Ep 3 | Michael Rectenwald | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Hey, welcome to the podcast, episode number three.

It features Michael Reckenwald, who is honestly a guy, and you'll understand right at the beginning, I wasn't sure if he was the real deal.

I started reading his book and

thought, boy, this is a great story,

but is it real?

Wow, it's even better than I thought.

Listen all the way to the end of the podcast because it's remarkable.

So he's a self-described former libertarian libertarian communist.

I know, I asked him about that.

He's worked in the university system his whole life.

He has been part of the radical Marxist left until a few months ago.

Today on this episode, he's going to share what happened to him when he finally woke up, what woke him up, and what happened to him.

He's been busy on Twitter as deplorable NYU professor.

He's a guy who's published white papers on communists for communists.

He is well respected in the communist community, or was, but now he's writing tweets like this.

Hey, Paul Parrott and robotic chanting leftists, you are losing the actual war of the intellect.

Your minds are so utterly flabby from disuse that it's almost unfair to ask you to express a thought.

The moon is the sun because I say it is, and if you disagree, you're a bigot.

I see the right doesn't know a fraction regarding the insanity of the identitarian left.

No father-daughter dances?

Try people who identify as yellow-scaled, wingless dragon kin.

And quote, an expensive, ornate building.

It's way crazier than you think.

This is that's real.

His new book is Springtime for Snowflakes.

I think it's a must-read.

You're going to love Michael Rechtenwald.

So, I wanted to sit down and talk to you because your story is absolutely incredible and fascinating.

And I'm not sure I know who you are yet.

So, that's my goal.

Okay.

Okay.

That's great.

So, let's start at the beginning.

Tell me who you were 10 years ago, who you've spent your life being and studying and thinking.

Okay, well, I mean, let me give you a sort of an anecdote that'll tell you who I was.

Okay.

I'd say about 10 years ago, I used to be a regular on Joe Scarborough's show called Scarborough Country.

Yeah.

I was brought on as the standard liberal pundit who they beat up on and then dispensed with.

And so, you know, at one point, Joe Scarborough even suggested

I might be a traitor against the country, that I should be tried for treason.

Joe Scarborough said that.

Wow.

Because I took exception with George Bush's execution of the war in Iraq.

Right.

So did I.

Yeah.

And,

you know, so since he's leaned forward, I've leaned the other way.

I was also a left communist at some point.

You might have wanted to lead with that.

Not want to lead with that?

No, you might have wanted to lead with that.

Because that's where.

That's where I find your

transformation a little profound.

How deeply into that theory and that belief or anti-capitalist, pro-communist were you?

Well, I was very well published as a known

communist writer.

I had essays all over the place.

People referred to my work all the time.

I have essays that have been read by thousands of people.

They were critiques of certain other aspects of the left a lot of the times, but they were committed to

what I called a libertarian version of communism.

The idea was the Bolsheviks, they were right in having a revolution, but they were wrong in killing everybody afterwards.

Right.

So, but how does community, serious, this is a serious question?

Yeah.

How does communism work?

For instance, I think the

you know, everybody just make money, put it in a big pile, and take what you need.

Right.

I think that's a great plan.

I really do in utopian ways.

Right.

But when you're dealing with man,

men go bad quickly.

Right.

So, how do you do that without the barrel?

Let me just tell you what it's really, what the people that espouse this belief are about.

Okay.

I'm going to give it to you from the inside.

This is a story you'll never have heard before.

Okay.

Here's what they think.

They think because they have this ideal that

we can establish a de facto

equality in the world as it is.

Because we have this idea, we're better than you if you don't.

We're morally superior to you.

Right.

And we're intellectually superior to you.

And another thing about Marxism is it gives you a lot of intellectual grist to grind on, and it gives you a lot of intellectual work to do.

And it's a sort of self-flattery that comes with that.

It's very highly engaging intellectually, Marxism is.

And there's a lot of different aspects to it that are quite compelling.

They're good things to think.

I mean,

it's a good exercise for the mind.

I will tell you,

I am a baby in any of

Marx's philosophy, but I will tell you, it does,

it pushes you to think differently because it's completely different.

It's completely different.

And

so I was one of those people that thought that

the world could be a much, much better place

and that this was the way to go about it.

Now, we'll get to what I think now, but it's quite, quite different.

Okay.

It's completely radically different from that.

And you are

a professor of global liberal studies.

Okay.

Basically anything I want to teach, what that means.

What a gig.

Yeah, it's a nice gig.

Yeah.

I teach my own textbook, for example.

It's called Academic Writing, Real World Topics, and I approach various worldly topics from different I let the students read about very controversial contemporary issues, but I make them look at all all these topics from multiple perspectives so that people aren't, I'm not indoctrinating anybody.

I'm not trying to inculcate some particular ideology.

Was that always that way?

That's always been the way I've taught.

I've never been, I don't believe the classroom should ever be a site of indoctrination.

And I've, I've, I've differed with people, colleagues of my own and other friends who are also professors and leftists who were, you know, they were trying to drive somebody to Marxist, feminist,

you know, and that's just how they worked.

Their syllabus were stacked that way.

Best professor you could have is one that

you might think for half the class he's this.

That's right.

And then the other half, he's arguing the exact opposite, and you have no idea where they stand.

That's what I do.

I embody different positions, you know, rather believably.

Right.

So that's been my approach.

But

when it comes to my own change, it came basically from

the terrible run-in I had with the left.

And the, you know, I thought the, you you know, the utopian and the egalitarian veneer of leftists really is very thin.

And when you scratch it a bit, underneath of that, I found totalitarians.

Yeah.

And that's what scared the heck out of me.

And that really is what caused my political conversion.

I've had a daughter of one of the communists that was arrested during the communist trials from Hollywood come to me.

She still says, you'd call me a communist, Glenn.

In my family, I'm called a conservative.

Yeah.

But she, she, we've had several conversations and she and her friends are more afraid right now of what's happening on the campuses and the left

than they are on the right.

And they're really concerned about the right.

I said this from the beginning when Trump got into office or before he got into office even.

Oh, I guess it was after when he founded the resistance.

I said the resistance would be far worse than Trump.

and I think that's been the case.

I mean, the resistance is really unhinged, and it's fueled by all kinds of

ideological error, I think.

And it's fueled by a conviction, an absolute conviction of total moral certainty.

And that's what's scary.

When people believe they're absolutely morally superior and certain,

and they're absolutely right, they become like Antifa.

Well,

it is why totalitarianism always ends in massive death.

Bloodshed.

Because

if you get to a point, I've asked this question from the left and the right.

Just let's imagine tomorrow you have your way and everybody you've elected is in and every

you still have 50% of the country that doesn't agree with you.

That's right.

What are you going to do with them?

Well, even, you know, this is most Marxists won't admit this, but Marx himself said you have to kill them.

There has to be a terror.

And they got this idea of the terror from, of course, the French Revolution and the aftermath.

You know, they said that that is the model.

After a revolution, you must go on a terror spree.

You must get rid of ideological opponents and you must get rid of the bourgeoisie if they cling to their bourgeoisie character.

Otherwise, you know, if they're willing to convert, then fine.

But people are killed for having the wrong thoughts.

That's basically what it comes down to.

So

you're a guy who

you weren't, I mean, you weren't against this stuff, but you didn't think that it was,

it wouldn't end the killing.

Yeah, absolutely not.

In fact, I was never, you know, I've had friends that were communists that would joke about putting a bullet to the people's heads, you know, and they actually said if I had my chance, I would do it.

And I never chimed in on that.

That was not my cup of tea.

I thought, yeah, that violates the deepest moral system that I have, the beliefs that I have, that each person has an absolute right to live and nobody here on earth has a right to take that away.

So

one more thing, and then I want to go to the first thing that it was kind of your red line.

Yeah.

But

no pun intended, in the opposite direction.

You describe yourself as not a Jon Stuart Mill kind of guy.

Well, I am now.

You are now.

Yeah.

So, because that gives us life, liberty, and the pursuit of an individual.

Right.

I'm basically a classical liberal, a libertarian, so cultural and social libertarian.

That is, I believe, people should be allowed to do what they want.

Right.

As long as they're not infringing on my rights, other people's rights.

Like, I have no problem.

If you want to live as a communist with

people,

that's fine.

And you don't have a right.

But I have a right to get, I have a right to not be a part of that and live my life.

I mean, I started a criticism of Marxism from the standpoint that, you know, the worst thing is politically, it's murderous.

It's totalitarian.

Then second, I got to the point where I understood the economics of it as well and why it's flawed, deeply flawed.

The market has to be there.

You have to have a market.

You can't have individual rights without the market.

And so, and also that you can't have what socialists want most, which is what they would call economic democracy.

You can't have that without the market because without a market, you have no prices.

And if you have no prices, you have no way of knowing what something's worth to people.

And therefore, you have to dictate it.

And therefore, it's undemocratic.

It's the opposite of what you tried to dictate.

Okay, so let's go to your the first thing that woke you up and said, you know what?

I got it.

Yeah, it was a Twitter.

It was, I'm sorry, it was a Facebook post that I made.

It was a joke.

There's a student at the University of Michigan who posted when asked by the university or given the right to

use any pronoun he wanted and to enter it into the system under his profile, chose, quote, His Majesty.

I thought it was hilarious.

And so I posted, I simply posted a link to that article, having thousands of leftist friends, a lot of trans friends at that time.

And the

vitriol, the outrage, the hysteria was just unbelievable.

They called me everything from a transphobe to a to committing discursive violence, a phrase I will explain later, please.

And

of treason,

you know, on and on and on, just for posting a link to an article with no comment.

And I said, this is, this is unbelievable.

And then I realized that everybody was, everybody was kowtowing to this kind of ideological pressure.

Everybody I knew, they were all careful not to say something that would offend this crowd, this trans crowd and this social justice crowd.

And they were scary.

How many of your friends?

Because you being a professor at NYU, living in Manhattan, I've done it.

I was alone on that island.

I felt.

Wow.

I know what that feels like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You bet.

I bet you do.

How many would you say of your friends are

quietly have a couple of glasses of wine and go, you know what, Michael, don't say this to anybody, but I'm with you.

And how many are die-hard,

you know, social justice, post-modernist, radicals?

From the earlier

group of friends that I used to have?

Or yeah, from earlier?

From earlier,

I would say that it was about 90%

socialist, social justice,

the whole nine yards.

Wow.

And about 10%

that were reasonable otherwise.

You know, people that were less enthusiastic, shall we say, about the whole thing.

How many of those, if any, are waking up with you?

Oh, several.

I've actually led some people out of Egypt, if you will.

I'm not, I don't mean to

have any main grandiosity here, but I'm saying a lot of people followed me out of that.

And they followed me.

The rage is contagious.

Yes, it really is.

It just takes one person to say, guys, what are you doing?

So I saw that, and then I set up the Twitter account.

I said, and I have been thinking that there's a lot of things are going wrong here in the left, this identity politics and social justice fanaticism.

So I set up that Twitter account and started tweeting that.

And I did it anonymously.

I called myself the deplorable NYU prof.

I did that not as so much as a sign of support of Trump, as a sign of solidarity with the Trump people who were treated.

so miserably and called, you know, those people holding onto their guns and Bibles, those people, those flyover state people who were called, you know, thrown into the basket of deplorables by Hillary Clinton.

I just thought that was a despicable way to talk about people.

And I just felt that these people, these are the people that are most maligned in our culture.

They're the most maligned people in our country.

And I thought, I'll call myself by that name because I want to stand with them.

How did you and I want you to know, Michael,

I think we're repeating the Obama years just at volume 10.

We've just switched places.

Yeah.

Okay.

Perhaps.

There are things that the people on the left see about Trump, I have seen about Trump that concern me.

Right.

And, but he's kind of in with my side.

And so we're not going to go crazy.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the same thing with...

What happened with Obama, yeah.

Right.

And so we've just switched places and

people don't realize none of us should be this afraid of a government or a president, no matter which side.

That's right.

That should not be the case.

So something's wrong in the whole process, as I think your work is pointing out.

Something's seriously wrong.

Seriously wrong.

Okay, so

you start your tweets and

you have

just awesome tweets.

Thank you.

They're very, very satisfying.

But then you decide to go on the record.

That's right.

I had an NYU student newspaper reporter contact me and said, you know, these tweets are really something else.

Are you really an NYU professor?

This was through a direct message.

And I said, yes.

And so she asked me if I would sit down for an interview and I said yes.

I wasn't sure I would go on the record, but I would talk to her.

So we did that.

And after I was done talking to her, I thought, there's really nothing, what I've said here needs to be said.

And I actually want to put my name on it, frankly,

because I think

there's nothing objectionable in some, you know, there's nothing fundamentally abhorrent or deplorable about it.

It's just, it's just another viewpoint and it's a vantage point I think needs to be aired.

And

that went in the paper.

She took a picture of me laughing and that made the heresy, you know, somewhat redoubled.

And then all hell broke loose within my university.

You were called in the middle of a class, were you not?

I was called out in the middle of the class by the dean and said, you know, can you come over to see me?

And I said, sure.

I've kind of had an idea what it was about.

Although I was saying that this really is happening.

I'm being called in for my political views.

Think about that a minute.

I mean, no,

I have.

Okay.

I mean, I have thought.

I mean, because that's, if you're a conservative, if you're a conservative, I've talked to so many people that want to be a professor.

Yeah.

And they can't.

No, they can't.

So, I mean,

we live this on this side.

But for you now to see this and you, now it's, now maybe some things are starting to come to you i'm guessing that you're like oh oh oh crap oh they came to me right away and so i go over and uh

he comes up really close to me about pulls me into the office i come into the office he pulls me real close with by a handshake you know michael i want you to know this has nothing to do with your twitter account or the publicity you're getting i said oh

and uh sure sure and then he said just after that hang on before this yeah you are a well-liked professor professor.

Well-liked.

I was well-liked.

Students love me.

My student, you know, evaluations are very high.

I mean, I have done everything you're supposed to do.

You were liked by your peers up until this time.

Most of my colleagues liked me.

Okay.

All right.

There were a few that didn't.

That's fine.

It's always going to happen.

And I had done everything that an academic is supposed to do, published widely, committee work, all that stuff.

Yep, yep.

I was a good citizen

until I said the wrong thing.

Right.

Right.

And then he said, no, have a seat.

And if you don't mind, I would like the head of human resources to join us.

Uh-oh.

Right.

And so he continues by saying, people are worried about you.

And I said, really?

Why?

He said,

they think that this Twitter account, which this has nothing to do with,

represents a cry for help.

As one of the people put, I said, who said that?

And he wouldn't tell me.

He said, this is confidential.

Somebody in the department said they thought my Twitter account was a cry for help.

And, you know, in other words, they were, he was suggesting something was wrong with me mentally, like that I had some sort of a psychological problem.

So in other words, I'm being called crazy for my views.

It's that simple.

And

then the pressure came, you know, to

accede to their view.

They wanted me to take a leave of absence, get off campus, get out of here.

For my good, for my own good.

No, wait, wait, wait.

For your own good, because it would become unsafe or because

they said I needed the rest.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

So they're so it's clear.

And if you take that, did this occur to you?

Yes, it did.

Yeah.

If you take that, I'm admitting in a way that I am exhausted.

Yeah, that I need some help.

I need rest.

And I might need, you know, some sort of,

I might need therapy, whatever.

I might need medicine.

I don't know.

Whatever they thought.

or were trying to insinuate rather.

And then.

But you took them up on that.

Well, I did because there was something else at stake okay that is i had been up for a promotion to full professor since the previous april now we're sitting here in september at this point or october i guess by this time and um

this this this promotion was largely dependent upon uh the upper administration approving me as and i needed this this promotion because um i've worked your whole i've worked yeah i needed i deserved it There was nobody that had done more publishing and so forth in the department.

I ran a massive

conference on secularism and brought scholars from all over the world, the first conference by this, that was ever put up by this department.

And I needed

this promotion badly.

And I wanted it badly.

And I thought that if I didn't,

you know, if I didn't go along or acquiesce with what they wanted, that they would, you know, that i wouldn't get the promotion that that that i would be you know right i don't know maybe you could yeah maybe you could just do this thing and then it would be over and you could come back right and then i you know also the promotion would be announced and i'd get it because i i gave into the demands and all that but then after i left you know i felt very coerced into that and the and the leftists are saying that i lied because they said you know And the university later said, you know, all leaves of absence for medical reasons are voluntary.

Yes, it was voluntary, but they were twisting my arm, you know.

Certainly leftists should understand power differentials.

Isn't that their thing?

Yeah.

Right?

Yes.

I, you know, I took, I said, okay, and then I went to my office.

They actually had the head of human resources shadow me on the campus for the rest of the day, like wouldn't leave my side.

Wow.

As if I was opposing some sort of a threat or somebody might pose a threat to me.

I don't know why, but they just suggested that she stay with me while I was on campus.

and so she did and then i got uncomfortable with her and i said listen i i just think you can go i'm fine i'll just i'm in my office i said i'll lock the door whatever you're worried about nothing's going to happen here so she left and i got a call from the new york post like five minutes later saying you know we we're following this case with great keen interest and we think you know we really support what you're saying and what you're doing and we think the university's treatment of you is bad deplorable and i said what treatment because

how could she know?

Well, there was an open letter that had been published in the same newspaper where my interview was published, in which I was denounced really wildly by this committee, calling itself the diversity, equity, and inclusion group,

which I've later dubbed the conformity, inequity, and exclusion group.

Right.

Because they certainly wanted to exclude me.

Right.

They wanted to, you know, debunk.

They wanted me out.

And they came out against me in no uncertain terms, basically calling me guilty for the structure of my thought.

That is for my, you know, for my thinking, of wrong.

They accused me of wrong think, in effect.

And

so she told me about this open letter.

I said, oh, wow.

Do you think there's any connection between my Twitter account, the interview, and this open letter and the leave of abstinence?

And she said, are you kidding?

Of course there is.

So I said, I better, you know, so she convinced me to go on the record.

I had to because I thought if I don't, they could just bury me.

I'd be out of there and that would be it would be over yeah so i went on the record and they you know they accused me of being you know media uh you know the university accused me of being sort of like media hungry or something i was looking for attention i don't know i had i wasn't looking for anything they were looking for the attention i was trying to i didn't have opinions but i certainly wasn't looking for this kind of attention right so

and um

So I went on the record and I decided to go on the record and tell them that, you know, tell them what I really, that I,

to let them publish the story about this.

And they did so I went on you know she asked them questions about what I thought about this and that and we went out with it and then it just went viral

the biggest betrayal your friends must have felt was going on Fox yes they did oh they thought that was just unbelievable and when you went on what were you expecting?

I was expecting supportive conversation.

I didn't expect to be attacked, and they didn't.

Nobody on Fox attacked me at all.

In fact, they were supportive.

So if you're being chased and

called a devil and

Satan and white pants, shirt pants, white boy by these other people, and

this other group is being very friendly and nice and cordial and welcoming and supportive, where are you going to go?

So it made perfect sense for me to talk to that, to Fox and other right-leaning media.

And because they really,

having been the victims, if you will, of this very kind of head-hunting,

they understood.

And that was very nice.

And so

I couldn't help but think that I've been with the wrong people for a long time.

In fact, I've had no better friends than I've had since this.

I mean, really, really good people.

It's amazing the difference.

I think there's a difference.

You know, there's

some people, not all people, but some people, because they've really been pushed for so long on what they believe, they've been called all kinds of names.

Yeah.

You, at least for me, when I left Fox,

before I went to Fox, I was on CNN.

Yeah.

I won the most admired man in the world.

I was, I was tied for fourth between Nelson Mandela and the Pope.

Wow.

Okay.

That's crazy.

That's impressive.

I tell you.

A year later, I wasn't on that list.

I was hated by everybody.

Okay.

I did the same show.

Did the same show.

What happened?

The platform was so huge.

And

I just, I think I misjudged.

And I think this tool

went into effect.

I think it's a combination of a lot of things.

Yeah.

But,

you know, I stepped back from that and I went, how does 50% of the country who didn't have a problem with me just a few years ago,

what have I done?

Am I what they think I am?

I know I'm not, you know, the hero that the right thinks I am.

I'm not that guy.

Yeah.

But I'm not that guy either.

No, I know.

And so you self-reflect.

I don't think people on the left for a long time

have had to self-reflect.

And

it's amazing to me that we're repeating McCarthyism in reverse.

In reverse.

And it's, and it's also involving the Russians.

I mean, everything's there.

All the players just taking it.

It's the same characters, you know, with different, different script.

Right.

It's really unbelievable.

So let me, let me take you now into something that I am, I think that people on the right have absolutely no clue of what it really means.

One of your tweets was, you know, yeah, father, father, no, no more father-daughter dances.

yeah yeah how about this what was the person that was it was somebody actually it came out of the google lawsuit with james demora this person who identifies as a uh yellow uh wingless dragonfly kin

and an ornate building that's their sexual identity an ornate building and an ornate building so don't don't ask me how this you know sexuality works because it's an ornate building i don't know i'm sure there's some portals there but i mean

you know, but that's.

You just parked that tractor trailer in the back.

Those are some of the people that work at Google, that James DeMore, who got, you know, got fired for expressing the view that there was a difference between the genders.

Yes.

Those are the kind of people.

Those identities are actually venerated.

They're valued and they're actually observed

at that organization.

I mean, so you have to.

you have to refer to people as if they are what they say they are.

A large ornate building.

Yes.

I guess they described as that.

I don't know if you go up and knock on their head or what.

I mean, right.

Okay, so

let me just

one more before we back up into all of this stuff.

Yeah.

Were you for the gender

thing when you were transgenderism and all that?

I transgenderedism.

Yeah, the whole everything is fluid.

There's 183.

It was disturbing to me from the beginning, to tell you the truth.

So you didn't say anything about it.

I didn't say anything about it.

I figured it was like there were some

touchy subjects on the left that you didn't go after.

Yeah.

Because

you'd just be vilified instantly.

I mean, you know, you're just a

but you didn't buy into it.

I didn't buy into it at all.

But I didn't touch it.

Okay.

You know, I was, you know, you'd be just vilified for being who you are.

And you're only saying that because you are a cis gen, a cis hetero male.

You know, cis means, yeah, yeah.

This is the word they made up for other than trans.

It's the non-glorious category.

Right.

So yeah, you just, I knew that you didn't touch these things unless you wanted all this fury to come at you.

So I've written a book called Addicted to Outrage.

I saw I know that.

And

we know the addiction is happening.

I mean, these companies are designing those, you know, those apps to be addicted.

Right.

Then we're, on top of that, we're yelling at each other, calling each other names, which shuts down all thinking.

People are afraid on both sides,

which shuts down all thinking.

We're becoming very tribal.

We have this when somebody says something, we now can say it back twice as loud, which is very addicting.

And when I found postmodernism about two years ago, I started going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Wait, what?

Because as a conservative,

you don't know all this crap.

Yeah.

And you don't know,

you just hear these words and you're like, what the hell does that mean?

Where did that come from?

Exactly.

Okay.

Right.

And it's really well thought out.

And when you understand

the

original birth and point

of post-modernism,

you realize,

I mean, I cannot find a reason that that isn't just

100% destructive.

I mean, that's its point.

Yes, it is its point.

Its point is destruction.

Right.

And so

if we are ramping it back up on our side,

it doesn't leave a place for anyone like you or like me that goes, I don't want to be with either of those people.

Exactly.

Right.

That's right.

That's true.

Let me give you a little, a very short little metaphorical way of understanding the difference between, say, postmodernism and Marxism.

Okay.

If Marxism is about blowing up the house

and raising it to the ground, postmodernism is about putting a few little termites here and there

in the walls and watch the house get eaten up slowly until it finally collapses

under its own weight.

So the point being that Marxism was about overthrowing everything, overthrowing the whole social order, overthrowing capitalism, overthrowing the ruling class.

No, no, postmodernism said that can't be done because you can't tackle the totality of the world.

You can only do these little subversive things

one at a time here and there, and that

we'll work on the system in a different way.

Okay, so please.

I know I could tell you everything there is to know about progressivism early 20th century.

I've studied it.

So correct, let me lay this out and you correct me where I don't have it and I'm wrong.

And then we'll, you can fill in all of the gaps.

Okay.

Turn of the century.

The American system is not moving fast enough.

We have science, we have eugenics, we have all these things, bright horizon.

Yeah.

And

because

you know,

a a republic is plotting and ugly and, you know, it just doesn't move fast.

Yeah.

The idea is if we just put an authoritarian in, now this is before any of that's bad.

Yeah.

We put some strong leader in.

Yeah.

He'll be able to lead us and he'll, the state will be able to say,

no, we have to make this.

We have to make this.

We have to do this.

And it's all going to, because we're working together.

Right.

Correct?

Right.

There's the utopian early 1900s.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

Then revolution happens in Russia.

And the progressives have been arguing in the West, they want communism or fascism.

I think this is right before fascism really starts, right?

They were eugenicists, too.

Right, right.

And they want to create this utopian world.

That's right.

And there's no negative on it at this point.

That's right.

Okay.

So

they're moving towards that.

but they see the revolution and and the west says we don't want a bloody revolution right right we don't want to do that right but we want this so we want the object though right so we want to we will just take progressive steps at what point does the postmodern um

theory of let's add some termite let's speed this up yeah at what point does that come in that happens in 1968 in france

It's a result.

The way to understand the birth of postmodernism is this.

It is a philosophical and social cultural response to the failure of the 1968 student rebellion in France.

The student rebellion also involved union workers from

publicly held

organizations or companies, like the railroads, the subways and all that.

The students and these workers, they were on the verge, they thought, of overthrowing capitalism in France and therefore throughout Europe and therefore perhaps after that in the United States.

And it failed.

It did not end in a revolution.

It ended in anarchy.

Nothing took place.

They didn't overthrow the state.

Nothing.

Can you stop there for a second?

Can you back up?

Tell me the significance of the Frankfurt School meeting in 1959.

Well, the Frankfurt School is another, I would call them neo-Marxists.

They're a different breed.

They're coming out of Germany.

They left.

Nazi Germany just in the beginning in like 33 after Hitler comes to power and they realize they're in bad shape.

If they stay, they're intellectuals, they're Jewish,

and

they'd be on the hunt list right away.

So they escaped to the United States and they set up at Columbia, actually, first, and then out in Berkeley.

They mostly are, they're just theorists.

They're not, they're theorists, but they're not theorists who are going to be

They're not the kind of theory that you read and say, let's put this into practice.

They're rather theorists who say basically, let's just keep it theoretical, frankly.

But that's not the case with what happens after the 1968 failure of the 1968 rebellion.

As a matter of fact, Hork Adorno, Theodore Dorno, who was one of the major players

in that

movement, the Frankfurt School.

He was appalled by the 1968 student rebellion, which spread to Germany as well.

He was totally appalled by it.

He thought it was horrific.

It reminded him of fascism.

How do you like that?

Okay, so hang on.

Let's stop in 1968 because I think everybody knows 1968 in America, horrible.

RFK, Martin Luther King, I think Malcolm X in the same year.

We have the same year we're doing the moonshot.

That same summer is Woodstock and I think Altamont.

Yeah, perhaps.

I'm not sure about that.

One of them was in 68.

I think it might have been Altamont.

And

I'd love to hear your theory of why it falls apart here.

This is when the Beatles come out with Revolution and their answer saying, I'm not doing that.

We're not joining you.

And so the whole thing kind of falls apart here.

How much of that is connected, America 1968, to Paris 1968?

Very much so.

Yeah.

The same kind of people or actual connections.

It's the same kind of people in the same spirit.

You know, the movement, it's not necessarily like there's no tactical connections that much.

Right.

But it's the, they're in the same spirit of a kind of cultural revolution that we had here, of course, but a cultural revolution that they also wanted to become political.

And it didn't happen.

So postmodernism was born as a response to that.

And how was it born?

Who started it?

What?

It started this way.

And so even though they were moving away from Marxism as as such,

they did incorporate some techniques from Maoism.

Feminists were sitting around reading Mao's red book

in France.

And they didn't know about the horrors that were happening there.

They just thought this is the way to go.

A cultural revolution.

We can have a full communism, a total communistic revolution culturally, socially, politically, and every other way.

I'm so economically.

I'm so riddled with ADD.

I'm sorry to pull you off again, but

how do people still, Marxists and communists, how do they still not see every time it's tried and then just draw the conclusion that you're going to have a great number of people that don't want to do it?

We joke about this, friends of mine.

Now, it's always next time.

Next time it's going to be right.

Next time it'll be right.

Next time we won't do that.

So they say that

there was mistakes made or that wasn't really socialism.

That's the other way they usually go.

That was actually state capitalism, blah, blah, blah.

So they have every type of excuse instead of seeing that when you run an experiment X amount of times and the result is the same no matter where it's run.

So it can't be blamed on the people and their regional differences or peculiarities.

It's got to be on the system that's being implemented.

And it ends the same way every time.

Paul Pott,

you know, Mao, Stalin.

I'm sorry, but I put

Hitler in.

I know there's a difference, but to me, it is a difference of how much the state actually owns and

if it's international or national.

But I mean, there's another both the same idea.

It's socialism.

It is national.

There is one other difference, though, and that is the type of people that are deemed villains or vilified, and the reason they're vilified.

In the case of Nazism, the difference is that the Nazis, and Hitler is, of course, the main agent here, they see

the enemy to the state in terms of race.

Whereas in the Soviet Union and Communist China and

Vietnam, North Vietnam, etc., etc., they see the enemy of the state in terms of ideology.

So because putatively people can change their ideology, you're not trapped

like you are in the cases of race, where you can't get out of your racial identity.

Marxism, though, does, I mean, Marxism.

Although George Soros did.

Marxism, though, does it does carry with it a lot of anti-Semitism.

It does, indeed.

I mean, it's usually

when you start to hear anti-Semitic things, that's the first, you know, the left is riddled with this.

This is happening in the Labour Party in England is going, in Great Britain, is going through this right now, too.

I mean,

this anti-Semitism on the left is just viral over it.

Okay, yeah, that's true.

All right, so 1968.

68.

So what happens is these theorists say, okay, so you can't overthrow the totality.

Let's go at it in a different way, in effect.

Let's attack the character of language.

Language is the big power structure now.

So, deconstruction is born.

Jacques Derrida, he's a philosopher.

He says that there is nothing outside of text.

Okay,

he says this in his book of Grammatology in 1968.

There is nothing outside, there is no outside of text.

Meaning, those words are the words.

And

what he's saying is this,

that language doesn't have any real connection to anything but itself.

So this is,

sorry, you may not even know this reference.

I read Saul Kripke.

Okay.

And he, and he basically, a wheel is a wheel because we call it a wheel.

And that's.

Yeah, but that's part of it.

Yeah.

The arbitrary nature of language.

Yeah.

That every word is arbitrary.

For example, tree has no relation to the plant.

Right.

Tree.

Right.

We call it a tree.

And some of of that makes sense.

I mean, when you think of the wheel as the wheel because we call it a wheel,

I've always used that as an understanding of handy capable.

You could call them Superman,

but in one generation,

you're going to think, well, I have to build a ramp for Superman.

That's right.

So

it doesn't matter what word you attach to that.

That's right.

It doesn't matter.

But from that, he decides the idea is that

all of Western philosophy, all of Western thought, he thinks, is invalidated by the idea that these words that are supposedly connected to real things are not connected to real things at all.

And so the whole of Western society and Western philosophy is just like, is bogus.

Okay.

And

it's different from the Christian notion or the Judeo-Christian notion that in the beginning there was the word.

Okay.

In the sense that the word is

God.

Yes.

Okay.

So there is an ontological connection.

An ontology means on the register of being, whether something exists or not, there is an ontological connection between the word and God.

Yes, right.

Yes.

It's inherent.

It is identified with.

Okay.

So here, in this case, language is broken off from the world.

But they also suggest there's nothing but language, nothing but language.

That's it.

That everything is text.

Yes, that's how far they went with this.

And therefore, they said if we really want to subvert society, we've got to subvert it textually.

We've got to subvert it through textual politics.

Okay, so

let me go back in time, 1920.

Harvard, I think, is the first one that starts to say, forget reading the Constitution.

Harvard's the first one that takes up Deconstruction.

Right.

In the 70s.

In the 70s.

Let me go back to the 20s here for a second.

They're saying,

you know, in law school, don't study the Constitution.

We're going to do case law.

And they start to study case law, which gets us away from the text.

You also, in the 20s, start to have people rewriting history books.

But

this is entirely different.

This isn't different.

Did we say Harvard?

It's Yale.

Is it Yale?

It's Yale that takes up Deconstruction.

Okay.

And, you know, here's an interesting story.

Sitting on the tarmac, after they landed in the United States, in Boston, Derrida and his co-conspirator of Deconstructionism said to each, they said to each other, one of them said to the other, you know, we're about to unleash a virus on this culture.

And that's exactly how they saw it.

They saw it as a virus that

would eat at the very foundations of all of our cultural values.

And that's exactly what they.

I think that's what people are feeling now, but they don't understand.

They don't realize this is where it came.

This virus was unleashed on us and has worked its way into the entire body politic.

And it's undermined all of our ontological beliefs and this is where all of this crazy stuff about gender and gender differences and the non-binariness and all this that has nothing to do with biology this is where it came from so i had i had somebody who is a lefty but reasonable um say um

you know postmodernism is really dangerous um you know but it has its place in for instance um the literary realm yeah But as I understand it, and please help me understand this, as I understand it,

what postmodernism gives you license to do is to go up and say, well, this is what this word means.

I don't care what it meant back then.

This is what it means.

So you can basically deconstruct and reconstruct any story

out of its time.

Is that right or wrong?

Well,

what it really is, is that

this isn't important.

No, this is important because the thing is about the idea that it's valuable in literature, that's a good point.

But they believe they're undertaking politics through literature.

Right.

This is all political.

Right.

Everything is political.

All texts are political.

The novel is political.

You can see the gender constructions here.

You can see the patriarchy here.

You can see the colonialism here.

You can see all of this.

Literature now is not read for the aesthetic value anymore.

It's read for the political valences that it supposedly contains.

And deconstruction is is a way of saying, let's expose the way Western culture has been setting up this hegemony over all of all these people.

Let's expose it through deconstruction.

Let's take these texts and take them apart and show how, in fact, they're kind of, they're trying to make me the other.

They're trying to demote these people, that people, the other people, things like that.

So that's, it's, it's, it is, it is, it is something that they, they, you know, that was used in literature, but literature studies now, literary studies was not deemed anything but but political work, a cultural politics.

All right.

So

again,

help me in this.

I got to go back to Frankfurt because the Frankfurt School in 59,

they're kind of, and I could be wrong,

they're kind of seeing the post-World War or the post-war world, and they're saying.

These guys are not going to stand up and be, they're not going to,

they are driving those huge cars with big fins, and they're just not going to do that.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

They said the working class

is not the agent that Marx said they were.

They weren't it.

They weren't going to be the ones to do it.

And so then they come to this understanding that,

and I don't know how much of this they actually believed or how much they just thought this was a working way to get around it, was it's because they don't even know.

It's almost like they're hypnotized by all this.

They don't even know they're oppressed.

That's right.

Well, one of the things is that, you know, they've been bought off by consumerism, is one of the things.

Also, they have been

duped and completely sort of drugged by the culture industry, as they put it.

The culture industry has inculcated their minds with capitalist ideology.

That's what Horkheimer and Adorno said in their essay, The Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception.

And in some ways, though, I mean, if you read, I'm trying to to remember his name,

the guy who really came up with propaganda under Wilson.

Oh, what was his name?

Anyway, now known as the greatest advertising man.

Oh, yes.

Okay, I know how you're referring to, but the name is

he had women, you know, with the cigarettes and the statue of liberty.

Okay.

So in some ways,

the left is the one who created this

way through Freud of

actually indoctrinating us.

And it is happening now.

Culture is steering.

We're not steering culture.

It's not a reflection.

It is.

Everything is, yeah, politics as we now see it.

We know this now.

We see it.

We're living this.

Politics is so far downstream from culture.

It's

impossible.

It is the beginning of the poop coming out of the dog.

That's right.

It's not even a problem.

That's what we're experiencing here.

And this is where this whole, this whole,

I call them the robotic left.

I call them the histrionic left.

I call them the, you know, the resistance.

I call them a lot of names.

Anyway, I saw in the Kavanaugh hearings.

No, it was actually somebody else during that week.

There was a

disruption on a campus in a class where these people came in and one person was shouting and everybody else was shouting back.

Right.

That's right.

And I thought,

this is a,

I mean, almost what they accuse the Catholic Church of doing all those years.

Absolutely.

You're just, you're just garbage in, garbage out.

You're just repeating it.

This has been one of my major complaints, you know, is to say what's happened to academia with the left and their

just robotic repeating of mantras, political mantras.

Like,

you know, it started, I guess, at Stanford when they had the chant to get rid of Western Civ.

And they didn't mean the whole of Western civilization.

They meant a course called Western Civ.

Hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go.

You know, Now that chant, hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go, that became not the course, but Western civilization itself has got to go.

And that's been really the object here.

They want to get rid of Western civilization entirely.

So tell me, explain how, because I don't think people really get this.

They hear, people who are conservative, especially here postmodernism, and they don't even know what it means.

But

if you don't understand that it is

the modern world is the world created by the Enlightenment.

Yes.

And the Enlightenment took us out of the dark ages.

That's right.

This is why

anything that stands to prop Western civilization up is needs to be destroyed.

And that's why

you can say mathematics is racist.

You say mathematics is racist, that it's...

It's patriarchal, it's phallic, it's white supremacist.

And you say that because if you convince enough people, then you reject math.

And if you reject math, you got nothing.

Yeah.

You're hitting a very big point here is that postmodernism is anti-enlightenment.

It has always been against the Enlightenment.

It considers the Enlightenment a means of

rationality used for

power and domination over others.

Okay.

That's the big sin of Enlightenment.

People use science as a toll to oppress.

Right.

And that's why science is no good.

Well, in some ways, eugenics, it didn't necessarily start that way, but it certainly ended that way.

I mean, some you know, eugenics, I would call eugenics more a social

experiment

that draws from science.

It's not strictly, you know, genetics is the science.

Right.

Eugenics is the social project that uses science.

But yeah.

Right.

Let's let's go to social media.

Social media can be used to oppress, but that's, you know, it's a

there's nothing intrinsic about rationality that oppresses anyone.

Just like language, that's the other thing.

Another phrase that postmodernists threw around was this thing called what they called logocentrism.

And what they meant, logocentrism, which means a centering, centering on the word.

And it was the idea was language is a form of domination over people.

Okay.

That's why deconstruction comes in, because it wants to undo that domination

of language.

So

if you were to ask me what then is postmodernism,

Michael, I would say it is a

toolkit

for dismantling all power structures without bombing the building.

Right.

Beyond it's almost an it's a neutron bomb

of logic and reason and anything.

Against those, yes.

Yeah.

Against those.

Anything standing.

Anything standing.

Anything established is bad.

Yeah.

Anything established is bad.

Any types of organization, structural hierarchies, anything like that is bad, bad, bad, just by virtue of existing.

And I mean, you know, colonialism, everything, and everything is the white man's fault.

I mean, everything.

We're the only evil, the only evil that's never been done on earth has been done by white men.

Did you know that?

Europeans and Western, Western, other Westerners.

That's it.

There's never been colonialism by others.

There's never been race.

There's never been

unless you study history.

Yes, unless you study, which they don't do.

Yeah.

They have

a cartoon version of history that they follow.

And you can't even, if you say something like, did you know that there's still slavery going on today and that it's being undertaken by Islamists over people that are actually black?

Did you know that's happening?

And that

this is not the white man that's doing this today?

In fact, the only people that ever ended slavery in history.

Well,

we're Eurocentric, if you will, or Euro-based.

So isn't that interesting?

But if you say that, they're just going to say, you're just saying that because you are one of them and you're one of the oppressors.

So even saying that is a form of violence.

In the 90s, when we started first to become politically correct, you know, I knew control the language, win the argument.

Yes.

You know,

but there's something in humans, maybe it's, you know, Americans, or I think it's all of us, I don't know,

that I don't want to hurt your feelings.

You know, I don't, I want to get along with you.

Right.

So if you want to be called this, you want this to happen, I don't care.

I don't care.

As long as you don't force me to do it.

Right.

Right.

So political correctness, this kind of creeped up on us because it played to our heart.

Yes.

Right.

Right.

But this is not

political correctness that we're seeing now.

I mean, unless you emphasize political.

Yeah.

Right.

That's right.

If you're in line and you're correct with the political power, you're fine.

But now there comes a big penalty.

Oh, yeah.

And it seems every day, I think the

enemy of civilization is obviously chaos.

And

people

feel that they are surrounded by chaos because you get up every day and there's a new term that you'll be crucified for

if you don't use today, even though yesterday it was five nine.

It's a different term, yeah.

Like literally that fast.

It's that fast.

And so there's lots of people who have never heard any of these terms.

They don't have any idea the source of where this stuff is coming from.

They're like, who's doing this?

Who's in control?

What is this?

I know.

It's incredible.

Even while I was amongst the left, in the left, I saw these terms coming up all the time.

And I was like, what is going on here?

Somebody said, well, you're as a cis heteromale, you dot, dot, dot, dot.

And I'm like, what is this?

You know, and did you know the term cis?

I had no idea.

I think this was about 2015 or 14 when this term first surfaced in my consciousness.

And then I found out it was something bad to be.

And what it meant was somebody who accepts the gender they were assigned at birth.

I didn't know I was assigned a gender.

And they mean socially assigned.

They don't mean assigned by your chromosomes.

They mean assigned by the social order.

When you come out looking like this or that, that you were assigned to a gender.

Well, I know you know Brett Weinstein.

Yes, I do.

And I mean, he's an evolutionary scientist.

And that's why he got in trouble.

He's like, no, I'm a scientist, man.

You don't just assign.

It's assigned by science.

It's assigned by the chromosomes, actually.

You know, by whether you have XX or XY.

I mean, there are some anomalies, of course, that are XXY or XYY, but

the great majority fall at the poles, at the binary ends.

Those kind of terms,

so they were subverting ontologies again, right?

Ontologies, that's the beings, you know, established entities

in the social order by virtue of language.

Here we go again.

See how language is working to undercut

social certainties of all types?

So tell me, because this is an argument that I had with my daughter.

She went to Fordham.

Fordham is a Catholic social justice university.

Oh, my.

Well, she was taught by the Jesuits there that the Bible is nonsense and that, I mean, it was crazy.

And she was taught that

in Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah, that sodomy was just a greeting.

It wasn't a bad thing.

It's how you greeted people.

And I'm like, wow, that's quite an aggressive greeting, you know?

Hey, I don't even want to, I don't even want to.

So, but she had, it took me, it took me almost three or four years to get my relationship back on track with my daughter after this indoctrination

because she wouldn't even talk about it with me.

I would be like, okay, okay, wait, okay, let's just, let's think here for a second.

Yeah.

And there is this,

there's this underlying thing that if

you don't know, then you're part of the problem.

That's right.

And

the professor or whoever is at the top of the ladder here knows.

And I think some of the students, they are told you don't even have to talk about it.

You don't have to, they just won't ever get it.

Right.

And some of it is such nonsense

that I think that the weaker won't even want to talk about it because

you start to think about it and it all falls apart.

The reason why your daughter's not talking to you about it, not even soliciting your view, is because you're going to try to think about it using rationality.

Correct.

And rationality has been, it's been banished from the start.

Right.

A priori.

That's out.

So, you know, terms like, you want to talk about some terms like like intersectionality.

Don't even know what that means.

Okay, I can explain that one for you.

Intersectionality was actually came, was derived

or I guess inaugurated by

a legal person,

a lawyer, a feminist lawyer, who said that

it wasn't satisfactory to call somebody just, you know,

to refer to somebody as black or as a woman or as, you know, some other marginalized, supposedly subordinated type there are

it's called intersectionality because there's the vectors of power intersect people in different ways and there are more than one vector of power there's racial sexual gender

so being a white i am i'm being a white male who is heterosexual yeah i am the top of the power yeah you have no power vectors right intersecting over you you're not being subordinated by any of these vectors and even if because I'm conservative,

that says, well,

you have the hierarchy and you're trying to keep things.

That's right.

Because I'm Christian or faith believer, especially Christian.

Well, the Christians have dominated everything.

So I have no, I have nothing into it.

I'm intersecting everyone.

Because you're at the top.

You're at the bottom.

I'll get into that in a minute.

Being at the top is not where you want to be

in this social justice realm.

This is the worst place to be.

Right.

Because they're going to flip the hierarchy.

That the whole thing is an inversion.

They want to invert the hierarchy, basically.

Anyway, has anybody talked, you talk about inverting, I mean, this is something that

it's beyond politically correct to talk about.

The Judeo-Christian world has done a whole bunch of bad things.

It's like Winston Churchill and Gandhi.

Yeah.

Same time against each other.

Both seem to be a little racist.

Both said some crazy things.

You look at Churchill in the Western point of view.

he's great.

You learn about Churchill what he did in India, not so great.

Yeah, we're all of it, we're both good and bad.

It's which direction are we going?

Are we getting better or not?

Right.

And also,

what were the founding principles?

Are they good or not?

Right.

Yeah.

So when you look at the Judeo-Christian world, it has been really modeled around two guys, Moses and Jesus.

I don't think there's anybody that would say, you know, if,

you know, I'm alone in a very white neighborhood, but it's a dangerous, you know, the cisgender neighborhood is,

you know,

I don't feel safe as a bad person.

And if you don't feel safe,

and it's in the middle of the night, your car broke down, you're changing your tire, and you see all these white guys, you know,

obviously,

and they're coming at you at night.

Would you feel better

or not at all

if you knew that they were coming from

a church choir practice or a Bible study group, would that ease your mind?

Most people would say

yes, but they'll say no.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

Who's replacing?

You've taken, you're taking our pinnacle of Jesus of be good to each other.

You know, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, help the poor.

Do unto others.

Right.

We're taking that away.

Right.

Who are we replacing that with?

Well, Well, we're replacing it with

this ideology that says

Christianity has been part of the dominant culture.

It has been the hegemonic religion.

The people that are Christian have been, as you said, the hegemonic people.

They're mostly white or they're mostly

and you're European and it's men and all that.

And you can't argue against that.

They don't say do unto others as as you would have them do unto you.

They say do unto others as they've done unto you.

Right.

So that they won't do it again.

So theirs is a vindictive religious belief system.

And it's about taking the hierarchy on which men are putatively on top, white men in particular, and it goes down this scale to the subordinated, the most subordinated.

You know, you'd get

African Americans or Africans or blacks.

You'd get women.

You'd get trans people, everybody.

And those people, it's not about equalizing everything, even though they say they're for equality.

It's about flipping that hierarchy so that those...

You're punishing the

punished get

punishment has to happen.

It has to happen.

It's very much like the, you know, the terror.

So how does the mind work

when it comes to, for instance,

I think there's a difference between Islam and an Islamist.

An Islamist wants that state control.

They want Sharia.

Correct.

And it's very dangerous.

You see the left embrace Islamists.

How does where they say that if you criticize them, you're a Islamophobic.

Correct.

Right.

So

at worst, they say, don't look here.

Right.

How do

How do you how does an intelligent person get to that point?

What what is the what's the there's there's a couple factors okay one of the main things that has been inaugurated by the left is cultural relativism

and cultural relativism also brings with it a more relativism but the main thing about cultural relativism is that you can't from your from your culture you're not allowed to criticize people of another culture because

you're suggesting that your culture is better than theirs.

And that's...

So when I meet, and this actually happened, I met, I asked for a meeting with people of GLAAD.

This is when the height of

Ahmadinejad throwing people off the building, you know, gay people off the buildings, torturing them, killing them.

Russia is starting to take driver's license away and absconding people at night and they're never seen again because they're homosexual.

You can say, well, their culture is different, so I can't comment.

But we all know

killing someone because they're homosexual is a no-go zone yeah how come they they won't make that step well there's another aspect to it not just the relativism the other thing is the enemy of my enemy is my friend and you're they're you they are the enemy of you know

western civilization yeah all right so intersectionality is how many times that's why basically how many yeah how many power vectors are intersecting you and subordinating you and does that give you the hierarchy once you have more vectors, the lower you are, the higher you are.

Right.

This is why there's a race to the bottom in the oppression Olympics, as it's called, rather derogatorily.

You want to rush to the bottom because by the time you get there, you're going to be on top.

Okay.

Yeah.

What are the other words that we need to really understand?

Okay.

Well, one of them we mentioned already, cis.

Yeah.

We talked about that.

That's, you know, accepting the gender you were quote unquote assigned to that.

That's a termite word.

Yeah.

Right.

To take away all understanding of gender because if you do

what happens what is their what is their ultimate goal here by taking away and confusing all gender yeah how does that affect us oh

well it undermines many of the basic structures of the social order like the family right i mean that's the object here by the way is to get rid of the family

That's one of the main objects.

Why?

Because the family is a source of power in itself, and it's a source of cohesion.

They don't want to exist.

There are forces here that want to get rid of

any kinds of organizational

adhesions or groups of solidarity or cohesion

that take power away from

the state.

or that take power away from other forces outside of the state and

cultural power and cultural politics too.

So the family's family's got to get rid of,

to undermine gender is to undermine the family.

There's no question about it.

Michael, I mean,

I hate to use this language because it's so condemning

and

it pits us against each other.

But I have I have honestly thought, like, for instance, progressivism, I can look and say, okay, I understand that we have a difference of opinion of either the welfare state on how big it should be or whatever.

That's that's aggressive tax systems.

So

I get that, and I disagree with the way it's done, et cetera, et cetera.

But postmodernism, I cannot, the first word that comes to mind when

I read it, hear about it, or anything, is it's just evil.

There's no, I don't know of any other thing that is just pure poison

to a system.

It's evil.

And social justice is the practical,

is practical postmodernist.

You write in your book that postmodernism is dead.

It's theoretical, the high theory era of postmodernism is dead.

That was the

era in which people were theorizing all these things.

Now this is the era of

practical

pragmatic

social justice.

Social justice is practical postmodern theory?

Is there postmodern theory reduced and put in a kind of cartoon version, too?

It's definitely been dumbed down.

But that's what has to happen when you want to, you know, when you want to proliferate something across the whole mass of humanity.

You know?

Do you believe there is good social justice?

See, that's a word that sounds good.

And this is one of the tricks of the left is to use abstractions that sound wonderful.

And how could you possibly not want that?

Right.

Well, there's no meaning to it at all, intrinsically, so to speak.

There's been a lot of different versions of social justice over time.

I mean, Catholics will say that that's one of our

Catholic.

The phrase was founded by Luigi Taparelli in 1841 when he wrote a massive

tome about

Catholic social justice.

And the difference being?

The difference is it was a conservative.

Here's a case of cultural appropriation by the socialists and the left of a term that was actually a conservative term in the beginning.

It was about establishing a kind of charity between people.

It was a way of mitigating the difficulties that came with laissez-faire capitalism and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

It was all based on individuals and small groups undertaking charity to try to mitigate the diff, you know, the hardships of people on the bottom.

But not about equal, not about equating them or making equality in real time and real

life.

So there is a, I'm trying to remember what the theology is.

It started in South America.

It was

liberation theology.

Yeah.

The president, President Obama used to talk about this.

Yes.

That it is

that there is that social justice is required because there is no individual salvation if we're not all working wow this is scary it's funny because it's social justice was about individual salvation and individuals helping other individuals right okay he believed that charity was a part of human nature and and social justice was just a way of of of talking about how human nature should be tapped how

human nature should be understood so that we could act properly towards our neighbors.

That's really what it was.

But it got hijacked by even within the Catholic Church.

They hijacked it and turned it into socialism in effect.

Liberation theology is

socialism with holy water sprinkled on it.

That's all it is.

If you

could

look at the future and

nobody knows what tomorrow is going to hold.

But if we don't change course,

what does our future look like?

Near future, even?

Scary.

What's coming?

It's scary.

I mean, it scares me to think that

children are being

indoctrinated, for lack of a better term, and I don't think it's really overstating it either, into this system of practical postmodernism or social justice from kindergarten up.

I mean, this is, and they're being told that this undermining of all of these social ontologies, like gender, like

the family, are that that is good.

This is the good.

That it's good to be like this and it's evil to oppose it.

What do you do if you're

my granddaughter just started kindergarten?

What do you do?

I have to tell you that I pull them out of every public school and most private ones as well.

I'd be very, very careful where I'd send my kids if I sent them anywhere outside of the house for education.

I'm not, I was never believed that I would be somebody saying homeschooling might be the best option, but I'm starting to think, yes, it might be the only option if you don't want to end up with a kid who tells who comes home one day as somebody else

because they're being encouraged to get rid of these identities.

What are the warning signs that most people won't know?

What's like buzz language that

yeah, you'll hear

people talking about

the female brain.

You'll hear people talking about

the,

you know, you'll hear the terms that we've talked about.

You'll hear people talking about transitioning.

If you hear a child come home, say, oh, my friend in school was in trans, we had a transition party for my friend.

This means this is a party of celebrating their transition from one gender to the other.

This happened in California just recently in August.

You started off saying you were a libertarian communist.

Right.

I cannot get my arms around.

A lot of people say that's an oxymoron.

There can't be such a thing.

How does that work?

It was a movement

when people recognized what the Bolsheviks did.

When they started the terror right after the revolution, there was no delay till Stalin.

Lenin started killing people right away.

They even killed workers.

Workers who had the audacity to go on strike were murdered.

And people were sent to Gulag.

Now, the concentration camp came later.

I'm sorry, the Gulag came later.

The concentration camp came first.

And the Nazis, by the way, got their idea for the concentration camp from the Soviets.

I don't think people realize this.

No.

Anyway,

there was a movement that said this, that the Bolsheviks went wrong already, right early, you know, that they became authoritarian.

They imposed their party value over everybody.

And instead of being democratic, and so libertarian or that's already, I mean, we are living in a Bolshevik time here in America, are we not?

Yes, I mean, we do.

We're seeing that, that if they take control, you will toe the line.

Oh, yeah.

Or

they'll destroy you.

Yeah.

You know, and they don't maybe shoot you in the back of the head, but

if you lose your job and every respectability that you need to survive in society, it's the same difference.

So I thought

that there was a better socialist, a better version.

You know, now I think that this, now I think there's no way it could ever be any different than that.

Because you can't enforce equality unless you squelch many people in the process and get rid of a lot of them too.

And you you don't I'm I it's why I was so against well for one reason why I was so against like for instance TARP and the bank bailout.

We could talk about that too.

Yeah.

We could talk about that's not a role of government.

We could talk about right but that also takes away your right to fail

and the learning you have learned more because you dipped your toe and you dared to make a mistake.

And look who you are now.

That you don't, nobody has a right to take my failures away from me.

Away from me.

That's right.

Because it's what makes me.

That's right.

It's just a step on the way to where you're going.

And sometimes there are steps that are missteps.

But in any way,

if you take that away,

you take away the person's actual rights.

You take away their rights to be self-determined.

Yeah.

So what are you now?

How would you classify yourself?

Politically?

Well, politically, I would call myself classical liberal or

social and cultural libertarian.

In terms of the market or in terms of the economic aspect, I would call myself,

I'm a believer in the market.

I believe that unless you have a free market where people can take their talents to the marketplace and do what they will with them under their own free will, then you have total, you have despotism.

Yes, you have to.

The market is the only way.

But if you have the free market

without volume one of Adam Smith, moral sentiments, that's right.

Theory of moral sentiments.

You know that book?

That's amazing.

That's great.

You also have totalitarianism, just in a different way.

Yeah, so that's what Taparelli was trying to mitigate as well, that the Jesuit have founded the real social justice, or the first one, I should say.

Yeah, so I say I'm, I call myself a classical

liberal

social and cultural libertarian in the sense that I believe people, not that people should be excessive in their,

you know, doing whatever they want.

It should not violate other people's rights.

Right.

But you should have the self-determination, the freedom, the individual freedom to pursue your dream, which not only is your dream, but might be, you know, part of a bigger plan.

Can you help me tie up one thing?

Because

I'm a libertarian.

And for years, because I was on Fox, people thought I was against gay marriage.

I'm not against gay marriage.

I'm against the state being involved in marriage at all.

You know, you have no place.

I don't get any value from the state forcing me to take a blood test and give me a license.

They have no place there.

So do what you want.

But how do we close the loop of,

look, you want to be transgender?

That's fine.

That's fine.

Yeah.

But

I don't, don't, my church might marry gay couples, might not.

Right.

That's my church.

Yeah.

We, you know, we might believe that transgender is the absolute way to go.

We might look at the stats and say it doesn't look like it's healthy long term because suicide rate actually goes up.

Up.

Yeah.

I mean, without judgment, let's just talk about that.

Sure.

But we get into this place to where now who's teaching what is the norm?

How do you do that?

How do we have an open society that says, look, everybody's got to be left alone.

I see where you're going.

But there are moral principles or there are eternal value.

Let me say it this way.

I can't remember the name of the building, but it's one of the first modern is first modern, postmodern buildings in America.

Staircases lead to nowhere, columns that come down and are floating.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, yeah.

But it still has a foundation.

Yeah.

They didn't, they didn't monkey with the actual foundation.

So you're asking me, how do we have, how do we reconcile social and cultural libertarianism

with holding on to values that we believe are necessary for a healthy and functioning social order?

Right.

You have to have,

you have to have an unum that you come running around.

And the only one I can find is the Bill of Rights.

E pluribus unum.

And without which we have chaos.

Right.

Well, this may be where we differ slightly.

Okay.

And tell me if I'm wrong in thinking that we might.

I think

it requires a struggle of ideas.

I agree.

We're going to have to gain consent.

We're going to have to actually gain hegemony

by...

duking it out, not physically, in the marketplace of ideas.

But the problem we have now is that the marketplace of ideas has been greatly curtailed, greatly abbreviated by the social justice left, such that we can't even get different ideas into the marketplace.

We're being banned from, there's putting tariffs that are impenetrable to our bringing those goods to the marketplace of ideas at all.

We're stopped at the

perimeter.

So I think we're saying the same thing.

When I was interviewing schools for my kids to go to, I met with a science teacher and

I said,

do you teach evolution?

Do you teach intelligent design?

Right.

Do you teach creationism?

In my opinion,

all of those should be.

We don't know.

What happened before the Big Bang?

We don't know.

Nothing, maybe.

Right, but what happened?

What was the first cause that lit that fuse?

I don't know.

Right.

And

it's good

to know

all of it.

And And that's

teach the controversy.

Yeah, teach the controversy, but we're not letting that happen.

So I, you know, I am a social cultural and, you know,

libertarian and libertarian in the marketplace of ideation or ideas.

And I think we have to have that, or we're going to have real problems because that's what's happening.

There's no competition.

There's no competition in these places for thoughts.

So that's why our children are being told, you know, come and have a gender transition party and everybody acts like it's normal.

Right.

And if you oppose it, you must be some Neanderthal.

So the difference I'm thinking that we might have is I know you're real big on reconciliation, and I'm not sure we can have reconciliation with people whose ideas are so

injurious.

Tell me if that's okay.

I do not believe,

I mean, I couldn't reconcile with Adolf Hitler.

Yes.

Unless Adolf Hitler changed.

Changed.

Yes.

Okay.

But there's a lot of people who, like you,

have kind of gone along.

And now these signs are starting to pop up.

And they're like, wait a minute.

Just like me in 2004, 2003, I was very raw, raw GOP.

Well, about 2005, I'm starting to wake up going, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

We're going where?

We're doing what?

And that's that.

Wait a minute.

This is not right.

Something's wrong here.

And I started seeing the game that was played.

Yes.

But I had no place to go.

That was, it was either this or that.

It's binary.

It's the only binary thing that's allowed.

It's allowed.

And so what do you do?

And so reconciling is, we're reconciling.

Yes.

You know, we might have, we might, I might have seen you with Joe Scarborough and thought, this guy's a moron.

You might have watched me and said the same thing.

But we now realize,

no, we don't have to agree on anything.

Yeah.

But the unum, for me, it's the Bill of Rights.

Yes.

You have a right to speak.

have standing principles, standing foundational beliefs.

And around that.

And unless we have that, and unless they're good ones, right?

Ones that are based on what we think

make the happiness of everybody possible, not guaranteed, but possible.

But don't we have that?

We do, but it's being utterly avoided, utterly eschewed, and actually dispensed with.

Michael, my theory is

we need to start a whole different system of education.

I don't know how we can do that.

Yes.

But I've got to do that.

Let me ask you in the short term.

My theory is if we play into this outrage and we continue to call each other names,

we are going to miss the opportunity to meet people like you or for people like you to meet people like me.

Yeah.

Because we're just going to say, you're on the other side.

Yeah.

And

we play in and actually accelerate the chaos.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I agree with you entirely.

So what,

if you had one piece of advice,

what does somebody on a conservative side or a liberal side say to the other to bring them to some sort of understanding of reason?

Wow.

Oh, wow.

What's your opening statement?

To

tell either a conservative or somebody on the other side how to broach

how do i how do i how do i

what i mean there's a study and i write about it in the book there's a study that says you have a great impact i think it's 65 or 75 percent uh chance of actually opening a door if you start with

you know what i got to tell you something One of the big mistakes that I made was X, Y, and Z.

Yeah.

Because people put their shields down and they go, oh,

and then they usually will go, oh, I know I've done that too.

And it opens.

Yeah.

Is there.

Oh, I think that's a good point.

That's a

leading with questions rather than leading with declarations might be a way.

You know, leading with invitations rather than leading with daggers.

Yeah.

But we have to, how do we deal with something like Antifa?

I mean, they're not going to listen.

No.

But I don't think.

There's that many of them.

Look, yeah.

I think it's like a football field.

Yeah.

And

we're talking about reconciliation or understanding each other, and we think that we have to, everybody has to agree from the 50-yard line to the end zone.

Yeah, no, those people at the three-yard line, they're never going to get them.

No, they're crazy on both sides.

Yeah, that's true.

Let's just get the people who are.

Oh, okay, so that's a that's what we're looking for: a quorum, and we can do that.

We can do that.

I think we can do that.

I knowakes we spoke beforehand, and you know, I know that you would say that,

oh, no, I, you know, I didn't have a problem with you, I thought you were a smart guy, whatever.

But there had to be at least a lot of your friends who hated my guts and thought I was the Antichrist.

Oh, yeah, I would have.

I mean, the fact that I'm sitting down with you now is just further validation for these people that, yeah, this guy, you've you're gone, I'm gone, you're gone.

And they think I had a great fall.

Right.

Okay.

They think I've fallen from a great height.

I know.

And so I look at this and I think

I'm an alcoholic.

When I sobered up,

all my friends changed.

And a lot of my old friends didn't want me to sober up because I was following.

Sure.

That's right.

Changes the paradigm.

It changes everything.

And you have to start life over.

You are going from respected, intellectual, New York, NYU.

It doesn't get any,

no offense, easier in some ways.

Yes.

It's pretty elite.

You were in the in crowd, in the in place, doing the right thing.

Right.

Now your whole life is

different.

Yeah.

What happens to you?

What are you?

Well, you know, what's happened?

See, you know, you mentioned being an alcoholic.

i gave up something

and it might look like i've lost something by having given it up but i've gained my soul that's more important than the whole world as we know i got my soul back i have a i have a relationship with a god i have a relationship with my family that was never like this before i mean i lost i got divorced over this stuff i turned into a weirdo in graduate school and i couldn't have a relationship with my wife anymore.

I lost the family over this.

So

I don't care.

I don't care what they say.

They can say whatever they want.

I have a relationship with somebody that's far more powerful and meaningful and glorious than them.

You were agnostic.

Yes.

Raised Catholic?

I was raised Catholic.

I was a seminarian in high school.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then you went agnostic.

So you never rejected.

And I was like, I wanted to be, it wasn't about being tepid or anything, but I said, you know, you can't really know.

Yeah.

So an agnostic means don't, you don't know.

I would never say I would, I would never say I was atheist.

I never did because I thought that's arrogant and I still think it's arrogant.

You have to be God to say there's no God.

I mean, who are you to know?

Yeah.

But I was, I was the same way.

I got to, when I sobered up, I got to a point where I was like, you know what?

I believe in stuff because people told me I believed in it.

And I don't have any relationship.

I don't know if any of that's true.

Yeah.

And I became an agnostic.

Oh.

And

thought, you know, if God is real,

he'd want me to find him.

And if he's a good God, he'll help me to get there.

Yeah, he'll help me.

And he wants me to challenge him.

Yeah.

Because he doesn't.

You know what?

Being a child.

You know, the other thing I thought about is, you know, I thought that

in a way, the way I was raised and sort of the...

the religiosity of my family.

I'm talking about not my kids and wife, but my, you know, my siblings and so forth.

I thought that I couldn't trust God because he would take away my gifts, my intellect, what I wanted, you know, what I, my goals and stuff like that, what I wanted to do for a live with my life.

I didn't trust him.

I thought he would, if he was there, he would take it away.

So why would I follow that?

I don't want to be.

So

it's been a,

I would say that this happened for a reason, what happened to me.

And it wasn't my idea.

It was God's idea.

Now, I'm not saying I'm some sort of a

Moses here, but I'm saying that I have a small mission and this is it.

All of us do.

I can't get over.

I can't get over the idea that we were all born in this country with this technology at this time, with this struggle.

And we're not supposed to stand up one way or another.

You're not supposed to.

We are all placed exactly where we're supposed to be.

Right.

and and the people we meet and the even sitting in an airport the stranger right next to you it's no mistake it's no accident so what are you going to do now michael

well um i'm just following the path i don't you know i i'm trying to follow the path that i've been put on and i believe the next right thing will be revealed you know, at the right time.

I can't say where the plans, where the plan leads, but I know it's really not up to me, really.

So I'll just follow the lead that I get and the hints that I get and the cues and the very clear messages that I get along the way.

And I'll end up where I end up and I'll be happy and I know it's the best way to go.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.