Cognitive liberty and Democrat postmortems (11-15-2024--Hour2)

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[00:00:28] So the postmortems have begun, maybe a little bit, kind of. These are usually conducted by the losers after... Sorry, I don't mean to be like that. But when political parties suffered defeats like we saw the Democrats suffer last week, it's usually wise for them to go back and do...

[00:00:52] They call them postmortem meetings or autopsies, depending on how bad the beating was. But they go back and they look at, like, you know, things that didn't work. Why do they think they lost? And the idea there is that we should course correct so we don't get wiped out like that again.

[00:01:11] So Axios.com, in a piece by Stephen Newcomb, reports outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer heard a consistent, urgent alarm this week from Democrats who felt ambushed by GOP attacks on transgender people participating in women's sports, Axios has learned.

[00:01:39] So the fever has not quite broken on the woke left. And I'm not sure it actually will, by the way. A lot of people think, like, oh, we won. Yay. And this is it. Turning point and all that. I don't believe that.

[00:01:55] And actually, I'm not alone. Have you heard of a guy named Peter Boghossian? Peter Boghossian was one of the guys that did the grievance study affair with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.

[00:02:10] These are not right wingers. They they wrote fake papers. This is now probably, I don't know, like 10 years ago.

[00:02:19] But they started writing fake papers to get them submitted and then approved for publication in the soft social science magazines and journals and such.

[00:02:31] I'll pull some of the headlines or some of the titles that they wrote. But they basically just made up fake woke research in order to prove how this field of study had zero guardrails and intellectual rigor.

[00:02:49] And they got stuff published. Peter Boghossian was one of them. He has now a sub stack and a YouTube and all this. He does podcasting and all this stuff.

[00:02:59] He was a guest at a panel discussion at the Danube Institute. And his opening statement here, I think, is very important for people to hear.

[00:03:09] It's only it's only about six minutes. And and this is my this is my thinking as well.

[00:03:16] When a wild dog.

[00:03:19] Is captured or cornered.

[00:03:23] It becomes even more ferocious.

[00:03:26] I have a sobering message for the people here.

[00:03:29] If you think a Trump victory is going to make the enemies of civilization, the enemies of cognitive liberty,

[00:03:38] the enemies of civility itself, any kind of basic freedom.

[00:03:41] To quote the famous poem, go quietly into this good night.

[00:03:47] I have a sobering message for you.

[00:03:50] You're a fool.

[00:03:52] You're grossly mistaken.

[00:03:54] That will not happen.

[00:03:56] I predict that we will see a ferociousness and a tenacity and a pathological vengeance upon the people and the cronies that we have thrown out of office.

[00:04:07] The people have basically terrorized the United States and the West of the world for at the very minimum of 12 years.

[00:04:15] So let's take a look at that landscape.

[00:04:17] What does it look like and who holds the levers of power?

[00:04:20] Here's what we're fighting right now.

[00:04:24] In my opinion, the most important battle is in the academies.

[00:04:27] Yes.

[00:04:28] All of our academies are controlled by woke maniacs.

[00:04:32] All of them.

[00:04:34] If you look at the, and this is not my, these are not my data points, the foundation, FIRE, Greg Lukianoff's organization does an excellent job of breaking down right, left.

[00:04:49] I don't think that those are very useful demarcations any longer.

[00:04:52] But just as a placeholder, we can use them.

[00:04:55] The overwhelming majority of college professors are in the far left camp.

[00:05:02] That would be one thing, but they're identitarians, as many people on the panel have discussed.

[00:05:07] So we have the control of the academies still belongs to the far left, not merely the left.

[00:05:12] The control of teacher colleges of education, where teachers become certified, is controlled by the far left.

[00:05:20] The media landscape.

[00:05:22] Now, the good thing about this, the positive news, and this is not a kind of Pollyanna optimism, the positive news is that the media has been damaged tremendously from this.

[00:05:32] The legacy media, I wouldn't say that it's in tatters, but it's taken a blow.

[00:05:36] If you look at the number one, if you want one single indication of who will vote for whom, it boils down to a single sentence.

[00:05:45] How much do you trust legacy media?

[00:05:47] The higher the trust in legacy media, the more likely they are to vote Democrat.

[00:05:54] So let's take a look at the broader culture war.

[00:05:57] Four or five things pop to mind.

[00:05:59] One thing, which is crazy, you have normal crazy, and then you have extra crazy.

[00:06:06] Anything with trans is extra, extra crazy.

[00:06:10] So, for example, there's someone, Etan Haim, who blew the whistle on doctors mutilating the genitals of children in surgeries.

[00:06:23] And Dr. Haim, instead of being given an award and thanked, was prosecuted by – you're probably very familiar with this, yeah.

[00:06:32] He was prosecuted by the full extent of the law.

[00:06:38] And he told me in an interview, in no uncertain terms, if the Democrats get in, he's going to go to a federal penitentiary.

[00:06:47] For exposing the people who have mutilated the genitals of children, he will go to a federal penitentiary.

[00:06:59] And the story is really – I know someone's saying, well, there's got to be something.

[00:07:02] But there's actually really nothing more to it than that.

[00:07:05] Okay.

[00:07:05] So we have the trans issue.

[00:07:07] We have the, quote, unquote, transing children under 18.

[00:07:10] You cannot change your sex, by the way.

[00:07:13] That is – it's not even a myth.

[00:07:15] There's some great stuff.

[00:07:16] If you have a chance, you want to look up the work of Mia Hughes, which has exposed something called the WPATH files.

[00:07:21] So the trans war, it plays large in a culture war.

[00:07:27] Things that 20, 30 years ago played in the culture war, for example, abortion plays much less of a culture – in the culture war.

[00:07:34] Other things now have come to the fore.

[00:07:37] Freedom of speech.

[00:07:38] Again, the same ideologues, the same vicious ideologues who control the organs of the media, the organs of the – what ought to be independent.

[00:07:48] These are the people who will double down.

[00:07:50] These are the people who come with a ferocious tenacity.

[00:07:54] And part of the problem is that they have jobs for life.

[00:07:58] They're tenured.

[00:07:59] They're not going anywhere.

[00:08:01] And they look at the institutions to forward very specific messages to indoctrinate people, very specific conclusions.

[00:08:08] So you can think about this in right or left.

[00:08:11] I personally prefer not to think about that.

[00:08:13] I prefer to think about it in terms of cognitive liberty.

[00:08:17] The people who want to tell you what to think and what to believe were just thrown out of office.

[00:08:24] And don't you for a single second think that these people are going to be happy about this and say, well, you know, this is really unfortunate.

[00:08:32] This is really unfortunate.

[00:08:34] We lost.

[00:08:34] These people will come back with a ferocity and a tenacity that I do not think that we have seen in a long, long time.

[00:08:44] So I leave you with this message.

[00:08:46] Now is not the time to rest on your laurels.

[00:08:49] Now is the time to work.

[00:08:52] Now is the time right now when we have momentum using institutions like the Danube Institute is the time to fight back and put the final nail in the coffin of the divisive madness, which has thrown society off of a cliff in the last 12 years.

[00:09:09] Thank you.

[00:09:10] That's Peter Boghossian speaking at the Danube Institute.

[00:09:14] There's another reason why, particularly on the trans issue, that so many people are not going to be able to give up the fight.

[00:09:24] It's because they can't.

[00:09:26] Because to do so would be to acknowledge, to admit that they have been a part of something really awful.

[00:09:37] And maybe even something that they've done or allowed to be done to their own kids.

[00:09:44] They can't say that it's anything other than what they've been saying.

[00:09:49] Because to admit that they were wrong would be to admit to a parade of horribles far worse.

[00:09:59] So it's not over.

[00:10:02] At least now, though, I think that we are seeing, you know, a division of the battle lines.

[00:10:07] And I think people are going to have to pick sides.

[00:10:10] That's where this is right now, in my opinion.

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[00:11:17] So I like this term that Peter Boghossian framed.

[00:11:23] Cognitive liberty.

[00:11:25] And this is also part of the problem with the whole trans issue.

[00:11:31] Is that, and also COVID.

[00:11:35] Which is that people don't trust the medical establishment anymore.

[00:11:39] They don't.

[00:11:42] And that's of their own doing.

[00:11:44] They did that.

[00:11:45] I, you know, I, I wasn't the one saying all of the stuff during COVID.

[00:11:51] Predicting all the catastrophe and, you know, finding time to cut dance videos in the meantime.

[00:11:57] Like, that wasn't me.

[00:11:58] I didn't do that.

[00:12:00] I wasn't the one that went before Congress denying any kind of gain of function research and all of that stuff.

[00:12:05] I wasn't the one that, that tried to, you know, play nice with China and let them cover up where the virus may have originated.

[00:12:15] That wasn't me.

[00:12:19] So, that's why you got RFK Jr.

[00:12:22] Like, that's it.

[00:12:23] You want to know how that happens?

[00:12:24] That's how that happens.

[00:12:25] And the fact that this Axios piece, talking about the post-mortem meeting, that, actually two meetings that Chuck Schumer held with his fellow Democrats to, you know, try to talk about and figure out how they lost so badly.

[00:12:48] And the first sentence is that he heard from Democrats who felt ambushed by GOP attacks on transgender people participating in women's sports.

[00:13:01] Right?

[00:13:02] The mere fact that you still write that sentence means there's a lot of work to do.

[00:13:07] The fever hasn't broken completely yet.

[00:13:11] Because we're talking about males playing in female sports.

[00:13:16] That's the issue.

[00:13:19] That's it.

[00:13:20] It's not an attack on trans people.

[00:13:23] It's saying these people need to have their sports, their leagues, their opportunities protected.

[00:13:34] But it's not framed like that by our media.

[00:13:37] But any parent that has their kid playing sports for 12 years, trying to get a scholarship, so close to getting a full ride to their, you know, favored university.

[00:13:53] And then to have that lost because somebody who couldn't compete with their own gender, they then come over and compete against your daughter.

[00:14:04] And your daughter now loses that scholarship.

[00:14:07] There isn't, like, that's not a policing the language kind of a thing now anymore for that family.

[00:14:13] And that has been happening.

[00:14:15] The GOP spent over $77 million on ads about transgender issues in the United States Senate races in 10 states going back to the summer, to July.

[00:14:26] That, according to data from Ed Impact.

[00:14:30] This Axio piece goes on to say, sources briefed on the meetings described them as listening sessions for Schumer and the rest of the Democratic caucus to hear about what went wrong and right on the campaign trail.

[00:14:42] Senate Democrats also discussed the impact the economy, specifically inflation, had on the campaigns and how Democrats message around it.

[00:14:51] Like, once again, it's never the Democrats' fault, right?

[00:14:55] It's never the policies.

[00:14:56] It's never that they've gone crazy.

[00:14:58] It's never that they pushed the envelope too far, which, by the way, I found out that's an aeronautical term.

[00:15:03] It's never that.

[00:15:04] It's that people just didn't understand our message.

[00:15:07] We just have to figure out the right words.

[00:15:10] Like, stop with the message crafting.

[00:15:12] Come up with better ideas.

[00:15:14] Because I know I go back and forth on whether I should do these types of, cover these types of topics, because I don't want to tell Democrats what they've done wrong, because I don't trust them back in power.

[00:15:27] And so by telling them what they're doing wrong, I'm afraid that they might, well, you know, adapt their strategies and messaging to lie and then get back into power and then keep doing more of this stuff, you know?

[00:15:40] But I will, but I just can't help it, you know?

[00:15:45] I'm a giver.

[00:15:46] And so here's another reason why you guys lost, okay?

[00:15:50] The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds carrying out President Biden's DEI initiatives.

[00:16:03] Hundreds of millions of dollars.

[00:16:05] Biden issued an executive order in June of 2021 calling for federal agencies to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion.

[00:16:16] Which I thought we were getting rid of the inclusion.

[00:16:18] I thought we were going to belonging.

[00:16:22] Wasn't that the push about a year ago?

[00:16:25] It's not inclusion anymore, because that would indicate somebody's on the outside and, like, you're doing stuff to include them into your group.

[00:16:34] And that's kind of bigoted, you know?

[00:16:37] You can't be saying we're going to bring you into our group.

[00:16:41] So it's just belonging, which is sort of esoteric enough where there aren't any real groups, which, of course, is a lie to anybody who went to high school.

[00:16:52] So he signs this order, June 2021.

[00:16:58] And this prioritizes DEI in recruiting and when considering promotions.

[00:17:04] DEI quickly became a dominant theme within the federal government over the next four years.

[00:17:09] The Department of Health and Human Services currently employs, you want to take a guess, how many people are DEI employees?

[00:17:19] Like people who work in DEI initiatives.

[00:17:22] Not like DEI hires, but DEI initiatives.

[00:17:28] 294.

[00:17:30] That costs the agency.

[00:17:32] This is just one.

[00:17:34] Health and Human Services.

[00:17:35] About $39 million each year.

[00:17:39] This is according to a report from Open the Books.

[00:17:42] In fiscal year 2023, 247 of the 294, 247, made more than $100,000.

[00:17:52] Four people were taken home twice that amount.

[00:17:56] So over $200,000 they were pulling in for DEI.

[00:17:59] An additional 207 oversee Biden's health equity efforts in the Office of Minority Health.

[00:18:08] That cost is about $29.4 million for salaries alone each year.

[00:18:13] Since Biden assumed the Oval Office in 2021, grant applicants for the rural community's opioid response have been required to complete a disparate impact statement that explains how systemic racism will inform their efforts in addressing the opioid crisis.

[00:18:35] So if you want any of that sweet, sweet federal money, you have to do this disparate impact statement or the diss.

[00:18:45] You have to do the diss and in the process you have to diss America.

[00:18:52] Because you have to explain how you're going to spend your money in addressing systemic racism.

[00:19:02] You're there to treat people who have opioid addiction.

[00:19:06] Applicants remain encouraged to defer to groups that have suffered from disproportioned historical inequities.

[00:19:15] And this pattern repeats across all sectors of the federal government.

[00:19:22] Here's another reason.

[00:19:23] By the way, that was National Review, a piece by Alex Wells.

[00:19:27] Here's another National Review piece by James Irwin.

[00:19:30] And I just keep, I collect these.

[00:19:33] They go into the stack of stuff.

[00:19:35] And then when I get enough of, you know, related items, I kind of bunch them all together and weave a tapestry, if you will.

[00:19:42] So here's another reason.

[00:19:44] Broadband.

[00:19:46] Broadband equity access and deployment.

[00:19:51] That's the name of the program.

[00:19:52] The B-E-A-D or the BEAD.

[00:19:55] The BEAD program.

[00:19:57] According to U.S. Census data, an estimated 11.5 million U.S. citizens still do not have access to the Internet.

[00:20:05] But we have spent billions of dollars, billions, to correct this problem.

[00:20:13] Anybody who follows a commissioner of the FCC, a guy by the name of Brendan Carr, if you follow him on Twitter, he's worth a follow.

[00:20:20] And I'm not just saying that because the FCC regulates radio.

[00:20:23] I'm not saying that.

[00:20:24] I think he's a good follow.

[00:20:26] He knows that 1,079 days after Vice President Kamala Harris was put in charge of the BEAD program,

[00:20:35] one of her many czar roles, not a single home got connected with Internet service.

[00:20:42] And given the mess of competing priorities that went into designing the program and the partisan red tape that the Biden administration piled on,

[00:20:50] the program was doomed to failure from the start.

[00:20:53] I should know.

[00:20:55] I helped write it, says James Irwin at National Review.

[00:21:00] He talks about he goes deep into some of these regulations.

[00:21:03] I'm not going to go through it.

[00:21:05] It's worth the read, though, if you're at National Review dot com.

[00:21:07] Biden's broadband bust is the name of the article.

[00:21:11] He said, I had a front row seat at the negotiations that turned what started as a straightforward state block grant program.

[00:21:20] That's what it was initially started as.

[00:21:23] Like, why don't we just give the states a chunk of money and let them determine how to connect everybody?

[00:21:28] Instead, it turned into this contradictory labyrinth of competing interests.

[00:21:35] You had senators who signed their names to the package, but they had competing and contradictory broadband needs.

[00:21:44] Almost any agreement reached in negotiations on technical standards that worked for most states did not work for Alaska.

[00:21:53] Why?

[00:21:53] Why?

[00:21:54] Permafrost.

[00:21:57] Permanent frost, right?

[00:21:59] Permanent frozen ground.

[00:22:00] Permafrost.

[00:22:01] Makes deployment more expensive.

[00:22:03] Then you got urbanized states like Rhode Island.

[00:22:06] They wanted as much money as the rural states like Maine, even though urban areas already have Internet service.

[00:22:14] The experience called into question the very idea of a national broadband expansion plan

[00:22:19] since no national strategy could possibly work in such a geographically diverse country.

[00:22:25] So Republicans said, do a block grant.

[00:22:28] And then states can determine how to do it themselves.

[00:22:31] Democrats' staff wanted more centralization, which is really off-brand for them.

[00:22:37] I mean, who couldn't see that coming, right?

[00:22:40] They pushed for requirements that states should give priority to government-owned networks, or GONs, G-O-Ns.

[00:22:50] They wanted favoritism for union labor and a national scheme of price controls known as rate regulation.

[00:22:59] He then goes on to explain all the problems with this and how the GONs, the GONs, would force out all of the private competitors and such.

[00:23:09] He says, not even one home has been connected with Internet service as a result of this Bede program,

[00:23:15] despite Biden signing it into law in November of 2021.

[00:23:19] If the first three years are any indication, Bede will end up like so many broadband programs before it,

[00:23:25] billions wasted, pockets lined, and zero homes connected.

[00:23:30] Yet another example of why you guys lost.

[00:23:35] Sure, why not? Let's go to the phones and talk with Priscilla.

[00:23:38] Welcome to the show. Hey, Priscilla.

[00:23:41] Hello.

[00:23:42] Hello.

[00:23:42] I have a question. Hello.

[00:23:44] Hello.

[00:23:45] Hello.

[00:23:46] Hello.

[00:23:47] Can you hear me?

[00:23:49] Yeah, I can hear you. That's why I'm saying hello.

[00:23:51] What is the estimate of children who have been mutilated through that surgery that you guys were talking about a few minutes ago?

[00:24:01] Hello.

[00:24:02] It's hard to know for certain. The numbers I have seen range on the low end, 15,000.

[00:24:10] Oh my gosh, you're kidding.

[00:24:13] Mm-mm. Why, did you think it was higher or lower?

[00:24:16] Lower.

[00:24:16] Oh.

[00:24:18] So is that just in the United States?

[00:24:21] Yes.

[00:24:21] Or is that over the whole...

[00:24:22] Just the United States?

[00:24:24] Yeah, over, you know, the past...

[00:24:29] Well, I don't remember the date range, but it's years. It's, you know, five to ten years.

[00:24:35] But mainly in the last half of the decade.

[00:24:39] Three and a half.

[00:24:39] Yeah.

[00:24:40] Yeah.

[00:24:41] So what was the guy's name that you can follow and read about what they're going to do to try to stop...

[00:24:48] Is Robert Kennedy going to try to stop that?

[00:24:52] Well, he's going to be in charge of the FDA, I think, is what they're looking to put him in charge of, right? The FDA?

[00:24:59] So I don't think that. I think it's HHS. Unless he's HHS. Are they putting him in HHS? Okay, he is HHS. So, yeah.

[00:25:08] I mean, that needs to be stopped.

[00:25:11] Well, a lot of people agree with you. And I think there are a lot of people that voted for Trump and for Republicans because they cannot wrap their minds around how crazy this stuff has gotten.

[00:25:25] Yes. Yeah.

[00:25:26] Okay. Thank you.

[00:25:27] Yeah, yeah.

[00:25:28] Love the program.

[00:25:28] Thanks, Priscilla. I appreciate the call. Have a great weekend. And we'll talk now with Barbara. Hello, Barbara. Welcome to the show.

[00:25:36] Hey, Pete.

[00:25:37] Hey, what's up?

[00:25:37] I heard James Lindsay when he was here in Charlotte back in September or in the fall with Mom for Liberty.

[00:25:45] I did not know he was here. Dang it. I would have loved to have seen that.

[00:25:49] He was so excellent. And it was a Republican group. And when you were reading what you read, I thought that is straight out of the Bible. It's biblical.

[00:26:02] Because there's a passage. And I had someone witness to me in one of my jobs. It was at the community college here. And she said,

[00:26:10] when something bad happens and then you go in and it gets healed, if you don't work and pray a thousand times, it will come back a thousand times worse.

[00:26:23] And I've seen it happen. And that is exactly what he's saying. They are not going to let up.

[00:26:29] Yeah.

[00:26:29] And there is such a spiritual element to the whole election. And a lot of the people I know feel the same way. And I know that...I mean, I don't know the exact scripture. I think it's in Matthew.

[00:26:42] But ever since she told me that, I just keep doing it. And you just say...you quote scripture. And she told me what to quote.

[00:26:50] Because you can just say it, but you cannot let up on something that's this awful.

[00:26:55] Yeah. No, I don't think...I heard Megan Kelly, the former Fox News host, and now she does her own show.

[00:27:01] So, um, I heard her say, and I completely agree and find myself in the same boat, which is that she said,

[00:27:07] I don't think I've used the word evil more than I have used it in the last three to four years.

[00:27:13] In my entire life prior, I never used the word evil as much as I've used it in the last three or four years.

[00:27:18] Because there comes a point where you just lack the vocabulary.

[00:27:22] Barbara, I appreciate the call. And it's not just a vocabulary thing. It's also, you know, it looks like that's what it is.

[00:27:29] All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

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[00:27:46] Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.