Now It Can Be Told: Part Two Million (09-04-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, So I came across an interesting story. It was from a podcast, and I'm on location, so I don't have the audio to play for you. But it's a guy by the name of Malcolm Gladwell. And I confess I did not know this man's name, but I do know one of his pieces of work, which was the Tipping Point. Do you remember that the tipping Point? This guy apparently has coined a couple of phrases that are now in sort of the popular vernacular, particularly with like the crossover of culture and politics. So this is a guy who is I think he's described by Jim Garrity at National Review as being well ensconced in the cultural elite. And he doesn't mean that as an insult. This is a guy who is literally like a taste maker, trendsetter, kind of a dude. Okay, And that's just the background, and you'll see why it's important in a moment. So he goes onto a podcast called The Real Science of Sport. I confess I had never heard of that either, and it is hosted by a sports scientist, professor, and I confess I had never heard of that line of work ever before either, this sports scientist professor Ross Tucker, as well as a sports journalist Mike Finch, but he doesn't really play a role in this back and forth. So you've got Raw Tucker and this guy Malcolm Gladwell. Okay, So Ross Tucker and Gladwell have done a number of things together over the years. And one of the things that they did back in either they weren't really clear on the date. It was somewhere around twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, but try to imagine, like, you know, where we were as a society and culture in twenty one twenty two, right we were we were still you know, coming out of the pandemic. A lot of the mask mandates were still in place. If you were North Carolina. In free er states, they had dropped long ago, if they were ever implemented at all. But you know, there were fights over whether the school should reopen. People were still freaked out about you know, standing five feet away from somebody or six feet away from somebody, and all of that. There was also the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful protests and rioting and looting, and so we still had a lot of that stuff going on. We had cancel culture running full bore, and at the time we also were having the rise of woke, right. We were seeing these presentations in corporate settings and in school settings right with the privileged walks and all of that stuff. So this was like sort of peak crazy. Okay, So they go on to a panel discussion. It was at something called the Sloan Conference. And I confess I have never heard of the Sloan Conference either. It's held every year at MIT in Boston. I have heard of them. But they were on a panel together Ross Tucker, the sports scientist professor, and Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. And so I believe let me see here. Tucker was a panelist and Gladwell was the moderator, Okay, And what Gladwell tells Tucker is that the organizers stacked the panel discussion. They stacked it against you, Ross, That's what he says. They put a trans athlete and a trans advocate and you on the panel. And Gladwell was the moderator, and he says it was one of those strange situations where he said, my suspicion was that ninety percent of the people in the audience were actually on Tucker's side, but five percent of the audience was willing to admit it. So a ninety percent support in an audience, but only five percent of them willing to voice that support. Because Tucker was saying things like men and women are different and men have an inherent physiological biological advantage when playing against female in sports, and whenever he would say these things, dead silence in the audience. Nobody would clap, nobody would signal approval or agreement. But when the two trans panelists would say no, no, if a dude wants to play against the women, that's totally fine, and the audience would erupt in cheers. And Gladwell says it was a particular moment which has now passed in our society. He means, if we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan Conference this year, he says, it runs in the exact opposite direction. In other words, now the people are applauding. When Tucker would say what he was saying, he says, I suspect there'd be near unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category. He says, I'm ashamed of my performance in that panel. On that panel, he's ashamed of his performance because I share your position one hundred percent, and I was cowed. He says, I was in I believe in retrospect in a dishonest way. I was objective in a dishonest way. That is not for me. I'm still feeling fine. It'll pass here. It goes Charlotte Fire Department. That's the ladder. I missed it. It's a ladder truck though heading in Touptown. I missed the number on it. Godspeed Ben. So what's interesting here is that this guy Gladwell, who is you know among the cultural elite, acknowledging what I and probably you had long suspected during the peak crazy of twenty one and twenty two, that these people didn't really believe this stuff. They didn't they just went along. And it's one of the things that I've said for years, and I forget who I first heard say it. It's not my brilliance that conjured this up, but I do believe it to be true that most people think that they would be the family that hid and Frank and her family in their attic from the Nazis, when in fact most people would not. Most people would turn them in right. Most people don't make the courageous decision, which is why it's called courageous. So this guy, Malcolm Gladwell now acknowledges he was one hundred percent on board with Ross Tucker's view, but he allowed Tucker to stand alone on that stage and to take all of the slings and arrows and to be met with death silent stares and allow the audience to rave with applause for the people that were saying things that Gladwell knew were one hundred percent incorrect. And then there's one moment he said that really solidified it for him. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. 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And the audience goes wild with approval and all of this, and Gladwell is, like I was cowed, I knew what Ross Tucker was saying. He tells him, he says, I knew what you were saying was true. I agreed with you, But in retrospect he said he was in a dishonest way. He was objective in a dishonest way because he was I'm just the moderator, so I don't have to weigh in on this, okay. But then there came a point. Gladwell says that the trans athlete that was on the panel at one point they turned to Ross Tucker and they said, quote, Ross, you have to let us win. End quote. And it was at that moment Gladwell says, quote, I realized this position has gone, This argument has gone to the furthest extreme. What the trans movement is not asking for. They're not asking for a place at the table. They're not asking to be treated with respect and dignity. What they're asking for is nobody to question the considerable physical physiological advantage that they bring to the sport, and no one to question if they're going to win these races by five seconds, well then just suck it up, right, That's what they were asking. What they're saying is you should have to live with that and that when I heard that, I was like, this is nuts, and yet I didn't say anything. And this is why at the very heart of the transactivism is a demand not for equality, but a demand for conformity, a demand that you abide by their delusion, that you participate in the fantasy you are required to say things that you do not believe to be true. That's what the demand has has always been at the heart of all of this. And people there's this belief that when you, you know, rise through the socioeconomic ranks, you become very well known, like Malcolm Gladwell, when you become comfortable economically, that now you've got this perch where you can say whatever you want and you're not beholden to this stuff. You know, you work from home, you make your own money, like you don't need somebody for another job and all of this, and people think that that insulates you, when in fact, it makes you less likely to break with the peer pressure and the conformity. And that's why you saw, as Gladwell surmised, ninety percent of the people in the audience agreeing with Ross Tucker, but only five percent of them willing to say they do. That's why you end up with that the permission structure once again, right, the permission structure. Once you can say we saw it all also with Donald Trump, right, there was that period after Trump was out. J six occurs and everybody is like, oh my gosh, you icky man, orange man, you know, and all of this. And then after he gets well, he gets shot in the first attempted assassination, after you know, he had been charged, indighted and dragged through the courts and house raided, right, all of this stuff, and then he gets shot. And at that point there becomes this permission structure that it's like this is not acceptable, no, like and what was it Mark Zuckerberg who said, like, actually, when you see Trump stand up and fist in the air, fight fight fight, like this is pretty cool, you know what I mean? Like that's pretty cool. And all of a sudden, now everybody can Elon Musk buying Twitter and coming out for Donald Trump, and all of a sudden, the floodgates open. And that's what we call the preference cascade. All of a sudden, now it's except and then you get the you know, you get your pioneers, your first followers, and then you have all the rest of the people that just you know, crash the gates. So back to Jim Garritty talking about this at National Review. He points out that Gladwell is a in demand public speaker. He gets between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars per speaking fee, which is like that, that's Pete calendar money. You have to look hard to find a guy with a better, higher, or more stable perch in the American cultural elite, he says. And I say that because even this guy was afraid to say what he really thought for fear of getting canceled. Are there other issues where ninety percent of the public feels a certain way but only five percent are willing to say so for fear of social ostracization and dire professional consequences. Of course there are, right why wouldn't there be? And then he talks about what's happening over on Blue Sky, which was the Twitter competitor. All the lefties were like, oh, I can't stand elon, and so they all fled to Blue Sky and like, if you're a conservative, you set up an account over there, and you'll get banned like within a minute. They do not countenance any disagreement whatsoever on blue sky. And it's a microcosm, writes Noah Smith, for all of the American liberalism right now, the entire left of center became defined by cancel culture, and now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack. But everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces because they say, there was a big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small number of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values, and for a decade it seemed to be working, but it overreached and collapsed, And so now you've got a shrinking pool of leftists in these spaces, and they're just canceling each other because there's nobody else in their space to cancel. Game on Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout. With Draft Kings sports book and official sports betting partner of the NFL, this isn't just football, it's first touchdown fireworks. Anytime TD rushes live bets that ride every momentum shift that DraftKings, every play is your next shot to win. Will the Panthers win? Will we even get a touchdown. 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Void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. See Sportsbook dot DraftKings dot com, Slash promos NFL Sunday Ticket offer for new subscribers only and auto renews until canceled. Digital games and commercial use excluded. Restrictions apply additional NFL Sunday Ticket terms or at YouTube dot com slash go Slash NFL Sunday Tickets Slash terms Limited time offer. All Right, So this Malcolm Gladwell, you know, this credentialed member of the cultural elite, admits he was cowed, he was dishonest when he refused to express any kind of opposition to the demands of transgender activists to allow men to play in women's sports. And by the way, we saw this also right here in North Carolina Lo those many years ago, with the fight over HB two. I keep bringing this up because it's very relevant now that the tide has turned, the vibe has shifted. And our former governor who ran on this issue to let men into women's bathrooms and locker rooms and showers and such, he ran on a campaign to win the governor's mansion to beat Pat McCrory by oh so few votes. On the HB to issue, and now he is running for US Senate and Roy Cooper should not be able to dodge these questions about whether or not he was wrong about HB two, which he was, so that's part of it. Let me get to this email. It's from Ron down in Rockhill to Pete at vptecleanershow dot com. It's a Pete meal and Ron says, uh, he's actually thankfully says for all of the transgender insanity sort of, it seems to have been the bridge too far that enabled the pendulum to swing back to some semblance of rational thinking. Dee I nonsense, defund the police, COVID insanity, social justice riots, all of it didn't do it, but the transgenderism thing came to the rescue. So yeah, I mean there that's the thing, Like, you never know what the reaction to these things are going is going to be. People can make predictions and such, but nobody knows. So yes, more cow bell, Thank you, Bob. And this is from South Carolina number who says, tell that guy admitting it now after the danger of being canceled has passed, it only means that he was a coward for not admitting it then. Well and look to his credit, it sounds like that's what he was admitting to, right, he was acknowledging that he folded. We saw it during COVID as well, right when everybody was running around saying, get vaccinated, get vaccinated, And I mean I got vaccinated, but I never told anybody else to do so. I had co morbidities and I was like way overweight, sedentary, like I'm probably a high blood pressure and all this. I was like, I'm probably in the elevated risk category. I said, but everybody could make their own decision. And I was against all of the mandates, against the lockdowns and the masking rules, all of Roy Cooper's eds. We had a lot of them, his executive directives. So so yeah, like I think that that. You know, that also showed how many people are willing to simply fall into line when you know, the experts say something, and that has eroded a lot of the trust that we have now in our institutions and the quote unquote experts. Okay, this is a very long text. I'm not going to be able to read it yet. I will come back to that. That's from Baine. I'll have to come back to that. But speaking of the great cancelation culture collapse. Have you heard the news about Barry Weiss. You know who she is. She was a columnist. She may have been like the youngest columnist at the New York Times or something like that. She was very young, and you may recall how her cancelation occurred. It was over the crazy idea that a sitting US Senator should be able to offer an op ed about rioting in our cities. Tom Cotton US Senator Tom Cotton submitted an op ed to the New York Times, and in it he said, Hey, maybe we shouldn't allow all of the rioting and looting to occur, and maybe we should actually be sending in National guardsmen to quell the riots and maintain the peace. And the leftists inside the New York Times newsroom had to complete and utter meltdown. They forced out the editor that ran the op ed, and then Barry Weiss was collateral damage in that because I believe she came to the defense of the editor who said we should run this. It's a sitting US senator and the point is for a newspaper like this is to have these discussions. And the leftists were like, no, we don't want any discussions, because that's how leftists roll, right. They don't want a free flowing debate. They want compliance to what they want. So Barry Weiss oh, also she was pro Israel, and so the leftist did not like her for that either, and that was even before October seventh. So she gets forced out. She leaves The New York Times, and she talked about this when she launched her sub stack publication called The Free Press. And over the last five years she has built The Free Press into this stable of all of these different voices and journalists doing a lot of good work. And now somebody has come along and said, we would like to buy you. You know who it is, ce BS News. All right, you hear me talk a lot about incentives, right, Well, let's talk about incentive trips, the kind that companies offer employees to fire them up and reward their teams. If you own a business or you work somewhere that offers these incentive trips, first off, good for you, but also there is a custom app that's a game changer for these trips. It's called Incentive Tripkit. Private group messaging, shared photos, you're itinerary, travel details all built into a single, easy to use app. There's even a traveler locator, so Carl from Accounting doesn't get left behind. The best part about Incentive trip Kit it's totally private, no email captures, no sign ups, no cringe ads. It's simple, clean and secure. And when the trip is over, Incentive trip Kit turns those highlights into a professional storytelling video. So think about it. When you launch next year's incentive trip campaign, that video becomes your greatest motivator. Talk about a return on investment, right, You got to check out Incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. From the text line, did get to read through Bain's text here, it says Years ago, doctor Scott Peck, author of the well known The road Less Traveled, wrote a lesser known book called The People of the Lie a Clinical Look at Evil. His focus was on the mass murder of twenty two unarmed South Vietnamese civilians called the Myli Massacre, led by the US Lieutenant William Cally in March of nineteen sixty eight. The questions raised was how in the world could a group of soldiers do this? And how no one within the platoons spoke up during the atrocity, begging them to stop during it, during and after the killings. The gist of a very detailed book is that we as humans will do things as a group we would never dream of doing as individuals. As Malcolm Gladwell suggested, there is a group dynamic that I dare say is demonic that overtakes people, as Jesus experienced with the crowd yell and crucify him. The and Frank example that I gave earlier is also another example of that. Yeah, this is this is why they say courage is contagious, right, once one person steps forward, then it emboldens somebody else. I've talked about the how riots begin. There was a sociologist that looked at riots in the sixties and talked about how everybody has a number basically, and you know, if your number is zero, that means you don't need to see anybody else pick up a brick and throw it through a window. But if your number is two, after you see two people do that, then you join in, and then somebody whose number was three sees you, and then they join in someone who's numbers four and so as you can imagine it just starts. That's again, that's a cascading effect, right, just sort of lemming, like just money, just kind of rushes where everybody is going. All right, let me go over here and talk to Ray. Hello, Ray, Welcome to the show. Hey Pete, how you doing? I'm all right? How are you all right? I had a couple quick questions maybe you could answer it for me. First off, we're saturated via WBT radio here in this area with getting the new conservative news points out. I was just wondering if that holds true across the whole country or are we kind of few and far between. And the second question is do you think we're making having a better fight of it fighting the left like now versus the days of water cron Cot and Dan rather. Those are my two questions. So on the first, I am not aware of another radio station that has hosts from uh five am until nine pm. I'm not aware of that. I think every station either starts later or ends much earlier. So we are unique, I think in that regard. But there are other, you know, conservative news talk radio stations throughout the country. There are a bunch of them in all different markets. So I don't know if that answers your question or not, but I think, yeah, we are. We are unique in that regard, Yes, based on the abount of local coverage. Yeah. And then what was the second one, that are we making any kind of a difference. I mean, yeah, we are making a better fight of it this day, getting our conservative points out and making it known better than we did, say in the days of Walter Cronkott and Dan Rather. Well. Yeah, I mean I think so. I mean there's you know, it's just like h. Thomas Soul always says that, you know, there are no solutions, there were only trade offs. And so on the one hand, we lost a lot of national unity by having a lot of different media sources because now people can get different they can get different coverage, they get different opinions and even different news stories. Right, so we don't all believe that, you know, this is the one big story that America is following, and so there's more disunity now in that regard. But on the other hand, that's a good thing because if the big three, you know, networks didn't cover a story, or the Washington Post and the New York Times didn't cover a story, then people literally would not know about it. So I think, you know, there are trade offs to the disintegration of that model. All right, Ray, I appreciate the call. Yeah, I mean, there are trade offs to the disintegration of that old model. And now you've got social media and you've got people that are now being exposed to all sorts of different ideas that they otherwise might not have been. So yeah, I mean for some people it's been very good. And you know, maybe for other people that just kind of descend into the algorithm rabbit hole and they only follow the stories they want to follow and they live in an echo chamber, then you know, for them, there's probably no difference, you know, because they're just still not interested in breaking free of that echo chamber. So I think, like I said, it's there's just a lot of trade offs there. The media ecosystem as it is now. I think it will serve whatever purpose you want it to serve for yourself, but you have to be your own aggregator now versus in the past. All Right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.