#0037 - Christopher Rufo

This podcast is supported by MIDI Health.

Are you in midlife, feeling dismissed, unheard, or just plain tired of the old healthcare system?

You're not alone.

For too long, women's serious midlife health issues have been trivialized, ignored, and met with a just deal-with it attitude.

Many of us have been made to feel ashamed or forgotten.

In fact, even today, 75% of women seeking care for menopause and perimenopause issues are left entirely untreated.

But here's the powerful truth.

It's time for a change.

It's time for MIDI.

MIDI is not just a healthcare provider.

It's a women's telehealth clinic founded and supported by world-class leaders in women's health.

What sets MIDI apart?

We are the only women's telehealth brand covered by major insurance companies, making high-quality, expert care accessible and affordable for all women everywhere.

Our clinicians provide one-on-one face-to-face consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs.

We offer a full range of holistic data-driven solutions from hormonal therapies and weight loss protocols to lifestyle coaching and preventive health guidance.

This isn't a one-size-fits-all care.

This is care uniquely tailored for you.

At MIDI, you will join our patients who feel seen, heard, and prioritized.

You will find that our mission is clear, to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the health care they deserve.

Because we believe midlife isn't the middle at all.

It's just the beginning of your second act.

Ready to feel your best and write your second act script?

Visit joinmitti.com today to book your personalized insurance-covered virtual visit.

That's joinmitty.com.

MIDI, the care women deserve.

Looking for an exceptional driving experience?

Find it behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz SUV.

Experience the power, precision, and intelligence of an iconic Mercedes-Benz SUV at your local Mercedes-Benz dealer today.

On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2113 with guest Chris Ruffo.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

It's a show where two podcasters with now 110 hours of Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

This is a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Cecil Cicarello, joined by Michael Marshall.

Today we're going to be covering Joe's March 2024 interview with Christopher Ruffo.

So how did Joe introduce Chris in the show notes?

Yeah, according to the show notes, Christopher F.

Rufo is a writer, filmmaker, activist, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

He's also a contributing editor of City Journal, a distinguished fellow of Hillsdale College, and the founder of American Studio, a non-profit focused on the American experience.

Huh.

Okay, well, is there anything else we should know about?

Yeah, I think there is.

I think there is.

So

despite what you can see in a lot of that particular description

in your show notes, Rufo is a conservative activist who is deeply connected to a lot of very large and very well-funded right-wing influence organizations, essentially.

So he used to be the visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which uses its significant resources to push climate change denial, to oppose LGBTQ rights, to fight efforts to redress racism.

They are the organization that published Project 2025, which has essentially had a guiding hand on most of Trump's second term so far.

Ruffo also used to be a director of some degree at the Discovery Institute, which is the creationist organization which tries to push anti-evolution positions into public schools.

And when those overt creationist attempts failed because the public are just not interested in teaching the controversy around evolution anymore, the movement then started to look for other chinks in the armor of liberal education.

And it settled on issues around race and gender and sexuality as these tension points that could be exploited.

And we're going to see that in the show he does with Chau.

In particular, Rufo Mother, any other activist out there was responsible for mainstreaming the

relatively recent panic around critical race theory.

If you remember the panic around critical race theory, no one talks about that anymore.

But for a while, you couldn't really go anywhere online without encountering how CRT was indoctrinating our kids and undermining the fabric of American society.

You don't particularly hear about it anymore.

Yeah, they exchanged it for a different acronym.

Now it's DEI.

Yeah, exactly.

Now it's DEI.

Very, very much so.

And all of that was completely deliberate.

In fact, Rufo even admitted on Twitter that he was intentionally trying to tie CRT to whatever extreme positions he could, whether or not that was accurate or related to critical race theory at all.

What he said was, quote, we've successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions, will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory.

We have decodified the term and we will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

⁇ Unquote.

So he was admitting very explicitly there, when he talks about critical race theory, he's not talking about real critical race theory.

He's talking about anything he wants to put under that bucket in order to demonize it and scare the public.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, what exactly did they talk about in this episode?

So they talk a lot about politics and how evil and wrong the left are.

They talk a bit about Marxism.

They talk about drag queens.

They talk about Rufo's appointment to the board of a liberal and very queer-friendly college in Florida.

And they also talk about how Rufo got a woman of color fired from a very prominent position at Harvard.

So all the kind of stuff that's in that description that I gave you earlier.

That's even examples of that.

Well, we got our work cut out for us.

So, before we get to our main event, we're going to say thanks to our Area 51, all Access Past patrons.

That's Don't Thank Me, Your Show Is Just Worth Investment.

Fredar Gruthius, sorry, I ran out of space entering my name.

It's Am I a Robot?

Captcha says no, but maintenance records say yes.

Blue Ridge True Crime Podcast, Chonky Cat in Chicago is giving free hugs.

Grotius, the end of all things, 11 Gruthius, definitely not an AI overlord, Laura Williams, no, not that one, the other one, Stone Banana, tax-free nuclear beer run, Daleen, Scott Laird, Stargazer97, the Fallacious Trump Podcast, KTA, Slarty Bartfast, Lucy Cortez, billionaire oligarchs, and Mike Fish.

They all subscribe to patreon.com slash no Rogan.

You can do that too.

All patrons get an early access to episodes and a space and a special patron-only bonus segment each week.

And this week, we're going to talk about Snopes, more about drag queens, and we're going to bring up Milo Ionnopoulos.

Remember that guy?

All right, check it out, patreon.com slash no rogan.

But for now, our main event.

It's time.

Huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast.

That was Jacob from Second Cut Pod on Substacks, where they do movie reviews and essays.

They were announcing our main event.

Remember that you too can be on the show by sending us your best rendition of It's Time.

Send that to no Roganpod at gmail.com, as well as how you'd like to be credited on the show.

So this is actually, we're recording this a little early this week.

And this is really happening right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I mean, a couple days after, less than a week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

So it's a really interesting show that we had planned to do before this sort of thing had happened.

We didn't, this wasn't something that was, uh, that, that we come to lightly.

We have our sort of ideas of what we're going to do well in advance of what we're actually doing.

So we had already had this on the docket.

We had already done all the notes for it.

This sort of happened.

And this is sort of a really interesting

way to look at how people inflame each other.

on the political spectrum in our country.

I think this is a really interesting way to look at something that's happening over a year ago and listening to the language of how they're using the certain people on the right are using it to inflame an already,

I would say, very tenuous relationship between the right and the left in the United States.

Yeah, absolutely.

And in many ways, like I'd say Chris Ruffaud is in the same category of people, in the same kind of group of people as Charlie Cook, in that he's one of these

very vocal activists who's very savvy at using social media to push a version of his political enemies that could be defended by, you could defend his interpretation by highlighting some of the things he's citing.

But actually, when you really start to dig into the specific examples he talks about, it's not often as he's portraying.

So there's like a handful of people who are in that space, Candace Owens being another, Ben Shapiro being another.

And it feels like there is a small band of actors who are really driving that kind of right-wing polarization.

All right, so we're going to start early on talking about,

this is really sort of talking about drugs being legal and how that's a bad thing.

And that sort of leads up into this particular clip.

The big problem, though, is that the political left in the United States has lost the willingness and the capacity to say no.

This is something we've all seen.

You know, we're raised a generation of kids where like saying saying no and imposing limits is something that you can't do.

It's this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits.

But

some limits are necessary.

Some limits are important.

And so I think we're starting to finally see the consequences of obliterating limits.

And then now we're starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way, we should start reimposing some guardrails.

Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive.

But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations on them, which sounds so crazy, but they are happier and they have less anxiety, apparently.

Obviously, I'm not a doctor, because they're by having structure to life, it doesn't seem like everything is like if they're in charge, like, oh my God, I'm fucking 12 and I'm in charge, I have no idea what's going on, and I could stay out late all night, the world's chaos, which it kind of is in some ways.

But by imposing structure on them, it gives them comfort.

And I find that's the case with human beings.

So a first thing to highlight, I think, there, and this is, I say, very early on in the show, you can hear the way, the language that Chris Rufo uses when he's talking here.

He's talking about how the left is obliterating all of the limits, while the right is imposing reasonable limits.

And so he will do this

kind of linguistic trick kind of throughout this entire episode is that everything on the left is dealt with in extreme language, extremely inflaming adjectives, whereas the right, and particularly the version of the right that Chris Ruffo is putting forward, particularly the positions he's putting forward, they're just reasonable.

You know, they're common sense.

Everything that he says is very much common sense that most people think, whereas the left are doing these extremist things.

That's

the picture that he will paint.

Now, I would argue, from my perspective, from the outside of America, even if you were to accept that the left is doing some extreme things, you can't argue that everything on the right is also completely free from extremism, not not least because of the number of people who are getting shot at from the American right.

But also, you know, January 6th was not a reasonable, common sense response to political transfer of power.

I would argue that was the obliteration of guardrails and things.

So you can hear the reframing here in order to paint his political opposition and political opponents as extremists.

And I also think Joe's response is interesting because throughout all of that, he reflects that to,

well,

the way the government responds to people, it's a bit like how parents are with their children.

Like he's saying that the government should be in a position of imposing limits, imposing structure, like parents and children.

Now, I don't think he would be remotely happy with the government acting as the parents of the people in any of the situations.

But when we're talking about trying to curtail the excesses of the side of the political spectrum that he doesn't agree with, suddenly it's totally fine for the nanny state and big governments to be the one putting you to bed and telling you your bedtime.

Yeah, great point.

I think Joe and Chris, the previous conversation here, it's really long, so we didn't play it, but they talk about decriminalization of drugs and defund the police in sort of a passing way as an example of what they bring up here, which is let's remove the limits.

But that's a total straw man.

Let's take defund the police, for instance.

This isn't a movement to remove limits.

It's a movement to shift the responsibility from certain, for certain emergencies to more

capable departments people who can handle this in a better way often in the united states they will call the police for anything and sometimes people will having be having say a a a psychological breakdown and the police will show up and they will shoot that person dead instead of bringing someone who knows how to handle this sort of thing.

They take care of them.

They bring them to a place where they can help that person, et cetera, et cetera.

That happens all the time in the United States States where someone winds up dead because the police show up when it could be another service that shows up and helps.

Yeah, I mean, that whole movement is literally about actively imposing limits on responsibility, the police and what the police are expected to do, but also on things like the budgets of the police, which otherwise have been expanding significantly.

You know, there are police departments with essentially vehicles that are quasi tanks.

You know, that isn't necessarily the best way to be going about it.

So it is about imposing limits and to move the responsibility into more appropriate ways.

I would argue that those are guardrails.

Those aren't the removal of guardrails.

There's also a part of this where they're talking about, and again, we probably won't play it, but it's Chris Ruffo mentioning

that his life in Seattle, he had to make a change because he was living in Seattle and it was really.

really disgusting because of all these homeless people who were around and they were grotesque and they were doing all kinds of his you know they're talking about all different types of things like uh hypodermic needles and uh poop in the streets et cetera, et cetera.

And he's talking about how gross that is.

You have to fund

these things in order to take care of them.

You can't just want them to go away and then not do anything about it and expect them to go away.

You can do that if you just arrest them or something.

But if you really want it to go away, you can't cut taxes and get rid of taxes and then say, well, we're not going to fund these programs to take care of these people.

And that is literally the Republican mantra.

They don't want to pay for anything, but yet they want to live in a place that's safe and that has social safety nets for them.

They want all of these things when it comes to them, but they don't want to have to fund it.

And that's the real issue.

That's, I think, the real problem here.

Joe is the same way.

He will talk about people in LA.

He'll talk about people, you know, homeless people.

He talks about homeless camps.

You have to fund things in order to make sure that those things don't happen.

If you don't fund any kind of help for the homeless, what you wind up with is what we have, which is a structure that has no social safety net and no ability to help anyone who's on the street.

And then you just have a bunch of people who complain about it and then blame the other side because it's their fault they're out there.

Yeah.

And the thing is, the average Republican voter may not have that mentality, may not want that particular version of the world.

They may not be against as many social safety nets.

But what we do know is the big organizations that are, for example, hiring people like Chris Ruffo, that is their project in order to demonize those social safety nets so that you can cut taxes because these organizations, the Heritage Foundation, which Chris Rufo worked for, the Discovery Institute, which he worked for, with several other institutes that he worked, the Manhattan Institute that he works for, they aren't funded through grassroots donations from the average person.

As much as Chris Ruffo, throughout this conversation, we'll talk about the average person agreeing with him and the blue-collar workers that he knows, they're not the ones funding this drive towards cutting the social safety net.

And they're not the ones who are trying to reduce taxes for the wealthy.

The people paying Rufo are paying him in order to push those positions and to push these religious extremist positions too.

And yeah, also you mentioned the drugs element too.

There's like a little bit just after this, Rufor talks about how children at school are being taught what to do if they encounter a hypodermic needle in the playground.

And he's saying, and this is terrible because the left would essentially, you know, he's arguing the left would rather teach children how to deal safely with picking up a hypodermic needle than to stop the needle being there in the first place.

And they're even talking about it in the framework of that this would offend intravenous drug users who we have to see as deprived and we have to be extremely compassionate and sympathetic for to the point of putting our children at risk that is the the version of the world that he's putting forward now obviously i'd argue that is nonsense there is no version uh nobody out there is saying it's totally fine for your kids to be around hypodermic needles as long as we don't offend the drug users that is not the the position of the left or the position of anyone in america what they are saying is maybe it's not a bad thing to teach kids what not to do if they do encounter a hazard.

So you do what you can to ensure that hazard isn't there, but you also teach kids what to do if they do come across the hazard.

And then you're sort of tackling

the problem from both ends.

What Rufo want to do is pretend that the only kind of action being taken is, kids, this is how you deal with needles because we're not going to do anything to stop the needles being there.

That is not true.

It's the demonization of the people he disagrees with.

But also, what struck me listening to it back through,

bear in mind, this is in America, where kids at school are routinely taught what to do if a mass shooter breaks into a school and starts shooting.

Rufo at no point raises that as an example of kids being taught how to deal with a situation that no one is doing anything to prevent in the first place.

He's totally fine with that because the prevention methods there would start to be looking at gun control.

And those are some of the issues that he is paid to muddy the water on.

So this next clip, they're going to talk about a phrase that they're going to bring up multiple times called minor attracted persons.

I love when they use terms like the houseless.

Like, you already have a word for it.

Yeah.

Like, stop trying to dress it up with a new word.

You already have a word for it.

The word, like, this one's been driving me fucking crazy lately.

Minor attracted persons.

Yes.

I saw two politicians in two different speeches talk about protecting minor attracted persons.

You're talking about pedophiles.

That's what we're talking about.

It must be that these people have no children.

It must be.

I don't know.

If they do, they're monsters.

This idea that you are going to minimize the harm caused by evil criminals who steal children's lives, ruin their lives forever, and you're just going to call them a minor attracted person and try to say that it's an identity.

I'll point out at this point, it cuts straight into a Squarespace ad on my audio version of this.

And I can only imagine how delighted

Squarespace were to go straight in after that.

But okay, let's let's let's look at this.

He's saying that, oh, there are these people now, and he's kind of implying that it's people on the left who are routinely using the phrase minor attracted person in order to, you know, these two democratic lawmakers or these two lawmakers who are doing that in order to kind of minimize how bad pedophilia is.

Now, I haven't seen this in the left generally.

I'm a member of the left.

I've not seen a big move towards giving some degree of credibility to

minor attracted persons as an identity.

So I just don't think that's true.

So where is Joe getting this from?

So first of all, the only thing that I could find was actually from Karen Berg from Kentucky, which was posted earlier that month.

It happened earlier that month.

So I assume that's what Joe is referring to.

I've got a link in the show notes

about that.

So it's Kentucky Senator Karen Berg.

This is the quote from that of the senator using the term minor attracted person.

She says, quote, I was completely unfamiliar with child sex dolls, so I had to, of course, Google it last night.

But there are what they call maps, minor attracted persons, and the limited amount of research that's done on these dolls suggests that they actually, for people who are attracted to minors, that these dolls actually decrease their proclivity to go out and attack children, that it actively, that it actually gives them a release that makes them less likely to go outside of their home.

And what's interesting is the research didn't support the same conclusion for people who were adults attracted using dolls.

So this wasn't talking, as Joe painted, about protecting paedophiles at all.

This wasn't a don't offend paedophiles, let's call them a different term.

The study on the whole research that they're talking about here is how to stop paedophiles attacking children.

And they're saying maybe there is this way of doing it.

I'm not saying that that's a good way of doing it.

I'm not talking to the credibility of the research, but when Joe brings it up, he's saying we need to not offend the paedophiles by calling them paedophiles.

We have to call them MAPs.

The thing he's referring to is someone talking about how to protect kids.

Now,

how did Joe come about this?

Well, footage of those remarks was shared on Twitter by Robbie Starbuck, who's a conservative leaning activist who produced the Elon Musk-endorsed documentary, The War on Children.

And the clip...

By the time Joe had seen it, I believe, received more than half a million views and 3,000 posts from other Twitter users.

In addition to posting the video, Starbuck commented, Democrats like Karen are sexualizing kids and defending paedophiles, pure evil, criminally stupid, or both.

Now, I would argue she wasn't doing that at all.

I'd argue, I would suspect Joe didn't even bother to watch the actual full video or the context it was in.

I think this is another instance where Joe has seen a thing on Twitter from somebody who exists to inflame this culture war.

who exists to demonize their cultural opponents, their political opponents, by taking things as out of context as they could and to

add commentary that adds extra demonization.

So he's saying here that Karen sexualized kids and defended pailes.

That is not what that was about.

She was talking about how to protect kids from paedophiles and ways that we go about doing that.

As for the term minor attractive persons, is this something that's gathering steam, is it a trend towards giving an identity to paedophiles?

No, I don't think so.

So first of all, it's a term that comes up from online paedophiles who are looking to actively justify themselves,

which that is not a political issue.

It's not something that the left have embraced or anything like that.

It's, you know, self-identifying paedophiles.

But also, it's from academics who are talking about the topic purely academically, including referencing people who might have attractions that they have never and will never act on.

So it's trying to understand what is happening in someone's brain who might have an attraction to children.

They're just trying to research that in order to better protect children.

And they may use that term in the academic literature specifically rather than keep saying paedophile all the way through the academic literature.

They're not talking about how we should talk about them, how society should talk about them, or even how society should criminalize or deal with

paedophilia.

They're just talking in the academic literature.

None of those are politicians.

None of those are mainstream at all.

I'll go one further.

There was another senator from Alabama who also used the term minor attractive person.

I could see this in the congressional record.

On March 13th, 2025, they said, quote, Democrats only pretend to care about the oppressed or the most vulnerable among us when it benefits their agenda.

After all, it was Democrats in states like California and Washington who introduced bills to change the term of, the name of it, sex offenders, to minor attracted persons.

You're not a sex offender anymore.

If you beat up a little child, you are a molested child.

You're not a sex offender.

You're a minor attracted person.

We don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

What a joke.

It makes me sick to my stomach.

That was a quote from a Republican senator in Alabama.

So I looked up those bills in California, Washington.

I could find absolutely no evidence of them at all.

In fact, the only mention of minor attracted persons in the the congressional record that I could find was from this Republican null senator from Alabama.

Who was using it to inflame and attack the other side?

How crazy is that, Marsh?

Okay, now we're moving on.

They're going to talk about, and this comes up a lot in this episode.

They're talking about Drag Queen Story Hour.

To what?

For what reason?

To what end?

Like, why would you want to do that?

I mean, the end is, it's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.

You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour.

You say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.

These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing,

dancing and performing for other people's children.

That

should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language.

Like you're talking about euphemisms, very, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.

But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.

And like, I wouldn't want to do that.

Well, not only that.

Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children?

No.

No.

Not like a million years ago.

The thing you'd want to avoid, like most in life.

There's no reason to talk to them about that.

There's no reason.

So Chris Rufor says

drag queens, which have been propaganda, propaganda is about, and they have been.

by people like Chris Rufor, including right here, which is what he is doing right here.

He's bringing up drag queens in this context in order to demonize an idea that he is

politically opposed to.

And he says, do you want them to talk about sex?

They're not reading.

They're not talking about sex.

They're reading kids' stories.

It's drag queen story time, you know, story hour.

They're reading kids' stories.

They just happen to be dressed up.

That's all that is.

It's just a fun, silly time where there's someone reading some kids' stories.

You're the one introducing sex to this, Chris Rufor.

Exactly.

You know, he has to do that because that's the quickest way to turn Joe and Joe's listeners and other people against it.

But it's mostly just people dressing up.

That's most of what it is.

And the funniest thing about that panic for me, this whole panic about drag queens around our kids, is how it played out actually over here in the UK.

People still demonize the idea of kids being entertained by men dressed as women and vice versa.

And then it came to Christmas time and those same parents took their kids to the traditional Christmas pantomime, which is 80% men dressed as women and vice versa and has been for centuries.

You know, Peter Pan will be played by a woman dressed as Peter Pan.

The ugly sisters in Cinderella will be two guys in drag.

That's how that has always gone and it's always been a part of kids' entertainment.

So what not an issue then?

And then a moment after this, just a moment after this, he'll suggest that drag queens are trying to indoctrinate kids.

That's the real reason they're there.

They're reading these stories to kids.

They're doing it in order to indoctrinate kids.

And that is just the same old myth about, about, that was previously used about gay people trying to recruit your kids, that gay people just want to recruit kids.

And that's kind of their raison d'être, the reason that they want to be around kids and the reason we can't have teachers who are gay because they'll try and recruit your kids.

There is almost nothing that people like Rufo and other activists in that area will say about drag queens and also about trans people that weren't just said about gay people 30 years ago.

They just can't say them about gay people anymore because they've lost on that particular issue right now.

So they've moved on to another demographic and rolled out the same old arguments.

So this next clip, they start talking about, you know, because they're using as many different words as they can to inflame the left.

The next buzzword is Marxism.

When I was in my 20s, I traveled through a lot of the former Soviet Union socialist republics.

So Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and

Mongolia and other countries that have been ruled by the Soviets.

And what happened, and I think there is a, of course, with caveats in a much lighter way here, is you have an ideology that seeks conquest, it generates failure, and then it seeks more conquest.

And so when you travel through those countries, it is the most depressing, gray, dismal, haunted kind of places you can be.

It's these Soviet block housing.

It has enormous rates of alcoholism.

You see people strewn on the road, freezing to death in the winters.

There's no economic productivity.

There's no culture.

The Soviets had evaporated their religions and all of their old customs.

And so you have human beings that have been totally extracted from any of their cultural traditions.

They've been totally

annihilated as far as their economic possibilities.

But you still have three, four, five million people.

And it's what happens when your society is devoured by ideology.

And so the ideology that we're seeing in American institutions is, of course, different.

We're blessed with this country to have a much more robust system and history, but it's functionally the same.

So just to point out, Chris Rufo is exactly one year younger than me.

So he said he was traveling around these former Soviet bloc states in his 20s.

Well, his 20s were from 2004 to 2013.

So depending when on his 20s, he was doing this little tour through some of those places.

We're not talking about fall of the Soviet bloc territory.

We're talking essentially in the

timeline of my podcasting career.

You know, I've been doing podcasts in 2009.

So like part of his 20s, as was mine, in that kind of era.

So he's talking like he's got first-hand experience of what the Soviet Union and soon after the Soviet Union was like.

But he wasn't 20 until 13 years after the Soviet Union fell.

You know, the Soviet Union fell when he was seven.

I don't think a vacation that he took at some point in his 20s is going to give him the kind of deep cultural insight that he's claiming to have here as he's talking to Joe.

This isn't his back.

It's not like like he did a lot of study in this area.

It's not like he's qualified or has a degree in the history of the former Soviet bloc.

He's talking about he went on holiday to some of those places and he's named some of those places and saying, you know, they've been extracted from their cultural identity.

Now, I would argue if you go to some of the places that were in the former Soviet bloc, places like I've been to the Czech Republic, which is part of the Soviet bloc, it still has a very clear cultural identity.

People aren't extracted from their cultural identity.

So I think he's kind of, he's playing a game there in order to try and say that people's culture is being taken away from them.

And you've got to wonder why is he saying that to Joel Rorgan?

And what else have we heard people saying to Joel Rorgan about, you've got to be worried that the Marxists are coming to take your culture away and replace it with something?

I think that is, that's what he's leaning into.

But let's take him at his word.

He was in Kazakhstan, for example, in his 20s, and that's when he saw this kind of horrible economic

people who were annihilated in terms of economic possibilities.

Well, what was happening in Kazakhstan during that time?

Well, Kazakhstan was ruled from 1990 to 2019.

He gave us Kazakhstan as an example.

For nearly 30 years, it was ruled by the same guy, a guy called Nasultan Nazarbayev.

They ruled by decree.

He kept changing the constitution to expand his powers and remove his term limits.

So that is hardly a Marxist or communist approach to governance there.

But even so, under Nazarabayev's rule, Kazakhstan experienced substantial economic growth, driven by high oil prices and market-oriented reforms.

And his policies focused on modernizing infrastructure and attracting foreign investment and positioning Kazakhstan as an economic hub in Central Asia.

That is a quote from, I think, the Wikipedia page for Kazakhstan.

So is it true that Kazakhstan, the place that he specifically mentions having been during that time, was a place where it's annihilated its culture and was

had zero economic possibilities?

I don't think so.

I think he's just trying to paint a picture that he has no real expertise or insight into in order to push a political agenda.

He's talking about he's going to a place where communism collapsed.

Well, look, I'm not suggesting that communism is the right thing, but that'd be like going to Detroit and saying manufacturing things is evil.

Just look around Detroit.

Look at how destroyed this place is.

Look at how destitute this place is.

They had a manufacturing base.

Look at what it did to the United States.

That's the same thing.

You're looking at some place that failed and then recovered.

So we can't look at something, especially, and it, and it failed at this point.

If he's two, let's just give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was 21.

If it's 2005, when he's traveling around there, the communism had failed at that point for over 10 years.

So he's trying to, he's looking at a society that their economic system collapsed over 10 years prior, and he's making judgments about how bad that system was.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

You're juggling juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family, and now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

At APU, the bigger your ambition, the better we fit.

Learn more about our 40-plus career relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

Okay, welcome back.

Let's jump right back in.

Next bit here, he's going to be talking a little bit about reform in this next clip.

And here's my number one beef with this.

All this effort to do that, all this effort to let people out of jail, no cash bail.

What about reform?

What about putting all that effort into reforming people?

How come that doesn't exist?

What about funding reform inside the prisons?

What about going to all these impoverished, drug-ridden, gang-ridden communities and doing some good?

How come there's no effort there?

If you're a real progressive, you want fucking progress, you don't want people who are already fucked up by the system and violent criminals, habitual criminals, and just let them loose to victimize everybody else, raise everyone's anxiety, create more crime and violence, and have no solution to it whatsoever.

That's not the solution.

It's very unfortunate those people are in that situation where they are habitual criminals.

And I'm sure a variety of factors beyond their control contributed to that, without doubt, right?

Sure.

But that's the solution's not let them out.

The solution is stop that from happening in the future.

And there's no effort whatsoever put on that.

There's no conscious thought of like, how do we get at the beginning of this?

Yeah,

and that's an almost impossible question to answer because it is so complex.

There are so many contributing factors.

But I actually don't think it's totally necessary to do that.

You actually can just say, here are the behaviors that we tolerate.

here are the ones that we don't tolerate, and then you lay out a series of simple consequences.

Okay, so like Joe is mentioning there, the impoverished communities where people are more likely to end up in prison.

I'm just going to point out that sounds an awful lot like their economic system failed.

A capitalism that they were living under sounds like it failed for them in that particular area, but that's not taken as a critique of the economic system they were under, unlike when Chris Rufo did his little tour of the Eastern European bloc.

But when Joe talks about prison reform, I actually take him at his word.

I think he genuinely does want and care about prison reform.

We've heard him allude to it in other kinds of places.

It's something he does think there should be some time put into.

But he's done nothing at all to promote or even explore work in that direction.

It's a thing he says he wants, but he tends to bring it up when we're talking about something else in order to say, why we care about this?

We should be caring about prison reform.

When was the last, we haven't seen him have someone on who's an expert in prison reform.

He says there's no effort in that area.

Well, that's not the case.

It's just that you're not spending any time looking for or listening to the people who are making those efforts.

Instead, you're interviewing Chris Ruffel.

That's how Joe is kind of doing this.

And it just, it just makes me a little sad because think of how big Joe's platform is.

And then imagine what a platform of that size could achieve.

If he did actually speak to people who are pushing for prison reform, if he talked about the actual complexity of the situation, the economics of incarceration, the cycle of imprisonment, the impact of poverty into it all.

He could genuinely make a big difference to it all because this claim he, this is a cause he claims to care about.

But instead, he's interviewing propagandists who use prisoners and prisons as pawns in a culture war.

Because Rufo's agenda here absolutely is not prison reform.

Everyone he's ever worked from, from the Heritage Foundation to the Discovery Institute and people in between, pushed the policies that would actively make the prison system more punitive and more discriminatory.

He even says so in this interview there.

He's saying, we just have to say, here's what we tolerate, here's what we don't, and here are the consequences.

That is, you know, tough on crime, essentially, is all he's got on this.

That is not prison reform.

And I'll link in the show notes.

The Heritage Foundation published a report on incarceration, denying that mass incarceration is even a problem and saying that the criminal justice system is in no way racist at all.

And those are the ones who wrote Project 2025, who are now reshaping the criminal justice system in America.

Joe is creating a huge straw man here by saying that they don't, the progressives really don't care about all this stuff.

They just want to let people out of jail and they don't want to fund anything and they don't want to look at any of the underlying problems.

That's just a total lie.

The defund the police movement is a perfect example of this.

The defund the police movement didn't say just take that money and do nothing with it.

They said defund the police, take away from our law enforcement, the people who come with guns and and use that as a hammer and every problem is a nail.

Instead, they said, hey, why don't we just try to see if we can manipulate some of these funds to maybe fund other places that might be able to respond to some of these emergencies differently and maybe help people in a better way, in a more holistic way, instead of just suggesting that these people can handle every problem.

And they moved, if you look at how the funding was spent, they took that money and they said, okay, well, we're going to

do other types of responders and they spent that money in different ways.

So he's just lying and saying that they're just, they don't want to help these people and they don't want to spend the money to try to fix these problems.

Of course they do.

The people who hold the purse strings and who vote differently every time to cut those purse strings, those are the ones who don't want to help anybody.

He's also talking about the prison system here and how we need to invest in, you know, make sure that these people come out.

How do you think you do that in a for-profit system?

We've been selling our prison system to for-profit providers all across the country.

Do you think that there's somehow money in there that they can just give out and be like, oh, we're going to try to make it so these people don't come back?

Do you think that's a good business model for them?

Of course, they want those people to come back.

They want those people to fill up the beds.

They have no interest whatsoever in reforming anyone.

Also, he's talking too about people being led out of jail.

And he's talking about how there's these Soros-funded DAs and they're doing these heinous crimes and they're letting people out of jail.

Well, look, defunding the police has nothing to do with a DA letting people out of jail.

That has nothing.

Those two things aren't even the same.

I mean, in some ways, defunding the police, they still caught the person.

You defunded the police and they still accomplished their job.

That has nothing to do at all with the DA and this whole conversation that's being played out.

It's all around defund the police.

It's all around that same idea.

Finally, I just want to say, like,

they talk about no cash bail here.

And we live in a country where people don't understand some of the things that they vote on.

And no cash bail is a perfect example.

They seem to think that no cash bail means if you commit a crime, you just get let out of jail.

That is not true.

That's not how no cash bail works.

They take what used to be a bail system, which definitely weights itself and favors rich people.

So if you're wealthy, you can basically get out of the jail for any crime you commit until you are tried.

If you're poor, that doesn't work that way.

So what happens is, is you go to, you get in front of a judge and a judge says, okay, well, you know, it's going to be $1,000 in bail for a misdemeanor or a felony, maybe a low-level felony, and the people can't pay it.

So they just have to spend their time in jail until their trial.

Those people, all those people, they are guilty until they're proven innocent.

There is this idea that all these people who get caught are suddenly guilty.

They're not guilty.

They have to go through a trial first to decide whether or not they're guilty.

So what you're saying is, I would much rather have people who live in poverty have a much worse chance of getting out of jail than other people who are rich who can get out of jail.

And none of them are guilty yet.

Not any one of the people who you pick are guilty yet.

The judge can just make a decision.

and look at somebody and say, no, you committed a violent felony.

I'm not going to let you out.

But they think it's a revolving door.

they get caught and they get thrown back out into the into the streets and that's not how it works just educate yourself for two minutes on how it actually works instead of just picking up on a buzzword like chris rufo is trying to get them to do and use that to say well this is how this this terrible position on the left is without actually understanding how that position even works yeah exactly take a buzz phrase from the left and pour everything that you think is crazy into it and convince people that that's what that actually means and then watch as they stop supporting that thing.

That is Chris Rufo's entire M.O.

Okay, so now they're going to move on to talk about Harvard.

After the 10-7 attack, Harvard kind of reveals the ideology and the institution.

And then

another reporter and I obtained the plagiarism documents.

We were the ones who broke the plagiarism.

Just for people that aren't aware, for maybe so this can be standalone, what Christopher's referring to is that Harvard,

the president of Harvard and the president of MIT and Penn,

they all had this meeting where they were grilled by which was the

Stephanik.

Yes.

Who grilled them about using anti-Jewish hate and is that hate speech to say death to the Jews?

And their answer was essentially, if it's actionable, then it's hate.

It was the most bonkers, bizarre mental gymnastics.

And also with that one woman from Penn, done in the most condescending way.

Oh, yeah.

It's like she is so accustomed to being the boss, so accustomed to people like accepting her word and not dealing with the outside world that she doesn't realize how fucking insane what she's saying is.

Yeah.

The question was, if

students were calling for the genocide of Jews, would that violate Harvard's policy?

Yes.

And the answer from Claudine Gay, the former president, was it depends on the context.

It's like, I mean, oh, you know, and so that is a moment where things that had been obscure, especially for people on the center left, suddenly became clear.

Yes.

And so this caused all sorts of chaos predictably.

You have donors dropping out.

You have alumni furious.

So let's look into this story here.

So this was, I had a quick look into this because you may not remember it at the time.

There was nearly a six-hour hearing, is what this was.

And at the end of, no, near the end of that uh six-hour hearing new york republican elise stefanik asked the three women from harvard at the time does calling for the genocide of jews violate your university's code of conduct rules regarding bullying harassment yes or no each witness avoided giving a direct answer because this was six hours in it was clearly trying to be a gotcha question and they were trying to avoid a gotcha question and say something along the lines it depends on context Claudine Geh added further that Harvard only takes action when the speech crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, or intimidation.

Now, in that

six-hour hearing and subsequently, Dr.

Gay and the other college presidents also stated their strong support for Israel, their opposition to anti-Semitism.

But she has said that her comments during the exchange that went viral were a mistake.

It was taken, that clip was taken from the end of the six-hour hearing and went viral of, look, here's someone from a senior position in Harvard who is saying it's totally fine to be saying, to be calling for the genocide of Jews.

What Claudine Gay said about it was, what I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community and threats to our Jewish students have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.

So it sounds to me like she spent a six-hour session of them trying to bait her into saying something they could use, and she fucked up near the end of it by saying something that she could use.

And okay, that is bad.

I'm not defending what she said, but I can understand in context how after six hours you may say something that you're trying to avoid being baited into a gotcha question and you make a fuck-up along the way.

That is what they're talking about here.

That's the entire scandal.

It's something she apologized for.

She later resigned over it.

And Joe is portraying this, understandably, as it's awful that you would say something like that.

I will point out that during the Graham Linehan interview, he talks about Mark Meacham, who is the Scottish comedian who taught his pug to do nazi salutes based on the trigger phrase, gas the Jews.

And Joe Rogan was completely on the side of the comedian.

He should be fine to say stuff like that.

He shouldn't face repercussions for saying that kind of thing.

So whether you do think, whether Joe thinks there should be consequences for calling for the genocide of Jewish people depends very much on who's the one saying it.

If it's a white Scottish comedian from the right wing, totally fine, he should be allowed to say it.

If it's a woman of color who's in a position of authority at Harvard, absolutely not.

She should be sacked over it.

So I just think that kind of moment of direct hypocrisy on that one question is worth drawing attention to.

That's a great point, Marsh.

That's a really interesting juxtaposition of those two ideas, him trying to hold those at the same time.

I want to mention too, just really quickly, this idea that someone on a stand in front of Congress says something, and don't get me wrong, this is a powerful person at Harvard.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's policy, right?

It could be someone who's just saying something, and then it's not necessarily policy.

But to have somebody up there and to say it, suddenly now you can demonize the entirety of Harvard by having someone make a slip-up while they're listening.

And it's obviously a slip-up because they admit that it was a slip-up, right?

Yeah, I'm not putting that in there.

That's something that they said they did.

They said they slipped up.

Now you can basically attack all of essentially any Ivy League or even just any higher education, as long as you have that one slip-up,

when in essence, it is essentially just one person saying one thing in one moment.

It's not necessarily policy across the board.

Yeah.

And had she, had she responded the other way and saying, no, as the second you're talking about the genocide of the Jews, that you will be, you'll be kicked out of Harvard, Joe could have been just as offended that he's no longer allowed to tell Holocaust jokes as a comedian.

How dare they come for the freedom of speech?

So it's very much about finding ways to dismiss the people you dislike because they're your political opponents and not about a worldview that's coherent.

And that's kind of, again, that's Chris Ruffo's M.O.

essentially.

Okay, more on Harvard.

And then a little birdie sent another reporter and me a document showing that actually Claudine Gay, you know, great scholar of Harvard, had plagiarized dozens of passages in her PhD thesis.

And so in this context of this big fight, you know, you get a document like this and you say, this actually reveals the heart of this conflict.

And so published it, obviously it causes a huge firestorm.

But the question is the same.

It's to say to Harvard, okay,

DEI is the de facto highest principle of the university now.

That's clear.

But your motto for the last, you know, three, four hundred years has been veritas, truth.

And we put them in a dilemma where they had to choose one.

You either choose DEI or you choose truth.

Which one are you going to sacrifice?

So I think this is interesting because after that whole exchange about

the genocide of Jewish people, as Rufo points out, he was given some kind of evidence that he thinks evidenced the fact that Claudian Gay was plagiarizing her PhD thesis.

And what he's saying is this goes to the heart of it.

I would argue this speaks not at all to the heart of it.

As you say, this is a person who's high up in Harvard who says something during a hearing.

That doesn't mean that it's policy.

If it was policy, that's a different thing.

You could say that

she herself might have views in this area that you don't agree with.

That's perfectly fine.

But Chris Rufer was saying that she's only there because of DEI,

because she is the first black female president of Harvard.

So this is DEI versus truth.

I would argue it's nothing to do with DEI at all, because I think she was appointed on merit.

So what is this plagiarism accusation that he brings?

So this is going to, I've got a couple of links I'll put in the show notes from Snopes and from Wikipedia.

I'll just summarize some bits of them.

But the allegations he made were

the claims of plagiarism was more, it says in Snopes here, it was more subtle than the copying that many people think of.

People think a plagiarism thing was you take entire chunks and you're passing it off as your own.

In fact, what she did was she cited the sources that the plagiarized, so called plagiarized material is from, but some of the texts that she used verbatim, she didn't put quotation marks around.

Some of them she did,

but from the same source, she included other sentences that she neglected to put quotation marks around, even though she said in in the references, this is the source for those kind of claims.

It goes on here, according to an article in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard Students' newspaper, the inquiry was requested by Gay herself.

So she requested an inquiry into her work.

And what it found is while there was a few instances of inadequate citations, the mishaps didn't meet Harvard standards for research misconduct.

It also mentions that many of the academics that Claudine Gay

supposedly plagiarized didn't think she'd done anything wrong.

So she's got sections of her

thesis that quote other people.

Those people say, I don't think she's plagiarized me here.

This isn't plagiarism.

And that's their work they're talking about.

But instead, Claudine Gay did

resign after all.

And Rufo explained afterwards that the campaign to false gay to resign was highly coordinated and organized, and that he planned to smuggle the plagiarism story into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple gay.

So Rufo is saying very specifically here, his plan was to make her resign to find something he could use to give to the left so that the left would come for this particular person.

That is what's going on here.

That is part of

his whole project here is to try and topple someone who is a powerful woman, a powerful woman of color, in a position at a fairly left-leaning university.

And he was finding what he could in order to bring her down.

And in the end, she's the one who called for

inquiry into it.

The inquiry found she had nothing nothing to answer, but she still resigned because of the coordinated campaign that Rufo himself admits it was a highly coordinated campaign against her.

That is what he's talking about to Joel Rorgan here.

Okay, so this next bit,

this is

this one's talking about ratings and rage bait.

And so this stuff is like, it's rage bait for the right.

It drives headlines, it drives outrage, it drives, you know, some kind of momentum.

Ratings.

Ratings.

But what it's not driving, unfortunately, is a substantive pushback, legal, administrative, policy,

and as far as kind of deeper cultural changes.

But

I'm very concerned because these are just these gambits where they make.

And once they stick, then you're in.

It's very hard to roll back.

Look at the military.

You have all of these, you know, men masquerading as women that are now suddenly elevated in the military hierarchy.

This is not trivial.

We're the most powerful military in the world.

We maintain, you know, kind of international peace.

And it's like now the highest concern is trans?

No.

I don't think that this is how we should be making decisions.

And I don't think that we should be submitting to the original lie.

You should never submit to the original lie because if you do, you can never successfully push back again.

So I think he's right here that this is rage bait for the right.

That's what he admits that this is.

It's just rage bait for the right that will drive ratings.

I mean, his career is built on rage bait for the right.

That drives ratings.

That's why he has a massive Twitter following.

That's why he's able to be cited in various newspaper reports.

It's why he's able to topple the president of Harvard, because he finds things that are rage bait for the right, and in particular the one for Harvard, finds ways to smuggle that into the left to become rage bait for the left as well.

But

his reason for bringing that up in particular is to say it's only rage bait, but it doesn't achieve anything from a policy or cultural change.

This is only last year.

Imagine thinking or imagine pretending that you want people to think that you think that there were no policy or cultural changes due to the demonization of critical race theory, DEI, wokeness, or anything like that.

I would argue a large part of the political landscape, not just of your country, but of my country as well, has been driven by the policy and cultural changes that are prefaced and built on the foundations of, I would argue, disingenuous stories like this from bad actors who admit that what they're trying to do is highly organized, highly coordinated attacks in order to bring down the things that they dislike.

Like even in this bit of this one clip, he goes straight from saying that to saying that now the highest concern in the military is to make sure there's trans people involved.

As if that is genuinely reflective of anything at all.

That all these, he says, all of these men are suddenly these men dressed as women.

Now, I don't think there's a great deal of trans people in the military.

I think there are trans people in the military, but I don't think the military is suddenly overrun by people identifying as trans.

And it certainly isn't the highest concern of the American military, a military that up until only recently, you weren't allowed to admit that you were gay and allowed to be here.

And maybe even now, again, I'm not sure.

It's just a lie to say that that is now the highest concern of the American military.

And it's a lie from a propagandist in order to push a very specific political opinion because he's trying to do rage bait from the right that he can use for cultural and policy change.

He will even admit that in this interview.

And Joe could push back.

But even as Rufo says here, you know, you should never submit to the original lie because if you can do, you can never successfully push back again.

Joe doesn't push back on any of this original stuff.

And so he will never successfully be able to push back in any of this conversation against what Rufo is saying and doing.

And it's, you get a chance to see Rufo being doing, I think, a really great job of flicking all the perfect switches on Joe, which is like trans issues.

And then he starts talking about the military and talking about how we need to protect ourselves.

So he's he's feeding into all the traits that Joe constantly talks about on his show.

It could be almost every other show.

He's, he has to bring up trans issues on almost every show.

And it makes it seem like if he makes it seem like this stuff is eroding America, Joe is just going to be on his on his side no matter what.

And Joe here doesn't push push back and won't push back for the rest of the show.

Yeah, and we'll hear because the next clip is directly following that.

So this is the very next thing that Joe starts talking about.

It's certainly odd that they're pushing that.

You know, this is where I get so confused.

Because if I really want to go full tinfoil hat conspiracy, I would say, well, if I was a foreign country,

I would be promoting this as much as possible in any way I could.

I would be funding organizations to do things that would destroy cities.

I would be funding universities to continue insane policies.

I'd be teaching them the kind of things that they taught people where that woman, do you remember you saw that woman who talked to Josh Howley?

He was asking, I think it was like, can men get their periods?

And she is actually laughing.

I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.

Like, what?

I think she's a Stanford law professor.

She was somewhere.

Yeah.

Might have been Berkeley.

Yeah.

But it was whatever it was.

It was like, what did you just say?

What did you just say?

And why did you say it that way?

You think you're so accustomed to being in your bubble that you don't recognize how gross it is when you giggle before you say something.

I just want to point out what you're saying is transphobic and opens up trans people to violence.

Like some, some men can have periods.

So, Joe starts that clip by recognizing that, yeah, there is some strategic value in pushing at these weak spots in society.

Seeing like, oh, tinfoil hat is if I was a foreign power, I'd be pushing at these spots in society.

Well, he has no awareness that the spots in society are being exploited by propagandists like Chris Ruffo.

That is what Chris Ruffo is there to do, to generate these spaces,

these fracture bifurcation points in society, and then exploit them to political ends for the various organizations that he's worked with and for.

This is from 2024, you know, and Joe is very happily agreeing with all of this.

But Rufo's agenda is very much also to come for the various things that we've seen Joe say he cares about.

You know, steps towards racial justice.

Joe said he cares about.

Chris Rufo's agenda is to prevent that from happening.

Abortion, Chris Ruffo's agenda is to come against abortion.

Joe has said he cares about abortion.

Rufo is against that.

Prison reform.

He's talked about prison reform in this conversation.

And Rufo's agenda is to not have that, is to just push, you know, these are the things that we will tolerate and anything else as consequences.

But these are, those are all things that Joe has paid lip service to at least believing in, including in this episode.

And he can't see that he is being played by Rufo to not care about those things as much as he does trans people and the various other obvious split points that Rufo is pushing.

The clip that they're talking about, it is someone talking to Josh Hawley, but it's not as Joe represents it, because she does laugh, but it's because she's laughing at the attempt from Josh Hawley to give her gotcha questions.

And she is recognizing that these are gotcha questions.

And she's, rather than answering that question, is reflecting that what you're trying to do is do a gotcha on me.

And that is why she's laughing, because she recognizes the game that he is trying to play here.

That's what that is.

But Joe is painting it like she's so out of touch that she thinks it's totally fine to just laugh when senators ask you really serious questions and things.

There is a thing that Joe does, and I've been noticing it as we listen to the show.

You know, neither of us had any experience when it came into this, but as we've started to listen, there's a thing that I've been noticing.

And it's whenever a woman is confronted, especially a woman who is in higher education or is an educated woman, if she is attacked in any way, and he will, he will, one, he will try to imitate her voice to make her sound stupid, right?

So he does that a lot.

He will try to make a stupid sounding voice to make her sound as if she, the things she was saying are stupid.

But if she gets attacked in any way, He is 100% on the side of the attacker and very much wants to see that woman put back in her place.

I think that that is pretty evident from many of the clips and even two of the clips that we played in this episode specifically, when they were talking about the three people who were defending Ivy League institutions in front of Congress, he made a voice and he made their position sound stupid and he did the exact same thing here.

And I think that's a real problem for Joe.

He comes off as a serious misogynist when he does this stuff over and over and over again.

It's something I've picked out as we've listened to more and more of his tape.

Okay, so now they're going to start talking about this new College of Florida.

Now, this is a college that Chris Ruffo has some ability to affect.

And so we're going to hear a lot about it in these next clips

you know when we took over new college of florida it was the most left-leaning university it's basically the evergreen it was the evergreen state of florida it was the the the student population was more than 50 percent trans queer and non-binary more than 50 more than 50 percent what is the odds of that uh in terms of like the normal account when they do if they get a random group of 100 human beings there's a bit of a disparity there uh you know especially because like non-binary is fake it's not a thing right it's it this doesn't exist.

It's a non-binary.

Maybe I am.

You can be.

You just say it.

You just say it.

I knew a dude just to say it.

So they're acting like it's completely random chance that a college that skewed towards LGBTQ people would have quite a large percentage of people there.

But it's not random chance that there's a reason they were going there and it's because of the reputation of the college.

Exactly.

It's like when you get, you know, it's like since San Francisco has a lot of gay people in it.

What are the chances?

Is there something in the water?

No, it's because gay people will move to San Francisco for the culture.

Same with Brighton in the UK.

There are places that will have a culture that will attract people because they are seeking that culture.

And that's what's going on here.

But by the same token, it also isn't random chance that Rufo was brought into that specific college.

Great point.

That is why he was brought in.

And what we actually have here is a trustee of a college.

specifically discriminating against students from within that college on the largest podcast platform in the world, while also complaining that it's just impossible these days to stand up against wokeness.

There's nothing we can do.

You are employed as a representative of a college that your own statistics show is disproportionately LGBTQ friendly, and you are saying non-binary people don't exist.

That is direct discrimination from a position of authority.

Yeah, and he says it's the most left-leaning or was the most left-leaning university.

And like you suggest, if they happen to be inclusive towards trans and non-binary people and minorities, of course it would be the most left.

It's not like it's a secret why it's the most left-leaning.

It makes sense that left-leaning people would feel comfortable there and go there because it reinforces their values.

What a dumb thing to say.

Yeah.

I want to say, too, like, we're not going to play the tape.

But Joe, after this, he starts saying, well, you know, if you're non-binary, if you're a non-binary person, you could just, you know, say that you're a non-binary person and you can basically pick up women by lying about your gender identity.

And if you pick up these women and they eventually find out, they won't respect you anymore.

And it's like, that's because you're a liar, you dumbass.

Of course they wouldn't respect you anymore.

But he almost makes it seem like the women are at fault for not respecting you anymore because you lied about your gender identity.

Well, do you know what?

I think he's actually fucked up because I think because it's Chris Rufus saying non-binary doesn't exist.

I think Joe has computed that in his head to bisexual because what he says is I had a friend who lied about doing that, but you just you just say you're non-binary, but you date only women.

And I think what he means is bisexual you just you say you're bisexual but you only ever date women and then when they find out you're not bisexual they lose respect for you and that's kind of discriminatory i think he's he's making a mistake between non-binary and bisexual

that's what i think

right um and also just for fun you know consider this flip for just a moment okay imagine this was the left-wing trustee of a university that went on a very large left-wing podcast and directly explicitly discriminated against for example christian students something that right-wing causes care about an awful lot.

And said, you know, well, the thing about Christianity is it's stupid and all the Christian students are really stupid.

The students at my university who are Christian are really stupid.

If he said something like that, right?

Instead of hearing this clip for the first time on this show, you'd have heard it played on Fox News on a loop for months while Chris Rufor called on them to resign.

And, you know, we know that's true because that's exactly what he did with the Harvard president who said that one thing about

genocide of Jewish people.

That's exactly what he's doing here.

All right.

So now they're going to talk about gays against groomers and the don't say gay bill.

Well, you know how you know that this is an

ideologically driven thing that

you have this very clear group of opinions that you must adopt is the rejection of the gays against groomers movement.

Right.

Because there's they attack those people

mercilessly.

It's like, no, like we are just homosexual men and we don't think that indoctrinating children the way you're doing is right.

It's not right.

Like what you're doing is fucked up.

You're not supposed to be teaching kids about blowjobs when they're six.

They don't need to know about sucking dick when they're six.

That's nuts.

And anybody that wants to put that in schools and put these blatantly pornographic.

And then here's the thing.

This one drove me bananas when they said the don't say gay, that it's don't say gay law.

And everybody kept repeating it.

All these liberals that I know kept repeating.

It the don't say gay law.

Nowhere in that law does it say don't say gay.

Right.

That's not what it's about.

It's about introducing, and it's a very specific age group.

It's about introducing sexually explicit books to kids that are a certain age.

And they're calling it the don't say gay law.

And I'm going to say it.

I'm going to say gay, gay, gay.

Wow.

You deserve a prize.

Again, older women, no kids, liberal, right?

But that's not what the law said.

And, but for low-information viewers of The View or listeners of MSNBC and the people that kept repeating that that don't say gay law over and over, they're like, wow, this is you hear what they're doing in Florida?

You can't say gay in school.

Imagine being a gay kid and you're in that class and you can't even say you're gay.

That's fucking nuts.

Like, hey, pal, we're talking about seven-year-olds.

So, yeah, nobody is saying we should teach six-year-olds about blowjobs.

Zero people are saying that.

That's what Joel's saying, that we shouldn't be doing that.

Good news, Joel.

Nobody is doing that.

Nobody has ever done that.

No one has ever advocated for that position.

But this idea of the don't say gay bill, well, Joe is aggressively misunderstanding or misrepresenting what that law was.

This wasn't, oh, you're just not allowed to say gay.

This is essentially talking about homosexuality at all in school was what they were targeting.

That doesn't mean about gay sex.

It's about anything that would put forward the idea that there are gay people out there and they would have, there are gay lifestyles, there are gay relationships.

Those things are all explicitly banned.

That might mean that there are some students who can't say they're gay.

It also means there are teachers who aren't allowed to talk about being gay, who aren't even to just mention that their partner is the same sex as them or they're not allowed to talk about their home life if they happen to be gay.

If they were straight, that wouldn't be an issue.

But because they're gay, they're not allowed to talk about it.

That is discrimination.

That is absolutely textbook discrimination.

That's what people are

particularly up in arms about is the complete eradication, the complete erasure of the existence of gay people in those schools.

Those kids who are seven might find out, might get to the age of 14, 15, and start to realize that they're gay, but they've got no context for what that means because they're banned from even knowing about gay people at all in their school environment, a huge part of their lives.

That's the issue.

And you also hear a call back to Candace Owens, a show we did two episodes ago, where Joe is, Joe was introduced or at least reinforced in the idea that women who are older and don't have children are open season and you can attack them for having crazy political opinions.

And this is him doing it again here, attacking people who listen to the view, but then also attacking older women, no kids.

He literally explicitly does it.

Okay, so this next bit is about fake penises.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's, yeah.

And, you know, I did a bunch of reporting and the stuff that they're doing is like insane.

It's not just, oh, teaching kids about sex.

Okay, fine.

Obviously, they have to know certain like biological realities that you know, sooner or later we all figure out.

But it was like, you know, artificial penis packers.

That was a story I did.

They were teaching like Chicago public school kids and middle school how to wear, you know, like fake penis

and then setting it up with the kind of with the hormone clinics.

And but if they don't teach them that, who's going to teach them?

That's right.

Yeah.

The older guy down the street who rodes by in the van, you know,

run in, I've got lessons.

So I'll point out Chris Ruffo smuggles in there, you know, sex lessons.

Okay, you know, things that sooner or later we all figure out.

That's because sex ed is the next thing on his list.

It's

on his list of things to remove.

Like, you don't need sex ed.

Sooner or later, we just figure it out.

But this idea of fake penises, that's a very specific claim there.

Kids, Chicago public schools, fake penises, these are things that we can look up.

So what's he referring to here?

Well, initially, when I was first looking this story up, I was in a coffee shop in London and the Wi-Fi hid those results because the British internet has been completely ruined.

So, the idea of just Googling for basic information about something to fact-check it was like, no, Google has hidden these results because of the area that you're in.

However, when I got home and onto a VPN, I could actually look this up.

I found Rufo's article for the City Journal, an article called Unholy Alliance, where he refers to his website, which refers back to that article.

That's like a circular thing going on of where to find out more information.

In it, he claims that he obtained from a whistleblower a presentation that was circulated around schools in districts 75, 120, 181, and 204 in Chicago.

So this particular presentation went to all the schools in those different districts and he links to the presentations that he found for two of those districts, districts 181 and district 204.

He doesn't link to any presentation for 75 or 120 for those particular districts, despite the fact in his article, what he says is, quote, at the end of the beyond binary presentation circulated to teachers in districts 75 and district 120, the hospital recommended a binder exchange program to assist teenage girls in binding their breasts, a kid-friendly website for gender-affirming gear, which sells items such as artificial penis packers and male-to-female

trans mask pumps, and an LGBTQ-friendly sex shop for teens that sells a range of dildors, vibrators, harnesses, anal toys, trans-friendly toys, and kink and BDSM equipment.

The links include graphic descriptions of sadomasochism, bondage, pornography, and transgressive sex.

Unquote.

So all of that sounds incredibly bad.

You shouldn't be giving children links to dildos and anal toys and various stuff like that.

But the thing is, the two districts with the apparently most damning contents in the presentation are the two that he doesn't provide the presentations for.

So the whistleblower has given in this presentation.

He's definitely seen it and he's linked other presentations, but not the two he says were the worst.

So why would it be that

the presentations with the most damning content are the ones that he doesn't provide as evidence?

The ones he does provide for districts 181 and 204, I looked at them, they've got nothing of the sort in them.

They talk about how trans people have been acknowledged for centuries in other cultures, how we shouldn't, how we should try not to misgender people.

But if we do misgender people, it's okay.

We just apologize and move on, and people will be fine with that.

If you didn't mean to do it, it's totally fine.

It's all just stuff like that.

Nothing at all to do with kink and sex toys or anything at all.

No fake penises involved in those at all.

One of those two presentations that was pretty innocuous does finish with links to other organizations where you can get more information generally.

Nothing of the sort that he's talking about.

So, my guess here, I suspect he hasn't made this up from Hall Cloth because I don't think someone like Chris Ruffo would just completely invent

a lie in this way.

I think he'd take something and twist it.

My guess is the presentations that he had got to the end of the resources section.

And maybe some of those links included included websites that also offer advice to older people, older kids, that do contain some of the kind of material or have links off to the kind of material for older kids to like, you know, teenagers, older teenagers to explore themselves in that way.

And it's a lot more appropriate for them.

So the presentation didn't have that information in it and didn't link directly to it, but you could get there if you followed some links through.

But I can't tell if that's the case or not, because there is no version of his work in this area, even in the internet archives archives from the time when it was first published that i could see that include the links for the two districts that he claims had explicit presentations and those are meant to be adaptations of a base presentation that we know didn't include anything of the sort so either he chose to just leave off links to the only damning pieces of evidence his campaign was entirely built on or he didn't include those links because it was pretty clear that it wasn't what he claimed impossible to know.

But in the published version, what we do know, he mentions four districts, two of which included explicit material those two he doesn't provide links to those are the ones he's bringing up here on joe rogan as evidence as proof and we cannot fact check that because he doesn't give us the evidence he says he's seen that is suspicious that should be a red flag

this next clip is about uh well it's really just him telling himself

the economics of it is also perilous right all of these systems are functionally insolvent, right?

University system, our federal budget.

Federal budget, why?

It's just crazy.

You don't have to be a math PhD to understand that this is not sustainable over the long term.

And so, look, as a political person,

what I always do is try to figure out what rifts and possibilities are opening in society and how can I use those to advance the political objectives that I have.

That's how it works.

And so when there's the kind of Hamas attacks and the universities reveal themselves to be crazy, or it's the capture of K through 12 schools and the gender ideology is going radical, you know, of these problems also provide opportunities for correction, for reforms, for decentralizing some of these institutions.

And I think we're now teetering on a few different vectors towards what could be a radical restructuring of our society.

This is everything you need to know about Chris Ruffo right here.

This is him admitting his plans and his tactics.

You know, he says, I look for what rifts and possibilities there are out there.

He looks for rifts rifts in society and looks at how he could exploit them in order to push his particular political agendas, which is decentralizing institutions, especially liberal institutions.

He's not coming for any of the right-wing conservative institutions.

He's coming for the liberal institutions that are a threat to the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute, Christian nationalism, those old, same old talking points.

And he's saying he's looking for those opportunities around gender ideology, around Hamas and Israel.

He sees anything he could find and seize upon in order to find these opportunities.

And he's willing to create those opportunities by taking a term like critical race theory and adjusting it and in the minds of

the public until it includes everything he dislikes and everything they're scared of.

And he will use that to widen the rift and to create the opportunity he wants to exploit.

That is what Chris Rufo is about.

And Joe Rogan is just another of those possibilities.

He says there are different vectors for a radical restructuring society.

Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan experience, the podcast, the listenership, just another vector for him to explore.

Yep.

This last clip is talking about how he got radicalized.

And then the final change was

in the run-up and then after 2020.

I mean, 2020 radicalized me because you realized how profound this cultural capture is.

And you realize that the consequences are no longer abstract.

They're no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, let's say, that are totally run by the state.

But actually, it's now proliferated to the middle classes, the upper classes.

This is something that wants total domination.

And so

I got canceled out of my documentary career.

Once I became known as a conservative, I lost funding, I lost relationships, I lost broadcast, distribution.

And then it's like, I'm out kind of launched into the wilderness.

Like, all right, well, that career is done.

What do I do next?

And then say, all right, well, let's let's get into politics.

Let's use some of the skills that I've developed as a filmmaker.

I'm not a traditional conservative.

Like, I'm not a college Republican.

I don't own a bow tie.

So he talks at various points in the interview that he was leftist.

He's saying 2020 radicalized him out of his leftist views.

Well, those leftist views in 2020 must have been awkward because in 2017, he was a fellow at the Claremont Institute for Conservative Think Tank alongside James O'Keefe from Project Veritas.

Wow.

Before 2020, he'd been working for the Heritage Foundation.

He'd been working for the Discovery Institute.

It must have been really awkward to be very leftist in his views while working for those incredibly conservative think tanks.

Here is a quote from the New York magazine about Chris Ruffo that I think explains it quite well.

He's a product of right-wing movement that has formed countless others from the same mold.

A documentary filmmaker who graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Rufo possesses an impeccable conservative pedigree.

Fellowships with unclear purviews litter his resume.

A former visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Rufo was once also a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremore Institute alongside James O'Keefe of Project Veritas.

Later, he worked for a little-known Christian think tank based in Seattle called the Discovery Institute, where he frequently wrote on the subject of homelessness.

So, that is kind of the New York magazine talking about Rufo's credentials there.

And also, he says, you know, 2020, he decided to get into politics.

He said that in the clip right there.

And so, in 2020, I decided, what do I do now?

Now I can't be a documentary maker.

Let's get into politics.

Well, is that true?

Well, no.

In fact, Rufo once tried to sue the city of Seattle in 2017 over its high earner income tax, but he didn't make enough of himself to be impacted by it at the time, but he was trying to sort of get rid of the income tax.

And then in 2018, he ran a brief blink and you miss it campaign for Seattle City Council.

So he was involved in politics before 2020.

That is just a lie that he's telling Joe, because if you say, did you know I used to be very left-wing and now I'm not, Joe will believe anything you say from

Whether you spend your day in a tractor seat or split time between your office and your land, LandPride offers a complete line of tractor-mounted implements and Kubota-branded skid steer attachments.

These labor-saving tools tackle your chores and fit your lifestyle.

Visit LandPride.com to browse a wide range of mowers, seeders, tillers, as well as tools for snow removal, dirt working, and material handling.

Financing is available.

Visit your Land Pride dealer and build your tractor package today.

Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the tool bag?

Okay, so Marsh, this time we're doing argument ad populum.

Yeah, so this is also known as the argument from popularity.

And the argument roughly goes along the lines of, well, a lot of people think this, so it must be true because that many people can't be wrong.

And we're not going to do a straight version of the argument for popularity.

We're actually going to go for a bit of a twist version, a slightly sneakier version of it that Rufo employs constantly throughout this whole conversation, where he is assuring Joe that.

Actually, most people agree with me on these positions, even if they're too scared to say so.

So it's essentially the argument from the hypothetical popularity.

You know, he's the voice of the common sense, the silent majority.

You won't hear them saying that because they daren't say it, but I'm willing to say it.

And I know most people agree with me.

But the thing is, lots of people can believe something that isn't true.

And that's even just assuming that we accept you at your word.

That lots of people even agree with you in the first place when we have no evidence of that, because those silent people aren't telling us what they really think.

And what they really think is, you're great, Chris Rufo.

So, yeah, that is the version of the argument we're going to see throughout here.

All right, let's get it started.

Here's the first clip.

It's a very strange thing where logic has just been blown by the wayside because the very people that are in charge of disseminating education and

challenging young minds have completely abandoned that task and are now wholesale focused on promoting this ideology that must be adhered to.

And none of these people exist that are teaching these things.

None of these people exist in the world that we're currently existing in, which is the outside of the university world.

These people exist in this bizarre world where they get indoctrinated and educated, and then they indoctrinate more and educate more, and they stay in this system.

And they're not out there in the world.

They're just not.

But they don't speak for us.

But they don't speak for us.

They don't agree with us.

And yet they're ruling the institutions that are educating our children, that are forming the values, that are creating the very vocabulary that we use.

So Joe and Chris both at this stage are doing this thing of like, these people aren't like us.

Everyone else knows what's true.

We're the common sense alternative.

We are the voice of the silent masses.

And just assuming that everybody disagrees with the things that they also disagree with.

But that's just a position that they're claiming in order to make their ideas seem way more popular and way more common sense than they actually are.

And we see the kind of stuff that they get caught up on when they're talking about this framework, this framework that they're bringing up.

This is all campus craziness stuff.

This is a segment on Tucker Carlson, where some low power person who might be a student or a low-level official might say something that's controversial to a lot of conservatives, and that suddenly puts everybody up in arms.

And they all presume that that is the official opinion of all the institutions across the entirety of the United States when it could be a tiny little group of people at a very small university who have a very specific opinion about what's happening around them right now.

And these people seem to think it's ubiquitous and passed all across the United States.

Listen to how they're talking about this.

They're like, they don't speak for us.

They don't know how to exist outside of the university.

Listen to how they're talking about it.

They make it seem like it's ubiquitous.

Very often, it's a very hyper-localized opinion about something very specific.

that's happening at a very specific university.

We found this when we did the background on Warren Smith.

When When he came in and he was like, oh, it's all campus craziness stuff.

And then you look into it, you're like, oh, there was a very specific thing happening at your university that you aren't even bringing up in this conversation just to pass off everybody who goes to a university as a crazy person.

Yeah.

And they'll say like, well, everybody agrees with us.

We have a common sense.

We're speaking of the everyday person.

To be honest, the everyday person isn't really paying attention to this.

The everyday person didn't really give a shit about the Claudine Gay plagiarism at Harvard.

The average person doesn't care about that.

You just, you're so deep in this world that you have to paint yourself, your concerns, as the concerns of everyone.

And I just don't think they are.

So now they're going to talk about oil in this next clip.

People, look, I'm in that world of words, ideas, publication.

It's a pretty easy life in some ways, right?

You know, you're doing reading, you're doing writing, you're doing media.

But I have a lot of friends that live in my small town that do actual hard work.

You know, they're doing work in the oil business.

They're working on commercial plumbing.

They're working in actual real things that we depend on, but we take for granted.

Right.

And those things are actually hard.

Super fun.

Those things are super hard.

It takes a ton of dedication, a ton of skill.

And it's the reason that those of us who are privileged enough, in the real sense of the word, can do what we do.

We depend on this entire infrastructure of the actual physical world.

And so

I get endlessly frustrated with people who have these, ban oil.

Oh, ban oil?

Our whole society collapses instantly.

Yeah.

Everything that you do vanishes in 10 seconds.

And so it's like we've created people with not only no connection to the real world around them, but they have no connection to their own nature as human beings.

I mean, these are people that don't know what it means to be human.

They're just kind of symbols of ideology.

They're like, you know, you look at those videos and you're like, these are not people who are making even conscious decisions.

These are kind of puppets as part of some agenda, as part of some some mimetic ideology that is nihilistic at its heart.

And that's where I think we're going.

If you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color, you know,

you have no sense of values.

Okay, so the organization is called Just Stop Oil, not Ban Oil.

Yeah.

And they want to phase it out as a form of energy, not remove it from our society completely because oil contributes all kinds of different things to our society, not just fuel.

It is many different things.

It creates a lot of different plastics that we use.

So they're not saying remove it from your life entirely.

They're saying, hey, let's stop using it as a fuel so that we can maybe cut down the carbon that we're shooting into the atmosphere and maybe burning the planet.

Can we maybe think about doing that?

Instead, they start to call these people inhuman because they oppose banning fossil fuels.

That person's inhuman?

I mean, it doesn't even, it doesn't even make any sense what he's saying, but he is using words that are really, I mean, that, that's a really, that's a really,

it's a really vicious thing to say about someone who opposes what you think.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just listening to dehumanizing the people he agree, he disagrees with.

And the thing is, once you do that, don't worry, they're not, they're not real people.

They're symbols.

They're avatars.

They're not really

puppets.

They're nihilistic.

Well, once you start painting the people who disagree with you as that, what does that mean?

Well, it means if they're not real people, then the consequences aren't real.

That's how you inflame violence.

It's how you inflame further division.

That's how you get to where America and even British culture are right now.

So it's really dangerous.

I agree.

And he also uses this line at the end.

He's like, if you hate your traditions, you hate your history, you hate your economy, you hate your own skin color, you know, you have no sense of values.

I would say if you look back on your culture's history and you think everything you ever did was right, then you have no sense of values.

You have to be able to look back and be able to think, maybe we made mistakes in the past.

If you think everything you did in the past was a good thing, I would say that you're the one who doesn't have any sense of history.

Yeah, I agree.

And so why is this an example of the this twisted argument at Populum?

Well, think about what he's saying here.

The people who want to stop climate change, they've got no connection to the real world.

Unlike, you know, Chris, who assures us he's got all of these blue-collar friends who represent the real people, and they all agree with him.

So, you know, know chris's positions they must be really grassroots and they must be really realistic because of all the very real people he's told us about that he definitely knows that definitely definitely agree with him except if we want to really talk about what most people think there's a 2024 paper from science advancers that found uh 59 000 people sampled across 63 countries and of them 86% of people agree that climate change is real and that it's a serious threat.

72% support policies that tackle climate change.

I guess none of those 59,000 people were in the handful of hypothetical working class people in the small town that Chris Rufor knows who agree with him.

And I also imagine none of them were inside of the well-financed climate change denying organizations placed at the Heritage Foundation who employ Rufor to deny climate change and push back against the measures.

All right, this last clip.

is talking about being wealthy.

If it's not already.

Again, people are scared to speak out you talk to folks that are you know i i used to have this idea that oh you know there's the concept of fuck you money once you have a certain kind of net worth uh you're untouchable uh you have you're kind of immune to to to social consequences you can do whatever you want that's not even true i talk to a lot of folks um of of you know considerable means and not all of them but many of them are also scared because there's status and prestige concerns family concerns business concerns And so it really is up and down the line.

People are scared to speak.

They're scared to tell the truth.

And because there are real social consequences for doing so.

So it's interesting, you know, he talks to a lot of people who've got a lot of money.

And, you know, honestly, guys, they're just as scared as you are.

They're just like you.

And Chris Rufo is just like you, too.

We're all the same.

We're against those nasty people.

But even the very rich people, they're just totally, totally scared and things.

They are always just normal people.

What he's trying to do here is trying to paint the concerns of the people who pay him as the concerns of the everyday person.

But they're not.

The concerns of the people who pay him, the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute, the various different kinds of institutions like that, those concerns are we can't be doing things about climate change because we don't believe that it's real.

We've got to be demonizing trans people.

We've got to be pushing back against LGBTQ people.

We've got to be pushing back against any efforts to redress racism because those things threaten our bottom line and threaten the culture of Christian nationalism we want to push in this country.

Those Those aren't popular positions, but Chris Ruffo, by doing this for the rich people are just like you guys, he's trying to push

their ideas and their concerns and their fears as common sense things that are just the same as what everyone else agrees with.

And that's just not the case.

I'm reminded of a movie.

It's called Starship Troopers.

And at the end, one of the guys walks up who has like psychic powers and he touches one of these bugs and he screams, it's afraid, it's afraid.

And like, that's sort of the victory for human beings because they're afraid.

And I just think there should be a remake with Peter Thiel coming out and someone touching Peter Thiel and be like, it's afraid, everybody.

It's afraid.

I'll tell you, billionaires should feel more afraid.

What he's suggesting is that if you have a lot of money, you can literally have no consequences for your actions.

And it's wrong that they do have to face consequences for their actions.

How dare we impose on these very rich people consequences for their actions?

That's appalling.

That's what he's saying saying in this clip.

Yeah, and I think there's actually something even more beyond that as well, because I listened to the show that we're going to cover next week, where Joe is interviewed by Lex Friedman.

That's what we're going to do next week.

And in that interview, which precedes this interview by a few years, Joe talks about how he responds to cancer culture: well, once you've got fuck you money, you're fine.

So I think Chris Ruffo has done research on Joe Rogan.

And that fuck you money idea is Joe's idea that Chris Ruffo is saying, I used to believe in this thing like fuck you money, but you know, not even fuck you money will protect you anymore.

They'll still come for you.

So you need to be scared.

You need to get on board with this agenda.

You need to follow my propaganda because even your money won't insulate you from the consequences

of what I'm saying.

So I think that's him doing a bit of research there.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh, end of the show.

Anything good in this?

So, no, but the only only thing I can say,

the only thing that I can say, and it's something I've said before,

Joe has this belief that if you talk to someone, if he sits down and talks to someone for long enough, they'll reveal who they are and what they think.

And I think that does happen.

And I think the problem is he never sees it.

I think he is capable of getting it out of them.

He's just not capable of seeing it when he does it.

And Chris Ruffel at times explicitly tells you what he does.

He explicitly says, I'm looking for these divisions in society and I'm going to provoke them in order to push the conservative activist agenda that I have.

So, yeah, we get to see Chris Ruffo admit to his master plan, but the problem is Joe doesn't notice that it's the master plan.

And it happens all the time.

It's like Joe is the James Bond where the bad guy is explaining his evil scheme, but Joe isn't listening.

Like, Joe is like strapped to the table and isn't listening as the evil guy is telling you exactly what he wants to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Someone has pulled the curtain away and you can see the wizard, but Joe is too focused on the flying monkeys to pay any attention.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I found the same exact thing.

There's nothing redeemable in this.

This is a man who is literally just trying to rev up Joe's listeners to attack people who he disagrees with and who he's paid highly to disagree with.

So it's, it's all it is is propaganda from start to finish.

And Joe is 100% on board with the propaganda.

There's no moment that Joe really pushes back at all.

He just rides along with Chris Ruffo.

They hold hands as they skip off into the distance at the end of this episode.

There's not a bit of pushback for all the ideas that Joe thinks that I can bring these ideas on and an idea can fight against an idea.

It certainly can, I guess, some places, but Joe Rogan's show isn't a place where that happens.

Yeah.

Okay, that's going to be it for this week.

Remember, you can access more than a half hour of bonus content each week for as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com slash no Rogan.

Meanwhile, you can horn more from me at Cognitive Dissonance and citation needed and more from Marsh at Skeptics with a K and the skeptic podcast.

We're going to be back next week for a little more the no Rogan experience.

If you love the show, please rate and share it.

If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to norogan.com.

K-N-O-W-R-O-G-A-N dot com.

Looking for an exceptional driving experience?

Find it behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz SUV.

Experience the power, precision, and intelligence of an iconic Mercedes-Benz SUV at your local Mercedes-Benz dealer today.

Hi, I'm Chris Gethard, and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone.

I tweet out a phone number, thousands of people try to call.

I talk to one of them, they stay anonymous.

I can't hang up.

That's all the rules.

I never know what's going to happen.

We get serious ones, I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison, I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy, funny ones, I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends.

I never know what's gonna happen.

It's a great show.

Subscribe today, Beautiful Anonymous.