June 21, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:24:55
3721 Why Women Are So Unhappy | Blonde in the Belly of the Beast and Stefan Molyneux
What is the state of modern romantic relationships and the tradition family in a post-third wave feminism world? Stefan Molyneux is joined by Blonde in the Belly of the Beast to discuss rising female unhappiness, the lies feminists have told to young women, the myth of patriarchy, the inevitable collapse of the welfare state, the dangers of central planning and if it makes sense to be optimistic or pessimistic for the future of the world? YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/blondeinthebellyofthebeastTwitter: https://twitter.com/blondes_tweetsYour 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
We are here with the blonde in the belly of the beast.
She lives deep in the heart of liberal territory and is sending up a few flares of non-leftist thought, which are excellent, finely crafted, well presented.
We're going to call her Rebecca.
I do believe that is, in fact, her real name, but we'll find out in the comments.
You can check her out at youtube.com forward slash blonde in the belly of the beast.
Yes, that's right.
That's blonde with an E. Rebecca, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you so much for having me.
So what's the story?
What's the backstory?
If you were like a superhero, what would we need to know if we cast you in that role?
What was the backstory of your transition from wherever you started to wherever you are now?
Well, I wouldn't say I was ever really far on the left.
I never self-identified as a feminist, but I did go to Mizzou, University of Missouri, which you've seen.
What's happened there the last few years?
I graduated a few years ago, and I think it's gotten much worse over the last two or three years, and so I didn't have the same kind of indoctrination that it seems that they're having right now, especially last year.
I did get indoctrinated at Mizzou to some degree.
After I worked on Wall Street for a few years, it was very unsuccessful.
I was really unhappy.
Around 23, I was like, this is not the path to happiness.
I could see an older generation of women on Wall Street that were childless or that were just totally overwhelmed working mothers.
I was like, nope, I'm not doing this.
I decided to Restructure my life, try to relearn behaviors.
Because I was more of a feminist than I was willing to admit.
I never would have called myself a feminist, but I was working a high-pressure job in a male-dominated field.
So I pretty much was.
And so I just decided, I have to move.
I have to change my lifestyle.
I need to relearn behaviors.
I need to treat relationships differently.
In my early 20s, so I'm glad that I decided that then.
And since then, it's just been a lot of your channel, Stefan, a lot of Black Hood and Speaks, a lot of relearning behaviors, finding out the truth, restructuring my worldview and trying to live right.
It's funny, too, because, I mean, I worked not on Wall Street, but I guess on a somewhat Canadian equivalent.
And seeing the people down the road, like 10 or 15 years, it's pretty important.
Like, I mean, I grew up in a single mom household, as you know, so I didn't have a lot of, here's the way you achieve happiness in relationships or stability financially or whatever.
So when I got into the working world, I looked at the people around me, particularly the older people.
I'm like, okay, does that look like a particular place to land the old helicopter of youth?
And a lot of times it was like, no, flaming volcano wreckage of doom.
People were either single, generally unhealthy, you know, sitting at desks all day is pretty rough for the old constitution and increasingly bitter and desperate.
Or they were facing this tsunami of obligation that comes from having a career plus kids.
Because the reason why you have a career if you have kids is because your career is really stimulating, really enjoyable.
I mean, nobody sits there and says, wow, I could do eight hours of phone customer service.
Boy, that's worth giving up time with my kids.
So generally, it was the women in particular who had these glorious, exciting careers.
But those careers are very demanding.
And so it was like, OK, so the more enjoyable your career, if you have kids, the less enjoyable everything becomes.
Thanks.
And I saw all these women that were just, they were overtaxed.
And it made me realize throughout the several jobs that I've had, I can't think of a single woman who was balancing work and their children appropriately.
And it made me realize this is impossible.
This is an impossible feat.
If I'm successful in this field, the end goal here is that I'm just not going to have a relationship with my children.
I'm going to be working 80-hour weeks.
And so when I realized that it wasn't feasible, I knew I was going to have to work from home if I wanted to work.
And that is one of the reasons that I started the channel.
That and my anger.
Right, right.
Which is a very healthy emotion in my book.
Now, were you, because there's a huge amount of like anti-kid propaganda in society, particularly I think at Weitz, were you somebody who from the get-go was interested in being a sort of wife and mom?
Was that something that came along later in your life?
I always knew that I wanted to have kids.
I'm 29 now, and I've gotten to this a little later than I wanted to because of life circumstances and everything.
So I wasn't somebody that was like, I'm never having children, and then I changed my mind.
I knew I wanted to have kids.
But I also knew that I wanted to have a strong relationship with my kids, that I wanted to stay at home, that I wanted to be the primary caretaker.
And so it just seems an impossible task when you're working that much.
Even if you're working 40 hours a week, I'm not really sure how you can do that, unless you're working from home and you don't have a very taxing job.
Right, right.
And so if you want to have kids, of course, then the challenge is you need to sort of plan ahead.
And then I think you're going to end up looking for a different kind of man than if you just want that sort of postmodern robotic no-kids, purely egalitarian partnership.
Because, you know, things change enormously when you have kids.
Someone's going to end up turning themselves inside out to...
Feed them and not getting much sleep.
And there just is that natural division of labor that happens with kids.
And so I think then recognizing the vulnerability and dependence that you're going to have as a woman who has kids, I think that really fundamentally changes what you look for.
And I know you've done a lot of shows on dating and relationships.
Do you think that sort of desire to have kids to be dependent on a man, to be there to provide, to be the sort of rock wall that protects you and the children...
Particularly the early years.
I gotta think that's had a big effect on your dating choices and your frustration with some of the more liberal men.
That's definitely true.
I've been in a traditional relationship with a conservative man for a while and that's just been vastly different than the dating experiences that I had before I started my channel.
And that's another reason that I started my channel because I was meeting all these men and I'm like...
This is the most conservative man that I could find.
I was on Match.com and I was searching based on political criteria and things like that.
But I couldn't find a relationship dynamic that would work because they were so overwhelmed by my conservatism.
And this was before I even realized that I was that conservative.
So it just seemed like an impossibility.
My family's like, you know, you can date a liberal guy.
And I'm like, I just don't think that I can.
So it did change the way...
I ultimately chose.
You can date a tall liberal guy like you can date a tall, short person.
I mean, if the terms are innately self-contradictory, you're going to have a little bit of a challenge.
And, you know, it's funny because, I mean, the genders are different because of reproduction, because of, you know, how we go about making new bipeds on the planet.
And this is something to be celebrated.
This is when I was a kid, you know, the vive la différence sort of thing, the idea that men or women are not identical and we're not like two pods, two pod people.
And we are different and we should celebrate those differences.
Really seems to have gone kind of haywire lately where every difference is considered an inequality that results from injustice.
Every conceivable difference.
And it's like, that's really frustrating because what's wrong with difference that's celebrated?
Right.
And it's really manifested itself in dating, like the way people date.
I was getting a lot of mixed signals.
Like I went out with one person who was like, you were just far too independent for me.
And I was like, all right.
And then I went out with another person who was like, I would never date a woman that didn't make as much money as I do or more money.
He was an executive at Nordstrom.
He was making six figures.
I was just like, I just do not understand.
I just didn't understand what men wanted, what people were looking for, what the dating culture was like until I moved to Seattle.
And this is one of the things that I find so frustrating about sort of modern male-female relationships and makes me glad to be happily married for so long is that there seems to be such an elemental amount of confusion out there in the dating world.
And I know in your shows you get a lot of questions around this.
What's it like?
I mean, I know you're in a more steady relationship now, but when you were dating, how many cross signals, how much confusion is there out there in the dating market these days?
I would say that pretty much nobody knows what they're doing because men have kind of been trained to not want what they truly want in a woman, which is, you know, that they're demure and they're sweet and they're feminine.
And so getting those mixed signals from men saying, like, you need to make as much money as I am or I won't even consider you as a dating prospect, I was like, this is just not what I expected.
And so that made me realize, you know, men are very confused too because they've been raised by feminist mothers.
They don't seem to know what they want and women don't seem to know what they want either because once they get it, once they achieve this higher career success, they're bitterly unhappy.
And so I think that it really creates this huge element of confusion that all of us have a hard time wading through.
But I did see some very encouraging divorce statistics for millennials the other day.
I read that most millennials will actually not end up getting divorced.
And I've heard for years and years that 50 to 60 couples will end up getting divorced.
And so I think that's generationals worse than baby boomers.
So I read that and I was a little reassured.
I'm like, maybe we'll figure it out.
But I'm not too sure.
I'm not super confident.
Yeah, there is this, and I remember this when I was younger, too.
There's all of this, I see this propaganda about what women want, and you try to be sort of the nice guy, the considerate guy, the altruistic guy, the let's, sure, let's talk about feeling some more kind of guy.
you see the women drift towards these kind of callous, cold-hearted, stubbly, whatever kind of guys, and you get friend-zoned repeatedly.
And that, I think, is really, really frustrating for a lot of men, that there's this mismatch between one.
It's almost like this giant test, you know, let's see if we can get guys to believe this is what women want, despite all of the empirical evidence to the contrary.
Well, it's unfair.
I mean, it's very unfair because they've been taught a complete lie, which is that they want something different.
And if parents would have been honest, if they weren't raised by a generation of feminists, I think that men and women would be better equipped to deal with relationships and marriages.
Right, right.
And also, I think, with this idea of egalitarianism between the genders.
And again, I have no problem.
If people don't want to have kids, I think it's a huge mistake in general, but if people don't want to have kids, yeah, men and women, outside of just general physical strength and a few things at the top level of IQ, men and women can be perfectly equal.
It's children who are the great divider, and it's almost like the leftists are willing to sacrifice children Birth rates.
They're willing to sacrifice the very existence of the children whose taxes they need to support the social programs they're promising to everyone.
It's like they're willing to erase the reproduction of the West in order to maintain this dream, this fantasy of pure egalitarianism, because it's so much easier to sustain until kids come into the mix, and then you need giant government programs to even keep the pretense of egalitarianism going.
Isn't it amazing that people have been able to kind of squelch this survival instinct, our most basic instinct, just so they can appear kind to others?
It blows my mind.
And that's why, you know, I oscillate between being hopeful and being pessimistic.
But I don't know, I think that your average person wants that, needs that to be happy.
And so maybe there's more hope than I'm letting on.
Well, there's something I read from Jung many, many years ago where he was saying that sort of the first half of your life is striving and trying to make your mark and achieve your goals either in terms of your career or education or your impact on the world.
It's sort of like climbing this mountain, like you're grinding your way up, pulling yourself up by your teeth and molars and all that.
And then you get to the top of the mountain and you're like, okay, I'm here.
And this is sort of middle age and this is sort of the midlife crisis a lot of people face.
And then what happens, he says, okay, the second half of your life, you just can't keep doing that forever.
I mean, you can't.
I mean, you just run out of energy and so on.
But the second half of your life is more around enjoying the fruits of your labors and reaping the rewards of what you've sown and all that.
And I remember seeing that because when I was growing up, most of the people that I knew with very few, very few exceptions, so it's kind of redundant, but most of the people I knew, they had worked enormously hard in the first half of their life and the second half of their life, which is kind of invisible from your twenties in a way, you know, there's that immortality and you'd use it to be, I'm going which is kind of invisible from your twenties in a way, you know, The second half of your life needs a huge amount of preparation.
And it's really, particularly for women in fertility, you can't rewind.
That's definitely true.
And so we see millennials getting older and they're becoming increasingly embittered because they haven't built that financial security for themselves in the middle of their lives.
And so they become increasingly government dependent.
And I'm worried for my generation because we don't seem to have the basic skill set to make relationships work, to be successful in careers.
And so what are we going to be like when we're older?
I mean, we will be a government dependent generation again.
Right.
Right.
Because that as well, there used to be, as you know, Rebecca, there used to be this old thing where you had kids and you loved your kids and they loved you back.
And then when you got old, you had security, you had pensions, you had healthcare taken care of by your children who loved you and who wanted to ensure that your old age was as happy as possible.
And you had all the joys of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on.
And so if you go through life...
And you don't have kids, you save a lot of money.
Kids can be pretty pricey.
And you save a lot of money, and so you should, of course, be saving that money for your old age.
If you have spent the money that you otherwise would have spent on kids, on, you know, your materialistic, hedonistic comforts, you haven't saved your old age and you don't have kids to take care of you, again, you have this giant desire for government old age pension programs, which, ironically, of course, other people's kids have to pay for.
Have you seen that clip of that feminist in her 80s talking about how it was the biggest mistake of her life?
I think I saw it on Sargon of Akkad's channel.
But she's talking about how feminism is just great for women in their 20s and then you hit your 30s and you're like, oh my god.
And she's in her 80s and she's like, I have no family.
This was the worst thing I ever could have done for myself.
I'm lonely.
I'm old.
I'm going to die alone.
And I'm like, why can we not just show everybody this?
Because feminism is great for women in their 20s.
You don't have any obligations.
You don't have to worry about children or anything.
But later in life, it just becomes a disaster.
You've destroyed your entire life because of decisions that you made in your 20s and early 30s.
And you have to hide the old from the young so they don't hear this, so they don't see this.
You always hear, oh, old people have no voice in society.
It's like, yes, because a lot of times the old people's voice in society is leftism and socialism and feminism killed the happiness of the second half of my life.
And so you have to kind of hide all of this misery.
I mean, as we've pointed out or has been pointed out in your show and other people's show, Feminism has been associated with continuing rates of female unhappiness, misery, piled upon misery.
Decade after decade, women are getting unhappier and unhappier.
And there's this weird thing where there seems to be no choice but to double down.
Like to question any of these basic principles has become so...
It's unthinkable to most people.
It's like, well, okay, it's true that I'm getting more and more and more miserable, so I've got to do more and more and more of exactly the same stuff that's making me miserable.
That seems exactly like an addiction to me, right?
A guy who's strung out on cocaine.
He knows it's bad for him.
He knows it's going to cost him his family, his job, his savings, his health.
He knows all of that, so it makes him so stressed he goes out and gets more cocaine.
You know, it's a terrible addiction where you can't even question the fundamentals or the basics of that which seems to be driving so much unhappiness in the world.
But I'm somewhat hopeful because I feel like social pressures are changing feminist perceptions.
I mean, you see BuzzFeed videos about feminists, how downvoted they are.
There are tangible ways that they can tell that their ideas are not welcome, especially in this sphere.
And then we see people like Lacey Green, and I've talked about this a lot on my channel, but this specifically made me very hopeful because she got in a relationship with somebody that is, you know, right-leaning, and then she...
Totally abandoned her feminist principles.
Maybe that's what women need.
They need the social pressure.
They need people around them saying, this is idiotic.
This is going to ruin your life.
You need to rethink what you believed in your 20s.
Find a good man, and you'll become more conservative.
You'll become more traditional.
Oh, so I didn't know that's what happened with Lacey, because I have a terrific weakness for gossip.
It's my only weakness, as you can well imagine, Rebecca.
Terrific weakness for gossip.
And I knew that she had put out some more conciliatory videos, and she'd also questioned some of the leftist narrative, which, I mean, my goodness, the blowback was astonishing.
Oh, yeah.
Her whole family has been doxxed.
The feminists that she used to be friends with released her family's addresses and everything like that.
Yeah, she's dating Chris Ragon, another YouTuber you might be familiar with.
They're public with their relationship.
Yeah.
But she released the Red Pill videos before we found out about that.
And really, all she was doing was questioning.
She was just saying, like, you know, nobody on my side is open to even have a discussion with these people.
And then the way they treated her, I'm sure that that really deepened her skepticism about feminism and the community.
Well, that I think we see...
Ooh, can have a little gossip fest.
Excellent.
But that I see as pretty common in the left, which is...
It's all about diversity and inclusiveness and multiple viewpoints and diversity as a strength and so on.
But if you even question a tiny thread of the general tapestry of leftist rhetoric, man, I mean, I think it's easier to get out of a cult than it is to get out of these people, you know?
And this...
And it isn't just that they want to criticize you.
They want to ruin your life.
And that is something that I've seen so much on the left and I don't really see it on the right.
I don't see us employing the same kind of tactics with doxing and trying to ruin somebody's career.
I was doxed in October and it was by a leftist St.
Louis publication, which is my hometown.
It was the Riverfront Times.
And the editor of the publication after he published this horrible hit piece on me calling me a racist Nazi, all sorts of stuff, my hometown newspaper, he mined the comments for my last name and then published the first and last name of my brother and father and their occupations on Twitter.
This isn't a national leftist news publication.
I just couldn't believe it.
I'm like, you know, my family didn't ask for this.
So they will come after the people that you love.
We know that this is what their main tactic is.
So if I were on the left and I was thinking of leaving, I mean, I think I would probably think twice about it because the people that I love would become embroiled in this, like it happened to me.
I think that what it does is it broadcasts the ferocity of this kind of mindset, the ugliness and the viciousness and the lack of rational arguments.
And hopefully that does undermine credibility elsewhere when it comes to people's receptivity towards these perspectives.
They still seem to be under the impression, though, that the right are the only people that are employing violence or any kind of tactics like that.
And I don't know how they can keep this perception going when it's so demonstrably untrue.
I was at the Milo event where there was a shooting.
This was in January.
And the reports I was reading about the Milo event, I was like, this is just a straight-up lie.
Like, every report I read, it was like the right was bringing all this violence.
I saw people walking up and down the lines like...
Like, don't even yell.
We want to make sure that we appear to be peaceful and everything.
Don't start anything.
And I did not see anybody on the right starting anything at all.
It was all Antifa.
Well, that I think we've seen pretty consistently.
And I think that lie is, again, starting to unravel for those who are willing to cross the aisle and look at feeds or information on the Internet or elsewhere that's not part of the sort of mirrored perspective of where they've come from.
If it's not an echo chamber, then it's starting to unravel.
My particular concern is that people aren't looking – like everyone's in separate movie houses watching different movies.
There's no crossover.
And so there are people who genuinely believe, well, the right is violent and the left is peaceful and that's the only way it ever goes down.
And the right wants to shut down free speech and the right – and all of these – because that's what you hear broadcast in the leftist sort of media or the leftist narrative.
And on the right, which I think there's a lot more truth in because I do sort of look at both sides – They are putting out a lot more of these basic facts.
But if there's not that cross-pollination of facts between these two worlds, I don't see how this doesn't just continue to escalate.
And I've been watching the media, the leftist media, totally unravel, and I've got to say that I thought that they would have fallen by now.
I mean, I just don't understand how people have any faith in CNN at this point, knowing what kind of, you know, lack of journalistic integrity that they have.
But people do, and I think that it's this hardwiring, and they have an older audience, so does Fox, and I guess all mainstream media outlets.
So I think that in time this will kind of I think, though, it's different because I've never been...
Dependent on state in the way that people are.
There are tens of millions of people across America, by some estimates it's up to half the American population, who are partially or even totally dependent on the state for their income.
There is this, I think, foundational terror on people who are dependent on the state that, you know, it's unsustainable and like, take him, not me, take him, not me.
And because it's unsustainable, it's going to get cut and they just want to make sure, you know, that the steady conveyor belt of government cheese keeps rolling up to the door because they've made decisions that are somewhat irrevocable at the moment.
I mean, I don't mean that they're unsolvable.
Yeah, that's true.
But they inexplicably support programs and policies that put more pressure on government spending and they advocate for immigration.
I'm like, why would you people do that if you're government dependent?
Seems so counterintuitive to me.
There are limited resources.
Right.
No, that's a very, very good point.
Again, that's also, I think, just sort of putting it in the addiction context, I think that has something to do with the addict acts in ways that are so self-destructive.
You can have an addiction, even to hard drugs, that is manageable, that you can still function in your life.
But there's some people, again, it's this snowball, this avalanche, this this they just continue to do more and more things that are going to end up destroying everything that they claim they need, that they depend on.
And so you're right.
I mean, so many of these policies are going to end up escalating spending to the point where it is going to collapse even sooner.
And maybe that's I mean, part of the addiction, I think, has to do with, well, I'm just going to I'm going to go full in, man.
And like nothing but gas, because that way I get out of the car one way or the other, like either in a bag or through the windshield.
But I'm out of the car one way or the other.
And that idea that sort of worse becomes better, that let's just lay down the government with even more spending and more more unfunded liabilities so that we can just reset and reboot this whole system.
I can I sort of veer back and forth between sympathy for that perspective.
Thank you.
I don't know.
I think some of it's an addiction to the necessity.
And then some of it's an addiction to the feeling that you get when you tell somebody that you advocate a policy that's going to help somebody that's in worse shape than you.
I mean, it's virtue signaling.
I mean, it makes people feel good.
It makes them feel righteous.
And I think in many ways, that's just as dangerous as the necessity of government dependence.
Yeah, the endorphin rush of unearned virtue or virtue signaling that people say, yeah, no, I think that's very toxic.
Now, when you first started doing your videos, Rebecca, you were talking about your fears about coming out, you know, and it's funny, you know, being a conservative or at least not being on the left is like being gay in the 50s in certain districts these days, right?
It really is.
How has it played out relative to what you hoped for and feared for?
I mean, I'm definitely socially isolated in Seattle.
I don't have a lot of friends here.
But it has opened up a whole community of people that I agree with and that are like-minded.
And so that's been...
That's been really helpful.
It's been really comforting to know that even though they're not right here, that they're all over the world.
So that's been reassuring.
But as far as my fears from the beginning of the channel, most of that was that I knew that I was going to get fired because I was working for a Seattle firm and I had a feminist boss.
And I was like, man, if they find out about this, they are going to fire me in two seconds.
So once my channel hit about, I don't know, 5 or 10,000 subscribers, I was like, I have to quit.
They will...
Find out about this.
And, of course, they did.
They called me after I quit, and they were like, you've got to take some of these videos down, you know, because I had mentioned that...
Yeah, I had mentioned that I worked for, like, a specific organization.
They were saying it was a violation of the NDA, but it really wasn't.
I read over the NDA. And then after that, some leftist was tweeting to the company, like, you hired this racist bigot.
So I know, I got fired, or I got doxxed, like, a few months later.
I know that if I would have held on, I would have gotten fired.
But luckily, YouTube, it's an income.
It's my full-time job now.
So it doesn't come with the same set of fears.
Like, Being socially alienated, I can handle that.
I've got all these friends on the internet.
And I don't have the financial concern anymore.
And then my other concern was about my family.
But once doxing happens, it's really scary, but it's also really liberating.
It can only happen one time.
And so they just, you know, they didn't have any power after that.
The threatened dox wasn't there.
So now I feel really free.
If something like that happens to your family, they're going to pull with you.
They're going to be like, oh, so this is what you're facing.
You know, you go.
Yeah, my family's been so super supportive.
My dad is my number one fan.
I didn't tell them about my channel for about three months because I was like, I don't know, they might be mad about this.
But then they discovered it and they binge watch all the videos and they call me and they're like, your subscriber count is up.
We're so proud of you.
And so it's just having that.
That's so comforting to me to know that like my family's on board and they aren't resentful about about the doxing and things like that.
So it's great to have them around.
Right.
Now, how did this...
I'm trying to think of the timeline of your channel and then the great PewDiePie-inspired demonetization push, you know, when they unjustly went after PewDiePie and then, you know, the whole story.
How did that play into what you're doing on YouTube?
Right.
I'm in my, I think, 15th month of my channel, so I got a good six to eight months of ad revenue before they pull the plug.
But as of right now, I'm almost completely crowdfunded.
I get almost no ad revenue.
Everything's demonetized.
Even though I don't tag anything, I have kind of vague titles and things like that.
They are still really, I don't know if anybody's really making any money from ad revenue.
But luckily there's Patreon, there's other ways to crowdfund our projects, and so I can still invest time in it and have it be a full-time job.
If I were on the left, I would not go so hard after non-leftists because what it does is it means you have to be all in.
You know, if it was like, oh, you know, you might get a little bit of negative pushback here or there or whatever, you'd be like, okay, well, I'll try and put, you know, one leg on the job and one leg on YouTube and I'll see if I can navigate this.
But what happens is they go after you so hard that you kind of have to go all in.
On what it is you're doing online.
I mean, there's no plan B. There's no backup.
It's like, okay, it's too fast to jump out of the car now, so I guess I've got to learn how to steer.
I mean, there is no plan B anymore, and I think that really engenders a huge amount of commitment from non-leftists.
That's true.
And their disdain for the right has just made me less sympathetic to their position.
I mean, the right's growing.
People from the left are coming to the right.
I don't think that it's going the other way because we see, like I said before, we see the tactics that the left employs and people on the right are like, yeah, no, I can't ever go to that side.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I know what you mean, but the problem is, of course, that there's this giant leftist factory, like your alma mater and other places.
There's this giant leftist factory that keeps cranking out these people, and I don't know whether the medicine is keeping pace with the infection, so to speak.
I don't know.
I mean, Mizzou enrollment's down 35%, which makes me really hopeful.
I kind of feel like the higher education bubble is going to burst because you come out of college now less skilled somehow than you went into college because you've got a victim complex.
You've learned a bunch of things that make you a more useless employee, harder to get along with and everything.
And how sustainable is this?
I mean, you've got a huge amount of debt.
You're unemployable.
How many more people can do this before they realize that it is a poor financial investment to go to college unless you're majoring in some kind of STEM field or something like that?
Yeah, I mean, my position is if you can get by in any way to do what you want to do in life without going to college, don't go to college.
It's very risky.
And not just financially, but like in your soul, in your psychology, in your happiness with yourself, they will try to change your brain.
And some of those changes can be permanent.
It is...
It is a terrifying thing to submit yourself to that kind of authority.
Because either you're going to end up agreeing with them, if they're lefty indoctrinators, which a lot of them are.
You're either going to end up agreeing with them for real, which is horrifying enough.
Or you're going to spend a couple of years biting your tongue, navigating the minefield, and fighting back in a battle where you have no particular authority.
And I just can't see what the upside is at all.
18 to 22, I mean, that is...
Perhaps some of the worst time to be indoctrinating people, especially when they're away from home.
But I will say that I had a humanities professor, Professor Bondeson.
It was a two-year class and he guided us through the classics and I think perhaps single-handedly prevented my indoctrination from Mizzou.
So I can't say that it was all bad.
I definitely had some good professors and being in the business school somewhat shielded me from this social justice warrior element at Mizzou.
Right, right.
When you got into Wall Street, or you got into the sort of financial sector, what was the least, I guess, positive experience or perspective that you had of, you know, finally becoming an adult, getting into the working world and all that?
I was very surprised to find out that my level of happiness did not at all move in conjunction with my income.
So at the time that I was making the most money in my life, which is probably when I was working on Wall Street, it has got to be when I was the most unhappy.
And so that was a really valuable lesson for me to learn.
I'm like, I'd rather take my income down and have a lower stress job.
I will have a better quality of life.
Although that's not super specific.
I'm not really sure if that's what you were asking.
But more specifically, I'd say that the worst thing that I experienced...
Was watching this older generation of women that had destroyed their lives.
That had a huge impact on me.
Watching these mothers try to be good mothers, fail miserably, try to be good at their jobs, fail miserably.
And I'd say that of all the things that happened on Wall Street, all the experience I had, that was the most influential and the most formative for me.
Did the women talk to you about it or was it more just like looking at the fish tank and seeing the fish constantly having a terrible time?
Um, at my most recent job, uh, there were two older women that were married, but, or one of them just had a boyfriend, but they, they were childless.
And I would always talk about how, you know, my plants are having kids, um, and everything like that.
And I remember one of them coming into my office and her being like, like, why would you ever want to have, you don't want to have children.
You know, you don't want to have children.
And I didn't realize until months later, but like, An older woman that I can tell is unhappy in life telling me not to have children, that just blows my mind now.
I would never give somebody unsolicited advice like that, of that magnitude.
And it made me realize, you know, older career women, it's...
To some degree, it's about sabotage.
I really do think so.
And I think that you're right that they're doubling down.
They realize they've ruined their lives.
And so they want to bring in younger women into the fold of their life mistakes.
And I think that that's so detrimental.
It's so selfish.
But we see that across feminism.
It's not necessarily just in corporate America.
I think that's feminist as a whole.
If we look at them, I mean, it's all older feminists telling younger women that marriage is slavery and so is traditionalism, that you don't want children.
children, they're a burden and that you should live in this realm of hedonism for your whole life.
And that's what will make you happy.
And we're just doing people such a disservice.
We're encouraging them to destroy their lives.
Well, and it seems so believable when, you know, you're a young, healthy, attractive woman and the world is your oyster and, you know, guys line up to buy you drinks from here to eternity and you get all of this positive attention and feedback.
I, you know, I can't, I can't imagine as a man what it must be like to be a very attractive young woman.
Like, I just, I can't conceive of it because that level of, quote, privilege, you know, it's all supposed to be male privilege and so on.
But for young women, when they say, oh, you know, you don't need to plan for the second half of your life, this kind of, this is implication that how it is now is how it's going to continue forever.
And man, you know what they call the wall or when women get older and so on.
It, I think, is a fundamental shock that really needs to be swept under the rug.
You can't have a voice for these women who are like, whoa, whoa, hang on.
Like, I'm now 34, and I want to settle down, but there aren't any decent guys around, in the same way that there aren't generally any really good used cars on the market, because if you get a really great used car, you don't sell it.
And I think that aspect, when things really change, it used to be very common.
I mean, there's tons of poems and plays about it, even entire novels about it, that you're going to get older and less pretty, and you're going to get older and less fertile, so plan for down the road now and don't expect this to last forever.
But that seems to have been completely erased from our general accumulated wisdom in society.
Right, and I think it would have taken care of itself if women were facing more consequences than they are.
I mean, they can basically marry the state.
And I know a lot of really handsome, not particularly beta men that are raising other people's children, that are in relationships where they're raising young children, too.
Like, several young children that aren't their own.
They're like, this is just a modern relationship.
I'm like, are women going to face no consequences for this?
So you would think that, like...
You know, when women get older that, you know, they have no options and everything like that and they would face natural consequences.
But especially in Seattle, I'm not really seeing that.
And that's disheartening because how are they going to reform their behavior without consequences?
But you said that the money didn't make up for the unhappiness.
Oh, and in fact, the two were correlated, whether directly or indirectly.
So women can marry the state, but the state doesn't go to bed with them.
The state doesn't wake up in the morning with them.
The state doesn't give them a foot rub.
The state doesn't bring them chicken soup when they're unwell.
The state can give you money, and the state can eliminate certain material consequences from bad decisions, but it can't fill the hole in your heart.
It can be a provider, but it can't be a husband.
It can't be a lover.
And that aspect of things is not really, I think...
I think it's showing up, as you say, in the increasing unhappiness and the antidepressants and the increasingly bizarre pronouncements that come out of some of the feminist or leftist camp about...
What it means to be human and the endlessness of the revolution.
The free market is great because the free market says, okay, if there's something bad in the world, have yourself a revolution.
That's wonderful.
And then when you solve that problem, stop having that revolution and go on and find some other injustice.
But because the government's funding it so much, all of this leftist stuff, the government funds it so, so much, there is no way to know when to stop.
And this is why there's this weird continual escalation where now it's like the big problem that women face is a guy who's trying to give his nutsack some air by spreading his legs on a subway.
It is so bizarre how much it escalates and how much the emotional negativity or the emotional bitterness that accumulates for women who have made these kinds of choices just doesn't exist in social discourse.
So I would really like it if there was more of a voice for women who have regretted some of these decisions.
You know, like, it's like the fat positivity movement.
I'd like also to hear about the women who had a giant heart attack, or the women who have horrible knee problems, or, you know, the women who can't get pregnant because they're obese.
I would also like to hear a little bit of that.
This relentless, yay, everyone gets a trophy stuff.
It's appropriate for toddlers.
You know, like when your baby is learning to roll over or learning to walk, it's like, yay, good job!
You don't criticize them for their form when they're hanging onto a table and trying to make it around a couch.
So this sort of relentless positivity is great for toddlers and infants.
It's not great, certainly not great for adults.
And I sort of feel like women's maternal instincts have spilled over from the empty nest to the mothering and the scolding often of society as a whole.
Yeah, it's this Mother Merkel concept.
I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that she's childless and that she embraces this image of being the mother of all these migrants.
I mean, it's just misplaced maternal instinct to me.
And we say that a lot in politics.
Right.
I often wonder, there's a lot of EU leaders who are childless, in fact, and I often wonder if part of the urge to not...
Part of the sort of programming or propaganda to not have kids has to do with making sure that smart people are not as much invested in the future of society.
Because it's the smart people who listen to, oh, well, gosh, there's a lot of extra people in the world.
We do have to be concerned about resources.
That's not IQ90 stuff, right?
That's smarter people.
And smarter people are generally not very helpful to those in power, unless they can be co-opted by giving them plum positions in professorships and in the media and so on.
But if you can convince smart people to not have kids, smart people innately drift towards hedonism.
There's something about having kids where you say, okay, I'm going to stretch out my My perspective a little bit, I got to look a little bit over the horizon because I also want there to be a great world for my children to grow up in.
So if you convince either less intelligent people to not have kids and convince smarter people to not have kids, it just seems that hedonism inevitably starts to take over because the self-sacrifices and the long-term horizon planning of having kids is just taken away from the most able people in society.
How selfish, though, to detonate your society to ensure a future voting block.
I mean, it's not the first time this has happened, but it never ceases to amaze me.
I'm like, you know, these people will put their most basic instincts to rest in favor of just destroying our culture and our society.
And that was another reason that I started my channel.
It's this fear that my children are not going to inherit an inhabitable world.
And that's a really deep-seated fear for me.
And so I try to do what I can.
I mean, You have such a larger influence than I do.
But, you know, you wake up every day and you're like, what can I do to stop this, to help it get a little bit better to do anything that I can?
Yeah, larger influence, but also got nine years head start.
I wouldn't count that for too much.
We'll check back in eight and a half years and we'll see who has the larger influence.
And That, I think, is something that is really worth reminding people that we're all here because people chose to have children and people chose to take care of those kids and raise those kids.
Everyone who's alive has benefited from pro-child decisions.
And I sort of feel, and it's not a great argument, but to me it's an emotionally compelling argument, so take it for what it's worth.
But, you know, four billion years of evolution culminates in you and in me.
And it's because for 4 billion years, various organisms have said, okay, fine, maybe I'll spend a little bit less time playing video games and maybe I'll spend a little bit more time, you know, raising children and doing all that stuff.
There's been a huge amount of sacrifices all the way from single-celled organisms, you know, through crayfish and frogs and all the way up to us, the most complex beings in the universe.
Is it really fair?
It's like this baton race that's been going on.
Here, you take this baton.
Now you take this baton.
You have some kids.
You have some offspring.
And then you're like, after four billion years, I don't even know how many millions of generations, you're like, nope, no baton for me.
It all ends here.
And it's like, I just...
I feel that's kind of an insult to all of the animals that, you know, fought and died and reproduced to get you to where you are.
No, none of that for me.
Four billion years, but, you know, we're kind of done about now.
I think we're done.
I know.
And just in exchange for a lifetime of hedonism.
And doesn't that get boring?
worrying.
I mean, I see people in their late 20s and in their 30s that just have hedonism burnout.
And they're like, I just want to have some responsibilities and have a kid.
And I'm like, all right, I understand that position.
But then I also see people in like their 40s and 50s that are still going at it really hard.
They're still partying.
They're still picking up chicks in bars.
I'm like, how has that not gotten old?
I mean, I just I just don't get that mindset.
Like, don't you want adult responsibilities?
You want to go through life just worrying about yourself, just worrying about your pleasures, your immediate pleasures?
Well, the other thing, too, is that hedonism is a lot more fun in your 20s than it is in your 60s.
You know?
Seriously, I mean, in your 60s, it's like, well, I'm too creaky to be really hedonistic.
And like, I mean, I'm like, I'm going to be, what, 51 this year?
I'm mostly okay, pretty much the same, stay healthy, exercise and all that.
But there's a little bit of, you know, just a few sounds, a little bit here and there.
You know, you get up and it's like, it's like, whoa, was that the floorboard?
No.
Oh, my goodness, that came from me.
You know, and it's a different kind of thing.
I used to be able to go out and completely face plant an entire vat of Indian food and be perfectly fine.
And now it's like, whoa, whoa.
Well, we all have to get into all the details.
But hedonism is a lot more fun when you're younger and it seems like it's just going to last forever.
And it's going to be as much fun to be hedonistic when you're 70 as it is when you're 20.
And the answer is, no, it won't be.
It really won't be.
Because, of course, the hedonism, if it has to do with not eating well, not getting enough sleep, or over-exercise.
Like, I know people who are older.
Yeah, we were ski instructors for 30 years, and now I can't bend my leg, you know, and it's horrible.
Right, right.
And so the hedonism, it really begins to fade out.
I'm at the beginning of that road, so I'm just looking down, staring down that and saying, okay, I think I did things pretty much okay.
I was pretty healthy most of my life.
But by the time it shows up that hedonism isn't any fun or becomes less fun as you go older, again, you can't sort of circle back and say, well, you know, now I'm going to have a whole bunch of kids because you don't need...
To be, you know, physically strong, limber and healthy to really enjoy your grandkids.
You know, it doesn't hurt, but it's not essential.
And this satisfaction of people around you when you get older, I mean, 50-50 your friends are going to die before you do.
Or, you know, there may be some crack up, you know, maybe someone like Donald Trump comes along and it's like this giant wood chipper axe that goes down between the tree trunks of friendships and splits people off.
Or maybe, you know, you have some sort of divergence or someone goes crazy or someone gets married to the wrong person or has a bad divorce and you got to pick sides.
And you don't know there is a continuity to family that is tough to reproduce in mere friendships, as you've sort of found out with some of your political perspectives.
And if you have that foundation of companionship in your old age, marriage is great, but again, could get divorced 50-50, they're going to die before you do.
And you really need to build for that old age.
You know, the 65 to 85, that's a long time.
And that's a long time to be lonely and inconsequential in the world.
But I do have sympathy, especially for millennials, because we have been taught to indulge this hedonism above all else, that what we feel is the most important thing going on, and we weren't given a lot of lessons in believing in things that were larger than us.
And I think that part of that has manifested itself in this toddler generation, this mentality that we're children, we have to be treated like children.
Right.
Is there...
You mentioned earlier sort of recoiling against the easy divorce.
And of course, a lot of Gen Xs, even millennials and even younger, have grown up with the horror of divorce and how it plays out.
And it's never good.
I mean, it's always terrible.
And, you know, people who call it in my show, oh, man, it's so horrible because they're like, oh, yes, we got divorced, but we're still wonderful friends.
We get along beautifully.
Then why did you get divorced?
Why did you get divorced?
I mean, it's incomprehensible to the kids or it's horribly comprehensible.
Because if the parents are really civilized and wonderful and all mature about it, and it's like, well, then why are you taking a giant MOAB to the family if you really are getting a long fail and you're just wonderful friends and so on?
Or if it's some, you know, horrible plate-throwing, screaming, smashing, you know, trailer park situation, then the kids are like, oh, well, that was really horrible and let's make sure we never do that.
So I think there is...
It's tough to remember this pendulum, you know, the pendulum that swings.
People get sick and tired of this easy hedonism of easy divorce, and especially, you know, oh, we care if we do anything for our kids.
Well, except pick the right person or stay together.
And so I think there is this pushback or this blowback, but is there – how deep do you think it goes?
I think that society isn't going in such a bad direction that – Everything, to me, is open to question, but I'm not sure how far the younger people are questioning it, or whether it's just sort of an emotional pushback to bad experiences.
I've read that Generation Z is the most conservative generation since, I believe, the greatest generation.
I might be wrong about that.
So I do feel like the pendulum is swinging back.
People don't want to get divorced.
They saw all these horrible divorces in their parents' generation, and baby boomers, I think they really were the first generation generation.
That decided that no longer being in love was an appropriate reason for divorce.
I haven't seen this in previous generations.
And I think that millennials and Generation Z, they realize that you go through periods in a relationship where you're in love, where you're out of love, where you have problems, and that what's going to benefit the kid the most is for the parents to stick together basically no matter what.
Like my parents said, they've been married for 37 years and it wasn't perfect.
But I thank God every day that they stayed together and that my mom stayed home with me.
I think that that made all three of us more well-rounded people.
And it's interesting how in this supposed claim for diversity, it's interesting how that perspective is automatically devalued.
You have a perspective of a stable, relatively happy household with a mother who stayed home and committed herself to her kids.
And that is a really important perspective.
I mean, just your own personal experience bringing to the world.
But statistically, we know that is by far, by far the very best environment for children.
Like bar none, not even a close second.
And in fact, it's sort of like, again, I'm trying to come up like every week, I'm trying to think of a great word for catastrophic or whatever it is.
Like, it's not like, well, single moms are only one on a scale of happiness.
But, you know, married couples are 10.
It's like, no, single moms, like minus 10.
It's not even like, well, this is better than.
It's like better than in the way that a really nice pasta is better than roadkill by the side of the road.
Like it's on opposite sides of the entire poll.
Like I was reading this statistic, you're dozens of times more likely to be abused or molested if you're in a single mom household.
That is not like, well, you know, married couples, it's just better.
It's like, it's not better.
It's on the right side of the equation.
And This sort of alternative family structures tend to be disastrous for children and for a society that claims, oh, you know, we care about the kids and, you know, we need government education for the kids so the kids get well-educated.
It's like, where is this in all of our calculations?
Where is it in terms of national debt?
Where is it in terms of educational quality, school choice?
Where is it in terms of family staying together?
Where is it in terms of just, if you love kids so much as a society, why are you trying to tell everyone not to have them?
Right, and the perception of stay-at-home moms is just absolutely terrible.
I remember one of my corporate jobs, I told an older childless woman that I wanted to do that, and she goes, a stay-at-home mom, what would you even do all day?
She just said that, like, right to me.
What would you even do all day?
Like, having a child is nothing to this paper-pushing bullshit job that she has.
And I was just, like, dumbfounded.
I'm like, what do you mean, like...
Change diapers, take care of a human life, form an individual into a successful member of society.
That's not important to you at all.
And so there really is this perception of stay-at-home moms being stupid, uneducated, lazy.
And that needs to change if we're going to have a generation of children that are well-adjusted individuals.
Here's the big secret.
I'm going to tell just you, no one else.
Here's the big secret.
Kids are the most fascinating things around.
They are so incredibly absorbing and interesting and fascinating.
It's something new every day.
It is watching their personalities emerge, watching their choices emerge from a fairly – I mean, their personality is to some degree, to significant degrees, genetic, but But seeing how it manifests and grows and seeing, I mean, it is the most fascinating thing.
I mean, I've done some fascinating things in my life.
Being a father is by far the most fascinating thing.
And I'm not the dumbest guy on the planet.
So if I find it fascinating, I find it hard to say, well, you know, let's just outsource it to people who can't really speak English very well and have an IQ of 87.
I just don't see how that is even more possible.
But I think what they're doing...
I don't know this woman, of course, from anyone, but what I would guess is what they're doing is they're saying, well...
I was institutionalized as a kid.
I didn't have, you know, and being a child is nothing more than being fed and watered.
You're like a plant, you know, like you keep them in the sunlight, you know, give them some water, maybe push a little plant food into their soil once in a while.
There's no individual connection, no personal soul connection with, no bond, no bond, right, with a caregiver.
And saying, well, what do single moms do all day?
Um...
Stay at home.
Or stay at home parents.
What do they do all day?
Well, you do the most important and fascinating thing that there is, which is to grow an entire human life and make your contribution to the peace and productivity of the planet.
I mean, it's not only what do you do, it's like what else would you want to do fundamentally if you have the choice.
Right, right.
I have an older sister and she had the first baby in the family almost a year ago.
And just watching her this first year of her life, it's been the most amazing thing that I've ever seen.
I mean, she really does learn something new every day and now she's saying baby and mama and she's like standing up and I just can't believe it.
And I watch the bond they have.
I watch her breastfeeding and I'm like, why would any woman not want this?
It's such a beautiful thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it deepens and enriches your own life.
And I don't know, there's something on the more extreme left, which is the idea that human beings being sort of product of their economic circumstances, you know, this economic determinism, you know, your fundamental personality or characteristic or even intelligence or opportunities are all defined by your relationship to the means of production.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just such nonsense, such a richness and depth in human life and in the human experience that to me, just trying to explain it away with bland economic determinism is so hollowed out, it seems just completely empty, almost sociopathic to me.
But this idea that we are just sort of interchangeable and replaceable means that One caregiver is the same as another caregiver.
It doesn't really matter.
And the kid's going to grow up to be who they are regardless.
Like, it doesn't matter.
I mean, you don't sit there and talk to your plants that much, I hope, right?
Because, you know, they're not going to go up to become bloggers or whatever.
They're not going to do that much in the world.
But how you treat your children is foundational to how the world goes.
And it's not just interchangeable at all.
It's not interchangeable at all.
The connection that you have with your kids, the investment that you have with your kids is absolutely irreplaceable.
It can't be outsourced.
It can't be subbed.
It doesn't mean other people can't have wonderful relationship with their kids, but that primary parental relationship with your kids is foundational.
But on the left, it's like, you don't need to be there.
What does it matter?
You can just have someone else do it.
It doesn't matter.
Everyone's interchangeable.
That is not viewing human beings as human beings, but just, I don't know, like garden gnomes or stuff.
What does one garden gnomes matter relative to another?
It doesn't matter, but it does matter.
We're individuals.
Right, like when I see my sister leave the room when I'm holding the baby and I see her reaction, like she doesn't want me.
She wants her mom.
Only her mom.
And so just the fact that I have friends that have kids and they'll post on Facebook like, oh, my kid did a craft project at daycare today and it's like a six-month-old.
Your kid didn't do a craft project today.
Your kid screamed all day for his mom while some overwhelmed daycare worker drew some stuff haphazardly on a paper and was like, look at what your kid did.
They're just in total denial about abandoning their kids.
Total denial.
Yeah, well, I mean, and it's funny, too, because there's something about my history that has sort of uniquely prepared me for this kind of stuff, because I worked in a daycare for years as a teenager.
I actually made an arrangement with the school to get out of school early because I had to take a couple of buses to get to the daycare, and I worked there for a couple of years.
I did summers there.
And I've seen it firsthand.
I've seen it firsthand.
This desperate desire to bond with anyone who's got any semblance of credibility around, particularly a male, since most of these, of course, were kids without living fathers or even fathers around at all.
And the fact that if kids don't have a bond with their parents, having a bond with your parents allows you to outsource responsibility in adulthood so that you can enjoy your childhood.
The legion of I don't know, little men and women.
The kids who have no particular bond where they can trust their parents to take care of things and where they have given too much responsibility too early or too much independence too early.
You need to shield your kids from the world.
In the way that you need to shield young trees from excessive winds and fire and so on, you need to shield your kids from the world.
It gives them a wonderful space to grow up strong and security to grow up strong.
And there are so many kids out there who have this little Lord Fauntleroy, this like little prince, little princess thing where they've had to grow up far too quickly.
And it really distorts the personality.
And I think it's really hard to overcome.
And I think that's one of the reasons why if you have a productive relationship with somebody who has authority over you as a parent, then you can outgrow that relationship as you grow up.
My particular concern is that when they don't have a productive bond that they can outgrow with an authority figure, people spend their entire lives looking for some kind of authority figure, someone to take care of them.
If you're a woman and you grow up, I think, without a productive relationship to an authority figure that you can outgrow, I think you spend the rest of your life looking for that authority figure.
And then when some good-looking, swift-talking politician who's tall and hairy comes along and says, don't you worry, I can get you all the free stuff in the world.
Because you haven't had that relationship which you've outgrown with an authority figure, I think you're very susceptible to having your buttons pushed directly.
And the fact that politicians so often put voters in a...
Child-like position.
Oh, things happen to you.
You're a victim.
You didn't make choices or you weren't responsible for your choices, so let me just sidle right up in my pony of infinite fiat currency and take care of your little lady or little man.
They put you in this child position because I think without parents around who are responsible, you kind of never grow up.
And I think that's another reason why convincing parents to stay away from their kids creates this government-sized hole in their future personalities that I think is very hard for them to resist those promises and protections offered by the government.
And that's the biggest weakness of the millennial generation.
I mean, I think that we're the first real daycare generation, although maybe that's not true.
But we never really got the skill set to...
To have normal relationships.
And I resent baby boomers for this, I've got to say.
I do.
I think that we would be doing a lot better if parents would have just stayed together.
And that might have solved all of these problems before they even existed in universities, especially.
There was something that the baby boomers did, which I find hard to fathom.
And maybe it was just, you know, the first flush of, hey, we've got birth control that's reliable and we have a welfare state.
And, you know, all restrictions have been set aside.
But, you know, it took, I think they just recently found the oldest specimen of a human being, 300,000 years old.
Oddly enough, a liberal on the Supreme Court.
So human beings are like way old.
And think of how long it took to develop these basic structures in society and how much suffering was engendered in the development of these basic structures within society.
You know, like two-person monogamy and a sense of, you know, and I've increasingly come to respect the Christian contribution in this, a sense of universal ethics, a sense of free will, a sense of personal responsibility, a sense of universal ethics and all of that.
Two-parent households and the opposition to the purely animalistic form of hedonism that drives so many people.
And it's like, okay, 300,000 years to build this.
This entire cathedral and less than one generation to tear most of it down.
I mean, that to me is really astounding.
And the lack of respect for history that came along in the 1960s, where everything was just bourgeois prejudice and, you know, you've got to go and explore and you've got to go be yourself and feel yourself.
It's like that Kramer versus Kramer movie.
It's probably way before you.
I know it's way before your time, but...
I watched it a couple of times in the theater when I was a kid and a pretty poor kid, so that meant a lot to me because, you know, in this movie, this Meryl Streep character, she just leaves her family because she wants to go find herself.
And it's like, look in the mirror.
You're right there and you have kids, so stop being that, you know.
The husband wasn't abusive.
He wasn't mean.
He wasn't any of those kinds of things.
But she just...
And she's a hero.
This is a positive thing that she's doing.
And just 300,000 years to build up these human habits and then like one generation where people just said, it's all prejudice.
Forget it all.
We've got to burn the whole thing to the ground.
And now we have to try and live in this smoking ruin and try and rebuild it.
It took 300,000 years to build.
One generation to set fire to it.
And now we've got to try and find the pieces again.
Let me ask you something, Stefan.
I've asked Lauren Southern this this week.
Are you optimistic for the future of Western civilization?
Do you think that, not necessarily as a society, but as a people will survive?
Not in our current form.
And I'm ambivalent about that, too.
Like, okay, so lots of crappy stuff is going on in the West, right?
I mean, and I've talked about it a lot in my show.
So I... I don't want to necessarily paint the past in these rosy pictures as well.
Something went way wrong in Western civilization in the 20th century.
I mean, those two world wars?
I mean, that was almost it.
I mean, that was almost it for everything.
Not just us, but the entire species, the world, the planet, you name it.
So, something had to change.
And we have, in the West, now gone 70 years without a major war.
In the West.
Lots of proxy wars and they're horrible and should be opposed and so on.
But if we'd had another world war, that could have been it.
So, you know, the fact that other people got kind of annoyed at Westerners, at Whiteys, well, you know, it is...
We, as a sort of culture, we had created these deadly devices, these nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, and we had a 20th century habit of waging war around the world.
So we had become an existential threat or a danger to the existence of life on the planet.
And, you know, for people who all talk about, oh, it's overpopulation or it's environmentalism, it's like, nope, sorry, the way I grew up, it was East versus West, capitalism versus communism, armed to the teeth with planet-destroying weapons.
So something had to change.
And we are a mix-up and shake-up kind of culture.
The creative destruction, because we have access to philosophy and principles and so on, and we tend to, at least in society as a whole, respect words over force, at least still to a large degree.
Something had to change.
Some of it has changed for the better, and some of it has changed for the worse.
So, for instance, the fact that in the West there is a focus on better parenting.
There is a focus on more reasonable parenting.
There is some opposition growing to spanking and so on.
I think that's been positive.
I think that's been very, very healthy and very helpful.
And there is a more renewed focus on equality before the law relative to genders and minorities and so on.
Positive, positive stuff.
We don't have a good habit as a society or as a culture of stopping in the middle.
It's like the pendulum starts and it's like, we have to go from Jim Crow and segregation to now we have affirmative action and if you're white or Asian, you can't get into school.
It's like, can we just stop in the middle somewhere, at some point, slow this thing down, back and forth the whole time.
And so, you know, we've gone from invading other countries and other cultures and having giant imperialistic networks of questionable benefit to anyone except the ruling class in the West, to now, open borders, everyone come in and let's do the reverse and see if that works out.
Like, I just, I wish somewhere in the middle, you know, we want equality for women.
No, we're going to swing way over to massive superiority women.
No stopping in the middle.
And of course, you know, thinkers and philosophers, I think it's our job to Like, okay, Aristotelian mean people, come on, it's been around for 2,500 years.
Aristotelian mean, somewhere in between these two extremes, you know, let's do a little bit of this stuff.
So I think we're in motion, and there's some positives.
I think that there are some huge negatives and really, really challenging negatives.
And I have significant concerns about civil war in the West in the future, and I don't even think the too distant future.
That is my major and grave concern.
And so, you know, it's funny because it's the same thing with the pendulum.
I could talk about it in this new show.
We've gone from, like, racial superiority and inferiority to we can't talk about any racial differences at all.
It's like, can we just somewhere in the middle?
You know, just somewhere in the middle would be a productive place.
But, you know, that, of course, is, I think, up to the thinkers and the movers and shakers in the culture to try and achieve.
So, I would say that...
I am both optimistic and pessimistic enough, Rebecca, to work as hard as I possibly can to achieve a positive outcome.
If I was truly pessimistic, then I would not be working for this.
If I was truly optimistic, I wouldn't be working that hard for this because it's going to happen anyway.
You know what I mean?
Like I don't wake up every morning and stretch my daughter.
She's going to grow anyway, right?
So I am...
I think I'm at a sweet spot of optimism versus pessimism where I feel a very strong desire to do as much as I possibly can with the talents that I have to get society to rest more in the middle, to get society to genuinely value diversity and openness and arguments and thought and so on.
If I were more optimistic, I'd be less motivated.
And if I were more pessimistic, I'd be less motivated.
So I guess I have maybe even the vanity or some would say even perhaps grandiosity to say, where's the future going to go?
Am I optimistic or pessimistic?
Both of those seem kind of passive to me.
Like, I hope my team wins, you know, if you're sitting in the stands.
But if you're actually on the match, if you're actually, you have the ball and you're calling the plays, I believe that society goes where the most committed and strong willed people And I put myself in that category.
I put you and other people in that category.
It'll go where we want it to go.
And that is a very powerful and grave responsibility, which means we have to really know what we're talking about before we start pushing society off in a new direction.
It can't go the way it's going, without a doubt.
It is going to change.
I still very strongly believe it's going to change how we want it to change, because we're right.
That's very optimistic.
I've been having a problem where I've been indulging my nihilism too much these last few weeks.
This Comey thing really upset me because I listened to it and I was like, this was a complete vindication.
And then I look at leftist media and they're just talking about how impeachment is totally inevitable.
And I keep thinking that there are so many highs and lows in this job, but I keep thinking the left has, they finally hit the wall.
They can't, they're going to have to adopt some element of self-awareness.
They have to this time, right?
And then they never do.
And so I find myself, when things like this happening, indulging my nihilism a little bit.
And I just have to not get excited that they're going to come to terms with, you know, their worldview.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, you're such a nice person and a reasonable person.
And you've had such a nice and reasonable upbringing.
You've not had truly crazy people in your life, right?
Oh, I've had plenty.
No, but when you were growing up, instead of your family environment and so on, where you didn't really have much of a choice.
Yeah, I guess not.
And this is not an insult.
I mean, good.
Good.
I think that's wonderful.
But if you've had sort of inescapable crazy people in your life, they don't change.
The left, I mean, I don't know what the answer is other than you have to delegitimize the moral authority that the left has.
But they're not going to see...
I mean, most of them.
A few will, absolutely.
And I hope it's the thought leaders and so on.
And I can't even tell you how much respect I have for people.
We talked about some of them earlier.
How much respect I have for people who are waking up to that, waking up to some of the challenges.
And they don't have to agree with us, but just start thinking for yourself.
That's the whole point, right?
But the people who are really committed, they're crazy.
I mean, if you're not going to be overturned in leftism, Jeremy Corbyn was praising Hugo Chavez who created the giant economic sinkhole of Venezuela where people are losing 20 pounds a year and women are escaping to Colombia to sell their bodies for bread and people are pouring off their children on the local market.
So if...
If Venezuela, if the Soviet Union, if Cambodia, if North Korea, if all of this communist nightmare of Cuba, if this hasn't been enough to impress upon you the dangers and horrifying nature of central planning, totalitarianism, socialism, communism, you name it, if that isn't enough...
If the fact that Sweden now has, what, added six more no-go zones to the apparently completely mythical no-go zones in Sweden, if migrant crime, if immigrant dependence on welfare, if these basic facts, if by now, with the internet, as you pointed out, it's the patriarchy that gave you this tiny little computer that has all the world's knowledge in your pocket.
If it hasn't been enough to change people's minds, I'll just tell you this, Rebecca, they're committed.
And if you've had crazy people in your life who are committed to their particular worldviews, you'll know that it seems they're completely impervious to reality.
They are like to reality as Superman's boobs are to bullets, like they just bounce wide off.
Sorry to interrupt.
You were just in the middle and I've had quite a bunch of filibusters.
You've had a nice enough upbringing that you haven't been face-to-face with unsalvageable crazy.
That's probably true.
And I do still sometimes think, like, maybe it's just their ignorance to this, which is why I made a video on communism, because it was a lot of basic knowledge about communism that I just didn't pick up in public school or at Mizzou.
And I was like, maybe, maybe that liberals, a lot of them just were never exposed to the reality of communism and socialism.
But now that I'm, you know, discovering more, I think that they...
That they have been and they just don't really care.
They keep saying, you know, it was an inappropriate application of a good principle and theory.
I hear this from people all the time.
I'm like, how many times 100 million people have died under communist rule?
Yeah.
They just keep saying, next time.
I'm like, what are you going to do?
And isn't that the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over?
No, but I don't think it's insanity.
I think it's sadism.
Again, this is like, it's not crazy.
It's sadistic.
Like, if you knowingly want to impose a system that's responsible for at least 100 million, I actually think it's much higher, but at least 100 million deaths.
And that's just the deaths.
Yeah.
ungodly human suffering that went on under these systems.
If you want to reimpose that, it's because you like to see people suffer, because you want to see particularly the case selected people.
You want to see them hurt.
You want to see them killed.
You want to see them suffer.
I mean, there is a massive amount of sadism involved in a lot of this stuff, which is where the cruelty comes from.
I mean, sadists are not averse to using violence.
And I think that there is a lot of cruelty, a lot of sadism involved in this stuff.
If you want to bring that kind of system back and you want to pretend that somehow it's going to go different, I think it's because you know it's not going to go different, but you just want to watch that horror movie.
It's just what gets you going.
about.
What about all these Antifa members?
I mean, they all look like they're about 18 to 25.
And I don't know, I just, I still hold out hope that adulthood is going to smack them right in the face and they'll come to their senses.
I don't know about those guys in particular, but I do think that men are genetically programmed or culturally programmed perhaps to sacrifice for women.
And given how many single moms are dependent on the state, anybody who tries to rein in the power of the state is going to be egged on psychologically, overtly or covertly by the single moms who need that or believe that they need that government cheese to keep rolling in.
And this is why trying to sort of restrain the welfare state or pull back on the welfare state provokes a lot of violence.
And a lot of that violence, I think, is driven by women manipulating men to go out and make trouble so that the checks keep coming in.
Boy, well, that's a darker answer than I expected, but I bet you're right.
I could be.
That's a hypothesis.
I mean, I wouldn't even know how you'd go about testing that.
Maybe you could try and figure out some of these agitators and look at their family histories.
And, you know, if they come a lot from single moms, then we would know that the single mom's perception is they're dependent on the state.
And people will do a lot to protect their moms.
Yeah, I'm very confident that that's true.
I do think that a lot of these people came from single mother households.
Which is another reason why, you know, getting men out of the picture.
Like, what is it?
I was just reading about how testosterone in American men, it's gone down 1% every year since the 80s.
It's significantly lower now than it was in the past.
And nobody knows exactly what the cause is, right?
There are theories, you know, fluoride in the water or stump something in the plastic bottles or, you know, I think it has a lot to do with just father absence.
I think it has a lot to do with father absence, but that's pretty significant.
And People think that the alpha male is the violent one.
That's, to me, that's not alpha behavior.
Alpha behavior is, you know, moral courage.
It's forthrightness in conversation with the world.
It's standing up for what's right.
That, to me, is sort of alpha behavior.
But this sort of beta cover up your face and throw fox pee at a blonde, I mean, that's not alpha behavior.
But I think that comes from a severely emasculated masculinity.
That doesn't have a positive role model on how to challenge the inevitable aggression that is good for society when it's channeled in the right way.
But men are going to be aggressive.
And we want that aggression to be channeled in positive ways.
But when boys grow up without fathers, who teach them how to channel their behavior.
I mean, you've seen it a million times, I'm sure, if you've been around boys.
They play for it all the time.
I go see friends and their girls are like, I made you a pretend cupcake!
And the boys are like, I'm actually varmint!
And it's like, hit me with a rolled up paper tube or something, right?
And That level of aggression is great.
And, you know, with boys, you know, they need constant reinforcement of like, you know, here's how to control your aggression, use it, fine, let's play fight, but don't be too rough and learn how to manage your strength and learn how to, you know, be in control of your aggressive impulses so that it's fun and not dangerous and all that.
Literally, millions and millions of little course corrections that involve fatherhood or fathering does for boys, it's not available.
So where are they getting their perception of what it means to be assertive?
To be assertive doesn't mean to be destructive.
It just means to stand up for what's right.
But what do they get?
Well, of course, I mean, the cliche is video games and movies and, you know, the shiftless bums who come in and have sex with their mom before moving on and cursing at everyone.
And so father absence, I think, does provoke lower testosterone.
I think it provokes higher aggression and less self-control over that aggression.
I want to hear that.
That is important and powerful stuff that the left has to say.
But they're so over the top that it's hard to listen to the sanity inside the crazy.
And I don't know what the solution to that is.
I think having more positive male role models is important out there.
It's a little bit of what I do, but I don't know what the substitute is for that continual course correction of having a father in the home.
And it isn't just in the home, you know, schools have become so feminized.
And I read a story, I don't remember, I think this was last year, but a little boy had been suspended for chewing a cookie into the shape of a gun.
Just a suspension, you know?
We're teaching little boys that they should abandon their masculine energy in favor of feminine energy.
And that's really doubling down the effect of single motherhood.
And it creates or perpetuates at least this lie, Rebecca, that feminine energy is somehow peaceful.
And it's not.
You know, I've done all of this stuff with spanking and with domestic violence and so on.
Women have as great, if not a greater, capacity for violence than men do.
It's just that it's more covered up or socially sanctioned or whatever.
Or, you know, women get the victim card that men...
Don't get to excuse themselves for their bad behavior.
But this lie that, you know, men are aggressive and women are just wonderful.
It's actually a psychological effect.
It's well known in the psychological community.
It's WAW. Women are wonderful.
You know, that, boy, if we could just have an entire society, you know, like Sweden, run by women, boy, it would just be a paradise for everyone involved.
And this covering up of...
Women's capacity for evil is, I think, one of the most dangerous things that is occurring in society, and feminists have a lot to do with this.
And I thought it was all about equality, which includes equality of immorality, but this Women Are Wonderful effect is hugely problematic because it automatically portrays, you know...
What are girls made of, right?
Sugar and spice and all things nice.
And boys are like snips and snails and puppy dog tails.
And boys are dirty and messy and rough and loud.
And it's like, yes, and they built civilization that protects you from wolves.
Seems kind of important to me.
I'll take a little bit of noise if it gets me a wall.
Right, right.
And I really did believe that for years until I heard Milo Yiannopoulos cite a statistic about how lesbians have the highest rate of domestic abuse of any couple demographic.
And that just shocked me.
And it made me realize, you know, women are not more peaceful.
They're emotionally manipulative.
They often get men to do their dirty work.
I just have seen no evidence in my life that women are really more peaceful individuals than men have less propensity for violence.
Well, I mean, feminists, of course, talk a lot about the power disparity and its effects on aggression.
And we know that power corrupts and power lends people to behave worse.
And there's no greater power disparity in the universe than that between a mother and her daughter.
A mother and her baby, a mother and her toddler in particular.
And women hit kids a lot.
And that is the biggest power disparity.
And it is a hugely horrible abuse of power.
And of course, it's cowardly because the kids can't leave.
The kids can't hit back.
It's certainly not self-defense.
And it's not to say that men don't hit children.
Of course they do.
But we know that.
We know that men, you know, this idea that men can be violent, particularly when there's a power disparity, for sure.
I mean, if the boss asks out the employee, the female employee, oh, there's a power disparity, you know, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, it doesn't matter.
So this power disparity causing, like, you need higher standards of behavior when there's a power disparity, but it's no bigger power disparity than between parent and child and mother and child.
It's where you need your very highest standards of behavior.
And so often, this is all covered up.
And I think until we can sort of look at that capacity for female evil directly in the face, without, you know, this doesn't mean women are bad.
It means women are human beings, which I thought was the whole point of feminism.
But until we can look at that, I think it's going to be a great challenge for us to deal with all of this kind of stuff.
What is the motivation for women to support female?
Third world migration into the countries.
Well, there's, I think, some pretty dark motivations.
We really need to be able to look at that, but it is a big challenge for people.
I think there are some dark motivations, and something that I wanted to explore further is the sexual motivation of women.
I mean, I was in Europe this winter, and I talked about this in a video, but in Germany, around this university in Freiburg, I was seeing all these native German men that were like Very, very, very effeminate.
I couldn't believe it.
Really tight jeans, long hair, everything.
And then I was seeing all of these girls in relationships with these more sexually aggressive migrants.
And so it got me thinking, is this Western European women that are disgusted with their native male population because feminism has turned them into such betas and now they're trying to outsource this masculine energy?
Is that what's going on here?
Or is this just one part in a much larger tapestry of all the issues here?
Women are genetically predisposed to being very sensitive as to who's going to win.
For women to sexually side with the losing team, ancient tribal warfare...
If women sided with the losing team, well, their children would be killed, their husbands would be killed, and then they would be taken usually as concubines by the ruling tribe.
So women, whereas if you side with the winning side, you don't go through that trauma and you don't, you know, you're then a virgin.
So there is, I think, a lot of sensitivity among women for trying to pick the winning side.
Right.
I don't know what that means in terms of Europe.
I'd have to go and stare at that abyss myself.
But that would be one of my guesses as to what's happening.
And as far as what men and women want, I mean, I think all I want is freedom.
What do men and women want?
I don't know.
Because right now, male-female relationships are run by the state.
resources.
The state controls marriage, the state controls divorce, the state controls custody, the state controls domestic violence laws, which have gone kind of crazy, I think, recently.
There's so much, and of course, the massive resource transfers from largely men, male taxpayers to largely female recipients.
It's not a free market between the genders anymore.
It's become central planning.
It's basically become communized.
It's socialized.
And so as far as what men and women want or how they would interact, I don't know.
It's sort of like saying, well, what would a factory look like after communism?
I don't know, but it sure as hell is going to look a whole lot different than it looks with communism.
And so until we can get the government out of incentivizing and disincentivizing so much of gender relationships, I don't know how we can have a natural and healthy respect and positive working relationship between the genders.
You're right.
And I just wonder if the average person knows how much blame women really have in this.
I don't think so.
I mean, I think that that would probably dispel feminist myths in and of itself.
I think people would look at this differently if they knew.
Yeah.
I mean, people complain about the national debt, but if you try clawing back spending, I think often the most vociferous opponents of that are women.
Women are very dependent on state handouts, and women live longer.
They vote more than men.
And partly that's by choice, and partly that's just because they live longer and because they often will have more time.
And so where society is going in a democracy where female voters outnumber male voters, the idea that women have no agency in this, they're just victims.
I mean, that is...
Again, the victim card, I just, you know, again, I can't understand that.
You know, when I was a kid, if I cried, people would basically just tell me to snap out of it, you know, like, boy up or whatever the equivalent was at the time.
But, you know, women cry and everyone's like, oh, how can we make it better?
How can we make the bad feelings go away with lots of money and debt?
I don't know what that's like.
But again, I do believe that power corrupts and this kind of deference is very anti-feminist.
And this kind of deference is, I think, continues to infantilize women and has women have this amazing capacity to be upset and have the world change to make it go away.
And I think that's way too much power for anyone to have.
Oh, yeah.
I agree.
All right.
Well, I really want to thank you for a very good, wide-ranging, as I knew it would be, and I really want to remind people that Rebecca, Blonde in the Belly of the Beast covers a huge number of topics and very passionately, very rationally, very powerfully.
Please, please, please check out youtube.com forward slash blonde with an E in the belly of the beast.
We'll put links to it below twitter.com forward slash blondesunderbar.com.
It was a great pleasure.
I appreciate all the bullets you're taking for the cause and the courage that it takes.
For those out there watching this, if you're not doing this, it's hard to really gauge.
It can be tough.
And you've done a fantastic job in getting great ideas out.
