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Oct. 1, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:40
4214 'What I Was Wrong About' | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux here with our good friend Mike Cernovich, the lawyer, filmmaker, and the best-selling author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, How to Make You and America Great Again, and the brand new book, Hoaxed, The Truth About Fake News.
Now, speaking of hoaxed, Cernovich is also the producer of the film documentary Silenced, Our War on Free Speech, and the upcoming film Hoaxed, The Media's War on Truth.
Twitter.com forward slash Cernovich.
C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. Same thing for Cernovich.com.
And the movie, which you really, really got to check out, especially at the ending.
It's called HoaxedMovie.com.
So, Mike, thanks for taking the time today.
Yeah, man. But I don't believe you because I Googled myself and I'm actually a conspiracy theorist.
And that's really all I am and all I ever do.
I've never written books. I've never...
I've done movies. I'm just a conspiracy theorist.
I actually saw a funny one.
This was two days ago.
This is my favorite one.
I was a men's rights conspiracy theorist.
And I was like, I don't even know what that means.
I know you're trying to insult me.
I don't even get that one.
And moreover, they missed the great war that I had with the men's rights movement, I guess, five years ago, where I said that MRAs are all Just kind of cry babies and you need to go to the gym and quit crying.
It's all so very weird.
But that's why we made the movie Hoax and that's why we did the book.
There's actually a whole essay in the book, Hoax, about my Wikipedia entry.
And how there's five paragraphs about some internet beef that I'd forgotten about.
I forget who this guy is, but it takes up five paragraphs because If a couple of freaks want to stalk your Wikipedia page, they can just kind of camp at it.
And because they're losers with nothing else going on, you just have to deal with whatever they write.
Well, interestingly enough, yeah, because, I mean, I'm apparently so far right that you can use me in a vision periphery test, you know, just to find out if you can see that far right.
And if you can, I think you're either a fly or a porpoise.
So that's important to remember.
So what's the relationship between Between the book and the movie, because, you know, sometimes they just write up the movie, but this is a much more, there's much more in the book than is in the movie.
The movie's great to begin with. There's even more in the book.
Yeah. So the problem, the number one problem with the hoax is that I wanted, we didn't know this going in, of course.
So I crowdfunded it. Very generous people.
You helped me with the crowdfunding and everything.
And the people wanted a movie and We had so much content.
I was like, well, why don't we do six episodes?
I asked the backers, and they were like, no, no, no, we want a movie because the movie still has that prestige and cachet.
And I said, fine. But meanwhile, I had a three-hour, four-hour interview with you.
I had an interview with all authors.
I had an interview with a long, long interview with all kinds of interesting people.
And I just thought, well, it's terrible.
And then I go, well, let's just upload the full videos.
It's a great idea until you realize these are 4K videos, and it takes literally almost a week to upload a couple hours of footage.
So I was like, oh, we'll just throw it on YouTube thinking it's like an iPhone.
And the guys are like, no, no, no, that's not really how this stuff works.
And then I said, okay, let's get these interviews transcribed.
We'll get them edited.
And then it's a fascinating book because I've read it probably six times.
And each time I learn something new, And unlike most books, because I don't like boring books, I like challenging books, there's a Black Lives Matter person in Hoaxed who is essentially saying America is white supremacist.
And I think it's important to know the points of views of other people.
This idea that, you know, I just want to have some boring book wouldn't work.
So we have a bunch of interviews and then I have, oh, 10 or 15 original essays where I just illustrate very clearly and precisely how The double standards work, how fake news is created, and how fake narratives are made.
Yeah, no, I mean, and I just want to really reiterate, I've watched the movie a bunch of times.
I've been with it with a bunch of audiences, sort of more local friends and what we saw in St.
Louis. Whatever you think the movie is, it ain't what you think it is.
And that is one of the things that's really, really powerful about it, that it's not going to be some MAGA fest.
It's not going to be some mic pump fest.
It's not going to be, look at all our friends, we're so cool.
It's a very powerful film because it does draw in a lot of different perspectives and no matter how much you think you know Mike or me or the other people in the movie, you're gonna be blown away because the perspective is very independent and very clear and very powerful.
And it is one of the most important, if not the most important topics at the moment because everything's being driven by narrative and very few people can deconstruct it on the fly.
Yeah, I think it's the most important documentary of the decade.
And I say that without ego or vanity because I helped with production, interviewing and producer stuff, interviewed a bunch of people, interviewed you and all that.
And then around, I don't know, November, December, I did my interview and then I went away and I just said, you guys, to my directors, make the film you want to make.
I only set a few guidelines.
I said, make the film you want to make, but I don't want MAGA propaganda.
We don't work for the Trump campaign.
So I don't want just, oh, MAGA's the best and everybody who's not MAGA is evil.
And I said, I want you to deal with a film that is not propaganda of Cernovich.
I want it to be, you know, cast me in a critical light, make a case against me, show people, you know, show people dimension and depth.
And then, oh, about seven months later, I'll always remember this moment in my life.
Which is maybe an ironic thing to say, considering memories are false, but I was driving in LA to the dinner with some of the bigger hoax backers, and my wife messaged me, oh my God, baby, this was the rough cut.
This is the film that you always wanted to make.
And I was like, oh, wow.
So I pulled over to a coffee shop nearby, and I was on my iPhone, and I was captivated.
I go, oh, wow. And this was the rough cut, right?
Wow, this is really incredible stuff.
And as you know, the rough cut was two hours and 45 minutes.
So we had to edit that down.
Just a moment. I'm just wiping away a tear here for a moment, thinking about that first push had more of me in it.
But I'm fine. I'm good.
I'm okay. I'm breathing through it.
Well, that's the issue. We got hours of just the most interesting people.
We have an amazing interview with Scaramucci.
And the way I view things as a content person is, we talked a little bit about fake news, but then I talked to him about entrepreneurialism, how would you compete against the mainstream media, books he's read, because the way I looked at it was, okay, if I get an hour of your time to talk about the news, but if you don't mind staying for another hour, I'll just talk about something unrelated to the film, because who knows?
Better to have it than to not have it.
So that's the case with a lot of these interviews too and hoaxes.
They veer way off topic.
In a good way. Right.
So, we're going to chat a little bit about things that we used to believe that we don't believe quite as much, or maybe even believe the opposite.
So, one of the things that you were pointing out earlier on about the men's rights activists, you know, that you're like, guys, just go hit the gym.
Now, for those who don't know about this, hitting the gym is something that I've recommended to people for many, many years, because there's only so much you can do in changing your mind.
Your mind is like the top Set of bricks on a giant pyramid, call your entire being, which rests on the purely physical.
There are studies, I'm sure you've seen them, Mike, there are studies that show that men who have more upper body strength are more into free markets, and men who are more weak and, you know, pencil-necked and so on, are more into...
Left-wing or socialism or redistributionist policies for reasons that we can all fully understand.
It's why more attractive women tend to be into the free market and less attractive women tend to be into socialism because more attractive women can compete in the free market, can get men more alpha males to provide for them in the free market and so on.
So you can hand people a stack of books on economics or you can hand them a gym membership and sometimes the two will have similar outcomes or the physical one would be even better.
Well, there's that, and there's also the sense of just, and I think that's why Jordan Peterson's stuff ended up resonating with people, is just fix your life, man.
The language I used was always, for years, just un-F-U-C-K yourself, right?
You want to talk about the system, and it's rigged, and there's misandry.
Well, sure, we all know this, right?
We all know this. But what I find interesting, too, though, is when men say, well, misinjury is real, and everybody tells them no, but then a lot of those same people say, well, yeah, but there's no such thing as, you know, racism against black people.
I'm like, well, maybe have an open mind, right?
And I think that's, too, one of the goals of Hoax is that, hey, if we're conservatives and we all know that we're being censored and shadowbanned, And we're gaslit by the media that we're not.
But then when another group of people says they're being discriminated against, far too many of our fellow travelers are like, well, that's not true, and this and that.
It's like, okay, well, maybe, but let's talk about it at least, right?
Let's talk about it from a place of Empathy and mutual understanding.
And that's the way with a lot of these issues.
So fundamentally, I just tell people, because people always say, well, what do I do this?
And the feminists are doing all that for me.
I'm like, man, the feminists ain't keeping you from reading books.
They're not keeping you from learning another language.
They're not keeping you from starting a business.
They're not keeping you from going to the gym, doing meditation, Wim Hof breathing, watching interesting stuff, making movies.
Sure, there are structural issues going on, but fundamentally, why don't you just put that emphasis on yourself and fix as much of yourself as you can?
That's always been my position on those issues.
Maybe this is a digression, though, but that's why I think a lot of people, when they struggle how to think because you don't learn how to think this way in society, You can hold simultaneously and seemingly conflicting truths if you're a high consciousness thinker.
If you're a low consciousness, you're like, cognitive dissonance, one has to be true, I have to reconcile these conflicting points of view.
But it's possible to, one, say that there is misandry and there is a toxic masculinity, men are evil.
There are messages coming from the world.
You can fundamentally and simultaneously recognize that, yeah, there is a lot of male hate out there.
And also, and also, that male hate isn't going to stop you from living the kind of life you want to live.
And likewise too with women.
I've always been critical of, and this is what I think is funny about the lies about me, I've always been critical of the advertising industry.
Telling women, you know, you have to put on this makeup and Obviously, being obese is just not a good way to live because you're going to be unhealthy.
But telling women, oh, you have to look a certain way and everything has to be the right way, that's all coming from advertising.
So women are being programmed also by the system, just like men are, just in different ways.
Right. No, and it is one of these...
Processes of disengaging from things you have no control over.
I had this with the Kavanaugh-Blasey Ford hearings this week.
I found myself, Mike, I got...
Oddly wound up and tense about it.
And in a way that I didn't really feel like this, you know, I guess 2016, the election with Trump and all of that was the last time I sort of felt this.
I felt just kind of a little bit lightheaded and I was like, what the heck is going on?
And I sort of realized, and this morning I just had to like pull myself off the internet because I realized that I was very much willing to For some kind of mediocre people to try and do the right thing, to stand up against this kind of bullying, to continue to go forward with the process, to recognize the investigation.
And wanting people to do the right thing is a way of losing ownership over yourself because you become so other focused.
You focus on things you don't really have any direct control over anyway.
It's not like I got some phone line to these people.
I can talk them into and out of things.
And this being drawn out of yourself to try and will things you can't control is very much the illusion of power and it does end up with you feeling kind of weakened and detached from yourself.
Yeah, you feel a lot of people are telling me that the vibes are, it feels a negative vibe because everybody feels that way.
If you're a woman and you've actually been abused or molested or something, you've relived that trauma.
And if you're a man who has maybe been falsely accused or knows somebody who's been falsely accused or you can imagine yourself being falsely accused, you lived that trauma vicariously through Kavanaugh.
And I think that's something that hasn't really been pointed out yet is 20% of US households watch that hearing.
So what is that? 60 million people.
60 million people simultaneously relived some kind of deep trauma or deep fear collectively all at once.
That shifts the energy.
It shifts the consciousness.
It shifts everything.
And people end up feeling, yeah, the vibe is kind of bad.
The vibe does feel kind of bad.
But to me, the answer to that is I've just been focusing on other things today.
So I don't even know if any news happened today because I was watching some – I had a thing in my head and I Googled it.
Thinking it would be a clever book title and somebody else had not only used that title before, but he has a whole series of lectures and other stuff about it.
So it ended up being a good find and saved me the time of having to write a book.
I'll read his book now and then review his book and then promote it.
Right. So, one of the things that I'm still wrestling with, you know, it's never black and white in terms of, I used to believe this, now I don't believe it at all, or it's 180 degree opposite or whatever.
So, when I was younger, I was not a rational thinker.
I was not taught how to be a rational thinker.
I mean, I was raised religious, a Christian, and, you know, there's lots of good stuff in Christianity, but...
Rigorous rational analysis was certainly not part of my religious education.
And, you know, socialist and lefty and all that kind of stuff.
And then when I came across better arguments, I was like, hmm, that's hard to resist.
You know, the sequin, the plotting sequence of reason and evidence, kind of hard to resist.
And I changed enormously and have continued to change.
So this, I was open to reason and So I kind of assumed I've got two legs.
They have two legs. I'm open to reason.
They're going to be open to reason. And I spent a lot of time, a lot of time, beating my head against the wall of people's irrational belief systems with reason and evidence.
And at some point, I mean, I did the research and I've got a whole presentation called The Death of Reason.
I realized that I was actually the irrational one after a while by expecting reason to change people's minds foundationally on a regular basis.
It happens with some people and so on.
But by believing that reason was going to be the way to change people's minds, I was actually rejecting the evidence that I claimed to be the foundation of my rationality.
Yeah. Excuse me.
Yeah, that's another point people miss is, first of all, there's a lot of things to unpack there.
One is that people change their minds.
Well, no, people don't change their minds, unless they're bullied by culture into changing their positions, because to not change your position is untenable.
For example, I was always fine with gay marriage.
Why? Because fundamentally, I have a libertarian belief system which says that two consenting adults want to sign a contract.
Now, whether you'd want to call that a civil union or maybe not give them the formal marriage title or whatever, to me, you know, we could have that debate on the margins.
But to me, I was just always like, well, yeah, I mean, two consenting adults want to enter into a binding contract.
I mean, if anything, marriage should be outlawed, right?
It's like nobody should be able to get married because it's an unbelievably intrusive contract that would never be upheld in any other context.
But everybody else changed their mind.
Well, they didn't change their mind. That wasn't a thoughtful process.
Democrats were opposed to gay marriage.
And then suddenly it became this cause du jour.
Oh, everybody has to support it now.
So nobody even changed their minds.
They're just being programmed passively by the machine.
So I don't know that I would say that people aren't open to reason and evidence.
I would just say that people are naturally not active.
They're just naturally passive.
And so whatever the culture, the cultural programming, whatever society tells people to believe, that's what they're going to believe.
But on a micro level, people rarely take an active approach to their own mindset and to their own lives.
Yeah, it's like, am I going to be approved of or disapproved of by holding this position?
That's mostly how people navigate.
And evolutionarily speaking, it's kind of hard to get too mad at that, because that's kind of how we all survived when we were born into a tribe of elders who had almost complete control over our futures.
You kind of got to go with what the tribe's saying.
Otherwise, you get ostracized, you get kicked out of the tribe, or no woman will have sex with you.
So whatever genes there might have been for standing for the truth against all odds...
They probably didn't last too long in the hurly-burly and back and forth of sort of our tribal evolution and recognizing that people will say that their beliefs are derived from reason and evidence.
But then when you start to bring them arguments that go against them, not only do they not respond to those, but quite often the studies show that they actually dig in deeper and they're stronger with their beliefs than they were before they encountered opposing arguments.
Yeah, I mean, that was actually shown in the classic seminal work on cognitive dissonance, which was they would study doomsday cults, and the doomsday cult leader would say, okay, tomorrow the aliens are coming to rescue us, and the world is ending, and only us and the cult will be saved.
And then that day happens and passes.
And the very next day, instead of people saying, oh, son of a gun, I believe the wrong thing.
Yeah, hey, you know, whatever.
You know, we've all been duped, charged you to the game.
No, no, no. A large percentage doubled down on their belief.
And of course, we saw this, and Scott Adams talks about this in Hoaxed, actually, which was that people said Trump couldn't win.
So if we lived in a rational world, a logical world, here's what would have happened.
The election was November 8th.
2016. On November 9th, people would have said, son of a gun, Trump won.
Why did he win? We were all wrong.
Let's go talk to the people who said he was going to win.
Right? Let's go call up Scott Adams.
You know, maybe you're too controversial.
I'm too controversial. Fine.
Let's call up Scott Adams.
He's not too controversial to have.
Hey, Scott, you said that Trump was going to win.
You, Ann Coulter, and a couple other people said he was going to win when everybody thought that was insane.
Educate us. What did we miss?
What did we not understand about the world?
That's what would happen in a logical world.
Well, as we now know, people had hysteria and panic, and now we have a new form of satanic panic, which was the Russiagate panic.
So, of course, when I was a kid, I even wrote about this, how Geraldo Rivera ruined my childhood.
There was a satanic panic and all these parents in the Midwest were worried that you were being recruited for religious cults.
And one of the warning signs was that you enjoyed being by yourself in your room.
I don't know where that came from, but the experts in satanic cults literally said that.
It literally filtered into Geraldo Rivera to my parents to where I later knew at the time nobody knew what an introvert was.
I'd never even heard the word.
You know, so parents didn't know, like, no, your kid's probably just an introvert.
He doesn't want to listen to your mindless chatter all day.
And that was the satanic panic.
So what we did with Russiagate, another satanic panic hysteria.
Now we have another hysteria, which is rape gate.
You know, everywhere you walk, it's like people think we're living in Somalia or the Congo or something.
Like the numbers, people say, well, 25% of women have been raped.
You're like, no, no, no. You would be terrified if that were really true.
Again, the rationality. If that were really true, that's actually more than men are raped in prison.
In prison, the numbers are actually closer to 10%.
So, you're saying that living in the world makes you more likely to be raped than going into prison, right?
Or living in the Congo.
Yeah. If that were really true, if you really believed that, we would live like we live in South Africa.
Double locked doors, triple locked doors.
So, we don't live in a rational world.
It is dictated by By culture.
And people do have being wrapped up into their identity.
And rather than just say, oh, new evidence came in, son of a gun.
That's the way life is.
Now learn and grow.
They double down and they freak out.
And they get angry. That's like another thing I said is people are interested in the truth.
And if you tell people the truth, usually that'll just make them angry.
Well, it's also there. I thought people had an individual relationship to ideas and to belief systems, but generally what it is is our beliefs are social in nature because, you know, we have particular beliefs and we choose our society or our society is chosen for us by biology if it's a family.
Our beliefs are horizontal rather than, you know, we've got this relationship to the truth.
And so what happens is if we reorient our sense of truth, we then go to the people in our life explicitly or implicitly.
We say, will you still like me if I don't believe exactly what you believe?
Will you still like me if I've changed my mind about this, that or the other?
Now, of course, if they do like you just for you, then they should follow you on that journey.
They should be inspired by that journey and so on.
But most people are pretty nervous that if they change their beliefs about anything particularly important, that they're going to be ostracized and rejected by their clan, by their friends, by their family, whoever it is, right?
And it may be even more serious than that in terms of you might get divorced from your spouse, you might get fired from your job, you might be run out of your profession.
I mean, it can have hugely deleterious effects to change anything foundational.
about your belief system, and that's the big question.
What are my relationships like?
Are they dependent upon my compliance to a shared delusion, or do people value me for who I am as an individual?
There's that area, and there's also just the area, and I don't really fully understand it, but if you live a fantasy, you don't want anybody to tell you the fantasy is real.
To use a completely non-political example, Every two or three years, I have to educate my audience, which includes a lot of young men, that, okay, there's a new internet marketing guy coming in, ripping you all off.
You're not going to go from you're living behind a dumpster to you're making a million dollars a year on a block.
You're just not going to.
I've made it on the internet.
You've made it.
You've been a successful entrepreneur in other areas.
I've I've done entrepreneurialism in other areas.
You're not going to make a million dollars off a blog if you pay somebody a thousand bucks for an internet marketing course on how to start a dropshipping store.
People get angry. So I don't talk about it because what I wanted to do years ago, I was more gullible or naive.
And I would be like, look, this is a scam and here's why.
And people would get angry. So three or four years ago, everybody was going to make a million dollars off a blog and self-publishing books.
Now everybody's going to make a million dollars dropshipping.
So even if it isn't something political and you're actually trying to help people, hey, I'd rather you not waste your money on this and I'd rather you not waste your time on this.
You could actually make more money working a minimum wage job than you're ever going to do with this so-called thing.
People actually just get really angry.
And I learned that with the housing bubble, too.
I told people, man, everybody I know who shouldn't be able to buy a house is buying a house.
It's probably a bad sign.
And then people would get angry, scream at me.
How dare you? You're just a hater, right?
Okay. So I've learned to just keep my- even when I want to help people and protect them from a financially disastrous decision, I've learned to just keep my mind to myself because all it does is makes people angry.
Right. Now, another thing that changed quite a bit for me, and this is a little bit more recent, although I guess it kind of started with some of the environmental scares of my youth, was this idea that I have about the objective, empirical, white lab coat scientist who doesn't care a whit about politics or funding or popularity and is just in bulletproof pursuit of rational truth about the universe no matter where it leads.
I had some skepticism because I had the crap scared out of me half literally as a kid on a repetitive basis by all these environmental scares.
I remember as a kid, the predictions that the world was running out of food by 1980, that there was going to be a global cooling, there was going to be a new ice age, there were holes in the ozone layers, you name it, right?
It was really terrifying.
And it has a huge effect, at least it did for me, probably as big an effect as the imminent nuclear war that you and I grew up with, which is like, yeah, you know, I guess I could study for that math test, but if I'm going to be a nuclear shadow that's very thin because I was starving to death, well, you know, maybe.
It has a huge effect and a huge impact and how cold that was to transmit down to kids.
And they would show us these movies in school.
It wasn't like you had to go and find them or something like that.
And then realizing that scientists, you know, there's great scientists, and I believe fully in the scientific method.
I mean, it's one of the great tools of human accuracy, power, and invention.
But actual scientists paid for by governments in general, you know, there's a lot of squidgy stuff.
And looking at the replication crisis, you know, half of the studies in this field can't be reproduced.
80% of the studies in this area can't be reproduced.
It's like... You know, the ideal and the people who inhabit it are just two very, very different things and it took me quite a while to sort of puzzle that one out.
Yeah, so many things about biology and scientific studies turn out to be bogus.
Let's see, when I was a kid, we had the hole in the ozone layer.
The rainforests were all being destroyed.
Everybody's going to have cancer because ozone layer hole caused by aerosol cans.
It was one thing- Dr. Justin Marchegiani Acid rain?
Yeah. Yeah, acid rain was going to strip all your car paint of things.
It was just one thing after another that we were told.
And now we're told, okay, there's this thing called man-made global warming.
And I'm like, man, I don't know.
People want me to have a strong opinion.
I'm like, well, I've looked at both sides.
And they go, well, 99% of scientists say this.
And I go, Well, okay, sure, but what would happen to the person who disagreed?
He'd be driven out as a heretic, right?
You can't even work in the scientific field because you're working around people, and they would drive anyone out as a heretic.
And so it's been one catastrophe after another the whole life, and of course that is the problem, the crying wolf problem, is that if it is indeed correct that we're contributing global warming, then We're all in a lot of trouble.
But then on the other hand, too, is they'll create all this hysteria about the Paris Climate Accord.
But then when you really, really research, you're like, well, wait a minute.
We're talking like a 3% thing.
It's China, right?
I actually got into an argument with somebody.
I can't remember who. I just said I don't argue with people, so I lied.
I did argue with this person.
It was just about the facts, where I'm like, no, no, no, China is producing more global greenhouse gas than everybody else.
He's like, well, that isn't true.
And then he actually did the research, and it was true.
So yeah, we live in a world now where people don't even know the basic facts.
We're at the West, like, well, you better recycle this.
And sure, that's nice. It makes you feel good.
It's virtue signaling. But that is going to do nothing.
It's going to do nothing. It's actually China and these other nations.
But then moreover, China went from a very poor country where people are starving.
And now it's their time to have an industrial revolution like we had in the West.
What are we going to tell them? No, no, just stay poor.
Just don't industrialize, right?
So we're not even having an intelligent, nuanced conversation about it.
We're just saying global warming is bad.
And if you don't ban straws, then you hate the environment and you're a science denier.
And you're like, no, no, no, we're arguing.
And that's another thing, too, about the sign of the times.
We're fighting over maybe a 3% reduction in carbon emissions, maybe a 3%.
And we're screaming at each other rather than asking more intelligent questions like, OK, China and India, they have a right to have an industrial revolution.
Okay, what about when Africa, which is going to be half the population, Sub-Saharan Africa by 2050, what about when they have their industrial revolution?
What do we do about pollution then?
Why don't we be a little forward-thinking?
Because they'll eventually have one.
Especially as China colonizes Africa.
So there's all these actually really interesting conversations that we could be having.
Nope. Oh, you're a climate denier.
That's it. You're an idiot.
You can never be respectable for the rest of your life ever again.
Yeah, I mean, even I've, you know, I've done a whole show on that.
I think it's 97% and so on.
And even that seems like complete fake news.
And it is tough. Yeah, I agree.
Big challenges around pollution.
And there's lots of great things, you know, less war would be nice, because war is extraordinarily polluting.
So, you know, Less war would have been great.
Maybe not dropping all these bombs in the Middle East under Bush and Obama would have been great.
That would have been fantastic.
Getting rid of taxi licenses would be really great because then people could afford to take taxis more easily without having to buy their own cars.
Mass migration from the third world to the first world is certainly cranking up our resource usage, but I've also heard reports that some environmental organizations were given lots of money to never talk about that.
Which, you know, it's kind of squidgy.
And trying to find people to trust.
Because, you know, I'd have these trust in universities.
Well, it's Yale, it's Harvard, it's the University of Toronto.
It's like, wow, these guys are really great.
They've got all this research and all these degrees.
So there's this institution that you trust, whether it's science, or whether it's the media, or whether it's an academic institution.
And then so you trust the institution and then people insert themselves into that and gain that umbrella of trust.
And recognizing that the institution is just the people.
There's no big giant momentum from history that keeps Yale honest or science full of integrity or governments as nice as they were or nasty as they were in the past.
It's just the people.
And the fact that they can pillage the trust associated with institutions and try and lacquer themselves in that...
Is really something that I've had to painfully strip out of my brain.
Yeah. The client institutions, the idea that the institution is somehow more than the people.
The idea that there is such a thing as the government, which is—it's an interesting belief for a number of reasons.
One is, if you're a socialist and you're saying, we can't trust the police, but then you want to ban guns and you want to have a bigger government, you're just like, well, this doesn't make sense.
But then on the other side, too, is if you support the death penalty, then the question will be, well, why does the government have the rights and powers that a private individual wouldn't have, too?
So it works, it cuts both ways, this belief that there is the government, this government becomes this sort of meta-phenomena that's something greater than everyone else.
You would say, well, no, if me and five people couldn't band together to go break into your house and steal your stuff, then why do me and five million people get to band together and call this a The government and do the same thing.
Why don't we think about that and have a conversation?
But that, of course, too, is why these beliefs are imprinted in you.
Trust the institutions. That's why all these people are freaking out now.
These think tanks from Trump was elected.
They're saying, well, it's an era of people not trusting experts.
And, well, yeah, we don't.
You gave us the financial crisis.
You gave us these wars on Iraq. You gave us the Vietnam War.
You gave us...
You gave us massive unemployment.
You gave us communism.
You gave us human misery.
You terrified us that we're going to have nuclear wars all the time.
We can't trust anything. So, yeah, there's a reason we don't trust experts.
And the death of expertise was self-inflicted.
It was a suicide of expertise.
Well, and there doesn't seem to be, as you point out, other experts.
Well, I guess maybe that's where people like us come in.
One of the first things I learned as an entrepreneur is you've got to have the post-mortem, the 360 review.
At the end of every project, you all sit down or you go off-site if you have to and you whiteboard it.
You go over the notes. Did you make money?
Did you lose money? What was good?
What was bad? What lessons learned and so on?
You got to circle back as an entrepreneur in order to be able to keep your company going in the right direction.
You got to constantly reinvent yourself.
And I can't imagine really, and this is true on the internet too, right?
New topics, new ideas all the time.
I can't imagine, Mike, what it would be like to just say, well, we never have to fundamentally review anything that we do.
We never have to circle back and check whether we never have to refine our process.
We can just keep putting out the same crap every single day because there's a market that's going to lap it up.
And we're as trapped by the market as they are by our propaganda.
Nothing has to change.
Nothing needs to be re-evaluated.
I can't imagine. It seems almost like a different species of people to me.
Yeah, there are government bailouts, government subsidizes, student loans.
Anywhere you look, we're insulated now from, well, not we, you and I sure aren't, but the institutions, they're insulated from any reckless decision they made because people know that the government is going to come in, so then they don't have to self-correct.
If you make a mistake or I make a mistake, we learn it right away.
We have to self-correct.
Any entrepreneur or anybody who I like Elon Musk, so get me wrong, but the subsidies are what they are.
They are what they are, as much as I might admire the guy.
But we don't have a margin of error.
Small business owners don't have a margin of error, and you don't have the government bailout.
So your ideas have to be right, or they have to be workable.
Your reality pushes right back against you.
But if you're in higher ed, oh, here's what we believe.
Oh, and you have to have this certificate in order to get a job in corporate America.
Oh, the government's going to let us raise our rates whenever we want.
We won't have to compete with other schools because the government's just flushing everything with money.
So there's never been a big self-correction in higher ed, nor was there in Wall Street.
The common person felt the correction, but We should not have all these big banks.
These big banks should have folded.
Then we'd have smaller community banks.
Risk would have gone from this massive, huge thing at the top to widely distributed.
We never had that either, thanks to Uncle Sam, people who said we should invade Iraq.
None of them lost their jobs.
None of them got fired from the media.
None of them lost their government positions.
Just nothing ever happens.
And, of course, Nassim Taleb talks about skin in the game and other people have made some of the points.
Which is, the people who demand that we trust their expertise, they don't suffer the consequences if they're wrong, it's the rest of us who suffer those consequences.
Can you, I mean, can you imagine, because, I mean, you and I, I think, more so than even people in alternative media are constantly dancing on this knife edge of things that we want to talk about, things which will be permitted to talk about, things that are important and things that are too controversial and so on.
Like, I literally can't imagine What it would be like to make catastrophic mistakes, not only with no consequences, but with positive consequences.
You know, I mean, just the basic thing, like, you know, I make a slight error in some show and I'm like, oh, you know, should I edit it?
Should I put a note on? Whatever, right?
An inconsequential error, right?
And yet, you know, someone like, I don't know, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton destroy Libya and destroy a country and now flooding migrants into Europe and open air slave markets and torture and rape and abuse on a grand scale or just like all the singers in the 80s who were warbling about how evil apartheid was and no follow up.
On massive increases in crime and debt and rape in South Africa and so on.
There's never any consequences.
People do better by these disasters and these weird misprioritization of resources.
It's impossible for me to avoid the fact that The US government has spent more time investigating Blasey Ford's accusations than they ever did looking into what I would consider war crimes from George Bush the younger, you know, this just illegal act of invading countries without any justification.
I can't imagine what it would be like.
You know, the FUMU thing, like fudge up, move up kind of thing, or the more the disaster, the more the bailout, the worse your mistake, the more you get promoted.
Like that's such a weird place to live.
I can't fathom it, especially compared to the lives that we lead.
Yeah, what we...
What we, and I actually talk about this in Hoaxed, is if you and I tweet one thing that's, like, minor correct, you'll have, like, 20 journalists emailing you.
You claim the following.
And actually, I'm like, man, why don't you go ask Joy Reid?
She's got an NBC thing.
You know, she's an anchor at supposedly real news.
So, for example, Joy Reid just got sued for defamation because she lied about a woman.
The woman received death threats.
Okay, well, Where are all the people who say that Alex Jones should be banned?
Where are they saying, well, Joy Reid spread fake news.
She ought to maybe take a week off.
Those same people are just sort of gone.
And so, yeah, we see that every day.
You and us, everything we do is just nitpicked to a degree that to me is almost – it isn't It doesn't make me afraid, it just makes me bored.
Like, oh god, I retweeted this person, and the person I retweeted is apparently a bad person, and I have to go through every tweet.
Steve King did that, he retweeted somebody, and they're like, well, he retweeted a white nationalist.
I'm like, man, I didn't even know that guy was a white nationalist.
How is Steve King supposed to know this stuff?
But these people, they actually know more who the far left-wingers.
I don't know who all these people are.
I don't spend all day looking at Twitter accounts with 100 followers and trying to figure out what they believe.
So the level of scrutiny we get would be nice if people whose errors actually cause, like you said, death and destruction like what happened in Libya.
Compare, and we talk about this in Hoax the movie, Hoax the book.
Okay, let's just say that Mike Cernovich is a bad guy.
Okay, I'm a bad guy.
Well, let's compare that to Libya.
Let's go look at Libya. Show me where I'm even in the ballpark of messing things up the way Hillary Clinton did, right?
We came, we saw he died.
Ha ha ha, isn't it funny?
All the journalists saying we're going to democratize it.
You can actually go through and show me where I did anything like what happened in Libya.
You just can't.
Okay, so why don't you go talk to some people and say, hey, I noticed in 2014 You said that invading Libya or killing Qaddafi would be a good thing, and now there's an open-air slave market.
Do you disavow your earlier views?
That never happens.
There's never any kind of critical self-examination, which I've engaged in.
People try to lie about what I actually did with a certain hashtag and completely manipulate what I actually did.
But in hindsight, I'm like, oh, yeah, if there's a new hashtag, I'll be a little more conscientious.
I'll pay a little more attention.
I'll realize that, hey, okay, I get it.
So even though they lied about what I actually did, I still was like, well, let's all be a little bit more conscientious and scrutinize things a little bit more before we just ride that wave or whatever it may be.
Cool, I do that. You'll do that.
Other people will do that. Why don't the people who said we should kill Gaddafi, why don't they do that?
What they did isn't just merely, you know, some wacko does one bad thing.
They've destroyed a whole country.
They've destroyed maybe a whole continent.
They've created humans.
If there's a refugee crisis, well, that was caused by killing Qaddafi.
So why don't we find, right?
Why don't we find everybody then who advocated for killing Qaddafi?
And why don't we say, do you support slavery?
Well, no. Well, do you regret what you said?
Do you disavow it? No, no, no.
There's never anything like that.
They just move on to the next.
Oh, we need to go to Venezuela now.
Oh, yeah, we need military action in Venezuela.
Let's go. Oh, we can't do Venezuela.
Well, let's go into Syria.
Son of a gun, we can't do Syria.
Well, no, we need to go to Ukraine now because the Russians are bullying the Ukrainians, even though when you look into the area, it was actually...
The people in the Ukraine were actually ethnically Russian and identified as Russian.
So they actually wanted to be with Russia, if you actually look into it.
So it's like, oh, well, we can't invade there.
Why don't we invade there? It's like, how about you all just sit this out, right?
How about you just sit it out for a year?
We don't go anywhere.
And you figure out how you blew Libya and destroyed lives, millions of lives.
Every refugee suffering is because of the people who want to invade Libya.
So why don't they own that?
They never will and it seems like nobody will ever make them.
So I've come up with a bunch and I know you've written an article recently.
What's one of the biggest ones or the biggest one for you, Mike, since you were a kid?
Well, the number one, I don't know if this is the most consequential, but that adults don't mature, right?
So you're a kid and you think, well, one day, you know, these are the adults, you need to listen to the adults and No, no, no.
They don't mature.
Whatever you're dealing with in high school or maybe freshman, sophomore year in college, the vast majority of people, that's who they are the rest of their lives.
You knew someone in college, you know someone now.
And I think the significance of that are, again, this death of expertise.
The reason we shouldn't trust experts is because an emotionally mature, fully integrated man or woman is willing to critically self-analyze and say, you know what, son of a gun, Even what we're doing now is critical self-analysis.
We're saying, here are things that we believe to be true.
We've concluded they're actually not true.
We are going to update our priors about the world so that going forward, we can not only make better decisions, but we can also maybe be a little bit more humble in our views.
Maybe we'll say, well, I had strongly held views about the world.
They ended up being wrong. So if I believe something very strongly about invading a foreign country, well, you know, maybe I have a little humility about something that consequential.
That's what everybody should do, and it just rarely happens because it does hurt.
It feels bad when you're wrong.
Right? Just like, ugh.
You know, I was wrong. I probably look stupid.
You know, do people I respect?
Are they going to look down on me for that?
You know, I let people down.
So you could just say, well, I was therefore not wrong to make yourself feel better.
You can just say, well, I was wrong.
That's too bad. Here's what went wrong.
And here's what we're going to do going forward.
How about you? Yeah.
No, that's tragically rare.
Something else that flipped around for me quite a bit was this question of diversity.
Diversity is a strength. Diversity is wonderful no matter what.
I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day and he was saying that he loves being a parent except for all the driving.
You know, he's got to drive his kids to...
He said, you know, when I was growing up, we all just played in the neighborhood.
We all just played in the neighborhood and that was it.
And that was my experience growing up too.
The glorious anarchy of, you know, just when my mom would ring a cowbell out the window and it was like dinnertime.
We'd come home like a bunch of heifers.
But I just remember going out, out and playing.
And I also remember what it was like to live in a world where I didn't know what the word racism meant.
Right? Because, I mean, I grew up...
I mean, it was England. It was the...
Late 60s, the 1970s.
Even Canada, like, I don't know, 97, 98% white or whatever.
So, you know, we'd have our disagreements and so on, but I didn't know what the word racism meant.
I didn't really know what it was.
And the idea that diversity is just automatically a strength, because I've heard this complaint from a lot of parents, like, oh, we got to drive our kids everywhere.
It's got to drive. It's like, well, why aren't the kids just out playing with each other?
And I think for among different cultures and religions, that happens more when the kids are very young.
When the kids get older, they start talking about what they believe and what the virtues are, what the values are.
And I think some of the old school parents, like from the old country and so on, they don't really like that mix up so much because it can dilute the message that they're trying to give.
To their kids from a religious or a cultural or an ethnic standpoint or whatever.
So this emptiness or the emptying out of neighborhoods, the lack of trust that's in these wildly multicultural neighborhoods, the lack of trust even within particular ethnic groups when they live in multi-ethnic neighborhoods, the problems and the challenges and so on.
I mean, there can be good stuff in diversity.
It's complex, but that you can never, ever speak of a downside, even when it's been empirically proven.
Boy, that is... That makes things pretty tough because that's like the biggest thing going on in the West these days.
Yeah, yeah. That's a great point, which is the idea if you just say, well, if you want to claim diversity as a strength, does diversity have any downsides?
Well, no, no, no, you can't. Well, I mean, everything, you know, like if you take a medication that works that has like a side effect, nothing in this world, if you make more money, you know, to take a great example is If somebody just showed up with a million-dollar briefcase, everybody thinks their life would just be better in every imagined sense of the word.
Well, yeah, but then people find out you have money, and then they resent you, and they think they deserve some of that.
It's called the lottery effect, right?
So nothing in this world, even winning the lottery, is just without any kind of downside.
So why can't we talk about both parts?
Well, we can't.
We don't talk about just the sense that It's good for a lot of people because you can accept everything is true.
You can accept that people are inherently tribalistic and it's unfortunate and I wish we weren't.
This is also why one of the things I used to believe is that society could function without organized religion.
Notice I don't say it has to be Christianity or has to be Judaism or has to be Islam or has to be Buddhist.
People have to have religion.
They have to have values instilled in them regularly as a culture, even as an adult.
And why? Because people are fallen, people are tribal.
So then if you do have a diversity, well, you're going to have to recognize there will be tribal disputes that are going to break out amongst people.
Now, is that worth it for the good?
Well, that's a conversation we can have.
We can say, well, you know, here's their cons, their pros.
I think unbalanced is actually a good thing.
And fine, fine, fine.
That's your conclusion, right?
But let's talk about Let's talk about the underlying facts first, and then before we even get to the conclusion.
But now what we have to do is just question-backing.
Well, this is good, and if you don't like it, you're a bad person, and that's the end of things.
It's just simply not the case, right?
We should be able to say, well, there are pros and cons to everything in life, even winning the lottery.
So there are going to be pros and cons to structural things.
So, for example, I think it's great that women have the right to vote, okay?
I think it's great. That said, we can talk about how policies have changed.
You can talk about, has government grown?
Has government grown?
Is that right? There's a conversation to be had.
So you can even believe that something is good or that it should exist because whatever the consequence of that may be, well, sure, but you're denying half the people their right to participate in society and, you know, they're just outweighed, right? You can balance things.
We've lost that sense of just nuance and saying, oh, this person believes We should balance factors versus, oh, wow, how dare you even ask the question, right?
How dare you even ask the question?
It's like, well, I actually agree with you, right?
There's even a funny video about Trump where the guy's a Hillary voter, but he's just like, he has to keep correcting people when they're just wrong about Trump.
Oh, well, Trump made fun of this disabled guy.
Well, no, actually, he's made that same gesture to reference Ted Cruz and like 10 other people.
One guy happened to have a hand problem or whatever.
And people are like, oh, God, so you support Trump.
How can you defend that? I'm not defending it.
I'm not defending it. I don't think the president should make fun of anybody like that.
And that's where we are intellectually, where if you just ask a question, even if you agree ultimately with the conclusion, people become very upset and they get very triggered.
Oh, can you imagine? Like, you see someone drawing a picture of Satan with three horns, and you say, actually, technically, it's two.
You're a Satanist! You love Satan!
It's like, no, I'm just correcting a fact here, if you don't mind.
And it's funny how we live in this blasphemy universe, in this sort of post-Christian hyper-blasphemy universe.
And this is the kind of blasphemy that was rare to find, at least in post-Enlightenment Christianity, where there were lots of robust debates, sometimes at sort point, but robust debates about...
The meanings of Bible verses and the interpretations of particular pieces of Scripture and so on.
But this hysterical, if you even bring up the question, you are automatically an evil person, that is really dull.
That is producing a very dull universe.
And a lot of the scintillating, interesting stuff, it is edgy, it is challenging, it is new data, and it is challenging preconceptions.
That's kind of where the fun is.
That's where the surface, that's where the cool stuff is happening.
And this idea that there's these just ideas that are platonically perfect, and to even question them, it doesn't just display ignorance.
Because if someone displays ignorance, you just correct them.
They say, I don't know, the capital of Yeah, I don't know.
I can't say all of American history, but at least in my lifetime, We've never been more ignorant and simultaneously more morally certain.
So, oh, you would question this.
Therefore, you are evil.
You know, half the country thinks the other half is evil.
Half the country thinks that the other half wants to just do them bad regardless of the side.
But people are just not being sane and sensible.
I mean, it's gotten so bad now, too, that there was a report that came out by a Soros-funded group, of all things.
It was saying that Joe Rogan is somehow connected to whatever happened at the Charlottesville rally because one time he talked to somebody To talk to someone else, to talk to that person.
So they're not only saying you have to be ignorant, they're saying that even if you don't agree with what people are saying, if you even talk to them and try to figure out what they're thinking is, or even if you try to debate them, right?
Think about where we've come as a culture where it used to be that you would debate people, but now debating someone is actually bad.
Because now you're exposing your people to these other ideas and That's really dangerous and scary and we should just shut everyone up who has ideas that we, the Soros people, don't like and don't agree with.
It's absurd.
It's certainly not how we got here.
How we got to the successes that we've had in the West was through debate, was through challenging pre-existing norms, was through that creative destruction of free speech.
Man, people just want to do a freeze time.
As soon as you freeze time, you decay.
It's life. You're either growing or you're shrinking.
You're either advancing or retreating.
There's no stasis in life.
The only way to be sure that you're actually advancing rather than decaying is robust free speech, which Boy, it does not seem to be doing too well these days because, you know, you still have the legal right to say things, but you have the practical right to say things, you know? And yeah, I mean, in a lot of the West, well, not so much in Europe, but certainly I think in Canada, North America, you still have Canada, America, you still have the legal right to say certain things.
But in terms of practical consequences of deplatforming, and as you point out, at some point they're going to be like, oh, I saw that video.
You can't have a bank account.
You can't have a visa. You can't sign a lease.
You can't, you know, like, I mean, okay, you technically have the right, but who's ever going to exercise it?
Yeah, and it's actually backfiring on people in a way that I find quite humorous.
Especially when it comes to the far left, as we know, because the things are so in flux now, you have to be an insane person to understand the insanity almost.
And there's the big movement on boycott, divestment against Israel, and that's usually done by very far left people who try to shut me down.
So what I've done is I've educated my college student followers that they can actually report These groups for hate speech.
This is a little dark nighting, but that's what it takes now.
So the far left is now realizing, oh, no, I can't believe you're getting our student group in trouble by calling us all these names and you're reporting us for hate speech.
Oh, no, no, no. They need to feel a little bit and realize, yeah, you want to criticize Israel.
That's because of free speech.
That's the only reason you're allowed to criticize anyone.
It's because of free speech.
And in fact, if you think Israel has all this power, then you need free speech more than the people who are pro-Israel.
Because whoever has power, if you're siding with power, you don't need free speech, right?
Because nobody's coming out. If I come out and say, you know what?
I just, I love Hillary Clinton.
I watched her speech and I was weeping.
I was moved emotionally and I was shamed.
I was ashamed of myself.
For just not realizing she should be a president.
You don't need free speech for that.
Right? You're there.
You're in the club now.
Diversity is a strength.
You don't need free speech for that either.
Yeah. So even if socialism is good, you don't need free speech for that.
Right? You don't need speech for any of that.
And that's the problem.
So the far left, though, they're realizing that some of their ideas are hate speech under someone else's definition.
I encourage any college student who listens to this to find hate speech from the left and report them to student activities groups and report them to the dean and don't listen to the kind of people like Sean Hannity who say, well, we don't do things like that.
Like, no, this is existential survival.
You know, like, the lives of Stefan and I, our lives are in danger.
So if you can't go report a student group that is engaging in hate speech because Sean Hannity tells you not to, Then you have no idea what's coming.
You're not doing anyone any favors because people do need to learn.
I think that it's probably fair to say that most of us don't have quite as much money as Sean Hannity.
I mean, I think he's going to be okay no matter what.
He's got money for generations to come.
But this is another big thing.
And I learned some of this from you directly, Mike, which is, man, this high road, this noble path, this, you know, when they go low, we go high stuff.
This graceful losing is really terrible.
It really is terrible.
I mean, the left is ferocious.
They are feral. They play to win.
And if you don't learn and if you don't hold them to their own standards, like as you point out in your tweets, you know, hey, these are the rules.
You wanted the rules. You get the rules.
Now you got to play by the rules that you've been imposing on us.
I think it really is the only shot that we have.
Yeah, just kind of wake people up and say, hey, you want to criticize Israel?
Great, go for it.
But if you're trying to keep me from coming to a college campus because I'm such a bad person, okay then.
Under your rules, any ideas that are deemed offensive to some group of people— So, okay, this is the world you wanted.
There was a funny thing Sarah Silverman did a bit on her show and ironically she's so culturally irrelevant now that I only found it because some blog wrote about it my name and I was vangorously googling my name.
And she goes, I can't believe Cernovich went after James Gunn because Cernovich wrote this article that was bad.
James Gunn is good and Cernovich is bad.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, kid.
It's quite possible to say that James Gunn is bad and Cernovich is bad.
But I've never said anything like that guy said.
So it's quite possible to just say, isn't it terrible?
Just bad people all over this world.
But no, no, no.
That's not their point.
Their point is that, well, I mean, if our team...
It's a satire. It's a joke.
Lighten up. What's wrong?
It's just Twitter, bro. He was just tweeting, man, trying to get a rise out of people.
I'm like, oh, really? You're allowed to do that?
Thanks, because I sure can't.
I can't even put a typo in my tweets, and I have to hear about it.
But that is the lesson here.
We live in a society.
We have a social contract.
The rules have to apply equally to everyone.
And if they don't, if they're being applied unevenly, you can either cry about that and cry about the double standards, or you can just say, fine, these are the rules.
Everybody's going to follow the same rules, and I'll be the guy.
I'll be the hall monitor, the hall monitor of conservatism.
Or as the old saying goes, it ain't so much fun when the rabbit's got a gun.
In other words, when the rules are applied more universally, and I mean, of course, that in a very peaceful way.
The only way I think that the left – I mean, if the left keeps getting to impose this deplatforming, this getting people attacked if they try and speak in college campuses or whatever, if they continue to have that power and only they have that power, I mean, they're not going to give it up. They're not going to give it up because they wake up suddenly with a – Glorious sense of Christ-like moral conscience or anything like that because, you know, it's the will the power universe, right?
They've already admitted that their post...
Christian, they've already admitted that they're post-religious, that they're post-ethics, that they're post-universals, that they're post-reason really with post-modernism.
So they're not going to wake up tomorrow with some God-given moral conscience.
They're going to keep exercising that power.
And I think the only way to push back the exercise of that power is to say, okay, well, how do you like it?
You know, that's what you say to the kid without empathy, right?
So if a kid hits another kid, you say, you know, the other kid's crying.
You don't want to make the kid cry, do you?
And if he's like, I don't care. Then, you know, what are you left with?
Well, the next time that kid gets hit, it's like, hey, that's how it feels.
You know, if you're not going to learn because you have basic human empathy, you're going to have to learn because now it's hurting you.
And that may not give you empathy for the other person, but clearly you care about your own feelings, and so maybe that will cause you to back off those rules because now they're hurting you.
You obviously didn't care when it hurt other people you disagree with, that you've dehumanized, that you've deplatformed.
You don't care about that. But maybe if it hurts you, then we can find common cause, which is, okay, I don't like you, you don't like me, but this is hurting both of us.
Yeah, and oddly, and this sounds a little like concern trolling is a term, but it's actually sincere.
I don't want to live in a civil war that's violent even if I win or my side wins.
You might not be there to win.
Yeah, I like flushable toilets.
I like culture and art.
And a pulse. And libraries and a pulse and cold brew coffee and vineyard.
I love all the trappings of Western civilization.
And I would rather not...
And this is where, of course, it leads to...
I tell people, I go, just think about it as...
World War I started from Archduke Ferdinand.
His assassination sent things in.
This is the mob behavior that they don't see through.
If you're a left-wing mob and you're running Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of a bar, it's been proven scientifically that people who aren't a mob do things they would never do individually.
So you don't have to have too active of imagination to wonder what would happen if this becomes normalized to run people out.
So what do you think happens if something bad happens to her or to a prominent conservative or Don Jr.
or someone like you?
It isn't going to be good.
It isn't going to be good.
You don't want the people of the country, especially the people of the country who are very pro-Second Amendment, you don't want to say to them, hey, oh yeah, we're just going to kill you as you go out about your business.
Like this guy from ThinkProgress said, I think Ian Millhiser, however you say his name, We have to find people where they sleep.
I was like, are you out of your mind?
He even got pushed back from the left.
They were like, bro, this is a little creepy, man.
It's one thing to say, protest.
Another thing, maybe go in an elevator with Jeff Flake.
He's a senator. He said Republicans must be confronted where they work, where they eat, and where they sleep.
I can assure you that you do not want to confront people where they sleep for a number of reasons.
So this is me even just saying, hey, let's just argue with each other and we can fight about tax rates and we can fight about, you know, am I to tax?
Is taxation theft? You know, let's not get to the point where you think it's okay to go break into someone's house while they're sleeping and the consequences of that on either side would be bad.
I think that the left as well have been dominant culturally for so long that they don't know what kind of bear they're poking.
Because there is a new generation of conservatives who really don't want to take this shit anymore.
I think they've just been the biggest kid in the playground for so long that I don't know what...
I was really struck when Kavanaugh said, you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.
That was a radicalizing week.
I think that's why I was so tense about it as I was talking about earlier.
That's a radicalizing week.
That is people polarizing.
That is people that the center not holding, people moving more.
I hate to say to extremes because that always sounds like the center is always good and the squishy center is good and the extremes are bad, which is not an argument.
But there is a naked power play that is occurring in America at the moment.
We can see this with the whole Supreme Court thing.
There is a naked power play that is occurring in America at the moment.
And man, I think that the right are pretty disgusted with the think tanks who've achieved nothing with the RINOs, who've conserved nothing with the conservatives, who've conserved nothing.
And they're saying, well, look, if these guys keep winning, and this is what they're doing, maybe we should be doing it too.
Yeah, I've been hearing from all—because most of my friends don't like Trump.
Most of my friends who are Republicans don't like him.
They don't respect him as a man.
They don't think he's an honorable or virtuous person, etc.
So I'm not here to defend or attack Trump.
I will say these very same people were like, I can't believe what's happening to Kavanaugh.
I was like, oh, that's nice.
You couldn't believe it when Antifa showed up and tried to kill a guy outside of my event as the guy was walking home.
Oh, but now you suddenly care, right?
Now, whatever. Whatever wakes people up, everybody has their sort of awakening moment.
And for Kavanaugh, they realize like, wow, so you live your whole life, you do everything right, you do everything by the book.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
You're going to be completely and totally destroyed.
Once people get that in their mind that that's what's going to happen, Then they are going to make that pivot and they are going to look for, and by the way, that does concern me because Trump not only is not a fascist, but he doesn't do enough to be fascist, right? People are like, he's a fascist.
I'm like, well, this will be taken out of context.
So I won't say I wish.
You just want him to protect the people who have supported him.
Like, you know, throw a tweet out when people in MAGA hats get attacked.
Just, you know, throw something out.
You don't have to, like, call Sessions to go visit them in their house with a SWAT team.
But, you know, maybe throw a couple of bones out for the people getting hammered in the street who support you.
That's not... I don't think that's a huge man to ask.
Yeah, yeah. So people are like, oh, Trump is so scary.
I'm like, oh, not only is he not scary, but there's legitimate righteous indignation that could...
That could be had, and it isn't even happening.
So that's what I find funny about that.
But in any event, people who—that is how you have fascism rise, is if you tell a large proportion of population, oh yeah, if you walk outside, some guy from ThinkProgress might kill you.
He might visit you while you sleep.
What kind of creepy—could you imagine if Alex Jones or you or I tweeted that?
Man, we'd be in an hour.
It'd be the biggest story in the world.
Rape threat. They'd call it a rape threat.
They would say, Far right-wing social media personalities threaten to rape people while they sleep.
This guy says it and everybody's like, well, you know, maybe that's too far.
But if you convince people and you're this guy, you do not want millions of people thinking that you're going to hunt them down when they sleep.
Because that is how you actually get a real fascist.
That's how you get an actual real strong man.
Because people realize, okay, I guess I can't rely on the rule of law anymore.
And then people fundamentally want protection, and then they're going to look for that.
So I keep telling people, hey, if you don't want fascism to rise in America, chill out a little bit.
Knock the violence off, okay?
Because that's going to summon the demon that you're supposedly trying to prevent or to fight.
I remember reading this from some guy in Germany, begging the left, like, please do not push us into this corner again.
Please, as Germans, please do not push us into this corner again.
And it has always struck me I don't know if you've ever had, you probably have, I think everyone's had someone like this in their life, who create the very disastrous that they're constantly complaining about.
Like the people who are like, oh, you know, I got this woman, man, she's too good for me, you know, she's too pretty, she's too accomplished, you know, she's gonna leave me, she's, you know, she finds other guys more attractive, I can't keep up, I can't, you know, and eventually she just gets so tired of this negative self-talk that she leaves him and then he's like, ah, I knew it, man, didn't I predict this?
And it's like self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
And so when you keep saying to people, as the left does, you know, you guys are like, you're racist, you're scum, you're, you know, like you're assholes, you're deplorables, you're, you know, like, I mean, and we, you're Nazis, and we have the right to beat up on Nazis and so on, then eventually there's going to be blowback.
And then, of course, everyone on the left, not everyone, some people on the left are going to be like, aha, we knew it, we knew it.
It's like, no, but you create, you didn't know it, you created it.
And that's a very different thing.
It's not necessary. Yeah, and that's all ends.
You know, that's why when people who follow me say things that I find bigoted, I say, hey, don't talk like this, or don't follow me if you talk like this, right?
When people get in, because there's two components to it.
One is that it's just bad.
You shouldn't be hateful anyway.
I don't want hateful people around me because then I have to read it.
And it's like, even if you're hating on someone else, like, okay, that's still a hate message being imprinted in my brain.
And two is that You're going to make people more afraid and people who are afraid do things that are rash and that aren't good.
So we can disagree in our own ways but without un-personing people, without treating people like they aren't fully human or they're not fellow human beings.
Both sides need to realize that because we are in a delicate balance, and civilization has always been a delicate system, and it isn't natural.
It isn't natural. Democracy isn't natural.
The idea that you can just be born anywhere in the world, or be born into any family, and you don't have to have a title of nobility, you don't have to be born into a certain caste, you actually have the right to participate in the government, this is not a natural state of affairs.
The natural state of affairs is barbaric.
It's sapiens.
And we should say, if thus we live in an unnatural state, we should try to maintain this unnatural state, which requires almost supernatural energy.
Well, and that's, you know, I think where Christianity and other religions have it right, that we are constantly being drawn back down to the animal, to the demonic, to the will to power, to the, not the following of virtue for its own sake, but the manipulation of virtuous statements in order to gain power over others.
And this idea that human beings are so perfect that they can never be wrong is part of the vanity of what comes out of communism, what comes out of fascism and some things as well.
Because, yeah, I used to be much more pro-atheist until I realized that atheists in general tend to be very big government people.
And the Christian doesn't mind if I don't go to church.
But if I don't pay the tax bill the atheists want, then they throw me into a rape cage.
And that's a whole lot less tolerant.
And I've got a lot of flack for that kind of stuff.
But again, you know, you got to follow the facts where they lay.
You know, they've seen studies where like...
Atheists are like dozens of times more likely to be like big government leftists and so on.
And there are atheist libertarians, even atheist anarchists out there.
Very, very rare. For the most part, the atheists are big government people.
That's far more tyrannical than anything Christianity's had since the separation of church and state.
Yeah, it's ultimately, unfortunately, it's pick your poison.
And we've tried conservatism.
We've tried far left-wing liberalism.
We've tried communism and we know what works.
It is limited government conservatism based around religious values.
Sorry, you don't have to like it.
Maybe I wish it were otherwise.
Maybe I wish we were all enlightened people, you know, reading books and going to the plays and the theaters and on the weekends and having these big, huge debates.
But unfortunately, that isn't the case.
It isn't the state of humanity.
Right. Well, I really, really want to thank you for the time today.
I want to remind people, oh, we're going to pull a link.
We'll tweet it out tomorrow. The book is out.
And listen, it's not going to spoil the movie to read the book because the movie is a whole living thing.
You've got eyeball to eyeball, very passionate, very powerful stuff in the movie.
But the book is Hoaxed, The Truth About Fake News.
You can also follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com slash Cernovich.
The website is cernovich.com.
The movie site, Hoaxed Movie, is hoaxedmovie.com.
We'll put a link to Mike's books and the silenced documentary.
Always a great pleasure, my friend.
I guess we'll be seeing each other relatively soon.
And I really, really appreciate your time together.
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