's a study out there.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and China.
Complexities and controversies.
All right.
So this study goes into some historical details about Mental disorders, how they were used to classify people that, you know, may have been perfectly fine, but were causing some problems for the government at the time.
So, quote from the study.
Under applicable laws of Russia and other former Soviet republics, a person charged with a crime could be subjected to, quote, custodial measures of a medical nature, end quote, if the criminal act was proved and the person was found non-imputable due to mental illness.
Eventual investigation found no evidence of mental disorder of any kind in many of these cases.
It is likely that these individuals are representative of many hundreds of others who were found non-imputable for crimes of political or religious dissent in the Soviet Union, mainly between 1970 and 1990.
End quote.
You're mentally ill.
You're inconvenient to us.
In many of these non-democratic countries, that's pretty much the same thing.
You have failed to adapt to an insane system, therefore you must be insane and must be drugged.
Continuing from the study, quote, in the 1980s, China also established a system of maximum security forensic hospitals modeled after the Soviet, quote, special hospitals, end quote, for confining offenders who present a, quote, social danger, end quote.
Yay!
Yay for people that present a social danger, you know, with their dangerous ideas and all.
Violent reactions to non-leftist ideas.
Huh.
Why does that...
I don't know.
I'm getting something, but it's very deep in the amygdala.
So, over 6,000 people that we know of in China, most of them were teenagers, have been treated with actual electroshock therapy.
Why?
Why?
Well, they were thought to have been using the internet too much.
Would you like some electroshock therapy because you enjoy browsing the internet?
I'm going to guess no.
And that stuff, like that's literally running significant voltage through your brain, that can mess you up.
Like, I mean, you can get temporary or even permanent memory loss.
I mean, it's some serious, it's serious brain-destroying, brain-rewiring stuff.
Now, there have been some There's some evidence that can help with sort of chronic depression and so on, but, you know, I'm a big fan of the old talk therapy.
Compared to what?
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
That's the compared to what question when it comes to that.
Being struck by lightning cured my headache.
Let's take everyone with a headache and give them a nice piece of tinfoil and anyway.
Let's say these 6,000 teenagers in China, or most of them teenagers, did have a problem.
They just liked the internet too much.
Let's say that that was objectively true.
Is electroshock therapy really the best treatment for that?
Couldn't you just maybe change the Wi-Fi password?
From the Don't Think It Can't Happen Here file, in 2010, a police officer, this is in the United States, was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward for attempting to reveal what he said was the truth about falsified crime rate statistics.
That never happens!
What are you talking about?
He was eventually paid $600,000 in a settlement by the city of New York after filing a $50 million human rights violation suit.
So, yay taxpayers!
You get to pay for the $600,000 settlement.
For the officials that ended up involuntarily committing a police officer who was trying to get some facts to you.
So don't you just feel all rosy and warm inside?
That's, I mean, that's an astonishing story.
And the use of, quote, mental illness as a political weapon is rife throughout governments, the history of governments as a whole.
And yeah, you're right.
Anti-male, anti-minority.
And it's whacking a giant biochemical club at a symptom of a dysfunctional society.
Why?
And look, there are people who are addicted to the internet.
There are people who are addicted to video games.
There are people who are addicted to media and so on.
And, you know, when people are burning up dozens of hours a week on media and video games, it is coming at the expense of other things.
And I think that is something that needs to be addressed, not by the state, not by psychiatrists, not by medication, and certainly not by electroconvulsive therapy or whatever the hell you'll call it.
The question is why are people doing this?
Why are young men and women, in general it's young, although it happens to older people as well, but why are they spending so much time on media and in video games?
Well, it's not that hard to figure out because they have no future, because they have no traction in the economy, economy because they are depressed and anxious for being bamboozled into getting useless college degrees that come with massive amounts of debt and very few economic opportunities because they have seen their fathers often be dragged through family court and literally turned inside out for extra kidneys to sell on the black market to feed the insatiable more female hypergamy and material lusting.
And they can't get jobs.
They can't get wives.
They can't get girlfriends.
They can't get a future.
They can't have children.
They just have nothing.
And deep down, the young know.
Because the young are paying for the sins of the old in the current situation.
We'll get to that when we talk about Illinois and the pension scheme.
But the entire Ponzi scheme known as sort of retirement systems and social security and up here in Canada is the CPP, Canada Pension Plan.
It's all a Ponzi scheme that's completely unsustainable.
And the massive piling on in national debt, the degradation of schooling and education throughout the Western world, massive demographic replacement.
These are huge problems, and you can't talk about them.
I mean, if you get talked about them, you can often be in fairly big trouble.
So, yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of future.
I mean, look at the zombie economy of Japan.
20 years of massive deficits and very little economic growth at a time when the Japanese youth saw their father's karoshi, right?
Death by overwork.
I mean, just wretched, horrible lives.
And they have no traction, nowhere to go, no growth, no climbing the staircase to adulthood filled with professional, reasonable professional success and becoming a father and a husband and so on.
They have no place to go.
And when you can't achieve things that are tangible, when you can't achieve things in the real world, well, what do you do?
You still want the thrill of achievement, so you'll go for a high score.
You'll go for collecting all the stars on the level.
You'll go for dominating the leaderboards online.
We as species desperately need that sense of achievement, that sense of purpose, that sense of accomplishment, that sense of sharpening our skill set in a challenging environment.
And if we are barred from doing that in the real world, well, we'll do that in the make-believe world.
And the same thing was said, of course, when I was a kid about Dungeons& Dragons.
The same things have been said about a variety of things beforehand.
The question is, why are the kids doing it?
And nobody really wants to answer that question.
And a lot of it has to do, again, with the state stepping in for bad parenting.
Of course kids are going to be drawn to candy and they're going to be drawn to tablets and they're going to be drawn to video games in various forms.
They're going to be drawn to media and so on.
Your challenge as a parent is to be more interesting and more enjoyable and more engaging than a video game.
And if you can't, with all of your intelligence and verbal skills, you don't need a huge amount to be more interesting than a video game.
If you can't lure your kids away from a screen by being more enjoyable than a video game...
Well, I don't think that the solution is to have the states drug your children.
Well, well put, Steph.
And on the vein of the state stepping in for bad parenting, we're going to continue talking about the drugging of children.
This is from Mercury News.
Nearly one out of every four adolescents in California's foster care system are put on psychiatric drugs.
That's three and a half times the rate for all adolescents nationwide.
Over the last decade, almost 15% of the state's foster children of all ages will prescribe psychotropics.
Holy God!
12.2% of California foster children who received a psych drug in 2013 were not just prescribed one psych drug.
We're prescribed two, three, four, or more psychotropic medications at a time!
That's 12.2% of all California foster children who received a psych drug.
And that's up from 10.1% just 10 years prior.
And just so everyone knows, I mean, and you can read Whitaker's Mad in America for more on this, and we've had him on the show once or twice.
There's no particularly objective diagnosis, right?
I mean, you know, if you have an infection, you go get a blood test, and then you get your medicine to counter that specific infection, hopefully.
But they just basically, oh, try this.
Oh, that's not working.
Oh, try this.
Okay, well, let's add this.
And it is a lot of spin the wheel with the future of your neural connections.
Also, there's drugs to counter.
Oh, this drug's making you hyper.
Okay, let's put this drug to bring you down.
Oh, this drug's making you sleepy.
Okay, let's give you this drug to stimulate you.
I mean, it is a cocktail.
And it takes months to really see the effect of this drug, so we have to have you on it for a long period of time before we know whether or not it's going to work, and then we adjust the dosage, and then we put you on something else.
Yeah.
Funny story.
Funny story.
Depression, in particular, responds very well to talk therapy and exercise.
And, you know, diet changes and all of that.
And it often will resolve, you know, 6 to 12 weeks or whatever it is going to be, right?
And funnily enough, a lot of these medications claim that they take 6 to 12 weeks to become manifest, to cure you.
I mean, most colds will resolve themselves in 3 to 5 days.
So, Mike, I have a question for you.
If I'm going to sell you a cure for your cold that promises that it will be resolved in 3 to 5 days, How much are you going to pay me, brother?
Big fat goose egg stuff.
Well, on that vein, a study from 2006 found that 85% of untreated depressed patients recovered spontaneously within one year.
So, 85%.
Spontaneous.
No treatment.
They're depressed.
Now they feel better.
Interesting thing is a lot of these drug combinations often fall into uncharted medical territory.
With no scientific evidence that young brains aren't being harmed.
So while the FDA does have studies for this drug or that drug, Mass studies involving a cocktail, not so much.
I know this is a pet peeve of yours, Mike, and I share it too.
So the FDA will not let you take a drug that has not gone through the FDA process, even though there may be significant evidence it can save your life.
They won't let you take a drug that has worked for other people in other countries that could save your life.
It's perfectly fine and they perfectly approve these drugs that have not been tested on kids and the long-term effects.
I mean, this is how mad it is.
Well, not to mention as well, the drug agency can do lots and lots of studies on the various drugs and then hand over the studies that say positive things about their drugs and they don't look at the ones that say, Drug doesn't do anything or it's useless or it's harmful.
They can just discard those and submit the ones that said, oh, this is great.
This is fantastic.
The whole FDA system, and we have a great interview on the channel that we did recently describing it, it's a mess and a half.
And I am thrilled to death that Donald Trump has talked about some reforms with the FDA. That could save a lot of lives.
So in California, at least 275 foster children, five and under, are prescribed psych medications each year.
Children under five!
Under five!
Having their brains bathed in these medications.
And who knows?
Is it one?
Is it two?
Is it three?
Is it four?
Hey, let's just use them as a damn guinea pig and put them on everything.
God help us all.
Now, over the last decade, to put this in perspective, this number was pretty shocking, California has spent over $226 million on psych meds for foster children.
In the last 10 years, California has spent $226 million on psych meds for foster children, which equates to 72% of the total drug costs for foster children.
I think we all understand the politics of it, which is that if you were to try and figure out why these children are so disturbed, you would be led to socioeconomic conditions that politicians don't want to go to.
I'm not putting the entire blame, but there is a significant correlation between childhood dysfunction and, say, being raised by a single mom.
But women vote more than men do, and there's a lot of white knighting if you ever criticize women or single moms and so on.
So politicians don't want to say, well, you know, this whole single mom thing seems to be producing a lot of dysfunctional kids.
No, no, no.
See, because kids don't vote, and single moms do, and the white knights who want to protect them or maybe bang them, I don't know, they also vote too.
So, sorry kids, you have to be sacrificed on the altar of I need the votes of women and white knights, so we've got to drug you rather than talking, or fixing up government schools.
You know, as I said before, teach philosophy to kids, they'll do a lot better, but they don't want to take on the teachers unions, they don't want to take on the education industrial complex, and so, sorry kids, we've got to mask the symptoms rather than deal with the cause.
Well, even President Trump is pandering to women as he signed an executive order regarding getting more women in the STEM fields and that.
And people are like, why is he doing this?
He's a politician now, folks.
He likes votes.
So that Donald is even doing the pandering to women.
So, yeah, not many politicians are going to start going, hey, single moms, we need to have a talk.
Yeah, goodbye political career.
Not going to happen.
So a recent study also found that 13% of the U.S. population was being prescribed an antidepressant in 2012.
And this is all part of the socialization of healthcare.
So if the bills for these medications accrued to the individuals, they would demand some proof of their efficacy.
Hey, I need you to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month on particular medication.
It's like, okay, well, now that it's my money, I really, really want to see the studies.
I really, really want to see the effectiveness.
And I also want to know if there are any conceivable alternatives to me spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month on particular medications.
And there are.
Very effective alternatives.
If you even count this stuff as working at all, you know, diet, exercise, and talk therapy, and so on, and self-knowledge, and improving your circumstances, getting better friends, you know, having better people, higher quality people around you in your life.
Welfare leads to depression.
Anyway, so...
If people actually had to pay for it themselves, they would be demanding efficacy.
But when other people are bungeeing in and just saying, oh yeah, the government's going to pay for it all and this is what you need to do, that basic pushback of it's my money, show me the proof doesn't exist.
I'm surrounded by assholes.
How do I not change my circumstances or friends yet at the same time feel happy?
Well, here's a drug.
Yeah, and another thing when it comes to the state paying for the health care, paying for the antidepressants, all that kind of stuff, long-term health costs.
Are there lots of studies on the long term?
What does this stuff look like 20 years down the line?
What kind of interactions may they be?
What kind of additional health problems may spring up in people that take these kind of drugs?
You know, you'd be asking those questions if you had to pay for the bill.
I mean, most people, unfortunately, It's strange.
If they don't pay the bill, they're just like, yeah, whatever.
We'll just move forward.
Someone else will take care of it.
It's their own body.
It's their own life.
But at the same time, I mean, we see this with circumcision, too.
If the state pays for it, yeah, you know, just cut off the most sensitive part of my baby boy's penis.
Fine, go ahead.
Oh, what, I have to pay for it?
Oh, never mind.
300 bucks?
Well, that's a different story.
Well, yeah.
Imagine if it was an insurance company, right?
So an insurance company, before laying out hundreds of millions of dollars for medication, would really, really want to know the effectiveness of that medication if it had negative long-term consequences.
Because once you're signed up to an insurance company, the whole point of the free market healthcare insurance would be they can't just drop you for no reason.
And so if this stuff was very expensive, didn't produce much benefit, or the benefit that it did produce could be easily replicated by the Free and health beneficial consequences of better diet, better exercise, and talk therapy.
Exercise and diet definitely is free.
Talk therapy would cost, but has significantly positive economic results as we talked about years ago with an expert on this show.
But if it, say, led to higher incidence of long-term disability, which is one of the major theses of Mad in America, the book, which you just need to check this out because it's very foundational to where society is in America.
If it led to long-term disability, if the positive results could be replicated with diet and exercise, which don't lead to long-term disability but better health outcomes in general, Then the insurance companies would say, no, I'm sorry, we literally can't afford to pay for this stuff.
It's unnecessary, it's dangerous, and there's a chance that it could lead to an increase in long-term disability.
So it is the government that is driving this crisis.
Whole industry, maybe in certain extreme cases, again, I'm no doctor, I'm no expert, but the fact that there's no pushback on costs and that there are significant psychological and emotional benefits to imagining that it's not your crappy system, your crappy schools, your crappy parenting that has led to your child being dysfunctional, but it's just some weird thing that a pill can cure, that is something that in the absence of cost pushback is going to spread in a truly cancerous manner.
Well, along those lines, 11% of all children ages 4 to 17 in the United States are now diagnosed with ADHD. Holy crap!
15% of high school students in the US are now diagnosed with ADHD. No, school doesn't suck.
They just have ADHD. They're bored.
It has nothing to do with the fact that they're sitting neatly in rows.
Boys have testosterone raging through their bloodstream and they would like to get out and maybe build something with their hands.
No, sit in a row for eight hours.
Yeah, oh no, you can't do that.
You must have a problem.
You must drug you.
It's strange how if you have too little concentration...
You get drugged.
But as we saw with the video game addiction, if you're able to concentrate for too long a period of time, hey, you know what?
You also get drugged.
Children diagnosed with ADHD increased from 600,000 in just 1990 to 3.5 million in 2013.
ADHD drugs are some of the most prescribed psych drugs with over $10 billion spent on them annually in the United States.
So that's a Donald Trump every single year spent on ADHD drugs.
The Medical Journal of Australia examined over 300,000 students between the ages of 6 and 10 and 11 and 15.
They found that school-aged children who are younger than their classroom peers are far more likely to receive pharmacological treatment for ADHD, which is similar to other studies in the United States, Taiwan, and Canada.
So developmental immaturity is mislabeled as a mental disorder and unnecessarily treated with stimulant medication.
Tragic.
Yeah, approximately 2% of all children in this study had been prescribed ADHD drugs, and the gender breakdown, this shouldn't be surprising to anyone that has listened to this show, 2.9% of all males, 0.8% of all females.
And this is, I mean, the feminists should be going nuts about this.
Because gender is a social construct, and therefore if you're drugging males disproportionate to women, given that men and women are perfectly equal, or boys and girls are perfectly equal, then this shows significant bias.
But of course, they have never seen any complaints about it.
Well, if children need these drugs to improve and the women aren't getting the drugs compared to the men or the boys, wow, that's really bad, right?
Feminine should be up in arms.
Well, there's lots of data that shows a lack of efficacy for antidepressants as well.
SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are the most commonly prescribed antidepressant medications and include such brand names as Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, and Zoloft.
In 2008, researchers found that although antidepressants appear more efficacious for severe depression, the difference is, quote, relatively small even for severely depressed patients, end quote.
You're putting this substance into your body.
It costs a great amount of money.
The long-term results?
Meh, not so sure about it.
And...
The effect is relatively small, even for the severely depressed.
On the plus side, the effect on the balance sheet of pharmaceutical companies is enormously positive, and I think we can all get behind that, no matter what damage it may be doing to the general population.
I mean, look, those people have yachts to buy, they have private security guards to install, they have mansions to flip.
I mean, think of these executives and their shareholders and their employees.
I mean, what are they supposed to do?
I mean, go out and get other jobs?
In 2010, an analysis found that the benefit of antidepressant medications, quote, may be minimal or nonexistent on average in patients with mild or moderate symptoms, end quote.
Noting, though, that for, quote, very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo...
Well, and sorry to interrupt, but I don't know.
People can look this up for themselves.
The benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.
Okay, but what does placebo mean?
Does that mean that everyone's doing exactly the same thing but getting a sugar pill?
Or does that mean that the placebo is better diet, better exercise, talk therapy, and so on?
Like, what are you comparing things to?
Now, this new study involved the analysis of 131 randomized control trials.
For a total of 27,422 participants.
So this is a big, big look at this.
And it was to determine the efficacy of SSRIs for depression based on the largest statistical analysis possible.
All right.
So they used the 53-point Hamilton Depression Rating Scale.
The previous research suggested that a three-point difference corresponded to no clinical change in this scale.
So Remember, you go up to 27, we're going to say that's no clinical change.
So that is, neither a doctor nor a patient would notice that change.
Other researchers showed that at least a seven-point difference was necessary for, quote, minimal improvement on this 53-point Hamilton depression rating scale.
All right.
So for the trials that examined depression that was mild to moderate in severity, the benefit was just 1.29 points Well, for trials that studied severe depression, the benefit was 2.69 points, so pretty much no real-world noticeable significance or difference.
Researchers also found that every single one of these 131 studies they examined had a high risk of bias in study design and publication, Including where studies emitted critical data about outcomes and side effects.
Why would you want to know about side effects?
Come on, pay for the yacht.
That's a side effect.
We're happy with that.
In all but four of the 131 cases, it was likely that the patients and the researchers were effectively unblinded, which, you know, is a problem for blind trials and studies.
Able to determine whether the subject was taking a placebo or an actual SSRI. So, yay research!
Now, that's important.
Yeah, that's very crucial.
Right?
That's very crucial.
So, the double-blind is where the patients don't know whether they're getting the real medicine or the...
Placebo, and the researchers also don't know it as well.
So if you're unblinded, given the placebo effect is very strong and there's confirmation bias, and of course, billions of dollars on the line, yeah, once you unblind it, to me, again, outside view, amateur view, once you unblind it, it's toilet paper.
Additionally, the researchers theorize that publication bias is Could also account for the statistically significant results.
Publication bias?
That doesn't happen!
Oh wait, no!
I listened to Steph's interview with Kevin Beaver where he talked explicitly about publication bias in the field of criminology.
Alright.
Publication bias refers to the tendency for only positive results to be reported in published articles.
No, that couldn't happen.
This occurs for several reasons.
Journals want to publish positive results, and so do study authors.
The pharmaceutical companies funding industry research also rely on positive results for public perception of the drugs as well as FDA approval.
Remember I mentioned before that when you submit something to the FDA, you can submit your own studies, and if you have studies or trials that don't go particularly well for that drug, you can just kind of sweep those under the rug and put on the, oh, this study, it's great.
It's also something to keep in mind here.
No, and I find that this principle should really be applied to my sports activities.
So if I play golf, I should basically just get a mulligan until I get a hole-in-one, and then I can call myself a genius golfer.
If I'm playing tennis, then only the serves that go in are the ones that count.
And this is really important for people to understand.
So if you run 10 trials, let's say that it's random, right?
There's no benefits, no correlation.
There'll be a bell curve, right?
There'll be a bell curve where most of the trials show no correlation, a few of them will show a negative correlation, and a few trials will show a positive correlation.
So let's say you run 10 trials and you get 2 or 3 that show a medium positive correlation.
You'll get that just randomly, just randomly.
Now, if you only have to submit those 2 or 3 trials to the FDA, it will look really, really good for you because 100% of the trials you're submitting to the FDA show a positive correlation between your medicine and some sort of cure or some sort of beneficial outcome.
However, if you don't have to submit or maybe even tell the FDA about all the trials you did with a neutral or negative correlation, whew, Wow.
You know, try that in your sports game and see how well.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't get it quite right.
I'm going to try it again and only count the one that comes out perfectly.
Woohoo!
I get the gold!
This is equivalent to taking, you've seen these videos, to people that do the half-court over-the-head toss of the basketball and nothing but net swoosh it goes in.
You just take the clips of that working, draft yourself a basketball team, and just hand them the NBA championship because they must be the best, of course!
The anti-science thing that comes from the left to anyone on the right that wants to talk about, let's apply some skepticism to the whole global warming thesis.
Let's do that.
I'd like to hear some more skepticism applied to this kind of stuff from people on the left.
I'd like to hear more skepticism applied to this from people on the right, too.
I'd like to hear some skepticism regarding these studies from everyone all across the spectrum.
What's the temperature of the world going to be in 150 years?
We have a massive tsunami of brain-harming chemicals flowing into the minds of our children.
Can we talk about that?
No!
Sea levels are rising!
Donald Trump has destroyed the planet!
Da-da-da!
Children are everything, but we don't give a good goddamn about what they're being drugged with.
Okay, fine.
Fine, fine, fine.
Or the entire educational structure, which appears to be a massive failure on just about every level, to the point where 8% of the damn American population thinks the guy that murdered tens of billions of people is a great guy!
Well, failure or success?
That depends how you look at it.
It depends which way you look at it.
In 2008, when both published and unpublished studies were examined, they found that 49% of the total studies had negative results.
Huh.
Huh.
Almost like it's half the bell curve of randomized stuff.
No, that couldn't be.
That is almost exactly half of the studies were conducted and found no beneficial effects for antidepressants.
Well, no beneficial effect except for, of course, the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies, the crappy teachers who can pretend that it's not their crappy teaching that's causing dysfunction, guilty parents who've done bad parenting and dropped their kids in daycare or neglected them and so on.
So there are beneficial effects for antidepressants, just not for the children themselves, I think.
Well, I'm, with all this information, and this is a pretty bleak picture regarding this type of stuff, I at least take some solace in the reality that the doctors are at the front lines of, you know, keeping people safe.
Oh, oh dear.
The Journal of General Internal Medicine recently estimated that two-thirds of American adults saw a physician who had received money or gifts from the pharmaceutical industry.
Yay!
In addition, only 5% of those respondents reported knowing whether or not their physician received such payments.
Hey, doctor!
Have you possibly been bribed to offer this medication over another medication or another treatment option?
How many doctors are asked that by their patients in their visits?
I don't know.
You think, I mean, good God, the disclosure that's required for many other things is incredibly significant, but, you know, should that be posted in the office?
Should you get a rundown from the doctor?
Should it be like the end of a drug commercial?
I've received money from pharmaceutical company A, B, X, Y, and Z. They took me on a trip to Ha!
Well, but it's one of these situations where the tragedy that flows out of government control of the funding and of the regulations gives everyone bad incentives.
I mean, the doctors, you know, someone comes in and says they're depressed.
Well, the doctors in general will make more money the more people they cycle through their...
They're offices.
And so you can either sit there and, you know, really ask a lot of questions about the life, about health habits, order a full workout, try and figure out what's going on, try and encourage the person to lose weight, to exercise, to improve their personal relationships.
I mean, that's all very time-consuming and very problematic.
Or you can take, you know, what the average doctor listens to you describe your symptoms for about 18 seconds.
Or you can just say, yeah, well, you know, sound down.
Here's a prescription.
Off you go.
It is tragic.
And each individual actor can be perceived as having fairly positive motivations.
But the entire structure, the entire system as a whole, produces such disastrous outcomes.
And this is the terrifying thing and terrible thing about government control and government funding and government spending.
Every individual may think that they're doing the best.
Every individual is making rational, positive decisions that they can easily justify to themselves.
But the outcome of it is so terrible.
Well, we live in the culture as well that has the advertisements playing nonstop that say, ask your doctor if X is right for you.
At some point, when does your doctor just become your legal dealer?
And the reality is people prefer...
A pill solution.
I have all these problems.
I could do the hard work of changing my life, changing my habits, or I could take a pill.
What are you going to pick?
Well, most people, they want the quick fix, even if it's not a fix at all, instead of actually making some significant changes in their life, because as we know, self-knowledge is hard.
Self-knowledge is hard, especially if you're put into a government school and drugs since a young age.
That's going to make it a bit harder.
Well, and if you're told you have a disease, you don't imagine that self-knowledge or improved lifestyle can cure it, right?
I mean, when I had cancer, I didn't sit there and say, well, you know, I better get me to a talk therapist because that's how...
If you're told that you have an objective disease, a chemical imbalance in the brain or whatever, then of course you're going to go to medication to solve this problem.
So it's bad information, bad incentives, and terribly...
Wrong funding models.
It is, you know, and when we say this to people, you know, again, we're not experts in the field.
This is just data and information and arguments.
Check everything out for yourself.
But it is pretty scandalous.
And I think in the future, they will look back upon this time as a pretty deranged medical mind model period in human history.
All right.
Well, moving on to one of the most bizarre scandals I think I've seen in politics in a while.
People are very upset that Vice President Mike Pence doesn't cheat on his wife.
So we've moved from politics where the scandal is typically, oh, infidelity, to now it's a scandal that Mike Pence isn't cheating on his wife.
So the Washington Post just reported, and this is an old, old thing, 15-year-old information that the Washington Post put out.
But I wonder if that's case-selected behavior that might trigger a hysterical R-selected response.
What do you think, Mike?
Well, this caused Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffrey, and for those that don't know Mother Jones, extreme leftist.
I hate using the term extreme.
It's normally just nonsense that people tack on, but Mother Jones is very safely in the extreme leftist camp.
So the Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffrey...
Use this to assume that the vice president must pass over qualified female applicants for key government jobs due to the guidelines he maintains with his wife.
So by having this arrangement with his wife, which is showing some incredible respect for his wife, he's somehow anti-woman.
Well, isn't it also the case that if you say to a woman, listen, to get this job, you'll have to go out to dinner with me, that he'd also be attacked for harassment as well.
You can't win.
The interviews are supposed to be in the office.
You're not supposed to have to go out to dinner and get a woman drunk in order to give her a job.
Then you'll be criticized for that too.
So she went on a storm and said, if Pence won't eat dinner alone with any women other than his wife, that means he won't hire women in key spots.
She didn't walk us through the logic that leads to that being the case, but she continued nonetheless.
There are a zillion threads out there about the Pence's extra suffocating habits, but the key one is this.
If Pence won't eat with a woman alone, how could a woman be chief of staff or lawyer, campaign manager, or would Pence dine with Ivanka?
Or Kellyanne, referring to Kellyanne Conway.
Or are they too relegated to second-class citizens?
I don't know slash care if Pence's have weird hangups.
I do care if women are being denied jobs and opportunities.
And that some normalize this.
Has Pence in his career had a woman high up in any campaign, administration, private practice, radio show, or think tank, question mark?
Well, you know, Google exists.
Since you're typing this on the internet and you're supposed to be a journalist, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones and all.
Pence's vice presidential staff actually includes several women, many of whom have worked with him when he served as governor or as congressman.
So the answer to the question is yes.
Yes, he does have women high up in many of the fields he's involved with and working with him, despite having this rule.
So you're not upset at the rule.
You're upset at the possible outcome of the rule, which wasn't the outcome, and you didn't bother to look it up before going on a tweetstorm.
Yay, yay thinking.
Fantastic.
Well, I mean, I think it's evidence that this woman would probably not be hired for a presidential.
And how cliché is it?
I don't have any arguments, but I feel this is really offensive and I'm manipulating.
That's just, that's so girly.
Such a stereotypical girly response that I think is pretty wretched.
Maybe she just wants to go to dinner with Mike Pence.
Now, another thing, too, and this is a general principle that people need to watch out for from the left.
Any boundaries are pathologized on the left, right?
Any boundaries, including borders to countries, but any boundaries are pathologized.
So, for instance, if you don't want to be a slut, well, you must be a prude, right?
If you criticize people sleeping around, you must have a weird hang-up.
If you have some questions about the efficacy and maybe even the morality of things like polyamory, well, you just must be a suffocating Victorian prude who hates sex.
Like, they pathologize boundaries as a whole.
And yeah, Pence, it doesn't eat dinner alone with any woman except his wife.
Well, that's respect for his wife.
And of course, as we said before, you shouldn't have to go out with a guy for dinner to get a job.
But he's got boundaries.
And there's weird hang-ups, man.
Like, if you don't want to join the local rowdy gang on shoplifting fun night, it's like, whoa, man, you're such a square.
You're such a hang-ups.
You're such a prude.
Don't be so uptight.
Relax.
Loosen up.
And it's like, no, no, no.
You just want to dissolve reasonable boundaries.
You want to dissolve standards.
You want to dissolve any kind of And anyone who puts restrictions on your emotions must be just some weird prude with Victorian hang-ups.
And this is a standard, boring, leftist cliché that has become so mainstream.
A lot of people don't even see it anymore.
The last thing I wanted to mention was...
Closing with the rousing Chicago's pension plans.
And this is illustrative of, again, you get the wrong incentives, you just get terrible outcomes, even if everybody has the best incentives.
So during 2015, the two pension plans for Chicago City employees...
Well, they paid out almost a trillion dollars, right?
$999 million in retirement benefits to 29,286 retirees, right?
So $30,000, $31,000 a year.
$999 million in retirement benefits.
Mike, quick guess.
How much investment income do you think those funds generate?
Not that much.
It's two numbers off.
So 999 million in retirement benefits went out, and they generated $90 million in investment income.
So that is less than 10%.
That doesn't sound sustainable to me, Steph.
I mean, my math might be off.
That is a shortfall in the way...
That the Grand Canyon is a crack in the road.
That is staggering.
Now, there's three ways that pension plans, government pension plans get money.
Number one, of course, they're supposed to have accumulated a bunch of money from people paying into the plans through forced contributions when they were working.
So they get a whole bunch of money, and they're supposed to collect all of that money, invest it, and then pay you of the income.
Now, why you can't do that yourself?
Again, I have no fundamental idea.
I mean, if these people are supposed to be smart enough to run Chicago or to run Illinois, then surely they're smart enough to save for their own retirements.
If they're too stupid to save for their own retirements, what are they doing in charge of an entire economy?
It makes no sense whatsoever.
But of course, it's just a Ponzi scheme and it's a money grab and so on.
So you're supposed to pay back these employees when they retire from all the money you collected when they were retired.
Paying into it.
That's one way.
The other way, of course, is once you have all this money, you invest it and you reap the rewards of your investments and then you pay out more from there.
Now the third is, oh yeah, sorry, I'm afraid, it's you, the taxpayer in Illinois.
So if there's a shortfall, I'm afraid, it's you who has to make up the case.
And this is why they're talking about taxing soda and other sugary drinks.
They're talking about taxing sewage.
And of course, this isn't going to solve the pension crisis anymore.
And as they raise taxes and all this, they're going to drive more people out of Chicago.
Chicago has already had two years running where they've seen a drop in population, and so it's not going to work.
Now, this is why you have multiple layers of government, so that people can hide their bodies in the fog of bureaucratic layerism.
Chicago, of course, desperate for Illinois to help out.
Hey, shortfall!
Let's go to another layer of bureaucracy to make up for the shortfall, but Illinois as a whole...
Well, it has the worst state-level pension deficit in the nation.
$286 billion deficit in retirement-related costs at the state level.
This is, of course, healthcare costs as well as pensions and all that kind of stuff.
And it is crazy.
From 2006, Chicago has basically not even put in half of what it should be doing to keep the fund stable.
And again, when people offer you these massive retirement benefits, who are you to say no?
When you can use the money to buy votes in the here and now and you're going to be out of office, You'll be done and retired, maybe even dead by the time the bill comes due.
Who would sanely say no?
It doesn't make any sense for people to do anything different given all the incentives in place.
And this is why, to me, yelling at the effects or nagging the effects rather than dealing with the cause, the cause is having the power to do all of this kind of stuff.
Once the government has this power...
It's all going to be tragic in the way it works out.
And there's nothing you can do by yelling at individuals.
You have to talk about the fundamental ethics and power behind these kinds of situations.
But this is going on with CalPERS.
I did an interview with an expert on this years and years ago.
These unfunded pensions, these underfunded pensions, these unfunded liabilities are a huge, huge aspect of what is wrong with America and the West as a whole at the moment.
And it's worth doing a little bit of research because this is going to be a big issue coming up relatively soon.
And if you want more on this as well, I'd highly recommend the Fall of Chicago presentation that we did a little over a year ago.
So the data won't be completely up to date, but it certainly shows you the general trends, and they're not heading in a positive direction.
And we break it down and show how little economic freedom exists in Illinois and specifically Chicago as well.
Yeah.
Keep an eye on that because it's going to blow up and it's going to happen sooner than later.
Well, thanks everyone so much for listening.
We look forward to your feedback on our newest installment of The Week in Review.
I really, really appreciate the feedback we've been getting so far.
Things you like, things you dislike, areas we can explore maybe that we're underexploring where we may be doing too much.
Just let us know.
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