The Biggest Medical Scandal Of Our Time | Michael Shellenberger | EP 435

The picture that this organization WPATH had presented to the world was a picture of real professionalism grounded in the best available science and evidence. It is not! There is no evidence-based support for these radical interventions, which include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, meaning testosterone for females and estrogen for males, and genital surgeries, which are, of course, irreversible. The assumption is that you are trans. I think because if you accept that this mistreatment is widespread, it is so damning.

Hello everybody! I'm talking today with journalist and author Michael Shellenberger. Michael wrote "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" and also "San Francisco." He has a new book coming out called "Pathocracy." It won't launch until next year, but I'm talking to him today about something more specific and more controversial, I suppose, and that's his recent release of the so-called WPATH files.

Now, WPATH is arguably an association, but certainly not professional, and also an organization that has nothing to do whatsoever with health. We walk through his release of about 170 pages of material documenting the activities of this group, and we're going to see what happens as a consequence. So come on board for the ride!

You were instrumental in the release of the so-called WPATH files very recently, and you keep dumping catastrophes into the public sphere. Yeah, yeah, who knew that would be a role? You seem to be playing it very effectively, so why don't you tell us what's WPATH in man? Take us from the talk.

Sure, so this organization in question is called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and it's called WPATH. It's an organization I hadn't heard of until a source or sources gave me about 1,170 pages of the internal files from the discussion boards of WPATH, along with a 90-minute video of WPATH leaders and members talking about some of the problems they were encountering.

What you're seeing in these files—and I encourage people to read the files themselves; there's really no substitute for confronting the evidence directly—are conversations about how to treat or mistreat, I think I would say, people who are experiencing gender distress as young as 10, 14 years old. There's a discussion of a 13-year-old adolescent with developmental delays. There's a conversation about whether to perform genital surgeries on somebody that’s suffering from symptoms like schizophrenia, and maybe homeless concerns expressed about whether that person will be able to care for their wound, supposedly a neo-vagina. Sorry to get right into it right away, but this is the material we're discussing.

There's a lot of conversations about the problems they have in getting kids and adolescents and their parents to understand that these procedures will result in sterilization and likely a loss of sexual function. The picture that this organization WPATH had presented to the world and to the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and every major medical organization was a picture of real professionalism grounded in the best available science and evidence.

They have something called "Standards of Care," which are ostensibly guidelines for proper medical care for people suffering from so-called gender dysphoria or gender distress, and their eighth version of that—so they call it "Standards of Care 8" or SOC 8—based on their public presentation. You would think that this is a serious scientific and professional body; it is not! When you read these documents, what you see is a lot of spitballing, a lot of people making things up. You don’t see a lot of references to what's in the standards of care. But even if you did, you would learn that what's in the standards of care is effectively pseudoscience.

There is no evidence-based support for these radical interventions, which include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones—meaning testosterone for females and estrogen for males—and then surgeries, which they euphemistically refer to as top and bottom surgeries. People can understand that we’re talking about breast elimination, double mastectomy for girls as young as 13, 14, and 15 years old, and genital surgeries, which are of course irreversible, including on adolescents.

It's extremely shocking to read these conversations. There's so much to unpack in them. I think there's a kind of horror to it that—for people like me that have tried to stay away from this for a long time—I’ve certainly heard you talk about it and seen you write about it. I’d read Abigail Shrier’s book, but honestly, my psychological reaction until I was confronted with these files and asked to effectively bring them into the world was of denial. I just didn't really think that these things were going on at the scale at which they're occurring. I thought maybe people were exaggerating what was happening.

These files put to rest any doubts anybody should have that what is happening is one of the greatest medical mistreatment scandals in recorded human history. It might be the worst; it’s certainly up there with lobotomies, it’s up there with the Tuskegee experiments. It’s way worse than both of those!

There’s a lot to unpack, but anyway, that's an overview of it. It's 170 pages, and the video—oh, the one final thing I’ll say, Jordan—is just that it also shows without a shadow of a doubt that they themselves, the people that are performing these mistreatments, are aware that they are not getting what's called informed consent. This is as important as “do no harm.” So they are acknowledging that the kids and the parents don’t understand that, and then they just sort of throw up their hands and say, yeah, we don’t really know how to solve this problem.

At no point in the video does anybody say, “Hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this." It's a truly horrifying thing. But then at the intellectual level, you can't help but be slightly fascinated by these people. What is wrong with them that they're so in the grip of an ideology that they're doing these mistreatments and never questioning—effectively never questioning—that perhaps they shouldn't be doing them at all?

Okay, so let’s walk through that right now. Right from everything you said, we’re going to start with the Professional Association. Okay, so it turns out apparently that all you have to do to become a professional association that other professional associations can rely on is to call yourself a professional association.

The way you finesse that if you aren't actually a professional association—which means you're not a group of scientists and you're not qualified to be doing what you're doing—is to proclaim as loudly as you can that you're operating on behalf of someone who’s oppressed, because then it becomes a moral crime to question anything you say. So that means if you're an absolute bloody narcissistic abuser, who’s also incompetent, the best way to clamber yourself to the top of a hierarchy that would otherwise be unattainable is to lie about who you are and what you're doing.

So great, that's a wonderful invitation to the willfully blind narcissistic psychopaths. Okay, so that accounts for WPATH. Then with regards to the medical associations and the psychological associations who’ve gone along with this in the most despicable imaginable way? Well, they can point to the fact that they consulted the true experts. And who more to know than those with lived experience in the area, right? So great, we've got all sorts of excuses at hand.

Okay, so that's appalling on the professional side, and what it really is is the invasion of, what would you say, domains of specialization that once required effort by parasites who use ideology to game the system. So great! Now that’s the American Psychological Association, that’s the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and certainly WPATH are inexcusable.

I’ve never seen anything like this. I'm absolutely appalled and ashamed of my therapist colleagues, for example, for not being rioting in the streets because of this. That brings us to the next issue in your progression because then you describe gender distress. Okay, so let’s think about that. Two words: gender and distress.

Distress is indistinguishable from two things: generalized negative emotion and absence of positive emotion. Okay, so that's the core of depression and anxiety, and it's the core set of symptoms for virtually every form of pathology that comes to the attention not only of psychologists but also of medical professionals. Right? So distress is a very, very large bin. What you do if you're a credible diagnostician is you assume to begin with that the more generalized diagnosis applies: depression and anxiety. And then you further specify that as necessary, understanding that a lot of what you might attribute to the more specialized problem is actually a manifestation of the more general problem.

Right? Because one question is, well, what the hell is the difference between gender distress and anxiety and depression? And the answer is mostly nothing. Mostly nothing! And maybe there's something left over that's specific to something like body dysmorphia, but probably not. You need pretty solid proof that there is something in addition. And see, that’s another part of the slight of hand, because you might say, well, people with gender dysphoria are more likely to commit suicide. It's like, no, depressed and anxious people are more likely to commit suicide.

You have to demonstrate that there's an additional utility in your diagnostic label, and that turns out to be extremely difficult. But we're way past all that, okay? So now then we have the additional lie: so we've mucked up the notion of distress. Now we've appended another lie to it: some of this distress is attributable to confusion about gender.

There's no difference about confusion between confusion about gender and confusion about identity, right? Those are the same thing. And everybody who seeks psychological treatment has confusion about identity. That’s why they seek treatment! So you can't just take all that and rename it "gender" and think that you can get away with it. Although apparently you can!

So that’s appalling on the conceptual side; it’s inexcusable. There’s no reason whatsoever that any psychologist or physician who’s been trained remotely in the mental health sciences should ever fall for that, even for a second. No matter what! But they did!

Okay, next, next! And this is the progression that you laid out. Okay, so now we have gender distress as delineated by a pack of professionals who aren't professional and who aren't a pack and are certainly not a professional association. And what do they recommend?

They don’t recommend the minimal necessary intervention. So the clinical literature six years ago was absolutely clear regarding the small number of cases of gender dysphoria that emerged in early childhood? Very rare: one in 3,000! Very rare! Leave them the hell alone, right, till they’re 18?

Yeah, most of them turn out to be gay! Ninety percent of them! And the existence of that final 10% is highly debatable! Accept the physical reality of their embodiment! Right? So the rule is, don’t do anything stupid.

Now the man who established that was Ken Zucker. Right? He ran the best journal that dealt with childhood gender dysphoria for years up in Toronto. That was his recommendation for treatment. And the bloody radicals ran him out of business 10 years ago! Right? That’s when all this idiocy started up in Toronto.

Okay, so now you're not supposed to do anything—you’re just supposed to wait! Bad treatment is worse than no treatment. Okay, but no! We’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the opposite! We’re going to take the most extreme possible imaginable surgical intervention, and then we’re going to combine that with the most extreme possible imaginable hormonal intervention, and then we’re going to recommend that, and we’re going to tell people that if they don’t listen, their children are going to die! Right?

They’re going to commit suicide, which is a complete bloody lie. There was never a bit of evidence for that—not even bad evidence. It was just a lie! And then, to top it all off, we’re going to offer this absolutely cataclysmic treatment with unimaginably dire consequences to people who don’t even understand and can’t understand what they’re agreeing to. Right? Then we’re going to promise them that’s how they’ll find their true self!

Right? So that’s where we’re at! It’s so sickening! It’s so sickening that, well, and let’s close with your final point! You said you’d heard a little bit from Abigail Shrier; you heard a little bit from me. There have been some other people screeching and bitching about this in the background.

Like, I knew this was coming back in 2016. I could see it just absolutely clearly! I knew it was going to affect young women primarily because that’s a historical part of the course! But you said, you know, you’re a pretty astute guy and you’re actually also pretty open to the revelation of uncomfortable material. But you said that even you were enticed into what? Exactly what did you think of Abigail?

Okay, why? I think it was some... I mean, I should say, I mean, I wasn't totally unenticed—it’s gradual. But I mean, I think it’s important to talk about because I think if we want to figure out how to end this, we do have to figure out how to get through to people! And I've been certainly talking about this with my friends and family who are very progressive for a couple of years now.

And the most recent argument was last summer with—I don’t want to say who—but people that I'm close to, and they also engage in a kind of denial that this was in any way widespread because I think that when I was describing a particular detransitioner who I had gotten to know and whose case I’ve talked a little bit about, it is so damning! It is such an indictment. It’s an indictment of the entire, what they call, the chain of trust—from the pseudo-scientists to the practitioners to the associations to the news media, psychologists, psychiatrists, the institutions—every phalanx, every drug company!

Yeah, far drug companies. The indictment is so serious and it goes right—and I’m very excited to talk to you about it all, Jordan, because I think it really goes to just the rotting away of the core restraints society used to impose: the guardrails, you know, the gatekeeping.

And I want to clarify one thing, by the way, which is that in the files, they don’t talk about gender distress. That’s more neutral language that some of the people in the gender critical movement use. They just think they’re all trans. If you are someone that expresses confusion about your gender identity, the assumption is that you are trans, and that clearly comes right out of the gay rights movement, where there was a sense in which—and this is I think what’s been so, you know, the heart of a lot of it—for how liberals accepted it was that I think a lot of us accepted gay relationships and same-sex relationships and the innateness of them.

So when it came to trans, it basically was just the application of this rule of innateness onto trans. There was never a question of there being a misdiagnosis and mistreatment. Two separate things, by the way: misdiagnosis and mistreatment.

And then when you kind of, when it just runs away, it's like, you know, the front page, the cover of Time Magazine and it's all the—everybody’s talking about this is the new form of liberation! And then you had, as you were saying, there are different characters, right? There’s the psychopaths and the narcissists, who are the bullies, and they’re sort of mesmerizing people, the narcissists are mesmerizing people, the psychopaths are bullying people.

And then all of the nice guys, all of the kind liberals—the compassionate, caring liberals—cave. And they kind of go, I can’t deal with it! So then I’m talking about the journalists, the medical associations, the other doctors, the Democrats, the liberals. I mean, it is just an absolutely shocking cowardice, dogma, psychopathologies.

You know, you look at the people, there’s real sadism! Don't forget sadism. I mean, that’s a fun addition—yeah, we're going to write—I mean, there are going to be books written about this episode that, I mean, I don’t want to race ahead to looking back.

I know Parton may—that may be my coping mechanism. This all has to be stopped! I mean, this is—I will say, and you probably will probably get to it, but one week after we released the WPATH files, Britain's National Health Service came out and finally banned puberty blockers in all of its clinics. The Times of London then came out the next day—this is a center-left newspaper—they called this quack medicine in the lead editorial; they called for expanding the ban.

They were worried—we are worried, as we should be—that puberty blockers are still going to be prescribed in private clinics! But you could see with the WPATH files, the NHS decision—a huge opening! Finally, people that had, I think—including me—that had been sort of quiet on this, maybe a little bit unsure, “Is this my role to speak out on this?” finally going, no! This is absolutely bonkers and has to be stopped.

This is maybe the greatest medical mistreatment scandal of the last 100 years, 200 years? I don’t know. It’s hard to identify a worse one, and it’s hard to identify a worse one. It’s like Unit 731—the Japanese medical experiments on the Chinese when they invaded—that's the worst!

That's the worst of the horrors that I’ve ever familiarized myself with. This is at that level, and that’s really something. It’s because the nitty-gritty of the details of this are so shocking that you can’t believe it’s true! And I’ll give you one final detail. The picture is, oh yeah, we’re doing all the science.

The people will—they—in these conversations, the doctors will say, well, I don’t know. I mean, we haven’t seen anybody really come in to complain with us, at least the people we followed up with over the few weeks after the surgeries. There’s like, not only is there no serious study or follow-up of the victims of these mistreatments, they’re not interested!

It’s a complete abdication of responsibility by everybody involved. Nobody even chimed in and said, hey, maybe we should follow up with these people. What about the person that had tumors on their liver? Maybe we should find that person! We did not see this anywhere in the files. Nobody piped up and tried to take responsibility.

It was a complete abdication of responsibility. It was just this kind of M.O. that we have: we're going to mess with people's bodies, and then we don’t care what happens afterward—it’s almost like they’re getting a euphoric pleasure from it, and then they’re done with it.

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Well, sadists are overrepresented among surgeons; that’s known clinically. Every—I’ll contextualize that: every profession attracts a range of temperamental talents that have associations with their temperamental temptations. Right? So there are more narcissists among movie stars, politicians, and media people, obviously. Well, there are more sadists among those who cut up people for a living.

That doesn’t mean they’re all that way—certainly, it doesn’t mean that at all! That is not at all the point! And we haven’t even talked about one of the absolute bloody horrors of this, which is the fact that it’s unbelievably profitable. You know, I saw a projection—this was three years ago—some idiot consulting company came up with a, you know, 130-page PDF showing the trans industry as its growth projections for the next seven years, right? It’s like marketing speak. It’s like, well, it’s going to go from a few hundred million to something, you know, something approximating .3 billion in the next seven—get in while the getting’s good!

You know, every bloody butcher that can’t make a living as a genuine physician and surgeon can easily turn their attention to producing, like, pseudo-penises out of cut-off flesh. It’s so sickening!

It’s so—but again, I want to concentrate on your response because it’s very interesting to me. Because look, I’ve watched Canadians become selectively blind in Canada over the last 10 years, and I can understand why! I really can! It’s like, here’s the situation in Canada: for 150 years, every single one of our major institutions was middle of the road and reliable.

The United Church, that’s kind of the mainstream Protestant organization in Canada, or the Catholics if you’re French Canadian. You know, they had their problems, but they weren’t completely pathologized; let’s put it that way. You could rely on them! Same with the news media, the same with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, even though it was a Crown corporation.

You could basically trust them. Same with the universities, same with the education system. It’s not like it was top-rate, but it wasn’t riddled with pathology. This is a terrible thing for someone with a conservative bent to indicate. It’s like, well, none of that’s true anymore!

The federal liberals subsidized the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to the tune of $1.4 billion a year for no customers, right? But that’s where everybody gets their news! It’s like I told my mother a year ago, “Everything the CBC tells you is a lie!” And she said, “Well, where am I supposed to get my news?” Which is a really good question, right?

So, you imagine the conundrum that faces people. It’s like, all the institutions—you have two choices: those like me who are screaming about this are right-wing conspiratorial lunatics, or all those things you thought you could trust—the hierarchy you just described to the medical community—you can’t trust that anymore.

Well, yes! Well, first of all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! So even if you were just using a rule of thumb, you’d screen out the people who are, you know, crying in the wilderness, so to speak. And this is even worse! But I’m very curious about it in relationship to you.

Because like you’ve already investigated the Twitter files, for example, you’ve already seen this happen, but you said that even in your case, what do you think it was that made you initially resistant to believing that this might be the case?

It’s just too shocking! I mean, I think it’s interesting for your—I think I was—think about your work! You talk in your—some of your earlier work was about kind of finding yourself disoriented or thrown into a sense of chaos after these foundational things you counted on or believed in.

I still had that around some sense of the medical system—I still had some confidence in the medical system before really getting into this, and I think that was part of what was a barrier. I mean, I read Abigail Shrier’s book twice; I spoke to her on the phone multiple times.

I think she grew a little frustrated with me because I think there was a sense among some gender-critical folks of like, “Where are the men?” I don’t mean—I mean, I don’t want to overly gender it, but there was a sense in which it’s disproportionately women that have been raising the alarm about this.

You’re one of the—you know, you and some of the other folks at DailyWire are exceptions, I think. But I think she was a little annoyed with me, which is like, “Why is it taking so long?” We did publish a few articles on it; then we got the WPATH files. But there’s that sense of like, you know, look, if this is really what it appears to be, and now we have the evidence overwhelming that it is in the WPATH files, you have everything you need to know that this is just as awful as it appears to be.

If that’s true, then you cannot trust the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, you cannot trust the health insurance companies, you cannot trust the hospitals, you cannot trust the doctors. It means that this—the fancy word for this, of course, is iatrogenesis—that’s when the medical system makes people sick. It’s an old phenomenon!

There’s a wonderful book, "Fourth Leading Cause of Death." That was before when it was functioning, right? We have no idea what its contribution to death is now, especially in the aftermath of the vaccine compulsion!

We may never find out; maybe we will, but we might not. Yeah, it’s really—it’s really—okay, so fine! Part is, Al, I want to be—I want to respect local knowledge.

And so I know that the people that call themselves environmentalists—I knew the people that were calling themselves environmentalists weren’t really saving the environment; that was my life’s work for 20 years! I then discovered the same thing on homelessness: these are not people that are trying to end homelessness; they’re trying to enable addiction and prevent the proper medical care of people with psychiatric disorders and serious mental illness.

You then get to this, and it’s such a grotesque perversion of the promise of healthcare and a perversion, as you were saying before, of the lesbian, gay, rights and bisexual movement. They’re literally destroying the bodies of people that if you left them alone, most of them would grow up to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual!

So you should see the gay rights movement be the first out there to express outrage! But of course, they’ve been—they were the first to get co-opted by it, you know— the corruption of it. It starts with the people who would have been the first line of defense. If you’d said, “There’s going to be an effort to completely undermine the reproductive capacity and sexual function of gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents,” you would have said, “Well, no! The lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement would never allow that!” No! They just—they’re part of it! The LGBT movement facilitated it!

So, okay, let’s zero in on that then, because we might as well go where, you know, angels fear to tread. Okay, so let me contextualize this first or can I? I have a lot of thoughts on this too; I'm excited to get into this! Alright, so one of the things we wrestled with—this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that I put together that you mentioned earlier—we had our first conference in October.

We have a family policy, okay? And we had a lot of scraps about that. Part of the reason for that was—there were a lot of reasons—but one of the reasons was we had a number of people who were gay who were in our advisory group, and we were very happy to have them.

But our sense was that the heterosexual couple oriented toward long-term relationship is the bedrock for the communal enterprise, and that can’t be replaced! Okay? And so then we really argued about that a lot.

Part of the reason we argued about that was because that relationship is honored in the breach more often than it’s honored in the, what would you say, in the celebration. So like in my own family, for example, there’s plenty of people—my own immediate and extended family, I suppose—the divorce rate in my extended family is approximately the same as the national divorce rate! I don’t imagine it’s any different!

And so, you know, there’s plenty of single mothers, there’s plenty of divorced people, there’s plenty of people who have affairs, there’s plenty of gay people, you know, there’s plenty of single people. So there might be even a majority of those people. You know, if you looked at it cross-sectionally.

So what does that mean? Does it mean that you destroy the ideal upon which community itself is founded? It’s like, no! I don’t think so! I think you have to live with the tension between the ideal and the exception.

It’s something like you establish the core, and then there’s a zone of tolerance for the margin. And not only tolerance, but appreciation for the experimentation that could take place on the margin! But then you have the demand now to put the margin in the center!

And my sense of that was, well, that’s fine, except now the margin of the margin will come forth! And if they’re not frightening enough, then the fringe of the margin of the margin will come forth! And if you’re not frightened, then that’s because you’re not paying attention!

And like, this is a big problem! And so I want to delve into this. It’s such a core problem because you said yourself—and this was part of your resistance—I think, if I’ve got this right—is that we had this movement of liberalization of the conception of coupling and family that really let’s say unrolled in the 1960s to the 1980s and culminated in the almost universal acceptance, I would say, of let’s say gay marriage.

That was an attempt to bring homosexuality, and I would say mostly on the male side—but I think the evidence that male homosexuality is like a permanent part of the human condition and biologically predicated, I think it’s quite strong.

Now, why that is is a very difficult question. But in any case, we all agreed that we could expand the conception of the core to include those relationships. And over time, even the more conservative people more or less came aboard, I would say, but then we got this morph—and you—and you said the thing that’s so bloody perverse about it.

It’s like, in a way, here’s an argument—and I’m not making this a canonical argument—we reconfigured the norm and the ideal, but that invited something even more marginal to make itself manifest. And then you said yourself that that new marginal identity was then conceptualized in the same civil rights-oriented terms.

And the consequence of that, this is what’s so cool and so horrible, the consequence of that wasn’t further degeneration of the nuclear family; the consequence of that was that the first people on the firing block were the gay community!

Right? Because, as you said, if the conservatives had conspired to produce a catastrophe that was aimed more horribly at the gay community, they couldn’t have done worse than this!

Yeah, it’s beyond comprehension, right? It’s truly beyond so what do you think that now, first of all, is the tension between the lesbian and gay rights movement and its extension into this trans domain? Was that part of what motivated your psychological resistance? And then also, what do you think about how this unfolded? What do you make of that?

Well, so I think so! Yeah! So, I mean, first of all, I’m from the left. I’ve obviously much more—I’ve abandoned a lot of those radical left views. But I’m still very high on openness in terms of personality trait, right? So I’m sort of like, if a biological male wants to dress up as a woman and go out in public dressed up as a woman, my first instinct is, I’m fine with that! Like, why? It’s a free country; you should be able to do that!

And I think this is an—I’m using this case in particular because you may know that there are two psychologists who have done a lot of work studying the people that call themselves trans women. We might say trans-identified males or, you know, you can say trans women, it’s fine! But there are two psychologists, Ray Blanchard and, oh my God, I’m blanking on the second one, basically two psychologists who have done the research on these men, and they’ve identified them; they say, they say that what it is, it’s autogynephilia—the word they’ve invented! Blanchard, right?

So it’s—nobody disputed that, by the way, five years ago. Every mainstream clinician who was educated understood this, right—that transsexualism was an autogynephilic condition, right? And it primarily affected men, or primarily manifested by men, and it often was fully realized, let’s say, in their 30s and 40s, although there might be a history of such behavior, like the psychoanalysts had a whole well-developed theory, which I think is one that’s very—like the theory there, in part, the deep theory, the one that I thought was most appropriate, was that these were often men who, and this goes along with the openness idea, who had constrained the development of their personality in the stereotypically masculine direction too much. They’d put a more open temperament into a too-tight box, and what was happening was that the impulse to have them develop the cross-sex proclivities that might have expanded their personality were all suppressed and it emerged in a warped and sexualized manner.

They started to play out in the world what they should have been manifesting as a psychological transformation, right? That’s a Jungian take; it’s a great take! It’s a great take!

So the play that autogynephilia is a form of sexualized play in relationship to identity transformation, and I think that’s—and by the way, the other psychologist is Michael Bailey, and he wrote a book on it. So it’s really these two characters’ book—I think it was something like "The Man Who Would Be Queen." Yeah, that’s the man who would be queen, right?

I know Blanchard’s work and that work, too. Yeah, yeah, so they come out with this theory of autogynephilia, which is defined as the attraction to oneself as a woman; or it’s having the fantasy of oneself as a woman. It’s a sexual fantasy of oneself as a woman, and this was pretty well supported. These two psychologists really did a lot of work on it, and then some of the autogynephilic men started going after Bailey, I think, in particular, and Blanchard actually talked about having survivor’s guilt because he felt he had helped develop the concept.

But Bailey took the brunt of the attacks; they were trying to get him fired, and they were harassing him, and they were doxing him, and it was a very shocking treatment. And they basically—the I think they both came to the conclusion, at least Bailey did, that they were undermining the fantasy and absolutely!

And these autogynephilic men were attacking them for undermining the fantasy! Now, well, look, Michael, what happens is, okay, well, you can see this with these absolutely absurd displays of narcissistic fetishism online. You get these men who are dressed up as women but who couldn’t pass as a woman for anyone within like a 200 yards of them, you know, but their fantasy—see, they idealize themselves in their fantasy play as a sexually attractive woman.

Because what the hell good is the sexual fantasy without that? And then that is undermined by any evidence whatsoever that what they’re making manifest as imagination is tantamount to a delusion.

And so, they get narcissistically outraged just like a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old who's disrupted in their fantasy playing. It’s like, well, you know, you're not really a woman. It’s like, well, what do you mean I’m not really a woman? The entire fantasy is predicated on the notion that not only am I a woman, but I’m a beautiful hyper-feminine woman: I’m the best of all!

I’m the best of all possible women! And the fact that you would dare to oppose that—there’s two interpretations: either I’m delusional beyond belief, or you’re cruel. Well, right! Easy to figure out which one of those that they’re going to take! And then they go and bully everybody around them! They use—so, I mean, honestly, I just think it’s psychopathic.

Like the tactics they’re using show no regard for others, engaging in very high-risk behavior, and who—and so you look at these folks, and these people are the leaders. They’re the ones that are the presidents of WPATH. They are the surgeon Marcy Bowers, who’s the president of WPATH. She who operated—who blocked the puberty of Jazz Jennings, did a botched surgery—a botched genital surgery on Jazz. There’s a video of Marcy, and we publicized that for like tens of millions of dollars to the entire low-level IQ TV-watching community and glamorized it—sacrificed Jazz Jennings in the process!

And what would you say brought his stunningly narcissistic mother into exactly the kind of spotlight that her cluster B personality demanded? Right? And her child was a small price to pay for that! Right?

It’s so shocking! So basically you have a situation where when you piece it all together, you have a situation of powerful narcissists and psychopathic men who, in order to fulfill their sexual fantasies, are needing to construct the idea and then the reality of trans children. And this is where it really—well, that’s how they get out of the moral conundrum, Michael! Because, sure!

Because, and this is a typical psychopathic narcissist move. It’s like, I bear no moral responsibility for that. In fact, I’ve always been like this. And the fact that that wasn’t recognized is an indication of two things: my unbelievable moral virtue and specialness because I was that sort of special person, and the absolute pathology of anyone who got in the way, which was basically, you know, the entire world, the entire patriarchy, everyone that knew them.

Right? Right. It’s so—it’s so narcissistic that it beggars belief! It beggars belief! Right? So my understanding—you’re obviously the expert—my understanding is that psychopathic narcissists, the psychopathy is in service of the narcissism.

And so, if being an autogynephile is a kind of narcissism, the psychopathy then is that you will—you don’t care about the feelings of others, and you’ll engage in highly risky behaviors in order to service your narcissism—that's how it works!

Yeah, well service—well, and well we should—we could qualify that even further because I think it’s useful to do so. So what’s the difference between a mature person and an immature person? Okay, so well, first of all, we can all agree that there’s a difference between like a toddler and a responsible adult.

You know, because otherwise, why would we grow up, okay? So what characterizes a toddler? Well, a toddler is characterized by possession by a sequence of whims, okay? So why is that counterproductive? Well, because the toddler wants what he wants right now, no matter what! Okay, so what does that mean? No matter what?

It means no matter what it costs his future self and no matter what it costs other people. Okay, so why is that bad? Well, if you betray your future self, you die, and if you can’t get along with other people, well, then you die too! You can’t engage in reciprocal altruism, for example.

So what you try to do when you socialize children is that you extend their purview so that as their cortex integrates, they’re able to regulate their impulse of whim in accordance with their future self and with other people, right? So that’s like the definition of maturity!

Okay, so you’re perfectly describing and explaining one of the things in the files that we see over and over again! You also see this in the Jazz Jennings show, which is it’s a complete focus by the gender quacks to service somebody’s needs right now without any sense of what the consequences will be in the future!

There, in the video, one of the people literally says, well, we just want to provide that care and comfort right now! Well, but you’re talking about lifelong stability and loss of sexual function! And you’re actually concerned—and then similarly you see this Dr. Marcy Bowers, who’s operating on Jazz Jennings, is obsessed with doing surgical procedures, having an argument while conducting the surgery in the operating room.

She’s having an argument with her colleague who’s telling her that she doesn’t need to remove what she’s calling scar tissue. She says, no, I hate it! I hate it! You can see her; she’s just really, really—she’s got to get rid of that because it’s got to look this right way!

They’re playing—like to really get into it—they’re playing God! They’re trying to play God! And of course, the problem is they’re not gods! And so, it’s like, they’re just—there’s a sense in which when you read this, they’re just—they’re like toddlers! They’re just wrecking things!

They don’t care! And there’s no sense of the future! You pointed out something since we’re going down the rabbit hole—that’s even worse, I would say: there’s a lot of things going on underneath this and one of them is the devouring mother!

Okay, so what’s a devouring mother? Okay, let’s define that technically. Now, Freud intuited that the oedipal situation was at the root of much psychopathology. Now he over-sexualized that; that was a mistake. But the core insight was brilliant. And here’s the insight, okay?

So, human infants are born in an incredibly underdeveloped state. There are a couple of reasons for that, but the fundamental reason is that our brains are so big that in order for us to be born through a functional female pelvis, we had to be born in a fetal stage. That’s why our heads are compressible.

It’s a compromise! Now, the cost that we pay for that is the unbelievable vulnerability of human infants! Okay? Now the cost the mothers pay for that is that the neonate is so dependent that they need 100% care.

Okay? So that means that the impetus of agreeableness—that personality trait—in combination with negative emotion—that’s the two feminine personality traits: high negative emotion and high agreeableness—the purest expression of that is to give the suffering infant what it needs right now, no matter what.

Right? Okay? And that’s perfectly legitimate for six months—for an infant! Well, for six months! For six months! It’s the right attitude!

Now, okay, so then—and it’s a very, very powerful instinct! It’s the maternal instinct upon which the human species depends! Okay? The question is, what happens when that pathologizes? Okay? So what does it look like when it pathologizes?

Well, the first is you treat a one-year-old like a six-month-old or you treat a five-year-old like a six-month-old. You just give in to whatever they want right now! Well, that means that you start to interfere with their development!

So that’s where the devouring mother comes in! Right? Okay? And so—and that’s very, very bad! That’s how you make useless, entitled, narcissistic, privileged, dependent, and terrified children! Right?

Who also hate their parents! Right? So that’s a very bad idea! Okay? But it—but here’s something even worse than that, which no one will talk about and which no one will contend with! Okay? The maternal instinct is hyper-powerful and it’s the defining characteristic of femininity!

The question that our culture is facing now is, what happens when that, when women enter into the political arena and that instinct doesn’t find its proper place?

And the answer is, as far as I can tell, is that childless women infantilize everything! Yep. Yeah. Well, God, Michael! That’s true! We are in serious trouble! Like, you know, because we know the most woke disciplines, for example, in the universities are the ones with the highest percentage of women.

Now, I’m—not to get me wrong—I’m not blaming women! Because I think men have abdicated their responsibility on that front as well! And I’m also not unhappy that we’ve been able to determine how to capitalize on the broad intellectual abilities of women in the broader civilizational scheme of things, let’s say.

That’s not my point! My point is that we don’t know what sort of political psychopathologies will be specific to females! And we bloody well know now! And part of that is that horrible infantilization of everything!

And then there’s another associated issue, which is women are also very good, let’s say, at spotting predators! Okay? If you have an infant and you misidentify a predator—you know, you call something a predator that isn’t—whatever, you protect your baby; it’s not a problem! It’s kind of hard on the misidentified predator!

Right? And so part of that cluster B proclivity of the psychopathological woman to cry wolf continually and profit thereby is also a manifestation of that maternal instinct! It’s right! You oppose me? You must be a predator! And if you’re—this is the terrible thing about the devouring mother pathology: if you’re a predator, no punishment is too harsh for you!

Right? No quarter! Right? Why would you give quarter to something that wants to eat your child? It’s like, no quarter! And so that’s another problem that we have that we have no idea what to do with!

So, well, yeah, I was going to just say a couple thoughts about that. I mean, I think that, first of all, yeah, I mean, you look at Jazz Jennings’ mom; that’s absolutely how she—but then you look at her dad and Jazz’s dad.

Here they are; the surgery is botched. You know? I just watched some of the video from it. The surgery is botched, and the dad’s kind of like, “Well, yeah, it didn’t quite go like we thought it was.” You know what I have heard when I talk to the parents of the detransitioners and the desisters—the desisters, of course, are the parents that got their kids saved before real danger was done!

What they say is they go, often the dad was finally like, “I don’t want to do this!” The dad had to step in and say no! And perform that role, that traditionally—I’m not saying what dads do; that’s what dads are supposed to do!

Dads are supposed to be like, no! Yeah! Yeah! Um, that didn’t happen!

Um, and then the—but then also, just you pull back even further and you go, what is this really about? Look what they’re doing—they're blocking puberty! Puberty is a fundamental human right! Growing up is a fundamental human right! They’re depriving people of the right to be adults!

That's what the witch in Snow White does! That’s so interesting! That is! I’m—it’s a standard form of female pathology, which is that’s how you eliminate competitors!

Right! Right? No kidding! No kidding! It’s really bad! Well, it’s—you know, you know the story of Snow White is that she’s the most beautiful, which means she’s peaked, and she’s at her peak, but the next generation is coming, and she’s going to be supplanted.

And so instead of accepting that gracefully and making the transition to grandmother, which is what she should do, she attempts to prolong her youthful adulthood beyond its acceptable point, and she does that by sacrificing the up-and-coming next feminine generation!

Exactly! Exactly! So she poisons Snow White!

Yeah! Yeah! She’s the witch that lives in the forest and has always lived in the forest! Yes! Yes!

It’s, well, the witch is in power! I mean, this is what’s so shocking about it is that the witch is in power—like, across all these institutions—and the men are completely, you know, simped out!

I don’t know how else to describe it! The men have abdicated their authority! Abdicated their responsibility! The core responsibility of the father, at a minimum!

These dads—all these dads are focused on playing with their kids—protect your kids! Protect your kids from these creepy, these deeply creepy doctors that are trying to prey on your children!

I mean, I couldn’t—it’s so—so it gets to the spiritual stuff too, I think! Because I watched the Barbara Walters special on Jazz Jennings before they performed this horrible surgery on her.

Barbara Walters opens that special—Barbara Walters, that trusted face of the news media, right?! I mean, she’s like the—she’s like Walter Cronkite is dead, but Barbara Walters is still there! Someone like my parents, my family, would rely on! She gets up, and she goes, "Beautiful little girl born into the wrong body!"

I mean, I look at—I’ve been working on nihilism and the ways in which nihilism is, I mean, when you are sterilizing your children, when you are depriving them of sexual function, when you are denying them puberty, you are—you are—you are just—it’s nihilism!

I mean, you’re just saying no to life! You’re negating life! You’re negating your own immortality project!

That’s how a lot of people feel like their lives have meaning—that goes on by having kids and then grandkids!

So the hard nihilism of it, and underneath it is a kind of hedonism of the immediate pleasure of exercising your power over other people’s bodies or your body!

I think that nihilism is at the heart of this! I just look at it and I go, this is—I mean, nihilism, you know, in the Nietzschean sense, in the classical sense, is just a kind of rejection of reality for some alternative world!

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Yeah, well, you remember Nietzsche concentrated—he didn’t stop with nihilism, right? He pursued that into resentment, which is the—like, I would say your concentration on nihilism is insufficiently pessimistic, because nihilism is a step on the way to resentment!

Right? And resentment, man, if you’re looking for—a cardinal sin—resentment is—it’s a contender—it’s a contender for what’s at the bottom—resentment, arrogance, and deceit, you know. Those make one evil, evil triad.

While we were talking about power, the reason I brought up the infants to begin with is because there’s this unholy relationship between power and hedonism!

Because I will turn to power to gratify my hedonism, because I don’t have to! Otherwise, like, if I can invite you to play along with me, and you want to, well, I don’t need to use power.

The only time I need power is when I want you to do something that you don’t want to do! And worse than that, I want you to do something that isn’t going to be good for you in the medium to long run!

That’s also not going to be good for me! You know, because one of the things I’ve been looking into, for example, is the personality structure of short-term maters.

So, like, human beings are a pair-bonding species that invest heavily in their offspring. But within the human realm, there are temperamental long-term maters and let’s say temperamental short-term maters.

And you might say, well, who are the one-night stand crowd? So these are the hedonists! Well, we know what their personality characteristics are because it’s been studied—narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian! And that wasn’t enough!

So after studying those three for seven or eight years, the relevant psychologists added sadism because that’s where it ends up! And so you get this unholy dynamic of—it’s part of that inevitable dynamic of hedonism and force!

Is that if you’re going to pursue short-term hedonistic ends, then force will enter into it. I just rewatched Cabaret! Remember Cabaret?

Oh, sure! It’s so bloody brilliant because you see this cabaret where all the transsexuals are, by the way, and Liza Minnelli, who’s the cluster B wannabe actress, narcissist, and they’re dancing away madly, having their hedonistic orgy, and the Nazis are in the audience!

And it’s so interesting! Joel Grey does a lovely job of this because the hedonists are—they’re in a dance with the Nazis! You know? And I think both of them know it!

And we’re doing the same thing. We are doing exactly the same thing now! We are doing exactly the same thing! I mean, this is where I was headed to!

I mean this is how you get totalitarianism! You know, if you believe the—if you read "Political Ponerology," this really interesting book on the psychology of totalitarianism, he argues that totalitarianism is defined by the narcissists and the psychopaths taking over every major institution in society and emerging from the bottom up.

The narcissists—there’s power! Power is exercised, I think, in those two ways: the psychopath, it’s through raw power—it’s bullying, being domineering, trying to get people canceled, trying to get people fired, you know, harassment. The narcissists—this is—I’m borrowing from the ponerology book; I think the last name is pronounced Lusi—he argues that the narcissists are spellbinders, so they’re casting a spell.

I mean, speaking of the witch, right? There’s a spell cast! And so I’ve been really—we wrote—I think there’s like a trance that has come over individuals. It’s cast by these really charismatic trans leaders, and they sort of mesmerize, hypnotize, put people in a sort of particular seduction.

Yes! Definitely! And then everybody—our brain waves get to some level or whatever, and then anybody who veers outside of it and goes, “Wait a second, this doesn’t seem right,” then they’re there with the bully to keep them in line and make an example of them and scapegoat them in order to create this culture of fear and conformity.

So, and we see it in the files! I mean, the files themselves are so chilling. If you were just a scholar of totalitarianism, you know, everybody spends so much time talking about, you know those studies that were done in the ’50s—the electroshock studies or the prison Stanford experiments. Read these files!

You want to see what totalitarianism looks like? Somebody says, “Hey, maybe we should take a minute and think about whether or not to give drugs and surgery to somebody that has multiple personalities!” Or that’s been—we’ll just get consent from each personality!

That’s right! Oh my God! Oh my God! So then somebody goes, “Maybe! Yeah, why don’t we take— or why don’t we have like a—why don’t we actually maybe pause about— or think about it!” And then there’s somebody in the room in the chat room or the message board saying, “Oh, how dare you gatekeep! How dare you create barriers to providing this health care just because they happen to have multiple personalities?”

I mean it is so crazy, you kind of can’t even believe that it’s actually happening! Like, if you were to make a Hollywood movie out of the WPATH files, you would—you’d be like, “This is not realistic!” Like, this would not be able to occur in today’s society, and yet here we are!

Now you know firsthand why the Germans didn’t wake up in the late 1930s! Yeah! Because they couldn’t believe it! They literally couldn’t! Now, first of all, they didn’t want to believe it, and they put their heads in the sand, you know, but they also couldn’t believe it!

There’s no way that can be happening! And you can understand why! I was there! I mean, I was there like—I was there like a year or two ago being like, “This can’t be true!” Because if it were true, then we are—something about it!

Yeah! Or somebody would do something about it! Yeah! Or it would mean that we’re living in a totalitarian society already! It would mean that the medical institutions—it's like a horror—it’s like that thing in the horror movie! You get to the middle of the horror movie and you discover everybody's brain has been taken over by the aliens!

Or it’s actually a secret brain-swapping exercise! There’s some horror in the middle of it! And then you have to figure out how to get out of it, you know, which is I think what we’re onto!

Well, okay, okay! So let's approach that in two directions! So, one of the things you pointed out—so the manifestation of the narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, sadist is different in men than in women, okay? So in men, it tends to be more, “Get the hell out of my way, or I will definitely hurt you!” Like, it’s really in your face.

With women, it’s much more subtle! It’s much more behind the scenes! They’re much more manipulative! And the proclivity of the female antisocial type is to reputation salvage and gossip!

Now, there’s a big—so tell me what you think about this! So first, it’s very difficult to fight against that! So, like, women can’t fight other women who do that! It’s very hard for them to do that! But men also can’t fight! Because the thing is, if I figure out that you’re a psychopath, and you’re interacting with me, and you’re manipulating me, I can actually punch you!

And there’s a high likelihood of that if you push it, right? And that’s one of the things that regulates social interaction between men! It’s like, don’t push your luck too far! But that wave is barred 100% for women against women—or virtually 100%! And even more so against men! And so men—I believe that men have abdicated their responsibility to say no, but I have a certain sympathy because for example, I’ve had clients who were unfortunate enough to take up residence, for example, with a woman with cluster B psychopathology.

And it was like their lives were over! Those women would light themselves on fire to singe them, and they had no defenses! And if they did ever raise a hand in defense of any sort, then the cluster B type would call the authorities, lie about what had happened, invite a knight in shining armor to save her in tears, which is really effective because she also happens to be attractive, and that guy was done! He was done! His little dried-up corpse was being sucked dry by the psychopathic woman on the side of the road, and that was it!

So, so that’s a big problem! And so that’s another—I think—go ahead, no—sorry!

I was going to say, I mean, I think since it seems like we’re turning a little bit to how do we handle this, I mean, I think the one of the things that that Lusi describes in the Ponerology book—and of course, it’s just a theory because he couldn’t prove it—he lived, by the way, he lived through Nazism and communism.

He opens the book describing a really lousy academic being appointed as the president of his university in Poland, and the guy was just a psychopath! Like, that’s how he made it to that position! And what Lusi’s argument is that it could never happen!

Michael, no! I know you’re reading it being like, oh, I think we’re there.

Yeah! No kidding! We’re definitely there! We’re definitely there! So you kind of go—so he argues very persuasively, I think, that it’s not enough to condemn! It’s not enough to say, this gender mistreatment is bad! It’s pseudoscience, it’s hurting people!

We should definitely do that! But you have to actually do what you’re doing, I think! And what I’m realizing I need to do, which is you have to describe the psychopathology quite specifically! You have to describe it! You must!

And so in that sense, everybody says, oh, I don’t want to get into the auto-gynophile files or whatever! He—under Lusi’s view, he says you must describe the psychopathologies of the leaders!

You must distinguish between the narcissists, the psychopaths, the psychopathic narcissists—you must describe—I think he would probably go by extension—you must just say these are autogynephiles! These are not actually women! These are people that think they’re women!

And they get angry at you! And the reason they're angry at you is because you deny their fantasy! And you must deny their fantasy because their fantasy is driving such a huge amount of this! And then you must also then look at everybody else and go, you’re behaving like a coward! You have got to stop!

You’re the head of the American Medical Association! You’re the head of the American—they—the head of the Endocrine Society! Be the head! Be the president of it, which means you must have courage, or step down!

Yeah! And allow—try saying no, you sons of bitches! It has to be—you—we have—I think we have to go—unfortunately, and it’s going to take some time—I don’t think there’s any substitute between going institution by institution in society explaining what’s going on! Challenging these leaders!

And it’s really simple! American Medical Association, you can—you can end with stop with the pseudo-science and cowardice, or stop being respected by anybody as the American Medical Association! Those are your two choices! Like, this can’t continue! I mean, Jordan! On the AMA website, they still say that gender medicine prevents suicide!

That piece of pseudo-science is still on the website, despite multiple studies showing quite the opposite! So I do think that those are the—for me, I look at how do you get—how does this end?

Okay, into—okay, so let’s delve into that a bit more! Okay, so there’s—a long—this has been infuriating me for quite a long time, right? Like, I knew—in 2016, when Bill C-16 came out in Canada that mandated pronoun use, I went to the Senate and I said, “You are going to cause an epidemic among young women! This is what’s going to happen!”

And the senators, of course, knew better and just asked me why I was such a mean man and why I was making such a mountain out of a molehill. It’s like, well, it’s because I can see exactly what’s going to happen! And I can actually see why you’re doing it, you bloody virtue signalers, right? You hypocrites! We’re so compassionate!

It’s like, oh, I’ll love my son no matter what, and how am I going to demonstrate that? Well, I’ll castrate and mutilate him and turn him into a monster, and I’ll still love him! That’s how wonderful I am!

Right? Jesus, man! It’s no wonder people can’t admit that that sort of thing exists because that’s so goddamn dark that it puts almost everything else to shame. You just can’t believe that could happen, and it happens, right?

And a fair bit! Right? So there are plenty of mothers who hoist their child’s severed body parts up on a flag to signal their maternal virtue! Right? Brutal! Unbelievable! Unbelievable sacrifice, that’s for sure!

That’s exactly what it is! Yes! It’s child sacrifice to the demon of pride! That’s what it is! And it’s bad!

Okay, so then I think, well, you know, what do we do? Do we have like a truth and reconciliation hug fest? I don’t think so! I think that—I think we put the people who’ve done this in prison!

I mean, like, I think anybody who’s transitioned a minor should be—they should lose their license! This includes the counselors! They should lose their license, and they should be put in prison!

There’s no excuse for it! And so I’m afraid that we have to change the laws first! Yeah! You have to change the laws!

I mean, I think if you go stepwise, Jordan, I would say let’s go institution by institution, and I mean medical, sports! You know, Riley Gaines is trying to do that on the sports side.

Riley’s doing it! Yeah, and she’s going to succeed! She’s going to succeed! I mean, look, I will say, I think the public is really with us! They’re already with us! And they don’t even understand because I think a lot of the public’s in denial, but I would say we got to go institution by institution, then, yeah, the laws have to change!

I mean, the Republican states in the United States are already changing! We have to complete that! And then we’re going to have to go into the Democratic states and explain what’s really going on and change the laws in those states!

I mean, I think it’s a lot harder for my liberal friends and family to justify this medical mistreatment when the National Health Service of Britain says that they’re no longer going to do it!

I think it’s a lot easier for them to—because they’re all partisan Democrats, I think it’s a lot easier for them to dismiss what’s been happening in a Republican state because they’re just so partisan!

But the British National Health Service is different! You know, because they did it in—they’ve done it in the Netherlands, they’ve done it in Scandinavian countries, right? They’ve pulled back quite! Quite!

And the Netherlands example is particularly apropos because that’s where that bloody Dutch so-called Dutch protocol of gender-affirming care came from! Right? So for the Dutch to reverse that, and they’re quite left-leaning, for them to reverse that, well that—I understand it’s not a sign of reverse as we saw in the UK, right?

And the fact that the Times actually wrote an article and published it was also, you know, definitely worthy of note!

Right! But it’s going to—like, the problem is that the rot that’s generating this thing—the problem is again is that horrible as this is, it’s merely the worst symptom of an underlying systemic problem.

And it’s even hard to characterize this systemic problem! Well, here’s part of a reflection of that. You tell me what you think about this. So the demographic slice that’s most supportive of the Democrats is childless women under 30!

Right? So, but that’s now—forget the bloody politics! We go down to the biological and the psychological level—there’s a reason for that!

Like the policies that the Democrats have devised, which are variants of the victim-victimizer narrative, play very well into a misapplied maternal instinct! Because the maternal instinct is, find the infant, and protect it! It’s like, well, I don’t have an infant!

Well, do you have a dog? No! Well, I don’t have a dog either!

Well, how about the oppressed? Oh! Yeah, I’ve got the oppressed!

Right! Exactly! And so now—the oppressed are infants! They can do no wrong! Now all we have to do is find the oppressor!

This has turned out to be, by the way, quite hard on the Jews, as we're seeing! Right? Right! Right!

Because if we are going to play oppressor-oppression with classifications of disproportionate representation in the upper strata of hierarchies as evidence of oppression and victimization, then the Jews win that contest!

Right? Right! Well, right! And this is not much different, by the way, than what happened in Austria and in Nazi Germany! This is a very old story!

Like, I went through, for example, I went through the story of Exodus in great detail recently, and the reason the Egyptians enslaved the Jews is because they’re a disproportionately successful minority! Right?

So this has been going on for a very long time! So what do you think then? It seems like if—I agree with your assessment—so what do you think then? How would you describe the way forward?

It seems like you have to find some secular way to affirm that everybody’s born into the right body! You know, that there’s biological differences, that everybody has the right to puberty, that nobody shall be denied the right to puberty!

But I think you’re right—it’s denialism until we address it with some life-affirming, pro-human vision! And I know you’re—I’m a person of faith, you’re a person of faith—but I recognize also I’m in a secular society!

So I mean, how do you answer the question of how do you make this case for a pro-human, life-affirming vision in a society that’s so secular?

I don’t think there is a secular reform, okay? I think we’re at the end of the Enlightenment! I think the secular experiment has collapsed!

I think it’s collapsed because it’s technically wrong! I’ve—the book I’ve just published, or will publish in November, the one I’m touring about, is the book called "We Who Wrestle with God."

And I make an elaborate case for this, I think the evidence now—this is the scientific evidence by the way—the evidence is overwhelming that we see the world through a structure of value!

And the description of a structure of the description of the structure of value of a person is a story! That’s what a story is! So when you go to a movie and you watch someone characterized, what you’re seeing is the embodiment of their value structure!

And you want to see that because you need a value structure to orient yourself in the world! That’s what makes you pay attention to one thing rather than another! Because attention itself is value-predicated!

And the monotheistic hypothesis is that all values unify at the pinnacle, and that people should orient themselves towards that! And I think that’s—I think there’s every reason to assume that that’s exactly right!

I also think it’s irreplaceable! What do you say? How do you—we—you and I have a lot of mutual friends that self-describe as atheists.

Yeah! Our friend Steven Pinker—I have, you know, a lot of my supporters are atheists—Michael Shermer! So there’s obviously some—and they’re not nihilists, right? And they’re very pragmatic and very sensible!

So do you just sort of think, well, there are a minority of folks that are not overwhelmed by the nihilism of life and they have a way to affirm it despite their atheism?

Or do you feel like—what do you—how do you reconcile? How are they managing it?

Well, I guess it’s both! It’s not just a personal question; I also think I’m asking a political question, which is—it seems like if we need to get a majority on our side on these issues, and you’re in a secularizing society, how do you build those alliances?

Well, I mean, I don’t have an answer for that! I mean, what I’m trying to do is to tell a better story, and you know that has a certain impact! And that’s the right way to do it! Because I think the right way forward is always—it’s always invitational!

The right way forward is invitation! And so if you can’t tell a better story, then you don’t win the contest! What’s the best story?

Well, look! The leftist story is one of power! Right? The postmodernists discovered that we see the world through a structure of value, which is partly why they’ve been able to kind of scuttle the scientific enterprise!

Because raw empiricism doesn’t work! This is partly why the Enlightenment has to come to an end! You cannot orient yourself with knowledge of the facts!

And the reason for that is that there’s an infinite number of facts! You have to organize the facts! And as soon as you organize them, you’re in a value hierarchy!

So the postmodernists figured that out, which is why—and it’s so interesting because most of them were literary critics! Right? They were critics of story! They knew there was something key to the story!

Well, the problem with the postmodernists wasn’t that they—they got that right, and that was a major accomplishment! But they leaped immediately to the assumption—because of their Marxism—they leaped immediately to the assumption that the fundamental story was one of power!

Right? And you can understand why that’s an attractive story! It’s easy to understand! You can understand every human dynamic in relationship to power! Plus, when interpersonal dynamics, marriage, business, society, when they become corrupt, they do become corrupt in the direction of power!

So it’s a powerful diagnostic observation, but it’s wrong! So you might say, well, if the story isn’t one of power, what’s the story?

And I know what the story is! The story is one of voluntary sacrifice! That’s the story! And the Christian mythos got that exactly right, as far as I can tell!

And so the reason for that is that community itself is a sacrificial operation! To become a member of a community, you sacrifice yourself! That’s the definition of community!

Now, you might be able to sacrifice yourself in a manner that benefits you and everyone else! Right? That would be the highest form of self-sacrifice! That’s what God calls Abraham to do when God calls Abraham to adventure!

He offers him a sacrificial path forward that would be optimally beneficial to him and to everyone else! And so there’s an equation in that story of the call to the adventure of sacrificial transformation and the simultaneous establishment of social harmony!

And I think that’s right! And that’s not power! And I think the country that got that most right has been the United States, right? Is that people have their responsibility! It’s—they bear that responsibility!

That’s a sacrifice! They work because work is sacrifice; it’s the sacrifice of the present to the future.

So it’s voluntary self-sacrifice that’s the right basis for community! And the image of the crucifixion is that—that’s why it’s in the—the altar! That’s why it’s at the center!

That’s why the church