EXPOSING Totalitarianism, Critical Race Theory, & Gender Ideology - Will & Amala LIVE | Will & Amala

What's up guys? What's up everybody? Will and Amala here. We have some big news. We are moving offices, so our studio space where we film the show is going to be moving to a new building. So we weren't able to film the show for you guys today, but we put together a supercut of some amazing interviews that we've done, some of the best interviews that we've had on the show. One with Rod Dreher, the author of Live Not by Lies, talking about totalitarianism. Chris Rufo, our resident expert on CRT, who is exposing it in schools, universities, big business, everywhere in the United States. And another one from Colin Wright, who is an intellectual exposing some of the lies the left puts around sex and gender. So don't miss these interviews. They're really powerful, really educational, and we are moving offices. Talk yourself up and up for these interviews. They are interviews that I conducted, so I have to say that they're good. I think I was there. And I'm there for these interviews, too. Wait, were you? Well, I was there for the Chris Rufo one, I know. What? Guys, if you didn't know what we're doing, we're in Florida right now. We're in Fort Lauderdale. I'm driving, Amala's sitting. We're on our way to an event for PragerU. We did one last night. And Fort Lauderdale, now we're driving to West Palm Beach. So we're having a lot of fun. Had sushi last night. Yeah, I'm just telling people, so it's not just, you know, the most boring thing in the whole world, Amala. Ah, whatever. Nothing to be entertained. Okay, guys. Well, here's the intro. Enjoy the interviews. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special guest on the show today. He just finished up filming a five-minute video here with us at PragerU. Now, a bit of a backstory. So every year, PragerU has an employee retreat. And this year, we all got a book for our employee retreat and an American flag. Now, the name of that book was Live Not by Lies, a manual for Christian dissidents written by Rod Dreher. And we have him on the show today. Rod, thank you so much for being on. It's so great to be here. Oh, fantastic. Now, I want to start off by reading the first sentence in chapter one of your book. Sometimes a stranger who sees deeper and farther than the crowd appears to warn of trouble coming. Now, in my experience, my stranger was Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector who was talking about the influence of propaganda and communism in America. And for a lot of people, you're now that stranger who's bringing the warning. So let's assume you're the stranger for everybody listening right now. What is your warning? My warning is that in the West today, we are slipping into a kind of totalitarianism that is similar but not equivalent to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, the hard totalitarianism. And the message didn't come from me. It came to me from people in this country who had escaped the Soviet Union, escaped the communist world during the Cold War, and thought they were coming to freedom in America. Well, what they're now seeing happen in America today is the emergence of conditions like what they left behind. When I first started hearing these people, I thought, surely they're exaggerating. Not here in America. This couldn't happen here. But the more I listened to them, the more I realized that they were actually seeing things that the rest of us couldn't see, in part because we think it can't happen here. Mostly we're talking about cancel culture, about wokeness, about people being afraid to say what they really think, to worship like they want to worship, and so on and so forth. These are things that came to the communist world. This was the first wave of communism there, but it wasn't the last. And what these people are telling, trying to warn Americans and Europeans is that, wake up. It's happening right here. You can stop it, but not if you continue to just sit by passively and watch things happen. Right, absolutely. And I think it's become so pervasive in our culture now that you nearly can't avoid it. And people are trying to call it out and call attention to it, but still people fall sort of, it falls sort of on deaf ears. And why do you think that is? And are you optimistic about us sort of breaking that barrier when it comes to that conversation? I think a lot of it goes ignored by people in our country, because so much of what's being done is done in the name of compassion. If you look at George Orwell's 1984, which was the literary equivalent of Stalinism, that was a dystopian totalitarian society in which the state and the powers that be enforced their ideology through pain and terror. But we don't have that here. So people think that, what is he talking about, totalitarianism? I think a better model for us is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the other 20th century totalitarian novel. In that totalitarian world, the totalitarianism is enforced not by pain and terror, but by managing people's comfort and pleasure. So I think that's why we don't understand what's happening to us, because the new totalitarianism is done in the name of compassion. The idea that if you object to it, then you must hate people. You must hate sexual minorities, religious minorities, racial minorities. And nobody wants to be a hater, so they stay silent. And they allow our liberties to be taken from us. And what the people who grew up under hard totalitarianism are saying is, this is real, what we're seeing happen now. And it's sneaking up on you, because it's all done in the name of making America a safe space and a compassionate space. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I often say that wokeism is sort of this beast that's born out of empathy and wanting to sort of shelter people from suffering and oppression and perceived suffering and oppression, I guess that is. Now, you present an interesting idea in your book, and it's one that's echoed by a lot of intellectuals, that progressivism has now become a religion of sorts. Now, Dennis Prager says that it's a religion that has more sins than any other. And I have this quote specifically from you in your chapter, Progressivism as Religion. Social justice warriors believe that human nature is constructed largely through the use of linguistic conventions. Can you explain that sort of idea a little further? Sure. That's why they care so much about which pronouns we use and the language we use to talk about reality. They believe that language itself doesn't simply describe reality, but creates reality. And that's why for most normal people, you think it's crazy that they would care so much about the language we use. But for them, this is what constitutes their reality, the reality of their identity and reality everywhere. But it's kind of a form of hocus pocus, you know, then the rest of us laugh at it. But here's the thing, the people who run our institutions now, I'm talking about universities, media, corporate America, even lately, the military and the CIA, they've all bought into this wokeness. They've all bought into the idea that language creates reality and so on and so forth. And if all the people who exert power in this society believe this sort of thing, then we all have to believe it too, or we get punished. This is how it was in the Soviet Union. Over there, whatever the government said, whatever lies it had to tell in the name of ideology, whatever language it used to mask its lies and sell its lies, people had to agree with it or they would go to prison. Ultimately, though, this can't last. The Soviet Union finally collapsed because reality is real. It's not just a linguistic construct or any other kind of construct, but there can be a lot of ruin in a nation before reality reasserts itself. I'm afraid we're going to live through that. Yeah, it seems like that is the case. And that honestly leads me right into my next question, is even in the conservative and Christian realm, there seems to be a lot of people who have adopted that sort of rationale, who are sort of abandoning reason and logic and adopting more progressive thought. Now, what can we do as conservatives and Christians who are against that to sort of speak to those people and start a conversation? Well, I think a lot of Christians who are adopting wokeness are doing it for the best of reasons. They want to be compassionate. And there's nothing wrong with being compassionate. They want to fight racism. That's the right thing to do as Christians. And they want to at least not make the struggles of people who are dealing with transgenderism, with same-sex attraction, whatever. They don't want to make their lives harder. These are things I admire. On the other hand, we cannot say that something we believe is untrue is true. And I think if you go back and look at the experiences of the persecuted church, whether it's the persecuted church of the past in the communist countries or the persecuted church today in the Middle East, in China, and elsewhere in the world, they will tell you that things are very, very different from bourgeois, middle-class American morality. I was just in Europe and met a Christian from Egypt. The Coptic Christians over there have been persecuted for 1,200 years. And he told me that he actually feels sorry for us Americans because he said, as we know from the Bible, from our faith, that it's more dangerous to lose your soul than your body. And he feels that American Christians are losing our soul because we're so afraid of the world. We want so badly to be thought of well by the world. We fear the world more than we fear God. And I think that if we recognize that to be a Christian is always to be out of step with the world, whatever world you find yourself in, whatever era you find yourself in, we have to do that. And there's a great book that I read recently by a Protestant pastor named Vadhi Bokum, African-American evangelical pastor, who talks about wokeness as being anti-Christian. Good brothers and sisters in Christ like him, we have to listen to them because they are seeing things that the rest of us either can't see or are too afraid to talk about. Last point, there was a Christian academic named Rene Girard who taught at Stanford. He was one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. He died a few years ago. Girard said that in the end of days, that when the Antichrist comes, he will be like a false Christ. He will try to be more compassionate and more just than even Jesus Christ was. Girard said before he died that he could see in what we now call wokeness. The word didn't exist then. He sees perhaps the presentiment of the Antichrist because the woke are trying to be more just and compassionate than even Jesus. Wow, my goodness. So the stories and things that you must have heard through these interviews must have altered you in some way, even though you're very grounded in these thoughts and these beliefs. How have you changed through the work that you've been doing for this book? You know, I'm so glad you asked that because I live a pretty comfortable life. I'm like a hobbit. I like to sit at home and drink my tea and cook dinner for people, read my books. But in talking to the people in the former Soviet bloc about what they went through, especially those who went to prison, and I realized how important suffering was for our faith. I talked to a Baptist pastor, an elderly Baptist pastor in Moscow, who looked at me in the eyes and said, you go home and you tell the American church that your faith means nothing if you're not prepared to suffer for it. On that same trip to Moscow, I talked to a man who had spent years in prison, a Russian Orthodox man for evangelizing, and his face is partially paralyzed from the beatings he took. He actually told me that he had visions in prison where God sent angels to bolster him and tell him that your suffering is not in vain, that people are being converted and will be saved for all eternity because of the things you've been willing to suffer. Now this is radical stuff for us Americans. The church today, whether it's Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, whatever, we are so accustomed to thinking that the faith is all about feeling good about ourselves and feeling comfortable. Here we have these believers saying, that's not it. If you think that's what the faith is, you're going to collapse when the secret police come to take you away. This was made so deeply impressed in me by these people. And again, when you're looking at a man who's crying, remembering his beatings in prison that he took because of his faith, it can't help but get into your heart. Wow, wow. So that's a lesson everybody listening right now, sort of put yourself out of the scope of your own life and try to learn about others and how they practice faith and just simply how they live. And you'll have this deep appreciation for the freedom that you get to have here in America and for your faith itself. Rod, thank you so much for being on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, I should say before we go, I dedicated this book to the memory of a Catholic priest named Father Tomislav Kolakovic. Father Kolakovic was a Croatian Jesuit who was doing work against the Nazis in 1943. He heard they were coming for him. He escaped to Slovakia and told the people there, the Christians there, that the good news is the Germans are going to lose. The bad news is the Soviets are going to be ruling this country when it's over. And the first thing they're going to do is persecute the church. He began to prepare the church for this persecution. His own bishops told him, Father, stop scaring people. It will never happen here. But he knew better. Sure enough, everything he predicted happened. But because Father Kolakovic saw what was coming and found people, Christians, who were willing to lay the groundwork for the resistance, the underground church in that country survived for 40 years of communist oppression. We are in a Kolakovic moment here in America now. And we Christians and all our allies had better get ready for it. You're absolutely right. And that's something we try to focus in on the show is just, I know it sounds scary. It sounds like we are just being alarmist. But these things can happen and they do happen. They've happened historically over and over. And to think that they won't happen here is just not rational. So that's a very valid warning. Rod, how can people support you and this book? Well, they can get the book. It's on sale everywhere. I prefer they buy it from independent bookstores. But you can get it on Amazon if you want. I write a blog daily at theamericanconservative.com. I have a sub stack, rodreer.substack.com, of which I focus on spiritual issues. And of course, I'm on Twitter at Rod Reer. Amazing. So everybody listening right now, go get yourself a copy of Live Not By Lies by Rod Reer. Thank you again for being on the program. It was great fun. Guys, we have an extremely special guest on the show today. It's Christopher Rufo. I feel like Christopher Rufo is on the show, even when he's not physically here, because we're always covering his stories. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, as well as our resident CRT expert. So Christopher, thank you so much for being on the program. It's good to be with you. Amazing, amazing. So you had a sort of a rough go of things recently. You're very popular on Twitter. That's the platform that I feel like most people know and love you from. But you had your verification badge sort of snatched from you. What happened there? I did. My kind of blue check was disappeared. It was taken away. Very odd. Two things happened in my kind of tech world. I got about a week ago a notification from Gmail, or from Google, rather, where I host some of my email systems, my non-sensitive email systems, and my cloud storage. And they said that a government-backed attack was seeking entry into my email. So this was a kind of state-sponsored intelligence agency. I'm not sure which one. Foreign domestic was seeking access to my email. And then a week later, I think by coincidence, most likely, Google just removes my check, said I was incorrectly verified, and then just snatches it away. And I think that it shows both our vulnerability as individuals, but also the arbitrary nature of a lot of the policies from tech, which, while I can't say why it happened, I can't discern intentions, I don't know from behind the scenes. It at least raises the suspicion that there is some kind of bias, there's some kind of lack of transparency, there's some kind of effort. When you've been a naughty conservative, they're going to take your stuff away. That's what it feels like, at least to me. Right. I just had my run-in with this yesterday. I've been banned off TikTok numerous times now, but I went on Instagram to do a live video yesterday, nothing political, just to play music for the people who follow me, and banned from doing live videos, and simply because of community guidelines violations that go along with my political beliefs. So we share that space. Have you had any help in sort of fighting back against this? Yeah, you know, the media has been really great. I had a lot of articles written about it, raising some kind of the alarm, sounding the alarm, and Glenn Greenwald made a nice tweet, you know, kind of coming to my defense. Also noting that the first time someone was unverified was Julian Assange. So there is a kind of backstory to some of this unverification. And then, you know, I've had some people reach out behind the scenes, although if you're listening and you have any connections with Twitter, please reach out to me to try to see what happened and see if we can get it fixed. And, you know, at the end of the day, we only can do what we do. And I don't think I'm, it doesn't, it certainly doesn't make me feel like I need to change what I do, to censor what I do. I think of myself as a fairly moderate, rational, reasonable person. And so it's sometimes kind of funny when I look at the news coverage about me in the New York Times or the Post, they present me as some kind of flamethrowing, arch conservative ideologue. And it just kind of, it just, it's like, it's so bewildering. It doesn't feel like to me, that's what I am. And I oftentimes don't even recognize myself in some of the coverage. I see you're a white man talking about CRT. So that's basically what you get, essentially. You are this horrible conservative Nazi racist, but almost like I'm not verified. I have over 100,000 followers on Twitter, not verified. You know, someone like Dave Portnoy isn't verified. James O'Keefe was never verified. I feel like this is kind of for you, in some respect, almost a second badge of honor is being unverified. The people at Twitter, these leftists, hate you so much because you speak so much truth that you get unverified. It's almost like a kind of cool thing to know. It's the new cool, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like the new verification badge is no verification badge. And I'm not just saying that because I'm unverified. You got to get it and then get it taken away. That's really the double trick. Exactly. What do you think is the main problem when it comes to these big social media sites? I mean, we're obviously seeing you being, you know, your blue checkmark being taken away. We're seeing censorship about conservatives all over the place. I mean, we saw this during the election and it's just all over with the shadow banning and demonetization and all sorts of things. Do you think that those kind of things tie in with a lot of the CRT that you talk about? Or what do you think is the biggest problem when it comes to these big tech overlords we have now? You know, I think there are two types of media, right? You have high production media. So you look at Hollywood, television programs, kind of more artistic creations that are really dominated by the left and have been dominated by the left for many years. And then you look at the kind of low tech, lower production, lower barrier to entry media such as talk radio, Facebook, Twitter, live streams, podcasts that are easier entry and require less production. Conservatives actually do really, really well on those platforms. Dominate talk radio, you know, have historically dominated kind of sharing on Twitter. And so I think what the tech companies have realized is that the people who are increasingly using their services, using their platforms and doing actually really well, reaching big audiences, having a lot of influence are people that are not like them, that do not think like them, that do not share the same values as they do. And they're now kind of shocked. They thought that their platforms would liberate a kind of progressive utopian vision, you know, and that would remake the world in their image. And now they're confronted with this problem that the people who actually oppose that vision in some cases are using their platform to advance something different. And so they're trying to figure out what do we do? Do we kind of take a heavy handed approach? Do we take a more subtle approach? And this is the thing that we're seeing. And I think the President Trump ban was really the Rubicon moment where they said, you know what, we're going to actually start drawing a line and enforcing a political orthodoxy and we're going to take the heat from banning a sitting president. And now we're living in the wake of that. And I know PragerU has had many, many run ins. I have had my own small run ins in my own way. And we're all in this fight. We're all experiencing this jostling back and forth. And the future is unknown. We'll have to see what happens. Yeah, it sucks that we have to go on big tech and big social media to talk about the censorship that they are doing to us on their own platforms. It's kind of ironic in a sense that that's what we have to do. But it's really the best means of getting our messages out. And, you know, one thing I hear a lot of people talking about is, you know, creating our own platforms and things like that as conservatives and truth loving people. But for me, you know, I think that people who are conservative need to be on these other social media platforms, because if we want to influence people who have a difference of opinion than us or change their minds, you know, Amala was a leftist before getting involved with PragerU. I was a liberal atheist before getting involved. And it's like if it wasn't for social media, we wouldn't be in this position. What do you think about the argument of just going and creating our own social media? Or do you think we should try and stick it out with the ones that we already have? I think that, yeah, sure, you can create an alternative platform. I don't think there's any harm in that. But what you have is then you have a kind of conservative technological ghetto. You know, conservatives don't have the market power, don't have the kind of engineering power, don't have the aesthetic power to create a true rival. Getter and Parler, et cetera, will never have even a significant market share compared to Twitter, because they're derivative products and they're inferior products, frankly. And so I think that the solution is not to create a kind of an alternative echo chamber at a very small scale. You know, the solution is to recognize that even as a free market conservative, when you have monopoly conditions, you justify some regulation, some government intervention. Even very hardcore libertarians would agree. Under monopoly conditions, whether it's Standard Oil or YouTube, some government regulation is necessary and appropriate. And I think that when you have these monopolies, YouTube, again, a kind of video platform monopoly, Twitter, social media, kind of micro-blogging monopoly, Facebook, interpersonal monopoly, this now comprises the new public square. And these are really public platforms for public debate. And the founders were very clear on this, that political speech is the most important speech to protect. It's the essential speech category of our First Amendment. And therefore, I think there's a good argument to be made that these companies should be—I mean, look, they're great companies. They've created an incredible public service. They've allowed people who are voiceless to have a voice. But there is now, I think, an obligation to the public that these should be essentially a public square services, public square platforms. And they should at least be—you know, you can't be, you know, threatening to kill someone. There's certainly a line, right, on the First Amendment freedom of speech. But I think that there has to be simple, neutral, accountable, transparent mechanisms to guarantee that people who are engaging in political speech are protected and not going to be at the whims of an arbitrary ideological power. Well, sadly, they want to say that they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to say that they have editorial control over what happens. But then they also want to say that they're a public forum open to all. And that's the great joke that they've basically played on us, it seems. Yeah. All while hiding the indoctrination that they're trying to put people through. Now, I kind of want to shift gears to a PragerU project that you've been heavily involved in and is coming out tomorrow. And that is a short documentary called Miseducated. So we're going to play the trailer really quickly. And then we have a couple of questions about your involvement in this project. And these lessons are poison for all kids. The design of this is to put into the minds of kids as young as kindergarten that you are not like him. He is not like her. All of these things are designed to divide you. The system's set up to where if you're teaching anything about gender identity, that you don't even have to notify parents when it's being taught. Parents have no idea. And they don't know how radically the sex ed has changed. Here in America, our kids are taught divisive racial ideologies, skewed history, and a new kind of sex education that robs them of their innocence. This is the miseducation of our children. Okay, so that's a new PragerU short documentary that's coming out featuring you, Christopher Rufo, called Miseducated, a decline of America's schools. Now, this has been getting out everywhere. It's all over social media, on every single platform. I'm seeing people talk about the infiltration of CRT and gender theory and this really horrible sex education that young people are being subjected to in our schools. And it seems like people are fighting back and responding to it. An article out of the journal says that 1.1 million students have now left the public school system and we're seeing a massive boom in homeschooling. Do you feel like this sort of indoctrination is a key player in that shift? I think it is. I think obviously the pandemic was probably the number one. But the pandemic was number one for two reasons. The pandemic, first off, shut down schools. So parents are saying, well, if my kid wants to learn anything, I better get more involved. But second, even for kids who were attending school virtually, parents got a kind of an ugly look into what's happening in the classroom, what's actually being taught. And then I think the combination of those two things really pushed parents to say, wait a minute, I need to get more involved. I need to find out what's happening in our schools. I need to show up at city council meetings or rather school board meetings. You're seeing that happening everywhere. And then in some cases, I'm better off actually pulling my kid from the public school system, finding an alternative. This is a hardship, obviously, for many parents. But the unintended benefit of this is that parents are now starting to raise questions about what's happening. Parents are seeing a really ugly side within the public education system. And then they're actually using their creative energies and faculties to try to find new solutions. And I think that this is going to be a huge jolt of energy for people who want to see more parental control, better education, better curriculum. And I think that that's the first I saw of the trailer. So it's very exciting to see that trailer. I think this would also play a part in getting out that message. We were talking before on the show about whether or not... We've had some states like Idaho and others who have said, we are going to ban CRT from being taught in our classrooms. And I said, I think that's a good idea. I think that banning it is best when you are teaching little white kids that they're racist and little black kids that they are oppressed. I think that's a horrible thing to do. What do you think about that? What's your take on whether or not it should be banned or not? Yeah, absolutely. I definitely have supported that and worked, actually, with many of the state legislatures in Texas, Idaho, Tennessee, Florida at the Board of Education level. Nine states now have done this. I think we're going to see another five to 10 states join with this movement next year when the legislatures are back in session. But it's really, I think, essential. You shouldn't teach that, for example, the language in many of these bills, one race is superior to another. Members of one race should be held responsible for the historical crimes committed by people who look like them. Or that one race or another is inherently oppressive or racist or victimized. These are really crass generalizations and reductions that only serve to fill kids with either guilt and shame or pessimism and despair. They don't actually improve educational outcomes. They're intellectually bogus formulations. State legislatures have a responsibility. You have limited time in the classroom. What's being taught, what's not being taught. They have to make these selections. The beauty of it is that now the people, the voters, the public, through their state representatives, get to decide, these are the values we want to transmit through our public school systems. These are the values we do not want to transmit through our public school systems. This is the heart of democracy. This is the heart of public control over public education. I think it's just starting. This is a good beginning. But we have to now offer better alternatives, better curricula, better pedagogies, so that parents in places like Texas and Florida and Idaho can be confident that when I send my child to a public school, it reflects my values, it reflects my priorities, and they're going to get something that's valuable. We live here in Los Angeles, the hellhole that it is, as I'm sure you're aware. I don't have kids yet, I don't think. One day, I want to have kids. Let's say my state, that I live in, California, isn't going to ban CRT. What do you say to parents who live in a state or a city that is not doing that or not really pushing to make these things outlawed? What do you give as advice to those parents on what they should do for their kids? This is a good question. I have two kids. My oldest is in elementary school. My youngest has just started preschool. Very exciting. I live in Washington state, so it's a very similar environment. I used to live in the city of Seattle. My wife and I, you can try to change the school system in Los Angeles or Seattle. God bless you if that's your passion and what you're fighting for. By the time your kids graduate from high school, it's not going to change. These are very slow-moving, very entrenched bureaucracies and institutions. I recommend, just from a practical point of view, you have a couple options. If you want to, say, live in the city of Los Angeles or New York or Berkeley or Seattle, you have two options. One is to move, to go to a part of the state or another state, even, that you would find a school system that is already set up that reflects your values to a greater degree. That's what I did. I moved to a small town in Washington state. You have much better options, much better schools. Actually, my local school district, where I live in rural Washington state, banned critical race theory by unanimous vote. They said, nope, we're not going to do this, even though we're in Washington state. Or you can send your kids to an alternative school, which is a private school, a Catholic school, a religious school, a Christian school, a Jewish school in some places. That costs money, but I think many parents make the decision that it's a worthwhile expenditure if they can afford it. That's the short-term solution for you personally. The longer-term solution is to try to get reform, and I think ultimately to try to get more school choice so that I can pull out my kids and send them to private school. I have the means to do so. But every family should have the right to exit. So if you're stuck in a failing school in the city of Los Angeles and you don't have money or in the working class, I think you should be able to take your education dollars, that's probably around $18,000 a year that the city of Los Angeles public schools are spending on you. You should be able to take that and apply it anywhere. So if you say, hey, I want to pull my kid out of this failing, indoctrinating public school in South LA, and I want to go to a charter school or a private school or a Catholic school, you should be able to take that money with you. And I think ultimately that's really the fight, is the right to exit. Everyone should have a right to exit a system that's failing them, and I think that's what we're seeing more and more from education reformers. Well, Christopher, I want to thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Honestly, you are an honorary employee at our podcast with how much we use your Twitter and your stories. That's good. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. If you guys want to see more from Christopher, you can follow him on social media. You can check out his five minute video that he did with us here at PragerU. He is also featured in our upcoming short documentary that comes out tomorrow called Miss Educated. Christopher, thank you so much for being on. Thank you so much. All right, everyone, we are here with Colin Wright, who is the managing editor at Quillette and an evolutionary biologist. We want to talk about the story about doctors and medicine and just the insanity going on there, but before we get into the story, I just want to hear a little bit about, because I'm not sure if everyone watching right now knows who you are, just a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are. Yeah, so right now I'm the managing editor over at Quillette, but just about a year ago, I was a full-time academic scientist, and I ended up leaving, long story short, because I started sort of writing essays and speaking publicly about what I saw was this rise of, I guess we would call it gender ideology, and specifically how it was denying the reality of the existence of male and female as natural categories. You'd see things like there are five sexes, there's 10 sexes, sex is a social construct or a spectrum. And so this just sort of offended me as a biologist and someone who cares about what's true in a biological sense. And so I started writing essays about this, speaking out against it. A lot of people didn't like the fact that I was speaking out against it, and so there was sort of a campaign to try to, I guess, poison the well about my name, try not to get me hired at universities, things like that. And so I ended up leaving of my own will. I did have a chance to renew my contract over at Penn State where I was working before, but I decided that I kind of wanted to have more control over my future profession. And then luckily, Claire Lehman, the editor-in-chief at Quillette, she reached out to me and they had an opening for an editor there. And they offered me the job. At first, it was a temporary position, and then I was moved up to full time. So that's what I've been doing ever since. And it's been really great. I don't have to worry about people trying to cancel me now. So our audience loves to hear stories of what's happening behind the scenes in these sort of institutions. Can you think of a particular moment where you really questioned, what am I doing right now before leaving your field? Yeah, well, there was... So I had an essay that I co-authored with a developmental biologist named Emma Hilton, and I had been applying to maybe hundreds of academic jobs that had them currently out. I was sort of on a Twitter hiatus because I had it on lockdown. So employers couldn't search for myself on social media. And then I sort of broke that social media silence by having an article come out in the Wall Street Journal that was titled, The Dangerous Denial of Sex, which just went over what sex is, why it's important, who it harms, women, children, LGBT community. And then this created such a big backlash that students at Penn State were saying that they felt unsafe, the fact that I was on campus. And so that's when it really sort of dawned on me that even if I were to be able to get a tenure track position, like what are the chances I'm going to get tenure if I stay here when students are constantly saying that they just don't feel included and safe with me just happily studying my ants and wasps in the laboratory on campus. So that was sort of a wake up call that this environment is really not friendly to me and that I probably need to jump ship. So that's exactly what I did. Amazing. And we hope that the work that you're doing at Quillette is reaching people and hopefully changing minds. It doesn't seem like that's happening in the university space yet. And I wanted to get into this story that we wanted to highlight with you. This is an article from Barry Weiss's Substack written by Katie Herzog. And it talks about one story in particular out of the University of California. And I'm going to show this article to the audience watching as well. That a professor was doing an endocrinology course and apologized to the entire class for saying the term pregnant woman to everybody. How do you feel about that? I think it's pretty ridiculous. I mean, it's getting more and more common. So there's a general assault on the language. What we're seeing is they don't want you to say that only women can have babies. They want to expand this to men and just the way people identify. But there is also part of that article, too, a more fundamental denial of the existence of male and female as just real categories completely. Not just, you know, you can identify as one or the other and biology remains static. There's sort of this underlying move to just abolish the underlying reality of biology in general. And this is something that I had commented on when the New England Journal of Medicine had recently had an article saying that we should not have sex on birth certificates anymore, that it should be removed or moved to below the demarcation line, you know, along where just, you know, like the race and marital status of your parents is, you know, just aggregate data rather than something that tells you information about yourself. And they even said something about, like, your biological sex is not relevant for any sort of medical indicator. And so I had an article that just, you know, showed all the ways that medical issues, certain, you know, heart disease, how they express differently in males and females and how, you know, if we have our doctors that aren't acknowledging male and female in favor of just gender identity, I mean, this is literally lives that are at stake here. I mean, this isn't just, you know, fun and games and this isn't even just, you know, trans women in sports anymore. We're talking about the symptoms of a heart attack and how they're going to present themselves differently or whether someone I think they mentioned in that article to presenting with abdominal pains and they were misdiagnosed as being a man. And so they didn't realize that this was a pregnant individual and that it resulted in the fetus actually dying. So, yeah, there's extremely consequential. It's hard to believe this is even what we're talking about. Yeah. The left wants to call you a bigot for saying anything like that. That's the way that they operate. And I want to ask because I was a biology major at one point years and years ago, about four years ago. I failed all my classes, ended up dropping out of school for the similar reason why I think you left school. But what I mean, I saw the similar things to what you're saying. Why is there this push to have this? Why if people know, obviously, that the things you're saying are right? I don't think that all of these people on the left or in academia really think that you're wrong. I think that they might just be too scared to speak out against it or actually say what the truth is. Why do you see that there is this big push, especially when this push pushes out great scientists like you, among others? Yeah, it's really tough. I think a lot of it is, again, just the fear to not want to push back against the LGBT community because this is the community that's generally putting forward some of these ideas. And they have a track record of doing good things and having gay marriage and gay rights. And no one wants to be seen as sort of on the opposite side of that movement anymore. And so they'll almost do anything they can to just be in their good graces. Unfortunately, the movement has changed a lot. And now it's influenced heavily by critical theories, specifically in this realm, queer theory, which is just trying to break apart binaries. It tries to deconstruct realities. It looks at things in terms of power dynamics. And it says, if you're saying that male and female are real, you're coming from a position of power, trying to maintain power. So it's just fundamentally a reality-denying ideology. And a lot of people are sort of ignorant that this is as bad as it actually is. I still have people telling me when I combat this type of nonsense that no one's really claiming that biological sex doesn't exist, or I'm just confusing sex and gender, and they still maintain this divide between the two, when that is just fundamentally not the case and hasn't been the case for years now. People need to start catching up to what's actually being claimed. And I think a lot of people are. So I think there's some hope. Right. The main pushback that we get when we talk about it on our program is, why does anybody care that a man wants to identify as a woman, or a woman wants to identify as a man, or that we want to change these parts of our society? And you mentioned a few broader implications, especially in the field of medicine, that can occur when we sort of shift our culture in this way. If you can really articulate to the audience why this is problematic, and what sort of changes they're going to see in their daily lives, what would you tell them? Well, I mean, we had a feminist movement that was largely concerned with sex-based rights, and they achieved a lot over the years in achieving these. And if we're going to just completely de-center biological sex as the thing that we're having rights enshrined upon, or at least circled around, these sex-based rights become impossible to enforce. It also undermines the LGBT community, because we're seeing people saying that things like being a lesbian or being gay no longer means you're same-sex attracted. It means you're attracted to the same gender identity. So people have told me, literally, that I'm actually pansexual, because I mentioned that Scarlett Johansson was attractive, and I'd still be attracted to her, even if tomorrow she said she identified as a man and changed nothing else about her, just because it has to do with her identity. If she happened to identify as a man, that would then make me gay. So we risk the successful normalization of the homosexual, the LGBT community by undermining this. And then at a more fundamental level, this gender ideology we're teaching to kids teaches them, really, to be dissatisfied with their bodies, to be confused about the relations of their behavior to their sex, to maybe think that they were born in the wrong body when they just might have gender nonconforming behavior that we tend to see a lot in LGBT youth. And this, specifically, is a fast track to putting kids on things like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries. These are, by and large, irreversible, and we shouldn't be trying to fast-track kids down any type of these medical interventions. So the list goes on. I mean, we could talk about trans women in sports, too, and breaking records of women and trans women in prison. Yeah, it's just, there's so many aspects. When you deny a fundamental aspect of biology, like the fact that we're a sexually dimorphic species, a lot of problems are going to start cropping up everywhere in our daily life. It's just too fundamental to what we are as a species. Yeah, that is definitely true. Then what it seems like is that most of this stuff seems to be child abuse. I mean, these things are hurting children. They're hurting people all over America, and it seems to be for an agenda that people are trying to push. It's funny, you're talking about the power dynamics, people talking about, we want to keep power dynamics in place by talking about this. They are creating a power dynamic themselves that, if you speak out against it, then you're not allowed to have any sort of power, right? It's a totally hypocritic way of thinking that many of these people go around, but Colin, I want to say thank you for coming on the show, talking to us about this. It's not often that we get to have many experts to talk about these things. That's very true. It's very cool. We just have AMLA. Where can people find your work, Colin, if they want to hear more? I have a lot of articles I've written for Quillet, that's Q-U-I-L-L-E-T-T dot com. I have a substack called, well, I have my own domain now, so it's www.realitieslaststand.com, where I talk a lot about the sex and gender debate and what sex is. You can also find me on Twitter. That's where you can mainly find me. My handle is at swipe right. It's W-R-I-G-H-T. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Awesome. We will link to his substack down below for anybody watching that wants to support him. Colin, again, thank you so much for talking with everybody today. Hey, awesome. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Hi, guys. Back again. I hope you enjoyed those interviews. Will, anything to say? I'm sure they did. I can only imagine that they did because they were very entertaining. They were very, very entertaining. Guys, we will be back together next week. The whole gang is going to be back together. Will, Taylor, myself, we're going to be filming the show once again. It's no longer the Will or AMLA show. It'll be the Will and AMLA show. So I hope you guys enjoyed these interviews. And hopefully when we come back to you, we're in a beautiful new studio for your viewing pleasure. Hope you guys enjoyed. With tans. See you guys next week.