“Disinformation” & America’s Ministry of Truth - Unapologetic LIVE w/ Tony Kinnett

[Music] [Music] hi everybody and welcome to unapologetic live i'm your host amela epinobi it's a fantastic tuesday taylor here taylor's here as well taylor can you i'm here what's up okay there we go uh today we're bringing you a special episode i know you guys watched when we covered this whole disinformation governance board that our current administration is opening up trying to battle dis and misinformation among its united states citizens i wonder what exactly that means but after we got that news and we got the executive director who has a wonderful mary poppins cover that we're going to show to you guys today we found a twitter account called ministry of truth that suddenly popped up with all these comedic angles about what this disinformation governance board is going to be doing now i thought maybe this person is going to remain anonymous not out themselves sort of like a libs of tick tock creator on twitter but no and now we have tony kenneth who's decided to show his face in a tweet where he said to save taylor lorenz of the washington post the time i'm the former science coordinator at indianapolis public schools fired for leaking documents to the public about race policies we are going to talk about that i'm the co-founder of the chalkboard rev an educational publication that publishes all political perspectives wonderful i love to see somebody who's not afraid to be open about who they are and tony kennedy is on the show today tony thank you so much for joining me thanks for having me amla let's talk about this so you opened up this twitter page ministry of truth you now have two 257 000 followers on this twitter account now what made you do this what's your background that you thought i'm just going to hop on this i'm going to create this twitter account and put it out there for the people so i was a freshman biology student at the time and i was really bored in some of the lectures that we were sitting in and i kind of picked up photoshop during that time i just you know would make memes and and photoshop like a flags and seals and things and that became kind of just a little pet hobby of mine over the years and uh on friday last friday i kind of thought well this disinformation board is getting kind of big so i'll make kind of a seal of what i think it would look like and it did alright you know threw it up on my twitter and later that day i was exhausted long day of working with chalkboard review and choice media and i looked around on twitter and i didn't see any ministry of truth accounts other than maybe a very old ministry of truth account that was inactive and was just the 1984 reference so i made the account threw up the seal put a picture of the storefront of the department of homeland security and sent out a quick tweet about the first amendment and i couldn't believe in just a few hours it was already sitting at 10 15 000 followers and and a few more hours it had passed my twitter account that i'd worked you know 12 years put all that effort into just to watch it get immediately dwarfed by some nonsense meme account right so you you come out with this it goes crazy what was the general response was it a lot of support or did you get the sort of leftist haters that started coming at your throat something that we experienced quite often with this show i got kind of a weird medium so i got a lot of support a lot of people that recognized some of the references that i was making a lot of people that you know enjoyed some of the jokes that have been in you know kind of conservative and libertarian twitter for some time but i also got some people who thought that the account was real and it was actually nina who was tweeting uh which that really that's really sad you know that you could actually mistake that for the real account that's just how bad our current government is but uh i did get a little bit of hate i have gotten a few interesting you know messages and and i guess would appear to be threats one person threatened to release my name to the public a full two days after i had released my name to the public as the owner of the account so what are you gonna do sometimes people are a bit slow on the uptake right it's it's amazing the things that people view as threats and they try to just tamp down anybody who represents a different opinion from them but it seems like from what i've looked at from your work and what you've done publicly you're no stranger to coming out against sort of this new ideology that we're living in this new woke world that we've all seemed to be subjected to you spoke out about your school and its use of critical race theory can you tell me a little bit about how you uh learned this and and what you did to work up the courage to come out about it oh i it wasn't courage it was more just really aggravated uh being asked to lie to parents and and to my teachers and to the many in the district indianapolis public schools is a district with many different buildings 35 000 students and we were told to tell our parents if they asked if we were teaching with any kind of critical race theory we were to tell them no that wasn't true i've studied critical race theory at the graduate level for about eight years i actually sat in on classes and i talked to gloria lads and billings and then through my time at ball state it's kind of like watching a dumpster fire you just can't turn away and i i that kind of fascination made me kind of an expert on the topic and and what it is and what it isn't uh and all of the ridiculous books that i've owned and paid for unfortunately so i'm being told by my district to lie to parents and then they bring in dr gloria ladson billings on october the 18th you know a couple months later to lead this racial equity presentation the entire staff had to participate in and several of the district staff were mocking parents that they weren't mature enough they weren't woke enough to understand critical race theory and how important it was for diversity equity and inclusion so i summarized the current case of critical race theory and how we taught it and the different ways we taught it in both curriculum and pedagogy and released it to the public and within uh two days of me releasing that video i was asked by human resources not to come back to the school for my own safety and hr later told me that i had given the class the uh several members of the staff clinical anxiety wow unbelievable so did you did you fight this at all what was what was the the work that you had to do after that all came out or did you just go okay i guess i'm fired it's what i had to do to to let people know this was happening so i knew when i submitted the video that i was putting my job on the line to be clear i was at a point in that job where i felt as though a little bit of my soul was dying each and every day that i went into work there the things i was being asked to do the thing as a science administrator that i was being asked to ignore or promote to my teachers and telling them how to teach science and what to what to say to their students and how to treat them differently based on whatever color of skin they have or whatever you know genitals that they have and it was disturbing so this kind of came as a bit of a relief you know being able to work from home on leave with pay for a while and there was an investigation they wouldn't let my lawyer come into the investigation with me i tried to participate in the investigation i gave them everything they want they were upset to find out that i had a perfect record of observations and evaluations i was rated highly effective that's like the best you can be rated in the indiana public school system and so in january couple months later they just kind of quietly sent me a letter and said we're firing you because in indiana you can fire someone in schools for whatever reason you want and we're firing you because no one else wants to work with you and because uh you didn't go to a microsoft teams meeting on like september the 3rd it was very very weird just a very small list of things it was really goofy right and we've heard a lot of people we've had quite a few people on the show who get fired from their jobs and they find some lame excuse which which is really just a guy's for we hate your ideology we hate the things that you're saying and we hate that you're fighting back with us now i know you say that doesn't take courage but i gotta say i think it really does to fight back against not only a hive mind but this this feeling that oh i could just go along with this and you know wipe my hands of it and whatever i did what they told me to do and i can keep my job and i can keep my career and i can keep my my family comforted and taken care of and just you know sell this little part of my soul in order to do this but what i think is interesting about your story is you chose to stand up a lot of teachers unfortunately i think are not doing that although we have heard from a few that are really up in arms about this critical race theory the gender theory in schools things like that for me when i hear stories like yours it makes me fearful for the future of our education system because i can imagine that good educators can only last so long in that sort of environment are you fearful for the future of education or do you think there's going to be some sort of turnaround where we start valuing good educators and getting rid of this ideology i'm actually incredibly optimistic about the future of education in the united states because there are so few that are supporting the status quo as a good education policy friend of mine likes to say if there's no one supporting the status quo that creates a vacuum and things are going to rush to fill that and what i see right now are a lot of parents a lot of good teachers a lot of classical a lot of parochial a lot of private institutions that are rushing in to fill that education gap with really solid instruction that values parents a lot of teachers are leaving to start micro schools that are built to increase the skills and the reading levels of the students not you know their level of woke justice and that is really encouraging to me another thing that's encouraging that no one ever talks about and this is in reference to your earlier points there are a lot of teachers that are starting to leak information even though they're not speaking out publicly i receive probably 70 or 80 direct messages a week from teachers around the country that are telling us little bits and pieces of information inside their school asking for advice asking to help uh asking us to help them leave their state's teachers union it's an incredible ideology shift uh that i don't think the left has quite grasped they've lost yet it feels like an undercover revolution we're just like sneaking papers of cross hallways trying to talk about this stuff and get it out to the people it really is it really is i i'm interested to see when it sort of comes to a head and everything comes crashing down because it feels like we're on the precipice of that right now parents leaving public education in droves now and finding alternatives and i'm wondering if the government's gonna have to go oh wait we're gonna have to shift because people are not people are not really buying into this stuff anymore and they're not allowing us to do this so i'm curious to see what happens your ministry of truth twitter we'll get back to that has blown my mind with how quickly it is grown and what it speaks to me is that same idea that there are people who are maybe not so open about their views but see what's happening right now and they're going i'm not okay with this here's a follow here's a retweet here's a like and i'm gonna push your stuff out now you said a lot of people thought that you might have been uh nina jankowicz making these tweets i want to show our audience a video of nina just so we can uh really see how how confusing a thought that might be because she's a very interesting woman and i will speculate and say probably not as funny and creative as you are here is her mary poppins rendition about disinformation wandering is really quite ferocious it's when a hopster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious by saying them in congress or a mainstream outlet so disinformation's origins are slightly less atrocious it's how you hide a delighted light it's how you hide a little light a little eye it's how you hide little idols live when rudy giuliani shared bad intel from ukraine or when tick-tock and flu and suicide can cause pain their laundering disinfo and we really should take note and not support their lives with our wallet voice or vote oh information wandering is really quite ferocious it's when our hawks to take some lies and makes them sound precocious by saying them in congress for a mainstream outlet sergius inflammation's origin seems slightly less atrocious okay that's enough of that for me i'm just gonna cut that off [Laughter] what were your thoughts when you first saw that video so uh well several things as a guy who actually in in some of my side time i'm a jazz vocalist and also a pianist and so listening to that horrible rendition it just causes pain to my soul i mean poor julie andrews you know she's had to hear this like several times now uh i mean the lyrical writing is just oh that's not how like syllables work in verse and rhythm and meter and it's it's so cringy like she's trying so hard like she you know you leave she leaves her she leaves the chorus and then she goes into the little that little bouncy like where you're supposed to repeat it like that hum the little little hum did a lie it's too much like i mean we've created videos on the ministry of truth and you you don't have a joke every second you let it ride you you let the joke play out and and yeah that's it's embarrassing honestly if i were you i would be offended that they thought that your twitter account was run by this woman i would be like how dare you i love how you watch the video and you're like just from a technical standpoint this is not good i set the politics aside for a second this is embarrassing there are many better content producers and creators out there have created far better parodies than this right but you got to think there are people watching these videos and going well i can sleep soundly at night knowing nina's at the head of the disinformation governance board making sure that we don't hear any lies from these conservative uh tin foil hat conspiracy theorists what does that say about the state of our nation tony it's it's really embarrassing there's an individual from up in wisconsin who is i guess an investigative journalist of sorts who wrote a 12-tweet thread about how the ministry of truth parody account was actually a mockery of orwellian propaganda that benefited putin and that what what that we were attacking democracy and and what the disinformation board's trying to do 12-tweet threat long just arduous and it's so sad that there are individuals who are so bought into what this administration is doing they're so desperate for the state to give them the answers because their ideology is so monolithic that they will defend absolutely anything even something as atrocious as this you know in our nation that's built on the principles of free speech that you would encourage or support a government calling out private citizens based on their opinions that's right it's it's unconscionable and it seems to me as though this progressive new era or new age that we're going in through it going through right now they're losing in a lot of ways and so long as we have a voice on the internet they will lose you can lie to people a thousand thousand times over but as soon as somebody sneaks in with the truth people are going to see it and it's going to start to spread and i think that's what they're worried about we watched it happen with the election stuff we watched it happen with crt we're watching it happen with gender theory now and this whole don't say gay bill which is not the name of the bill ladies and gentlemen parental rights and education okay let's make that very 1557 if you're a mathematician there you go and they're just losing and losing and losing so now they're like okay if we just put a cap on what people can say and where they can say it that's how we win this we we watched uh president obama do a speech at stanford talking about how disinformation is a threat to democracy i'm sure you got to see that as well and it seems like they're just grasping at straws trying to get people to rally behind their lies so that they can just control everything we think and feel and of course we know that conservatives and libertarian types we're the ones getting censored on these social media platforms here's a video of nina denying what is fact there's already this idea this allegation that there is anti-conservative bias on the platforms even though there has been study after study proving in fact that often it's liberal voices that are being silenced particularly minority voices on social media so i think we're going to see more allegations of that there's already ah yes pull the old minority card study after study are you familiar there's a meme on twitter where it just says sources and then underneath it says dude trust me when she says study after study that's just what comes to my study after what studies like some opinion piece from vox says well act actually liberals are are often censored much more yes of course i even tried to look into this i'm like where's the study that says that liberal and leftist voices are censored more than conservative could not find a thing but as long as you say study after study shows this you can just lie but we know that if i put out a tweet tomorrow or or a tick tock tomorrow saying you know men are men and women are women boom 11 minutes it's still gone it's taken off the platform i've been banned off of these platforms on multiple occasions what has been your experience with censorship now that you're in this new realm of being a conservative beacon well it was actually it was actually the censorship and education media that caused us to found chalkboard review we'd had pieces rejected from ed week chalkbeat several universities and we launched chalkboard review so that everyone could publish their perspectives left right center doesn't matter that's you know that's an individual's right is to publish you know their experiences and opinions and so what we've seen since founding that and since you know launching the ministry of truth and publishing all these different things and and really starting to get involved in uh echoing minor opinions that are often censored we've seen a lot more genial of a response than i expected i was you know expecting kind of this leftist outrage at any kind of of spotlight towards things that are going on but it's the truth is really starting to convince more individuals because they've been starved from honest facts and data for so long and fed this endless propaganda that you know this site hates you and they're racist and they're bigoted and they're they're coming for you and you know lori lightfoot's tweet that you know after roe v wade goes down next they're coming for the lgbtq community and i think a lot of people are kind of looking around at their neighbors and the people they see at the store and they're just not seeing it and that fear-mongering has lost its edge and that's what we've we've seen in the last couple of years and what worries me is i'm just like there has to be something next i think roe v wade this is speculation of course was just this fast effort to go oh no we're losing right now what's something quick climate change is way too far away they're not going to feel it immediately we can't get them to rally behind this we can get them to rally behind roe v wade somebody weak and somebody leak it and then we went through it and it seems like even now you went through your whole news cycle media debate about it everybody went back and forth people showed up at the supreme court and they and they yelled about it and they protested and then it sort of fizzled out i don't hear anybody really talking about it anymore all ready disappearing and this is one of the things that i thought was really interesting it was a gamble to throw roe v wade and when biden if i don't know if you've seen some of the the recent surveys and polling data that biden is even starting to lose his ground with millennials in gen z which is unheard of because that's starting to be the huge push for democrat votes in the fall if they're losing those camps they're losing gen z and millennials no wonder they threw this wild gamble and it's i would say it's unfortunate but it's incredibly fortunate that it's backfired as wonderfully as it has it's exposing hundreds of thousands and millions to a lot of the scientific data on exactly when life begins and the stories of mothers who chose to keep their children i am one of those children and it's incredibly important that we continue to have these conversations despite what the administration wants to call disinformation that's amazing i did not know that about you do you mind speaking about that briefly if you're comfortable no problem uh not a huge story to tell my mom and dad weren't married when my mom got pregnant and my mom was advised to abort me she was young she hadn't yet started nursing school and her family told her that she needed to keep it and encouraged her that i was already a child and so did my dad and my dad's family and my dad uh buckled down and ended up proposing to my mom and a few months later i came along and then my mom worked very hard i worked her way on her own while my dad was working at the factory to put herself through nursing school and now she runs one of the largest behavioral health practices in indianapolis is a john hopkins postgraduate very proud of her that is so amazing send my best wishes to your mother and tell her that i think she's fantastic and that's wonderful and with that you point out something that i believe in really the more radical they get i'm just like sitting and watching and going oh i know with every choice that you make people are looking at this and going oh wait i agreed with the other stuff but i don't quite agree with this and we saw elon musk post that meme that colin ryan made that went super viral saying you know people on the ride and centrist are just standing here and watching and the left just goes over and over and over i we did a video yesterday on the show reacting to somebody who identifies as trans-racial he identifies as korean and is getting all these oh yeah like like that british korean lady yeah this is yeah so i watch those things and i you know as much as i'm like we should give substantive commentary on why this is not correct i'm like you know what do your thing get on every single platform that you can possibly be on and just keep continuing to shine a light on the crooks in every single argument that they're making about all of these issues and the crazier you get the more that sane normal reasonable people are gonna go oh wait a minute those boogeyman conservatives and centrists that i heard about ages ago are not that at all so i'm an optimist in that sense and you spoke about optimism i view this woke ideology as something that is completely unsustainable even if they were successful in every single endeavor that they brought forth i don't view it as being sustainable what are your thoughts on that so it's it's the fire festival all over again so it's this big huge advertisement of this wonderful vacation utopia in the bahamas and if we just adopt all of these practices you know if we just reallocate our resources and redistribute or excuse me if we just provide reparations to all of these groups that claim grievances and you know we we try to make everyone in this this special rubric of how we're going to view everyone's opinion then it'll be this wonderful thing we'll all get along we'll all be happy only the places that they've tried it it's like showing up to the fire festival you know it's all of these fema tents and the weather is terrible and there's no food and it's awful and that's why chas up in seattle is no longer functioning that's why these districts that have canceled their uh advanced math and science programs in the name of equity are hemorrhaging students and the public education system in the united states is hemorrhaging in general it's not because of additional boot stomping by the right the riot's not in charge at the moment but the left's insane push towards what they call this grand utopia is revealing itself a little too soon they've overplayed their hand a little too quickly and they're paying the consequences for it oh absolutely i completely agree with you uh there is a brilliant video that i always encourage everybody to watch who watch the show of yuri besmanov who is a kgb defector and he talks about the steps of ideological subversion and the final step in just bringing down a society like america would be normalization and coming out to the world and saying look guys i know this is crazy but everything's normal and i think they got to that step a little too soon they were a little too open about the things that they believe and the things that they're planning to do but tony i can tell in the way that you communicate and the tweets that you put out and the work that you're doing that comedy is really the backbone of a lot of what you do and how you communicate your ideas to people how important is comedy in this new conservative movement that we're seeing moving forward i think that there's a measure of laughing at the absurd so lie like a lot of other individuals you know back a couple years ago when someone would call me racist someone would call me a bigot someone would call me fill in the blank i would start to argue and say no actually look at all of this data from my life that suggests that i'm not the things that you accused me of but there was a journalist from indianapolis who i noticed would honestly just laugh he would laugh at them he didn't take them seriously he didn't treat them as serious individuals and speaking to him later and actually also speaking with scott walker later he's like it's just not worth your time to take them seriously you'll know when someone is being serious with you you'll know when someone actually wants to have a genuine conversation so when we see these clowns and get up in front of everyone and start doing this big huge performance because that's what it is it's a big performance to try to impress other groups it's basically the democrats strategy currently toward the hispanic communities in the united states they get up and they put on this big show on this big performance and i think that instead of of treating it as though it's a serious proposal we should laugh because it's nonsense it's nonsense that someone believes they're a transsexual dog who also identifies as korean that makes no sense it's it's funny and it it also helps with the depression of my god there are real people who think this stuff and if you don't laugh you'll cry with just how sad it has become with a lot of individuals in our society well i gotta say you've managed to provide me a lot of comedic relief in what is a most ridiculous time it's it's really hard and it is it is so important to just sit back and take a moment as as bad as you may think things are you've got your family you've got laughter just like laugh at it a little bit let it slide for a little bit and just gain your footing back on the ground before you get back into these things i know you don't think that you are a brave and courageous person i would say something differently but what is your advice to people who feel the exact same way that you feel right now but are just not quite ready to put their foot forward and start speaking out about these things oh if you're not ready to start speaking out my first bit of advice is that no one is actually thinking about you so you spend more time thinking about what others think about you than others actually think about you so use that general anonymity to express what it is that you feel about these topics with family members have important conversations you know like something on twitter write a tweet write an article for somewhere like chalkboard review actually put your opinion out there because every time that you normalize on the other side the classical americana that individual liberty you provide a bit of encouragement for the next american down the line who may not be where you are yet and the second thing that i would encourage you to do is invest a lot of time into your family and into your local neighborhood i'm on twitter a lot but there's a time each day where i shut off the phone and i go spend time with my wife and my newborn and whichever of our families is over at the house that day and with my church family and that is time well spent don't spend all of your time looking at the trolls on twitter actually spend some time investing in your family because then you'll have a purpose for the fight then you'll have something driving you when you go to work and you have the tough conversations and that would be an encouragement i would say for life amazing i love to hear that and for for those of you listening right now dennis prager has this amazing way that he ends his speeches and says you know there's three groups of people there are the fighters they're the people who do nothing and they're the people who support the fighters and often the people who support the fighters are just as important as the people on the front lines during this whole cultural battle that we're going through right now so tony i'll throw it over to you with this last question how can people support the work that you're doing how can they follow the work that you're doing uh well uh i'm assuming a lot of individuals are already following the us ministry of truth and and that's great if you want to see a lot of my personal takes uh for whatever reason that would interest you you can follow me on twitter at the tonis t-h-e-t-o-n-u-s but the most important place that i would say you could go and show some support is to chalkboard review uh where we're showcasing educators homeschool parents uh the stories of students who have gone through uh private classical public micro all other kinds of systems and actually take a look about or take a look at what's going on inside education so you can develop uh more of a direct approach to how you feel and where we should be going in society you can find us at thechalkboardreview.com or at chalkboardrev on social media sorry no no no problem we'll have all of that also in the description down below we will drop that in the chat for you guys to follow and to keep up with everything and to support the chalkboard review guys thank you so much for watching tony again congratulations on your amazing account on your beautiful family and all the work that you're doing and i'm definitely gonna have to have you back on again we might do some sort of a disinformation correspondent we'll throw it over to you thank you so much for everything that you do it's truly amazing thank you so much amelia god is good