Best of The Program | Guests: Rep. Dan Crenshaw & Ryan Anderson | 2/25/21

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A lot of information, some deep philosophy on the world that you're actually listening to and living in.

Dan Crenshaw is with us.

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I'm saying that because he has a vendetta against Cuomo and he's just done really, really funny and great shows about Andrew Cuomo and his love mistress.

That's the only reason why he's saying that.

That's exactly the reason I'm saying it.

Check it out.

Students America available here.

And now, the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Blandbeck Program.

Pleased to have a very rare appearance on this program, Congressman Dan Crenshaw.

Dan, how are you, sir?

Good.

How are you doing?

I'm doing well.

Thanks for having me on.

It doesn't have to be rare.

You know, we can do it more often.

I just think we've been

hard to get the schedule right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No,

I'm not implying anything.

I'm just grateful that you're on.

It is rare to have you on, and I really appreciate it because I want to talk to you almost every day because you're one of the guys who I think really gets it and is standing for the things that we need to stand for.

And there are very few people left that I think people on the right trust, and you're one of them.

So, Dan, let me ask you a couple of questions.

I want to get into Texas here in a second, but there's two stories that boggle my mind that I think you're uniquely qualified to talk about.

One is this story from military.com today.

The Navy is making all sailors reaffirm the oath to the Constitution in the extremism standdown.

I find this incredibly insulting.

Can you comment on this?

Yeah,

I'm sorry.

I don't have coronavirus.

I just got so in my throat.

I haven't heard that story, but

it's concerning.

Look,

on the one hand, I'd love for sailors and Marines and soldiers to reaffirm their oath of the Constitution every morning.

I agree.

And pledge their allegiance as well.

Why not?

Yep.

But this pretense is concerning, and it's clearly, it's so obviously and clearly politically motivated.

And so let's just, for the viewers, who I think are aware of this, let's back up a second.

I think the premise of this is that, well, we had a lot of veterans on January 6th at the Capitol, right?

That's the premise of all this nonsense.

But that just mathematically, that's not a good indication of where active duty military stand or where veterans

stand more broadly.

Just because there's a lot of people here does not mean that a large proportion of those people are indeed extremists or bad people.

Correct.

And

wait a second.

I thought we were against that kind of profiling, right?

I thought that was against the very liberal values that supposedly the left stands for.

But Glenn, you know very well, the left is not liberal.

The left is very anti-liberal.

And I think as conservatives, we've got to say that more often.

Yes.

They've become genuinely authoritarian.

Progressivism is not in sync with liberalism.

All right.

There's a big difference between an Alan Dershowitz liberal and

a Democrat Party progressive.

They're totally different.

Totally different.

One other question,

because I don't understand this.

Democrats have asked Biden to surrender the keys on the nuclear launches.

What they're doing is they're trying to take away the president's sole authority to launch nuclear weapons because they say it could just happen too fast.

And they want him to

be forced into some sort of a committee

before anything is launched.

So he wouldn't have the nuclear football keys.

It would be with a committee.

What the hell is that?

It's extremely concerning.

Look,

from my point of view, your point of view, I'm sure, it is hard to actually assess which you trust less.

A Biden who can't finish sentences very well or a crazy Democrat Party.

But in the end, it's pretty obvious what they're doing.

And Nancy Pelosi laid the groundwork for this even before Biden took office, talking about invoking the 25th Amendment.

And it was pretty obvious she wasn't even talking about Trump.

so look it i think they obviously know that he has cognitive issues but um

the good news for america is that biden's demeanor and general disposition is not to go just go launch nuclear bombs no you know i'll say a lot of things about the guy but i i don't think that's what his plan is um and so this this feels a little bit disingenuous and i also feel like i mean if he woke up one day and he was

you know suddenly temporarily insane and he he said, let's launch the missiles.

There are people and systems in place to stop that madness.

All right.

He doesn't have it under his bed, all right?

It's not like in a bathroom.

That's not how it works.

Yeah, right.

It's not like, oops, push the wrong button.

I meant to hit the I Want More Coke button.

All right.

Let's talk a little bit about what happened in Texas because it is, it's insane on what's being said about the Texas grid and Texas not being green, et cetera, et cetera.

Part of the problem is that we are green.

We lead the country in wind power now.

Right.

So this is a bit complex, and I'm going to distill it as much as possible.

One thing that conservatives did right off the bat, you know, jumping on the means, which is what we do, and it's fun, but we put up all these pictures of frozen wind turbines because it's funny.

But that's not exactly why the grid went down.

And so it gave the left an opportunity to build a straw man argument against the right.

And they say, well, that's not really what happened.

And they're sort of correct.

But what did happen is over time, a huge overinvestment in renewable energy and a huge under-investment in baseload power.

And baseload power means...

Things that can turn on quick and power the grid reliably.

And those things, there's only three of them, coal, nuclear, and gas.

Correct.

In Texas,

we have underinvested in coal dramatically.

A lot of our coal plants have been replaced by natural gas because it's cheaper.

So, this is generally market-driven.

Nuclear is expensive.

I wish there was more of it because it is the only carbon-free energy that is reliable.

But we only have about four nuclear plants in Texas, and we haven't really built many new gas plants either.

All the new gas plants are generally replacing coal plants, and we've had massive population increases in Texas.

Massive.

20%.

It's

still the best place to live.

Right.

So when you don't have enough baseload power, you're not investing enough in it, you're investing a ton in renewable energy because it makes you feel good, it makes you feel green, but that renewable energy never works, never works when you need it the most.

It certainly doesn't work when there's no wind.

It certainly doesn't work when there's no sun.

And in extreme weather, that tends to be the case.

So yes, wind did go down dramatically.

I mean, at its best, wind can provide quite a bit of energy for the Texas grid.

But that's at its best if you can't rely rely on that.

Right.

So the left is building the straw man argument, saying, No, no, no, it's fossil fuels that failed.

And the question you have to ask them back is, compared to what?

Really, compared to what?

Compared to renewables?

Because renewables won't work.

Well, that's just a fact.

They don't work in good weather sometimes, let alone bad weather.

Their own selling from their own documents, wind power at most can provide 40% capacity at any given time.

At most, it just averages out.

The wind stops.

And so all of the energy that is being produced stops.

So by their own estimates, it's 40% reliable for capacity.

Yeah, and in practice, it's much less.

On average, it's actually extremely high, still very high, about 18%, but that's on average.

Sometimes it's 0%.

And that's the thing.

Like when you're designing an energy grid, you have to plan for what does 100%

look like on a given day.

Right.

But then you also have to, then you also have to plan for, well, what does 150% look like?

Like if the whole state freezes because it's a once-in-a-century freeze.

Correct.

And that's basically what happened.

We needed about 150% more.

And over time, because we haven't invested in fossil fuels, because green energy and such, again, I'm not against solar and wind.

But it is pretty obvious from a policy perspective that if you listen too much to the Democrats and take too many notes from them and take too many notes from California and you overinvest overinvest in these things and you federally subsidize it.

And here's the other thing that people don't know about Texas, we do prioritize electrons coming from wind.

So wind always gets to make a profit, but gas doesn't and nuclear certainly doesn't.

Nuclear often operates at a loss.

One other thing we do in Texas, which maybe we should look at, is we don't, this keeps our prices lower, but what we don't do is pay a capacity fee to plants that can generate capacity immediately and on demand.

So all the other states do that.

We don't do that in Texas.

It keeps our prices lower, but it also might discourage investment from these baseload capacity

power plants, which again, the left loves, but it's not good policy.

So take me here, because I think the problem is exactly the problem we went through in 2008 with the banks.

There was a policy.

They wanted everybody to own houses.

So

the feds made it easy for loans to be had that shouldn't have been taken out.

And they were pushing a policy.

And so everybody indulged, and then it broke.

This is the same thing that's happening in Texas.

The federal subsidies for wind power make it much more economical to build those.

And so the people who are

building and in this industry, they're like, I could get all this free money from the government for doing this.

Let's just build this.

I mean, isn't the subsidy a big problem?

It is.

I mean, I don't like these subsidies.

You know,

one response Republicans have is say, okay, how about at least we make the subsidies technology neutral so that they can at least go to nuclear?

You know, here's a statistic for you.

Solar gets 250 times more subsidies than nuclear does.

Wind gets about 160 times more subsidies than nuclear does.

This makes no sense.

Look, I'm very pro-nuclear.

I am too.

It's expensive.

But if we're going to believe that we actually have to reduce emissions rapidly, then why are they against nuclear?

It makes me question their intent and their motivations because it makes me think it's really not about the carbon reductions.

Because if you really care about carbon reductions,

your number one goal would be to export as much clean natural gas as possible to dirty coal-burning countries like China and India, and you'd be investing in nuclear.

We wouldn't have to put a $90 trillion

price tag on it because we would be able to build at scale.

We would be able to invest in American nuclear.

We could build nuclear around the world.

It could be instead of China and Russia doing it.

And by the way, that means they also gain a foothold into nuclear capabilities in developing countries, which is really not a good thing.

So there's a national security aspect of this in the sense that America wants to be controlling the nuclear energy around the world.

There's a clean energy aspect to this.

There's a reliability aspect to this.

You're never going to get rid of fossil fuels.

Look, coal, nuclear, these are the most reliable things in really, really bad weather.

It's why a lot of northern states still have coal.

Not going to escape that.

And I think that the lesson from Texas is, look, there's definitely a ceiling to how much renewables you can have on the grid.

It's not necessarily true that if you just keep building more wind,

it's terrible for the grid.

But it is true that if you also simultaneously underinvest in baseload power,

so there's a floor to that.

So there's a floor to that, and there's probably a ceiling to renewables.

And if you keep building renewables, it just becomes a waste of money at a certain point.

We're talking to Congressman Dan Crenshaw.

You are in Congress, so you see what's coming our way.

The things the Biden administration is doing and Congress is proposing with

the Green New Deal, et cetera, et cetera.

This is all about changing every aspect of our life.

It's all about control and power.

And I don't mean that in the electricity sort of way.

And

it's terrifying when you look into the way that corporations are now starting to incorporate what are called ESGs, environmental, social justice, and governmental standards, which

are a little terrifying when you understand the scope of what that means to the average person.

Yeah, so the lots taken.

I think that the quickest way to boil all this down is

there's quite a different disposition on the left and the right.

You have to boil all of our policy differences down to the psychological disposition.

And on the left, that disposition is this.

We want to change the nature of man.

And we believe we can.

We believe we can use the forces of government and the forces of institutions to fundamentally change you.

And

we'll keep fighting for that revolution no matter what.

We're not really sure where that revolution goes.

This is where it all falls apart because utopianism is, well, it's nowhere.

I mean, it literally means nowhere in Greek.

because it can't exist and you'll kill yourself trying to get there.

The right has a different disposition, a far more humble disposition that, look, there's about the best we can do with governance.

You cannot change the nature of man, but you can provide a good system and structural incentives and disincentives to get the best outcomes.

All right.

So

that's a fundamental difference that does not change.

It's almost like people are born that way.

This is where all of this nonsense comes from.

And they're always looking for ways

to thwart it.

We're always trying to point out to people, look, I know this feels good.

I know this feels like they're promising utopia, but we promise you that

the road to good,

the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

And this turned out to be true every single time.

Last week is another indication of that.

Dan,

I want you to know I'm going to be making a call today, and

you're probably going to hate that I say this, but I'm going to be making a call today after the program.

For the very first time since last week,

a name has come to me that I need to pass on to Premier Radio Networks on a replacement for Rush Limbaugh.

I think you could replace Rush Limbaugh.

That answer was so clear

and explaining a very complex thing.

This is why we would like you to be on this show.

Doesn't he already have a job?

No, he already has a job, but

maybe you can do it.

I have a podcast too.

I have a podcast.

There you go.

What's the name of your podcast?

Hold These Truths.

Hold These Truths.

Okay.

Dan, thank you.

We'll talk again.

appreciate it

quite the compliment coming from you i really appreciate it you bet being on with you you bet bye

this

is the best of the glenn beck program

i i want to explain the world that you're living in not the world that we think we're living in because the changes have already happened and the things we have to stop saying i can't believe that.

The reason why we're saying that is because we think we're living in a world that was operating the way it used to.

It's not.

So, stop being shocked by things, stop being pissed off by things,

and instead start to look at things as they really are.

Because if we look at it

as they really are,

we can logically deal with it.

And we can also stop it and stop playing the game.

There are two industries I told you about, media and government, that are losing their power.

But there are other industries that have lost their credibility.

There is

really pretty much all big business.

When we say, when people say, oh, I trust business, they don't mean big business.

They don't mean GE.

They mean the business down the street, the people that they think are more like them because they know them.

You trust the business people in your own town.

But if I ask you,

do you trust your local, locally run,

not connected at all with any other big bank?

Do you trust that bank?

Most people would say, yeah.

If you explain to them, they're completely disconnected from anybody else.

This is a locally owned and operated bank.

Yes, I trust them.

Do you trust Citibank, Bank of America?

Nope.

So these industries are in trouble.

And they're in trouble with trust because of something I told you would happen a few years ago, which would be the beginning of the reset, or I called it the New World Order,

the trust implosion.

When people no longer trust...

Well, we don't trust the media.

We don't trust government.

We don't now trust the government's doctors.

We don't trust their preventions.

Some people don't even trust their vaccines.

And that goes two ways.

Don't tell me that I have to trust the vaccine.

When you told me if Donald Trump was in charge, you wouldn't trust it.

You wouldn't take it.

So don't tell me that I'm some kind of denier.

I was skeptical of it when Donald Trump was in office.

I'm skeptical of it now.

It seems to be working.

That's good.

Okay.

But don't try to jam it down my throat.

Because the more you try to jam something down people's throat, the more they push back.

All right.

And you certainly, I mean,

I've had to have a scope down into my lungs once.

You haven't lived until you've done that.

Holy cow, it's worse than you think.

It's the only thing a doctor has ever said to me, this is really

going to set your whole body on fire and you will do everything

to make this stop and you won't be able to control it.

I'm just telling you, we're going to hold you down and you just focus on this person's eyes and listen to what they're saying.

It was the longest 30 seconds of my life because some foreign object is in your lungs and your body says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And you fight against it.

What do they do?

He was there.

It's almost over.

It's almost over.

Relax.

I'm just counting.

We're at 15 seconds.

You're almost done.

We're at 20 seconds.

You have 10 seconds left.

Five, four.

Calming.

If you're jamming something down my throat and you're saying, and you're a bad person.

And you know what?

This might last longer.

It might be worse than you think.

I might leave it in there longer.

You're not going to, you're going to fight.

You're going to fight.

and that's what big everything

is doing

they are doing all of the things not to calm you down they're doing all the things to push every button you have in you

so why

why would they do that

first let's understand people have you ever been to a local zoning board meeting and tried to you know i have a friend who tried to uh a school little teeny little teeny uh neighborhood all big trees no two-story houses nothing uh just a small little neighborhood and they had a small little elementary school and the elementary school had a lot of land so they decided they're going to build a new elementary school well this thing is like two or three stories tall It completely decimates this neighborhood.

Why didn't you just make a bigger, why didn't you just add on to to the school?

And it would have fit on the property.

It would be fine.

Why are you doing that?

Because they can.

Because they can.

If you've ever been to a local school board or you've ever been to a city council meeting or a zoning board and you disagree with them, how do they treat you?

They treat you like garbage.

Because

people get a little bit of power and they like to wield it.

Imagine what it feels like to have a lot of power.

Now imagine what people are willing to do when they think that power is going away.

Well, how is it going away?

Why is it going away?

Because of extremists?

No.

Most of it is going away because of technology.

Because we now can speak to one another

instantaneously.

and it's not just speaking.

I can see the pictures.

I don't need Walter Cronkite

to talk to me about what was happening in Tiananmen Square.

I saw it on television but they still had to carry it or it didn't happen.

Now I can see what's happening in Hong Kong and I question why aren't they covering this?

I can see what's happening on the streets with Antifa at the Capitol and wonder, why aren't they covering this?

Or why are they covering it this way?

Because I have information that I never had before.

When you have information, information is power.

Knowledge is power.

If you have knowledge,

please don't talk to me about what the labor unions are doing to our school children, please.

There's a million reasons that's going on.

None of them are good for the children.

None of them are good for children.

So don't try to hide behind my children.

And I do believe that there is some, some,

that actually are up at the top that believe that, you know what?

Okay, so we're

setting people back.

We're setting these kids.

There's a four, I think it's a 4%

increase of those who will not, who will drop out of school just because of the COVID thing.

And that's the least of our worries.

Four percent.

Look at suicides.

I think there's some that think, you know what?

It's going to be good because they can't think already.

Knowledge

is power.

Information is power.

So you have media that has had to give up their power.

Wait a minute, I'll tell you what's important.

Don't tell me.

That's being challenged.

Government is being challenged.

Wait a minute.

I can see what you said, and now I can see crystal clear in real time what you just voted on, what you just did, who you're hanging out with, what you actually do.

And that's not in the right direction.

We know it now because we can see it.

And we see it not in words, we see it in pictures.

There's nothing more powerful than a picture

or the spoken word when the speaker knows exactly what words to choose.

Pictures appeal to everyone.

Pictures lead to revolution.

The Industrial Revolution.

Well, it was revolutionary,

but it didn't entail a revolution, but it should have.

Usually when the world goes through a revolution like this,

you'll have things like the European Spring.

which was caused by Karl Marx, the birth of the labor unions, and the birth of communism

because of the industrial revolution.

They wanted revolution.

They sought as the opportunity to overthrow everything that stood in their way.

The same thing is happening right now.

Corporations, where do they get their credibility?

They get their credibility from you.

Well, not really.

They used to get it from advertising,

in the media.

But that's not what gives them credibility anymore.

And in fact, the more we learn about corporations, the less we like about them.

Because we find out they're in bed,

corruptly so, with government.

They're in trouble.

They need somebody to be able to cap you.

to stop you from communicating, stop you from putting pictures up or

ideas up or saying things because it's not just about you saying them it's about you hitting critical mass and being able to change the world one man can change the world I believe that

they don't

they don't believe that you can change the world by yourself

And they think that because they've empowered you to connect with other people.

Oh my gosh, what have we done?

We've given the power of information to people.

They can research themselves and they have as much power as I do at the New York Times.

I said this probably 10 years ago.

When I got into this, I had to work really hard to get this position to be able to gain an audience.

It doesn't come with an audience.

You have to grow the audience.

I could have said that to you and you wouldn't have ever understood necessarily what that meant.

You do now because my audience, for the first time in human history, the audience has an audience.

How many people are addicted to the like button?

How many retweets did it get?

You're addicted to that.

There's no difference between that and somebody who has sold their soul for money or fame and will do anything to get that movie roll or do anything to keep their job in media

Everybody's selling their soul for likes and retweets

That's the downside

But the downside to them

is That who allowed you to speak you notice nobody's saying who made you judge and jury on what is hate speech and who needs to be silenced.

Nobody's saying that

who made you king?

Instead, they're saying to you,

who gave you the right to say that?

Who gave you the right to disagree?

Why?

Because it benefits all of them in the end.

I'm only about a quarter through this.

We're going to have to pick this up, but

understand,

the world has changed.

Last night on my TV show, I started to outline, I began a chalkboard last night that is going to end up, I think, being one of the best and most important chalkboards, but you're going to have to pay attention all the way along.

I started it last night and I only added one little dot on this enormous chalkboard, but it, you will understand how the world is working once you start to see it differently.

There are pressures that want control, and it's government and

corrupt capitalism and corporations.

The way they're going to get you into that is through climate change and social justice

because they got to play on your fears.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

I want to just tell you who my next guest is by just saying this.

He has made appearances on ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been cited by two U.S.

Supreme Court justices in two Supreme Court cases.

He received his bachelor degree from Princeton and his doctoral degree from the University of

Notre Dame.

Yeah, that's the problem, I guess.

He's a religious zealot.

Everything else was going fine until that Catholic university was introduced.

He is the author of the book When Harry Became Sally.

It came out a few years ago and was controversial at the time, and then that blew over.

Amazon has just dropped it.

They will no longer sell it because they have deemed it a hate book.

And they said they are going to start culling through their libraries to see and make sure they're not selling books of hate.

The author of When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson.

Hello, Ryan.

How are you?

Doing well.

Thanks for having me on.

So, first of all,

when did you find out your book was being burned by Amazon?

You know, Sunday afternoon,

someone who was was trying to buy the book reached out to me and was like, it's no longer on Amazon.

You know, I thought to myself, what are you talking about?

Like, it's been on Amazon for over three years now.

And so I, you know, pull up my Amazon app on my smartphone and it's not there.

And the Kindle book's not there.

The hardback's not there.

The paperback's not there.

The audio book's not there.

You can't even get a used copy.

I mean, they entirely scrubbed it.

from their website with no advance notice.

A publisher reached out immediately.

We only heard back from Amazon late Tuesday afternoon, and all they'll say is that it violates their content policy.

They won't tell us what aspects of the content policy.

They won't tell us which page, you know, which sentence, you know, where did the book hurt your feelings?

Nothing.

It's a black box.

So what are you going to do about that?

So right now

we're trying to raise as much publicity about this as possible to get people aware, having people contact Amazon

out of the goodness of their heart.

They'll reinstate the book.

Probably not.

Yesterday, four senators, Senator Rubio, Lee, Holly, and Braun, sent a letter to Jeff Bezos asking for an explanation.

But beyond that, this is

a downside of an entirely unregulated big tech industry where

Amazon put out of business a lot of small and independent booksellers.

They gained this giant market prominence, and now they can can use their market power in ways that are destructive to you know readers authors publishers so ryan did they if you bought the book on kindle

did they pull it from your library

no which is important they haven't very important that you just you just can no longer buy it on kindle right so if you if you already if you've already purchased the book you know they're not going to take it back from you whether it was a physical copy or an electric company yeah yet they have done that in the the past.

Wow.

I wasn't even aware of that.

Yeah.

What is the

book?

A Million Pieces?

It was the Oprah book of the year.

A Million Little Pieces or something.

And

they said that

it was plagiarism on part of it or something like that.

But they pulled it in the middle of the night without anybody knowing.

And it caused a real uproar because that's my book.

I paid for that.

How can you go into my Kindle app and take something I paid for?

And the user agreement allows them to do it yeah

so uh be careful yeah be careful did they did they issue refunds

no

i don't remember i don't think so

the user agreement sort of almost reads like you're renting the book right

it does yeah that's right because we've talked to an attorney who said the biggest lawsuit class action lawsuit should be against these you know apple and kindle who you're buying these titles from says buy now yeah buy now.

Well, you're buying the title, but if Disney decides to pull that title from the Amazon library, it disappears in your library.

And a lot of that has to do with rights issues more than this sort of thing, which is far more egregious.

You're burning books.

I mean, this is something I thought we all united on.

This is a bad idea.

And I think they're getting away with it.

I'd love to hear your take on this.

I think they can get away with it, Ryan, because they don't actually have to stand in the parking lot and make an example of your book and burn it.

There's no visuals of anybody just hitting delete.

That's a great point.

And the Babylon B had a great article about, you know, Amazon will now let you do a digital book burning.

And it's amazing when satire becomes reality.

I know.

To my mind, like this, this suggests

that the

conservative response of, well, it's a private business, it can do whatever it wants.

That's true to a certain extent, but it's not always true, right?

If it was like one brick and mortar store that wouldn't sell a book, fine, there are other brick and mortar stores.

But if all the brick and mortar stores got together and said, we're not going to sell a book, right?

That looks more like a monopoly.

And if one individual seller that has, someone told me, and I need to check to see if the stat is accurate, but someone had tweeted out 83% of all U.S.

book sales are through Amazon.

I believe that.

If that's the case, when they drop a title,

the impact impact of that, and it's a chilling effect, right?

Because someone like me,

I am prominent enough within the conservative world that, you know, you can book me as a guest.

You heard about this.

How many authors will have their books canceled that none of us will ever hear about?

Oh, yeah.

How many titles?

And then for a publisher, how many publishers are going to say, ah, we just shouldn't even publish on that topic out of fear?

that Amazon will then drop the title.

This has a chilling effect on the entire industry.

So tell me about the book why it is so controversial.

Well, I think it's controversial precisely because it's not a bomb-throwing book.

It's not a hate book.

It's a kind of like mild-mannered, calm philosophy, science, medicine book exposing all of the lies that are being told about gender dysphoria.

So

I haven't read your book, but I talked to somebody who did, and they said it's actually a really loving book.

It approaches it in a way where it's like,

these people are bad.

It's not that at all.

It's you're really compassionately talking about it.

Thank you.

I mean,

that is exactly what I strove to do.

Yeah.

Like it was, it was three and a half years ago that I was, you know, finishing the book.

It was published three years ago.

And the idea was people with gender dysphoria, a gender identity conflict, they are victims.

They are suffering.

They didn't choose to experience this and they're not faking it, but they are being disserved by the medical professional community that has bought into a woke ideology that's telling them that you know your path to happiness is puberty blocking drugs cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy and that's not true and aren't the stats don't the stats show that um after that's done a very high percentage of people with dysphoria go fall right back into depression and and have problems because it it didn't it didn't cure what they thought it was going to cure.

That's exactly right.

And the book, it's chapter and verse, you know, footnote after footnote after footnote of all of the studies that show that.

And since, I mean, and the book came out three years ago, since the book came out, there have only been more and more studies revealing this.

And I think that's precisely why it's so threatening to the left, right?

They can't win on the merit, so they have to shut down the conversation.

So this is even more frightening than just book burning because this isn't, you know, they're pulling from the libraries now to kill a mockingbird.

That's insanity.

It's insanity.

But this book is also about medicine.

This is about

clinical studies

about mental health and what you put into your body for physical health and mental health.

We cannot come to a place to where we can't disagree on something like medicine.

Remember, medicine not too many years ago was drilling holes in people's heads to relieve the spirits in their head because they had a headache.

So please, what are we doing?

This is a medical book, is it not?

Yeah, so I mean,

there are several chapters about the medicine of this.

There's several chapters about the science.

There's several chapters about the philosophy and the law.

It's meant to be comprehensive.

And what I would add to what you just said is that the saddest conversations I have had have been with parents who placed their children on cross-sex hormones, allowed their children to have surgery because the doctors told them

that's what was in the best interest of their child.

And then only a couple years later did they realize the mistake.

By limiting the sale of a book like this, we're limiting the ability of parents to inform themselves about what's actually in the best interest of their child.

And it means how many more children are going to go through these misguided procedures

because they couldn't get all of the facts, right?

When you shut down a conversation like this, you would do a digital book burning.

There are going to be real life consequences.

Ryan, I hate to ask you this, but I have to because I haven't read your book.

Is there anything in it like, you know,

pray the gay away?

Is there anything like that in this book that would cause offense to

people like me could go, oh, geez, why would you put that in there?

Nothing at all.

Nothing even remotely close.

And just, I mean, so our listeners, oh, the book was endorsed by the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, from a professor of psychology at NYU, from a professor of neuroscience at Boston University, professor of law at Harvard Law School, professor of philosophy at Princeton University.

Like, this is not a fringe book.

This is not a conspiracy theory book, which says that if a book like this can be canceled from Amazon, no one's books are safe.

I will tell you, though, when I heard about this Monday, I immediately thought,

how am I ever going to publish another book?

Because,

you know,

if I'm quoting stats and I'm quoting these things in my book and Amazon decides they don't agree with that and they think that's dangerous for whatever reason and they don't have to explain themselves,

what chance do I have of putting books on Amazon?

It is.

Go ahead.

And that is what every

book author and book publisher is now asking themselves.

And so you can see the chilling effect.

Again, if it was just like one local bookstore, right?

You have some like left-wing progressive bookstore that won't sell your book or my book, no one would care because we can have a market.

But when the entity that controls the market starts censoring books, it will impact the entire book publishing, writing, and reading process.

Ryan, how much of a factor is it that if you're going to write another book on a similar topic, there would be an incentive and a temptation to self-edit before you released it.

Now, I think you probably, at the end of the day, are going to say what you want to say and damn the consequences, but there's a chilling effect for people before these books even get out there.

I mean, it's editing our speech before the speech happens.

Yep.

I think what you're going to see is that authors are going to say, let's say you're writing a book about political correctness and originally one of your chapters was going to be about transgender issues.

I think a lot of authors and publishers and agents are going to say, why don't we skip that chapter?

Oh, yeah.

That's that's the impact.

And this is also, this has been happening on university campuses for a while.

The reason that I'm at a think tank and not at a university is the think tank provides me with the freedom to tell the truth on these issues in the way that I can't tell you the number of tenured professors who have privately, confidentially reached out to me to say, Thank you for what you're saying.

I agree entirely.

But if I ever said it, I'm afraid I'd lose tenure.

This is now

Go ahead.

It's exporting the campus insanity that we've seen

into the entire

Amazon world.

And Amazon controls almost everything.

All right.

Ryan, thank you so much.

If you wouldn't hold, if you wouldn't mind holding for just a couple of minutes, I want to ask you something off the air.

Ryan Anderson, the book is When Harry Became Sally.

I would highly recommend that you write to Amazon

and Jeff Bezos and you send them an email, but no better.

Tweet at Jeff Bezos very kindly, very professionally, why

was this book removed and when, are you now starting to censor all books?

We need to know an answer.

And tweet, Jeff Bezos, and Amazon.

Somebody has to hold their feet to the fire or it will pass and they will learn a lesson that they can do anything.

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