Stories of Us: Gina Florio | Stories of Us

Women are completely dominating America. We get more college degrees. The gender wage gap was a complete myth. It was little by little, the modern feminist in me was just sort of dying. My name is Gina Florio and this is my story. I grew up in a Christian home. Yeah, my parents really taught me that this is the land of opportunity. And my mom always told me, she says, you can do anything you wanna do. She says, you can be anything you wanna be. I remember hearing that from a very early time when I was a kid. She said that as long as I got a great education, that I'd be able to do pretty much anything I wanted to do with my life. So that was a really big moment for me when I got into Harvard. But I got there and then I also, even then remember, because it was a divinity program. That's where you really get the machine of the brainwashing and the indoctrination. I took a class my first year called Race Ethics in the U.S. Prison System. And the professor, she flat out told us that it was a white supremacy system that ruled America and that the U.S. prison system treated black people like slaves and we read the New Jim Crow. And so I was really digging deep into this theology, into this critical theory, and I was getting deeper and deeper. But when I got done with my degree program, even more I asked myself, what on earth am I gonna do with this? I have to take responsibility too, but I think in a way higher education kind of destroyed me. It little by little took away all the layers that really gave me grounding and meaning and it gave me an entirely new viewpoint of the world, a new lens through which to see the world. And that lens did not see the world kindly. You know, there was an agenda there. They wanted us to hate America. They wanted us to hate the free market and capitalism. I came out of Harvard not only as an atheist, but I was angry. I hated America and I wanted to leave. So at the end of that year, I moved to Australia. I just picked up my stuff. I got rid of my apartment. I was like, I am out of here. And I was convinced that I was just gonna kind of live in this little small beach town called Byron Bay. I was really soul searching. I was searching for something. And because I had abandoned all of the things that were most meaningful to me, I felt so empty. And I, you know, I kept denouncing all of the things that I had held dear in my life before. And I spent a long time looking for meaning and happiness in all the wrong places. I was partying a lot. I was doing a lot of drugs. It was a rough time and God happened. I mean, I don't even know how to explain it. I was turning on the gas tank to the barbecue and the gas tank wasn't hooked up correctly. It set off, the gas tank exploded. I ended up going to the hospital. I had first and second degree burns all over my face, my neck, my face was just completely charred. All of the delicate skin that was peeling off. A couple of weeks went by, I had to leave the country in order to renew my tourist visa. They found out that I was essentially working on a tourist visa, which is obviously illegal. And I had no choice but to go back home. And my mom said, when I called her from the detention center, she said she was so relieved. She was so relieved, not only because I was alive, but because I was coming home. Sorry, I never expected to cry doing this. It was a rough time and it was strange. And I feel bad, I put my mom through that. She had to watch me go from a straight A student and having real ambitions for my life. And then all of a sudden I was just sort of like, kicking it all away and said, I don't want any of that. I just want to be free. I was a freelance writer for a couple of media publications. You write whatever they give you. So at the start of a week, my editor would give me a list of SEO phrases, a list of topics, and I could choose which ones I wanted. And the list was always something like, 10 ways you can be more of an intersectional feminist. 10 ways you can support more women-owned businesses. 10 ways that cultural appropriation hurts everyone, especially minorities. So they would assign us very, very leftist, very feminist issues that we would just sort of have to produce because the name of the game for these media companies is quantity over quality. It's all about clicks and views and traffic because that's how they make their money. That's how the advertisers will buy ads. So they just give you topics that they know will get a lot of clicks and views and you're just expected to write them. One year they asked me to write 10 New Year's resolutions that people of color have for white people. And I ended up writing that. And so I was taking everything that I learned from college and university and graduate school and then being in this media environment, I was kind of, it was just the perfect storm of a place to produce content where it was very anti-America, very anti-men, anti-capitalism. But what's interesting about that time is that my ex-husband red-pilled me. Little by little we would have these conversations at home and my husband at the time asked me if I would watch an interview. And that interview was Candace Owens, the first time she was on The Rubin Report in 2017. And I just remember watching this girl and thinking to myself, I am being lied to by the media. There's something wrong here. And then I took a deep dive. I was just binging. I watched so much Victor Davis Hanson. I watched a lot of his speeches. I was listening to The Rubin Report a lot. That marriage played a really big role in my life because it brought me, it pulled back the veil. He really helped me understand that a lot of the things that I was taught, a lot of the things that I was producing as an editor and as a writer, were just patently, blatantly false and a complete lie. Really big sort of red pill for me was the lie of modern feminism. The relationship between men and women is not the way that modern feminists say it is. And then I started researching more about how women were doing in America. And I started to realize that women are completely dominated in America. We get more college degrees. I learned that the gender wage gap was a complete myth. A lot of the PragerU videos at the time. I remember watching the video of Christina Hoff Summers talking about the myth of the gender wage gap. It was little by little, the modern feminism, the modern feminist in me was just sort of dying. All these facts and data and statistics that were just kind of bubbling up. All of the lies of America being a racist, white supremacist country, it was really dividing us. I started doing jujitsu when I was in San Francisco towards the end of my time there. And something occurred to me that sports and fitness are almost inherently conservative. They're based on merit. They're based on hard work. They're based on tangible results. No matter where you come from, no matter what the color of your skin is, no matter what kind of background you had, what kind of socioeconomic status you come from, if you work hard enough, you can lose 20 pounds. If you work hard enough, you can win that jujitsu fight. I do think there is a very strong, a very interesting connection between getting physically fit and going through that process because I found myself very inspired to improve every other part of my life. I look back on all of my experiences and I just really hope, I just hope and I pray that all of the pain and the suffering and the turmoil and the chaos and the inner struggle that I dealt with as a woman in my 20s, I hope that my story can really inspire young women to take the narrow path and not be seduced by the lifestyle that I think is pushed today in mainstream media, is pushed by our culture and our society to be free. I love, love, love this country. I love the opportunities that it's given my mother, that it's given my family. I love the opportunities that it's given to me. Every 4th of July now, I just, I have a deep reverence for this country and I really believe that God has blessed America in unique ways. We are a very, very unique experiment that has gone right. Right now, I'm reading Dinesh D'Souza's United States of Socialism and these books really make me, I clutch the book to my chest and I'm just so grateful that I was born here. And my mom always told me, since I was a kid, she said, girl, she said, you got the golden ticket. You were born in America. And my mom was right. I'm so, so lucky now and so fortunate to be here. I just love America. I love our country. Thank you so much for watching this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to PragerU so we can continue giving out this content for free. Thank you so much.