Episodi
-
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the root causes of declining fertility rates and the broader societal crisis of meaning. This thought-provoking discussion covers:
* The limitations of economic explanations for low fertility rates
* The role of hopelessness and lack of meaning in modern society
* How the "urban monoculture" contributes to increased anxiety and depression
* The dangers of religious "cargo cults" and surface-level cultural imitation
* Why traditional approaches to increasing fertility rates are failing
* The need for new social technologies and active theological conversations
* How social media distorts our perceptions of reality and success
* The importance of vitalism and finding meaning beyond self-affirmation
Whether you're concerned about demographic trends, struggling to find purpose in life, or interested in the intersection of culture and fertility, this video offers valuable insights and potential solutions for our society's deepest challenges.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I'm excited to talk with you right now! So today we are going to talk about the hope crisis as it relates to declining fertility rates, but also society more broadly.
And this was brought to me again, it's something I regularly see in a recent article in the Atlantic called the real reason people aren't having kids. It's a need that government subsidies and better family policy can't necessarily address. And this really reminds me of, we, We're talking with redeemed zoomer not too long ago, and he was saying, when you talk to boomers about.
All the sadness in this young generation right now, they'll reflexively be like, oh, it's phones. And if you talk to the media, because it's very urban monoculture, very distributed as much cash as possible. It's always all economic situations that you look at something like, oh, it's phones.
, and this is, , pretty quick to [00:01:00] disprove.
The studies on this show, generally that it does make up eight portion of the decrease in mental health in youth. But less than half. And that's the more generous studies.
For example. Amy O'Brien a lead author at Oxford university did a study of 350,000 participants. , across the U S and the UK on teen mental health, youth, and technology. And she found that a teenagers technology use or a teenagers social media use can only predict less than 1%. In the variation of their wellbeing, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wore glasses in school.
You can look at economic situations. They don't explain it at all.
Malcolm Collins: Like they have a correlation to well being. But if you look at the way that Americans live today versus the way we lived 100 years ago, it is very clear that people in 100 years ago lived in significantly more poverty than people today.
But the statistical [00:02:00] evidence is even more damning than that. It turns out that upper class teens actually have worse mental health than well, any other group? , a study by.
Sonia Luther at Columbia university's teacher college. Found that adolescents reared in suburban homes with an average family income of $120,000 report, higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.
Malcolm Collins: So And so those can sort of be thrown out. And then if you talk about fertility more broadly, even some of the answers that we throw out don't really explain everything, right?
So we're often like well, you know, if you had more pride in your identity you would have higher fertility rates. And yet, I mean, does not. Russia and Ukraine have pride in their identity, right? I mean, Clearly they do to motivate these wars. And yet their fertility rates are desperately low. Or I may say well, you need a [00:03:00] strong religious system, right?
But does not Iran, a literal theocracy, have a strong religious system and strong religion in their country? And yet their fertility rates are abysmal. So what is it that, you know, when everything else that's that, that, that we want to blame this on is out the window. And I think that everyone kind of internally knows the hope crisis is real because we aren't just dealing with a fertility rate crisis.
You're also dealing with an unaliving oneself crisis. We went into not recent fairly, we've talked about it in a few episodes recently that by recent CDC statistics, if you look at high schoolers in the United States, one in 10 considered an unaliving themselves.
No, sorry. Tried to unalign themselves on any given year. And one in four girls made a plan to unalign themselves at any given year. Like, The rates are catastrophically high,
It's like American high schools have become the happening. And everyone's [00:04:00] acting like it's totally normal.
Christ, men! Amen!
Malcolm Collins: But if you look at the other countries that have fertility rate problems, like South Korea, they also have a really high unaligning oneself problem within the youthful generation.
And then you look at countries that have actually pretty, you know, robust fertility rates like Israel, the unaliving oneself rate in Israel is actually on the fairly low side.
Interestingly, in Israel, while in places like the US, the unaliving rate is going up, it's been going down in Israel.
So here I'm going to pull up a heat map by
unaliving oneself rate. And what you'll notice is, remember I was [00:05:00] like, oh like, so here I am showing a map. Now, I do not think that this explains everything.
But it does explain a little bit. Okay. So I'm saying that this is not like a a definite like, this is, this is where this is coming from, but it's definitely a big part of it. And when I talk to young people, when we're talking about the massive shift we've seen recently, and I do need to clarify how massive this shift is because a lot of people, when they believe like the UN statistics on how quickly fertility is going to fall Those statistics are so laughably wrong to give you an idea of how laughably wrong when the UN is like, Oh, we'll have a steady continuous decline in the United States that will then level off.
First of all, it's like, why is it going to level off? But then second and more important right now, if you look at the expected fertility rate of women in the actual fertility rate of women. So if you ask women, you know, in the early twenties, how many kids they expect to have, and then you look at how many kids they have, it's [00:06:00] typically around.
like, I think it's like 20 percent lower. Depending on what you're looking at
This study showed it to be 25% lower.
Malcolm Collins: now, if you today ask kids their expected fertility rate, you get something like over 50 percent of young women saying they don't plan to have any kids. at all.
Sorry, it's worse than that. It's 57% of people under the age of 50.
With it being weighted towards the younger generation.
Malcolm Collins: This was not the case. Historically, if you go previous generation, our generation, I think it was like 80 percent plan to have kids.
So what we can see from this is if this pattern holds, and I love it that a lot of the data, they assume that now for this generation, the actual fertility rate is going to be above the expected fertility rate. Well For, Our generation and what we know from the past is The actual fertility
rate is almost always below the expected fertility rate, which means you're going to be seeing a [00:07:00] catastrophic crash here. But the thing is, is what is driving young women to decide that they don't want to have kids? And when I talk to people, yes, there's some like urban monoculture y like, oh, it's for the environment and stuff like that.
But I really feel like this is a just so story. Agreed. I feel like the much bigger thing is, is they just don't have hope that the future is going to be a place where they want humans living or they want humans related to them to live. And you see this very Explicitly in the Korean fertility rate when people talk to you know, people in Korea, cause I've seen lots of these interviews, a lot of them are just like, yeah, but I don't want my kid growing up in this environment.
And when you have a environment where one in 10 kids is trying to unalive themselves every year, like that obviously is a psychologically very damaging environment. Right. Yeah. And to talk about the silliness of cash incentives, I'm going to read a quote here from the Atlantic piece [00:08:00] because I thought it was actually pretty good.
Cash incentives and tax relief won't persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, or for their future children. In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children. Not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.
And then the, the God thing, another thing I'll put on the screen here, a breakdown . of religiosity by demographic
IE, you know, millennials, Gen Z zoomers, et cetera. And you'll see in gen alpha, it falls off a cliff, which in, in Gen Z to an extent, which isn't captured in the mainstream demographics.
There's a lot of people who are like, Oh, the younger generation is moving, right? Which I agree. It is moving, right. but it's not moving right. Towards the old religions, and this is a huge mistakes that a lot of religious people I know are making. They're like, Oh, all the kids are turning back to these old systems.
And it's like, no, they're not. They are moving right in like a, okay, the urban [00:09:00] monoculture doesn't work, but they don't. The vast majority don't view you guys particularly better than the urban monoculture. And the big problem that the small religious renaissance that we're having right now has is that it's like almost all male.
So the gen alpha faction that is actually like, okay, I'm going to go ortho bro, I'm going to, you know, convert to whatever they're struggling because there's not an equivalent number of females making the same switch over. And so they're not able to easily find partners and this causes a well. problem because then it solves nothing even though they might be good fathers now and they might be able to motivate a high fertility rate. They don't have a partner to marry, so they don't end up having kids. So I wonder what your thoughts are on this.
Simone Collins: How much do you think this is a, an epidemic, epidemic of hopelessness versus an epidemic of on week?
Because I, I [00:10:00] get that the unaliving element of this implies that it's more of a negative affectation aside from just a lack of feeling anything. But I also get the impression that a lot of the low fertility stems not from deep unhappiness, though maybe there's a lack of contentment that's pervasive, but rather a lack of meaning in general and a lack of desire to do anything that's not necessarily actively miserable.
Malcolm Collins: I think you have a really good point there. So, I, I think the, the, the meaning crisis as it's called is, is a really good way to look at this. And I think that you've laid this out and this was actually the core point of our first book and our shortest book, the pragmatist guide to life is helping people develop a sense of meaning without trying to push them in any one direction.
Very different than the type of people we are today. But yeah. One of the things I realized when I was writing that book is there just was no other tool like that. And I think that that is part of what led to the meaning crisis. So it used to be, if you go back to the 50s and the 60s in the United [00:11:00] States, when you went to school, they would teach you What you should live for now, it might be wrong, but they gave you a moral system then going into, they didn't just do that.
Simone Collins: They gave you a moral system. They told you how to live, how to date, how to maintain your household, how to navigate in laws, how to do all sorts of things. We shared a culture that said, here's how to deal with life. And here's also what you do. And of course that includes getting a job, you know, going to school.
I
Malcolm Collins: agree, but here I'm just specifically in this point, talking about the moral meaning.
Simone Collins: Okay. That's
Malcolm Collins: all I'm talking about here. No, No, I'm talking about your on we question and what I think it comes from.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Then in the 80s and 70s, they had like the satanic panic and stuff like that. And what this caused was because there are different religious systems in the U.
S. Many of these conservative religious systems, yes, unfortunately this problem started because of conservative religious systems and not the progressives began to say that schools couldn't teach meaning [00:12:00] because, you know, your Protestant evangelical might be afraid that the meaning being taught was a little bit too Catholic and the, the, the, the Catholic might think it was a little too Protestant evangelical and the Jew might have a problem with, you know, each of those.
And so schools were just like well, we won't. touch on questions like, why do I exist? What's the purpose of my life? Why should I keep existing? Why does humanity have value? And then you go forward to go forwards. And then it's the, the ACS in the nineties who are like, Oh, you can't teach these systems. But then if you try to teach an ACS version and the Christians are like, Oh, you can't teach these systems.
And during this whole time Intergenerationally, meaning was still being communicated to kids to some extent, but the system for that really broke down in the scaffolding and the ways that we have to think about and address these questions completely broke it down to the point we're now in society when people are looking for meaning.[00:13:00]
And if you want to understand more on how we think about this, you can look at our levels of thought video. They often look for it in an aesthetic sense. So, you know, this is really what we did a video on well, put a title card here. I forgot his name, but he was some like red pill influencer.
And I remember before like major life decisions, he'd be like, Oh, what's the most masculine decision I can make in this moment. Yeah. And to an extent, Andrew Tate does this as well with some of his philosophy. An identity
Simone Collins: based objective function.
Malcolm Collins: Was it's not even I did it. Yeah, it's like an aesthetic based objective function.
It's It's what would somebody who is and you see this on certain parts of the left as well. I think parts of the trans movement has gone in this direction where they begin to make a major life decision thinking. What decision would my gender identity maker on this? But this isn't just a gender thing, right?
Like, You'll also see this in what, what, what kind of decision would a good person make in a moment like this? Or what kind of decision would like a good crunchy hippie [00:14:00] make in a moment like this? And that these ethical systems have caught on at all shows how barren the landscape was and how unsophisticated.
the world had become in terms of how we address questions of meaning. And the first book I wrote, and I actually got it copyrighted, and I wrote it in high school never published it or anything, is titled Why Do Anything? Because that's when I had this crisis. I was like, why? Should I do anything like where is value in reality when I mean like why do anything I mean if I'm, you know, motivating going out of my house at the beginning of the morning or I'm, you know, choosing which college to get into, I need to be optimizing for something.
And I think a lot of people, they don't even think, what should I optimize for? Like they just think that that's not even a question that they're allowed to ask or when they answer it, they answer. It was very unsophisticated and unfulfilling answers. Like, you know, My own personal satisfaction. or [00:15:00] maximizing positive emotions throughout a population, even though they're just the things that led to our ancestors having the most surviving offspring, a very serendipitous thing to maximize.
So, and I think most people know how, how faulty these logical systems are, but we attempt to maximize them anyway, because they just don't have anything else. And I think that When they, a lot of people, when they realize how silly it is, they're like, but those are just the things that led to my ancestors having more babies, you know, and they don't have any good alternatives.
They don't have a framework for searching for alternatives. And then they hit this on weed that you're talking about. And so now if you're thinking about something like, okay, Should I have a child or not? Or should I go on living or not? And your life doesn't feel good, right? Like you're experiencing on mass negative emotions.
You're like, okay well, because my life is about how many positive emotions I can feel and how many positive emotions I can give my Children, then it's clearly not worth living. What's really interesting about this is that the [00:16:00] Number of positive emotions that somebody today should be feeling when you look at the, the wealth they have access to.
When I say wealth, I mean, all human knowledge at the touch of their fingers, not really having to worry about starvation, not really having to worry about, you know, many of the things that if you go 200 years ago, you know, you'd expect half your kids to die. Right? People back then, it is clear from the writings were much more mentally healthy and were much more satisfied with their lives and likely experienced actually less unhappiness than someone today.
So one, they don't have a system that can motivate them continuing to live in the current unhappiness of our culture, but two, they've adopted cultural systems that directly lead to this unhappiness. And the cultural systems lead to this unhappiness for. Two reasons one, the urban monoculture that we talk about all the time.
It's sort of is completely built around removing in the moment, negative, emotional stimuli, think of trigger [00:17:00] warnings and stuff like that, the haze movement. But of course, if you remove any in the moment, negative, emotional stimuli you're going to become incredibly sensitized to any negative stimuli, right. and then have these massive reactions to them because your body just isn't used to them. Focuses on them as the core purpose of your existence, like avoiding them as the core. So of course you're going to quickly spiral out of control the moment somebody like which should be like a non issue for a human being.
Right? But because you're so unused to negative emotional stimuli, you just have no system for dealing with something like that. And it really does cause this spiral and deep unhappiness. But then the second problem is just your. sort of mental receptors and way of engaging with the world gets totally fried.
I often argue that the, the way that the urban monoculture teach teaches things like how we should relate to pleasure and self affirmment is like eating a bowl of sugar every morning instead of cereal, like just literally like sitting up to a table and pulling a [00:18:00] bowl of sugar. Like this belief that Well, you know, like even the idea, for example, we did an episode recently on PrEP,
which is a drug that you really only need to need if you are regularly going to orgies and sleeping with people who you don't know well enough to know whether or not they have AIDS.
Because if you're in a marriage and you're on modern aid drugs, you will be something called you equals you, which means very low rates of transmission. So it's like really like just an orgy drug. And the government, Obamacare mandated that it's on all of our insurance plans and a ton of states in the United States like pay for it.
And so you look at something like that like, like, like orgies are a human right. In this government, which is kind of wild. They're not considered like a lifestyle choice. They are considered like a literal human right because that's why the government has to fund it. Right? Like If it was a lifestyle choice, like having a nicer house or a nicer car or something like that, then the government would be like well, you know, obviously we don't, we're not going to, you know, Upgrade you there, or I want to take a trip every year because it makes me feel better.
It's like, so why is this different from those types of things? [00:19:00] It's different because it kind of is considered a human right to these groups
These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. We're doing the only thing we can do.
We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans. Present day America. Number one. Yeah, America.
Malcolm Collins: That we've entered this moment where going out and doing whatever makes you feel good in the moment, whatever your basal emotions are telling you to do has increasingly become seen as a human right in these groups while at the same time being affirmed for whatever you want to believe about yourself.
Has also, I'll put on screen here, because it was shared with me by one of our fans and I just found it wild. Is there is a movement right now to try to normalize being a, a Therian?
And to build surgical techniques to get people to align more with their, sorry, for people who don't know. Furries are people who go to conferences for fun and have these fursonas, which are like these pretend animal identities.
Totally cool with that. Therians are people who think that they're [00:20:00] actually those animal identities in the same way that like a trans person thinks that they're actually a different gender than the gender they were born. And, and I'm not saying that to dismiss trans people, I'm just saying that they literally would liken themselves to trans people if you asked a Therian this.
Well, that's how far this has gone at this point that they're like, yeah, we need to start developing surgeries and, and this is how you could do a muscle graph to look more like a canine and stuff.
And I'll put those images on screen because it's, it's really fascinating to me how thorough they've gone with this stuff.
If you'd like to check out this organization yourself, you can go to freedom of form.org. , and it is a. Nonprofit registered in the United States.
Having registered non-profits before. I know that that means it is definitely not a joke because it's not easy to do. I'll say to clarify our position on this stuff, 80 is night that we are, you know, anti theory and exactly. If we are anti caring. At all.
The way your identity is perceived by other people. It just shouldn't [00:21:00] be important. You should have a higher purpose in life. Then affirming a specific identity. You want to believe about yourself? Likely some sort of consequentialist action on reality. For example, saving a collapsing society, making humanity better. Giving your kids a good life. , and I, and, and what we, what we. Are so against is the normalization of focusing first and foremost, within your life on how you are perceived by the world. And how you perceive yourself because neither of those things should matter at all.
Or like, not more than like did 0.5% of an individual's mental effort.
Malcolm Collins: But when your entire life becomes about, people can be like, come on. Mainstream culture is not obsessed with being able to affirm yourself, you know, with whatever you become being constantly affirmed for whoever you happen to be. And I'm like, [00:22:00] then how common is the statement, learn to love yourself, learn to be comfortable with yourself, learn to care for yourself.
Whereas within any traditional culture, they would have said, learn to become somebody worthy of loving, you know, learn to become somebody that you can be proud of you know, not learn like manipulate your own brain into affirming yourself, whatever. But these are like mainstream. These are like, These are like, you go into like, Vanilla mom houses, right?
And you'll see these on the walls. What's your thoughts on this, Simone? Like, Of course, to me, of course, this is going to lead to a short circuiting of all these pathways and lead to constant depression and anxiety. And then because you don't have any other moral system that can pull you out of this, you're also completely directionless.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think this is pretty self explanatory. Self explanatory and something we discuss a lot in our materials and in our podcast as well. I am going to push back on your argument that [00:23:00] instructions on how to live and norms around what is done in life isn't relevant in a conversation about meaning.
And here's why. People's explanation of meaning is often, and you've already alluded to this earlier in our conversation. A just so story resulting from someone's lifestyle choices. So you alluded to the person who that, that archetype of someone who says, I'm not having kids because the environment is, is falling apart or, or humanity is in a terrible place right now or whatever, insert excuse.
And I think that's a product of the way that they live. And the culture that they've surrounded themselves with. And if instead we were to give people the steps that lead to a life of a different type of meaning, that they would come to a conclusion that gives them that meaning. And that sometimes you have to surround people with the right [00:24:00] set and costumes and co-stars to have them as a character, have a hero's journey that's meaningful.
So, In other words I'm, I'm, I'm adopting the dress for the job you wish you had version of an objective function. And I don't think that, You're giving enough weight to the importance of showing people cultural norms that lead to healthy outcomes.
Malcolm Collins: I can agree with this, but I think one of the dangers of this way of thinking, and I was going to say reverse it, there were two reasons, is it's not just the urban monocultures problem.
Another problem is, Of the people who realize the, the disillusionment of the urban monoculture, a number of them have turned to cargo cults. And we've talked about this in regards to the tradwife phenomenon. But we should just remind you of what a cargo cult is for people who might've forgotten.
So in World War [00:25:00] II planes were active in the South Pacific and they would often give food and supplies to the people of the region while they were operational in those areas after they left, the people sort of developed an almost religion around this time in the past when there was more prosperity and they will build out of, you know, rocks and palm fronds and stuff like that.
Runways for planes to land on and then build like fake radio sets and fake antenna and talk into the fake radio sets to try to get the, the plane, do the, the words that they remember the people saying the last time they saw them and dress up with like USA written on them and do marches. And this is a cargo cult, right?
And in a way the trident light phenomenon. It is not. These people didn't like look up how did wives actually behave normatively in the 1950s? What they did is being a caricature. Yeah, they looked at we're not just a caricature. They're cargoing, copying often ads and Hollywood based media. It, it, it would be [00:26:00] as ridiculous if a hundred years from now or something, somebody was trying to live like a classic person from, you know, 2024 and they based everything off of like, Ads, right?
Like Sears ads or something like that, right? Like it's, it wasn't the way a huge portion of the population was ever really living and as such, it was never like an internally consistent way of living.
And if you're like, well, why with the media of the time motivated to manipulate people to live a lifestyle that almost no one was actually living well specifically, it was because this period of ads with right after war war, during world war II, when all the men went to war and the women started taking on lots of industrial jobs, , women really began to normalize to that. And so, , both government and big business, when the men came back to prevent a major economic catastrophe. Needed to get these women out of the [00:27:00] workplace that had just flooded it. , and so they created this image of, oh, you want to be a stay at home. Wife. That was the goal of all of these ads.
It was to
ake su
counter a trend that was already happening. They were produced like this specifically because this lifestyle was so rare.
Malcolm Collins: But we've touched on this was trad wives. The bigger problem for me is the religious cargo cults that I've been noticing popping up.
So, you know, earlier I talked about or so bros and I think for a large portion of like the or so bros it's really become a bit of a cargo cult about trying to ape the most religious looking of the Christian religions in the most religious looking way. You know, they, a lot of people, when they return to one of the traditional faith systems.
What they do is they advertise, like they, they, they search among them for the one they want by the one that aesthetically looks most to them, what their sort of pop cultural [00:28:00] memory of what a religion is supposed to look like. And so for modern 2024 pop culture You know, orthodox Christians look more Christian or more like, you know, traditional ish than other Christians.
They, They, they jumped to that, you know, without looking at the fertility rates of that community, without looking at the, which by the way, are very, very low. Without looking at, you know, okay, how many people who are joining this faith are actually getting married or achieving any sort of outcome or anything like that, it's like, if I act out this thing, I will get the benefits from this.
When historically speaking Most forms of Christianity that were in any way thriving and not in some sort of a dark age were what I call an active theological conversation that people were actively and excitedly engaging in, you know, if you look at, you know, what was happening in America during any of our great awakenings, that's what was happening, right?
We were, you know, constantly excited about what the newest religious ideas were, right? And [00:29:00] I think that they forget this in this cargo cult mindset that when these faiths, whether it's the Orthodox faiths or the Catholic faiths or one of the Protestant faiths or the Jewish faiths, has been in its moments of most thriving, that's when it was in this active conversation.
About how it was going to progress, instead of what was right and what was wrong. And I don't mean this in a progressive sense like, oh, these things don't change, like I mentioned before, when somebody says that, it's like, well, I mean, do you consider that Catholics only started believing that life began at conception with Pope Pius IX, you know, around 200 years ago.
You look at like Thomas Aquinas or Augustus Vipa, they didn't believe this. So if you hold to that Catholic belief, then you are okay with the church continuing to evolve its beliefs. And should it not continue to evolve its beliefs from here? If you are a Mormon, I mean, anyone who's actually like a Mormon and familiar with the Mormon faith must know how quickly, The active theological conversation needs to move in Mormonism.
And I think one of Mormonism's core challenges right [00:30:00] now is it moved from having a group of intelligent men in this active conversation to being more and more just the current prophet. The active conversation from the table, but I think I see that coming back. But I think More broadly, we have to be wary of the cargo cults of religion because when you do the cargo cults of religion and you think I just act out X, Y, and Z like, you know, the old 1950s ads, and all of a sudden the prosperity of the 1950s or the spiritual prosperity of the 1950s will come back to me, you know, you'll be sorely disappointed.
And we've seen, there's been a lot of videos of you know, trad wife to like despair pipeline and it makes a lot of sense because they, they are entering these relationships where now divorce is common and they're not fully considering this and now the guy's had five kids with him. He got all the utility he wanted from them.
They're old. They're not that attractive anymore. He's made a lot of money and he just divorces them and marries somebody younger. And they are quite [00:31:00] screwed. So like, how do you, how do you protect against stuff like this? But anyway, what are your thoughts?
Simone Collins: In general I agree, but I, I just, I think that giving those defaults to people helps to get them there.
You have to obviously, you can't just give the costume and the set and the surroundings and nothing else and assume that people are going to come to the right conclusion. But it makes a huge frickin difference.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah,
Simone Collins: right now I feel like people are concluding that nothing matters because they're set up or either nothing matters or literally they're better off not living because they're set up in such a bad way where how can they help but conclude that.
We have people who think that they're never going to be able to own a house. They're never going to have a meaningful career. They're in debt. They're in a desperate situation. They can't find a partner. What else are they going to conclude? I think if we set people up for success and if we gave them better cultural [00:32:00] defaults, that people would find more meaning more easily, even right now, for example, if we just gave people.
Meaning, or if we just gave everyone the pragmatist guide to life and had everyone truly and very carefully think for themselves, what mattered. I think the problem is that people would probably come to a very nihilistic and negative utilitarian conclusion to a great extent, given where they have been placed, given the priors they've been given, given the societal defaults that they're growing up with.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, And then I guess that to me, this is why. I think a lot of people wonder why we risk our reputation on projects like techno puritanism. If you want to learn more, you can go to techno puritan. com or you can check out our track series on YouTube which is sort of a religion that we now believe, but we're also in the process Not really a religion.
It's more like a Christian denomination that we're in the process of fleshing out and building and trying to determine from going back to the original [00:33:00] text, what do we think this part actually meant? What do we think this part actually meant? And a lot of people can be like, why would you risk your reputations on something like this?
Given all of the other important stuff that you're working on, like the pronatalist advocacy. And it, the core answer is, is because I think that this is, is literally as core to the pronatalist advocacy as anything can be. As core as the Collins Institute. If we can't find or engage in an active theological conversation about how we find meaning in life like our ancestors did we are pretty screwed generationally speaking.
And people are like, why can't you just go back to one of the old traditions? And it's like the old traditions have shown more resistance to. the urban monoculture than, than other things. They have shown higher fertility rates, but they're still losing. They're still losing like, and losing hard.
There's a [00:34:00] reason why, when you look at the old religious systems, more of Gen Alpha is de converting than Gen Z, and more of Gen Z is de converting than Millennials, right? Like, You guys are on the losing side of a battle, and you're like, why don't you come join us? And it's like, Hey guys, why don't you come hang, hang out at the Alamo? Like I know we're under siege, but you know, I think I got this. It's like, no, you are, you are clearly in a bad situation right now. And I am encouraging you to. Maybe fortify differently or get out of the LMO because if the statistics continue in the way that they're moving right now you will be decimated by the time you get to the other side of this.
What piece of advice I may commit to the audience here? Is I get the impression that people from some of these religious traditions. Think that they can instill confidence in the tradition from an outsider by denying the problems that they're facing. And. Trust me, it really does the [00:35:00] exact opposite. , the two face that are most common to do this are the Catholics and the Orthodox, , whereas was faced that don't really seem to have this problem at all.
You're looking at groups like, you know, Mormons and mainline Protestant groups. So like if I go to a Mormon and I'm like, wow, you guys have a major deconversion problem right now. They're like, yeah, we do have a major deconversion problem. And here's how we might work on it. , or, , you know, your fertility rates dropping a lot.
They're like, yeah. And here's some ideas I have for it. , but often when I go to Catholic or Orthodox groups about this, there'll be like, no, we don't, we don't, we don't have that problem. , and I'm like, well, I mean, here are the statistics. You, you do seem to have a massive. , fertility rate problem and deconversion problem.
And it's actually much bigger than the Mormon problem who. Our admitting this problem. And they'll be like, ah, it's not a problem in our most devout groups. Don't worry about it. And I'm like, well, I mean, Even if that's true, you know, you look at this statistical, get this statistic. Uh, the, the devoutness of your groups doesn't seem to correlate that highly with things [00:36:00] like their propensity to use plan B, even though that the direct sin was in the tradition, why aren't the more religious members using it at lower rates, , which we have a whole episode on, you can check out our Catholic fertility rate episode. , but I don't it's, it is very interesting to me how culturally different groups are and how they relate to problems.
And I really fear this, denying that the problem exists strategy. It's going to be effective in a modern era. At,
Addressing it. I guess that the assumption is like, I'm trying to figure out why these two groups, specifically the hierarchical groups, cause large bureaucracies deny their problems at a much higher frequency than other groups that I've seen. And I'm guessing it's because they have sort of a history of will live.
There is really a major problem than the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are going to recognize it. I come up with a solution and tell us what it is. And it's our job to just defend the bureaucracies honor, and we can best do that by denying that the [00:37:00] problems exist.
Malcolm Collins: Which is, which is why we're working on this project and why we risk our reputation on this. But I think also a lot of people, when they begin to engage in prenatalism, a lot of our ideas seem really stupid at first. They're like, why don't they just do cash handouts? Why don't they just try to get cheaper housing?
Why don't they just. You know, Do you know, more generic religion, right? And then anybody who actually seriously engages with the topic. And I've seen this evolution of people over time where at first they think that we're like crazy or extremists, and then they've been in the movement for like a year and they've actually personally dove into all of the other stats and they're like, Oh, I got, I get now why you came to, you need to create an alternate education system.
And you need to build social technologies of a religious variety to that are either totally new or augmented versions of our historic systems instead of just saying well, we can go back to the way we used to do things because it's clearly not working. And the cash handouts clearly aren't working in the smaller [00:38:00] apartments clearly aren't working in the, you know, i, I also think it's interesting. We should do a different episode on this, but I'd also love to hear your sauce on this. Why do you think as we become wealthier and wealthier as a society, when I say wealthier and wealthier, people like, no, look at how much this costs, look at how much this costs. And it's like, do you really think your life is harder than someone in the 1800s?
Really? Really? When we talk about that why, why has society become so much less satisfied as it's gotten so much wealthier? Do you think it's all downstream of the other things that we're talking about in this?
Simone Collins: We only know the context in which we exist. We only can really compare our lives to where we stand now.
And we normalize to where we stand. So it's, it's, I think it's not fair to expect someone to consider their situation as though they had just stepped off the lifestyle of their ancestors, if that makes sense. [00:39:00] We're just not really wired to do that. We're wired to look at where we stand vis a vis our peers, but not where we stand vis a vis our ancestors.
Malcolm Collins: You know, That is where you get in social media a bit of the, the, the downside, which is the peers that you were being shown are the peers that the most other people are looking at.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Instead of the average human, right? Which is
Malcolm Collins: the peers that are near the top of our society, which causes things like women to completely misjudge what the average male looks like, men to misjudge.
The average female looks like people to misjudge, you know, what is real expected wealth for them. What is real expected societal outcomes for them? So you might be right there. I, I, I often have people like, be like, Oh, you know, Simone is, is mid, but you guys really seem to like each other. And I'm like, okay, dude, go to an airport, look around, see how long it takes you before you find somebody who is over 30.
and anywhere near Simone's level of [00:40:00] attractiveness. No, you're like, I think death initially in the top 1 percent of attractiveness for your age range. Um, Just if you guys, isn't he the best?
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Malcolm Collins: No, because people don't judge by public spaces. No, but that's, that's very
Simone Collins: true. It's in, and it is the top, not even 1%, but like 0.
01 percent that we're really. Primarily looking at on YouTube. And of course not even that, but the top 0. 01 percent with a filter on with makeup, with the best possible camera angle, the best photo of 50. So it's not great.
Malcolm Collins: This reminds me of a little experiment I ran with Simone once where you still didn't believe me that I was like, no, that's just youth.
Like you pointed out a few people in an important, you're like, babe, or. Nearly as attractive as me. And I was like, Simone, that, that girl is like 17 or 18 years old. And you're like, nah. So then later we were at a, an event where we had to go to like a, a [00:41:00] nightclub venue for like an industry event. So we had people of all different ages and everyone going in there under age had to get an X on the back of their hand.
Simone Collins: I
Malcolm Collins: said, look around the room, Simone. And see anyone who you think is more attractive than you and she'd point people out. And then I'd walk around to an angle where I could see their hand and it was always an X. And I was like, you misunderstand how much youth, I mean, beauty. It is insane,
Simone Collins: especially in women, how much beauty is not even beauty.
It's just signs of youth. It's insane. It is completely insane.
Malcolm Collins: It just is though often. And people completely missed this. And I am very defeatist about this in an online environment because it causes people to make missed expectations, but also about their life and trips. Like, Okay, when you're, for example, judging how often you should take trips online, people are going to disproportionately post when they're taking a trip
Simone Collins: because you
Malcolm Collins: always have the trip album after the trip.
That's where you
Simone Collins: What are you going to take photos of in your day to day life that you haven't already taken a photo of. So
Malcolm Collins: And so people [00:42:00] like create these, these norms where like one of my cousins was like well, you know, your kids won't be able to go on trips because you're having so many of them. And it's like, yeah, but my ancestors didn't go on trips, you know, like, and I'm denying a human the chance to live over that.
And another thing that they'll notice, people will be like, no. Like, Housing costs so much more these days. That's why. And I'm like well, you know, you could just choose to live with other people. And they're like well, come on, you can't raise kids in an environment like that. And I was like, remember the 1800s thing I noted here?
This house was in use during the 1800s, the ones that we live in. And it had like four, Four or five different families living in it back then people used to live like sardines where I grew up historically which was with Dallas you know, I hung out with a lot of recent Hispanic immigrants and they'd often have like, Three or four related families in very small houses.
This is a cultural expectation that you have created for yourself. That doesn't really even improve your quality of [00:43:00] life. That much sharing a house with other people really doesn't negatively impact quality of life that much. I know that's a sin to say, but it really doesn't.
Simone Collins: Well, Even, and this is what really blows my mind about our lifestyle, if you're a severe introvert, I thought, I was genuinely worried that I would never get to be alone again, that our kids would never leave us alone again.
Many of our kids, not all. But many of them are extreme introverts as well who love being around their siblings, but also really love their alone time, even alone time from us, which is just so awesome. So yeah,
Malcolm Collins: dreams come true. You marry a partner who handles that stuff for you.
Simone Collins: Well, Yeah, but also both of us, I think are pretty genetically introverted.
And that means that it should not have been a surprise. It's just, to me that we would have children who tend to appreciate time alone. This is
Malcolm Collins: crazy. Appreciate time alone. [00:44:00] The finer things in life. But no, I mean there's always ways in, in the modern environment to, you know, I mean, as you know, if you look at AI these days, for example, you can live like any fantasy you want to live, right. With the chat bots and stuff like that. Yeah. You, you, you live in such a area of, I think, Stimulational wealth. That because you're making these miscalculations about what should be normative for you and what you should expect before having kids, you know, it's not happening, but yeah. This is why I think vitalism.
itself is like the vitalist movement and the pronatalist movement these days are like one to one. In terms of the people I see cheering for them and stuff like that, like Richard Anania often talks about the vitalist movement. And I'm like, yeah, and you know, also pronatalist, right? So we've got to re Kindle.
That historic vitalism and the vitalism, which motivates sacrifice in one's [00:45:00] behaviors, but also the pleasure that can come from sacrifice and austerity that I think as a culture we have forgotten.
Simone Collins: Bring back vitalism and we'll get there.
Malcolm Collins: I think we're on our way. I think we're on our way as a society. Anyway, I love you to Desimone.
Simone Collins: I love you too. And what do you want for dinner? Mm. Bye.
Malcolm Collins: You know, Do we have anything in the fridge that's like defrosted? We should probably start defrosting some lasagna and some of the curry that I made from the freezer.
I slow cooked it. Well,
Simone Collins: On Sun, we only have one more night here after tonight. So just one thing then, do you want curry or do you want lasagna? Where are we going? We're going to the Hamptons. It's not in my calendar.
Is it not? Nope. It's in your calendar. Family drive to Hampton Bay's [00:46:00] afternoon at the Hamptons.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, you put it all in Hampton's family.
Simone Collins: No, this has been in here. Can I see history of creation? It doesn't show history, but no, this has been here for a while. Someone just hasn't been paying attention. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. We
Simone Collins: won't, you just can't bother to know that we're going to the ton
Malcolm Collins: s Don't worry guys, we're not paying for it ourselves. So, can you then what, what, so well, I can
Simone Collins: make you, I want curry. I can make you your curry with rice tonight. I can.
Malcolm Collins: No, why don't I finish off the soup and do some pasta with pesto?
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Bow ties? Bow ties.
Simone Collins: Or macaroni thingies with little flavor twists. You notice that they put ridges on the bottom. On the macaroni.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let's try the macaroni things this time actually.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: You're a woman of sophistication and a wonderful chef. You know you cook for your husband now, right?
Simone Collins: Only because you asked me [00:47:00] to.
Malcolm Collins: Do you want me to not ask you to?
Simone Collins: No, I think our evening setup works really well. So I'm happy to do it. I appreciate you giving me time to do it tonight.
I love you. Bye.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the alarming trends shaping China's future. This eye-opening discussion covers:
* Shocking statistics revealing Chinese citizens' growing disillusionment with their economic system
* The rise of "lying flat" and "last generation" movements in China
* How the CCP is desperately trying to maintain control through surveillance and intimidation
* The potential collapse of China as a global superpower
* Implications for U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding Taiwan
* The unexpected cultural shifts occurring in Chinese society
This video provides crucial insights for anyone interested in geopolitics, economics, or the future of global power dynamics. With exclusive data and expert analysis, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the challenges facing China and how they might reshape our world.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Simone! Today we're going to be doing a stats heavy episode that I know our fans always love, where I can find some interesting and counterintuitive stats to tell us about where the world is going. Okay. Episode is going to be on internal Chinese politics the economic situation in China and how the Chinese population is becoming more and more You know, we use the title woke here, but it's not exactly woke because they're not exactly split among the types of of, uh, political demographics that we have in the U S there isn't the same like Republican Democrat party that you would have in the U S.
But the views of the Chinese people are definitely changing and in a way that should make the Chinese government very, very nervous.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: So let's start with a quote here. These are the clear findings that emerged from quantitative research by Stanford professors Jennifer Pan [00:01:00] and Ying Qing Xu. Survey data collected through a variety of channels and methodologies by Pan and Xu over several years show that Chinese urban residents are more liberal than expected and more liberal than the official positions of the government.
Moreover, the political views of respondents remained relatively stable over time and were correlated. across issues in ways comparable to those in democratic countries. It is important to note, however, that policy views in China do not align neatly along pro slash anti regime spectrums, or what might be considered a typical left right divide as they do in the United States and many other democracies.
Instead, they cluster around preferences for market versus state intervention in the economy more versus less democracy in the government and more versus less nationalism. So, one faction wants less nationalism and less government intervention in the markets and more democracy. And another group wants more [00:02:00] intervention, less democracy and more nationalism, which makes sense as natural clusters.
Using surveys conducted from 2012 and 2014 and separately at 2018 and 2019, Pan and Zhu show that Chinese correspondents have coherent policy preferences that are bunded in predictable ways. For example, those that hold politically liberal views are more likely to also support free markets and oppose nationalist foreign policy.
Those who support authoritarian political institutions are instead more likely to support state intervention in the economy and a nationalistic foreign policy. And I'll put a figure on screen here. So that's actually really interesting because that's different than the, at least older historic political alignment that we had here in the U.
S. Which is the more free market people are also the more politically or socially progressive people
Torsten: and
Malcolm Collins: the less free market people are the so you have a true tanky faction there that is very you know, pro nationalism, pro state control but also [00:03:00] pro more socially illiberal views. Do you have any thoughts on that before I go further?
Simone Collins: No, tell me more. I just want to dig into this.
Malcolm Collins: All right. So , the surveys carried out between 2004 and 2014 indicate that most respondents had positive views on the system's ability to deliver opportunities in the future, and that effort and hard work were rewarded.
So now we're going to look at some graphs. These findings were notable because, as I mentioned, below, And note I'm pulling from several different articles here. So these aren't all from the same article. These findings were notable because as mentioned above inequality increased rapidly after 1978 and has remained stubbornly high since the two thousands in China.
Perceptions as to the drivers of inequality are Are central to the population sense of fairness and belief in the efficacy of China's economic and political systems. The latest round of surveys, which were conducted over the course of 2023 through an online app. So this is all just important to note when you're looking at this data are so recent that the Whitney team has yet to publish them in [00:04:00] related academic articles.
So you are getting this stuff first. It's clear that there have been significant changes in how people view inequality and opportunities in China economy signaling. Less and less responsibility to themselves and more and more to the economic system. So now we're going to talk about some of these results and I'm going to put some on screen.
So, do you want me to share these with you Simone or do you want me to just describe them to you?
Simone Collins: Describe them.
Malcolm Collins: All right. So here I have put a graph on screen today. It shows in 2004 attribution of why people in China are poor. So this is why are some people in China poor? The number one reason that people gave in 2004 was lack of ability.
In 2023, that has fallen to the number six reason. The, the number one reason in 2023 that people said so was unequal opportunity. That was six back in 2004.
Simone Collins: Oh, so we're moving from an internal to an external locus of control [00:05:00] here, which is kind of scary.
Malcolm Collins: Exactly. You look at 2004, you had high ranked things like lack of effort.
However, lack of effort is ranked fairly low in 2003.
Simone Collins: But
Malcolm Collins: if you look at an unfair economic system, that was all the way down at eight in 2004, that was ranked at number three. Keep in mind, number three in China, where you can get unalive for saying things like this. So there is a cost to signaling these sorts of things.
Then they asked why are people in China rich? And it used to be in 2004 people would say ability and talent was the number one reason that some people were rich in China.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: In 2023 that had moved down to number four. What was number three back in 2004 connections that was ranked number one in 2023.
That was, so it used to be, they said ability and talent now it's connections. And, and you had a drop across the board in things like high education used to be number two as to why some people were rich. Now it's ranked all the way down at number [00:06:00] seven below even an unfair economic system. Hard work also dropped.
Simone Collins: You would think that the CCP, I mean, especially in a nation where there's more control over media and what people were, people are allowed to see, I, as a government official would have worked harder to make sure that memes like this. That switch people toward an external locus of control. Don't spread.
How is this, how is this happening in a nation that should be able to head this off?
Malcolm Collins: So we're going to talk about that after we get through all the statistics.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Because we're going to talk about the people's, how people shared this information and how the government tried to prevent them from sharing this information.
By the way, you want to know the number two reason that people said people are rich in 2023. It was all the way down to number six before grew up in a rich family. Okay.
They just don't believe the system is fair or that it's possible to move up anymore.
Now I'm going to put another graph on the screen that looks at explanations for why people in China are rich over [00:07:00] time.
That looks at things like, you know, connections, higher education, hard work, ability and talent. Basically if you're watching this instead of just reading all the statistics to you, people should be afraid. Now I'm going to put another graph, the government should be afraid, I should say perceptions of causes of wealth in China and selected post socialist countries.
So here you see other post socialist countries. You can see is what's happening in China normal?
and it has two bars, one for China in 2004 and one for China in 2023. And as we can see. , the trend is getting worse. , and now China is at the same level as other post socialist countries. , in terms of the public's belief, that ability or hard work helps them get ahead. , but what is interesting is that China is still nowhere near other post socialist countries. In terms of a perception of how unfair their economic system is. However, if you have a [00:08:00] similar increase. Over the next decade that we've had from 2004 to 2023, it may catch up.
Malcolm Collins: But again we're looking at lots of stats here and I want to make sure I get through them all. Explanations of why people in China are poor. Again we are looking at different dates here on this graph. What you see is It for a while it went up. So like things were good in China for a while.
So you look at something like lack of ability, it was going up from 2004, 58% to 2014, 64%. But then if you go to 2023 all the way down to 31%, you look at something like lack of effort. 51 percent in 2004. 2009, 61%. 2014, 63%. Oh, great trend. 2023, 33%. Lower than it's ever been. It is the same when you're looking at things like unequal opportunity or unfair economic systems.
2023 is the worst year from the perspective of the government. in their data.
Now we're looking at a figure that looks at attribution of variation in opportunities. [00:09:00] Whether a person becomes rich or remains poor is their own responsibility.
That's what was being asked. Agree, neutral, disagree. Again, here you see the steps moving in the wrong direction from what the government would want. Here you look at the question, opportunity for people to succeed is the same for everyone. Again in this one you actually see more growth in the neutral category and growth in the negative category with only 20 percent in 2023 saying that they believed.
That the opportunities to success were the same for everyone. And keep in mind, this is a government where you could be unalive for these sorts of opinions, which we will talk about shortly. In our country, effort is always rewarded. Only 28 percent said that in 2023. Oh boy. Gosh. So, Yikes. Now let's look at something like, given the current domestic situation, there is still great opportunity for people like you to improve their standard of living.
Only 28 percent of Chinese people believe this anymore. And you wonder why no one's having kids. No one has hope anymore in this country. Yeah, this is
Simone Collins: definitely [00:10:00] like, this explains lying flat. This explains we are the last generation. This is what lying
Malcolm Collins: flat is. And we are the last generation is before we go further.
Simone Collins: Right. Lying flat is a philosophy that sort of started to Arise around the pandemic in China, from my understanding basically the concept being that. You can do sort of the bare minimum yeah, you'll work, yeah, you'll do what you're supposed to do for the government, but you're not going to do a, a bit more than that because you're not going to be rewarded for it, what's the point?
Well, it's, it's,
Malcolm Collins: it's more than that it, it got its name from a guy who made money by, acting roles as dead people for a few months a year and the rest of the year lived on as little as possible. So the idea of lying flat is doing literally the minimum you have to, to survive. Take on some part time job maybe for three months and try to live off that money for as long as you can.
Often in like group houses or, or with a SO who you don't plan to have kids with because you don't want to do an ounce more than you actually need to do to survive. And you can see with these numbers why people would feel this [00:11:00] way. Remember I mentioned that like, Oh, do you have opportunity to increase your standard of living?
And I said only 28 people said that in 2023, 2014, it was 62%. These numbers are dropping precipitously and quickly. Then you talk about the, we are the last generation movement. This came from a viral video in China of CCP officers going to a family and berating them for not following COVID restrictions.
And they said, this will affect you in the next three generations of your family. And they go, that's okay because we are the last generation. I'm in a lot of Chinese people feel that way. It is part of why the government pressuring people to have kids doesn't work because people feel like it's just some wealthy class trying to pressure people to have.
Kids to live lives without opportunity. So this wealthy class can maintain their power and status. It's an act of subversive resistance, unarmed power and status. So, explanations of family wealth. So here we get a share of respondents who said their family [00:12:00] economic situation had gotten worse compared to five years ago by income group.
So, if you look at 2014, it was only 7%, 2023, 32%. Like more than, I think it's probably about four times higher. In, in, in, in, in, that's for people making under 50k a year. If we look at middle income people in China, okay, how is the middle income group 50 to a hundred K a year? How are they doing in 2014?
3 percent said that it hadn't gotten worse. And in 2009 it was only 1 percent said it hadn't gotten worse. 24 percent are now saying their situation is worse.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay. Well,
Malcolm Collins: 3 percent versus 24 percent things are breaking. If you look at the hundred K plus in 2009, literally 0 percent felt that in, in, in 2014, it was 1 percent felt that way.
So very small in 2023, 19 percent people are falling off an economic cliff in [00:13:00] China right now. And how is the government responding to this? Okay. They are trying to whip up nationalist fervor and it is in part working. In China, a form of wokeism expresses itself as blind nationalism. So let's talk about how this has affected some international companies.
So we can understand what it's like to do business in China these days. You know, not just having ports randomly closed, not having them just close a random part of your supply chain during COVID, which keep in mind affects companies in a huge way because now the rest of their supply chain stops working.
You know, Oh, I just make one part of the chip in China, well, now you can't make the phone, even if it was only 1 percent of the manufacturing process. If you can't find an alternate supplier, you're screwed. But what happens if you're selling into China, the German luxury car maker This is about Mercedes Benz.
The German luxury car maker posted an Instagram photo of a white coupe parked on a beach with the quote, quote, [00:14:00] look at situations from all angles and you will become more open in quote. The seemingly benign ad irritated China's internet users and state media alike because the quote was attributed to someone they consider a dangerous separatist, the Dalai Lama.
The, the Mercedes Benz quickly responded to the online outrage by deleting the ad and posting an apology on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter esque micro blogging site. We fully understand the incident has hurt feelings of Chinese people, including our employees in China, wrote the Weibo senten Statement in light of this, we will immediately take measures to deepen our understandings of Chinese culture and values, including our overseas colleagues to ensure this won't happen again.
Now, for people who don't know what happened as a result of this, people were burning Mercedes Benz cars. Mercedes were burning their own cars in the streets.
Note, uh, the clip I'm about to show you is actually about a different freak out about a [00:15:00] luxury car company in China, but it gives you an idea.
What you're seeing is a BMW showroom in China. This was taken today. And what you can see there is it says, you know, this basically says, um, get the, it's like BMW, get the hell back to Germany. Get out of China. And it's like spray painted, smashed on the winds, windshield. Um, and we've got another clip for you here, which is maybe even a little more extreme.
We've got a guy throwing gasoline all inside his BMW,
setting it on fire. Okay. So. You might be wondering, what's going on?
Malcolm Collins: This But that's the way the Chinese government works. It's in a nationalist direction.
They don't mind how much they whip off fervor, but I think this is going to bite them [00:16:00] in the butt one day. Now let's look at something else where this happened in a Chinese language survey sent out by customers in January. Marriott international listed Tibet, Hong Kong, Manchu, and Taiwan as options on a question, asking customers, their countries of residence.
Obviously this caused China to absolutely freak out and start banning people from going to Marriott. And I will look to the right back and find some crazy responses to this, but, but this shows that even the most benign things can cause freak outs because the government will attempt to whip people up and you can say, well, why aren't.
people reacting as strongly. Let's talk about some of the crazy things the government has done to try to prevent protests. So a lot of people are like, why would you do zero COVID? Remember I was talking about how it affected supply chains and stuff like that. It seems insane, but if you know that there's going to be an economic collapse coming and you can't do anything about it and you're a totalitarian government, well, what's the number one thing you want to do?
You want to restrict people. They never rolled back a most of the COVID for example. Tracking apps that [00:17:00] track where you are and can lock you down in location. And we saw in instances, there was an instance, for example, where the government was afraid of a bank run because a government somewhat supported bank had basically stolen everyone's money.
And so people of course wanted to go and withdraw their money. And. To prevent them from doing this, to prevent the bank run or even protests outside of the bank, because then people were saying, Oh, I'm going to go protest. The government would lock the apps, basically assign people as having COVID who had money in that bank or who had recently.
About potentially protesting.
Torsten: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And then they would start locking the apps of people who had come into contact with those people. They were using the contagion metrics that they had previously worked into their social media apps for social contagion. For social contagion. Yeah.
Simone Collins: Wow. I mean, it works.
It's elegant in that way, isn't it?
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Now let's talk about to push back and what the government has done to these sorts of people before we [00:18:00] go full on. I'm going to, I'm going to give the stage to you. The white paper protests also known as the A4 revolution were a series of demonstration that took place across China on November, 2020.
So why were they protesting with pieces of blank A4 paper? Because they knew if they protested against anything specific, the government could it. That's what the government historically did to protesters. It would use these tracking apps to not just round up the protesters in the middle of the night.
That's typically what they would do. They'd say, okay, well, you're not allowed to say X or you're not allowed to say Y. And anyone who has says that, well, they get rounded up in the middle of the night. And so does anyone they've come in contact with. And so the people thought, well, let's just protest with white pieces of paper.
Okay. Seems fair, right? And they were primarily response to zero COVID. Now key aspects of the protests include the protests were sparked by a deadly apartment fire on November 24th, 2022, where at least 10 people died. Many people believe the victims were unable to escape [00:19:00] due to COVID restrictions.
Specifically, they had been welded inside the apartment and the doors had been blocked. And the fire happened because of like bad government oversight. You know, a lot of Places in China, I'll show videos of like, you pick up a fire hydrant and you learn that just due to bureaucratic incompetence and, and people trying to scam each other because there's so many scams being run there they'll be empty or full of silly string or something like that.
Right.
A woman can be seen trying to extinguish a fire pile with the extinguisher, but to no avail. At a construction site, workers were testing a fire extinguisher, and discovered it could not put out a fire, then switched to another one and still the same. Many swindlers impersonate firefighters to perform fake fire prevention inspections on businesses, only to peddle overpriced firefighting equipment.
, A fire broke out on the 18th floor of a residential building in Buji Street, Longgang District, Shenzhen. Firefighters responding to the incident found that fire hydrants in the building's corridor were dry. [00:20:00] Residents revealed that in this large residential area the fire hydrants had been dry for many years.
Last year in Guangdong, a woman accidentally damaged a fire hydrant it led to the revelation that the fire hydrant was a mere facade with no connecting water supply. This situation is common in residential communities in China. In a residential community in Bozhou, Anhui, a person filming a video demonstrated that the fire hydrant was simply buried in the ground, with nothing connected below.
A similar situation was discovered in a neighborhood in Qiannan Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province.
Malcolm Collins: The protest demonstration spread to major cities across China, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shandong and Wuhan. They at first were focused on COVID restrictions, but then they began to call on things like we want freedom and step down Xi Jinping, step down Communist Party.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: And how did the government respond to this?
They began to disappear people. That was generally what happened. [00:21:00] And since then, the protests have largely disappeared. So the way the government typically reacts to protests like this is they'll, Loosen whatever was being complained about and they'll disappear anyone who was involved in the protest.
And if they were more severe or more prominent, they'll disappear anyone who they had contact with. And in terms of there's ads in China. I'm gonna see if I can find one to like put on screen here where they have unaliving vans now. For criminals where they don't even take time to take you to prison.
They just drive, drive by in a van. They take you to the van and, and, and they let the public know that these exist and they just put you down. In the van. In the van. Yeah, they have the whole straps and everything and everything like that in the van.
When I was living in China for 10 years, I mean, I KNEW that there were death vans in China, but it was always one of those dark things that lived in conversation, not necessarily in real life.
But China's death vans, or execution vans, these cars that just show up and execute you, [00:22:00] for stuff that I'll explain to you later, and they take you away forever, they're real. They're very real. Very real the crazy thing is that they want their citizens to know about the vans, and they really, really want them to feel scared. I'm not kidding. Not only does this death van pull up and take your life, it's being promoted and promoted.
Before I go any further, , If you don't know this channel that I'm playing this content from strongly suggested. , these guy does well, there's sort of like three channels at the network of channels. There's a serpent debt. That a, yeah. Why 80?
And China fact chasers, China fact chasers as a channel they do together.
And that someone I strongly suggest if you're just checking out any of them, but a good way to stay up to date with what's really going on in China these days. [00:23:00] That's actually true. You will be taken out to be cremated, but you'll just be put into another van. I kid you not. They have cremation vans. They really love this whole mobile death thing in China.
You see how this is framed? It's like, how would you be executed? This is going to happen to you. You are supposed to enter this as like a POV. This is from your perspective.
in fact, just back in 2001, they were still bringing people to stadiums to execute them in public to make people feel like, wow, the government does stuff about criminals and I better not be like that.
Malcolm Collins: It is honestly more dystopian in China now than a lot of dystopian books.
When people are like, they wouldn't really begin forced insemination in China. I'm like, they have drive by murder vans [00:24:00] that they tell you about. Yeah, they would. And why are they becoming so totalitarian? Because they're getting scared. There is in China something called the mandate of heaven. Right. Which says that if the gods don't approve of whoever is in power, they will send natural disasters.
Well, there have been since zero COVID, a number of major floods across major cities in China. And the government has been unable to really do anything meaningful about these. The country is falling apart. Buildings are falling over. Because they. You know, cut corners when they were building out infrastructure, people feel like even now, if you go to their apps, even mentioning this historic concept in Chinese, the mandate of heaven is banned across most of their social media because they are afraid of people beginning to, to realize this.
And so you're like, how did these ideas spread? They're spreading through family networks mostly right now. And China has very tight knit family networks.
Simone Collins: Probably this would [00:25:00] have to be also like offline in conversations behind closed doors with all the electronics turned off. Like the amount of care that would have to be put into these discussions spreading.
And yet despite all this, it's happening
Malcolm Collins: or you'll we'll do things like the government, you know, like the Winnie the Pooh thing, right? Like they'll know that the government will say that something innocuous offends them like Winnie the Pooh and then people think they're safe posting that because it's Not the government itself.
It's just I think they've
Simone Collins: gotten past that. I mean at this point, it's it's clear that even just you know protesting with the white people
Malcolm Collins: Another place where this happened is there was some song that people saw And As the title could be seen as an indication of the government. So people in short had hit number one on charts,
You know, but again, the government, you know, as soon as it realizes this, there is no compromise.
Torsten: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And a lot of people are like, why are we so unafraid of China as a geopolitical power? And why I might. Encourage even some, I mean, I think we should protect Taiwan, but not get in full scale war with China because it's [00:26:00] not worth it. They're not going to exist as a major power in 15 years or 20 years.
Don't you, we don't need to play this game. Their fertility rate is so low and everything they've done shows a complete inability to get it up. And they have had this one child policy going for a long time. So they are affected by this much longer than we are. People are like, Oh, the fertility because of the one child policy.
No, it's been crashing. Since the one child policy was lifted. It is much lower now than it ever was during the one child policy. It's lower now than it was even during the Great Famine. This is catastrophic, the situation they're in. And they are doing everything they can. They're banning vasectomies.
They're banning blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of it's working.
Simone Collins: Gosh, that's scary.
Malcolm Collins: So they are a country on the verge of collapse in every sense of the word.
Simone Collins: So I guess your, your stance is just when it comes to us policy. Okay. Yes. Maybe some protections for Taiwan, but aside from that. [00:27:00] The focus should be on disentangling trade relations from China as quickly as possible, because from a, from an economic perspective, the bigger liability is any dependency on Chinese industry, which is probably going to start falling apart even more sooner rather than later, we don't even need to really worry about trade embargoes.
We need to worry about literally our businesses not being able to. You know, get the products and basic components. They need. Plus, we also need to be worried about China and AI because it is going to be very strongly motivated to steal whatever superintelligence development we're doing.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, and I would also say with China.
And this is a policy change I've had recently, actually inspired by the changing of the policy positions of the new right and beginning to think about foreign policy more pragmatically. Historically, I would have been a hard liner on defending Taiwan just out of national pride reasons and stuff like that and being the good guy and we are Americans.[00:28:00]
Now I don't think it's pragmatically in our best interest and people might be shocked by that given the chip manufacturing that's done there and they'd say, why? I would put a condition on defending Taiwan. We will defend Taiwan if they can get their fertility rate up. But right now, Taiwan has such a low fertility rate that people who we waste defending them, we're doing it for nothing.
Their population at their current fertility rate, especially if it keeps dropping at the rate it has historically is going to be like, I think if you project forwards, like two or one Taiwanese person for every hundred Taiwanese people in terms of great grandchildren, it's just not a relevant player in the future and its current fertility rates.
Why are we. Wasting our children's lives and putting our country at risk to defend a country that can't even motivate itself to reproduce
Torsten: But I
Malcolm Collins: actually think that if we made this ultimatum with them, it would help them in the long run as well, because they'd realize, Oh shoot, we actually do have to reproduce.
However, I do think that we should have a plan for the Taiwanese [00:29:00] people. And by that, what I mean is if we are not fully defending them, we need to have a plan for evacuating them and acculturating them. I am open to, I mean, Taiwan produces is the key manufacturer of semiconductors for the world. I would not mind the U S being the key manufacturer of semiconductors for the world.
We have tried to build our own plants as advanced as Taiwanese. Plants, but culturally we're not as good at rule following and procedure and bureaucracy as them. And we have struggled. By the way, many people can ask why are Taiwanese so good at that stuff? Is it some Chinese thing? Is it some genetic thing?
It's a genetic thing, but it's not a Chinese thing. Exactly. Taiwan is like an entire country of America's Cuban immigrant population. You have communist upbringings. What often happens is the competent, smart, industrialist people who are Prone to enjoying competing in meritocracies and free markets leave the, you know, in America, you're like, well, what do you, what do you think of Cubans?
What's the Cuban stereotype? Well, they're like, well, they're, they're [00:30:00] capitalistic, they're Republican and they're successful at business. And it's like, is that a broader Cuban stereotype? No, it's the, it's the American Cubans. Same with the Chinese who fled the revolution and went to Taiwan. And if we can make use of that, especially if we can help create, build a stable population, I think people are like, well, aren't you worried about them not assimilating in the U S and changing American culture?
It's like, look, their fertility rate is so low. No, I'm not. At this rate, they're going to go extinct pretty much no matter what we do. We might as well get some semiconductor plants out of it. And and, and some years of economic productivity out of it. And hey, Koreans who immigrate to the US, their fertility rate bumps 50%.
It's still very low. It's like 1. 2 or something like that. Basically halving of regeneration. But it's not as low as it is in South Korea. I suspect we see a similar thing with the Taiwanese population, meaning that in the end it would also help them.
Simone Collins: Well. I [00:31:00] don't imagine we'll ever be that practical, but we'll see what happens.
We're in for a wild ride regardless. I had no idea things had gotten so dire, so terrifying, so quickly.
Malcolm Collins: So. And the people are like, what about the economic effects of taking a bunch of Taiwanese people and wouldn't they want to maintain their own stable communities? Well, why not have the government buy some land in like Alaska or something like that and develop it as a new separate community?
I don't mind doing that. Then you also don't have the cultural bleed effects and we get the economic benefits from it. And we get to develop real estate and land that's currently not developed or fully utilized. I don't mind that at all. Anyway, there are
Simone Collins: lots of ways to do things, but oh my gosh. Yeah.
I just,
Malcolm Collins: I hope everyone's okay. Well, I, I'm trying to, might genuinely attack to remove, like if they attack, I don't think they're doing it for any reason other than to distract their general public and to test and mobilize their military to make sure it can respond to threats from the general public.
I could
Simone Collins: see
Malcolm Collins: that. Yeah. Because that is the existential threat to China right now. [00:32:00] But and I should also note another problem China has right now is they don't have a play for after Xi Jinping leaves. He's done a very good job of like taking everyone out of the government who is a competitor to him, who is competent, who is ambitious.
I'll come in a second. Hold on. I'll bring Octavian on to say bye to you guys. Okay.
I want you to say hi to people. Octavian, come here. Tell them about your toys.
Octavian: I just brought the toys. Okay. So, that, I just brought toys. They're, I just, I just got the toys in the box from Stacey and John's
Malcolm Collins: house. What do you think about China?
Octavian: And, and then I got a box with toys to our house.
Stacy, Stacy does not need many more toys anymore.
Malcolm Collins: [00:33:00] Okay, but what do you think of China?
Octavian: Good.
Malcolm Collins: China's good? Are they, are, do you think that they could be our friends one day?
Octavian: Yes!
Malcolm Collins: What do you think of a bunch of Taiwanese people immigrating to the U. S.? I think a lot of our audience isn't going to like that.
Octavian: Yes, and you know, I just brought it right there at that door.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, but do you think that we have enough toys for them? What if, what if other kids came and started playing with your toys? Would that be good or bad?
So the more kids playing with your toys, the better?
Octavian: Yeah. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Especially if we can use those kids in an economic fight against other people. What do you think of that? What? What do you think of, do you think the kids would fight for you? No, they would not. Oh, they wouldn't? Well, then why would you want them to play with your choice?
Because.
Because it's a nice thing to do? Hold
Octavian: on a second.
Can you bring this? I'll bring, hold on a second. I'll be right, I'll be right here. I gotta get [00:34:00] this. I gotta get the toys. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: I love you, Octavian. I love you, Simone. Bye. Why don't you finish up with Octavian? He's gonna talk to you a little bit. Octavian, hold the mic.
And Malcolm, you get the kids.
Simone Collins: Octavian, come let me interview you. Come take a seat. Okay.
Octavian: Okay.
Simone Collins: All right. Tell me, Octavian, what do you know about the country, China?
Octavian: It's good.
Simone Collins: You love them. Do you think that, that the Chinese people. Have a hope for the future.
Octavian: Yeah. And where was Daddy going?
Simone Collins: Daddy's going to get your brother and sister 'cause it's time for dinner.
Well, where
Octavian: was Daddy's wife into when I was at Station? Dawn House.
Simone Collins: Oh, we were going to pick up some groceries for you because guess what, tonight you're having corn for kids. Corn on the cob.
Octavian: Thank you.
Simone Collins: You're welcome. Do you like corn on the cob? Do you put butter on it or do you eat it plain? Eat
Octavian: it with [00:35:00] plain.
Simone Collins: You want to eat it plain? Okay. Would you share your corn on the cob with kids who came over from China?
Octavian: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Good. It's good to share, right?
Octavian: Yeah, sharing is caring, right?
Simone Collins: Sharing is caring. That's right, Octavian. Are you going to share your corn with your brother and sister? Yes. That's really nice. Okay.
What do you think? So there, there's a lot of people in China right now who are sad. What do you think that they should do to be happy?
Octavian: Okay. Yes.
Simone Collins: What, what should we do to cheer up the people in China? Because they're very sad right now.
Octavian: Who, what makes them so sad?
Simone Collins: They feel like there's no hope for the future.
Like they'll never get toys again.
You'll get them toys. How will you get them toys? What will you do to get them toys?
Octavian: I'll get them. I'll get them a tiny teddy bear. A
Simone Collins: tiny teddy bear.
Octavian: Yeah. [00:36:00] So they come sleep and take a wreck and I, and I can, and I can get them all in the way. Five toys,
Simone Collins: only. Five toys. I think there are more than five people in China, though.
I think there's a lot of people in China.
Octavian: Oh, so I said them.
Simone Collins: I think you're gonna need to get more toys. But do you think that's going to be enough to cheer them up, Octavian?
Octavian: Yeah.
Simone Collins: You think so?
Octavian: Yeah, well, if all the toys are gone right at our house, I'm safe in our house, and we gotta get toys from the toy store.
Simone Collins: Oh, so you think this is a opportunity to cheer up the people in China because you get to go shopping?
Octavian: Yes!
Simone Collins: Huh. Okay. Okay. And how are you going to get all these toys to China? You know how when you look at the, at the globe, right? When you look at the world map, China is very far away. It's across the Pacific Ocean.
Octavian: What the? Oh yes, so I should go on the [00:37:00] boat.
Simone Collins: Oh, you're going to go on a boat to deliver the toys to China, to cheer up the people of China. Is that right?
Octavian: Yeah, I'm going to deliver the boats. I'm a great delivery man. I deliver everything. For everybody else who is sad.
Simone Collins: Okay, so you're one solution here.
Octavian: What?
Why think that's like a paddle? What's that thing there?
Simone Collins: It's a paddle. That's exactly what you think it is. It's a paddle for the boat.
Octavian: For for the boat that's in our house.
Simone Collins: That's right. Yeah, for the bumper bug is gonna
Octavian: be, is it gonna be for me?
Simone Collins: You can use it as long as you promise not to drop it.
Octavian: Okay.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. I'll put
Octavian: it right. I'll put it right here, right now.
Simone Collins: Okay. That sounds good.
Octavian: I just, so Oct.
Simone Collins: You know, here's a really important part of, oh, you got the teddy bear. That's good. So really important part of making toys is special microchips that make the toys work, right? Oh, okay. And there's a place called [00:38:00] Taiwan that makes all these really important chips and they're in danger.
What would you do to protect Taiwan?
Octavian: To kill them. I just had to kill them. Well,
Simone Collins: specifically So you kill whoever's attacking
Malcolm Collins: Taiwan?
Simone Collins: And how will you how will you protect Taiwan from China attacking because they might want to stop them from making the chips They might want to I don't know. Would
Malcolm Collins: you want to go
Simone Collins: yourself
Malcolm Collins: to kill them or would you send missiles?
Would you want to use a gun or a missile?
Octavian: That's not heff, that's not heffy.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so you want a light gun, okay. That makes sense, because you don't
Octavian: I want it! I want it!
Malcolm Collins: Let Torsten hold it, buddy. He wants to hold it.
Simone Collins: Torsten, how do you spell your name?
Octavian: Torsten. I want to hold it. I want to hold it. I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you do, buddy. Look, our kids don't like being on camera and don't like speaking into the microphone.
So, this [00:39:00] is clearly against their consent. You can see that we have not, hello, hello, hello, Torsten, let Torsten talk. He wants it. Can you ask, ask Octavian, ask Torsten an interview question. Ask Torsten an interview question. Ask him about China.
Octavian: I cannot have the microphone. The microphone
Malcolm Collins: can hear you from over there.
Just ask him a question. Thank you.
Simone Collins: Okay, Torsten. Torsten, how do we cheer up China? How do we make China happy?
Malcolm Collins: I'll give you the microphone. Next time we'll have a microphone for everyone. Awww. Okay.
Simone Collins: Torsten, the people of China need to be cheered up. How can you make them happy?
Malcolm Collins: How are you going to make them happy?
Torsten: I don't know how to get them happy.
Simone Collins: Oh, I don't think China knows how to either. The CCP is having trouble.
Oh, the mic just disconnected.
Malcolm Collins: No, he turned it off.
Simone Collins: What will you do if they [00:40:00] hurt somebody?
Torsten: I just got to turn it on.
Simone Collins: Oh, it's okay, Torsten. What would, if Chyna does something naughty, what will happen?
Octavian: Want
Malcolm Collins: to be the attention? Octavia, if Chyna hurt somebody, what would you do?
Octavian: Microphone!
Malcolm Collins: Okay, everybody wants the microphone.
Well, you know what that means, like, nobody gets to hold the microphone. I love you, Simone. I love you
Simone Collins: too,
Torsten: Malcolm. Oh,
Simone Collins: I love Toasty's voice on the microphone, though.
Malcolm Collins: I just want Toasty to say something on the
Simone Collins: microphone so bad, his little voice.
Malcolm Collins: I got the microphone!
Oh gosh, I, I've got it for now. Oh,
Torsten: oh gosh. Yes. Oh boy.
Simone Collins: All right. I'll come down. I'm making corn for Octavian. What do you want?
Malcolm Collins: What's hurting? [00:41:00]
Simone Collins: Would you like Malcolm, would you like your Tortellini?
Malcolm Collins: Fight or flight? Is that what you said? Would you like Tortellini? I reheat. Fried rice and reheat slow cooked meat for the fried rice. Okay.
Simone Collins: That sounds good.
Okay. Toasty. Tell me something interesting.
Oh yeah. Okay. Toasty.
Malcolm Collins: Octavian, are you China and Toasty's Taiwan?
Torsten: It's no
Simone Collins: tickles.
All right. I'll, I'll hit. And I love you, [00:42:00] Malcolm. This is, looks pretty dire. See you downstairs in a sec.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Episodi mancanti?
-
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the fascinating world of America's forgotten cultural groups, focusing on the Puritans and their lasting impact on modern American society. This eye-opening discussion explores:
* The surprising truth about Puritan culture and its evolution
* How Puritan values merged with Backwoods culture to survive
* The unexpected connection between Puritan ethics and modern parenting styles
* Why certain cultural groups thrived while others faded away
* The impact of Catholic immigration on America's cultural landscape
* Insights into raising children with a "clan-based" mentality
* How historical cultural differences still influence modern American society
Whether you're a history buff, a parent looking for unique perspectives, or just curious about America's cultural roots, this video offers valuable insights into the forces that shaped our nation.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am
excited to be here with you today. This will be our second episode going over some of the concepts, what we think they got right, and what we think they got wrong of the book.
Simone Collins: American Nations by Colin Woodard, which was inspired by one of our favorite books of all time, Albion Seed by David Hackett Fisher.
Malcolm Collins: And this divides America into a 11 cultural groups. And I will put a map on screen here so you can see it. And in the last episode we did on this, which you can check out one of the core things I think he got wrong is he thought that the Puritan cultural group in the Northeastern United States ended up being the core mountain head.
Of current Yankee culture or the northeastern coastal culture in the United States, where we argue this is fundamentally wrongheaded that that culture actually stems from Catholicism which for a long time made up the majority population in these regions after the immigration waves started so [00:01:00] even though.
Just to briefly cover some concepts from the last one that a lot of people are unfamiliar with Catholics at the time of America's founding were an incredibly small part of the colonies. They were like 1. 5%. Even in the quote unquote Catholic colony. They were a very small minority around 10%. That was Maryland.
So they just were not a big cultural force in America. Until the Irish, Italian, and now Hispanic immigration waves, which led to the Catholic population becoming the predominant cultural wellspring of three of the American cultural groups, specifically. In the last episode, we focused a lot on how they were the wellspring of the
Yankee cultural group, but they are also the wellspring of the El Norte cultural group, which is the Hispanic cultural group in the, in the center.
And the far left cultural group that is on the west coast. And if I put a map here of American by relig America's districts by primary religious affiliation, you will see there is a huge overlap with all the blue strongholds and where the Catholics were [00:02:00] settling. So now we want to go, or at least these specific blue strongholds, i.
e. Yankeedom and Far Leftem the, the far west coast of the United States. Now what we want to do is go into a question this brings up. And it's a very interesting question if you've read LBNC, is, okay, these are the four cultures that form the foundation of America.
Where did they go? Right?
Where did the Quakers go? Where did the Puritans go? Where did the Where did the Cavaliers go? Because the Backwoods people, which I'm descended from, the greater We know where they
Simone Collins: are. They're right where you think they are.
Malcolm Collins: We will, in this episode, talk about this culture. And it's background, but I think a lot of people are a bit mystified about what happened to the three other, it's kind of cool in American history, by the way, if you, if you like study it, it's like the lost tribes, it's like, well, they're really unique founding groups in the country.
Where did they go? How did they end up actually influencing the cultures that came [00:03:00] downstream of them? And a big answer here is. They mostly died out.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: However it was the, the, well, a separate episode on how the Quakers died out, because that's a very interesting story in and of itself. But today we're going to talk about the Puritans what they broadly stood for, how one group of the Puritans, or I'd say the Calvinist settlers in early America because there were two big groups here, which I think is really undersold.
The Backwoods people, the Backwoods group, the greater Appalachian group was heavily related to the Puritan group. They were also a Calvinist group. They generally got along with the Puritan group and they ended up, I actually, here's a great example of how well they got along with the Puritan group. So there was something called the Paxton boys uprising.
And in it because the Quakers always trying to bureaucratically control everything, we're giving their districts like half the vote that the, that the Quaker districts had the, the more central [00:04:00] urban districts had and they also had created a situation in which the Indians were constantly attacking and killing these people.
And they were like we don't really care, I guess, is the thing. I mean, talk about other, there's so much of like American lore, which is just like myth stories. So it was actually around this, the time of the Paxton Boys, like leading up to this, that the famous giving Indians smallpox infected blankets thing came from.
And people are like, oh, oh, that's so horrible. How could anyone have done that? And it's like, you know, they had just. Killed over 2, 000 settlers and were besieging a settlement and that was the context Excuse me They had been butchering children like what like they were trying to save a settlement that was under siege This is like a Alamo situation here people like, is it bad, like by modern warfare standards?
Yeah. If you are behind the walls of a city and you know, a group just butchered like the [00:05:00] two cities next to you and killed all the women and children. And you've got your family there. Are you not going to try everything you can think of to try to protect yourself? Because you have sent requests to the local Pennsylvania government, but it's run by Quakers and Quakers are pacifists.
Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, I kind of have like. With all things in life right now a f**k around and find out attitude. Like, I mean, also you siege a town, they're going to, they're going to try some stuff, like maybe they didn't expect biological warfare. Does that mean it's unfair? I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is actually a really interesting thing about the backwoods people.
So we're going to talk about where they came from, but also a really interesting thing about them culturally, because they had a relationship with the Indians that was both incredibly. more brutal than any of the other founding American cultural groups. Yeah, I
Simone Collins: think many American cultural groups saw them as equal to the Native American, the indigenous populations, because they were equally brutal in some of [00:06:00] their behaviors vis a vis other groups.
Malcolm Collins: Well, so, so we'll get to that. But first it's just like, let's talk about where they came from more broadly. Mm-Hmm. . So they were the second wave of immigrants into the United States. So you can really say the first wave of people who felt like European immigrants in America.
Simone Collins: I don't know. I think the second wave of immigrants was more the Cavaliers, followed by the Quakers, then followed by the Scots Irish.
So not great. I need
Malcolm Collins: I need to clarify what I mean by second wave. What I mean is they were the first wave of distinctly culturally different white Europeaners coming to already white European settled parts of America. Yes. The Cavaliers came as a separate wave, but they were mostly setting up. They were settling in
Simone Collins: indigenous lands with in totally foreign territory, not competing with existing UK based groups, right?
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: For like when the Quakers came and set up Philadelphia, it wasn't like there was a big existing group. Settlement there when the, you know, the came and the [00:07:00] Puritans came and set up Massachusetts, there wasn't a big existing settlement there. When the backwards people came or what became the greater Appalachian culture?
All of the stuff on the coastline was pretty much already settled.
Simone Collins: Mm-Hmm. .
Malcolm Collins: And unlike the later Irish and Italian immigrant waves, the Catholic immigrant waves these people were much more discriminated against than any other. A really white population group that entered America, to the extent that they almost were unable to settle in any already settled region.
Now this was due to two reasons. There wasn't yet this idea that America was like this mixing pot yet. It was like, who are these brutal savages? Because that's what they were seen as by the existing population. They were mostly Irish and Scottish clan people, I guess is what I call them. They had been through centuries of clan warfare.
They were an incredibly honor based people in an honor based culture. But they were also I won't say lawless. They believed in [00:08:00] law, but you know, they'd have blood feuds. They'd have the law was the law. Well, there's,
Simone Collins: there's honor based. Law and then there's civil law and they were on a more honor code based system where when you have a feud, it is settled by your people through a blood feud or through vigilante justice, rather than you going to a centralized authority and saying, Oh mommy, they did something bad.
Punish them. They didn't come to
Malcolm Collins: us. Toasty did it. Yeah. No, they, they kept coming and setting up. What were the names of the regulators? So they set up a separate governments ruled by something called the regulators which roving vigilante groups, but let's talk about how, how this all ended up happening as well, because this is important before we get to what ended up happening to the Puritans.
So, these people came over. Nobody wanted them in their cities. They were seen as incredibly, like, crying full people. And they kind of
Simone Collins: were.
Malcolm Collins: And loose
Simone Collins: women. The women had higher skirts, low bust lines. They all acted in a very informal [00:09:00] way. They just felt culturally extremely different.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were, they were very, well, they were a clan based low class group.
They were the first group that like really was not in any way intellectual or upper class. They were fleeing regional violence. And they were feeling regional violence from people like themselves. And so they got into these cities and, and in part because the cities can immediately be like, Oh, just go to the land outside the cities.
Go to the, the frontier, which at the time was the Appalachian mountains and the area right before the Appalachian mountains, like just outside of all of the settled areas,
Simone Collins: which is poetically quite appropriate because the Appalachian mountains are actually the same mountain range as the Scottish Highlands.
Just yeah, before they got split up into different continents
Malcolm Collins: and these people this, this actually worked out really good for everyone to begin with. So the reason it worked out so good is there were a lot of really dangerous Indian groups and you had these like pansy, like. Quakers, right? Who [00:10:00] refused to fight at all.
They would actually have like pirates just like plunder their settlements and they do nothing about it. And yeah. So Ben Franklin, who was a Puritan based in Philadelphia would be like, I could explain to our enemies that like, we do not retaliate for this.
And they wouldn't even come attack because they wouldn't believe that anyone would act like this. It is so insane that you're refusing to do anything. So anyway and then you have the Puritans who were hard people but they, well, they didn't have as much problem with the Indians for a couple reasons.
One is, is they were very hardy people, like they were willing to defend themselves and they were very prickly, but also they would intentionally settle the least productive lands the most stony fields and everything like that, because they believed that you know, the harder you made your life.
The more favor God was giving you that like God gave you favor through intentionally choosing To give yourself hardship. So the
Simone Collins: Puritans keep in mind, settled in the Northeast of the United States at a time when it was much colder, it had [00:11:00] much harsher winters than it does today. So right now the South, for example, where the Cavaliers and future Southerner groups settled is pretty much climatically the same now as it used to be, but New England was very different and very harsh.
It wasn't just the soil.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so, so these people were pushed out because the Quakers, if they had a boundary of these angry Klan people the Indians couldn't get through them, you know, the Indians ended up fighting the Klan people and the Klan people would fight the Indians. Now, it caused problems.
And this is one of the things where the Quakers, the Quakers are just so slimy. I will never get away from this lie that Quakers were like anti slavery when we know from Quaker wills that 43 percent of Quakers owned slaves. They just were vocally anti slavery. They had higher slave ownership rights than aristocratic southerners during the slave owning period.
They they, they were very woke. It was like, we'll say something's bad, but then, you know, our actions will cause more damage. So they're like, oh, we will always treat the Indians nice, and we will always pay for their land. Unlike [00:12:00] those Puritans who like do, you know, sort of cheaty deals with them, but then how did they actually treat the Indians?
Well, they took these warlike clan people, they put them all around the Indian land and then they used them for protection and they kept killing the Indians and the Indians kept killing them. So ultimately if you look at the Indian tribes that were in the Quaker areas, they actually ended up dying out at higher rates than the Indian tribes in the Puritan areas.
Because, again, it's, it's, yeah, technically they're pro Indian, except they settled these, like, bloodthirsty My Ancestors people next to them.
Simone Collins: Lord Almighty.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so, so, now we've got to get into how these people ended up relating to the Indians and why it was so different from any of the other early American groups.
And it really shows, in our show, I say I'm a pluralist, right? People here, Malcolm's a pluralist, like a dyed in the wool pluralist of the, the old Appalachian variety, and what they think I'm saying is I'm an equalist. You know, that I believe that, that all cultural practices are equal and all people are equal.
And [00:13:00] I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You'll understand when you understand how the Blackwoods people related to the union. So the Quakers would be like, I respect the Native Americans human dignity, right? Like, but they didn't. take time to understand or know or live with the Indians. They like superficially, academically respected the Indians, but they didn't actually like engage with the Indians.
The Backwoods people they were very known and actually very hated from the other people. They would frequently marry Indians. They would adopt Indian style of dresses. They would They
Simone Collins: did want some Children of mixed backwoods and indigenous pairings become significant leaders within Native American
Malcolm Collins: communities?
Yeah, they did. Well, and, and within backwoods communities. And some of the backwoods people would actually just go and move in and convert to the Indian communities and ways of life. They weren't that
Simone Collins: terribly different. It's not as though many, for example, Scottish settlements were [00:14:00] that different from many indigenous American settlements.
They could, they lived in, in rougher ways. They were
Malcolm Collins: clan based people in that they were similar, but they were culturally quite different.
Simone Collins: Oh, culturally very different. But sometimes I feel like lifestyle and culture,
Malcolm Collins: how different they were, because I can see this idea of. Oh, they were these, these backwards savages living off the land.
The Indians were backwards savages living off the land. Look, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that there's this perception of all this, this, it's such a like, oh, they must've been similar culturally. No, they were not at all similar culturally. Not culturally. Than they were to the Quakers or the Quakers were to the Indians.
The only way, the only one dimension, they were similar to the Indians. was that they were from a clan based system that had different clans similar to the Indians and these clans fought each other. But because of that, when they came into these Indian [00:15:00] areas, they saw the Indians. As with genuine human dignity as a separate clan that was in a clan based conflict with them But this also meant that they would regularly go butcher indian towns in a way that the puritans and the quakers Never ever would.
So in a way They would they respected the end they wanted to learn from them. They wanted to learn from their culture They would intermarry with them when they made sense. They would join their communities when they liked those specific communities but they also treated them As a full equal in terms of clan competition.
And for them, that meant regularly go in and raid their settlements. I mean, they raid other clan settlements. Why not raid the Indian?
Simone Collins: We're only treating them with the same respect that we treat our own. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: but go in and take
Simone Collins: their, but when you're back, that's a little different, isn't it?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because they were admittedly.
They weren't as brutal as the most brutal Indians, but they were close in terms [00:16:00] of the the areas that they came from and in those areas they were often the most brutal of the parts of Scotland in Ireland, for example. But keep in mind this group again was not the Catholics from Ireland. This was the the Protestants in Ireland who were the Irish who were part of this community.
Anyway, so, so, and, and this was actually the group. So the Scotch Irish, these are the Scots who were moved to Ireland. They were brought there by earlier English to rule over the parts of it, like, like to try to be like enforcers. Not really rule over, because they were more like, Enforcers or brutes for the English population because they wanted a particularly sort of bloodthirsty I guess you could say people to move there.
And so, that's what I mean when I say I mean pluralism I mean pluralism so that on equal terms the strong can defeat the weak. They can learn from them they can they they they can learn what like of the people who are different from the us What can we learn from them? What can we? And then we take that stuff and we use it to do better ourselves.
[00:17:00] Now, I do not believe that we should be in a system like they were, where the strong against the weak is the people who literally kill the other people should win. I think we're civilizationally beyond that point. But what I mean is, I think we should be able to economically cross culturally compete against other groups without putting training wheels on some groups, either from an ethical perspective, i.
e. you can't compete with those people because they're in a weaker position than you or something like that, or through, you know, affirmative action or through anything like that. We should all be able to compete. And, and it's so interesting to me that this all compete attitude. In a way, assigns more human dignity to the other than the attitude of, well, these, these you know, oh, poor little whatever minority, we need to give them all sorts of special stuff because goodness knows they can't work on their own culture, they can't fix anything themselves.
And I also believe this free competition mindset, I hold it because I believe it [00:18:00] helps even the groups that are in harder positions. So you can see this and I'll put on screen here, some graphs of black Americans and Hispanic Americans who were in Democrat controlled districts versus Republican controlled districts intergenerationally.
Had closer to white income levels and closer to white IQ. So they were intergenerationally improving and getting close to a point where they were equal with the existing white population. Whereas in the Democrat areas, they were not improving because of course you're not going to improve when you're putting training wheels on everything.
Right? Like the goal is, is, is individual cultural improvement.
Simone Collins: Well, the goal is to give people. Resources that empower them. It's the whole teach Amanda fish thing rather than disempowering them. And there's been systematic infantilization and disempowerment taking place in progressive communities.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Did you have anything else you wanted to say about this community before I move further?
Simone Collins: No, let's go for it.
Malcolm Collins: So with this [00:19:00] community, we can get to a. They were really, as we've already said, looked down upon by the Quakers extremely because that was a group that they were engaging with most.
And the, the German settlers who were like the Quaker society. So we're going to talk a little bit about the society that became the Midland cultural group, which I'll show on the map here. They were mostly formed. Of three groups. Okay. You had some of these backwoods people. You had some of the German settlers who were mostly like really industrious farmers and just wanted to be left alone and didn't really want any position of governments.
And then you had the elite class, which was the Quakers. They basically ran well, everything. They ran all of the major businesses. They ran all the slave operations and they ran most of the political offices.
And They used these positions to essentially oppress the two other groups, the Backwoods people, who they removed the ability to get votes from, they didn't really protect them and the, the German [00:20:00] settlers, but the German settlers didn't really care, they, in part, are the group that we now know of as the Amish but they didn't all become Amish, this was one part of this faction, but it's still the most culturally preserved of this original faction And so, you had this system where because the Germans didn't focus on anything other than education tied to, you know, efficiency of their farm labor, and because the backwoods people really saw learning as a fairly pointless thing to do.
It wasn't part of their culture. They, they, they didn't believe in higher education in the way any of the other cultures did. So they couldn't run these types of jobs. They also didn't believe in capital accumulation. So I want to talk about this really quickly because this is important. Why didn't they believe in capital accumulation?
Because the, the other Calvinist groups all heavily believed in capital accumulation. Well, because they, so let's talk about how like the Puritan in their view of capital accumulation created modern capitalism. So they believed that God showed his favor to people by how successful you were specifically for them because they lived, you know, in the [00:21:00] business world, right?
But if you spend any of that money on yourself, like aggrandizing yourself in the eyes of other people on art, on, on flashy things then you were showing that you, you had sort of failed the test that God had given you and that test was success. And Scrooge is very much a character who represents this old Calvinist Puritan mindset.
Well, keep in mind what success meant. Okay, so they, they agreed with the Puritans on that. God gives you success if he likes you. But they were in this clan based system, right? That was like, yeah, but if you ever accumulated too much capital, your neighbors would just come and steal it. You know, if you got a bunch of cows and your neighbors would come and steal those cows, there was no point in ever having stuff.
And this is something that is really noticed in I read in a previous episode about my ancestors and the people used to like their parents episode. And. In that episode one of the things that my ancestor was noting about his dad is he had so many [00:22:00] opportunities to make money through investment and stuff like that, but he just seemed allergic to even attempting to make money.
And he was like, why was that? And it was because he came from this clan based system. These people who, when the South was revolting, they started counter revolutions to try to, you know, because they were against slavery. And we'll talk about why they were against slavery because most of the backwoods people were And they were like, okay, we'll, we'll do our own thing here, but they'd already gone through this a few times, you know, go fight with your neighbors, create breakaway states.
This is where, you know, 15 of his brothers or siblings are one of the 50 founding members of the Free State of Jones.
You, me, all of us. We're all out there dying so they can stay rich. Tax collectors coming around here, taking everything. Girls, you know how to shoot one of these? No man oughta tell another man what he's gotta live for, or what he's got to die for.
Malcolm Collins: So, you know, heavy, heavy relation to, to that sort of movement. So anyway where was I
Simone Collins: capital
Malcolm Collins: accumulation. Capital accumulation, [00:23:00] yes.
So these people didn't have the same relation to capital accumulation that the Puritans did. It was more like status accumulation was what mattered more than traditional capital accumulation, like you would have in a Puritan setting. It was clan honor accumulation. Yes. So it was honor culture. You needed to accumulate honor for the sake of accumulating honor.
But, but also this
Simone Collins: honor was the currency in which this community dealt. There wasn't really so much capital. There wasn't really so much of an economy. There wasn't really so much of an external governing mechanism. Honor was the judicial system, the economy the social capital, the respect and the negotiating power.
So it did matter.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, this is the cure. I should be clear that they actually had a currency and it was a hard alcohol and whiskeys. That's what they used as a currency in their districts. Yeah. Just to give you an idea of the type of people they were. But they also related to morality quite differently than the
Simone Collins: speaking, which though, just random thing [00:24:00] it has been.
It's been mentioned in a couple of videos I've been listening to about Mormon culture that a lot of Mormons in their emergency supplies save like large jugs of vodka as a currency for like a, an apocalyptic event. So alcohol is currency. It actually makes me want to buy more vodka. Because it's not a bad idea.
Malcolm Collins: It's good frontier medicine. We're alcohol is currency, people. So, so, and keep in mind, we'll get to their counter governments in a second because they're actually important. But I should also hear, talk about their ethical system because it was a little different than the Puritan ethical system.
So they were both Calvinists, you know, they believed in predestination. They believed that you know, Pretty much everything is a sin. Dancing is a sin, music is a sin, sports, oh that's definitely a sin you know, extramarital sex is a sin anything you do for the pure sake of happiness, like personal happiness, is broadly a sin.[00:25:00]
And so they, they, the Puritans were like, Oh, well, then we need to not do any of those things. At all. Like, I know we'll break the rule sometimes, but broadly we should try not to do any of those things. Which is very different from the, the, the, than Catholics came in and the Catholics had this deontological set where there's some sins and some not sins.
Like sports isn't as high of a sin as say like extramarital sex or you know, music or something like that. Like they, they, they have the, this is a category of sin, this is a category of not sin.
for nerds, wondering about the biblical logic behind each of these interpretations.
For one interpretation, The one where sexual sins are an ultra big deal and other sins aren't really that important. you could look at quotes like. From Corinthians flee for your sexual immorality. All other sins, a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body in quote, the problem here is that this is very clearly in context. Speaking of prostitution and only prostitution. As the [00:26:00] paragraph immediately proceeding this line is all about prostitution and why specifically prostitution is bad. Which, and we will go over this in a future one of our tract episodes, I would argue is considered a unique form of sin because it has the chance of bringing an unwanted child into the world. And the sin is the potential of creating that child, and that's what it means to sin against the body. , By that, what we mean here is in this part, it talks of two people becoming one body when they have sex. But obviously two people don't literally become one body when they have sex, except in so far as one person gets pregnant and then they literally do become one body.
In the form of the child and one spirit in the form of the child.
if you look at the lines immediately above it. Whereas, alternatively, you can look at lines like.
Whether, therefore you eat or drink or whatever you do all to the glory of God. Or, and he died for all, all those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who [00:27:00] died for them and was raised again, Or, and whatsoever you do do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men. Or, but if you have doubts about whether or not you should eat something, you are sending Abe, you go ahead and do it for you are not following your convictions.
If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning. So in all of these quotes, the basic gist is, is anything that you are not doing for the glory of God is a sin. So if you can't reasonably argue that what you just did, you did for the glory of God. You committed a form of sin.
Malcolm Collins: It's not that everything that you're not doing for God is a sin. Where these two groups broadly believe that.
But the, the backwoods people They related to this very differently. They're like, Oh yeah, all of those things are sin. But like. I'm still human, bro. Like I will try to do good in the moment when it makes sense and aligns with my honor code. But I know that I may as well, like, as long as I'm going to be here and it is not a time when I otherwise could be dedicating myself [00:28:00] fully and meaningfully to God.
Like they didn't do the constant Bible study and everything like that. They're like, let's party tonight, you know? And they were known by the other people as constantly partying. But also engaging with low culture because of they saw, you know, hanging out and partying with the bros as an equal sin, you know, having some drinks and doing a jig.
And I remember this about my ancestors. There was a time when the confederacy had captured a number of these anti confederacy rebels and he He, he came into the confederate camp and he brought a bunch of booze with him and he got them all drunk and played the fiddle so transfixingly and apparently did a traditional Scottish like jig thing so amazingly that they were able to have another guy sneak around and free all of the prisoners while the confederate guards were distracted by my great great great.
Grandfather. I love [00:29:00] this because it's so like a, a trickster god sort of a thing to do from like an old fable or something like that, but that was the type of people they were, you know, it was, we've got to do what's right, we've got to do what fits our honor, but you know, sometimes a jig can be a part of that, sometimes drinking can be a part of that, you know.
So they can play a role in an honorable life. Now what this means is because they didn't distinguish between different types of sin, they would actually see the higher culture forms of sin as a higher form of a sin than the lower culture forms of a sin, because there you are mixing, and I've mentioned this in previous episode, One sin, which is just the general sin of doing something not for God, but with the sin of pride.
And, and, you know, like you would get from an art museum or something like that, but then you're also, in addition to that, doing something that's just like objectively stupid, because now if you're engaging with high culture, you likely have something that's worth stealing to other people.
So again, don't engage with that stuff, right?
You know, so there was a number of reasons that they felt this way, but anyway. In, in the [00:30:00] Midlands area where the, where the Quakers controlled everything they were they, they were, they didn't run any of the businesses. They didn't run any of the politics, but in the areas that they fully controlled, it was a different situation.
In the areas that they fully controlled, you could get some like local sort of. gang leaders who would end up ruling a district due to like how many siblings they had and how much honor they had was in their culture. But you wouldn't get tons of lawyers and teachers and doctors and competent politicians.
And so where did they get those people from? Well, it's the story of the Paxton boys. They had come. They were besieging Philadelphia. So this rural immigrant group, like I'm not even kidding. What immigrant group in the United States is literally besieging with guns and having murdered people in a major U.
S. city? These people were like a don't mess with me sort of thing. So the guy who ended up bailing Philadelphia out because the Quakers had their heads up their butts [00:31:00] and couldn't handle anything, was, Puritan Ben Franklin.
So, he ended up being able to make a negotiation with them that ended up saving the Quakers of Pennsylvania. They couldn't defend themselves well either because they'd never really done the military stuff. And I should note that these people actually went to war with a number of the other settlements.
It wasn't just the Quakers. They also went to war with with the Tidewater peoples these were the peoples who were the sons of the cavaliers to the south like around the sort of dc area and stuff like that so they would regularly go to war against the other colonists when they the other colonists would abuse them too much.
So the puritans actually worked very well with them. Like these two cultures went together while The Quakers were sort of oil and water with them. These people who didn't believe in war, these people who were from a fundamentally different religious framework. The Puritans were basically their religious framework.
They just expressed it differently. They didn't want Like to take stuff, right? Like I didn't like showing off their wealth so they could live in these communities [00:32:00] safely,
Here. I'd also note. If you remember earlier, I said that the Puritans would intentionally build settlements in areas where it was hard to farm. Either that were colder or that had lots of rocks in the field because they liked. Intentionally opting into hardship, thinking that it sort of purified their soul. They felt very comfortable moving into regions that anyone else would say were dangerous or that you shouldn't move into this region, you know? Uh, Quaker might say, well, we should move out there because these people might kill us. Whereas a Puritan would say. These people might kill us.
Therefore, we should move out there.
. They, they were hardworking.
Malcolm Collins: They like to put themselves in hard environments, which won them honor points among these people. They just got along very well.
And so a number of the Puritans ended up migrating into these communities and forming this sort of like, learned elite roles like the, the lawyers, the doctors, the entrepreneurs and stuff like that within these [00:33:00] communities enough so that they could get a bit of a society.
And here we should talk about what these societies ended up looking like. They built these societies they, they had a few different breakaway states at points, but the main one was the, I'll call it the regulator state. So they had like a local marshal role that was called a regulator. And this individual would apply clan like justice.
Well, actually, it was called lynching named after a guy named Lynch
For more color here. The term Lynch mob. I came after , a man with the name, Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and justice of the peace during the American revolution, Charles Lynch headed in irregular court that punished loyalists and his actions gave rights to the term Lynch's law, which referred to the extra judicial punishment of individuals without formal legal proceedings.
Although there is a claim that William Lynch, another Virginia planter of the same era with associated with the term.
Malcolm Collins: and it was a system of justice where when one person would do something bad, you would go into their community and you would lynch them. That was what the, the regulators did to police their [00:34:00] communities and they were needed to police their communities because the local governments were not policing their communities.
And they actually ended up when the 13 colonies were sending all their delegates down, they elected their own delegate to go down as a separate. You call this sort of shadow country because nobody else recognized them as a non ruled over part of the United States, but they genuinely were Basically separate colony was a separate legal system.
Okay. So for clarification here, the regulator movement had been put down before this event happened. This was sort of a successor government to them. , that was much less formal than the full regulator movement government was. And for anyone looking for more information on this stuff, this is all covered in American nations. So just go read that book. The core thing that I'm discussing here that differs from what's accounted in American nations.
Is the integration of the Puritan culture into the Backwoods culture, which he doesn't go that deep into.
Malcolm Collins: So any thoughts on this before I go into what what happened to the the puritans who didn't [00:35:00] meld with this culture?
Simone Collins: No, keep it going
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so the Puritans who melded with this culture, I'll talk a little about what happened to them and their ethical system. They began to adopt more of the ethical system that this culture had in its relationship to sin.
So they stayed really, really obsessed with education, but they became a lot less obsessed with and, and, and technical correctness and consequentialism and everything like that. But And the elect and all that, but they became a lot less obsessed was you have to follow every rule. Perfectly. It was more of like they, they began to, I guess, sort of understand.
I would guess. I call it the party lifestyle of these people and the everything to an extreme lifestyle of these people inform this sort of, I guess you could say, like, Braveheart like cultural class. Like you see in the Braveheart movie where they're like, well we need some people in this clan based system to be extremely educated and know tons of languages and be obsessed with education and that was sort of the role that they filled.
And you actually see this from My Ancestors. If you've ever read about the Free State of Jones [00:36:00] movement
One of the 15 of my ancestors who was involved and had the most senior position within the movement with Jasper Collins. He's actually the reason why we know about the movement to begin with, because he wrote the primary book on the movement Also is. It's a quick addition here. Cause I ain't forgot this, but I was just double checking this information that Jasper named his first son. Ulysses Sherman Collins. You got to understand in the antebellum south naming your first son, you Lissy Sherman college today. It would be like naming your kid. Hitler Mao Collins..
Malcolm Collins: but he's the guy in the movie who's always doing stuff like trying to write a constitution for them, and trying to write a set of laws, and trying to write philosophical treaties for them.
Now obviously, a lot of the people in this were related to my family but that was like the the patriarch of that local region, who is Jasper Collins, was who it was because that was what they did with these people. They would help them in their rebellions, and they'd be like, hey, guys, guys, guys, I got a a legal system that we can use, and I got these, like, religious arguments for why we're doing this, and I got this you could think of them as the helpful [00:37:00] nerd um, These communities um, they, they were never like leader, leader, but they were the leader's guy who helped the leader actually get s**t done.
And they were okay with that because to take the leadership position in a way would be a sign of sin because that would just show you wanted power for yourself. And so it worked very, very well with these two cultures work together.
Even today, I've noted that people from the Puritan cultural class work really well with the Backwoods people. And I think that this often surprises people from coastal cities where they're like, oh, the Backwoods people would see nothing in common with you. They'd hate all of your. Weird views. And I think that this shows a misunderstanding of the way the Backwood culture works now, or the way it worked historically.
Remember the Backwoods people were the first ones to pick up like Indian ways of doing things and stuff like that. They don't have a lot of prejudice against people of different cultural practices or really see things as quote unquote weird. They're more just concerned about being able [00:38:00] to get by and live their life and support their family. , , and then their wider network. And not being looked down upon. issues about like cultural purity and stuff like that, or not really important to them. , Except when it feels to them that another cultural clan is encroaching on their territory. and then to the Puritans, there's never really been a high amount of classic judgment of people outside the Puritan network within Puritan groups.
So I think, you know, some people hear like, oh, you never get along with like an average American Malcolm. Somebody said this after one of our other videos. And I'm like, you know, that like the people who care for our kids every day, , and who we're in business with? Like the core people were in business with. Are, you know, face tattoos and, , run a landscaping company, right?
Like the. We get along very well with average Americans and average Americans at least have this Appalachian cultural group get along very well with us because we're just not very judgemental people. And I've actually [00:39:00] noticed they get along uniquely well from us in the Pennsylvania area. When I contrast it with, , Texas. And I think the core reason is that in Pennsylvania, the upper class, people in Pennsylvania really looked down on middle-class Pennsylvania and like lower middle-class Pennsylvania. And, , in Texas Where I grew up. that just wasn't the case. , like George Bush, for example, clearly didn't look down on middle-class Americans. , in the same way, I see people in like the main line do.
Malcolm Collins: But then the Puritan Puritans, well, why did the Puritan Purims didn't die out?
And they mostly died out in the 1800s. And there are three reasons why they died out. Do you have any thoughts before I want to go further? Okay, reason number one, and by far, far, far, the biggest reason. The Catholic immigrant ways. They were mostly just displaced by the Catholics.
And would I say displaced? I mean, displaced, not like killed or replaced specifically. They migrated out to either [00:40:00] the Backwoods regions or the west, or, you know, Mormon territory. Uh, there were a lot of places that they migrated to around the frontier areas, but they mostly just kept moving to wherever was one of the hardest places to live in America, because that was part of their culture was to seek out. Intentional hardship and not.
Have any aspersion that they may be.
Benefiting from any form of nepotism or family reputation. , and my family has actually done this for a few generations where almost everyone in my family has started their first company in another country. Like you consider me, , I got my first big job in Korea and then the first company that we ran was in Peru. , and now I feel comfortable working in the U S because, you know, I've sort of proven that.
, my success wasn't due to any form of nepotism, but that's a really important thing was in this Puritan cultural group. But it also meant that it was very natural for them to be displeased. What I mean by that is it didn't require much of a [00:41:00] push or much of a culture change to get them to leave their previous cultural strongholds like Boston.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, if you look in like, it's recently in 2009, for example, the Puritan stronghold was Boston.
Yet in 2009, over 50 percent of Massachusetts was still Catholic. Like, That's wild. Like how much do you think was Puritan descended? Very small. Yeah. A lot of Americans, 13 percent or so were descendants from the Mayflower, but they didn't keep their culture intact. So the independent Puritan cultural clusters just mostly died or became narrower and narrower and focused and more and more like out there.
Cultish region regions like this is where you had like the Kelloggs and stuff like that where they would have these insane diets And everything like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And what were the puritans actually, bemarked by because I think a lot of people Misunderstand the puritans because the quakers basically historically went and whitewashed history and pretended The puritans were the quakers and the quakers were the puritans because they weren't puritans were incredibly pro sex they were so pro sex that in albion seed it even talks [00:42:00] about this You Their writings were not des censored until the 20th century.
They, they, they just were extremely strict about when you could have sex and when you couldn't have sex, weren't they? Yeah. They were sex positive within marriage. We'll say Within marriage, yeah. But they were also like 100% about everything. Like, they would never go anywhere without running. They would, you know, they would, the, the seller, the people would come in and be like, they were always rocking in their rock rocking chair.
They were like full of energy about life and about everything, just. 120 percent about absolutely everything in every conceivable way.
Simone Collins: Very intense people. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were, they were very intense people. They were also very about sort of intellectual stoicism and a performative intellectual stoicism.
And this performative intellectual stoicism is another thing that ended up killing them. They had an internal cultural hierarchy that was in part based on being able to show you were more humble than your neighbor. And this in a [00:43:00] way creates a form of inverse humility where they would do these ridiculous, I'll put on a skit here, With some people doing this so you can see like what it ended up looking like, but it was ridiculous.
It was ridiculous. I'm more humble than you. I'm more humble than you. I'm more humble than you. Oh, look at how crazy humble this thing I just did was
Those who court when the sun descends court the devil's design for certain? Ah, yes. I could not agree more. How dare you express enjoyment? My deepest apologies.
Your shoes are quite sensible. They are for sizes too small. The pain purifies my predilection for pleasure. Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry. My apologies. Strike me, silence!
Now, obviously this is a comedy sketch and not reality. But I think it shows why you cannot have a whole community dedicated to a.
Dominance hierarchy. Around humility. Because when the entire dominant hierarchy is based around humility and austerity, , people just go haywire. But if you mix these [00:44:00] people with another group that isn't dedicated to a dominance hierarchy around humility and austerity, then they, they don't have the same feedback cycle.
They can just be like, oh, well, you know, I'm a more humble than the average person in my community. , and they don't spiral out of control and go extinct. Like obviously if you grow up in a culture like this, you're probably not going to want to continue it when there are other options around you.
Which is why the Puritans in the more mono Puritan communities like you had in new England, mostly when extinct. Also, it's important to note here that when the Catholic immigrants came into new England, they did not mix with the Puritan communities much, , in the same way that the periods in communities mixed with like the Backwoods people and stuff like that. , these communities were much more oil and water.
And so there wasn't the ability, like if you were a, a town. That was half Catholic and half Puritan. And you are a Puritan 98% of your interactions would be with other Puritans. , whereas if you were a town that was, you know, half [00:45:00] Puritan, half backwater. About 50% of your interactions would be, was backwater people.
50% would be with Puritans. There wasn't the same amount of antipathy between these two cultural groups. Or,
Cultural isolation.
Malcolm Collins: And a lot of people are like, when they look at the modern cultural groups and they go, who's the descendants of the Puritans who has like, A performative cultural stoicism and is really pro education.
You're looking at like the Jordan Petersons of today. That's the descendant culture of the Puritans. The Wokas are the descendant culture of Quakers. We'll get into that in a different video. But there are some still like cultural descendants. of these Puritans, but mostly they went extinct. And another thing that was really unique about the Puritan communities was the way their religious worship was set up, where they set up like five churches in a town and then whichever one was like the most charismatic is the one that everyone would go to.
It was sort of like early social media, like everyone would choose like which version, but it meant that you would get, this is what we had with The Great Awakening just like these incredibly Religiously zealotic people [00:46:00] in terms of like everything about their life was basically like an influencer based culture of, of religious charisma and extreme austerity and humility.
Now what you can tell Maybe
Simone Collins: oppressive virtue signaling to a certain extent.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Is this then led to, now, we should talk about how the Puritans virtue signals, because it's very different from the way the Quakers, the Quakers would virtue signal with like big displays, like if they were anti animal cruelty, they'd like throw themselves on the dog track and like roll around and yell about stuff, very like modern woke people do, right?
With Puritans, it wasn't like that at all. It was all like, You weren't even really supposed to show necessarily how humble you were being, because that could be seen as not being humble enough. It was very, it was in your culture and very was in your towns. You just didn't want bad things happening that was in your towns.
You didn't care about what the people outside your towns, or outside your culture would.
Where was I going, was this how, how they died out. Yes, so the second thing that led to them dying out was the, This zealotry just, [00:47:00] as secularization began, it didn't do a good job of intergenerationally passing to the next generation. It was a very not cool thing for kids. This can be all well and good for a, you know, a few groups of like zealotic adults, but if you're a kid growing up in one of these cultures and the adult's like, well, you should just be ultra religion because it's like the coolest thing ever.
A lot of kids are like, yeah, but there's like, easier ways I can do this, right? So that was one reason it really died out, and then when it really died out in the 1800s was, was the rise of the evangelical movement.
Simone Collins: That
Malcolm Collins: did a very good job of converting out of these communities.
Well, because it was
Simone Collins: still very religiously, extra. It was still very high energy, but it was better, I think, at spreading. Puritanism didn't spread very well. It
Malcolm Collins: didn't have as many rules. It was just like a simpler message. It was, it was a related message which could sell to these people, but it didn't have all of the rules.
And so the Puritans would join these [00:48:00] communities, often keep the rules for one generation, but then their kids would grow up without them, and they'd be like, look, this performative austerity, like, I don't see the point, no one else in my church congregation is doing it, and so they'd drop it. And so that ended up dropping the, the, that part of the Puritan movement.
Another thing to remember about the Puritan movement was the city on a hill mindset. Which is we are all going to create a completely new way of creating society and it will lead to a utopia.
Very similar to how the kibbutz movement died. , this played into the Puritan movement. So for people who don't know how the kibbutz movement died, uh kibbutzes where these sort of like communist Jewish communes in Israel. , and the thing that killed them with actually how successful they ended up being, they, many of them turned out to be enormously wealthy in terms of the amount of revenue that they were generating to the point where when you got one or two generations in. , the kids were like, well, I mean, I could just leave with all of this money and then just join a normal conservative Jewish [00:49:00] sect. , and. That happened with many of the Puritan communities is that they did in a way, achieve the city on the hill dream, which was an enormous amount of wealth, but people who still lived dedicated to austerity, that's what the Scrooge stereotype with about you. As I pointed out the screws didn't spend his wealth on himself.
He didn't spend it on things like charity that could be used to Sidney virtue to other people. He just hoarded it. , but this doesn't end up looking like a city on a hill to outsiders, , or to an individual's own kids after a few generations. They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So when does the utopia come? , and so that also led a lot of people to leave. But this did not affect the Backwoods Puritan groups as much because they dropped the.
Practice of wealth accumulation altogether and focus much more on honor accumulation and information accumulation in terms of intergenerational education. , for an example of what I mean by that. If you look at my ancestors,
Every single one of my grandparents, both men [00:50:00] and women had a college degree, which is pretty rare for people of that generation.
Malcolm Collins: Another thing that really ended up killing the Puritan movement was, and this is another thing that is. hugely forgotten about the Puritan movement is they were very, very, very pro like science. Like it was a very, remember I talked about like the, the multiple churches, like fighting for members and, and somebody can be like that, that would lead to very interesting religious stuff.
Well, the scientific revolution was happening in this period. And a lot of the Puritans, these are the people who would try to like, Harmonize their bibles with what was scientifically known at the time.
They were a mix. of religious extremism, but also pro science extremism, or at least some sub factions of them were. This is something that's hugely forgotten about them. In terms of, , the modern stereotype of the Puritan, they can almost be thought of is antithetical to Amish, where they tried to adapt all of the latest technologies and all of the [00:51:00] latest scientific perspectives. In, in the most extreme forms possible.
Actually, , I remember a story about one of my ancestors from this group who lived not far from us here in Pennsylvania. And he built his house so that when you would ride the carriage up to it, there was a plate underneath the front of it and the platelet to a weight system that would automatically open the doors.
And apparently his entire house was full of automated gadgets. Like this.
Malcolm Collins: They would, they would, and this is captured in the Puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander did. Plus one for A weird classical name, plus three if they have one of these names themselves extra points if they have an invention, max plus three at least one, plus three points for one eccentric invention Plus one point if they created anything they gave a classical name to plus three points if they have achievements in multiple unrelated fields.
And that was really important in, in this Puritan culture is academic perfection in multiple fields. Plus [00:52:00] one atheist, deist, or theist. Free thinker which is interesting that you would associate that was Puritan, but it really was associated with these communities. They combined sort of an atheism with a religiosity, as you could say, obviously, we're culturally descendant of this plus one anti Catholic, plus three wrote a book about their heterodox religious views, plus three invented a new religion, plus three invented a new Christian heresy, plus three obsessed with religious tolerance, plus one went to Harvard, Yale or MIT plus one practiced law.
Plus three in college society with a classical name. Plus one wrote a really weird book . You can get three points for that. Plus three for founded their own school. Again, very similar to us. Plus three wrote a list of values. Plus three had plans to emancipatize the eschaton. Plus three if they were a social reformer.
Plus three if they raged a crusade on an abstract concept. Plus three if they had ideas that were utopian yet racist. Plus three if they were inspired by the by the wisdom of the Far East, plus three if they were an abolitionist, plus one if they fought for African American rights in some way, plus three if they were famous for philanthropy, plus three for prohibition, plus [00:53:00] three for rabidly anti war, yet rabidly supported every specific war that happened.
And I, I feel personally attacked by that last one. We're all like, yeah, I'm against war more broadly, but this war just has to be fought. But so, so their, their flirtation with science led them to even before the wave of Jews who deconverted due to secularization have a huge deconversion wave due to secularization.
When science began to become. Completely incompatible because in these early waves of like the early waves of Darwinism and stuff like that, it wasn't yet completely incompatible. They were trying to find ways to make it more compatible with the older interpretations of the Bible and they just couldn't.
And that ended up pushing away a lot of their kids as well. Because they, they, the education aspect and the search for truth aspect, which was a huge part of their culture ended up mattering more to them than the tradition and the religious aspect. So, thoughts, Simone, because you haven't talked much in this episode.
Simone Collins: Is it so terrible for me to [00:54:00] love the sound of your voice? I am your wife after all. And there's not much for you to say.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I, and I've always found it so absolutely bizarre, this idea that Yankee culture came from Puritan culture.
When. Part of it kind of did, I guess I would say. There are pockets of the old Puritan culture still in New England, and I think you see this in things like the Free State Movement. But definitely not in the governments we have in places like Massachusetts and stuff like that, which are really heavily Catholic influenced.
And even the Free State Movement is still, like, you know, the state is still heavily sort of catholic descendant influenced. Oh, also we can talk about why the Catholics didn't end up moving to the backwoods areas because I can also
Simone Collins: just add just as a general to add context. I'll be in seed was written to talk about how for foundational waves of immigration from England to the United States had.
A still lasting impact on our country and its culture. And I think what drove the creation of the book [00:55:00] American nations was that it's not enough to say that just four groups had this impact. And I think the broader point that you're making here is that pretty much every cultural group. that spends a non trivial amount of time in an area with a certain critical mass, is going to have a permanent and lasting effect on the culture and governance.
I wouldn't
Malcolm Collins: agree with that at all. No, really? Okay. No, I, I'm arguing that some specific cultures had a huge lasting impact. For example, the Asian immigration ways really didn't impact culture that much. Anywhere that they landed, they, they didn't integrate with the mainstream society as much and as such, their culture didn't really change the cultural tones of those areas.
So no, and I wouldn't argue that at all. I'm just arguing I said critical
Simone Collins: mass. I didn't say all of them.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but it's not based on numbers. It's based on the time of, of period they came there, what organizations they were interacting with. Like the key reason why the Catholics ended up affecting the regions they [00:56:00] were in so much.
So much was their propensity towards engaging with local bureaucracies. And that is why they ended up affecting things so heavily,
Simone Collins: way more heavily. We're looking at people building their intergenerationally durable cultures, and they want to build one that as humans go off planet, form new colonies on new planets and on spaceships, they want to be the ones that actually set the tone.
What should they be designing or what should they be looking at? Basically, you're saying you should be there. at the foundation, at the creation of governance structures, what other factors make a culture have this impact?
Malcolm Collins: Why? And this is actually a core thing. Why did the Catholics wipe out the Puritans, but they didn't wipe out the backwoods people in terms of their cultural footprint?
And the answer is because the backwoods people were in regions, the Catholics could not safely live. So the, the Puritans, you know, once you would clear it, all the stones off these initial fields that were hard to work and everything like that and [00:57:00] turn these areas into prosperous areas was big local governments and everything like that.
And the Catholic immigration waves came in they had a, and they were really good at bureaucracies that we talked about in our other video on this. They really integrated with the local bureaucracy. They had an easy time like settling and not moving into these areas. If you told them to move to these backwood areas they'd be like, what do you mean we're like the, the, the Indian, you know, clan people war is going on.
Why would I move there? That's incredibly dangerous. I'm not going to put my family at that kind of risk. These, the, the, the reason why they didn't move into these areas was because they were incredibly dangerous to live in. And that is something that helps preserve your culture. What fundamentally protected their culture, while all of the three other founding cultures, the Cavaliers, the Quakers, and the Puritans, all died out, is because they settled in regions that nobody else wanted to be in.
And because of that they never got wiped out. And this is what I would take away from the Backwoods [00:58:00] people. There is a huge cultural value In attempting to settle cultural niches where other people don't want to live, or people without your value system are going to not want to live. You know, for them, it was in part because they were settling on poorer land, but it was in part they, because they were settling on, they themselves created the hazard of those regions.
It was incredibly dangerous to move to those regions if you weren't from one of their cultures. And even if you were from one of their cultures, it was kind of dangerous to live in their regions. That was part of their culture.
I've tried to keep this PG. , mostly, , but when I say dangerous, you shouldn't misunderstand this as. Random violence. , for example, if you move to one of these regions and you had. A daughter and you could not protect your homestead. , Declan's around would just come and take her. That was a common thing that happened in regions. , and if you couldn't support a blood feud to get her [00:59:00] back, then you couldn't really exercise your rights. So we are talking about a form of violence. And, clan mentality. That goes beyond what you might be thinking If your reference point is modern day gang warfare, instead of.
Oh, the neighbors over there. Have a nice property. Should we take it? Well, they're newcomers. If they don't have any friends in the region and their property, isn't really heavily defended. So yeah, we can probably kill them., that mentality, very, very Savage. , and I, I also say this because people are like, oh, Malcolm, you're so biased against groups that you aren't descended from. So I need to make sure to present my own group. As honestly as possible. , because that was very different from the other American groups.
Malcolm Collins: but also this is the final thought I wanted to have before we wrap things up here is I think people when they see you and I raising our kids as, as, as most people who really came from these backwoods, you know, you came from like old woodland sheriff family, [01:00:00] basically.
You know, Did they expect our kids, like this large family we're having, to be like these large Mormon families? Or something like that. You know, they see all these orderly little kids line up. And that's not what they're going to see. Like if you saw a video of our kids in our house, as you've put it, like the closest thing, because a lot of a person's disposition is heritable.
I'm going to play a quick diatribe by Octavian , it's pretty obvious he didn't pick these ideas up from anything that Simone and I are saying And I think it's also pretty obvious that he didn't pick up these ideas from children's media.. So this is probably just a baked in genetic code. That's within both of us that sort of playing out on loop. At his young age.
Let the lobsters go Octavian. What just happened Octavian? Did you see them swim away? Yeah. You see, now they're all going home to their families. I hope I can catch all the families in those buckets. I love you. I just want the lobsters to die and the families too. [01:01:00] Wait, you want the lobsters and their families to die? You see? Yeah. Wait, so you let them go so that they could go to their families and then we could find their families to catch them?
Yeah. Okay? Let's get all, let's get all the lobsters to dry
oh, that's how you feel? Sometimes, if you're a lot bigger than something, it doesn't matter that it hurt you. You just have to say it's not as smart as you, so it's okay.
And then what are you going to do if you catch the family and the kids?
And then, and then they're friends too? Yeah. I just, I just want to have fun. Well, if I don't, I'm going to destroy all the lobsters. Not fish. I'm going to die to lobsters. Oh, so you don't want to hurt the fish? [01:02:00] No. I'm not going to let them do that. I don't hate fish. Has a lobster ever hurt you? Yes. I don't think so.
No? Nope? A lobster hurt an A2108. Oh, giving me some timelines here. I was going by myself. With, with your car. I just So you were driving my car one day, and a lobster attacked you. Yeah. And, uh, it hurt me when I was using the phone. I called the computer, but they didn't know I was using the phone. And then I did knock out a herd.
By lobsters. And then I decided to kill two lobsters. A pangow! Wait, what kills lobsters? Pangow! It kills lobsters.
This is actually a really fascinating diatribe to sort of break down because I think it gives a good eye into the way [01:03:00] these types of people thought about things. If you note, he divides the world into things that might hurt him in things that might not hurt him. Fish are in the category that won't hurt him.
Lobsters are in the category that might hurt him. He hates the things that might hurt him and they must die and their kids must die. And their families and friends must die. Okay. And then also when I try to be like, well, but I don't think any of them have hurt use specifically. He fabricates evidence.
Obviously he wasn't driving my car by himself. So I'm pretty sure it lobster did not attack him while he was in the car. , driving it by himself without me there. , and , I think that this is probably fairly common in the Backwood regions. At these times, they categorize different groups.
They were interacting with as the type of people that might hurt them and the type of people that might not hurt them and their good guy that they might not hurt them. And they must kill them. But there everyone they've ever met, if they're the type of person who might hurt them.
Malcolm Collins: So in part, this is just a heritable part of our kids, but in part it's because of how [01:04:00] we raise our kids. The way that these people historically raise their kids in the way that I was taught to raise my kids is our goal is to stoke the fire of ambition in life. Within them as much as possible you know, teach them about honor.
You know, you, you, you see this in the song. He's he's mine which I'll play some clips up here,
He had them by the collar, said he caught them shootin beer bottles down in a holler And I said, is that right? He said, they won't speak when spoken to. And I said, He's mine,
Malcolm Collins: but in it he's, he comes from this cultural group as well as the country song where he's proud of his kid for violating rules. And pushing boundaries. The kid still gets punished, right? Like the kid gets taught, you know, you're shooting bottles down in a hauler and then he brings over and he's like, he's mine.
Like, he's so proud that his kid was the one who broke the rules. It doesn't mean the kid doesn't get punished. Our kids still get punished, but we're proud of them for breaking rules. And that's part of why we do the punishment in the way we do. Right. And you know, later in the song, the reason why it's showing why do you have this?
[01:05:00] When he whooped up on that boy Way bigger for taking that cheap shot On their little Kicker and they threw him out. You should have heard me shout.
I yelled, he's
I also knew that this is where this cultural group is quite different than like say the Andrew take cultural group. Because something that was always made very clear to me growing up and is repeated in this song. Is the honor comes from the fact that he is both standing up to the system, but also challenging and winning against somebody who is larger and stronger than he is that there isn't any honor in just being stronger than someone and beating up or fighting somebody who is weaker than you
the second point is the song also here in the next line, I'm going to show makes a point of why do you do this? Why do you encourage rebellion even when it's against you? And it's because you can't turn rebellion on and off. If you have this rebellious stand up to authority mindset. You need to always encourage it.
You can't hope that the kids just able to [01:06:00] turn it on and off whenever they feel like it. You can't turn it off like electricity.
Malcolm Collins: Because then when the authority and everyone else is saying you shouldn't do something and you know, a big kid's picking on a little kid, you know, he's going to be the first to stand up for that little kid because he understands like this cultural consequentialism. And I've actually seen this from you, Simone, and a few things you do in terms of raising our kids.
Recently our kids told stole and your lesson to him was He got punished because he got caught and you made that very clear to him.
Or instance of this happening recently was she told Octavian to stay in bed. Or he wouldn't get, I don't know, some treat or something like that. And then she could see on the cameras that he was running all around, but when she came downstairs, he was back in bed and he asked her Ms. JVs. He's like, I've been staying in bed, right.
You didn't see me out of bed and she's like, no, I didn't see out of bed. So she gave him the treat. As she said me, if he grows up thinking that people don't lie in society, doesn't lie. , and that's not the way that he relates to the world. When, when they think [01:07:00] they can get away with it, he's going to get absolutely gooned on by society.
, a actually we have some friends who have this rule of never, ever lying to their children and she's like, oh my God, those kids are gonna end up. Being so taken advantage of when they hit the real world. But this isn't necessarily true, it is a cultural hypothesis. And this is the thing about the way different cultures relate to their kids. She would see. Learning to never ever deceive authority or learning that authority will never deceive.
You ends up putting the kid in a weaker position.
Whereas other people are like, no, the relationship between a kid and their parents are sacred and they don't understand that this is a cultural take, not an absolute is take.
Malcolm Collins: That is such a backwards, like ethical style for a kid. It, it, or my mom, you know, when I told on a kid at school and she goes, you know, why, why'd you do that?
Like, that's what a pussy would do. I was like, well, the kid was, you know, picking on another kid. And she goes, that's what your fists are for. Like I'm supposed to, I was like, well, I'll get in trouble. And she'd be like, good. Like, that's a sign of honor. Or what was another case? Well, so our kids will get in [01:08:00] fights over toys.
And Simone will go up to them and, and, and tell the big one, you need to wait until he gets bored of the toy and then snatch it from him and put it somewhere where he can't see it. You have to be sneaky. I said, hey, it's good. And he goes, oh. He's like, I want the thing that my little brother has. And Simone's like, what do you need to be?
And he goes, oh, I need to be sneaky. And so then he'll like go get another toy and like pretend. Sneaky and smart, he says. It's so sweet. And then the kid and
Simone Collins: then the younger sibling will get tired of playing with the toy, discard it somewhere and Octavian will come up to me with that toy and be like, can you put this in my bed for me?
Which is, but
Malcolm Collins: yeah, but not only that. So the, so you've got these like Mormon families where all these kids like follow the rules and everything like that. And then this one depiction of a Mormon family, I think is much more similar to like my childhood and much more similar to this back country style, which is a one from stranger things.
And I'm going to see if I can, I can find this where it's just like a complete loud house and be able to see my kids in the video. They know that like. Recreationally, he'll, like, climb behind me here and start kicking me in the face [01:09:00] or try to climb on top of me while I'm doing something and punch at me or, and their favorite thing is being, like, punched and thrown,
Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum
Malcolm Collins: and this is also why, like, I don't, like, I thought the bot thing was so weird because I'm like, I hurt my kid.
So much more than that in things that are recreational for them in terms of like kid roughhousing.
Simone Collins: You don't hurt, you don't injure them. You just rough house with them.
Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, but we do a lot of like punching and stuff. Yeah, there's a
Simone Collins: lot more rough and tumble going on in terms of fun, but that's, I mean, that is how pain works, right?
You know, if you're being whipped by, [01:10:00] a school teacher, none, and you're not very thrilled about it. And then yet, then you're being whipped by a partner and like a BDSM scenario, the same exact impact on your body using the same exact tool can feel very different depending on the context. So,
Malcolm Collins: well, it's, it's also a context of, and this is another interesting thing that we do as parenting, which I think is really different from the other influencer families.
Is, is we have like strict rules against ever punishing our kids for being too high energy or too happy. And I think that a, a lot of parents, like they can be like, I don't do that. But think about it. I've seen a lot of parents do this. A kid's just being too loud or running around too much and the parent's like, can you just calm down?
And I remember growing up, like never do that to a kid. Never get a kid to calm down because our goal in parents is to throw wood on that fire of excitement for life and engaging with the world. And, and so while we do punish them, we don't punish them ever for being too excited to engage [01:11:00] with the world.
And so I think it's going to lead to if we ever do get a reality show on us or, you know, Cameras in the house. People are going to be like, wow, these are very different from other influencer kids. These kids are wild actually reminds me I'll post the pictures. Well, I don't know if I can because the kids are in their underwear in the pictures.
But there were these scary pictures last night where Simone said goodnight to the baby in the crib and then through a camera
Simone Collins: that we have mounted there.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then what happens, Simone?
Simone Collins: Well, then all the kids get immediately extremely hyper, everyone crawls into our infant's crib, and everyone just, they start grabbing the camera, staring at it, and laughing maniacally, and it, Looks terrifying.
Malcolm Collins: They're all like a huge match in the baby cage
Simone Collins: match. And of course it's a night vision camera. So the way that the contrast comes out, they look fricking terrifying. Like with like black eyed monsters, it's nightmare fuel savages.
Malcolm Collins: This [01:12:00] actually reminds you of this really funny thing of like, Somebody from a non clan based culture entering a clan based culture.
So one of our family members who my kids aren't related to because it's, it's, it's through a marriage is a bit older than them, like four years, five years older than them. And was attempting to sort of watch over them during parts of the family reunion. And the, the kids and he's, he's not from one of these clan based cultures.
He's, he's actually from a Catholic. family, historically. And the kids just absolutely gooned on him. I felt so bad for the kid because this little like five and four year old were picking on him relentlessly. And in the way a five or four year old would like, you know, he'd be walking towards it, like jump him from behind and knock him over and then start jumping on him.
Or he was supposed to like watch them and he'd like. run after one and then the other one would run away and then he'd get exhausted and so they just try to like tackle him down and because there's two [01:13:00] of them they could get away with it and I just he was so beleaguered after this because I think that he was just like just just follow the rules guys don't run away guys please stop oh no And I was like, Oh God, but you know, I'm proud of them for their energy and like, not, not ever letting up about anything.
They weren't like genuinely mean. Like I think he had, he was sort of at his wits end, but I don't think he felt like genuinely picked on, picked on, but it was very clearly like a cultural clash in a way that You know, it's him versus a little clan of, of children. And one was clearly just having fun.
Toying was the person who was supposed to be watching over them. And I felt just so bad. But I also was like, I'm glad that my kids have so much fighting spirit to them. Can't keep them
Simone Collins: down.
Malcolm Collins: Any other anecdotes from our parent raising that you wanted to share? [01:14:00]
Simone Collins: Well, we were just discussing last night, another backcountry tradition is they sort of coined the term little s***s for children.
I remember growing up in the Bay Area, hearing that phrase or term and thinking, how could you call a child a little s**t? And then I met our children like, Oh my
Malcolm Collins: God, that's what my parents called me growing up with. Yeah. Yeah, it is a
Simone Collins: technical term. They are, they are so little s***s. But not all children are little s**t.
Oh my God, especially
Malcolm Collins: the littlest one. She now that she's developing a personality absolutely loves. He was people. She loves to
Simone Collins: make eye contact while openly defying you. So if you say something like, please don't drop your food on the floor, she'll pick up the messiest group of food. She possibly can smile and just throw it onto the floor.
Perfect eye contact and I think she's probably on the spectrum. She doesn't usually make eye contact. She just makes it when she really wants to [01:15:00] piss you off. She
Malcolm Collins: wants to watch you get angry at something she's doing. I love thinking about we have that Jordan Peterson parenting video where like, you know, the way he did he parents will write it wouldn't work with our kids.
I'll tell you that like this whole I'll just sit in the room with the kid until they break their
Simone Collins: spirit. Yeah. I'm
Malcolm Collins: like, okay, one, my kids would take that as a personal challenge. And two, what are they going to do? They're going to like grab the spaghetti, put it on their head or like toss it at you.
Like there, there, there's always a way to have creative opposition to any rule. People can be like, well, I just sit there and then make them do it again. And there's a point where like, they know that they've caused more pain for you than you've caused for them. And then they're like, fine. Okay. I won this dominance battle.
I'm out. But like you keep what you don't want to create those situations with kids of this cultural background of, I will out willpower you. That's not going to end. Well, it's just no God. No. [01:16:00] Yeah, you've just got to teach them a good enough honor code and good enough rules before they have the physical will to totally resist you.
That's basically the timeline you're working with. I actually remember this because I think that's
Simone Collins: the difference also between. Being consequentialist versus deontological, we want our children to come to their own conclusions on what's right, even if it's not exactly what we would have thought to be correct.
We want them to make that on judgment for themselves, and we want them to do what's right, not things the way that we want them to be, whereas I think a lot of parents don't really care that their children develop their own internal morality or find make their own decisions. They just want them to follow specific rules and behave in certain ways.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. Yeah. It's not about the end state. It's about the Well, and when you see a lot of parents, I'd say a lot of cultures and it is right for those cultures to act in a way that is in alignment with their cultural values. I mean, keep in mind, they co evolved with a set of cultural values.
[01:17:00] They're going to behaviorally and their kids behaviorally are going to relate to punishment techniques and everything like that. Different from other kids. Like, I don't know if you're Normal non backwards. Children's are genuinely as rowdy as our kids are. I mean, probably our cultural practices help increase that I mentioned in another episode, which is probably worth mentioning briefly here is the incident of my mom where I got in trouble with one of the teachers and she's like, well, I mean, Did you, were you doing what you thought was right?
And I was like, yeah. And she goes, well, you know, in the adult world, everybody thinks teachers are like underpaid losers, so don't worry about it. She's an elementary school teacher. Just do what you think is right yourself. But again, that's that very honor code based culture. Like do what you believe is right.
Ignore the teachers. Which was yeah, definitely part of that backwards upbringing. And, and that had soaked into this puritan culture, which ended up with this. You know, complete Puritan backwoods mix of a culture.
I guess I didn't mention this explicitly here, but I thought I [01:18:00] had the core, core reason, the Backwoods Puritan mix of a culture survived. Was that it changed its ethical system Rez in the Puritan ethical system, everything was a sin. And you were supposed to avoid basically everything in the Backwoods ethical system. Everything was a sin. And you didn't really put thins within a hierarchy.
It was just whatever you needed to do to achieve your consequentialist outcome, where the consequentialist outcome was, what you thought God's broader vision was for you or broader goals for you where. , and it was just much easier to follow this. Well, honestly, more consequentialist and less deontological ethical system.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely love you, Simone. I had a joy talking to you today. I'm sorry I kept you so long.
And yeah, I'll go get the kids.
Simone Collins: I love you, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: I love you too. I really do.
Simone Collins: I know you do. You show it every single day. You're just the best. And then did [01:19:00] you get the chickens?
Yeah, I got the chickens. I handled the professor. I've got it all sorted. You handle
Malcolm Collins: just everything. I'll never get over this. Oh, you always tell the reporters I handle so much.
Simone Collins: You do. You are
Malcolm Collins: the star. Who took
Simone Collins: Toasty to get his blood work today, Malcolm?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, but, you know. Who woke up and dressed the kids today,
Simone Collins: Malcolm?
Malcolm Collins: I forgot about those things. I guess I never log things in my ledger if I'm doing them. I only like, mentally log things. I keep a
Simone Collins: ledger, and I keep it 50 50.
Malcolm Collins: You don't keep it 50 50. You do everything. I see it. Don't worry. Don't worry. You are the absolute best wife anyone could want. Actually, I wonder, and this is something that we should meditate on, I kind of want to think about this, this backward culture, when I think about it in regards to the way our kids act and the way we parent, that's one thing, it's really interesting, but also in the way that our relationship is structured and like our love for each other works
Simone Collins: is
Malcolm Collins: very different, like it's based on mutual respect rather than like a set of rules about our duties.
Simone Collins: [01:20:00] Consequentialist and not gentological.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, true. Because yeah, damn, do I respect you Simone and everything you do. You are such a workhorse
Simone Collins: because we're fighting for the same thing and not just tallying things up.
Malcolm Collins: , did you steal something? This, when you, when we were on vacation, did you steal something?
Octavian: No.
Malcolm Collins: But you did do it, and you got caught doing it.
Octavian: Huh. Well, police did not see me. Huh.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, the police didn't see you, but now you're on camera. So the police know that you stole something.
Well, they should,,
Octavian: but
Malcolm Collins: the police are going to come arrest you now. No. Well, how do you explain to them? Why did you, why did you break the rules?
Octavian: What's your idea? If I have somebody sunglasses [01:21:00] that the, then the police will not know I am me. Okay. How
Malcolm Collins: about this? You can wear daddy's glasses. Okay, do you think you're safe now? Are you safe from the police?
Octavian: Yeah. They're
Malcolm Collins: not gonna catch you? So are
Octavian: I need this to be clean, okay? Daddy
Malcolm Collins: doesn't know how to clean. Mommy mostly cleans.
Octavian: This to Mommy while I talk to the police? What are you going
Malcolm Collins: to tell the police when they ask, why did you steal?
Okay, you can do this by yourself? Okay.
Octavian: At ceiling
so that ceiling is un applicable to me to not get under rest because I just don't wanna be rest because I just, so to not get under arrest. I just take something from the people and I put it on and then [01:22:00] you will not know I cannot get under arrest. So you cannot know I cannot get under arrest because that's a sticky thing.
I'm just trying to run away. It's so sticky so you can't I'm just so sick, you guys. And you know what happens next? You are gonna p And you know what happens if you are arrest me? I'm gonna arrest you, boys. So that is being not nice. Well, if you see a bad guy at someone's home, you do not have stripes like a bad guy, so I cannot be arrested.
And that is a headlock. [01:23:00] So, dad, the same way broadcast. I'm broadcasting, you are, I don't have stripes like the bad guy. So, I'm saying, oh, if you cause the stripes, Like a bad guy, which breaks on, and that's out of stew, you gotta rest up, okay? Oh, if you don't, you are getting under arrest, please.
And that is out. The talking is out. Oh, just one thing I'm gonna tell you. I miss bad guys. A red, bad guy that do bad things, okay? Not kids that have stripes like it. Bad guy.
Byebye police
What would you do with the bad people when you take over? Um, bop them. You bop them? Yeah. Um, would you, how, uh, [01:24:00] Gum. Yeah. Hey, you. I want it. I put this on. No, no, no, no. Gum, gum. Um, yeah. So you like being alive? What about the anti natalists who think you never should have been born? I mean, they, they, Torsten, there's people who say that you shouldn't exist.
Are they bad people? You're going to bump them? Oh, well, I don't know if that's legal, but when you're, when you're emperor, you can make it legal. Are you having fun with the microphone?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the controversial "White Women for Kamala" Zoom call, exposing the alarming cult-like behavior and rhetoric within the Democratic party. This eye-opening analysis reveals:
* The dehumanization of political opponents and racial groups
* The role of therapists in pushing political agendas
* How progressive ideology has morphed into a "memetic virus"
* The sudden shift in Democratic talking points about Biden and Harris
* The infantilization of voters through condescending language
* The dangerous implications of identity politics in modern America
Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the state of American politics, the urban monoculture, and the future of democracy. Whether you're a political junkie or just concerned about the direction of our country, this video offers crucial insights into the forces shaping our political landscape.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what's BLM's stance on Kamala Harris? They think the Democrats need to open a primary at the convention and are angry that Kamala Harris had been authoritarianly slot in
like, the actual black people Are saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, um and and yet you have this call that has prevented black people from enjoying its white women for camera What does that mean?
No black people. We can't have the black people spoiling our fictional black people that are telling us to do this.
Um, we are here because BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat. And instead we can put our listening ears on.
Simone Collins: it brought back to me a feeling of anxiety and rage that I haven't felt For well over 20 years, [00:01:00] but that feeling of being trapped and stuck in someone else's tyranny, but that weird cheerful tyranny of, I hope you were paying attention and doing this menial thing that nobody needs to do.
Malcolm Collins: I actually love this. The Democrats today are the party of Professor Umbridge. Oh, yes, it had Umbridge vibes.
Good morning, children.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I am very excited to be introducing this episode because I, as a white woman, just watched delayed basis the white women for Kamala Harris, zoom call that broke zoom, that broke records.
Wait, the entire four
Malcolm Collins: hour or whatever call you watched? I watched
Simone Collins: the whole thing. Well, I'm a white woman. This was a call to action. Of my people
Malcolm Collins: and I, first of all, can I just like say how insanely racist this is? Imagine if there was like a Trump campaign that was like white women for Trump. Wait, [00:02:00] wait, wait, what?
That is a, but Democrats have become so, so, so racist in their entire ideology, but they can't see anything racist when it's connected to things that are pro Democrat. They just ignore it.
Simone Collins: Well, I, I don't know. Like, I feel like what a. What a progressive woman would say about a white woman rally for Trump, you know, what do you call a white woman rally for Trump?
It would just be a white nationalist rally. Like that's, that's how they see it. Well that's
Malcolm Collins: what they want to frame things as, but actually the pats are not by the statistics, more racists who vote for Trump than who vote for the Democrats.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Don't let mainstream
Malcolm Collins: media know that. Actually, this made up narrative is actually really important to a point I'm gonna make right here.
Okay. And I think it frames this rally in like the most messed up possible sense. Okay. So, they, they [00:03:00] keep saying things like, You know, BIPOC women have tapped us in and like, you know, don't speak over black women and all of this is like about hypothetical black people. So I think, okay, real black people from a progressive standpoint, who these days is the voice of black people and especially black women, because the organization is run by a black woman, it would be BLM.
Right? So what is BLM? No one talks about BLM anymore. Have you noticed that? Well, yeah, because what's BLM's stance on Kamala Harris? Oh, what is BLM's stance on Kamala Harris? They think the Democrats need to open a primary at the convention and they should be choosing a candidate and that they are incredibly angry that Kamala Harris had been authoritarianly slot in.
Simone Collins: But even during the, the, the BLM associated riots of the pandemic, she was fundraising for bail [00:04:00] release funds. I don't understand why they would be opposed to her. I know her past has been very problematic. No, Simone,
Malcolm Collins: you know exactly why. She repented. Isn't repenting what the woke movement is all about?
No, an inability to repent is what the woke movement is about. So for people who like, don't know Kamala Harris's history, I'll give two little incidents here. In one incident because a lot of people like conflate like her history, like Republicans have reduced it to talking points where they mix it up and they sort of lower the severity of it.
Like, I'll talk with a Republican and they'll say something like, don't you know that she didn't release black, innocent black people from prison as like prison labor? And I'm like, that didn't happen. happen. You're confusing two different events and it's actually worse when you take the events on their face.
In one event there was a lab mistake and she was supposed to notify the lawyers of literally thousands of black inmates that they were up for potential release. She [00:05:00] chose not to because she wanted to secure the endorsement from the police commission. To win her next election cycle, she did secure the endorsement.
She didn't win the next election cycle. And then right afterwards she started letting everyone out. So, she kept them in jail longer to win an election. And then in a separate event, the Supreme court came and said the, the prison conditions in California are becoming dangerously overcrowded and it.
It's a human rights abuse by the U. S. Constitution. And then a court meeting in California came together like, yeah, we really need to reduce release people. And so then they went to Kamala Harris's office in Kamala Harris's office, literally like, it's not like a Subjective thing. They literally said, we cannot release these people because we need them for a prison work program right now.
Specifically, it was fire season and they were being used for fire prevention. The weird thing is, is that if they had released them and paid them, it would have been cheaper than keeping them in the prison system. Oh no! Would you [00:06:00] have any different, a thought from someone that could have been such
Simone Collins: a win to release prisoners and then give them immediate
Malcolm Collins: jobs.
You've got to remember she's descended from plantation owners. That is her mindset. It's the plantation owner mindset. Wait, they
Simone Collins: were
Malcolm Collins: owners and not. No, no. Yeah, sure. Her family owned a plantation in Jamaica and the plantations in Jamaica were far more brutal than the ones in the U S right? Yeah. You just go and die there.
Right. But yeah, they were expected to die. They didn't really care about intergenerational stuff. Kamala Harris is, like, there is a reason why BLM would be like, okay, like, I know she did some performative stuff for us, but, like, you get who this person is. So I'm gonna play a clip for you guys right after knowing that, like, the actual, actual black people Are saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, um and and yet you have this call that has prevented black people from enjoying its white women for camera What [00:07:00] does that mean?
No black people. We can't have the black people spoiling our fictional black people that are telling us to do this.
Um, we are here because BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. This is a really important time and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good,
like we are tonight has the toxic feels smaller when we support each other, bye. Don't make it about yourself. As white women, we need to use our privilege to make positive changes. If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat. And instead we can put our listening ears on.
So. Do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people, we have a lot to [00:08:00] learn and unlearn. So do check your blind spots. You are responsible for your algorithm, believe it or not, intentionally seek out and share content from BIPOC creators, activists, thought leaders.
They should be the leaders of conversations about race and justice and equity. So, Just whatever you do, don't stay silent on the issues of injustice. Big changes can start with just one person who's brave enough to speak up. I know when you see some headlines or someone makes a wild claim, it can be really shocking. But do give yourself permission to pause, take a breath, and do a Google search and ask questions and be critical of the sources. I was a kindergarten teacher and sometimes we would read stories and I know I have some of my former students here and their families.
Hi. Um, we would learn about a historical event and I would ask my students who is missing from this story. This is not a [00:09:00] concept or question that I invented, but it's something that I was taught as a way to decenter the Eurocentric and white voices that are often at the forefront of our history books and our media.
Malcolm Collins: So there's a few things I want to note about the language here. One is, is when we talk about how progressives have divided this society into a caste system, where some people are more deserving of human dignity than other people, and part of it is race based.
If you are willing to go along with the urban monoculture, the progressive machine on everything, and you are Black or BIPOC or whatever word they want to use here, right? You gain the ability to speak over other people and demand that they concede to anything you're telling them, no matter how outlandish it is.
That's what they're saying here. But what's really interesting is if you are black, even if you are a popular black, like the Black Lives Matter people, and you go against them in any way, no matter how much social credit you had [00:10:00] with them in the past, immediately you lose. Your blackness. Your black card is removed from you, you gain any special status I gave you, you are now a race traitor as they would say because they have stolen your racial identity.
and are now using it in sort of this priestly way, but you can only get the privileges of the priest cast if you do not challenge them on anything. It is macabre and horrible.
Essentially Progressive's appropriated the black identity and now denying that identity to real black people. If they do not act like human puppets for what these white progressive women want people to say, So individuals like this, essentially. Or putting their hands up the back of the black community and attempting to use that community like a puppet.
And whenever anyone is like, [00:11:00] um, well, Actually Kamela Harris has been really, really terrible to the black community. They're like, oh, I'm sorry. , you're not black anymore. It's not even like we disagree with you. , you.
are no longer one of these people who deserve all of this special status and privileges that she just delineated for black individuals.
I E believe them even when, what they say goes beyond what you think is reasonable or possible.
Malcolm Collins: But also Well, I think in
Simone Collins: a very patronizing way, they're saying we know better. So they're, they're overtaking their view or discounting it because they believe that if, if they were to question The nomination and run of Kamala Harris, the, the Democratic Party's ability to win the presidential seat is compromised.
And anything that would contribute to Trump winning is a direct threat. To their, their power hierarchy. And we'll say, let's, you know, Black Lives Matter. Well, to [00:12:00] protect black people, we have to make sure that at all costs, Trump can't win. So we can't let black people do anything that would cause Trump to possibly have higher odds of winning.
So anything they say that goes against what we think will cause Kamala Harris to win or the democratic party to win has to be completely ignored.
Malcolm Collins: But they're literally you're saying don't talk over black people and yet this entire call is talking, but
Simone Collins: what's more important if they had if they were an AI, and we asked the AI questions to sort of see how it sorts philosophical weights of things, they would say that the cultural legal legislative regulatory sanctity of black people.
Is more important than not talking over black people.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I actually think that you're, you're sort of giving them a little too much credit here. I think that what's really happening is there's. Multiple groups that are making decisions here. One group is the [00:13:00] people who are in the Biden White House right now and want to maintain their jobs and positions of power.
And they make up the core of the democratic bureaucracy at the moment. And they know that if Kamala versus somebody else wins, they have a much higher chance of keeping all of their positions and everything like that. I mean, if a new Democrat is running, especially one that may be, you know, You know, has different beliefs than someone like Camilla is more anti establishment, like a Bernie or something like that.
They all lose their jobs, right? So, or a good chunk of them does. So I also understand their motivation. They need to not have a real primary here. And then you have the big funders and everything like that. And the big funders, right? Want to control what's going on. And Kamala has shown herself as somebody who takes orders from them without much complaint at all.
She has actually repeatedly shown herself as a good order taker from the donor class. And so they don't want somebody like a Bernie, someone who's for the base. As we mentioned, big business moved to the left and intergenerational wealth moved to the left where they used to be right wing [00:14:00] factions.
Kamala is sort of the face of those interest groups and has shown herself incredibly loyal to those interest groups. And I think these groups, as much as they fear Trump, they also fear the base because the base removes their power and also goes against most of their interests. They have very little in common with the base's interests.
Then you have the type of like brainwashed woman on this call, and we'll be going over different quotes from them in this. Wild. These women are just in a cult, Can we
Simone Collins: talk about the woman and her therapist?
So just because this is so relevant, at one point, one of the speakers during this call, Glennon Doyle, talks about a conversation that she had with her therapist, and when she shared her anxiety about being a political organizer in this election, and that she was really concerned about the social capital that she was going to burn through.
And Malcolm, you can play the clip.
I was talking to my therapist this week about this hovering fear of mine.[00:15:00]
And she said, yeah, but what if every single bit of trust and credibility and social capital we have each built was saved up just for this moment? What if for this historic, vital moment, for our future, for our sisters, for our children, what if we just spent it all?
That's how this goes. Mistakes will be made and feelings will be hurt, and I will say out loud that I feel afraid about that, because we white women do not yet know how not to turn on each other. I don't know how yet either, but this time I'm going to learn, because listen to me, this moment could be historic in a different way too.
We, as a group of white women, could do this moment and this 102 days differently. We could put ourselves out there and we could make mistakes and [00:16:00] get scared and disagree and hurt each other's feelings and still stay connected to each other. We could let people be angry with us and disapprove of us and mock us even and not take our ball and go home.
We could decide to care more about our children's futures. Then our own comfort, we could not just post trust black women. We could also start doing it. We could recognize that black women know how to do this and we do not
Simone Collins: i, I, I gave it to you. I play it right now. She basically says that her therapist says burn it. Her therapist is telling her to pursue a political agenda. And it's wild to me after hearing all of your discussion about therapy, being a progressive cult and all these other things.
I. Hear you and I agree with you. The incentives [00:17:00] are there. I've heard these conversations as well. And yet still every time. We see more evidence of this and just how egregious it is that literally you have a woman saying, I feel really uncomfortable about what I'm doing socially right now with the election, politically speaking, and a therapist is saying, no, burn all your, burn your reputation, burn your social capital, cause a lot of anxiety, hurt your friendships because it matters for this election and we have to win.
That is so incredible.
Malcolm Collins: I told you that this is like, I think. I tell our audiences, I'm like, you do not understand the modern therapy movement has become taken over by a cult and this is part of the urban monoculture. It's one of their priest casts and it is used to communicate. Like when you go to therapy, basically you are an Android and you are allowing somebody to open the back of your head and tinker with all of the parts, right?
Like if you were an Android, you'd pay a lot of attention that that person doesn't have like an ideological motivation and they're [00:18:00] not going to rewire you to achieve their ideological ends. And yet that is exactly what has happened. And you see this, it's such a common, like if you go online and you watch like the craziest like lefty YouTubers, there's really almost every time they're in one of two professions.
They are either a teacher for, for secondary or primary school i. e. from kindergarten to high school, or they are a therapist. Like you look at somebody like Fundie Fridays, right? Like, her partner is a therapist. Oh, John? Yeah. Yeah. He's a social worker therapist.
So, this is, it is, it is horrifying to me and you really do need to be, and I'd also say with husbands, if you're going to do an episode, we haven't done it yet.
It's like the therapy to divorce. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We still have to do that. Oh my gosh. Like, if your wife is like, I'm thinking about therapy. Like, you really need to. This is not 90's therapy. This is more like saying I'm thinking about joining Scientology. Every alarm bell should be raised.
Simone Collins: I think also, though, what Glennon [00:19:00] Doyle, this, this woman whose therapist told her to burn it all, Was very indicative of what many progressive women and people are too, which is they're doing this because it's the societal norm.
And they want to be liked. She describes at the beginning of her speech, how when she first decided to start organizing politically and trying to get people involved and spread the word. That she expected to be praised and loved for it and celebrated for it. And I think that that's what gets a lot of people into this.
They see that everyone's rallying around how evil one side is and how good the other side is. So that if they start organizing for the good side, everyone's going to open their doors when they go door knocking and say, Oh, thank God you're out there. I'm so glad. And then they actually go out door knocking and people are irritable and mad.
whatever, just because they're having bad days and it's tough and that, that kind of ruins it. But then their therapists go out and tell them to do it anyway. So I thought [00:20:00] that was interesting too, because I think that that's another big element of this and everyone in that call felt so they felt either like very thirsty for approval people.
Or they felt like condescending school teachers or mean girls. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: let's play this school teacher clip because this was like insane. I was like, wow. She's like, you guys are idiots. It's what she thinks of these people.
Thank you, Shannon. Did everybody do their homework and write down three things? Write it down in your notes app, jot it down on a piece of paper, the three things you are going to do to impact this election.
Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Yeah, hearing this was insane. It took me, it, I felt not, I'm not going to just misuse the, the word PTSD, but it brought back to me a feeling of anxiety and rage that I haven't felt For well over 20 years, but that [00:21:00] feeling of being trapped and stuck in someone else's tyranny, but that weird cheerful tyranny of, I hope you were paying attention and doing this menial thing that nobody needs to do.
Malcolm Collins: I actually love this. The Democrats today are the party of Professor Umbridge. Oh, yes, it had Umbridge vibes.
Good morning, children.
Malcolm Collins: That's just what I see. Whenever I see like these, these progressive white, white women for Harris is like Umbridge for Harris,
I'm sure I must have misunderstood you, Professor. So silly of me, but it sounded, for a moment, as though I don't know. You were suggesting that the ministry had ordered the attack on this boy.
Malcolm Collins: Every, the entire vibe of the call, everything they're saying, it's like, how can we get Voldemort elected? How can we get, you know, Mrs. Plantation owner elected? When like everyone else knows [00:22:00] this is a terrible idea from, you know,
Simone Collins: And a lot of it also felt So much like cope at the beginning of the call one person says, Oh, this proves how electable Kamala Harris is when talking about how many people had joined the call and how much interest there had been and how much funds had been raised.
and remind you guys, drink water, stay hydrated. Um, because we have another three and a half months of this. And I think all this energy just like proves how electable Kamala Harris is.
Simone Collins: And there's definitely this trying to psych yourself up thing going on right now, which is really interesting as well. Of we are going to convince ourselves into believing that this is a thing. It's going to be
Malcolm Collins: okay. Where'd you get, which is for Harris? I didn't see that clip yet.
Simone Collins: Well, in asking for donations shortly after that, the same speaker, I think one of the organizers said [00:23:00] in trying to fundraise, cause this was a fundraising call said to share the fundraising link and whatever your favorite chat thread is in your, on your mobile device, like your signal or WhatsApp or Telegram chat thread group thread.
And her personal favorite group thread on her phone is, Which is for Harris! Which just also felt like such a white, progressive woman thing.
My personal favorite one on my phone is called witches for Harris. So I will be dropping the link into my witches for Harris. Get your friends to donate. Let's start to feel our collective power.
Simone Collins: Which is
Malcolm Collins: No, but I mean, it shows what we're fighting against. We're literally fighting against the devil here. And I think Well, they're
Simone Collins: owning it just like we owned deplorables.
But still, we are deplorables. There's
Malcolm Collins: a, there's a bit of a difference when, when we don't own deplorables and saying that we are deplorables. We are pointing out that they dehumanize their opponents. They literally are like, yeah, let's worship. You know, pagan gods. No, but hold on. [00:24:00] They literally dehumanized people in the car.
Yeah,
Simone Collins: Pink. Pink. The artist, Pink, was literally on her private jet flying back from a show, joining this call because she was so amped to join. And she says that the other choice, clearly referring, of course, to Trump and Republicans, doesn't feel human. And she actually caught herself In saying doesn't feel human.
That was her correction. She started with the other, the other choice doesn't or isn't, and then she changed. Doesn't feel human. She really meant to say the other choice isn't human.
I know that we're better than this And I know that kamala is gonna f*****g get us there because the other choice is not it doesn't feel human and I'm i'm I'm terrified
Simone Collins: these are monsters and that,
Malcolm Collins: and that's how they think of them. This is where you get things like the bear meme that we've done a video on.
Yeah. The other choice isn't human. Wow. They, they have been [00:25:00] trained. Mm-Hmm. . These white women, unthinking class, has it been trained? To see men as monsters when they say something like, I would rather be with a bear in the woods and a random man. And you changed it to anything else and you're like because I did that in the video, I changed it to like, would you rather be with a random black man in the woods or a bear?
black
Man is scary. Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.
Probably a bear. 100 percent a bear, which is like, terrifying to say, but Definitely a bear. Some
Malcolm Collins: black
men are very scary out there. I bet. Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him. If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a
Malcolm Collins: black
man?
I feel more like bear. I don't know, cause I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.
Malcolm Collins: And you're like, [00:26:00] Whoa, like you realize as soon as you are no longer coding things in the progressive way, how far off the rails they have gone into bigotry and dehumanization. You immediately like wake up and you're like, like cold water, like, oh my God, they are Nazis.
They are. Like at very, very high level stages of dehumanizing their enemies. And we need to fight back against this if we do not want our country to fall. Now, fortunately, this is a one generation thing. If we can keep it out of the hands of them for this generation, they're not having kids. They are only converting kids and that cannot replenish their numbers.
If we can just for 30 years, prevent us from descending into a fascist. Totalitarian state. We're fine. All right. Come on guys, just for like the next three election cycles, turn out at the polls and then it's over. Yeah. Hold fast.
[00:27:00]
Malcolm Collins: They've really begun to treat her and the black women who go along with the message, obviously not the ones who don't, they are worse than dirt to these people as like this weird, like, ethereal cast of people who can't make mistakes and do everything right.
And you know, it's funny because like so many things in my life, tonight's call, Started out as the social media post, just a few hours after president Biden announced he wasn't running and he was endorsing Kamala Harris to be the nominee, I watched black women instantly mobilize to uplift and support her. And it made me wonder whether white woman could and would do the same.
Simone Collins: The magical
Malcolm Collins: black woman. The magical black woman.
Yeah, they really are like magical [00:28:00] negro trope. And I'm not saying that as a slur, I'm saying that as a trope from like the recent movie. Yeah it's, it's, it's wild to hear and this call more than anything where I have recently, you know, I go on about, oh, progressivism is becoming like a cult and I'm like, bro, it is a cult.
Like, it is a cult. If you listen to this language, this reminds me of like the Scientology leaks where, where you had those videos of like a science, like, I think it was like Tom Cruise talking to other Scientologists, like looking insane and like, and you're like, Whoa, those guys are off the rocker. Like white women.
For Harris was like the Scientology leaks in terms of how crazy off the wall it was
And how absolutely brainwashed these people were and how absolutely they were selling out their children's futures and living in a completely delusional world and completely dehumanizing black people.[00:29:00]
Something. What about some of these other ones you had here?
So I reached out to Jyoteka Edy. She is the organizer of Win with Black Women and I wanted to get her counsel.
And she told me that white women did need to come together in community to do the work because our work is very different. We are starting at a significant deficit. White women in America make up over 40 percent of the electorate. We are the nation's largest voting block. But since the 1950s, most of us have voted for Republican presidential candidates in all but just two presidential elections, despite repeated predictions before every single election that white women might shift toward the Democratic presidential candidate.
It hasn't happened. The bad news is that a majority of white women repeatedly vote for Republicans because too many of us believe, consciously or subconsciously, that it is in our best interest to use our privilege and our support systems of white supremacy and the patriarchy to benefit us,
Simone Collins: [00:30:00] what confused me. Yeah. Is, is at one point Shannon Watts on the call. Notes that white women in America make up over 40 percent of the electorate, that they're the large, sorry, electorate, that they are the largest voting bloc.
And historically they voted Republican. She says, because women have believed that the white patriarchy is their best way to privilege and that now they have the power to discover that the white patriarchy has to be taken down. I was surprised to read that women historically have voted Republican.
Republican. It's not what I would expect. I would expect that they would always vote in the more progressive end of the spectrum because they are the empathetic, on average, more empathetic gender.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, remember we've gone through multiple party realignments throughout the history of this country.
And Republicans, I mean, I think always have. been at their core is they are the anti authoritarian party, and women, I think, [00:31:00] generally historically wanted to put the power in the hands of their family, right? That was the goal, to be able to make the decisions for the family that they wanted to make.
This idea that women are now democratic is only the case if you're talking about single women. If you divide society into groups married men, single men, married women, single women, the only one of those four groups that majority votes for Harris and not Trump is single women. And what has moved women into this democratic state is that just many, many more of them are single.
Lower rates of
Simone Collins: marriage. Interesting.
Malcolm Collins: And why are, why are single women more likely to be pro Democrat? It's because they want the social services that previously were handled by the family structure. You know, who cares for you when you're old, it's your kids, you know, who is the person you rely on when you get sick, it's your husband.
But now, because they don't have any of that, they need a state. to be handling all that for them. But I'd also say that [00:32:00] just this mimetic virus of the urban monoculture, historically, women were always the more spiritual group. They were always the more religious group in American history. And when they went away from traditional religions, they were caught up much more in these cults than men were, and these cults appealed to them in terms of like, just.
Total brain hegemony more than they did to
Simone Collins: men
Malcolm Collins: is my read of what's going on there.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that makes sense. I, yeah, I still found it quite surprising. And I mean, Hey, that this is a meaningful voting block, so it matters. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so interested in Megan Dom's unspeak easy retreats of Women, obviously it's not all white women, but I feel like women as a voting bloc are often misrepresented online because they're not necessarily the most active online participants, and at least normal women, neurotypical women [00:33:00] and they are, you know.
A large, both consumer and voting block. So they, their choices matter a lot, but it's hard to get what's going on in their minds. I guess you can by just going on Instagram and seeing what their lives are about, but in terms of what they believe, it's harder for me to understand.
Malcolm Collins: The final point I wanted to make about all of this has been really shocking for me is the way that the democratic talking classes have like whiplash shifted between different major talking points recently.
So when you're going over this with me this morning,
Simone Collins: I found it really notable how quick opinions were to change. And I think a lot of it's because the mooring point for people isn't truth or reality. It is whatever you have to believe. And you see this in the white women for Harris call, whatever you have to believe that is more likely to reduce the odds that the other side wins.
So if it looks like Harris is [00:34:00] running, well. Then she's the best woman ever. If it looks like Biden is running, then he's sharp as a tack. If it looks like he just decided to step down, well, he's our next generation's George Washington. But that this self censorship and this, this intentional manipulation or memory holing is a product of believing that the alternative That would come from any other belief is too dangerous, even if it may be true.
So I think there's this interesting concept of dangerous truths. And normally that comes in the con like in the, in the context of state based censorship or totalitarian regime based censorship, but in this case, it's urban monoculture based censorship. So the call is coming from inside the house. It is the memes that run our brain.
That are telling us you literally can't believe this. You don't have to believe this new thing. And so seeing it come, it's, it's a, it's an endogenous change that's based on [00:35:00] someone's being ruled by this particular culture. That's really interesting to watch because normally you expect to see this kind of creepy.
Reality shifting only happening because people are like, Oh, someone's going to shoot me in the head if I don't tell the line.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, so you, the way you said it to me this morning that I found so powerful is you're like, it was so weird to have like the entire demographic democratic party being like, Biden's the best.
Biden is totally mentally stable. Everything's good. Blah, blah, blah. Two, we really need to do something about Biden. To now of course Biden shouldn't have been running and Kamala Harris is the best candidate ever. And we don't need to be holding any, no more thought about this.
Simone Collins: And before a discussion of Kamala being kind of a weak running mate and a liability.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: A lot of people, when they were like talking about bringing Biden down, they were like, well, who
Simone Collins: else? And this is an opportunity for us to get someone really great. There was so much excitement. About anyone who wasn't Biden Harris.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like,
Simone Collins: oh, we could, we could get something new.
Malcolm Collins: We [00:36:00] could get something new.
I know. It's so cool. Pretending like this never happened. I mean, it reminds me of what happened during COVID where they're like if you wear a mask, you're killing people because the masks need to go to doctors.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And then how
Simone Collins: dare you not wear a mask? You're
Malcolm Collins: killing us right now. This, this whiplash, like, and I remember at the beginning where they're like, well, masks aren't even relevant for lay people and they don't even work.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: They don't even work. And then it was the exact opposite. And it was like, do you, are you like Dory from like finding Nemo? Like, do you not remember that two weeks ago or like, well, we need to flatten the curve. It's just, you know, two weeks. Two months, a year and a half. It's like, what, what, what?
Like We've
Simone Collins: all just decided to take after our current president Biden, who
Malcolm Collins: Who just wakes up every morning and has somebody tell him what's happening that day. But no, this, this another thing that really got me. Is the Democrats have been attacking Republicans for their disjointed attacks on Harris, where they're like, oh, they don't have [00:37:00] like a common theme in these attacks, which shows that they don't have any real attack.
And it's like, no, it's that they're actually human beings with diverse opinions and not like. Have little radio antennas in their head that get beamed to them, whatever the current talking point is. And then they all just repeat it like robots. Like it, it, it, right now, if you, when I talk about like the memetic virus, people may underestimate how literal I'm being with that.
If you talk about this ultra urban monoculture people, these ultra progressives, you, you watch a call like this, it's exactly like those ants that get infected with the fungus. And it like eats out all of their brains, all of their innards. And their entire life just becomes about spreading that fungus.
They stop caring about anything else. They go out there castrate their own children. They are just about climbing to the top of a, a vine or a a, a stick, and then having their heads split open and the spores spill out into the air because that is all that their [00:38:00] lives are for anymore.
Spores from a parasitic fungus called cordyceps have infiltrated their bodies and their minds.
Its infected brain directs this ant upwards. Those afflicted, that are discovered by the workers, are quickly taken away and dumped far away from the colony. It seems extreme. But this is the reason why. Like something out of science fiction, the fruiting body of the cordyceps erupts from the ant's head. And when finished, the deadly spores will burst from its tip.
The fungus is so virulent, it can wipe out whole colonies of ants. And it's not just ants that fall victim to this killer. The more numerous a species becomes, the more likely it'll be attacked
Malcolm Collins: we are fighting.
A fungally infected, brain eaten zombie horde against the forces of ideological and cultural diversity. [00:39:00] Because they represent the antithesis of that. And we, we need to fight like the lives of our children to fit, depend on it because they really might at this point. Or you could say I'm overstepping.
You're always the one who like, you know, dial things back. You're like, Malcolm, you're being a nutter.
Simone Collins: After watching this call, I wonder if maybe I'm being too, too moderating in my analysis.
Malcolm Collins: Did they, did they really feel like a cult to you or was that just me? It felt
Simone Collins: very cult. It felt very cult. Like, yes, I was a little, I was a little creeped out by it, just a tiny bit.
Malcolm Collins: And I love when the progressives try to like, say like, Oh no, Trump rallies are a cult. And I'm like, no, that's enthusiasm. That's genuine human enthusiasm. Like it's like they've never There are wackos on both political sides.
So here I'm going
Simone Collins: to come in. Moderate Simone's going to come in. There are wackos on both sides. And everyone's an a*****e. [00:40:00] So it's, it's choosing if you want the giant douche or
Malcolm Collins: I turned sandwich.
Simone Collins: You disagree with me.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I just, what is your final takeaway on this? It's cold. It's a cult. I love you, Simone. Have a wonderful day. You too.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the recent shift in political dynamics where conservatives are now being labeled as "weird" by their progressive opponents. They delve into the cultural implications of this change, discussing how the traditionally "cool" progressive movement has become the new establishment, while conservatives have embraced their outsider status. The video covers topics such as the evolution of political rhetoric, the impact of Trump and JD Vance on conservative identity, and the changing perceptions of what it means to be "weird" in modern American politics.
Key points discussed:
* The Democratic campaign's strategy of labeling conservatives as "weird"
* Trump and JD Vance's outsider appeal and its impact on conservative identity
* The shift in cultural dominance from conservatives to progressives
* The value of being "weird" and challenging societal norms
* Analysis of specific political incidents and their cultural implications
* The role of authenticity and relatability in modern politics
* The future of conservative and progressive political strategies
Whether you're interested in political analysis, cultural shifts, or the evolving nature of American conservatism, this video offers a fresh perspective on the current political landscape.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] What defines weirdness is a person's willingness to challenge the dominant cultural mores of a society with an alternate framework.
Democrats and the Harris campaign now deploying a new adjective to blast the Republican ticket. Some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it's just plain weird. Get those nerds! I mean, on the other side, they're just weird. Nerds! It's not just a, a, a, a weird style that he brings. Nerds! Nerds!
Nerds! Nerds! Where are they? I think they're talking about us. No way. Oh no! Ah! Ah! Ah! Hello Simone! I am so excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about A wild shift that has happened in part because of the political realignment, the ongoing political realignment in this country.
But it also reminds me a lot of bemoaning I've seen from normal [00:01:00] conservatives or they're like of the, of the old GOP ink dates. They're like, I'm not weird, but Harris has been, uh, in her campaign and the democratic establishment and a lot of democratic power players have been putting this idea out there that JD Vance is weird.
And Trump is weird and I kind of love it because me, they come off like, you know, because they are the culturally dominant force in our society right now. And when weirdness is defined by cultural distance from the culturally dominant force. Yes, definitionally, they are weird, but it's shown that as soon as they became the culturally dominant force in our society, they immediately became the bullets.
You know, they became like the people shouting nerd in like the Revenge of the Nerds movie. I just wanted to say that I'm a nerd. I mean, uh, all our lives, we've been laughed at and made to feel [00:02:00] inferior. President Obama started mocking Trump mercilessly. He can finally get back to focusing. On the issues that matter.
Like, did we fake the moon landing? Obama didn't hide his utter disdain. Obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. Um, for example, uh, No, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, You, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. You fired Gary Busek.
And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. The insults didn't stop with the president. Listen to comedian Seth Meyers, the evening's guest host. Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.
And tonight, [00:03:00] those b******s, they trashed our franchises. Why? Why? Because we're smart. Because we look different. I'm a nerd. And I'm pretty proud of it. There's a lot more of us than are of you. You might have been called a spaz. Or a dork. Or a geek. Any of you that have ever felt stepped on, left out, picked on, put down, left Why don't you just come down here and join us, okay?
Okay. Come on. Come on.
You know, coach, I think I'm gonna let these boys live over at the house while you and your boys rebuild theirs. And where [00:04:00] the hell are we gonna live? Yeah. What about us? Huh? You're out of touch billionaires who live in your mansions. Nerd! Nerd! Nerd!
I cannot believe it's happening. I, I heard recently that, , rumors have been spread that J. D. Vance wears eyeliner, , journal Like, even photographers have been like, yeah, I just took a picture of him. Confirmed. No, you can see photos of him as a child. He's one of those people that just has really thick eyelashes.
, and, and also there was this, , rumor that there was a detailed account in his book, the ability elegy of him
Simone Collins: Getting sexually intimate with a couch which is not there. And that these things are just coming out like that. We have to attack him in this way. It's so odd to me as well, because. Aren't there plenty of policy attacks, you know, policy based attacks that we can make, you know, aren't there?
Well, no, [00:05:00] there's
Malcolm Collins: all vibe with progressives. They're like unthinking masses. They're like vibe, vibe, vibe. But yeah, it's, it's,
Simone Collins: it's Kamala's Brad Summer. It's, they're weird. It's, there's no substance to it. And I don't, but also I kind of get it because here's what has me concerned is it's that same sentiment, Ascetic wave that I think got Trump elected in 2016.
It wasn't policy stances. It wasn't concrete elements of his character. It was the feeling. It was this groundswell of a mood. But here's the thing,
Malcolm Collins: actually, Trump and J. D. Vance have tried to push back against the weird accusations. I don't think they should. You think they should lean in? Weird is how you get things done.
Only a weirdo can really change things because they're the only ones willing to think outside the box. This is the thing about nerds and it's an accurate attack to be honest. Daddy [00:06:00] Vance is a nerd. Like he's a classic nerd growing up. It's clear from his diary that in, yeah, he grew up a hillbilly, but he was a nerd among the hillbillies.
You look at Trump. I guess he
Simone Collins: apparently didn't know what tentacle porn was. Which,
Malcolm Collins: come on, Vance. Yeah, he's pretending. Was Trump, was Trump ever no, to pretend you don't know must mean you have it on your computer. Because that is like a cultural millstone there, man. But, but with Trump, you look at this guy, this is a guy.
Who until the MAGA movement was never really accepted by elite New York culture, which is what he always strived for. He always
Simone Collins: He was the outcast. Totally. He was the bullied kid who really wanted
Malcolm Collins: to be a part of the fun. And he spent his entire life being bullied by these people. You saw this when he first won.
You saw the president of the United States when he was roasting people. And I'll put the clip here from the press dinner, literally go up there and And roast a sovereign [00:07:00] citizen, right? Roast Trump. If any people are like, they have this meme where it's like, that's when he decides he's going to run.
Like that was the birth of the Trump movement with him being roasted and being like, I'll show you, I'll show you all.
Donald Trump is here tonight. Just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, the men's cooking team, , Did not impress the judges and there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so,
you fired Gary Busey.
Say what you will about it. Not funny. Bigly not funny. Oh, I'll get you a birth certificate, Obama. We'll see who's laughing then. I'm not a loser. It's okay, Trump. They probably already forgot about the jokes. [00:08:00] Let's just see what's on the teletype. Donald Trump, humiliated by the leader of the free world tonight at the White House correspondent's dinner. Yes, Wolf, it was very clear who was the President of the United States and who was the buffoon.
AHHHHHHHHHH! NGYAHHH! Welcome 7 coverage of the utter humiliation of Donald Trump. Say what you will about, uh, Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House. Let's see what we've got up there. We will again.
Malcolm Collins: But that, that is who he was. He was this nerd who, who took over for the rest of us. Right. And I think that so many people feel that it with the urban monoculture, the [00:09:00] force of wokeness that the progressives represent being the dominant force in our society.
So many of us now know that feeling of being kicked out of a club because you're not Progressive enough being losing a job because you're not progressive enough being pushed around in college because you're not progressive enough. Having people play little tricks on you because you're not progressive enough.
We all know this feeling, and in whatever way, you're not progressive enough because progressivism is a monolith, you know, we were just well, it, it,
Simone Collins: it is what is normative. It used to be that. Being a little bit more conservative leaning, you know, being a jock or a cheerleader meant being normative and mainstream but now to be normative and mainstream is to be progressive So well, you are not you're going to be weird You're going to be the nerd and you're going to be bullied
Malcolm Collins: but back when the conservatives ran the country That was when you had You know, an evangelical Protestant majority that could be the dominant culture in this country, which you just [00:10:00] don't have anymore.
The conservative culture now is too diverse, right? So the progressivism is not diverse. We're just talking with Razim Zuma. We had an interview with him right before this. And what we were saying was if you get like two ultra conservatives of the same denomination, They will usually have more theological differences between each other than an extremist progressive, you know, Protestant minister versus a extremist progressive Muslim minister.
They really are just one culture that is using their cultural dominance to bully everyone else. And I think that many people who originally were drawn to the conservative movement back when the conservative movement represented the culturally dominant force, were not drawn. For theological or ideological reasons, they were drawn because it was the powerful group in society the way they saw it.
It was the cheerleaders. It was the jobs. And now that it's not, they're experiencing serious cognitive dissonance. And I've seen this when I've talked to the number of them. They're like, well, [00:11:00] Yeah, but I'm not weird. Like conservatives aren't weird. The Sweden was like, you were ruining it. I was like, you're fricking candidate is Trump and Vance.
Simone Collins: Come on. This is, this is even something that we found as early as a year ago, if not earlier, that when media coverage would talk about our pronatalism, people on Twitter would call us freaks. Which just, and they would, they would use words like, you know, that freaks is something that I think an eighties jock villain would say to a protagonist.
Do you really want to be partners with that freak?
Simone Collins: And one of the
Malcolm Collins: freaks,
Simone Collins: you know what I mean? It's so weird. Why would you say that to someone when it? Just seems so stereotypically.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it's the way that the dominant culture often reacts to anyone who is challenging it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. But why would, like, would you ever call someone a freak? Wouldn't that make you feel like you were the bad guy?[00:12:00]
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, because I grew up and this is also, I think, a different thing. Like, like these people who are now drawn to progressivism because they have power in previous. Oh, they would have
Simone Collins: been the evangelical Christians in their time, if that was They wouldn't
Malcolm Collins: be. They absolutely wouldn't be. They're just doing it because it gives them power and the power to, they're like, I have a lived a life according to what society has told me to do.
And now they're like, and you are doing something different and seem happy. I must shame that. Like that's how the culture works, right? It maintains internal consistently, consistency by reacting reactively to anybody who you know, There seems to be successful with an alternate cultural model. I mean, that's why they had to do this hit piece on like ballerina farms, for example.
And then it came out that the reporter because it turned out and we did an episode on this, but we didn't mention in the episode of the turned out that she had released. Recordings of the in person interviews and she like directly [00:13:00] lied in the article to try to make them look bad And she had released these on previous podcasts when she was talking about writing the article and it's like, oh But another thing I'd note is when people are like conservatives are not nerds I'm like, okay, so not just like the main top conservatives again.
We were just talking with We're we're green zoomer And look at this guy. He's got like a bowtie, a button down shirt. This has been conservatives for a long time. They have been the nerds for a long time, like at least a decade and a half at this point. And I love the dissonance I see. When I went on Blaze TV, I was doing this interview as like John Popobopolis or something, anyway.
So he was like, yeah, but aren't you tired? of being the rebels. Like, aren't you tired of being the resistance? And I'm like, tired of being the resistance? What? That's awesome! That's like, the best [00:14:00] life! And I realize it might be that, like, I'm genetically coded differently. You know, I'm like, a descendant of the original.
American patriots, because what does patriot mean? A lot of people think patriot means like, you love your country. No, patriot was a term that meant like, terrorist, originally. You were the resistance against the evil tyranny. You were the rebels, being on a righteous rebel team. What is better than that?
No retreat! Hold the line! [00:15:00]
Malcolm Collins: Like, I can't imagine anything from like, my cultural framing's perspective that would be A more enjoyable or fulfilling life than this. Like I love this generation of conservatism. And I think that a lot of these people, because like the guy who was interviewing me, he got into conservatism when they were the dominant faction.
And I, and I realized. he just wanted to be in the dominant faction.
Simone Collins: He
Malcolm Collins: didn't believe all of this. He didn't, you know, he, he doesn't, or maybe it's that he doesn't like fighting for justice for the sake of fighting for justice. Like maybe that doesn't fill him with a righteous passion every morning, like when I wake up every morning, I'm like, I am on the good guy side and we are on the back nines, but we are gonna win this thing by golly.
And, and that inspires me. And I realized that for [00:16:00] a portion of people that does it, they want to be the ones who control everything and can bully other people.
Simone Collins: What would be your answer to someone who was on the normative side who counters that with, well, what makes you think that just being weird is better?
Why, why would being normative being, be bad? And why do you think it's inherently good to be the one who resists the mainstream? The mainstream might be mainstream for a reason because it's correct.
Malcolm Collins: So there's two things here. There is the mainstream versus tradition. And then there is why is weird always good?
And it is always good. Always good. No, no, no. Actually, I should say weird is also always bad. There are different ways you can be weird. What defines weirdness is a person's willingness to challenge the dominant cultural mores of a society with an alternate framework. Now that alternate framework can be dumb, but we know that we [00:17:00] are not at a moral nexus of history.
Okay, humanity. Find ways to improve over time. If you even look at any of the mainstream Christian theologies, it has improved over time or it's degraded over time, in which case you need to go back to the original church, which looks nothing like any of the existing churches. Like, if you're like, well.
You know, Christian theology has degraded over time and Catholicism is the right choice. And it's like, well, then you need to go back to the, what the original Catholics believed, which is that life doesn't begin at conception. And they're like, Oh, I don't want to do that. And then it's like, well, then you think it's improved over time because that's a fairly new Catholic belief.
Like 200 years ago, it was a Pope Pius IX. You know, so, so we all believe that things are, you know, to some extent, improve over time. And, and that being the case, knowing that we're not at the moral nexus in history, we are challenged to look for where even within conservative cultural frameworks or more right cultural frameworks, where are they getting things wrong that we can push things forward.
I mean, fundamentally, that's what [00:18:00] based is. Based is weird. People, like, think based means conservative. Based doesn't mean conservative. Based means saying what you believe is true, even when you will be shamed by it. Yeah, I always
Simone Collins: thought of based as being unapologetically authentic.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah and, and so a lot of people are like, Well, that doesn't align with a conservative mindset.
Therefore, you're not being based. And it's like, no. We're just saying what we believe is true from the evidence, from what we read, from the Bible, and that's may go against what the mainstream conservative influencers say, or what was mainstream and conservative culture in the 1950s, but that doesn't mean that it goes against any sort of absolute truth.
So I wanted to make that point, but what was the other one I was really excited to make here? Oh yes, I mentioned traditionalism. Versus uh, uh, normative. Okay? So I love it when people are like, Why would this tradition have value? Why would you put any weight on traditionalism? Right? And it's like, that is the, the collective wisdom [00:19:00] of thousands of generations of humanity.
Right? That's not like your parents opinions, man. That is an idea that has been, honed and improved and worked on over and over and over and over again, generation to generation to generation. And then it finally got you to where we are today. It's, it's not like just an old person's out of touch idea about reality.
But what is culturally normative when, what is culturally normative isn't traditionalism. It's uniquely stupid.
Simone Collins: Okay,
Malcolm Collins: so we need to say that traditionalism definitely has more value than what's culturally normative But the process that brings us traditionalism Is also one of iterative generational improvement the traditions we have aren't in stone They changed and evolved over time to become better.
That is the way we are meant to be To relate to traditions, we take the traditions that are handed to us with [00:20:00] care and we work to improve them for a new era, for new context. And so I think that that's also the thing to, to, to differentiate there is traditionalism versus culturally normative, non traditional values.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I also think of the Winston Churchill quote about someone being angry at you, meaning that you actually stood up for something. And that's something that I think is running hand in hand with the concept of being weird. That you won't, if everyone agrees with you, or if you were not controversial in any way, if people aren't mad at you, you aren't fighting for anything substantive and you're not making a difference and something that we discussed early in our careers was.
Where we could actually make a difference in life. And if you are this was in the context of whether you should work with Google or not. And my argument to you was that in Google, if you do not take your position where you would make the most [00:21:00] optimal decision for whatever department you were put in.
Someone else with equal intelligence and credentials to you, roughly speaking would make the same optimal decisions. There, there would be no difference in the world depending on who was in that role, because it was going to be a role in which whoever was there was going to make roughly the same optimal decision.
And what really mattered was where we. Would have an impact. We would be a Delta and you're not going to in society make that impact. If, if you're just doing what everyone thinks is the inevitable course of society, when running correctly,
Malcolm Collins: you
Simone Collins: know,
Malcolm Collins: absolutely agree with you. And, and to add more color to the anecdote, she's talking about here.
There was a time in my life rated jaw. Choice between joining a venture capital firm in Korea, which was like a really risky move for me, or taking on a management position at Google. And she was like, differentially, you will have more impact on reality. If you take the job in Korea, therefore it's the obvious choice.
[00:22:00] Speaking of, you know, we also look for opportunities to help people in these sorts of spaces. So that said if anyone here is looking to buy server space for AI stuff we are looking to find somebody interested in that right now for a side project that I've taken on because I think it could change the course of AI development.
And of course now that's an inflection point in human history, so that's why I'm, I'm focused on it.
Simone Collins: Now, by the way, the, the Churchill quote is, you have enemies, good. That means you've stood up for something sometime in your life. And I love that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, people are like, how do you feel about people online making fun of you?
And it's like, well, you see, here is the thing. I've met the average human. If the average human disapproves of me, I'm probably doing something right. Uh, The average human. Um, My God uh, but yeah, it's, it's, it's absolutely wild now to you, Simone, how did you grow up thinking about this term weird? Would you [00:23:00] have thought about the term weird as like an intrinsically negative term growing up?
Or would you have taken it as a compliment?
Simone Collins: I would have taken it as a compliment, which is another reason why I find this campaign tactics so perplexing. It. I thought that everyone, when asked who they were in high school, the default, as a joke, as a trope, answer was, I was the weird one. I floated between crowds.
You know, I didn't affiliate with really anyone. And I thought that everyone saw themselves as weird and considered themselves weird. And the fact that they're attacking someone as weird, I thought, you know, Well, they're only going to alienate themselves from everyone who identifies as weird.
Apparently I was incorrect in this being a pervasive trope. Am I missing something here? Or was that actually a thing? No, I thought it was a thing too. I always thought weird was
Malcolm Collins: a good thing, right? Like,
Simone Collins: or at least it was how people personally identified. So if you saw other people accusing [00:24:00] someone of being weird, it's that same effect that I said about, that if you saw someone being, someone calling someone else weirdo or freak, they would think the name caller was the bad guy, not the name called.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that this, this sort of shows that the progressive party has become a party of people desperate to fit in. Desperate to not be criticized. But if you were
Simone Collins: desperate to fit in, you'd be like, well, we're all weirdos here and like, we're inclusive.
Malcolm Collins: I thought that was the thing. I thought that was, They got cultural control of society?
No, now the weirdos are the bad guys. There are the cool kids. And I'd also like to point out here that some people be like, how can you be saying this? Trump's the bully, not Kamala. Look at the way he acted in like his early debates where he would make fun of people. And I was like, Okay, come on, bro. In Trump's early debates, when he was debating against, like, the other conservatives to win the ticket, he was, hands down, seen as the underdog.
He was a giant political institution that was [00:25:00] constantly making fun of him, saying his political campaign was a joke. Nobody took
Simone Collins: him seriously. Nobody
Malcolm Collins: took him seriously. And Constantly, constantly clowned on him. He was the guy going up. He's the little nerdy kid who you saw getting bullied and then, like, turns out to know karate or something.
No, no.
Simone Collins: Here's the problem is you haven't seen it, but in 16 Candles, he's the blonde nerd. And it, it, for those who haven't seen the movie, including you, Malcolm, in, in the movie, there is this character who's kind of like the bully of the nerds who comes up to them and is like, I'm gonna I'm going to have sex with this girl.
You know, I'm going to like get her panties. And then he does get her panties, but he doesn't actually have sex with her. He just convinces her to loan her panties to him. So he can tell his friends that he had sex with her. Yeah. But like, that's Trump. Trump is like, just, I want to, like, I want to be cool. I want people to see that I'm cool.
And he, he may come across as a bully sometimes, I think mostly because he's. Fronting. He wants people to see way. No, no, no. It's not because
Malcolm Collins: he does. Unless you are completely brainwashed, [00:26:00] Trump never looked like a bully to you. If you are brainwashed, then you're like, anyone who fights the urban monoculture automatically bad.
But Trump, well come on the
Simone Collins: name calling. The, the, you know, he, he does,
Malcolm Collins: yeah. He was clearly in a position of non-power. He had a, a giant political apparatus that was against him on both sides. He had an entire press that was against him. Come on Malcolm.
Simone Collins: He wants to be seen. As a powerful boy,
Malcolm Collins: regardless, most nerds want to be seen as powerful.
There's the famous line at the end of revenge of the nerds, where the one character goes, well, I'm a nerd, which is something I just learned today. You know, you, you don't like, you don't get the nerd card. Okay. Simone, but when he was making fun of whether it was the press or it was his political opponents, these were people with power over him.
that had been acting in bad faith against him. And it was exactly to everyone who was watching this with any level of cultural sanity, [00:27:00] the nerd in the high school that you, you, you know, a hallway who then gets stopped by a group of like three beefy bullies who are picking on him, like he ends up just verbally owning them.
And then like, he's like, yeah, but you know, your mom doesn't love you and it's getting a divorce and they like run off crying or something. People can be like, Whoa, that was a low blow. The truth is, is everybody who saw what went down is like, thank God that little squirrely guy stood up for himself. And every, every other little squirrely guy out there, that is what he represented in those moments.
And you can be like, well, that's bull He reacted to their bullying. Like you look at the, oh, what about the reporter who had that disability? But it's like, yeah, but did you read the piece that he wrote about Trump? Did you like, are you just pretending that he did nothing to, that he didn't have power over Trump, that he's supposed to be able to like write whatever he wants, do whatever he wants without Trump overstepping in the same [00:28:00] way that he overstepped in his position of power in society.
And I think that this is the thing. It's very much like a, how can he slap moment. Progressives are so used. To making fun of and clowning on and telling white lies from their perspective about their opponents
Go on, b***h, say something funny. Uh oh. He's getting mad. Jack, let's just get out of here, okay? Yeah, puss. Run away. Go ahead, b***h. Say something funny. Make me laugh. Here,
Malcolm Collins: And then when their opponents fight back, they're like, oh my god You can't do that. You're a lower cast member than me in our society My cast is allowed to goon on your cast, but you're not allowed to do anything to us, of course and [00:29:00] I think that you're you're playing into their character Well, basically lie that Trump was acting with any level of cultural authority in those moments.
Once Trump was actually president, once he actually had power, he did fairly little actually picking on people. And this is something Yeah, lock her
Simone Collins: up kind of stopped
Malcolm Collins: and And he didn't Look, the progressives literally tried to lock him up. He didn't when he got power. All of that stuff for him was because and allowed, like, by his set of morals, allowed because he was in a position of less power.
Not, not, it wasn't stuff that he did when he became president, and he did it even less than previous Republican presidents, like back when the Republican ethos was like the dominant ethos, and you look at like the George Bush era, it was like well known that he would constantly make fun of his, like, staffers, like, Right, but I'll put the clip here from, um, 30 rock where he gets the nickname [00:30:00] burger.
Like five seconds after meeting Bush
Because that was the type of guy he was. He was from a dominant culture and he was used to being a Using it to sort of signal his power over other people. But Trump didn't do that. And he also didn't really front, you know, look at him always getting his like McDonald's and everything like that.
You know, he had weird cultural things, but they weren't high class cultural things. Like is a gold toilet, high class or trashy, right? A gold toilet and McDonald's burgers is the trashiest thing I can imagine. It's just rich, trashy, you know, he wasn't actually culturally fronting. He was being him. is nerdy.
But I mean, do you have other thoughts on this or?
Simone Collins: No, I think that that's accurate. And I still can't get over it. I can't get over that. We've gotten to the point where the. The party that used to be about letting your freak flag fly has become the party that literally accuses its opponents of [00:31:00] being weird.
Malcolm Collins: But even think about the things that they're accusing them of. JD Vance wears eyeliner. Yeah.
Simone Collins: I thought eyeliner belonged to the left. They should be like, stop appropriating our eyeliner, JD Vance.
Malcolm Collins: No, but they're like, he's the weird kid. Let's pick on him.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and also, you know, Sex with a couch? I thought we were sex positive.
This is horrible.
Malcolm Collins: Is that not like a classic weirdo kid who then ends up making a billion dollar thing to do? Yeah, but also he didn't do it. No, he didn't do it, but what I'm saying is even the fictions that they're creating around him are power fantasies around bullying someone. To create a fiction like this.
No,
Simone Collins: it's so classic. It's like the, it's like something that mean girls would make up in a high school. That like, oh so and so had sex with a couch. That, that's, it's what like, Shelby, the, the mean cheerleader who hates Cheryl. I, I'm [00:32:00] bad at names. But yeah. It's, it's, it's juvenile. An invention. I mean, it's funny.
I'm sure someone came up with it that, you know, they were very clever to do so, but.
Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. I need to take it aside here to talk about like how much Dems don't get it. Wait, what? The, the video from Kennedy that unfortunately is probably going to hurt Trump because it connects with like base people so much is he has this video and I'll see if I put it here about running into a, a bear okay.
So bear roadkill. Progressive bear roadkill story. Like, like make fun of him. They're like, what a weirdo to like. Put a bear in Central Park and then I'll play the video here or at least the highlights from it.
And that woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear. So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear.
[00:33:00] And it was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York City. You can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.
So we stayed late and instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city because there was a dinner at Peter Lugar's Steakhouse. And at the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn't go home, I had to go to the airport. And the bear was in my car, and I didn't want to leave the bear in the car.
Um, because that would have been bad. So then I thought, you know, at that time, This was the, a little bit of the redneck in me. There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and saw people, a couple of people got killed. And it was every day and people had gotten badly injured.
Every day it was in the press. And so I thought, [00:34:00] I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of. I said, let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike.
It'll be fun, funny for people. So, everybody thought, that's a great idea. So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. That's it. The next day, it was like, it was on every television station, it was the front page of every paper, and I turned on the TV, and there was like a mile of yellow tape, and there were twenty cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it, and I was like, oh my god, what did I do?
And, uh, and then, they were, there were some people on TV in Tyvek suits with gloves on, lifting up the bike, and they were saying they were going to take this guy home. It was up to Albany to get [00:35:00] a fingerprinted problem and, uh, I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.
Luckily, um, the, uh, the story died down after a while and, uh, And it stayed dead for a decade and then, um, the New Yorker somehow found out about it and they just, they're going to do a big article on me and that's one of the articles. So they asked me, the fact checker, to say, you know, it's going to be a bad story.
Malcolm Collins: And then you watch this video and if you're like a patriotic American, you're coming away from this like, this guy is f ing amazing.
Like, A, he's the type of guy who like sees bear roadkill and his first thought is, I bet I could skin that. Yeah, skin it and
Simone Collins: freeze the meat. This is an opportunity. You know, and also that he knew the roadkill laws. [00:36:00] Yeah, well, it's legal in New York, so it should
Malcolm Collins: be fine to break him away from this Kennedy stereotype of like being out of touch and you're like, Oh no, this guy Fs.
I know,
Simone Collins: but look, here's what I want. I want your take on, and maybe base campers want to know this too. So who is Kennedy going to draw votes from? Is he going to draw votes from Trump or from, from Kamala Harris?
Malcolm Collins: With stuff like this? I mean, this is the most authentic thing I've ever seen. Then that he, he gets, he gets to New York and he's like, Oh gosh, I got to go to an airport.
I can't leave the bear in my car. What do I do with it? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll put it in a bike lane and then take an old bike and, and put it next to it. Like somebody crashed into the bear to try to clown on bikers and it's like, here's the thing. Everybody hates bikers. Pedestrians hate bikers.
Cars hate bikers. The only people who don't like bikers are obsessive bikers. That guy No man, other
Simone Collins: bicyclists hate bikers. The only time I've ever been hit by a bike is when I was on a bike.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'm gonna post a video of the [00:37:00] IT crowd, biker boss guy, but like, I had a guy like this, a biker at my office, who would come in and like, his whole outfit, yeah, just, you know, he's a biker, there's like biker
Simone Collins: cleats.
Yeah, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So I, I see this and I'm like, oh my God, that is one. I love that you are like. You know, non pretentious and backwoods enough to see roadkill and immediately think, skin it. And then in bit two, you're cool enough to clown on bikers. Like, come on, that's fun, man. Well, then isn't
Simone Collins: Trump screwed then?
If Kennedy's going to draw votes from him?
Malcolm Collins: Nobody really cares. I mean, look, Kennedy is, is not going to matter that much in this election. But I, I will say that I gained a lot more respect for him after seeing this. And this is such a good example of media baiting where the progressives think that some fact that they are delivering to you is going to make you hate a person.
And then a normal American watches it. And they're like, that guy is so cool. Well, he also,
Simone Collins: he handled this. In the perfect way possible. [00:38:00] Basically, he hoped that this story would stay dead for what? 30 years. Yeah. And he had the New Yorker call him to fact check it realized, Oh s**t, this is finally coming out.
I thought this would never come out and then decided to release a video about it. And he released the video in the best possible way. It wasn't him facing a camera saying, this is what happened. I'm sorry. It was him sitting at a table talking to like in a room, there's at least two other people that are clearly more, but mostly like a woman who's kind of leaning against a coffee table.
And at first the woman looks kind of just kind of bored and disinterested, or maybe a little bit. Mad at him. And then everyone just starts cracking up as his story plays out. And as you're watching this woman, you're with her, you're having this journey with her as you're hearing this story and you're cracking up with her.
And it was, it was perfectly done. I don't know how intentional all of it was, but he had a [00:39:00] masterful approach to this.
Malcolm Collins: I love this. Before we sign out, what is the one, another thing that they've been attacking JD Vance for being weird for it? I want to hear your response to this. The weird cat lady, Oh, the childless cat
Simone Collins: lady 2021 comment on Twitter that he will now there's an op ed in the New York Times.
There's an op ed in the New Yorker. I mean, everyone has an opinion about him calling people. Out for being childless cat ladies.
Malcolm Collins: We used to know that old maid was a bad thing, that being a cat lady was a bad thing. But now the progressives are like a party of cat ladies and they're like, how dare he?
They call her the Cat Lady. People say she's crazy just because she has a few dozen cats. AHHH! NAH! AHH! TEEHEEHEEEHEEEHEEHEE!
Malcolm Collins: Well, I love
Simone Collins: his response. And one of his responses in a TV interview recently was I have nothing against cats, which is not a big response. That's a great non apology.
Malcolm Collins: They're like, [00:40:00] I'm not a cat lady, I just have one cat
She'll become a crazy cat lady. She only has one cat. Give her time.
Malcolm Collins: goes, no, it's, it's, we've gotta shame this stuff. And there was actually a progressive outlet that, I think it was in New York Times you were saying that said actually he's right to be shaming.
Simone Collins: The New York Times Op Ed that I read was not, it was, it was shaming him for saying that. Because, for example, he pointed out that many people who are childless are not childless by choice.
That he'd criticized, for example, Pete Buttigieg about, being childless and being one of the many childless lawmakers that's dictating the lives of American families when at that time, he didn't know this, of course, no one knew this, but Pete Buttigieg and his husband had just faced a major setback in their adoption journey, which is heartbreaking, right?
So the point that this Progressive New York Times op ed contributor was making, was that it's not really fair to criticize childless people and to shame them because you never know what's going on with them and it's actually quite sad that growing numbers of people under [00:41:00] 50 are reporting that they're not, they don't expect to ever have kids because many of those people want kids.
So, you know, he, he still shamed him and I, I, I'm with, you and I are clear on our stance that pernatalism should not be about shaming people, but you know anything that people say on twitter You
Malcolm Collins: are clear on that. I am clear on that, yes. My sympathy should involve a component of shame. I know. You
Simone Collins: never wanted to be child free.
I did. And I understand that lifestyle, and I respect it, and I think it's totally fine, and people who want to be child free should be child free. They just shouldn't
Malcolm Collins: have positions of power in society. Listen, P. G. Keenan's
Simone Collins: on No, no, no. P. G. Keenan is on board with me. P. G. Keenan has argued. The best possible thing is that people who want to be child free are going to be child free.
Let them be child free. Okay. I
Malcolm Collins: guess you're right. We don't want to, yeah, we don't want to pressure somebody. You're right. Because then they're having kids for social status and that sort
Simone Collins: of thing. There's nothing worse than someone bringing in an unwanted child that's not going to be given the best possible child and the best possible shot at life.
Anyway. The, the, the larger point is that when something is posted on Twitter, Like, Twitter is for trolling, [00:42:00] okay? I don't, any shaming that takes place on Twitter doesn't count as shaming because it is Twitter. It is where you trash talk, okay? This is not, the fact that But hold on, another thing
Malcolm Collins: you mentioned about this article is the number one upvoted comment under it.
Was wouldn't it be better if humanity went extinct,
Simone Collins: right? So the New York Times of it that I'm referring to the Malcolm is referring to, which we can link to in the, in the description basically was a progressive argument for prenatalism. It was saying that demographic collapse does affect everyone, including progressives, and that while.
J. D. Vance's approach to the issue based on shaming and that his policy stances that don't include support for single parents that don't support LGBTQ plus whatever, marriages, et cetera, is not the answer that we still need a progressive answer, optimally from the progressive view in the form of social services for I have to take a donor call.
Can I take it? All right. I love you.
I'm muting myself and seeing if I can finish up.
Perennialism matters to everyone. That was the argument that was being made in [00:43:00] the op ed. And then the, the number one comment that was upvoted in this New York Times op ed was.
Well, but honestly, wouldn't it be better if there were no humans left in the world? Like isn't human extinction kind of Okay. Which is, and and you know what I tweeted that ar I tweeted that saying this is why Progre TISM is a right wing coded article and the author of the op-Ed retweeted it because I think he's equally frustrated.
He's like, I tried. I tried and, and no one's listening. And so he gets it. Now he understands. He retweeted
Malcolm Collins: your tweet. That's amazing. He
Simone Collins: retweeted it. He retweeted it. Yeah. Which is I think it goes to show you
Malcolm Collins: have a good day. I'm gonna go.
Yes,
Simone Collins: I'm
Malcolm Collins: still here. Yes!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this insightful video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the profound influence of Catholic immigrants on American culture, particularly in reshaping the Yankee identity. Drawing from Colin Woodard's "American Nations" and contrasting it with David Hackett Fisher's "Albion's Seed," the Collins couple offers a nuanced perspective on how Catholic immigration waves transformed the cultural, political, and social landscape of America. This comprehensive analysis covers topics ranging from bureaucratic tendencies and voting patterns to the evolution of American arts and sports culture. Key points discussed: The misconception of Yankee culture's Puritan roots Catholic influence on American bureaucracy and politics The impact of Catholic immigration on urban centers The evolution of Catholic voting patterns Cultural differences between Catholic and Protestant traditions The role of Catholics in shaping American arts and education The future of Catholic influence in American politics
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. We were listening to the audio book for American nations by
Simone Collins: colin Woodard.
Malcolm Collins: . And we're likely going to do a series of episodes on them. This is a guy who divided America into 11 different populations with different histories. I'll put it on the screen here. I think he gets most things right. He wrote the book as a direct followup to another book that we mentioned all the time on the show called Albion's Seed that talks about the four founding cultures of America
Simone Collins: by historian David Hackett Fisher, which was written in either late eighties or early nineties.
So this answer is a much more modern take and quite interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Well, but it also does something quite different than Fisher's book. And I think it, it gets some things wrong. And one of the things that gets wrong, we're going to be talking about on this video, because I think he completely misunderstands the Yankee culture.
So first I'm going to talk a little bit about Albion Seed so you can get a little prep of this and, and why Albion Seed doesn't help us as much understand modern America as this [00:01:00] followup book does. Specifically, Albion Seed, they divide the original Americans into four Four distinct cultural groups, which is accurate.
The Puritans, the Quakers, the Backwoods people,
and the Cavaliers. Now what was interesting about these four groups is I remember I was talking to somebody about this, and they kept trying to guess. They were like, who are the Catholics? Which one is the Catholics?
And they go, like, I, I would go, so the first thing they go, oh, the next is the Catholic group. Or I mentioned the Cavaliers. And they go, oh, that must be the Catholic group. And I had to break to them something that is kind of, I think tough for a lot of Catholics today because they get this sort of retelling of American history that tries to include them in parts of American history that they just were not players in.
During the time of the American Revolution, only 1. 5 percent of America was Catholic. If you, and people are like, Maryland, Maryland was a Catholic colony, wasn't it? At the time of the revolution, less than 10 percent of the population in Maryland was Catholic. There was just no significant Catholic population in early America.
[00:02:00] However, that is not true of America today, even when we're talking about like significant declines in religiosity in America. You can look at something like Massachusetts, for example. And can you guess the percentage in 1990 of Americans , in Massachusetts, who identified as Catholics?
Simone Collins: 4%.
Malcolm Collins: 54%. Holy smokes. Do you, do you know what it was in 2010? 38? 45%.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Uh Oh. So we can go over some, some other, you know, new England states, you get 26% of New Hampshire, one of the least Catholic, of the New England states is incredibly Catholic. 22% of new Vermont, another low Catholic population of the New England states identifies as Catholic.
That is absolutely wild. [00:03:00] Yeah. Um, In terms of like how much of the population of New England Catholics makeup. So, the thing that the guy gets wrong in this book is he does get right. The Quakers, who ended up making up the Midlands population, were widely outcompeted by an alliance of the backwoods people and the German immigrants, who basically ended up erasing their cultural footprint until they came roaring back with a vengeance through the woke revolution, which we will do another episode on how that evolved out of Quakerism.
We talk about it heavily in the book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. However,
He incorrectly claims.
Malcolm Collins: the Yankees evolved out of the Puritans
When in reality.
Malcolm Collins: the Puritans. basically went extinct in the same way that the Quakers do. Oh, yes, they may got some small sliver of American population, but their ideals and their world vision was pretty much completely erased except for some small bubbles in places like New Hampshire, which I [00:04:00] think holds more to the Puritan political framing.
But largely speaking, they were erased by the many waves. of Catholic immigrants that mostly settled in the urban centers of New England. As to places why the, like Vermont and New Hampshire were not as affected, it's because their population doesn't live in urban centers. And most of the Catholic population went to settle in urban centers.
So, if you look here, , at his map and then contrast it with the concentration of Catholics in different parts of America. It is very clear that three of the regions. That he carved out are actually specifically Catholic cultural units. Here. We are talking about Yankee dim, the left coast and Eleanor.
Okay, This is the north Eastern United States. This is the far Western coast of the United States. And this is the Hispanic immigrant part of the United States. Every one of these has had an enormous impact on America's cultural [00:05:00] history.
And as such Catholicism has had an enormous impact on Americans, cultural history.
Malcolm Collins: Now, another thing that people get super wrong about Catholics modern, modern Catholics, and they go, Oh, Catholics, solid conservative voter place. Life begins at conception and all right. As of 2022, what percentage of Catholics identified was the Democratic Party versus the Republican party?
Simone Collins: That's a good question. I would say. Probably 68 percent of Catholics identify with the Democratic Party because it, it focuses more on this like, top down control and like charitable giving to the weak, right?
It's,
Malcolm Collins: it's 42 percent with the Democratic Party, 38 percent with the Republican Party. Oh, okay. So the rest aren't affiliated. Yeah. 20 percent are unaffiliated. There's still way more and they used to be even higher with the Democratic Party. So in the election cycle before that, in the 2020 election cycle it was 45 percent [00:06:00] identified with the Democratic Party.
And, and then if you look at exit polling, it's even worse. So you look at 2020 52 percent of Catholic voters voted for Joe Biden.
Simone Collins: 52%. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would think that the majority of Catholics are going Democrats.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Here I have contrasted to maps. For you. One map is the percent of Catholics in different counties of America. And the other map is how those counties voted. You can see there is almost a direct overlap to which counties went Democrat. And this is in the most recent election cycle. This is this election cycle, which counties are hotly contested, which ones are not. So, this is not.
just a historic thing.
Malcolm Collins: And I think a lot of people think that they're a Republican faction, Catholics at all voting was, Republicans is actually a fairly modern thing in the 1970s.
So again, I mentioned this on the show, but a lot of people don't know this. The Republican party ended up having to take a pro-life stance. It was majority the Republican party was the pro-choice life before, which [00:07:00] much more fit was Republican values because yeah. The, the Protestant tradition generally believes that life begins like 12 weeks after conception as Catholics did before about 200 years ago you know, like Thomas Aquinas and Augustus Hippo used to believe this, but they did this shift recently with Pope Pius IX, gone into that in another episode, don't need to go into it here but, but one, it was the, the, you know, Protestant religious thing to do, and it was the, Free choice thing to do, which is what Republicans were historically about.
And so they did this switch in the 1970s, specifically as a tactic to try to get some Catholics to vote Republican. And while it swung some Catholics their way, it has always been the minority of Catholics who this appealed to. And it was really just the single issue voters, because other than that issue, and we'll get into why the Catholic vote and the Catholic vote Cultural perception much more aligns with the democratic party.
And I also think people forget how recently Catholics were accepted as a mainstream block within American society. [00:08:00] You know, I'm just baffled where you'll get these like Catholic LARPers today. Like they don't, they're not actually culturally Catholic, like, Nick Fuentes, right, who like are aligning with like the KKK, the KKK.
hunted and lynched Catholics just as much as they did blacks. What? Yes, they hated Catholics. The three groups that the KKK was about getting rid of or removing from power were blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Oh, what?
Simone Collins: Okay how did I live my entire life not knowing this? Well, because there's
Malcolm Collins: been this like rewriting of history as like Catholics were this group that was always here and weren't this incredibly discriminated against group that was because, you know, you can't have like Irish as a discriminated group in modern progressive.
You can't have Italians, but there were lots of signs, you know, you look, you go back to these immigration ways and it was, you know, Irish need not apply here. Italian need not apply here. There was this [00:09:00] huge fear of the Catholic immigrant waves and that they would change our culture and they saw these people in the same way that many people today, I actually say much worse than most people look at Hispanic immigrants today.
They saw them as an intrinsically criminal people. Because most of the Catholic immigrant graves came with large organized crime, much larger than the current Hispanic wave. Like people They, they are nothing compared to like the mob or the mafia. The mob was the Irish wave and the mafia was the Italian wave which basically controlled huge portions of American urban centers.
Like people were terrified. So, so you've got to keep that in mind as well. Right. And when Kennedy, who was the first Catholic president that we had was running for office, it was a huge thing. Like it was the Obama. Yeah. They were like,
Simone Collins: is he going to be loyal to the Pope or to America?
Malcolm Collins: Can a Catholic be president?
This was a big thing that people saw beforehand. Like, like they were like, I do. It was a big belief before that the [00:10:00] Catholics couldn't be president. Like Mm-Hmm. because fundamentally they're loyal to their religion, and their religion is loyal to a foreign power. IE the Vatican. I. e. he can't be president, right?
And, and, and people are like, come on, Catholics aren't Democrats. Who was our last president? The Catholic Joe Biden. You know, keep this in mind, right? , so we've got to break through a number of things. One, Catholics were a discriminated group for a long time in American history.
It only recently came out of this discriminated status. This discriminated identity hugely shaped their cultural history, the way they impacted American politics, and the way they created, I think he is right about the boundary he drew around Yankeedom. I think he is wrong about what influenced their value set or how they came to exist as a cultural group.
We are going to do a different episode on why the Yankee Puritans went extinct and what ended up happening to America's Calvinists because they didn't go. purely extinct. They ended up merging with the backwoods [00:11:00] culture. You see a lot of this even in his book. And the backwoods people were already predominantly Calvinist.
These were the incredibly violent woodland people who ended up creating greater Appalachia, which is where my people are from. And I think people see this in my kids. It's like these sort of uncouth, violent like, like us as well. Like we prefer the lower arts. You know, we are not concerned with sort of signaling high class.
In fact, that would be considered like a very low class thing to do within the greater Appalachian cultural system. But we will get to a whole different episode talking about that. I want to focus now on how Catholics changed America. So when Catholics came into the United States, they behaved very differently than basically any cultural group that we had had in the United States before.
Typically and I've talked about this in other episodes, but it's worth noting during the recent sort of battle that we had as a country, you had, this was over the COVID vaccines. You had two different [00:12:00] ways of relating to truth. You had one group who said, well, true should be determined by people who spent their entire lives studying a subject and then who are certified by a central bureaucracy.
And then another group who said, in this case, the university system, the central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. Instead we should all determine truths for ourselves based on our own research. Wouldn't you know it, this actually broke out. If you look at the areas that were more pro really strict COVID restrictions and everything like that, you basically look at the percentage of Catholic descendants living in an area, and you will see a direct correlation to Did they go with the expert consensus or were they more about figuring this out on your own?
Now, I should note, I actually think that both of these systems for determining truth are important and a society is healthier when you have both of them. Otherwise, you go full QAnon where everyone is everything in the conspiracy. You can't trust anything. And I don't think QAnon is wrong about everything, but I think that, you know, there is, it's sort of a full conspiracy brain thing.
Or, you know, You go full, like, zero COVID, China, the experts can't have been [00:13:00] wrong the first time, so we have to keep doubling down. So I think that America benefits from having these two populations. But this, this flip is what we had during the Reformation, right? Like, that's why the Catholics took this mindset.
The Reformation was also one group saying, truth should be determined by people who spent their entire life studying a subject, and then who have been certified by a central bureaucracy, i. e., the Catholic Church. The priest system. And then another group who said, no, no, no. True should be determined by individuals studying the Bible themselves.
And then you have the, the, the secondary thing with the Catholic group that made them very different. So in the first great awakening in America. We'll have another episode on this, how it was sort of like the first social media movement is the Catholics when they were choosing, you know, who would be appointed priests who would, you know, speak to people one, the people couldn't even understand what they were saying most of the time because they were saying it in one language and it was a language that people didn't speak and they were promoted through a bureaucracy.
In the early American colonies during this like fiery Protestant great awakening [00:14:00] period, people would go to the church. There'd be like four churches in a town and you would choose the one that spoke to you most. It was like using early social media channels, but it led to a very different way of relating to your family.
Faith. It was like a very fiery driven way, right? Like, well, it made
Simone Collins: you have sort of the difference between religion almost as a public utility. Like you go to the local public school, just like you'd go to the local Catholic church versus like a startup world that, that Protestant preachers were the original social media platforms.
And we're. We're recently on a road trip and I was looking at in an old New England town that we were driving through, like all the different, very old churches in that town and feeling like, wow, like each of these feels kind of like a different social media platform and we had these basically like local entrepreneurs running around.
Raising money from benefactors who are hoping to get an ROI on their investment in terms of social capital prestige, and maybe, you [00:15:00] know, like better odds of going to heaven or being among the elect, whatever it might be. To, you know, to invest in these, in these, in these projects. Preachers who then we're trying to get audiences and get the network effects.
And they're very much like early social media platforms. It is a chicken and egg problem of like, you know, well, can I get a great congregation, you know, but can I also get the best, you know, like preacher, it's, it's a really interesting question. And so, yeah, I see what you're saying. This is so interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Pretty much all of the other early American cultural groups had a, a, a massive distrust of authority and they had a massive distrust bureaucracies and everything like that. And the Catholics didn't have this, which allowed them to do something very unique in terms of how they were able to integrate themselves into American society. So there were two things that they did. One. We got to talk about organized crime because organized crime wasn't just organized crime.
It was an alternate government structure that this group was using to both provide social services to their own people, [00:16:00] which the organized crime organizations often did. They were providing you know, orphanages, they were providing help to the local Catholic community. They were providing with food and everything like that.
And this was a discriminated community, right? But they also provided rules for that community and order for that community that superseded the local government's order, but something very interesting happened because they were able to form these large counter bureaucracies to the existing bureaucracies of the regions that they were moving into.
But then they begin to quickly integrate with the local regions. Specifically, this is where the stereotype of the Irish cop comes from in American history. They. Quickly took over pretty much all of the government bureaucratic positions specifically the cops and other government bureaucracies in the large urban centers where they were, they were hugely disproportionately represented there.
We even see this today in American politics, where if you look at the Supreme Court, it has been hugely, hugely, hugely, overwhelmingly Catholic, and [00:17:00] I'll add in post, like, just how overwhelmingly Catholic, I think it's like 80 percent Catholic or something.
So as of the last Supreme court for Supreme court justices raised in Catholic families, you had. John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch. And justice, Sonia Sotomayor. That's a 78% Catholic majority in a Supreme court. Within a country that only had the Catholic population of 20%.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely wild. And so they were sort of like bureaucratic specialists.
And it led to the culture that they were building in New England to have an incredible, this Yankee culture to have an incredible trust of bureaucracies and respect for bureaucratic traditions. So if you look at most of the other cultural groups, they would have looked down on, for example, lawyers especially wealthy lawyers.
So, and you see this in my family history. Remember I [00:18:00] read that story about my ancestor who was like really into getting educated and everything like that. Well, he always called himself, he said, well, I'm a a bacon and eggs lawyer. You know, he never wanted people to know that he wasn't a subsistence lawyer.
liver, that he lived on a subsistence lifestyle, but he was a lawyer. And we'll get into why the backwoods people wanted to be seen as living on a subsistence lifestyle and not accumulating capital. Because that was very important to their cultural tradition. But within the Catholic culture, no, this wasn't true.
You know, being a lawyer, being a judge, being a police officer, these were all very respected traditions.
This led to Catholics taking on a very unique role in the early. , economic hubs of America when the Catholic immigrant waves came in, because they were much more comfortable taking these sort of bureaucratic positions. Then the Protestants were, they were able to flood local institutions like the police, for example, and build a majority Catholic police force really, really quickly after their immigration waves came in.
And it was actually the rise [00:19:00] of the majority Catholic police force that led to the fall of the mob. , because there wasn't a need for an external, , bureaucratic., operation to protect the Catholics. When the Catholics controlled the police force, this is where you get that like stereotypical police officer's name of Murphy. You know,
But, but it wasn't just the police force.
It was also the legal system. It was also the governing bureaucracy. It was every bureaucratic layer became majority Catholic about a generation and a half after the first major Catholic immigration waves.
Malcolm Collins: And so it moved the Yankee culture into being a much more pro bureaucratic culture. But it also made it a culture that fundamentally, I think, didn't understand some of the things, like, the older parts of American culture.
So one of the things recently, like, if you talk about, like, the gay marriage stuff and like, oh, gays shouldn't be allowed to get married in the United States. And I've, I've noticed disproportionately it's the Catholic conservatives who push this. Which, from an [00:20:00] actual American perspective, is a very queer thing to be pushing because some religions within America do believe that gays can get married.
And if you are pushing that, then you are saying that the government should have the ability to choose how the Christian Bible should be interpreted. And this was actually one of the things that led to the revolution. So leading up to the revolution, one of the really like core evil things that the British government did is they, um, said that the Presbyterian.
the Calvinist ministers could not marry people. And they sent over Anglican ministers to marry people saying that we should have control over who marries and who doesn't marry and the traditions within which they marry. And this too, you know, the traditional American system was seen as horrifying.
So, the, the, during, during the revolution, I think a lot of people misunderstand the revolution's framing. So from the perspective of most of the revolutionaries, the way it's taught in school today, I think, to be more inclusive, is that they were mostly annoyed about just the [00:21:00] taxes that they were under, but that's not really the way most of the revolutionaries thought about it.
Most of the revolutionaries were like, Religious extremists, Calvinists, 70 percent of the white population in America. This is according to the heritage foundation, which is, you know, a core conservative organization were Calvinists during the American revolution and they solve the British Anglicans who were trying to impose their religious system on them as a Catholic light or a Catholic light group.
Trying to force them to live a more Catholic lifestyle. Still
Simone Collins: very much establishment because the whole thing is, you know, let me interpret for myself or let my community interpret for themselves without me.
Malcolm Collins: It wasn't just that it was the way that the Anglican, the Anglican church is very Catholic in a lot of its traditions.
And so they saw and, and even its belief system, because that's what, I mean, When Henry VIII, Henry VIII didn't really want to get rid of all of the great ceremony of the church, he liked all that stuff. He liked the hierarchy, he liked the ceremony, he just felt he had a duty [00:22:00] to his people to produce an error and he felt like due to church politics he wasn't able to do that.
He never really wanted to move away from the Catholic vibe, he wasn't ever really sold on the Puritan ideal of like, we need to reinvent the wheel. And because of that, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, always very much looked Catholic from the perspective of the, the Protestant immigrants. And so when they were fighting the revolution, to many of them, this was a holy religious war against a group that they saw as representing sort of the devil or the Antichrist.
And so, there was a huge anti, and this is where this anti Catholic sentiment came from. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but it's important to understand how strong it was in the early colonies. And so, so the Yankees then came and then, and this is also why many of the Catholics settled in the same areas and settled in this New England area, because that's where the ports were that they were dropping off the immigrants.
And when the immigrants came into those ports, If they moved too far from [00:23:00] these New England ports for the immigrants, the Ellis Island and stuff like that, where they were coming in, they would face an extreme amount of discrimination, possibly get killed. As I mentioned, you know, the KKK and the lynch mobs and stuff like that, there was a very strong motivation to not move from these ports of entry, which is why you have such a Catholic concentration in America.
And then here I'll put a, a map here on screen of where the Catholics actually live in America. . And and so I think that that is a fundamental thing he got wrong. , the Puritan ideology, which was mostly built around a hatred of authority, a hatred of bureaucracy a hatred of, yeah, they wanted to create utopian experiments, but it is very important that these utopian experiments were always meant to be small scale towns that would do things in different ways.
You can think of them very similar to the way we see things is, is that Puritan experiments, the different towns would run things in different ways. And those ways, like the way that the towns were different was very important. You would then go live in the town that, or follow the preacher that was most affiliated with your way of doing things.
Yes, it [00:24:00] was a city on a hill, but it was a city on the hill that was downstream of these influencer like early churches that led to the Great Awakening. It was not downstream of the government bureaucracy. They did not have trust in the government bureaucracy one iota, and you see this in the early days as well.
As you look at their writings and stuff like that. That trust did not descend from their utopian vision. It stemmed from the Catholic utopian visions. And another change that happened with the Yankee ideology that came with the Catholics is the Puritan ethical systems was always very consequential.
It was sort of like trying to find out why God laid the rules down that he laid and then follow those rules. The Catholic system was much more deontological. You know, help the poor don't have abortions and be a good people in this set of rules, which was also not the way many other early American cultures understood ethical systems and was brought by the Catholics and then became an important framing of reference [00:25:00] for the modern democratic party.
So, so that's important to note as well as this shift to this deontological ethical system, which was brought by the Catholics and a shift towards, I'd say, sort of government services, which they were much more comfortable with because the church had been offering them historically. Yeah, it sort of just
Simone Collins: switched from the church offering them to the government offering them.
But if the government's controlled by Catholics, who cares? It's still, yeah, the government's
Malcolm Collins: controlled by
Simone Collins: Catholics
Malcolm Collins: and get
Simone Collins: the taxpayers to tie it in addition to the Catholics, which is better, I guess.
Another huge difference between the Catholics and the other founding groups of America is that they were much, much less ideologically pluralistic. , whereas, you know, you're the, the Quakers and the Puritans Who both were pretty rigidly pluralistic, and then even the Backwoods people while they would fight with the native Americans. And we'll go into this a lot more in the next episode. They didn't really look down on them in the same way and that they would often marry them. They would often adopt their [00:26:00] customs. , the Catholic immigrant group was. Anti pluralistic in the extreme. If you look at the Catholic cultural centers in America, they were often the areas where we were most likely to have race riots in a historic basis. I mean, a couple of famous ones are the Boston burning crisis, , or the Boston draft riot. That occurred during the civil war.
Because there were many Southern sympathizers in Boston during the war. As to why the Catholic population with so much less pluralistic, culturally speaking than the other populations, there are two core reasons. One, if you are a discriminated group, you are always going to be more kind of racist than non discriminated groups. You even see this in our society where you have this moral license to act more racist.
If you are among a discriminated population.
Harrison, why haven't you called? You know how I worry. I'm giving it up, Maggie. I'm quitting the force. It seems like every time we frame a rich black guy, he's back out on the [00:27:00] streets in no time. Not another word of that kind of talk, Harrison Yates. I know you. Framing rich black men for crimes they didn't commit is in your blood.
Wiping that rich, smug smile off their faces is the only thing that puts a smile on yours. You're a good cop, Harrison Yates. You don't have to question that, and you're a good wife, Maggie. Where are you going? I think I've got a little more work to do.
and as to why populations that are at the top of society are more likely to be pluralistic it's because they've already won in a pluralistic system. So they feel that well, if you don't put any more rules, all in will continue to win.
Whereas people who are at the bottom of an existing system are like, well, if you added some more rules in our group might end up doing better. So let's do that. Let's rig things in our favor. , the plugin. Elysium is always the path favored by any group that thinks that they can naturally out-compete other groups. But in addition to that, you also just had, you know, the, the syllabus of errors, for [00:28:00] example, from Pope Pius. With the Knights, , which that essentially Catholics should try to take control of whatever country they're living in and make it a Catholic. , state. Theocratic state. , it is in the Catholic tradition to attempt to use the faith, to control a government, and then use the government to legislate morality. Where that was never really true of the Protestant traditions.
They believe that you could set up individual. , towns that might legislate morality, but the moral ideas of one town are going to be very different than the moral idea of another town. So you wouldn't want the town next door legislating your morality because you have this decentralized nature of the religion. Whereas the Catholic tradition was historically very, very centralized.
So it made sense to centralize the way the government with legislating morality. Of these reasons. One thing you will note that it is only this last one. That applies to all Catholics rather than just the discriminated American Catholic groups. And this is why in other countries, [00:29:00] Catholic populations are much more pluralistic than the early Catholic American immigrants.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is another thing. And again, I, I should know, like, I have nothing against the Catholics just culturally.
It's sort of, because we are just in for the puritan culture. It's like oil and water for us. And one thing I was thinking about is how much of an easier time, like a huge portion of our friend group is Latin American immigrants. Which I think is another thing that people really is how similar the current Latin American immigrants are dispositionally.
To the Irish when they first immigrated or to the Italians when they first immigrated, very, very similar cultural systems. And it, it can be hidden when we talk about Latin American immigrants. They are one step removed Spanish immigrants. Okay. They are from Southern Europe, you know, just like the Italian immigrant waves were.
Yes. There's some native American DNA in them, but in, in, I think in the majority of cases, it's a minority. Yeah. Mostly Spanish, Portuguese immigrant group.
When I Google this, I get answers between 60% and 80%. So it is the [00:30:00] majority. And I point this out, not because like European DNA hits. Better or something like that, but just culturally speaking, , these individuals are really not that different from the Italian immigration wave, which was just another wave of Southern European immigrants who were majority Catholic coming into the United States. The thing that is different is not the nature of this immigrant wave, but the nature of America now, E all the social services that we offer as a country, you cannot offer social services. To immigrants and have porous borders. That's just stupid.
Because that's going to disproportionately select for the least productive immigrants.
Malcolm Collins: And so, a lot of people can one forget that. But two they, they can forget how similar they were to these early waves. And it's like, why do I, why do I have so many more friends in this group?
And I think it's because. When I talk with them, they know that their value systems aren't American. And they're like, okay with that. They're like, Oh, well, you know, maybe we can adopt to a more American system or learn about the American system and learn about how to make our value systems sort of [00:31:00] align with the American value system.
Whereas these older, because there's been so much sort of, you know, cultural brainwashing to, to try to integrate the Catholic population, which I appreciate, you know, like Columbus Day and stuff like that, that was created to integrate this discriminated population to make an Italian one of the like founding American forefathers, because there, there weren't really any important American forefathers.
There were a few like random ones, but not really. So they had to go, Oh, Columbus, that's the American Catholic you know, forefather. But they now like, I'll talk to them. I'll be like, well, these are American conservative values. I'll be like, those are not American conservative values. Those are Catholic values that you brought over in one of the immigrant waves.
And, and some parts of the conservative party have gotten confused about value sets and they'll start spouting value sets. And I'm like, no, that's a Catholic thing. And this is, this is where you've gotten sort of two groups of Catholics in American politics now which is the, the core group, which moved to sort of the Democrat faction.
And then the more extreme religious group which is sort of very deontologically ethical. And has moved into [00:32:00] the, uh, conservative bureaucracy, and that's where they played a huge role in shaping America as well. The, while Catholics make up the minority of the conservative party, right, and the minority of Catholics are conservatives they were the only faction within the conservative party that could really stand out.
Stomach staffing bureaucratic positions the only other group that really could, and is a vast minority of Americans, and I'll add the statistic here, is Mormons.
Mormons makeup only 1.2% of the American population, which is why they alone cannot staff the conservative bureaucracy.
Malcolm Collins: Basically of the conservative political alliance, the only true groups that could really suck up and stomach listening to an incompetent bureaucratic authority were the Catholics and the Mormons, because they were used to that within their church structures.
I mean, so they make up a huge amount of the conservative, like, intellectual factor. And the conservative bureaucratic machinery which shapes in the way that, that sort of policies filter through that machinery, a lot of conservative [00:33:00] policy. Um, so that's also really important in terms of how they, they, they shaped American history through the way that they affected that.
Simone Collins: Yeah. You've, you've been pretty organized with this. So I'm trying to think, and you surprised me with some interesting facts too. I would just, I guess, like your thoughts on like the implications of what this means for the future of both the Republican and Democrat party and where do you think Catholics are going to go?
Also, do you think that their influence is on the rise or do you think it's going to decline given current Catholic birth rates?
Malcolm Collins: So Catholic's influence is definitely both on the rise and in the decline, right? I feel
Simone Collins: like there's an argument for both.
Malcolm Collins: No, there's two different Catholic factions or there's a number of different Catholic factions.
And we'll talk about the ones that are going to rise and the ones that are going to fall apart. First, the one that is the, Just been absolutely murdered recently. It used to be that the bureaucratic apparatus of both the conservatives and the Democrats was mostly Catholic run. But the super virus that we talk about, the urban monoculture, this sort of mimetic [00:34:00] virus has specialized at spreading within bureaucracies and.
Absolutely annihilated the progressive leaning Catholic church. It is torn through it, you know, led to huge amounts of deconversions led to huge amounts of like culturally moving away from what was a traditionally Catholic value system, traditional Catholic beliefs. And so they're basically Catholics in name only at this point.
The ones who stayed within the bureaucratic apparatus of the democratic party. And. And they've also become incredibly low fertility even lower fertility. As we've mentioned, the average Catholic in America that was born in America, not that immigrated is lower fertility than the average American.
So they just got hit really hard by the urban monoculture much harder than other groups because they were bureaucratic specialists. And then another group comes in. Pac Manning the the bureaucracy and unfortunately it ate them. Then you have the deontological Catholics that had historically been really, like, like, like, super strongly deontological Catholics, like, this is what's [00:35:00] true.
Uh, And the deontologists of all groups, we've talked about this in another episode, of the Mormons, the Catholics, all of them. ended up losing their positions of power because they have been unov to motivate intergenerational faith. They are much more likely to deconvert than the consequentialist of the various religious systems.
Mm-Hmm. , who are actually like actively having a theological conversation instead of like, this is how I aesthetically be a Catholic. This is how, and we saw this within the Mormon community as well, which had a large deontological faction was like a, you know, I think the classic version of this is girl defined, which is now, you know.
In the process of deconversion her husband's in the process of Deconversion and Minnie Science Point to, you know, one of them being in the process of Deconversion, which I think shows, you know, it's, it's very bad at intergenerationally keeping people involved in this age of the internet. And it also is unable to motivate a high fertility rate as we've just seen in the data.
And, and, and as we've anecdotally seen interviewing fans and stuff like that, it seems that the Mormons that are actually staying in their religion are staying firing their [00:36:00] religion and are still high fertility and. With the Catholics are moving to this more consequentialist understanding of their religion which leads to a more active and living discussion of the religious text that doesn't just say, well, this is the way we do it because this is the way we've always done it.
It's more like, well, what did God intend by this? What did God intend by this? How can we do this better? Because when you have that, you're able to update much faster and you're able to have better explanations to your kids for why you do things. That the urban monoculture disagrees with. So I actually think that this new faction of Catholics that we've seen sort of bubbling up and becoming very lively within the conservative space which is the new wave, conservative, intellectual Catholics.
I think that's the faction that's going to do really well. And you've seen them like create these all Catholic towns and everything like that. And there are a group of Catholics that I fully align with. Like when I talk with them, I have no trouble understanding them. I have no trouble talking to them.
When I talk with the deontological Catholic faction. They're the way that they logically structure their arguments is so foreign to me. [00:37:00] Even if I like them as people and everything like that, I genuinely, there, there isn't a lot of inter interpretability between the way I logically structure my ideas and the way they logically structure their ideas.
Don't you know about like the doctrine of the body and, and that shows why b*******s are bad. And that shows why IVF is bad. And I'm like what, what, who, who wrote this? Like it's somebody in the 1700s. And I'm like,
Simone Collins: It's so unmoored from the way that you relate to religion.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah there's much more respect for antiquity as being a, a, a sign of truth, like if something has long been, and it's interesting, this, this respect for antiquity within the Catholic, like, intellectuals I talk to, and this is another interesting thing the Catholics brought, is the Protestants generally, the early ways of the Protestants really had no respect for the non Christian intellectuals, historically speaking.
Whereas the Catholics have had a deep respect for people like Aristotle, people like Plato. Yeah. Like they really [00:38:00] cared about the classic intellectuals. And so they Well, and they also did
Simone Collins: so much to integrate other traditions and, and Partially an effort to integrate them into the Catholic fold to say, Hey, we'll just bring in your holidays.
We'll figure out a way to make this Catholic and to accommodate, whereas more Protestant religions, especially more Calvinistic religions with limited atonement, or like, I'm not going to like you, I'm not going to try to bring you in like, no. Not a good thing. Much more isolationist.
Malcolm Collins: The argument that a lot of our holidays are descended from pagan holidays is mostly fallacious.
And we'll likely do episodes on the various holidays about why it's fallacious that these are not actually mostly Christian holidays. They may have taken some elements from earlier holidays, but Catholics did genuinely adopt a lot of I mean, Pagan, I think is a loaded word. But a lot of ideas that came [00:39:00] from non Christian thinkers and allowed those ideas, I think, to the benefit of our society to percolate into the educated life of our society, because the way that the Catholic group related to education was very different than the way the Protestant group related to education.
Both groups valued education. Like that was part of the social status that you would have within various, no, not all Protestant groups valued education. When we talk more about the other early American groups, not all of them valued education. But some of them did like the Puritans heavily valued education.
What did that mean to a Puritan? You know, that meant a consequentialist form of education, education that allowed you to do things in the world. What did education mean in terms of the Catholic value hierarchy? It was, you've got to know all the rules. This is why they were so good at like. Law and stuff like that, and why they ended up dominating the profession.
You had to know all of the ancient thinkers, you needed to know all of the ancient writers, you needed to know all of the famous paintings, you needed to know it is sort of like a [00:40:00] study of the classics, really, right, where we're like, really, what the Catholics meant by education and Engineering and bible memorization.
And what are the latest like biblical theories and metaphysical theories is what the Puritans meant by education. And these are two completely different understandings of education. And I think that the country has been better for both of them existing. Like I'm not the type of guy who would come in and say, like, we need to cancel the humanities, right?
Like, I think that there is some utility in some people specializing in them. Right? Like, so this is me talking about a group that is very culturally different in what it values for me. But it brought a lot of that in and it brought a lot of that into New England.
That's another thing that the, the Yankee culture has that many other American cultures don't, which is a value of the high arts. It's IE you know, orchestra and art museums and you know, the classical paintings and sculptures and artists, you know, all this pagan stuff. [00:41:00] And I think that a lot of, if, if the large Catholic immigrant ways hadn't come to America, I think that generally as Americans, we'd see that stuff was the same disdain that many of our Puritan ancestors did.
If, if, if you come from one of those Puritan groups and so, they began to elevate those arts. And I also think that that is why you see those arts being more practiced and more culturally lauded. In the areas where you had more Catholic immigrant ways and specifically was in Yankee culture, which really values the high arts much more than other American cultures.
I think it also explains as we're having this new political realignment in America where the greater Appalachian cultural group is like a key player in this new political alignment in America is it has moved to become represented
Simone Collins: by JD Vance. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, it was also where I grew up in Texas, you know, I'm in rural Texas and JD Vance represents it and everything like that has a, but JD Vance, remember, converted to Catholicism which I think is because, you know, so we can talk [00:42:00] about why in a different episode but the The, the greater Appalachian cultural group always had a great, even more than the Puritans did, disdain for the high arts.
And they specifically were known for people who interacted with them as having an unusual amount of celebration with like the low arts. Like they would party and everything like that a lot. Like they, they, they liked enjoying their lives, but they knew that that enjoyment was a sin. The enjoyment that came from drinking and jigging and all of the Fiddling and everything like that.
They were like, yeah, unlike the Puritans, they were like, yeah, this is a sin, but like, it's fun and we're humans. So whatever. Right. We, we just recognize it as a sin. Whereas and so it led to them because they didn't distinguish between different types of arts. Whereas I think within the deontological ethical system that the Catholics had that sort of entertainment is much more sinful than the that you get from.
going to an orchestra or the entertainment that you get from going to an art museum. Whereas they would actually see those forms of [00:43:00] entertainment as being even more sinful because you're combining sin and pride, like regular sin. And then in addition to that pride and so, they always look to like low culture forms of entertainment.
And I think that this is why, and I think that this is very odd to people is how much of Trump's base is really into what I would call low culture, like from Warhammer, like God, emperor Trump. Like all of the anime memes for Trump, all of the 4chan for Trump and stuff like that. This like rebellious, intentionally low culture group.
Why are they moving to Trump? It is because they are coming from this greater Appalachian cultural group that always elevated low culture. And that you're seeing this clash with the historically Catholic ideas around like what is sin and what is not sin, right? Which is, which is really interesting to me.
This 11 cultures or nations within America concept, I think also much better helps understand the current political realignment in America. Here. I have put a map on the [00:44:00] screen that shows each of them at colored by how they voted in the last election cycle. How far red or blue they are? And what you will notice is Trump's core, core, core base.
It's not the deep south.
It's not the far west. It's greater Appalachian. Greater appellation is, and this is, you know, my people, , the furthest pro-Trump group. These are the descendants. , of the, , uncouth violent,
Backwoods people who are very different than like the deep south that used to be the GOP inks core base. , another really interesting thing to people is Yankee them is actually one of the least far democratic factions with the core democratic factions actually being the left coast.
And as well as the Tidewater basin, , with the recent Hispanic immigrant. Regions of the United States being far, far, far more blue than the far [00:45:00] Northeast of the United States.
I think what also might surprise people is that the left coast is more blue than the new Netherlands area or the New York area.
So the far. , Western coast of the United States is even more blue than the more blue. , New York area by, by a pretty significant margin.
Malcolm Collins: Did you have any final thoughts on this Simone?
Simone Collins: Only that I loved getting your take on this. When I. Was going through the book with you in our long car ride. I was not having these thoughts. And I just love that you add a whole new layer to the things that even I'm consuming. So thanks.
Malcolm Collins: He, I found it so interesting in the book that he was like, Oh yes, you have a cultural continuity from the Puritans until today.
And I was like, you are underestimating the size. If you look at the immigrant way, it's like, remember I was talking like, how do you get like 50 percent Catholic population in these regions? Well, you just have to look at the immigrant waves. At certain times in cities like Boston, 37 percent of the population was a first generation Catholic immigrant.
Like huge chunks. Imagine if one of [00:46:00] our major cities in the U S right now with that percentage, first generation immigrant people would like, like these were immigrant waves that in terms of their effects on the local areas, absolutely dwarfed what we are dealing with today from Latin America, which by the way, I would note.
is a very normal Catholic immigrant wave. Um, And, and people can be like, well, they're Democrats. It's like the Catholic um, and they're like, but, but, but they um, they have different values than us. The Catholic immigrant waves always had different, they bring organized crime. The Catholic immigrant waves always bring organized crime.
And, and it is interesting to me that you have these like performative individuals like Nick Fuentes, who was like, I hate the immigrant waves. And I'm like, how can you do that? These are like trad casts. Like, what, what are you talking about? And they're going to end up, I think, sorting out. Now this is an interesting thing.
I think that, so here's another question people can ask. They say, will the living versions of the Catholic tradition end up siding more with the progressive faction or more with the conservative [00:47:00] faction? As the urban monoculture begins to clean out the people who it was able to infect through mimetic sterilization.
I think after it cleans out, I think that they are again going to make up the core of the progressive faction. Totally agree. That has always been the idea that the government should enforce a value system. That's always been the progressive ideology. The idea that the government should provide services to the poor and the needy.
That's always been Catholic and progressive ideology. The idea that bureaucracies are the best way to solve things and that authority should be decided by people who spent their entire life studying a subject. Like it aligns very closely. The only reason why conservatives were ever able to peel off any Catholic faction was because of the anti abortion thing.
That was it. That was the only thing that we ever had to get in the Catholics. They culturally, there is just no alignment there. And I don't have a problem with that. You know, I think the country is better for having a two party system. Do I think our country would be better if we lived under a Republican dictatorship?
Absolutely not. So [00:48:00] long as the parties can both play fair, which unfortunately we might be moving out of that system. And that really scares me. But I, I think that people should be like, yes, I have, Criticisms of a cultural group because they are different from, right? Like when I criticize Catholics, I'm criticizing them because they are different from me, not because they are worse for me.
Okay. But of course. When I'm judging the morality of an action or like, should you approach things this way or should you approach it this way, I'm going to approach it using the measuring stack of my own cultural perspective, which is going to be very different than their cultural perspective.
Simone Collins: Exactly.
Malcolm Collins: That's totally fine. I, I should be able to have these types of ideas and say, well, they do things in this way and my culture doesn't, you know, shames doing things this way for X historical reason. Right. You know, which we'll get into in another episode as to why, The backwoods culture ended up merging with the Puritan culture and why it became so, well, it didn't really end up merging.
They basically formed a caste system where you had a Puritan upper class and most of their population, because they really didn't like running for elected positions [00:49:00] as much as other groups. So they typically use like the educated Puritan group to run things. And the two groups basically completely merged into each other over, over time.
American history. Because they were both Calvinists anyway. And so to understand why did they hate high culture so much, I think is really interesting. Why do they value the things they value is really interesting. And why did they survive while the traditional Puritan groups didn't survive?
That's also really interesting. As to why the, the Catholic survived this is also an interesting question. I think it was because while they had this strict deontological ethical system, they also understood that they would break it. And they had a system for dealing was when they broke it confession, which I think is like one of the most genius pieces of social technology.
Anyone is
Simone Collins: like, it creates a market failure and the solution. all in its own little system that sort of just generates its own flywheel of energy as it moves forward. What do you
Malcolm Collins: mean
Simone Collins: by that? I don't understand the market. Sending in confession. But what's the market failure it's creating? It's creating a bunch of deontological [00:50:00] rules that you're going to break.
Oh yeah, so it
Malcolm Collins: creates all these rules, but then you break them because you go out drinking, I mean.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it makes, it makes the impossible to follow standards, and then it creates a solution for when you break those standards, and it just, it, like I'm saying, it creates this flywheel, it creates this economy, that propels the church forward.
Instead of just being like
Malcolm Collins: the backwoods people, which were like well, we have these impossible standards, which are even stricter, but like, we also know that humanity is wretched and we must learn to accept our wretchedness. Where the Puritans were like, humanity is wretched and we should strive to be as perfect as we can.
Whereas in the Catholic, it was like, you should strive to be kind of perfect, like generally good, but like also you're going to sin. So go to confession. Which is maybe, maybe an interesting sort of in between these two, these two other perspectives on morality. And I think people see us in, in our perspective on morality really heavily colored by this backwoods cultures, moral systems.
When they see us be like, Oh, you have all these super strict moral values, but we're also like, yeah, but you know, you're [00:51:00] going to send, so let's party. As long as it doesn't distract from your ability to be a good person in terms of your, your efficacy as a human.
Okay, well the final thing I'd note here, that something that became part of the Yankee cultural system, That people might be underestimating is I actually think that downstream of this Catholic cultural group became the Yankee love of sports and baseball and, and sports more broadly, which is to say, if you look at Catholic majority countries and you look at the places that are, you know, have the, the craziest soccer fans and stuff like that I think it has to do with the way that they relate to entertainment.
Whereas the Puritan cultural groups mostly saw sports as as sinful as like gay sex, for instance. The, the Catholics didn't. They sort of had these carve outs of this isn't unethical. And so those are the things they do. Anyway, love you to Desimone. I'm going to go find out who's ringing our doorbell and get the kids.
Simone Collins: I love
Malcolm Collins: you too, Mom. Do you want me to go get them immediately?
Simone Collins: Give me a chance to do some diaper change cleanup. All right. Love you. Bye. Love you, too What should I make for [00:52:00] dinner?
Malcolm Collins: No, no yesterdays.
Simone Collins: Ah with white rice. Do you want fried rice or plain white rice? Oh fried rice if you don't mind making it plain without added vegetables, but with shallots, right?
I'll wing it
Malcolm Collins: Octavian, you farted. .
Octavian: Yes. That was that. So silly.
Malcolm Collins: I dunno. It's silly. That is gross. . So, so I got a, I got a question for you, Octavian. Do you, what do you think of Catholics?
Octavian: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Catholics are Yes. For you?
Octavian: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Are they the best people?
Octavian: Yes
Malcolm Collins: they are.
Octavian: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Are you gonna become a Catholic when you grow up?
Wait, you gotta give it what? Octavian. Here's, here's a question I have for you. What do you think that sports are evil?
Octavian: No. [00:53:00]
Malcolm Collins: Okay. What's evil?
Octavian: This and my bad guys are evil boy.
Malcolm Collins: Bad guys are evil. What are some of the things that bad guys do?
Octavian: They do bad stuff.
Malcolm Collins: Like what do they do that's bad?
Octavian: They take over the city.
Malcolm Collins: They take over the city?
Octavian: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Do you want to take over the city one day?
Octavian: No.
Malcolm Collins: You don't want to take over the city? Do you want to take over the world?
You're not going to take over the world? Can you promise them you won't take over the world?
Octavian: I promise I will not take over the world.
Malcolm Collins: What did you bring to the house today? What's in the package?
Octavian: So, What's in the package is a stinky teddy bear, so I need daddy to clean it.
Dad. So I just got my sinky teddy bear in the box, but I did, I made daddy to clean it.
Malcolm Collins: Is he your friend?
Octavian: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Is the teddy bear a catholic?[00:54:00]
Octavian: Well, he's dirty, so yes.
Malcolm Collins: Wait, what?
Octavian: Well, if he's dirty, then no. If he's clean, then yes. If my teddy's clean, then yes. Or if my teddy's dirty, then no.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so he stops being a Catholic when he's dirty?
Octavian: There's dirty,
Malcolm Collins: but when he when he when you get the dirt off then he's a Catholic because Catholics are clean, right?
Octavian: Yes And kind of
Malcolm Collins: much better.
Octavian: Hey, can you clean this for me?
Malcolm Collins: That was about to get very problematic, Octavian.
Octavian: Oh,
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this in-depth video, Malcolm and Simone Collins present a comprehensive overview of the "New Right" political movement, its origins, and its key policy positions. As Simone runs for office in Pennsylvania, the couple outlines their vision for a pragmatic, family-oriented, and anti-bureaucratic approach to governance. They discuss a wide range of topics including fiscal policy, social issues, immigration, foreign policy, and environmentalism, offering a fresh perspective on conservative values in the modern era.
Key topics covered:
* The emergence of the New Right and its differences from traditional conservatism
* Pragmatic, evidence-based fiscal policies
* Cultural sovereignty and family rights
* Immigration reform focusing on high-skilled workers
* America First foreign policy with strategic interventions
* Environmental conservation balanced with economic needs
* Critique of progressive policies and bureaucratic bloat
* The importance of meritocracy and fighting discrimination
Whether you're a political enthusiast, a concerned citizen, or simply curious about emerging conservative ideologies, this video provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of American politics.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I think this new political alliance of the tech entrepreneurs with the Americans who are just tired of being around Makes a lot of sense when it comes to stuff like this.
Okay. Let's build new systems. Let's build better systems. We don't need to do things the way they've always been done
Simone Collins: what progressivism is now is, is like a bureaucratic virus. And because these , organizations are so large. They were taken over by this virus, which, which presents itself as progressive. And so they turned left.
Malcolm Collins: And when you talk about the inefficiencies that this has gotten, I think a lot of people don't realize how big this is.
You know, you look at something like the case of putting the suicide netting on the golden gate bridge, which ended up costing. About a third the cost even in cash adjusted dollars of the original construction of the bridge itself.
. When, when we talk about the collapse of our school system, we see as we pour more money into the school system, it's just increasing the size of the bureaucracy.
I'm going to be putting some graphs on screen here so you can see this.
Simone Collins: Well, student outcomes are not improving. [00:01:00] And
Malcolm Collins: their mental health is going haywire with a recent
CDC study showing one in four school aged girls had a plan to kill themselves on any given year, not over the course of their entire adolescence.
And it reported one in ten attempts to unalive oneselves from students. every single year. This stuff needs massive and immediate reform. So let's go in to our actual policy positions
would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you. You are running for office in Pennsylvania right now. And this episode is meant to collate many of our Evolving political beliefs into one video that we can use as an ad for this campaign cycle, but also for our regular watchers to catch up or have a one place to see everything that they can share with other people and our political beliefs Well, they kind [00:02:00] of matter because something that's been coming up more and more in other videos we've been doing is this concept of the new right, a new political faction forming within the right.
And at first I thought that our views were just sort of a weird form of right wing beliefs. Then I put in the names of other figures that are associated with this new right, like Elon and Peter Thiel and Chamath and Vivek and David Sacks and Marc Andreessen. And JD Vance, the recently appointed VP for Trump.
And I asked , what are the unifying political beliefs between these people? And it basically spit out. Our political belief system to a T. And then I was like, well, then what I'd really like to do with this video is one explain , in short, we've done longer videos that go into a lot more detail on this, how the new right emerged, then also give a political philosophy, not just like a list of.
These are the things we believe, [00:03:00] but a larger philosophy around why we believe these things.
Simone Collins: I like it.
Malcolm Collins: And so people know you can be like, well, the Simone's running or Malcolm's running. It doesn't really matter. We do everything together. We run all our companies together. We believe in gender equality.
Just not the way feminists talk about it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and honestly, as, as you can see, Malcolm is, is the talker, the way we work, Malcolm. Malcolm is the outbound high risk high reward faces the public, you know, strategy guy and I'm execution. So that's why you're going to see him talk more. I mean, I think I get s**t done.
Malcolm Collins: It's sort of a a communist approach to putting together a family. You could say from each, according to their ability to each, according to their needs.
Simone Collins: All of our chickens are named after communists.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, because that's what always happens to communists at the end of the day is the, the. But what I mean in the family context, a, a communist family structure is to say [00:04:00] that we split tasks based on our ability and our needs while understanding that men and women are on average different and therefore Some tasks are going to be easier for a woman or dispositionally more favorable for a woman and some tasks are going to be easier for a man.
Simone Collins: Well, also logistically, like, for example, it's a lot easier to get elected as a woman than it is as a man. So who do we run? This one!
Malcolm Collins: Exactly! In this world of DEI! So let's start with How the new right emerged. And this will be a summary of some stuff we've gone over in other videos, but broadly speaking in the nineties there was a force that we call GOP Inc.
This is what the Republican party was. It was an alliance of two broad factions, one theocratic faction that was interested in legislating morality, i. e. enforcing people to conform to their view of what was moral through legislation like. You know, banning gay marriage, for example and then an alliance of them [00:05:00] and big business, as well as blue bloods, because big business and blue bloods are usually the same group.
Over time, big business moved to the left, as did intergenerational wealth and the theocrats stopped being able to get anything done. At that point in history, Trump came along. Trump inspired an entirely new base that the Republicans hadn't classically appealed to, which was disenfranchised Americans.
Americans who felt they were getting the raw deal and wanted to tear down parts of the system and try to build something new that kind of worked. Hence, drain the swamp. Hence, Drain the Swamp, but the new right hadn't really emerged yet with Trump because when Trump took this position, the types of people, like I mentioned before, like Elon and Shemmass and Vivek and David Sachs you know, they were still, and even us you know, we were still and actually even Trump's current running mate, we're still in trouble.
J. D. Vance, yeah,
Simone Collins: J. D. Vance was quite the never Trumper.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, but as time went on, the left move [00:06:00] further and further left. They begin to sort of divide our society into an ethnic caste system that believed some humans were more deserving of human dignity than other humans. For example, was the CDC partially distributing COVID vaccines based on a person's ethnicity instead of based on their need, which is just horrifying to us.
And recently they have moved
Jews to the bottom of this hierarchy. In our mind, making them a little different from Nazis,
Recently a response to one of our videos. Somebody was a bit surprised by this point they were like, oh no, it's only these Zionists. And then I put it out. Well, you know, you look at the surveys, it's 85 to 95% of users Zionists.. It doesn't require much knowledge of Jewish history to know why many Jews would think that for the Jewish people to be safe, they need to have at least one state where they are the majority of the population. But. Outside of that.
The urban monoculture, which the Progressive's push. Is based on the belief system that all economic differences between cultural and ethnic groups [00:07:00] is due entirely to discrimination. Therefore, if there is a group like the Jews that is disproportionately economically successful, yet claims to be the historic victims of discrimination. They must be lying because that is impossible within The urban monocultural perspective.
Malcolm Collins: but they have also overreached and gone against the science in many areas. For example, the gender transition of youth which we will get to when we talk about our social policies.
But this began to push the tech elite. So historically in the nineties, big business was conservative. Entrepreneurial tech elite was progressive. But that has flipped. Now the big business. Went to the other side, the tech elites came to, to our side and it was because as JD Vance, I think very eloquently showed, they actually have a lot in common with America's disenfranchised groups.
So if you take people like the people of rural Appalachia who have this pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality, [00:08:00] Who have this belief in a meritocracy and grittiness and entrepreneurialism. These are all things that were always valued by the entrepreneur class. In addition to that, the entrepreneur class has been very heavily shaped by libertarian philosophy since the crypto boom.
And in addition to that they are very distrustful of large bureaucracies and believe that A lot of the way the government has handled things recently, like the COVID response and it's well, and election cycles has become corrupt and bureaucratic and needs to be reformed.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I would just add that it, it seems that As we have shifted to an age of greater bureaucratic bloat and, and general organizational ossification in general, and just keep in mind the cost of doing anything now in business and government is so much higher because now there are all these layers of management, all these layers of regulation, which add costs, which add personnel, which had departments.
I think that also somehow has to do with The large organizations, you know, the big [00:09:00] dot coms of what used to be a much more scrappy era becoming progressive is that they're starting to align more with sort of progressive bureaucratic government interests. And I feel like. A lot of what people see as progressivism actually isn't that anymore.
It's not really what what people think of when they think of like progressive social policies. It really has to do more with large sprawling bureaucracies and a sort of cancerous growth. I don't know how else to put it. Well, I mean, that's what DEI is. It, it, it, like a cancerous It's not about actual diversity and equality.
It's about an organizational growth that has, has, has Increased in size like a large scale for
Malcolm Collins: replicating idea that prevents the organization's normal immune system from attacking it by saying it's doing something very important, i. e. protecting diversity and inclusion, but it is not. I mean, you can look at recent leaks from things like Disney.
Where we, they had an instance of a half black person not getting the job because they didn't quote [00:10:00] unquote, look black enough. Or the recent leaks from the FAA are not leaks, but like now we know that this is what happened where they built tests that were designed to get more minorities in.
And the way the test did that was by asking questions like, what was your least favorite subject in school and giving you points for saying science or saying, do you take commands from authority? Well, and giving you points for saying, no, you didn't.
So actual black people were not hired for this. If they didn't fit. Stereotypes, it was really black people. Yeah, it
Simone Collins: was, it was only people in a specific association who actually kind of got the answers leaked to them, which is even more corrupt. So I think the really interesting thing about this though, is that it's not that the large companies of before that used to be conservative somehow just became progressive culturally over time.
It's more that what progressivism is now is, is like a bureaucratic virus. And because these organisms, organizations are so [00:11:00] large. They were taken over by this virus, which, which presents itself as progressive. And so they turned left.
Malcolm Collins: And when you talk about the inefficiencies that this has gotten, I think a lot of people don't realize how big this is.
You know, you look at something like the case of putting the suicide netting on the golden gate bridge, which ended up costing. About a third the cost and taking about three times the, , the time even in cash adjusted dollars of the original construction of the bridge itself.
Simone Collins: It's telling, I mean, it's also telling about the mental health of our society. The huge amounts have to be spent just to stop people from hurling themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge
Malcolm Collins: at this time. When, when we talk about the collapse of our school system, we see as we pour more money into the school system, it's just increasing the size of the bureaucracy.
I'm going to be putting some graphs on screen here so you can see this.
Simone Collins: Well, student outcomes are not improving. And
Malcolm Collins: their mental health is going haywire with a recent
CDC study showing one in four school aged girls had a plan to kill themselves on any given [00:12:00] year, not over the course of their entire adolescence.
And it reported one in ten attempts to unalive oneselves from students. every single year. That was horrifying. This stuff needs massive and immediate reform. So let's go in to our actual policy positions and policy positions you sort of see across this group. So in terms of our fiscal policy we have a policy position that historically you and I republicanism, but it seems to just align broadly with the new right or the techno Conservatives, as we are sometimes called and it is what I , broadly would describe as pragmatic evidence based fiscal policy with a heavy distrust of bureaucracies.
Simone Collins: I think I have to emphasize here that evidence based. Policy of any sort is actually incredibly radical as a political concept. So, now come sent me to Cambridge to study technology policy. I literally have a master's degree in it. And the entire [00:13:00] punchline of the entire degree was. Wouldn't it be cool if politicians made evidence based policy decisions?
Oh, ha ha, that will never happen. Let's interview a whole bunch of politicians who tried to make it happen and they got laughed out of office and basically the incentives aren't in place to motivate it. But now there's this faction that's really pushing for it. So one, it seems like a no brainer, but two, this is revolutionary and also really exciting from a political development perspective.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. So what, what does this mean? This means a fiscal policy that is largely Anti bureaucracy, but not just anti government bureaucracy. We are also antagonistic towards large corporate bureaucracies, especially corporate bureaucracies that control the mediums of communication. So if they have natural monopolies in a space like, say, YouTube, or in a space like, say, Twitter, or in a space like, say, Facebook, it does make sense for the government to intervene like that as our founders knew.
That is why when our founders were [00:14:00] building our government, they nationalized the Postal system. Why did they do that? Why? When the phone lines were building out was heavy, heavy, heavy regulation put on them. Because if a company can buy the air between my wife and I and control what the other person is hearing or control most media in the country or something like that, that creates Huge negative incentives in huge incentives for foul play.
And so it makes sense to regulate that. But while we do believe that bureaucracy is bad, this does not mean that we are always against government intervention, as we have just pointed out is trust busting. For example you look at JD Vance and he was for raising the minimum wage. He just was sincere.
He didn't pretend like it wouldn't cause people to lose their jobs. He didn't pretend like it wouldn't put companies out of business. He just considered those in his calculations. Or you can look at policies that we push, like we would push a policy that says that companies should not be able to demand somebody work from the office.
Unless they can prove there is an efficiency gain from [00:15:00] that, that demand. You know, you shouldn't otherwise they should
Simone Collins: be permitted to work remotely, Malcolm saying, because that makes it easier, for example, for parents to be parents.
Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Or if you're talking about things like maternity leave I believe that if a company cannot create a safe environment for a mother to bring her child into the office, they need to pay for her to be with that kid at home.
And if it's not an office environment or an environment where the child can be safe, like a construction site or something like that, that means we need to allow the mother to stay home because, and if you're wondering why would you say something like this, there often are not other solutions for very young children, other than to be with the mother for the first, if you have not dealt with a baby under like 3 months old, it is very, very hard to find care solutions for them.
And it also means that we are open to economic experimentation when we say evidence based. So something like UBI is something that we would be open to, universal basic income.
But we would be open to doing it on a test [00:16:00] basis where it could be used to lower other bureaucracies. So this also applies to how we relate to things like Cash handouts to people who are struggling financially. We are pro cutting back all of the complicated bureaucratic mess and promoting simple cash handouts if, if those can pass along with a cutback of all of the other things.
Because we should be getting money directly into the hands of the citizens and not in the hands of bureaucrats, which, as you saw from that school problem, this is why more money isn't helping with school outcomes, because it's all going to the bureaucrats.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: With AI, we can really fight that now.
Simone Collins: Yeah, basically so many government systems, you know, were developed at a time when We mostly dealt with paper filing systems and snail mail.
Oh, excuse me. And now we live in an age where you can do things so much more efficiently. The really funny thing is, you know, we, we've done a [00:17:00] lot of work in other countries, Malcolm worked in South Korea. We, we have goodness gracious girl. Both we, we run a company In Peru, in addition to the United States, it's funny that in some countries like Peru, which you think of like, you know, their systems cannot be anywhere close to us, you know, sophisticated as the governmental systems in the United States, actually, in many ways, they're way more advanced because they were able to just leapfrog ahead.
You know, they were, they were developing certain systems when tech was way better than when we developed those same systems. So if we just kind of let go of what we started with and Built something a little fresher. It's amazing how much money could be saved, how much time could be saved. So like literally people like, Oh, you can't have improved government services without paying more in taxes.
Totally not true. If you just redesigned some systems, started fresh, you could both lower taxes And get better results, which is, you know, amazing, but also frustrating because no one's doing
Malcolm Collins: it yet. I should point out how easy this can be. So you look at like, when we talk about these [00:18:00] inefficiencies, consider that like recently I was trying to do some business filings on an online platform.
It would not let me submit them on the weekend. What is an online platform? Why did they need to accompany? Business hours. This is because of bureaucracy. Or you consider in it, you know, when she's saying things are so much smoother in Peru, you probably are underestimating how much smoother they are.
You know how I pay my taxes in Peru. I get a catalog that tells me everything that was done was my taxes. The last time I paid with a pie chart and pictures of local improvements. And then it has a little slide that says, my credit card and they're automatically deducted from my bank account. Yeah,
Simone Collins: we're, we're on auto pay.
We don't have to worry about it. Yeah. Whereas in our, in our district in in Pennsylvania we receive a snail mail letter and then have to go to the super janky online system. And we, I think there's a Yahoo address literally for our tax collector if we have questions. Because I literally paid our property taxes today [00:19:00] again.
And I was like, Oh my God. Wow. Okay. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, let's continue here. So the, then, then people are like, okay, I can see how that makes sense. Like, it's actually like, wait, wait. So you just want to be prepped. Like, you're not about like pointlessly defending big organizations that don't have any reason to defend them.
You're, you're not about endless expansion of bureaucracy. You just Want to do what helps the most people that seems that there's got to be a catch there somewhere, right? Because it's just not the way politics has been played historically But I think this new political alliance of the tech entrepreneurs with the Americans who are just tired of being around Makes a lot of sense when it comes to stuff like this.
Okay. Let's build new systems. Let's build better systems. We don't need to do things the way they've always been done because I don't need to worry about big multinationals losing their government contracts.
But let's keep going here. So our [00:20:00] social beliefs,
Simone Collins: yeah, , our overarching philosophy is cultural sovereignty, which is that the government should not be coercing people into living a certain way.
You know, you shouldn't, you shouldn't force families to say, okay, you have to raise your kids in this culture. For example in, in New York, there's been talk of, you know, shutting down various forms of private schooling in some states. It's very difficult to be a homeschooling parent or there's a lot of regulation around it.
So, yeah. And of course, in, in all states, there's a varying report support for school vouchers allowing people to send their kids to private schools and or homeschool their kids with some additional support. So really where we stand is, you know, kids should be able to be educated by their families as those families see fit without any control.
We certainly never want to see ourselves getting to a place where families are in Germany, for example, where you literally cannot. Homeschool your children? And I don't know what would, what would you wanna add to that, Malcolm?
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, the, the framing, the framing that I would [00:21:00] use is we see society right now as being an existential battle between two groups.
If you look back at what progressives we're trying to promote in like the nineties and the eighties, they may have been wrongheaded in some areas, but broadly they wanted more equality. That is no longer what they are pushing for. They are now pushing for what we call the urban monoculture. That's core value proposition is in the moment reduction of pain.
This is where you get things like trigger warnings. Small emotional pains should be avoided at all costs. But it's also where you get really strange decisions that would seem to make no sense at the if you're, if you're looking for something like equality, like why do Fentanyl handouts on the streets that's obviously going to make it harder for people from less advantaged backgrounds to get off drugs and easier for people who are from advantaged backgrounds to get off drugs because they have their family support or why would you like California has removed Certain types of testing in school, you [00:22:00] know, the the rich kids are still going to be able to go to sat prep and everything Like that they're still going to be taking these tests and they're going to be using that to get ahead These things increase inequality or why would you have something like the haze movement the healthy at every size movement?
That you see on university campuses these days and things like fat studies departments that's trying to say We should not tell people it is unhealthy to be fat because that causes, in the moment, emotional pain. We need to fight this. And the urban monoculture is the cultural group that exists across all large urban centers, pretty much everywhere you go the world, whether it is in France or New York or Philadelphia. This cultural group allows people to join it while ostensibly still being members of their birth culture. However, they are not allowed to continue to hold their birth cultures value sets. So if you don't understand what I mean when I say that
if I go across progressive groups, if I ask a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Catholic, or a progressive Jew you know, [00:23:00] what their views are on sexuality, what their views are on human gender roles, what their views are on a husband and wife's roles, what their views are on parental punishment techniques, what their views are on what happens to you You know, after you die, what their views are on the cosmology as a universe, what their views are on our relation to the environment.
I'm gonna get broadly the same answers. They are allowed to keep a few holidays here and there, but broadly speaking, when a person enters the urban monoculture, they have to let go of any genuine cultural differentiation. When I ask. Conservatives of these various religious factions. Those same questions.
I am going to get wildly different answers and we like that. And we like that. What the conservative party has become is an alliance of diverse cultural segments that are trying to protect their Children from the urban monoculture. And here you might be like, Oh, what do you mean? Protect your Children?
Well, the problem is, is that before the 90s, progressives and conservatives had about [00:24:00] the same number of kids. When progressives got consumed by the urban monoculture, which was a genuine cultural shift from promoting equality to mostly trying to fight in the moment, emotional pain what ended up happening was their fertility rate, Absolutely crashed.
And now they can only continue to exist as a culturally relevant faction by converting children from high fertility cultural groups or importing children from high fertility cultural groups. That means that the iterations of progressive culture that more aggressively target people in the age deconvert from their birth culture between 15 and 23.
End up out competing the other iterations and progressive culture begins to do this more and more and more in crazier and crazier ways, specifically through control of the education system and through attempts to control children's entertainment.
The point I am making here. They don't believe that this is some sort of conspiracy masterminded by a shadowy cabal. It's [00:25:00] just that the iterations. Of this incredibly low fertility, urban monoculture that disproportionately targeted youth ended up converting more members than other factions of it.
And thus began to represent more and more of it. It's simple cultural evolution.
Malcolm Collins: This is terrifying to this diverse alliance of conservative families, and I see our primary policy goal in regards to like social agendas is to.
Protect diverse and high fertility families, children's from deconversion, giving the children an opportunity to decide to deconvert when they want to, when they leave the financial support of their parents. But before then, I believe that the rules of the culture are best made by a family. And then people will be like, well, what if it's something, you know, clearly abusive.
And then it's like, where do you draw the line? Like, what about Jewish circumcision? Right. For example, this is key to their religion and yet many other cultural [00:26:00] groups would say that this is child genital mutilation And therefore it should be made illegal in our country
And if you were inclined to believe that government overreach, in terms of parenting practices, isn't that much of a problem. Keep in mind that one in three children in America Has the child protective services case
opened on them.
Malcolm Collins: at the end of the day I think the people who are best able to make decisions about whether a child should be have to undergo some sort of the cultural sacrifice or unusual cultural behavior Technique or parenting technique or tradition are people who have undergone that themselves.
I am okay with, for example, Jews who themselves were circumcised, deciding to after a lifetime of living with that, make that decision for their own kids.
Simone Collins: Yeah, and I think so. So when it comes to like adult issue legislation I think that the bigger policy is. leave this up to people. For example, we are not against gay [00:27:00] marriage.
We are not against you know, sort of legislating how adults live their lives.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and I'd also point out that Trump has really moved in this direction as well. So, you know, if you look at, for example, a lot of people are like, Oh, you really just mean like Christians and stuff like that. But no, you know, you look, Who was, was doing the prayers at, at the RNC just the other day?
That was Hamit Dhillon. That was a Sikh prayer. And people have been like, well, some Republicans got mad that she did a Sikh prayer. Like they were talking about how Nick Fuentes was fuming about it. When was the last time Nick Fuentes was at anything relevant? I don't know, of course he would have to.
I mean, he's, it's his brand, what? Progressives try to choose obscure racists to argue that the conservative party has a racist base. Yet here I will put on screen a poll done by FiveThirtyEight, a mainstream polling organization, showing that until Obama was elected, President, more Democrats than Republicans said they would not vote a black person president.
And you can see by these various graphs I'm putting on screen here that look at different types of racism, [00:28:00] that there really isn't a disproportionately racist Republican base. And there never has been at least not since the seventies or so. And what does this mean? This means that you have been manipulated by a media into believing that far fringe extremists make up any relevant portion of the party.
Simone Collins: Well, and you, I mean, I think anyone can understand why this would happen. You know, we live in an age where outrage drives clicks, where algorithms are driven by whatever gets the most engagement, not whatever is the most reasonable or correct or smart, but by what makes people either really angry or laugh a ton, and of course that means you're going to get crazy extreme views elevated from all sides.
Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, but it's important to note that the crazy extreme views on the right are not being implemented into policy at the crazy, not at all. No views on the left are being implemented into policy and are being taught to children.
Nick. Winters. Isn't teaching your [00:29:00] children. He's not in public schools. He's not even allowed on YouTube. Who is teaching your children who is being paid by the government? To teach your children. What is real? What is make believe? What is socially normative? What is wrong? What is right?
This has been my first year in preschool with a class of my own teaching alongside another queer neurodivergent educator and we have been rocking R2's class.
But our teaching team is shifting, and a new person is being onboarded. Someone with many years of experience. So today at the lunch table, when the topic of gender and genitals came up, one of our students plainly looked up and said, Well, I'm a girl today.
But I know that Teacher Co isn't. No, they're Enby. And the look on the incoming teacher's face was priceless. She was shocked in a good way. [00:30:00] And she just looked around at the two of us and said, This class is incredible, and I am so impressed.
Let me say it again for those in the back row, CRT is not being taught below law school.
Those of you that are against it are being misled. by the media about what CRT and where and when it is taught. My governor has put into place some ridiculous legislation that many governors across the country have put into place, such as
Can't teach critical race theory, so, teachers, in the past,
we've been activists. After this show of last year, we really need to stand up and do what's right for our kids right now. So, this is a call to action, teachers. We've got to stand up and fight for our kids, because this is b******t. Do your students call you by your first name or Mr. or Miss? Great question!
This is actually a classic [00:31:00] question. Here's your answer. Currently my students just call me Desmond or Desi, first name. However, I have been at schools that go by last name. Those schools I go by Teacher Fambrini. I am gender fluid, so I don't go by Mr. or Miss. I go by Teacher because I am a teacher. So Desmond, Desi, or Teacher Fambrini.
I'm starting to get a little emotional looking at the new masks I got for a couple reasons. I've had American flags put up in every classroom.
We're going to have to say the Pledge of Allegiance and I'm not going to be able to talk about basically any of the things that I have on these masks. Hey y'all, let me introduce you to our non binary alpaca. The kids voted on a gender neutral name. Alex was there to help me during the really quiet moments when nobody would talk during virtual learning.
Yes, they were so quiet! But then I also took it as an opportunity to teach my students about how to respect people's pronouns. Did Alex ever get misgendered? Yes. But then it opened up some teachable moments about what to do when that would happen. For [00:32:00] example, Hey, Mr. Vuong, did he just wake up from his nap?
Oh, do you mean did they wake up from their nap? Yeah, they just did. I would apologize quickly, make the correction, and move on. I started off modeling how to correct somebody, and then afterwards my students would correct each other whenever somebody would misgender Alex here. Representation in the classroom matters.
My kids were 5th graders, and they still got a kick out of Alex. Oh yes, and here's Alex's friend, Lincoln the Llama, who goes by pronouns he him. At first, my students thought that he had very feminine features, so they thought that he was a girl. And this is why we should never assume somebody's gender just based on what they look like.
Alright Lincoln, say something. Hello. My students were really surprised how low his voice sounded. Don't assume.
Malcolm Collins: The crazy extreme views on the right are not what your children are being exposed to in elementary school, in middle school.
Why do
Simone Collins: you think that is? By the way?
Malcolm Collins: Why do I think that is? Because they don't actually represent a large pool of people. The crazy extreme views on the left actually represent a large portion of the left's base. I mean, here I'm like showing statistics that show this is true, but let's, let's get into Trump's actual positions because I think a lot of people have been lying [00:33:00] to about what Trump's positions are.
So, a lot of people are like, well, you know, Trump is, against gay marriage, right? But you can look at, or here, I'll read a tweet by Richard Hanania about what happened at the RNC. Trump personally dictated the new RNC language on abortion and gay marriage. His team put the delegates in a room, took their phones.
Trump said, you're going to pass this and you're going to do it quickly. Night of nights for social conservatives. Mr. Trump made clear to his team, and now this is written from the perspective of Of somebody who was there. Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone.
He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler. And in some cases, vaguer, he was especially focused on language about abortion, which he recognized was a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He wanted nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to attack him, and he made it clear.
To aides, that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives, for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme Court with a conservative [00:34:00] supermajority. Trump also stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. This is coming from Trump!
And in his official platform position, instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation, quote, Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, end quote. So why is Trump making these moves on things like abortion and on things like gay marriage? Because it is what he, he is siding with this new right faction.
And the new right faction is building a set of, because if you look at the, the paleo conservatives. There are some areas where the new right and the paleo conservatives crash. And so it makes sense for them to have compromise in some places. Generally the new right is fairly pro gay rights. So they're just against what is, is a cult that's essentially grown within parts of the trans movement.
That targets, you know, kids as young as three and that is completely uncalled for. And we will talk about that in a second, but in regards to [00:35:00] adults deciding to get married, if they want to, I don't really see how that affects anyone else. And I don't see why we as a government should have any hand in that at all.
But if we are going to make marriage a legal institution, we should not be deciding who should and who should not be able to get married.
One of the primary causes that led to the American revolution was the British government making it illegal for Presbyterian ministers, to marry people and sending out Anglican ministers to do it in said to decide who can get married and what those ceremonies should be.
Some religions in the United States believe that gay people can get married. We need to allow those individuals to get married under those religions. Or we are doing what the British did. We are legislating what religions are true in what religions aren't true. And I don't think any Republican wants Government bureaucrats to have power, to determine how we should be interpreting our Bibles.
Malcolm Collins: and so you, and then I point out, [00:36:00] so why else is he doing this? It's also because it's what most Republicans want. And I think a lot of people, especially young Republicans, if you look at where the party is going, so, if you look at, Gallup polling for 2021, Showed that 55 percent of Republicans overall supported same sex marriage in 20, and in 2015, about 63 percent of Republicans under 30 supported protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination.
From Pew, nearly half of Republicans younger than 30 say that abortion should be legal in any age group. Or most cases, 47%. So the stance that we generally take on abortion is we should be stricter on it than we currently are. I do not think that a baby that has a nervous system and it appears they can feel should be getting aborted.
I think that that is killing a human being. However, I think before the nervous system really starts developing, I am not that antagonistic to abortion. So what week cutoff would you have on this about?
Simone Collins: Well, I hope pretty much 15 weeks is a reasonable place to be.
And that's where I think most people [00:37:00] stand on this. Yeah. Pennsylvania as a state is past that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Admittedly, I'd be super fine with more restrictions. In Pennsylvania, but not all the way to nothing, only, you know, to 15, basically.
Malcolm Collins: So here I need to talk a little bit about trans stuff, because this is an area where we are going to piss off a lot of progressives, but it is something that we need to begin to admit as a society.
A cult uses the fact that That trans people, that we were not supposed to attack them, and that's fine. I, I believe that there are, you know, I think if you believe that there are gender differences between male and female brains, it only makes sense that sometimes a person might be born with a brain that is somehow more like the opposite gender than like their own gender.
But, and, and that those people would need to be protected from discrimination. I understand that, and I'm okay with that. What I am not okay with is that whenever you say, Okay, here is a group, and we need to do everything [00:38:00] we can to protect them, then certain malevolent strains, often self replicating memes, will begin to grow within those communities.
And people will begin to use those communities identification to overreach. You will get, like we had in Pennsylvania, what was likely just a cis guy
In a middle school, but who just learned that he could identify as a woman and Prevent himself from having to face punishment for his actions to victimize young women He had created a hit list.
This list was brought to the teachers of his school by a young woman The teachers ignored it and later that very same day He savagely beat one of these girls until she had to go to a hospital and I think that we need to stop just saying You believe anyone especially when you're dealing with children.
it's genuinely really good grooming advice. On April 4th, 2023, Postcard reveals he's in contact with four minors. Age 9 to 13. I've so far sent it to four minors between the ages of 9 and 13. I hope it [00:39:00] encourages them to transition. When the Anka Zone animation became a meme, they got excited over its virality among kids. Mana Drain and Orion also fantasized about getting kids on hormones orion was the manager , coercing him every step of the way. This is apparent by how he talked about him to others. Has he started hormones yet? Yes, but not effectively. I guess that's what you'd expect just telling a r to buy hormones. They bought estrogen, but no anti androgen. It would have been more fun if he started hormone blockers at like 12.
Haha, isn't that true for everyone? Don't worry, I'll make him into a good girl
Don't blow up our spot, bro. All t slurs are like that. You can trust me around your kid. It'd be transphobic not to. Me with daycare tots. To Orion, and many of his associates, their identity was little more than a political shield.
It clearly worked, given he publicly fantasized about assaulting women in bathrooms. Me when transphobic little girls ask me what I'm doing in the women's restroom when I'm obviously a woman. the two fantasized about assaulting J. K. Rowling's grandchildren. Not letting teaslers get with your kids is transphobic. Someone should Harry Potter woman's [00:40:00] grandkids. Orion then goes on to call them turf meats.
Malcolm Collins: And this is where new studies,
like in 2024, development of gender non contentedness during adolescent and early adulthood was a study that came out that looked at 11 year olds who identified as the opposite gender. But, who did not receive gender affirming care. It turns out over 9 in 10 of them, by the time they were 20, 23, completely identified as their birth gender but it turns out they were just gay or autistic.
So that means that when you are applying these kind of treatments, Two 11 year olds the type of chemical castration that comes from puberty blockers that we now know is not safe long term that you can't just turn off puberty midway through and then start it up at a later developmental phase and have that have no cognitive effects, no physical effects.
I mean, I think it should have been pretty obvious from the beginning that that wasn't true, that we are sacrificing nine Gay or autistic children for every one trans child, we might be healthy and we shouldn't be doing that.
And when I say sacrifice, I'm using that [00:41:00] term, literally when you consider the fact that. When a child is diagnosed with being transgender and then given gender affirming care, the suicide rate in that population is around 40% to 50%, whether or not they are transgender.
This is particularly agregious as we are likely not even helping the individuals That have real gender dysmorphia. We are transitioning when you consider the fact that there are other treatments for gender dysmorphia that do not have this incredibly high suicide rate associated with them. Such as certain anti-psychotics. But the mimetic virus that is the modern progressive movement. Won't let us talk about this. The moment a child goes into gender affirming care. You are flipping a coin with their lives.
Malcolm Collins: The CAS report, like what we have seen in the UK where we have seen other developed world countries begin to move in this direction.
\ , this was a unbiased government survey for people who aren't familiar with it, that looked into all of this and basically said, We should be rolling it back. And [00:42:00] even even as I'll add this in post about what was found at that one clinic,
What is most disturbing is that after a year on blockers, a significant increase was found in the first item.
Quote, I deliberately try to hurt or kill self, end quote. This is in the youth survey questionnaire. So it was increasing. Puberty blockers increased even by Travis stocks own, as pro trans as you can get. They just didn't want to publish this increases. Do
but that they knew that this was causing more harm they found internal memos that showed that statistically the gender reforming care was increasing children's risk of unaliving themselves but they didn't publicly release this information because it didn't go with the cult's agenda.
Is the holy guide to living pure, this will help explain. First, Laughter. Her name's Lorraine, too? We're all Lorraine, and you will be Todd. A [00:43:00] name chosen especially for you oh. You're not
An oppressed minority. you're a cult!
Excuse me, are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love and Yeah, this is it
Malcolm Collins: And this is really scary to me that this was allowed to happen and that it's likely happening in the United States as well. So again, Cultural sovereignty means that the way I would approach culture, gender affirming care more broadly, as I guess I wouldn't ban it outright. I would say that if the parents consent to it, then it's okay for children.
But both parents need to consent to it. You can't, because a lot of divorced parents will use this as a way to get custody of a kid. Which is, you know, if you can convince a kid of this, then you can. Easily take them away from the other parent. And it's very easy to convince somebody, you know, as you've always told me, Simone, thank God, nobody figured out they could come to me because Simone is autistic.
When she was young and tell, tell her well, it turns out that there's a way that you can feel comfortable with your body. And [00:44:00] then that you could enter a group of people and they would all constantly affirm anything you wanted to believe about yourself. That would have been very difficult for you to resist.
You've often said, and I'm like even me, I think that would have been difficult to resist. I understand why it's alluring during puberty, these, these groups. And so if a family wants to do it, I am okay with them doing it. But I think if somebody has, you know, comes from a Christian background or for a Muslim background, no school should not be.
beginning to implement, and this is what we're seeing, this type of care without parents knowledge, which is current policy in Pennsylvania. And that is horrifying to me. So, that's probably one of the, the, the spicier things, but it is something that's, that's commonly believed without this group.
Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, I'm just the, this is something that comes up a lot that we're also not really in favor of having natal male sports, sportsmen, sportswomen on female teams. It's just not fair from a competitive standpoint.
You know, so that is something. It's so
Malcolm Collins: ghastly when people are [00:45:00] like, it is fair. Like, can't you see, like, look at this study or something. It's like, I can look at the pictures. This is obviously not fair.
not only that, I was in the GSA growing up and I remember Somebody being kicked out for being transphobic, for even suggesting that a trans person may one day want to do this.
They said that that was a transphobic thing to say. It was considered in the same category of suggestion as somebody being like, well, if you're trying to protect gay rights now, how long until you're trying to argue that people should be able to marry minors? And you'd be like, that's a homophobic thing to suggest.
The idea even was in the GSA when I was younger, that we would have trans people competing on female sports teams was considered homophobic and transphobic.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So, you know, that's just a step too far. And We're, we're along those lines too.
Malcolm Collins: Yep. Now I'm going to go to immigration cause that's a hot button issue these days.
What do we think on immigration?
Simone Collins: I
Malcolm Collins: do not believe that you can have a country that [00:46:00] offers a social safety net that is open to immigrants and have porous borders for low skilled immigrants because then you have a huge negative incentive for them to come in, but I am not anti immigration broadly, I believe we need.
To get much stricter on low skill immigration, and we need to be more permissive on high skill immigration. If somebody gets a degree, and Trump has said that this is a policy that he holds, actually, if somebody gets a degree in the U. S., he wants them to be able to immigrate to the U. S. I'm not as loose as Trump is.
I think if somebody gets a degree from a top, maybe 50 college in the U. S., Or gets an advanced degree in the U. S. of a STEM degree. And I think that this should only apply to STEM degrees, not to arts degrees. They should be given automatic entrance into the United States. Because it makes, it was insane to me, like at Stanford, I, I did my MBA at Stanford and I had classmates who wanted to stay in the U.
S. They would have been huge economic contribution. And
Simone Collins: struggled to, yeah, and, and still had to leave. Yeah. And we lost all that talent after investing in that talent. Immigration [00:47:00] policy also plays a really key role as populations start to decline in developed countries. So in the future, we're going to need obviously people to staff our economies. Yes. And so a lot of what is going to prop up nations as we start to see fewer And fewer kids being had by those living in them already is immigration, but it's not just about warm bodies, taking up jobs and taking care of old people and working in restaurants and whatnot.
It's also about your tax base. Basically if we do not have people paying in to pension funds and keeping up cities and maintaining our social services, we start to fall apart. So the nature of immigration also really matters from this perspective. To Malcolm's point, if we bring in just low paid, low skilled workers, we're not going to be receiving money into a tax base that will maintain our economies, it will maintain our social services and our governments.
So what really. Focus on is bringing in people who will continue to hold up our tax bases, our governments, [00:48:00] and our cities. And that has to be higher skilled, higher paid people.
Malcolm Collins: To word this another way, one of the major problems that we're facing right now throughout the developed world and now in the developing world, because Latin America fell below every population rate all the way back in 2019, even by the UN's own statistics is rapidly falling fertility rates.
That means fewer people, and that has a massive economic impact. However. You don't fix this problem by increasing the number of people on welfare. That makes the problem worse. Yeah, it basically accelerates the
Simone Collins: problem. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But all of those people are taking money from the government. Instead of adding money to the government, you have made this problem worse.
And so that means in our immigration policy, we have to be acutely aware of this. And now people are afraid of how, how this might change our culture. To take in people from other countries. That's really not a problem when you're dealing with high skilled, high earning immigrants, high earning immigrants, almost always culturally assimilate within one generation.
The reason why low [00:49:00] skill, low income immigrants are able to not integrate with a population is because they are often not engaging with the mainstream economy, which allows them to culturally isolate themselves within the population. Which allows these cultural ghettos to form,
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: that is not good for a country.
It's not good for them. And it's often not good for the country that they left.
So, Oh, a final point I would make with an immigration is I think we need to be more open to using immigration aggressively against our geopolitical rivals. When China. Turned its back on Hong Kong. I think the US should have been willing to take any Hong Kong individual with over X amount of income or X amount of savings.
I think when Russia became a geopolitical enemy of ours and there were people , fleeing the draft, we should have made it very easy for high skilled immigrants to immigrate into the US because then we create a stronger pole that. Severely damage at these countries economies. Hong Kong doesn't have value because the land of Hong Kong Hong Kong has value because of [00:50:00] all of the competent people in Hong Kong If we can take those people, especially the people who are drawn by the promises of america That helps us a lot and those people will assimilate very quickly if they are high earners Finally, I believe that we should create an alternate path to immigration that allows people to immigrate more easily if they're willing to pay higher taxes So a unique tax bracket that allows for very fast immigration.
However, as a counter to that, I also think that if somebody has immigrated, if they go on welfare or social services for more than a specific time level, they should be deported. I do not think that if you immigrate to our country, you should be able to use social safety nets that this country pays into because that creates very negative incentive systems.
All right, next one, foreign policy. What are our beliefs on foreign policy? Generally I have really liked Trump's foreign policy, which is to say that. Historically, people have [00:51:00] either been, you know, hawks or doves, broadly speaking, you know, do we get engaged? Do we act as the world police? Do we try to, we don't take that position at all.
Our goal is America is America's interest first.
However, America's interest first means that we need to pay attention to what's going on internationally, what's going on with our trade partners, what's going on in regions that we rely on for selling to, you know, a, a person can be like, Oh, I don't, I don't care that there's a person randomly murdering people on the streets outside my house, but if your house makes its money by selling to those people who are being murdered, well, then that matters.
Okay. So I think that we should intervene. In foreign affairs, but in very constrained ways, but also much more aggressively than we have historically. So what did that look like? That looks like what Trump would do. Somebody would cross a line, he'd draw a red line, somebody would cross it, he'd send a few missiles into their country.
Be like, if you escalate, I escalate. And a lot of people historically thought that this would [00:52:00] lead to a continuing cycle of escalation on each side. But when you make the lines that you're drawing very clear, i. e., you do this, I do this. If you do this to counter this, then I'm doing this. It doesn't lead to cycles of escalation.
I call this the BOP strategy. Um, And by that, what I mean is you need to lightly but immediately punish wrong actions by foreign actors and not be afraid to do that and not be afraid of escalation. And I think that we have been too cowardly to do that for a long time. And that has led to the spill out of larger conflicts that might not have happened.
Had they thought that this sort of retaliation could happen. For example, , there's the famous meeting with Trump and Putin. And many people were like, why didn't Putin invade Ukraine? And Trump said, well, there was a meeting where he told Putin, if you do that, all these beautiful minarets you see out here, they'll all be gone.
Simone Collins: Allegedly it [00:53:00] was all those golden turrets.
Malcolm Collins: Imagine if you just selectively sent missiles to blow up every one of the turrets in Moscow. That would be a, culturally, a pretty big slap in the face. But it's not the type of slap in the face that could be used to justify a nuclear escalation. And that's the type of thing that prevents people from escalating conflicts.
And it's the type of crazy nonsense that people are never sure if Trump is really going to do. And that's what allowed him to have such a peaceful term as president.
Simone Collins: What I like about what appears to be the new rights foreign policy is that it's very pragmatic and it's, it's America first.
What benefits American citizens and what do American citizens need. So from that perspective, it's less ideological, it's more pragmatic and it's not a blanket policy. For example, JD Vance though he's very for a swift end to conflict in Ukraine [00:54:00] he's not as bullish on major support in Ukraine, whereas he is pretty bullish on support for protecting Taiwan because he.
Is the strategic importance of Taiwan vis a vis the United States as being a much more salient issue than sort of Ukraine versus the United States.
Malcolm Collins: And I should point out a larger point on his position on Ukraine, which I'm actually coming around to. He's like, what are we really fighting over at this point?
We're fighting over small amounts of land. We have already shown Russia. We've already shown China through our support of the Ukraine, that we're willing to make this type of conflict costly to them. So now it's, do we wait 10 years so that Ukraine can maybe take back its land and spend hundreds of thousands more lives and spend billions more dollars, or do we end this now and say, look, it's mostly out in the rocks.
Wash at this point. We don't need to worry about further rescue Russian escalation because people are like, oh, it'll attack Europe next. No, it won't. They've expended their entire generation of soldiers. And [00:55:00] they have a fertility rate of like 1. 3. They, they cannot replace those soldiers with their current fertility rate.
They are about halving their population every generation at this point. point. Russia has detoosed itself. At this point, is it really worth the cost in human lives? Yeah, it's bad. We shouldn't allow bad actors to get what they want, but is it really worth hundreds of thousands of young lives?
I don't think so. Not at this point. Now what do we think on environmentalism?
Simone Collins: Yeah so, again, I think J. D. Vance shows exactly the kind of clear minded insight that I love with, with regard to environmentalism. Energy, the environment. He is, for example, in favor of, we'll say clean natural gas pipelines.
You know, he's like, yes, put a pipeline through a forest. I don't care. Let's focus on minimizing damage. Yes, but we're not going to run against it. But [00:56:00] he's also very in favor of nuclear, which is 1 of the most practical clean energy sources available in our time that we really should be focusing on.
And energy is a major. Environmental plus national security issue right now. Especially with the rise of AI. So, I think that that's really the best approach to take. I think the fact that sustainability and the environment has become a highly politically polarized issue is a travesty that we may be emerging from slowly.
Malcolm Collins: I'd say that, that the, you know, when we talk about bull moose republicanism, it's not just the trust busting. It's also the way that Teddy Roosevelt creating our national park system. I believe that for. Many traditional American cultures having healthy wilderness is core to their cultural traditions, hunting, fishing, hiking.
We need to protect our land and our streams. That means keeping the water clean. Clean rivers. That means [00:57:00] keeping healthy woodlands and preventing development on them.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's not. And it's also not even as though like traditional stereotypical old conservatives hated nature to your point, right? The classic hunting, fishing, nature loving.
This is not a politicized issue. So even the fact that because we're talking about right and left and we're saying, well, we have to have stances on the environment. It's kind of funny because really. All humans and all nations and everyone who cares about their nation should be caring about sustainable management of the land of their country.
What you're saying
Malcolm Collins: is correct, but the left fundamentally doesn't care about that, and we need to talk about what leftist environmentalism has become. Deontological environment, performative
Simone Collins: environmentalism. Well,
Malcolm Collins: more than that, anything that affects the environment is therefore an intrinsic negative.
You talk about something like an oil pipeline. It really doesn't have putting an oil pipeline through a national park really doesn't have that much effect. It is, it is a single strip of land for [00:58:00] vast efficiency gains, because what's the oil doing if you're not building the pipeline, it's going on trucks and it's going on tankers and those emit.
fossil fuels. It is all performative. That's why they hate nuclear power, even though we know that when it is well maintained, it is largely safe outside of natural disasters. So yes, pay attention to not putting it where natural disasters are. But if you're talking about what actually is green fuel, you're looking at things like nuclear.
But it also means that a lot of less just environmentalism is also, I'd almost say like downstream of bizarre conspiracy theories. It's like, Oh, well you need to do this and you need to do this and you need to do this. And it's, it's these huge webs of everything like that. And you need to save this one little species that blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, no, screw it. Build a dam. Damn. That's hydropower. That's useful, right? Yeah. Build the dam. I'd say Yeah, save the tree. Like that forest, save that forest, okay? But don't tell people they can't build a pipeline through it, okay? [00:59:00] Somebody's dumping chemicals in the streams, yeah, stop them from dumping chemicals in the streams.
But a ban on plastic bags or straws, that's getting ridiculous, okay? Especially when it was the left that put masks on everyone, which is now something like a third of all waste in the ocean. It is insane how bad this has gotten. It, it is all performative and in a way that causes much more environmental damage in the long run instead of just being sane about this and saying, let's protect our environment as a cultural asset in the same way that Teddy Roosevelt did.
So, to sum up this, like, because a lot of these can feel like feel like independent, maybe unrelated policy issues. And I'd say that pretty much the entirety of the new right is downstream of four core philosophies. One, anti [01:00:00] bureaucratic, all large bureaucracies lead to inefficiencies, which leads to evil and suffering.
We need to reform our bureaucracies too. Family sovereignty. The family should be able to make its own cultural choices, choices about how it educates its children and choices about how it relates to his children. Did you know that 37 percent of kids have had CPS called on them in America?
That is a huge waste of tax dollars and a sign of just public overreach. We should be allowed to have our kids walk to school without having CPS called on us and our kids taken away. There was a mother in the U S who was sent to jail because she, Allowed her 14 year old to babysit her eight year old.
That is insane. The government should not be making decisions around what's safe for our kids that are not safe. Three, pragmatic. That's how we approach the economy. That's how we approach foreign policy. That is how we approach everything. Be pragmatic. Pragmatic. Don't follow larger ideologies like just small government, just [01:01:00] large government, just always intervene, just always not intervene.
Know what you're trying to optimize for, which is the best interest of the American people, and then look for the most pragmatic way to optimize for that. And four, be willing to make large changes. The existing system cannot keep operating as it's operating. When Trump said drain the swamp, what he fundamentally meant is we need to replace large portions of our current government bureaucracy or remove them because they are not working.
And this is a national security issue at this point. Today, we Microsoft went down all around the planet because they were interfacing with a anti virus software, a computer protection software that was made by a company that was overly focused on DEI. Just a few weeks ago, we had one of the biggest secret services Failures in American history.
What is secret service been primarily focused on for the past half decade? D. E. [01:02:00] I. So much so that they now have a woman running the secret service. And you could say, what do you think that a woman can't run the secret service? And I'm just saying, realistically, was there a man who was more qualified for that role?
Almost certainly, because there's just more men in the military, and they've been in these positions for longer. So it seems to me almost impossible that she was the most qualified person for this position. And downstream of that, it led to incredibly deleterious mess ups that could have been avoided.
And when you're talking about stuff like the FAA, That controls our planes in the sky, employing people specifically because they don't like science and don't take orders well, this is going to lead to an American Chernobyl. We need to take this seriously, and I believe a new branch of government needs to be created that specific role, and obviously we wouldn't be doing this at the state level, but I would recommend that the new right begin to [01:03:00] advocate to this, that specific role.
Is churning through government organizations and cutting out these DEI cancers that are promoting bigotry and not meritocracy. What we need to be rewarding is meritocratic success. I remember I told this to a reporter once and they looked at me like I had lost my mind. Say you, you, you're not pro favoring black candidates over white candidates. That's literally what they said. And I go, I'm sorry, I old school racist, oh God, what did that racist say? That we should judge people by their character and not according to their skin color?
Who was that guy's name? Martin Luther King. Famous racist. I agree with him. And I think that we need to go back to what fighting racism used to mean. Which was fighting unfair discrimination. Not the insane bigotry it has led to.
Do you have [01:04:00] any final thoughts, Simone?
Simone Collins: Evidence based policy.
Malcolm Collins: Evidence based policy. If it produces And be willing to let institutions fail. This is, this is one of the things where like the existing guy you were writing against when he's like, well, if you did, if you allowed money to follow the students, then all the parents would pull their kids out of school.
They take them into homeschool programs and our existing public schools would fail. And it's like, Hmm. Well, I look at all the money that's going to the bureaucrats. Now, I look at the results that we're seeing as we pour more and more money in and I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't view that As the end case, if it would cause a school system to fail, then we need to develop new systems.
Simone Collins: It wouldn't. But here's the thing is it wouldn't cause the school system to fail. It would force the school system to reorient itself around student outcomes. The only way that you can reform the existing school system is by making it accountable. To parents and students, which right now it isn't right now.
It's accountable to teachers unions. And I love, I
Malcolm Collins: love when [01:05:00] Democrats are like, well, but schools form important sub functions, like getting food to food, scarce families. And it's like, why on earth is the school system doing that? Why on earth is the only meal that kid is happening when he's at the school system?
These two programs need to be disintermediated anyway. That's insane. If that's why you're putting kids in an environment where by the CDC's own statistics, 1 in 4 girls has created a plan to kill themselves every year. 1 in 10 kids is trying to unalive themselves every year. Yeah that, that's a critical level and we need to be okay with seriously reconstructing some institutions when they aren't working for us anymore.
And, and this goes across, you know, I, I, one of the things that was, that was said by A, a, a black voter recently that really got me is they go, we are being economically lynched by the Democrats. And that's the way I think a lot of Americans feel these days. Do you have any final thoughts?[01:06:00]
Simone Collins: But I'm very hopeful about the future. The fact that I used to think that both sides really just didn't have any decent solutions for our major problems. And now I feel like the new right, as you've defined it, and as we've found that we really resonate with. Really could be forging a new path forward that a lot of people can get behind.
So, yeah, well, things get kind of dire and yes, you're describing some really unpleasant scenarios that we've ended up in. I think that our future is bright and I'm excited for it.
Malcolm Collins: I, I do think so as well, but the thing that has scared me recently is. As the new right has formed into a political faction where I almost agree with every one of their major points, Democrats are evolving into a political faction that I think begins to embody more and more what I see as true human evil.
A group that orders humans on an ethnic based caste system with Jews at the bottom. We've seen this before [01:07:00] and I don't want to see what it could lead to.
Simone Collins: I feel like what we're seeing now though is, is more than ever a disengagement from it. And a distaste, a distaste for the straw man of the right among people who are on the left, but that's just due to a lack of understanding of the right, and more importantly, the new right.
And if anything, I'm seeing more and more people starting to either secretly or even publicly detract from how far the left has gone. While you say and argue that the extreme views. described by the left are being implemented in policy, and I agree with you that they have been. I think that most people secretly and behind closed doors aren't comfortable with it.
And more and more people are beginning to walk away because it's gone too far.
Malcolm Collins: Well, let's hope that happens before a plane crashes and children die.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Okay.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Or we implement DEI [01:08:00] policies at a local nuclear plant and it ends up, you know, this, this stuff is going to get dangerous if we are not aggressive in ripping it out.
Simone Collins: It has already gotten dangerous. We're already seeing. Breakdowns that are causing people to, well, I mean,
Malcolm Collins: look at Boeing's famous, very aggressive DI problem programs before all of the planes started falling out of the sky. Like this is no messing around anymore. This is your family's safety. This is your children's safety.
Anyway. Love you.
Simone Collins: Love you too. Gorgeous. Like our, our lifestyle, our like our whole thing. You know, our, you tell him you're running, he can vote . He's, he's outside our district. They're based in a, another district sadly didn't wanna vote there, but likes, likes a religion. Hey, it's nice of us. A random stranger can visit our house and be like, you know what?
I'm having what these guys
Malcolm Collins: are having. [01:09:00] Most people are like that when they meet us. I, I know almost nobody who like has met us and not liked us. Which has been an interesting, like recurring experience where somebody thinks that they hate us based on like preconceived notions or something. And then they meet us for an interview and they plan to do a hit piece.
And they're like,
Simone Collins: Oh, I
Malcolm Collins: can't bring myself to do this. Like, Oh, right. Like Mary Harrington, for example, she thought you
Simone Collins: know, or we tell them to write a hit piece and they're like, well,
Malcolm Collins: I don't want her. That was what the guardian piece was. She didn't want to read it. Well, but their editors are like, screw that, like, no,
As final note here, any of you who are in or around Pennsylvania's Montco region and are interested in helping with campaign stuff. , please reach out and we can connect you with the various teams in the area.
Oh, yeah. And I guess people should like, and subscribe.
That'd be cool.
We're going to get a lot of downvotes on this one, because it's going to be appearing as an ad to a lot of random people who aren't already following us. Uh, so that's not going to be a lot of fun to deal [01:10:00] with.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92
In this in-depth analysis, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the recent New York Times article about Hannah and Daniel Neeleman of Ballerina Farms, exploring the controversy surrounding their "trad wife" lifestyle. The video offers unique insights into media manipulation, the complexities of modern conservative influencers, and the tensions between progressive journalists and traditional families. Drawing from their own experiences with media coverage, the Collins couple provides a nuanced perspective on the Ballerina Farms story, discussing everything from Mormon culture to the economics of influencer farming.
Key topics covered:
* Analysis of the New York Times article on Ballerina Farms
* The "trad wife" phenomenon and its cultural implications
* Media manipulation tactics and influencer strategies
* Mormon culture and its influence on the Neelemans' lifestyle
* The economics of influencer farming and social media success
* Comparisons between Ballerina Farms and other conservative influencers
* The role of the LDS Church in shaping the Neelemans' public image
* Critiques of modern parenting and societal expectations
Whether you're interested in social media culture, conservative lifestyles, or media analysis, this video offers a thought-provoking look at one of the internet's most talked-about families.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You
Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?
Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.
Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?
Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.
It's the type of thing you and I have done with
Simone Collins: Oh, tell me more.
Malcolm Collins: I have a secret theory on what the trip to Greece faux pas was all about. And I'm going to get into it in this video because I do not think it's what you think it is.
I don't think she was saying that to her husband. I think she was saying that to somebody else entirely, but who could it be?
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: So Malcolm, I was
Malcolm Collins: actually Simone. I need to speak here. I don't, I don't think any of your opinions matter on this, but here we had to prep for that. Anyway, go ahead.
Simone Collins: Straight. The trad wife dynamic. I was cruising YouTube as is my want, and I found that three of [00:01:00] my favorite YouTubers all had done. In the span of the last few days, Ballerina Farms analyses, and I thought, Oh my gosh, what is going on for those not in the know, Ballerina Farms is a very popular.
We're talking like 9 million followers Trad wife, influencer, Instagram. They don't refer to themselves as a tra wife or a trad couple. And I say they because we're talking about sorry, Hannah and Daniel Neman. They are two Mormons married couple with. Eight kids living on a beautiful property outside Park City in Utah running a farm with dairy cows and chickens and pigs.
An
Malcolm Collins: experience recently that was very similar to an experience that we went through. Right. So yeah,
Simone Collins: these three YouTubers were all doing an analysis of an article that came out in the Times, which involved a reporter coming to visit them who then spent the day with the family. And then. Published what many people are calling a hit piece.
[00:02:00] And what's really interesting is that we're sort of looking at this from people who have seen the exact same formula. British journalist wants to cover a, an alt right adjacent subculture targets of family. goes to spend time with them, probably comes with an existing agenda, or at least their existing cultural baggage, is probably, you know, a pretty progressive, you know, female journalist, and then subsequently writes an article that is beautifully written, you know, you know, interesting, florid, whatever, you know, very evocative.
But it, you know, frames the target family in a controversial right and the target movement in a controversial right. And, and perennialism and tradwives, they're very, they're like cousin trends, if you know what I mean. You know, they're, they're a lot of, they rhyme. There's not a lot of intermixing. But they are, there kind of is, and I would say like any, any sort of progressive journalist that's like trying to explore and possibly criticize rising [00:03:00] conservative movements that are sort of, rebutting progressive ideals is going to look at both pronatalism and treadwifery.
So what, what had happened to that very similar to what had happened to us in various hit pitch pieces that have been written about our pronatalist advocacy and our family in general. So it's like, I feel like we have insights into what's happened with the Neelman's that other people don't have because they haven't had the experience of a journalist embedding with their family for a day.
Asking them questions, seeing the full range of the experience the journalist had that day, but then seeing how the journalist chose to frame that experience later. Because what people aren't seeing is everything that that journalist chose to not write about.
Malcolm Collins: Well, not just that, but I want to, I want to Make one a clarification here.
So there was one instance in which she was asked her and her husband were asked, but she was the one who was directly asked. And then her husband butted in and answered first does she consider herself a trad wife? The husband said, well, the term came up after we started doing what [00:04:00] we were doing.
So it's not like we were aiming to be trad wives, but I guess we sort of are now. And then she clarified further that she didn't fully agree or identify with the title. So. You are a trad wife as much as she is a trad wife. Two way progressive, you would be a trad wife, but we have mentioned many times on the show we should do a full episode on this concept that, that the trad wife movement as it exists now is a bit of a cargo cult.
So for people who aren't familiar with what cargo cults are, this is like, In these islands during World War II, they would there were like natives who weren't really familiar with Europe or Europeans cultural value system or anything like that, but all of a sudden these bases were set up with food and supplies and everything like that, and they'd be airdropped supplies regularly or planes would fly in and drop supplies.
And so, after the Europeans left, they sort of like built religions around them to try to bring back the prosperity of those times, like making Runways out of like [00:05:00] stones and stuff like that are trying to recreate some of the European rituals that they remembered from that period and I think But but all of it was sort of a mock of a time that they didn't fully understand or know And it is all the modern image of what that time was
Simone Collins: Yeah, and that's similar to sympathetic magic like, you know, I want to fly so i'm gonna eat a bird You know something like that of like well, like let's try to bring that back.
Like oh Just by doing things that are kind of similar, let's,
Malcolm Collins: let's try to bring back the, the, the wholesomeness and the prosperity where you could genuinely have, you know, your average American family and the whole family could survive off of the husband's income and like, And a lot of people think that we are fully against stay at home moms.
I'm not. I just don't like elevating this image because I don't think it's attainable for the average person. And I think it leads people to make very poor financial decisions. Well, in career decisions, there's
Simone Collins: a lot of risks with stay at home parenting, which is that like sort of the dynamics that can be built among a couple.
[00:06:00] Especially when there's one breadwinner and then one homemaker, there can be a lot of like misunderstanding of the roles that each person is playing. Then a lot of resentment building, like you don't understand how much work I put into this family, either as the breadwinner or as the homemaker. And then later after the homemaker partner becomes an empty nester, suddenly the value that they brought to the table.
Is sort of lost and their career is lost and they're a little bit aimless. Like the dynamics are just super screwed up. So it's just, we're concerned about adverse incentives. We're concerned about unsustainable relationship dynamics. And that's another concern. But not everybody
Malcolm Collins: has that. Some people don't have, what I'm saying is we don't actually, like some people have been on our discord, like, well, you know, you probably disapprove of I'm doing this.
And I'm like, no, like if you can make it work, it works. Yeah. One, the lottery. Right. Yeah. And especially. Especially we'll get into her situation, but I think she's really gone above and beyond in terms of like moms that have my respect, the ballerina farm lady, like, Oh my God,
Simone Collins: Neilman is insanely awesome.
And she doesn't, she doesn't use
Malcolm Collins: nannies by the way. She's his nannies once a week. [00:07:00] She has eight kids. She doesn't live like around their parents or around anyone. She can fob the kids off onto, but it's not like, even if she did live
Simone Collins: right by her parents, no one's going to take eight kids. So they're on their own,
Malcolm Collins: you know?
Well, and, and she helps with the farms operation. So, you know, she's, she's doing the whole package. But what I was going to say here is while I think that the modern trad wide movement is a bit of a cargo cult, that doesn't mean that there aren't valuable things that can be taken from earlier traditions that are social technologies that we have lost over time are discarded that now I think there is a broad understanding that the feminist movement still throughout a bunch of stuff that was actually really useful for women's mental health.
I mean, as we can see by the terrible mental health statistics in progressive women with over 50 percent of progressive white women under 30 having , a serious mental health issue.
Simone Collins: Well, I think that's, that's where this is, this becomes a really interesting interplay, is, I think there's this tension, between progressive women and more traditional women [00:08:00] where they're flirting with this idea of tradwifery.
They're flirting with the performative dream of tradwifery, which is why other tradwife influencers like Nara Smith and also Mormon, but not as like hard on the Mormon part are very popular. There's, it's the same kind of fantasy that Martha Stewart in her time popularized, which is taking the concept of homemaking and making it impossibly aspirational, where people used to, when they did Martha Stewart parodies, they would like, you know, joke, just like people joke about Nara Smith now of like, well, first I'm going to grind the wheat to make my bread, which I will then, you know, everything's made like impossibly from like scratch which is something that Hannah Nielman and I think it's this, this, this fantasy it's drawing in progressive women who know that things aren't working, but those progressive women at the same time feel a lot of tension around this concept of having a partner who might speak for both of you, which shows up in this article again and again.
The journalist brings up how David. Keeps, [00:09:00] hold on, hold on, hold
Malcolm Collins: on. Before we go to this I wanted to briefly bring up an anecdote from your life. So Simone, you know, she tries to do, you know, when we have time, because we're both not opening together and do the podcast, we don't have time for all of the traditional trad wifey stuff, but you know, she likes to try to make her own bread at home and stuff like that with the kids is a fun activity on weekends.
And you had somebody come to you and they go, well, did you mill the wheat? Like, how did, how did this go?
Simone Collins: They, yeah, they commented on an Instagram post I made where I had a picture of the kids making bread or something like that. And she was like, well, you should really consider, you know, milling your own wheat because the nutritional value is lost and in three days, I've been just thinking to myself, like, I just, I don't know where I'm going to get like the, where does one get wheat?
I, I think I even asked her this because I'm just, yeah, like, do I pick the wheat? Like where is it? And how, like, is there like a KitchenAid website? Mixer add on that like I do have like a kitchen and mixer meat grinder Like we could make our own hamburger meat if we wanted to but I don't know how I would mill my own [00:10:00] wheat
Malcolm Collins: Before we go further what I really want to do is go into the specific controversies that were created by this piece And try to dissect what was really happening in these moments even from the writing of the piece because I think Similar to the pieces that covered us, it was clear if you are reading them with a critical mind that the journalist never specifically outright lies, they just cover things in a way that will lead you to misinterpret what's happening.
Simone Collins: Well, and she, she, she highlights and observes things in a way that, that has her interpreting them. Even though they're like very subtle things like she at one point highlights how Hannah repeats something that her husband, Daniel says, and she highlights that and she doesn't add any commentary.
It's very like show. Don't tell it's it's well written. But that's, these are all things that she selectively chooses to present in a way that's like, look at that. You know what I think that means instead of just actually the really funny thing is the, the YouTubers that we talked about in another [00:11:00] podcast Jordan and McKay were talking about this and they were talking about that exact sentence and they're like, oh, you see, and a lot of Mormon mothers do that and.
The, the wife actually repeated something that the husband said, like, he said something like, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that. And she said, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that completely unironically. Like there was no wink to it. It's just something humans do. But because this was highlighted as such in the article that it was presented as this thing of like, oh, she's this brainwashed wife who, you know, is being completely controlled by her husband when.
I don't think that's the case. Go
Malcolm Collins: over the arguments they use for her being controlled by her husband.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So in, as this journalist visits, she becomes increasingly frustrated as she's going throughout the day. And in, in many cases, it's Daniel answering questions that she is asking while making eye contact or like looking directly at Hannah.
It's Daniel who, while Hannah is making lunch for the kids is driving through the city. This journalist around the property to show, to [00:12:00] show her irrigation ditch as much to her great frustration. It's often the kids who are answering for them. So, she gets really frustrated by that. And she also notes multiple times in the article how he appears to have gotten his way with things with the way that they chose.
Malcolm Collins: Before we go into that, I, I can also understand the, the journalist's perspective here, which is to say she went out to talk to the trad wife, the female influencer, of course. Yes. Right. And then her husband cuts in and is one answering questions directly being asked of the influencer and two drives the journalist all around the property.
Simone Collins: So she becomes yes, so she becomes increasingly frustrated because she just want to talk with this male influencer and the way that she interprets it is this is a controlling husband.
This is actually a serious trad wife situation where women are being disempowered. And when I, as I'm reading this, I'm thinking about what it's like when we have journalists visit us as people who are also like part of their, let's [00:13:00] explore the lives of conservatives journey as journalists and what they must be thinking.
And often what happens is Malcolm is answering a lot of the questions and I disappear for a while to take care of our infant while Malcolm, you know, takes a journalist out for lunch. That's like a common format that we use when they're visiting. Why is that the case? Because I want to get some fricking work done.
And also because I don't really like talking with, with journalists or being around people at all. I want to be alone for a little bit of the day. And often journalists are visiting all day. So always, inevitably the night before a journalist comes to visit, I tell Malcolm, Oh my gosh, I'm so stressed out.
I don't want to be around this person all day. I just need to get work done. I have this, this, and this to do. And Malcolm's like, don't worry. I will run interference. I I will give you the time that you need to get your stuff done. And we'll still make sure that you have plenty of time to talk with them.
But I know you don't really want to do this. I'm happy to step in. And so probably what's happening is a lot of these journalists are thinking, Oh, you know, how, you know, how dare he, you know, hide her away or something. And this may happen with Hannah. I could totally see Hannah being an introvert. I could totally see Hannah [00:14:00] also being like.
I just want to feed my kids lunch without a journalist breathing down my neck or criticizing me for the way that I'm feeding my kids, you know, or, or seeing the way that I feed my kids and then writing about that. Like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of criticism that could come from that. And I
Malcolm Collins: was, I was going to talk about how.
If you look at the actual incidents that she uses to try to make it look like Hannah is being controlled they are things like, you know, the husband saying, well, she does, I guess we're trad, she's a trad wife, given this new term that's come up and her saying, I'm not a trad wife as indicating that the husband wants her to be more traditional than she is.
But
Simone Collins: it
Malcolm Collins: really could just be the husband is just like, I guess she's a trad wife. Like he's a busy guy running a thing. And she's like, Yeah, but you know, I don't really fully identify with it. Very similar to us where it's like, I guess to you, she is a trad wife, but she doesn't like aspire to [00:15:00] be a trad wife.
And then you have other instances in which she's talking about how, like, and she writes in the piece how they both talk about how they gave up something. To start this that he gave up a career in finance and she gave up a career as a ballerina and she keeps trying to frame it as like, look at everything she lost with this career as a ballerina.
And I find this like uniquely insane. This is like, so for people who don't know the lifestyle of a ballerina, this is like, you know, a little boy when he's young, he wants to be a soldier and fight on the front lines, but oh no, he married a billionaire heiress. And now has to live in a farm. He doesn't get to fight on the front lines of war.
Like, people [00:16:00] aspiration, like, it's not even like a long term career, you were telling me. Well, it
Simone Collins: can't be. I mean, yeah, you basically have to be young to be a ballet dancer. primarily because after a while you accumulate so many injuries that you can no longer dance. And also it is one of the most kind of similar to cheerleading, you know, you think it's all fluffy and pretty and it turns out to be like the most dangerous sport, like probably worse than football for head injuries and probably not as worse.
The stats, I don't know, we have to look at the stats for cheerleading versus football, but they're both extremely dangerous.
So I looked this up in post in belly injuries are around comparable to football injuries.
Malcolm Collins: I'm pretty sure being a ballerina is harder on your body than being an MMA as a man.
Again, I looked this up in post and well, the rate of injuries per hour, fighting slash dancing is higher in MMA. You do more hours dancing in a average ballerina career. So when you calculate from that, the rate of injury is higher in ballet than MMA. For the average amount of [00:17:00] hours you are going to do have one of them per day.
Simone Collins: It's, it's, it's terrible. I mean, so, something that always stuck with me. me was Michelle Yeoh who is a very famous actress now who first, I think, hit American mindshare with her role in, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a ballet dancer in her youth until she sustained a serious spinal injury.
So then when she go to like acting in martial arts films, cause doing all that stunt work was way lighter on her body. Yeah, and she said that literally having the s**t kicked out of you is easier than being a ballet dancer. So, yeah, that's, it's punishing, and it's a lot like modeling too, where like a lot of the, the, the cachet that you can bring to the table, you know, is your youth.
And that's only going to last for so long. So her days were numbered from the very beginning. And the fact that she instead, you know, has been able to have an insanely influential career as an influencer, in addition to having a pretty picturesque life. You know, on this, on this gorgeous ranch. I want to
Malcolm Collins: elevate [00:18:00] this, this as well.
Why does a little girl want to be a ballerina? In the same way, like, why does a little boy want to be a soldier, right? Like, it's because they see it as, as, as beautiful and elegant and aspirational, and everyone looks up to them. And yeah,
Simone Collins: like, how many ballerinas can you name? How many ballerinas do little girls look at now and think, I want to be like her?
No, their own freaking instincts. Instagram. She's living the dream.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think how non committed to this ballerina lifestyle actually slips across in the piece. So she mentions in one part that she was going to, they had this barn set aside to be her ballet studio.
But then she's like, yeah, but then it got converted into a, the place where we educate our kids and and partially
Simone Collins: a gym
Malcolm Collins: and the, the journalist was sitting there like, Oh.
You know, this is a monument to like the horror of her life, that the one little part of a thing that she could have had to herself Yeah, the one
Simone Collins: barn that was supposed to be dedicated to becoming her ballet studio host, become a [00:19:00] school for their children, and now a gym for Daniel, which by the way, they, they share. The gym has tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in it. If they wanted to put in mirrors and a bar for ballet exercises, they would have done so like it, this is clearly just a lot of prior.
Malcolm Collins: They have hundreds of acres of property and, and they have to have at least a billion dollars.
And I'll talk about why I believe they have at least a billion dollars in a second. He actually was committed. To building herself a ballet studio, like this was more than a passing fancy when she's just like, eh, I guess I don't have time between teaching the kids and doing the other stuff. She, it would be trivial for her to do this.
, she has intentionally decided to not build this ballet studio.
Simone Collins: Yeah, ballet studios, of all the types of studios you might design, are extremely low maintenance. All you need is a bar and some mirrors, like, and a good floor. That's it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I just, I think what it is, is she just doesn't care that much, [00:20:00] especially given the public attention that she is already getting.
Now I want to talk a bit about them dating and their background. So I actually have a personal connection to this. And you may not know this. Did you know that we pitched to her, to the guy's father? When we were raising money for our search fund, he was a guy in Salt Lake
Simone Collins: city. No, I'm looking up.
Okay. I'm checking our CRM. I need to see if this is actually true.
Malcolm Collins: So, so the, her, his dad was one of the founders of jet blue. And not only that, he was one of my teachers at Stanford business school. And so he then, and, and what this guy did, so I can go into a bit of the career trajectory, because a lot of people don't understand why he might've been working in Brazil, because this is what they did early in their relationship.
They went to work in Brazil to run a company that his dad had founded, or I suspect actually purchased, and the news is just misreporting it is his core business now. So first he funded JetBlue, and now he invests in search funds, which is the industry that you and I were in. And so what his son was doing was acting as a search fund operator.
[00:21:00] Now this to me signals something quite different than it would to a general population. I'm actually like, if I have one complaint about the ballerina farms couple, it's when the son, when she was like, well, I gave up my dreams of being a ballerina. And he's like, well, you know, and I had to give up my job too.
And I was like, You didn't really though. You could have kept him in your career.
Simone Collins: After they got engaged, he said he wanted to be a pig farmer. So this actually was
Malcolm Collins: his dream. Yeah. He, this is him using his billions of dollars to start the type of company that somebody else couldn't start. He should like, I just, as somebody who comes from like a similar background to him and didn't end up using my family's money to cheese, you know, my early life or my existing career.
I Like he should be doing more in the world than just this one job. Yes, he has a big footprint, but like really he could be doing a lot more than he, he is right now to try to fix the world, whether it's politics or, you know, it's not just the podcast that we run. We also operate a search fund right now.
We also operate [00:22:00] a daily podcast. We also have Simone running for office right now. We're also have written five bestselling books. Like
Don't you get a job?
Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude. That's what's stopping you. You gotta get your act together.
Simone Collins: I'm going to push back on that. Can I do it now or should I do it later?
Malcolm Collins: Okay.
Simone Collins: So, one of the theories that's going on in the Reddit snark dedicated to ballerina farms, because of course there has to be snark about this is that the Mormon church has assigned to Hannah and And Daniel their like calling of being influencers for the Mormon church for the LDS church.
Oh, that would
Malcolm Collins: make sense.
Simone Collins: And they have a huge plot. They have 9 million followers. This is a huge number of people. The vast, vast, vast majority here, not even remotely. I mean, the first time I heard about them was from one of our gay friends who lives in California and has nothing to do with any of this.
Right. You know, like totally not Mormon. [00:23:00] And the, the theory. That actually was first posted in the, in the subreddit from an ex LDS church PR person is that the church has assigned this as their calling. And the church actually does actively work with a bunch of Mormon influencers, actually like coordinating on like, I would like you to send this message.
I would like you to do this. And it would make, it would be dumb if the church didn't do this with people. Yeah, I
Malcolm Collins: don't see this as a theory. This is confirmed for me. It would be insane for the church not to do this. It is weird that he isn't still doing something in the search fund industry. Because that was, it seemed to be where he was working.
And so the question is, or as an operator for a private equity firm, like he can do that stuff remotely. So like, why isn't he doing that stuff? He's in
Simone Collins: a position. Yeah, this is, this is something that very few other people can do very high barriers to entry getting this kind of following is very difficult and they put in their posts and their content.
They talk a lot about the Mormon religion. They talk about the church. They talk about you know, that [00:24:00] he talks about how like the barn they had was inspired by the architecture of the barns of original Mormon settlers. Like, this is definitely something that's worked into. their work in a way that also implies that this is just that they happen to be Mormon.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we need to talk about the dating and also the Mormon ness of their early relationship because it horrified the journalist, but it's actually very normal for Mormons. Yeah. So, the first part is the dating, right? Can you talk about the dating story?
Simone Collins: Yeah. So, and they, they, in the article, the journalist covers how Daniel had met Hannah, they, they met at a basketball game and he asked to go on a date with her, but she was kind of busy with school.
She was at Juilliard in New York at the time he was 23, she was 21. So for six months he wouldn't go on she wouldn't go on a date with him. Finally, he learns that she's going to take a five hour flight from home in Utah, back to New York for school. And he decides to get on the same day.
JetBlueFlight pulls some strings with this family to make sure that he is in the seat right next to her for those five hours, and that was their first date.
There's, [00:25:00] there's
Malcolm Collins: some things I want to note with this. He admitted to it immediately on this date that he had done this. He's like, I pulled some strings.
She didn't know. So, here's also an interesting thing in their courtship. When he was trying to date her and she wasn't saying yes to him, that six months period, She didn't know he was the son of a billionaire. She didn't know about his JetBlue connections. She didn't know how fabulously wealthy this guy was.
And I suspect the reason why things changed so quickly after that was she found out, Oh shi Um, not only that, He's a handsome looking normal. His family, like I know his dad's reputation on campus and everything like that, he is seen as like a wholesome, upstanding, very,
Simone Collins: very respected, very good, very
Malcolm Collins: respected.
Yeah.
Simone Collins: And she also in a separate social media post unmoored from this article made a long time ago, talked about how at the airport, I think in Salt Lake City, she happened upon some family who was like, Oh, you do not want to let [00:26:00] this guy slip away. I think maybe that was the point at which she was informed that he like, do you, you know who he is,
Malcolm Collins: this guy is in addition to this, you've got to think about this act he did for her.
So, so often, you know, when you have these billionaire non billionaire relationships, you get this idea that the non billionaire was like chasing them to try to like take their money or something like that, where there's always this, this fear in the background. One of the most romantic things anyone can do for you is a huge, like, act like this.
Like, like, all these women are pretending like, oh, how gross, that he basically went on a non consensual date with her, right? But you sit next to people That doesn't count as a first date. She could have chosen not to talk to him if she wanted to on the airplane. It could have just been an awkward flight.
No I, I really think any, any of these reporters or any of these people online who are acting horrified about this, it's like, [00:27:00] So you really are mortified that an attractive, wholesome, well mannered billionaire's son who is well respected in their community, does this huge act to try to be close to you and show you, then and forever, that he desperately wanted you, you specifically, and I actually think that you know how we say, like, when you are doing stuff with media relations, sometimes you need to lean in the opposite direction and create a scandal that makes the more natural scandal impossible?
The natural scandal of their relationship. is she was a gold digger. But they have, through this narrative, made that natural scandal impossible. And so I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You
Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?
Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.
Simone Collins: Oh, tell me [00:28:00] more.
Malcolm Collins: So, this is when she was sitting with the woman and the woman was like, well, so you gave birth without pain medication, right? Which you tried to do the first time you went into like women choose to do this on their own.
Totally. I, did I pressure you to try that the first time you wanted to have kids? You were devastated as I remember. I was devastated.
Simone Collins: You did not pressure me. Yeah, she was, I,
Malcolm Collins: I had to make the final call to be like, you need to get an epidural and you need to get a c-section because the baby's life is at risk.
And then after that, there just wasn't really a reason not to do it because, well then the second pregnancy was complicated, so we had to get a C-section, and after that to it would be not to do a c-section. So, with us, we didn't really have a choice, but you wanted to tank it because like, and you're not even like a Christian, whatever, you're just like, well, I fully, I don't know what the effects are of it.
Why did you wanna do it without payment?
Simone Collins: So I was concerned about the, you know, what we'd read about, you know, how much the epidural can accumulate in the baby, especially if [00:29:00] you're doing a vaginal birth and not just a quick C section. So that's for a long period of time, potentially, and epidurals can slow down.
birth, making it take longer. Plus, I was afraid of actually just getting a needle in my spine. You know, I'd never done it before and it seemed scary at the time. It's not a big deal, by the way.
Malcolm Collins: But then there was also the instance of her so So
Simone Collins: she did unmedicated births and then she talked about this one time where she was where she did get an epidural and it was kind of great, she said.
Malcolm Collins: And she apparently whispered this to the reporter while the husband was in another room on the call. Now either the reporter is lying or she was baiting the reporter with this.
Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?
Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.
It's the type of thing you and I have done with journalists. Like once you get good at journalism when I say journalism, I don't mean being a journalist, but like catching and writing press. Manipulating
Simone Collins: the media. Well, and I mean, already they've shown [00:30:00] themselves to be extremely good at at least at this point in their careers.
Now there are slip ups that they've made on social media before and even possibly We'll talk
Malcolm Collins: about one
Simone Collins: slip up that wasn't actually a big deal. They're known among their critics for being incredibly press savvy and incredibly controlled with their image. They have engaged with the media a lot. So this is possible and, and we, they may have learned what we've learned, which is that Courting controversy is how you get things to spread a lot.
There's also another reason why they might want to have courted controversy and been framed as like creepy conservatives, because to a normal conservative audience, every criticism in this article is completely like. issue. Like, what are you talking about? Nothing here is weird. They're being completely normal.
And here's what just happened. They opened a dairy and they're going to be selling raw milk to Utah. How else are you going to reach and resonate with the conservative Utah audience aside from being attacked by a bunch of progressive nuts online?
Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and, and people aren't familiar with like what we're talking about here.
We did a [00:31:00] video on it called the art of media baiting. This is perfectly played, perfectly played to go along with a brand launch. The one big mistake I think they made, because I just think that maybe they thought this was normal, is she mentioned that she occasionally gets so sick, she can't leave her bed for a week.
So exhausted. Yeah. Well, that's not normal. That's not normal. That sounds like a medical issue. And I would guess that either she has some undiagnosed disease or maybe you shouldn't be drinking raw milk. People have also noted sores around their mouths that look kind of like herpes sores, which can be caused potentially by raw milk as well.
Simone Collins: And they're really big on, well, now they have to kind of dig into it because they're going to be trying to sell it. So
Malcolm Collins: yeah, I should put some skit here about like disgusting raw foods that people drink because it's that short by that.
Simone Collins: There's this, that short that I shared with you that was like
okay. Well, we'll, we'll do that one.
This one simple superfood will change your life. Raw milk. Packed full of [00:32:00] nutrients and enzymes that aren't found in any other food. That's why we founded Odin's Juice. 100 percent raw milk. Made by cows from America. 100 percent American. 100 percent non woke. Store bought milk is full of chemicals and microplastics,
making you susceptible to all diseases. Making it easier for gay communists to control you. Over 50 million people die each year from store bought milk. Raw milk is the healthiest nutrition available to man. That's why all doctors and so called health experts will tell you that raw milk is unsafe.
Because they want your money. We don't. We only care about your health. And if you sign up for the Odin Deluxe plan, you will also receive this one of a kind Kyle Rittenhouse mug. If you're sick and or desperate, please contact us immediately. God made us. And God wants us to drink raw milk. The government doesn't want you to have raw milk!
Cure yourself with raw milk. They want you sick! With Oats Juice.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But yeah, we are not about that type of stuff. I don't eat disgusting stuff just because it's like, like we do natural eggs and stuff like that, but that's because
Simone Collins: I don't think raw milk is inherently disgusting. I just think that it, there's a, there's a bacterial [00:33:00] risk.
You know, it's just one of those things where like, we love, we love our eggs from our coop, but we also do not, we, we do not have them raw because the risk of salmonella is high. Like we, it's just one of those things, you know, we pasteurize and we cook for a reason.
Malcolm Collins: But I, I, well, and if Simone, if you ever told me I'm so exhausted, I can't work for a week, I'd be like, I'd have serious issues with that.
Oh,
Simone Collins: even when I was on death's door with Pneumonia. I still did podcast recordings from my death bed.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is another thing like with them that I love, right? Like, yeah, you were really, really sick then is you typically go back to work the day after you give birth. And you even, you know, we're doing like sales calls through contractions with, with some of her bursts and stuff like that.
So she, Simone's an absolute monster with that stuff. And so Isabella in a farms lady, you know, she one of the quote unquote controversies is she went to a pageant, a beauty pageant, and got through the first round immediately after having one of
Simone Collins: your pregnancy. Yeah, good for her. And,
Malcolm Collins: That, what was it, two days or two weeks?
Two weeks. That's not even that bad. Yeah, I mean,
Simone Collins: that's, two weeks after my [00:34:00] most recent delivery of, of Indy, I was at the primary at the polls. Yeah. And
Malcolm Collins: the French news crew
Simone Collins: was there filming us.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So like, you do the main thing, like, once you make fertility a yearly thing, it's not really a big deal.
Yeah. And this
Simone Collins: was her eighth kid, you know, and it was a home birth. So she probably had a lot less swelling cause she wasn't on an IV, which is big. So it's rough, but I mean, it's still super
Malcolm Collins: doable. And I think it's important to normalize this. We shouldn't be making pregnancy out to be this big, horrendous thing.
I think that's one of the reasons why people have so much trepidation about going into pregnancy, because basically society lies to them about how hard it is. And like, nobody has like a vested interest in being like, well, I mean, you know, people used to do this every year. It used to be part of the natural yearly cycle of a woman's life.
Like, what are you guys on? You know, That's what makes
Simone Collins: the controversy so interesting around this, is that it shows, it lays bare the tension in society. Between this [00:35:00] aspiration and realization of you can do it. You can be in a beauty pageant two weeks after delivering. You can look young and beautiful and still be a mother of eight kids.
You know, this is possible parenting and, and pregnancy don't have to be unsustainable, but then there's also this desire among those who feel like they can't, or don't really want to push through that cognitive dissonance or even try. To say, no, it's not possible. She has had help or she isn't okay. And there's, you know, I think that's part of what the journalist was trying to do was to demonstrate, no, she's not.
Okay. No, she's secretly crying for help.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, she threw acts like that is basically hitting the journalist on the head with a bong stick in being like, you know, in society. And it hurts. It hurts them when they realize that these lies that they've brought into are just that. They are lies. And they are lies that have, have cumulatively built up in society because, you know, no woman ever historically had a reason to be like, well, it's really not that big a deal, you know?
Because you know, you, you [00:36:00] get all this sympathy, you get all this. So why not lean into it? And if you go more progressive, then you get all these insane lies like, oh, well, like you can't be pregnant without getting fat afterwards. Like it just naturally happens. And it's like, no, it doesn't just naturally happen.
It happens because you created that standard for yourself and you realize now that, well, you don't have to worry about your husband leaving you. So you don't need to hold yourself to any sacrificial standards anymore. Because you don't respect your relationship in the way people like her respect her relationship and her husband.
And I'd also note here that Here you have the, the, the issue of them freaking out about how quickly they got married, how quickly they started dating and everything. Oh, and
Simone Collins: that's just a Mormon thing. You know, that's, that's not, yeah, that's not a weird thing. Yeah, that also gets framed in the articles.
Like those
Malcolm Collins: kind of But I don't even think it's a Mormon thing. Like you and I decided to get married within a few months of dating, at least.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but we waited for your brother and sister because we're nice.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that wasn't like, we would have gotten married earlier, but we specifically, so people who don't know this, we waited about a year to get [00:37:00] married.
I think more than
Simone Collins: that, we were, we were engaged. In 2013 and then we didn't get married until 2015 because we wait. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and for people who don't know is my brother wife had told him because they had been dating since their first day of college. That she would be upset if I got married before them because, you know, I would have met you years after they met.
I would have started dating you years after they started dating, but she was unable to get married while they were at Stanford business school together because She was on a scholarship. And so if they got married and they combined their finances, she would no longer qualify for the scholarship anymore.
And so as an act of sort of solidarity with them, I decided to wait until one day they had gotten married for us to get married. So we got married the day after them. But yeah, it was a day in
Simone Collins: between, but yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, there was a day in between. So two days after them, we had a lot of respect. Yeah.
Good 48 hours. I wasn't going to wait any longer than that. [00:38:00] But I, I we could have gotten married much earlier. I actually think that this is just like, these people don't know what it feels like to really care about somebody and want to live life together. Or, or
Simone Collins: to even date to marry. And I think that's also very different is, is people don't realize that there, there is this life you can choose to live in which you.
You date partners because you were trying to find a spouse and trying to start a family. And once, you know, you found the right person, it's a bad idea to wait because fertility only gets worse. You know, you only lose your optionality as time goes on.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and this is another thing that she did, which I have immense respect for.
So when the husband was thinking about marrying for her, she made one condition for him. Which is we have to work together
Simone Collins: because her parents did that.
Malcolm Collins: She saw her parents do it similar to what Simone and I push. You know, we run our companies together. We do the podcast together. We basically have a similar condition and I think it works amazingly [00:39:00] well.
I think it's much more sustainable than other forms of trad wifery. And I think that. She really embodies this. And this is another thing I respect about her, is her and her husband, while they do live this sort of idealized lifestyle due to their wealth, they are not doing things in terms of how they are raising their family that leans into the wealth overly.
By that, what I mean is they still have the job running the farm, which seems like it takes a lot of work. Same with the posting, that takes a lot of work. In addition to that, she doesn't hire nannies except for once a week. That needs kids. It was eight kids. Yeah. And no school, it's homeschooling. Right.
So like,
Simone Collins: no, there is a, a fellow Mormon who comes in a couple of days a week to do some homeschooling for them. So there's,
Malcolm Collins: Oh, there's that. Even so it's all very financially sustainable for like a normal Mormon family. Um, Working together with your husband and hiring a tutor for a couple of days a week.
Tutors don't cost that much because well, [00:40:00] and also it's
Simone Collins: like, it's, it's, it's Mormon. It's Mormon tutors. So like often that, like they're. You know, other people commenting on this have pointed out that, you know, when they babysat for fellow Mormons as a teen, they'd get paid like, you know, 20 bucks for like five hours, you know, it's like within Mormon community service provision is often at a high discount.
Elements of their lives are very sustainable. I would argue that they're often criticized for living a sort of petite Trinon lifestyle. This is in reference to the way that Marie Antoinette made her little farmhouse and lived her little life pretending to be a peasant farmer. And they are totally doing that.
But I would also argue that they are totally not hiding the fact that they're living a, they're cosplaying as homesteaders. I think Hannah even uses wording around that, like, you know, like pretending to be a homesteader or like, you know, trying to be a homesteader and they're not hiding the fact, like she talks about the fact that they insulated the outside of their house.
She shares pictures of their renovations and she cooks in front of a 10, 000 [00:41:00] Stove the Aga, like this, like the Rolls Royce of of stoves. And, and, you know, she doesn't hide the fact it's, it's very clear that they're wealthy, it's very clear that she, you know, is, is it the highest echelons of social class?
And I think the fact that there isn't that, that that lack of transparency that there's no criticism and keep in mind, okay, just as, and this is a time honor tradition of wealthy people. Cosplaying as poor people, but keep in mind that poor people constantly cosplay as wealthy people, which is why we've had sumptuary laws, which is why food trends have constantly changed.
Just explain what a
Malcolm Collins: sumptuary
Simone Collins: sumptuary law is saying poor people can't wear purple because dammit, we need to have something that they can't copy eventually. And food trends. Constantly fluctuate if you look throughout history between very like weird like gastronomic gross food That's all weird and abstracted to like down home country loaf Because as soon as poor people are able to somewhat copy what what wealthy people are eating [00:42:00] suddenly wealth people like that's disgusting poor food I must eat the opposite.
So there's always this game of cat and mouse You know, we cannot we can no sooner criticize wealthy people for cosplaying as poor people We can criticize the poor people who are buying food Fake Louis Vuitton bags and like wearing like knockoff luxury stuff or even real luxury stuff. Everyone's doing the other thing.
You know what I mean? I'm going to
Malcolm Collins: argue against you here. I don't think they are cosplaying as poor people. I think that these journalists, Oh yeah, no, they are actually cosplaying as wealthy
Simone Collins: people. Wealthy
Malcolm Collins: culture right now. Yeah. The, a key thing was in wealthy culture right now is this aesthetic, this homesteading aesthetic.
I mean, look at us. Like, look, it's a flex. No, it's a flex. It's a hardcore flex to have a farm and chickens and live in the countryside now. Also, cause
Simone Collins: you're not a wage slave. You don't have to go into your office. You're not obligated to go into these meetings like, because you have that much wealth. And everyone's pointed out who's an actual rancher.
They're like these people, you know, every, every like real like dairy farmer or person who has a farm like this, they're [00:43:00] financing it. They can barely make ends meet. These people are buying it in cash. They have all the most expensive high end farm equipment. This is very clearly a luxury endeavor and it's probably not cash positive.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I'm sure their channel is cash positive. Sure. The
Simone Collins: content is cash positive, but their farm, I don't know. I
Malcolm Collins: wouldn't be surprised if it's not cash positive, but probably about breaks neutral, but that's not the point of the farm. The point of the farm is the content. And that's very successful.
Well, and the lifestyle and the flex they, they are, well, and again, this is
Simone Collins: a calling. I really think that the key career here. is that they believe from an ideological standpoint that what their work is spreading the word of the Mormon church, showing the wholesomeness and attractiveness of that lifestyle, which is drawing people in, which is why this controversy is here in the first place.
Malcolm Collins: But I, I would, I would note here that as a society, so if people wonder why wealthy people are doing this, like why wealthy culture, as Simone has mentioned, historically, what you have is wealthy people, Go more and more and more out there with their [00:44:00] tastes as poor people try to catch up with them.
And then you get this reset where then wealthy people then go extremely simplistic and back to the countryside. Like the reason why like treat triumph or whatever she's talking about. It was a thing was because that was the height of wealth was to pretend to be a poor shepherd. But with all of the nicest stuff, this is like some new part of wealthy culture.
It's a cycle that we go through and you see historically where, you know, the wealthy people are going to like, Oh, escargot or like crazy stuff. And then they go back to meatloaf. Because now, now all the poor people are eating and you see this in society now, now that like. Brands like Louis Vuitton and, and, and Prada and like a lot of these like fancy brands have moved down market, down market, down market is how, how do you show your wealth when you do the things that poor people can't do, you know, you see all this was like tanning for a long time it was that having, A, a, a tan was considered very lower class because you had to go out on the fields and work.
And so the wealthy people had parasols. And, and they, and even masks, have you seen [00:45:00] the creepy writing masks? Very pale all the time, but then office work started and only the wealthy people could go outside. So then all the wealthy people started and going, these, getting these ridiculous tans, like growing up, we had like a tanning booth in my house and stuff like that.
And then The poor people figured out, Oh, we want to be like the wealthy people and be tanned. So they started to do like spray on tans and tanning booths themselves. And then all the wealthy people were like, Oh, being tan, we can't do that anymore. Now we need to go back to being pale again. And so you had, you have this little cat and mouse game and that's what they're seeing.
They're not pretending to be poor. They're just not up to date with what is considered a chic in wealthy culture right now. And the way that they're acting is very chic. Now, I want to talk about the one really bad incident where I'm like, this was actually a big mess.
Simone Collins: Right. So they posted, and this is definitely something that both of them decided to do.
A little video short. of Hannah receiving a birthday gift from her husband, Daniel, who's shooting this as it's [00:46:00] happening. It, it was a package that he didn't bother to wrap. And she's like, Oh, like, what is it? Could it be tickets to Greece? Like she just says multiple times, like she's starting to rip it open.
There's fabric. She's like, Oh, it's a hat for our trip to Greece. Like she very clearly wants it. A trip to Greece for her birthday. And then she opens it up and it is you know, fresh out of the box from Ukraine. A really cute egg apron. It's a little apron with a lot of little holes for eggs in it.
But people are like, how very dare he? Because after she like, you know, tries to look cheerful, like she's clearly disappointed. She tries to look cheerful. She kind of like does a little jig with it, you know, holding it to her body. And he says you're welcome. And in the sort of like passive aggressive smug way, which just comes across horribly.
And now it's this meme. I was just looking through Hannah's ballerina farms, Instagram account and now on like a bunch of her most recent posts. There are just people who are like, where is her [00:47:00] stage? Where is her trip to Greece? Just like give this woman her trip to Greece. Like, they're just like justice for Hannah.
You know, they're just, they're freaking out that this woman hasn't been given her trip to Greece. And it is weird that like, one, She very clearly kept, it's like, if, if I, for some reason would not let die, that hopefully dead horse of me constantly being like, I wish you could fly business class everywhere, which we can't because it's too expensive.
And you being like, you know, giving me like a vacuum and being like, you're welcome. You know, like that it just, I don't know why they would post something like that. It's not. So I have a theory on this. Okay. What's going on?
Malcolm Collins: All right. So first, something that the audience should know, I've checked, they do not appear to have ever done this trip to Greece, right?
This apron is a trivial gift for them, right? Like it's not an expensive thing. They are almost certainly billionaires. That being the case, a trip to Greece would be a trivial expense for them. So the question is, is why, if she really wants to do this, [00:48:00] why haven't they done the trip to Greece? Because they
Simone Collins: have gone to like Paris with their kids.
This isn't an impossible thing.
Malcolm Collins: My guess is it might actually be part of their calling to try to, I suspect maybe after the trip to Paris or something, the church says you can't do things that aren't financially sustainable for the average Mormon family. So while they can live the very best of lifestyle, it's supposed to be attainable.
And I suspect that that is what is going on here. She's
Simone Collins: not throwing shade at her husband, she's She's throwing shade at the LDS church. She's throwing shade at her handlers. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Because the husband, what, like, he's not like an idiot, right? Like, he knows, you know, if she wanted to have an off stage conversation with him about, Hey, the cryptography is actually really important to me.
They would have that conversation off air.
Simone Collins: Especially because they are media savvy. They're not idiots. That's why this was so confusing to me.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so she [00:49:00] definitely knew how this would come off. He who filmed this definitely knew who this would come off. So who are they talking to in this video?
They are talking to somebody who is not their fan base and not themselves. I bet it's their LDS handlers.
Simone Collins: Oh, that's so interesting.
That is
Malcolm Collins: my bet as to what the trip to Greece situation was really about. So yeah, yeah I, I, yeah, they can't be, they could have been that stupid, right?
Like, no, no, it's like with us in the bop, people are like, oh, he, he lost. Yeah. How could he have, how could he have slipped? Yeah. But you read the piece and it's very clearly like it was intentional. I did not lose control of my anger and I, knew what I was doing in the moment. And you did it
Simone Collins: in public surrounded by people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I could have, I could have done so many different things if I didn't want that to be in the piece. I wanted that to be in the piece. And actually a lot of people can be like, Oh, this was firmly a negative thing for them. You've got to keep in mind. The [00:50:00] type of people who are going to freak out about something like that are the type of people who are not going to support us anyway, given that it's something the majority of Americans do.
And the research now says it's the right thing to do. And most conservative people do it. So we had to look at how we were signaling to a conservative audience. Keep in mind, we're always constantly signaling to two audiences, the progressives who are interested at potentially getting into the conservatism and doing this transition.
But then also the conservatives who Are so hard line that they are costing the party votes and preventing us from winning elections. And they need to understand, like, a softer approach. Right? And so, a number of those people who previously were like, I don't know if we can really trust them.
I don't know they. After that happened, we're like, okay, I trust them a lot more now. They're, they're actually Even
Simone Collins: Limestone was like, well, there's one thing I can agree with you on. Limestone being a demographer who in the Prenatalist space absolutely hates us and everything we stand for. Yeah, he's like a
Malcolm Collins: socialist Christian.
So I guess he's like the one The one area where he's like, well, at least I'm a social conservative. He has, he has like far, far left. Yeah. But [00:51:00] at
Simone Collins: least he, he agrees that, you know, white corporal punishment is correct, you know, for sustainable parenting. Speaking of which, you know, another really common theme in the ballerina farm snark subreddit is, you know, a child endangerment essentially.
And, you know, it was very common. Top hits is look at what they've done with their children. Now look at their children close to a hotspot. Look at their Children chopping food in their home. Look at their Children getting injured. You know, look at the all these things, you know, Oh, don't they have any idea of how many farm accidents take place every year?
And I think this just comes down to again, anytime someone sees a family with more than two Children and no helicopter parents immediately, They're like, this is child endangerment, call Child Protective Services, which to your point, what's the stat of how many, how many families have had CPS called on them in the United States?
37%.
Malcolm Collins: 37 percent of children in the United States have CPS called on them. That's a 37 percent of families, that 37 percent of children.
Simone Collins: Yeah. That's
Malcolm Collins: insane.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So I think that's, that's the theme there is, you know, any criticism that they [00:52:00] are mistreating their children is really an inevitable product of them having.
More than like one or two children, period.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and also I will say that they earn high points on my social influencer index because when this channel was still a lot smaller than it is now I reached out to them about being on the channel and doing an interview with us and they had the courtesy to respond.
And a lot of influencers don't. They do not respond. And we tried to, we're going to be moving to stock responses soon, but it was like a, Oh, we don't do appearances like that, like that was basically the gist of it. So, I'd still love to have them on if they're ever open to it. But I don't know if a channel like ours would do anything other than hurt them because they try to keep a really clean brand if for their, they
Simone Collins: don't talk politics.
They talk about. Raw milk and baking. And you know, there's, she, Hannah does some, you know, very typical female influencer content, things like get ready with me. In fact, her [00:53:00] response to this article was her doing a voiceover commenting on what the journalist wrote over a get ready with me video format, which since you're not a female on constantly on Instagram, get ready with me is basically where women record their like morning routine, how they put on makeup, what they like, how they go to the gym, what they eat for breakfast.
Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's really fun. I love watching this stuff. I mean, I love it when I love it in movies. I love it in dangerous liaisons. I love it in the devil wears Prada. Like this is, but anyway, like she does stuff like that, but they do not talk politics, they do not talk like, aside from talking about how great the LDS church is, it is not, they're not on brand.
They shouldn't be talking with us.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and I want you to respond to, because you had taken a quote from the article that we haven't touched on and put it on our show notes
Simone Collins: so in a followup article that the author of this Times article wrote she commented But it was also a life of contradictions, children, not allowed [00:54:00] screens, but who are reality TV characters online for millions, a stay at home mother who has made a career out of being so an analog old fashioned farm only working because it was underwritten by social media cash, a choice modern in her ability to have one, to do something very traditional.
And this is something that shows up in, in some articles that have been published in relation to us, this like pull, like, Oh, they have kids, but they don't seem to like them. You know, the, the, the journalists seem to feel like they. They have to like catch us in our hypocrisy. And I think they're really trying to catch Hannah in her true woman, having it all.
Oh, but she can't have it all. Just like they wanted to catch us. Like they say they want to have kids, but surely they just hate their kids. Like they, I think they really, progressives covering these conservative moments and these whole little journeys of like, I'm going to go cover and, you know, go profile the family they want to try to catch them in a [00:55:00] lie and they come in planning to do so.
And just looking to fill in the little Mad Libs article doing so.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I mean, I'm not sorry this happened to them because I bet it was all planned and it worked exactly the way they wanted it to. No, it generated a ton of more interest. It's great. And if, if given you a new theory, I used to be like, get a job, man, was this guy.
But now I am much more, Oh, you know, he is actually, if he was given that calling and of course he probably was, he is living sort of the perfect life, you know, in terms of achieving his goal and, you know, acting as. probably the single biggest advocate in the world right now for the LDS church. I mean, he's probably close to Mitt Romney in terms of, you know, the, the positive reputation that he has gained the church among the type of people who might convert.
Keep in mind, like he doesn't care about the type of people who wouldn't convert. Therefore, they are not like the target of articles like this for him. Therefore, if they get mad at him, That's [00:56:00] no sweat off his back.
Simone Collins: I think he's more influential than Mittens because specifically he shows an intimate view into his life.
You can see the inside of his house. You can see his bathroom. You can see his children and his wife. The, the key thing to pronatalism, I think when it comes to propaganda is showing what it's like, you know, making it feel relatable, making it feel real because people are so unmoored from that. You and I.
Didn't spend a lot of time around kids at all. We honestly didn't know what parenting would be like. And here are a bunch of people often watching this out of like rage bait or just curiosity or just the sheer novelty of it suddenly becoming like normalized to this concept of having kids young, getting married young living a more wholesome life connected and oriented around family instead of around achievement and selling and business and all these other things.
He is incredible. Like talk about impact plus quality of life, like actually just being out there handling pigs, handling cows, handling [00:57:00] chickens, that is a very satisfying life for any human where you get to see the physical results of your
Malcolm Collins: labor. Rewarded by God when they live their calling. Well, and I, I think that you know, he seems to be doing that.
So, and this is what we mean, you know, we believe that Mormonism is one of the true faiths. So I, I think that he is you know, actually called by God to do this and he's doing a good job at it. So good on them. Good on not engaging with weirdos, shock jocks like us. And I love you to death Simone.
This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for bringing this to me and I will rush to see if I can get this posted tomorrow.
Simone Collins: I love me. A crazy controversy around conservatives and progressives fighting. So thanks for this. Malcolm loved it.
Malcolm Collins: Love you too. Bye.
Simone Collins: Bye. I really do love you though. You're so pretty.
What do you want to talk about next?
Malcolm Collins: Uh, I want to do the uh, how Catholics transformed America.
I've been told in the comments. You guys liked the little scenes of our family after videos. So [00:58:00] I've added one here. I would note that this one is from a recent family reunion. We went to where the kids met up with all their cousins and everything.
Oh, my goodness.
I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. Hold him. Hold him. Got it, got it, I got it. Give me that! Yo, throw it to me, okay?
Give it a turn, give it a, give it a [00:59:00] turn. You're a natural. Oh yeah. Malcolm. Oh yeah. Oh sorry
to the kids, I'm, I'm, I'm doing filming here. Throw it to your brother. Yeah, yeah, wait, Octavian, come over here, come over here.
Simone Collins: I was saying, I was thinking about the way that we're handling sex ed with our kids.
And I realized we're not sex positive. We're not sex negative. We're sex realists. And I just wish that more people were sex realists. What do you mean by that? Well, people are either like, You know, let's not talk about sex. It's dangerous. It's, you know, it's a sin or they're like, sex is a beautiful thing.
It's about making love. It's, it's a, you know, like it's sacred, it's a sacrament or, you know, it's whatever the hippie free love version of this is. And, you know, in the end, it's a biological process. It is not, I think something that we should be [01:00:00] moralizing. I think it's something that we should be understanding.
Just like we understand hunger and digestion.
Malcolm Collins: We'll do an episode on you know, actually, you know, I have an idea for an episode on that that we could even do today if you wanted to. On sex
Simone Collins: realism.
Malcolm Collins: All right. So, why don't you jump us into this and I'll interrupt you to be like Okay. Okay.
Simone Collins: Yes.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the fundamental flaws in communist ideology, even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world. They delve into the nature of scarcity, class structures, and the evolution of influence in the digital age. This video challenges common misconceptions about communism and offers insights into how modern society and economics are shaped by attention, competence, and disintermediated communities.
Key topics covered:
* The impossibility of a truly classless society
* Scarcity and status in post-scarcity environments
* The evolution of influencer culture and digital communities
* The role of competence and attention in modern economies
* Critiques of communist ideology and its practical applications
* The future of urban centers and distributed networks
* The importance of family and cultural identity in society
Whether you're interested in political theory, futurism, or the dynamics of online influence, this video offers a fresh perspective on age-old questions and contemporary challenges.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.
You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.
It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: And there is no such thing as a classist society. [00:01:00] It's not possible. No. Um, Do the intro.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be, I hope, a Simone Abigail episode because she was the one who made this point to me while we were walking around a Target. What a fitting place.
It's what we do.
Simone Collins: It's what we do. We
Malcolm Collins: were talking about communism and the cliche. Real communism has never been tried, which we will also get to in this video. But one of the things that you turned and said to me while we were walking was, There
Simone Collins: is no such thing as a classless society. It is absolutely impossible.
Go into your argument because I found it very powerful. Yeah. So no matter what happens in a society, there will always be scarce goods. As soon as you make one good, not so good, People will then sort into classes based on what is scarce. And this shows up in various sci fi novels that anyone can read.
I really like stuff by Cory Doctorow. He wrote this one book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which really [00:02:00] influenced the way that I saw the world in the future. It's, it takes place in a post scarcity environment. You know, post singularity, you can live forever, you have backups of yourself that you can just restore if you accidentally die or are murdered and in this world, you know, you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but There is still a class system and there's still a currency that is, that is limited and finite.
And it's called Woofie. Woofie is social capital in this world. And so people form themselves into what are called adhocracies in this world. Which I love that word. Also. I want, I want a world of adhocracies instead of bureaucracies. Adhocracies are basically short lived collections of people who get together to Do cool stuff to get social credit.
And the discovering system wouldn't be stable and I'll get to why in just a second, but continue. Yeah, I really like it. Nevertheless. This book is about adhocracies that form and compete in Disney's magic kingdom in Florida, in this [00:03:00] post singularity world. Cause some things never go away. Thank God. And what they do is they'll like, they take over the rides.
So, Two rival groups in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are, are kind of competing for more woofy. One is, is redoing the Hall of Presidents and the other one is doing the Haunted Mansion. And you know, it's all about like, who can, you know, impress the world the most with their really cool updates to these rides slash attractions.
And it's, it totally makes sense to me that that would be the case. And, you know, and when you, when you, when you say something, it's unpopular when you do something that really pisses people off. If you go viral for something bad. You know, that's it. You're sort of destitute, but being destitute doesn't mean you're starving or homeless.
It just means you don't really get the cool stuff. You don't get the cool stuff. Let's, let's,
Malcolm Collins: let's talk about, I want to break down a few aspects of this. So, because I think it's a very good description and it does a very good job of showing what's going on. Why you can't really have classlessness because [00:04:00] even in an environment where all our needs are met, there are still some things that are intrinsically of limited value, i.
e. Disney world. There is only one Disney world. You can create other Disney worlds, but they won't have the same cultural cliche as the first or the main Disney world. And I, oh, sorry. What was the point? And so. Who gets to work on that Disney World, that special thing, and who gets access to that special thing?
You would still need some metric for deciding these two things. In this, the metric that they choose is attention. The reason the Disney World has more value than another random thing or random park is because it is a thing that collects attention. And so the very attention you collect is what gives you access.
to it. Very interesting that he, one of the things I think he predicted so wrong in that [00:05:00] Disney world would always be a thing of value. Little did he know the wokes would completely destroy the brand so much that nobody even wants to go anymore.
Simone Collins: Oh, I mean, I think it's more, it was more an issue of, of poor planning and price gouging.
It's hard to, we can, we can get in. I mean, we love watching Disney analysts on YouTube for some reason. I also want to talk about why adhocracies
Malcolm Collins: can't form.
Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So suppose the world does work the way it does in that world and we'll be, or we'll feed or the amount of attention that you have access to is the core thing of value in that society. There would be it'd be really dangerous to break up with other groups and form new groups all the time because that would lower the efficiency at the production of this that you would have access to and therefore outcompeted by the groups that mostly stayed together and where it's fairly
discerning into who they work with. . So if you're discerning and who you work with, you [00:06:00] know, you work with people you have experience with and stuff like that. And you're not just working with random new people who might have high woofy, but it might be towards a different community.
It might be toward the different, whatever. You're just going to get out competed by the groups that are more successful. And so that's going to lead to more stable, like woofy corporations, you could call them, i. e. large groups that work together to control an area or an attention resource like Disney World.
And, Work together to do high amounts of production in many ways. You can think of YouTube as already being a Wolfie economy. And the big creators while they work in networks of big creators, and in that degree, you do have a bit of an adhocracy. They all have fairly large teams that are fairly consistent.
And even the different people they choose to work with occasionally. It's a fairly small pool and those pools don't cross over as much as you would think they would so like
Simone Collins: actually more or less how it works in the book, too. Oh,
Malcolm Collins: okay. Well, [00:07:00] yeah, like, for example, if you consider like the Simone and Malcolm, like wider network of intellectual thinkers, we're in,
Simone Collins: you know, we will.
This also in the effect of altruist and rationalist communities, you even see this, like, look at the PayPal mafia, right? You could kind of argue that the, the organizations and investments across which the PayPal mafia have like spread is a collection of adhocracies that are all, you know, they're kind of related.
They share a lot of people. And they form and dissolve as, as necessary. That's, that's what I like about adhocracy is the fluidity of them. The, the pragmatic, the pragmatic nature.
Malcolm Collins: If you look at the PayPal mafia, it doesn't function the way you're saying it functions. It's a collection of literal companies based on nepotism networks.
No, no, no.
Simone Collins: I'm, I'm referring, no, the, the, by the PayPal mafia, I'm referring to people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like those early investors and people involved in PayPal.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And then they consolidated their power through the way they were investing, forming an entrenched [00:08:00] power network, which is the antithesis of an adhocracy.
Yes, a group of people might organically come together to then form an entrenched bureaucracy well, I wouldn't describe
Simone Collins: them as a bureaucracy.
Malcolm Collins: No, they're a peerage network. Yeah. And a peerage network is not, no, it's not. Adhocracy. So this is where you're getting confused. So I'll, I'll describe this for you to help fix how you can understand how to adhocracy can't really form in these sorts of societies.
Peerage networks can absolutely peerage networks can. You have noticed that the first time these groups came together to form this like competent, good at working together community, they did really well like adhocracy because they were all coming together. But that All coming together accidentally only happens once and before most of them are super successful.
Once a team becomes successful together, it forms a peerage network. It no longer has a huge reason to continue to bring in outsiders [00:09:00] at the level of the initial team. That would just be stupid. It would be stupid to bring in another individual who's not as wealthy or something as like Elon Musk and the other people in the community, into that top level.
And so it doesn't happen. That's how peerage networks form. But anyway, I want to get into how in our own mostly post scarcity developed world, we already see the perpetuation of a class based system Through the consumer patterns of the Starbucks communists. And we've done an episode on Starbucks communism, but I think it really matters.
You know, when you go to the classic Starbucks communists, you, I mean, it's got the name because they've got their Starbucks, which is a brand, which has. Cost like they spent extra on that for the brand than they would spend for that coffee. If they had just made it themselves, they'll have their apple phone, which they have spent extra on because of the artificial [00:10:00] scarcity created by the apple brand.
They have their brand closings. They have their brand associations. So much of the scarcity that they face and in terms of the things that they are purchasing in the world. is, is just due to the scarcity of that thing. And even if it's not woofy or attention, that is the scarce thing in a society, you will always have something that is scarce because that's the way humans work.
And then status will be built around that scarce thing. Because if you don't have something that's scarce, then you can't build status networks, right? And then you can say, well, what if you had a society where everyone was totally. Right? How could that society be stable if you have varying degrees of competence?
Some individuals within that community would just innately be producing more than other individuals within that community, and they would want that to be recognized and [00:11:00] then, you know, cut off access to their productivity. Or
Simone Collins: innately be more attractive and then more people want to be their friends and they might go out of their way to do nice things for those people.
And then, you know, suddenly those people are getting like, Double food rations, you know, like it gets weird.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is, this is why that just doesn't work in a world of varied competence. You cannot have true equality because scarcity, Organically comes out of that. Now, you could, however, have a future society.
And in some of the sci fis that I've like written in my spare time what becomes of the socialist systems is systems where people's brains are edited after they are born to ensure that they are not, they have no unique area of competence. If they have a gift in music, if they have a gift in math, if they have a gift in the only way you can have sustainable communist or, or Classless systems is if I was literally the same.
Everyone's literally the same. And [00:12:00] that is mortifying, I think, but I think it's the only way you can produce that outcome.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but also you wouldn't really have a thriving society if everyone was the same and it would be good to be
Malcolm Collins: society. And they could be made smarter than humans are today through genetic augmentation.
They would just always be out competed by societies that had specialization. Which especially as genetic technology comes online is going to become more and more important for families to specialize. in specific fields, but that's going to mean that they need access to different sorts of things and are able to compete in systems over different sorts of things.
Simone Collins: Wait, hold on. Is the most accurate depiction of communism, real communism, in the media like those clips of the cloned stormtroopers in the new Star Wars movies? Just, just the existence of a bunch of clones that are all over the world. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: clone army is real communism. If they're room [00:13:00] and
Simone Collins: board is covered, it is a post scarce world for them.
They are all clones. They wear the same clothes. They have the same job. That is real communism. We've done it. Congratulations. But here's,
Malcolm Collins: here's another thing that I also want to push back against here. Because we have done. Other videos where we say, because I do think that this is where we're heading to an attention based economy.
Specifically friendships have become totally disintermediated for most of the people that you are communicating with. And somebody can be like, no. And I'm like, do you watch? more YouTubers and podcasters in terms of the total hours of your day than you spend talking to other human beings. If you do, then you have a disintermediated friendship network similar to me.
I spend more time watching stuff and then I go out and I talk and then people choose to listen to me. If that is the social connection that they want to engage with, it is a completely disintermediated social network. Which I think a lot of people are like, Oh, well, it, you lose a lot of [00:14:00] the interpersonal connection when you get this disintermediated social network, but what you get is access to higher quality or better tailored conversations for you than you would get without the disintermediation.
And so that's why you choose to do it. You could choose not to do it. You could choose to just turn all the podcasts and YouTubes off. Yeah. But you don't because we actually, this disintermediation is better for us than talking to somebody and waiting to get to the good parts of the conversation.
I mean, keep in mind, one of the reasons why our conversations like when people listen to our conversations, they're like, Oh, that was a uniquely enriching conversation without a lot of dead air and stuff like that. And I'm like, that is because you are not seeing this actual conversation. Right. You are seeing this conversation after I spent hours editing out every pause, every time we had to Google something we didn't know, every tangent, every it is as condensed as I can make [00:15:00] it for you, so it is a super normal stimuli for you, it is a super normal conversation, people who don't know what super normal stimuli is, this is a concept where like a a bird had the genetic impulse to sit on a blue egg, And then you put like an extra large blue ball next to it.
That's bigger than any egg it could ever produce. It will still sit on the blue ball because it doesn't have this disintermediating thing that's saying like, well, if a conversation is too good, then go away from it. Because you know, that's not a real conversation, probably that's some sort of artificial thing in your environment, but I actually think that the end user benefits more from this.
This isn't like a maladaptive supernormal stimuli. I think that this is actually an adaptive supernormal stimuli. And people can be like, why is that? Well, you engage in conversations for typically two reasons. One is to gain access to additional information about the world slash additional perspectives about the world.
And the other is to build out your personal network. The problem is, is that this is always going to be better when you can choose any conversation you want within an [00:16:00] online environment or have it served to you by an algorithm. The information and perspective side is going to be better served.
However, you can be like, well, what about the interpersonal connection side? And the answer to that is. While that may be worse served for your average person, it is going to be better served for a competent individual. Let me explain. You, like us, could go out there and start a podcast, or a Twitter account, or a you know, a YouTube, right?
And then thousands of people hundreds of people, you know, whatever, might choose to listen to what you have to say, which actually gives you access to, through parasocial connections, a wider network than you would have been able to get had you focused on one to one communication. However if you can't compete in that environment and you're like, well, I can't create something that a lot of people are going to want to listen to, it [00:17:00] also means Then you're, you're stuck in these individual conversations, which become lower and lower quality for the people who are forced into them.
And that is, I think, really damaging for a lot of people.
To put it another way, a system for supplying a type of good, which is substandard for an average deliver of that type of good. But super standard for an above average deliver of that. Good. And that doesn't constrain the quantity of the good being delivered. E and above average delivery of that. Good does not have their ability to deliver that.
Good hindered. By the number of people who are receiving that good.
Is always going to out-compete a system which is better for the average deliver of a good. And especially a system which constrains the amount of that good that a super standard deliver can deliver. I E. A better than average [00:18:00] conversationalist. Is going to be delivering less conversations in person because at least so many people can get access to that individual.
and your window, another phenomenon that has. Come out of the disintermediated conversation marketplace. Which is, if you are a competent individual who might be able to compete within this marketplace. But you do not have time to compete within this marketplace. Maybe it's because you are successful in, uh, you know, finance or you are as successful biologists, or you are a successful basically.
Your competence in some other area is eating your time. You are actually going to be rewarded for. Engaging up. I'd almost say negatively engaging with it. I E. Ensuring that you are as private as possible, because if you are a little public, if you post to Twitter, sometimes if you post to Facebook, sometimes. And you don't get a [00:19:00] lot of followers because you just don't have the time to put the effort into it. Then it might signal to people that you are actually a very uninteresting and uncompetent individual. And this is why you see so many competent individuals being so private these days because they don't have. The time to invest in these types of marketplaces. And if you are competent, but don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces, it's often better not to appear on them at all. This actually, isn't just a problem for competent people in other areas.
It's even a problem for competent communicators. , One friend of mine who is very, very, very famous in other parts of the internet, but that doesn't have a YouTube yet. when I was talking to her about this, one of her fears about starting a YouTube channel, Is that in the early days, she is going to be much smaller on YouTube than she is on the other platforms, which could cause people to perceive her as being much less. It's [00:20:00] successful or competent within online spaces.
And she actually is. , and so this is the big problem. When moving to other platforms, if you have already established yourself within one platform, So it's not just your competent banker who has to deal with this. When moving into the online sphere is all, but it's a person who is extra famous within one platform or media type, moving to a new platform or media type.
Malcolm Collins: I was actually talking with someone about this today about what we're doing for our kids networks and a huge problem. Many of the traditional cultural and religious systems use when they are trying to get a kid to stay in a family network is they will say like, okay, I want you to stay in our cultural network.
So I will give you a peer group that you can play with and access. And I will do that through the local church group or the local synagogue or something like that. Right. The problem with that group. Is that that group will be out competed by the super [00:21:00] normal communities that the child has access to through the Internet, which will make it very easy.
You might want to unmute yourself. And the child's not making noise anymore. Thanks. So because you were like, yeah, right. Okay. So that will give you access. To that'll, that'll give your kids access to people who are even more similar to them or might seem more impressive to them or might seem, you know, so then they end up, yes, you provided them with a peer group, but the peer group wasn't as compelling for to them as the peer groups you find a lot.
Now contrast that with what we're doing, where we take the most interesting, most successful families we know, and we add them to this network of families that we are building, that our kids can learn from. One go meet once a year by going to like a summer camp thing that we rent out and you know, all the families will keep in who send their kids and the kids can all get to know each other.
But two, have online forums where the kids can interact with each other. And if they build a good relationship with other. We might send them out, send them out to the family of, of the friend because they're an in network [00:22:00] family. And then that kid's family might send them over to us. So it allows you to have a dispersed network of high competence individuals who can also through the family connections, get my kids into good early jobs, get my kids investments, get my kids started on their first media projects.
So the kids are going to find this community disproportionately valuable to them because of the way that we curated it when contrasted with the random communities they can gain access to online. And so this is something I, I, I very intentionally structured and I think that over relying on these older systems, like I'm just going to focus on conversations or I'm just going to focus on, you know, my local church group.
It's very difficult to have that work in the modern environment, but it can work. So let's talk about where it does work. It does work when the in person connections due to cultural reasons, either you can be seen as a culture that doesn't trust people who they don't know [00:23:00] personally, and they're like older individuals and stuff like that, that can get you access to capital, that can get you access to friendships that you can't get otherwise, or because you have some capability due to the problem is that those networks are just gonna be out competed.
This is the problem, like why I wouldn't invest in that. Some people are like, well, due to my family's background or history, I have access to wealthy nepotistic networks, right? It's like, unfortunately, in this new disintermediated economy, like social economy the networks that were open to the disintermediated nature are going to outcompete the ones that aren't because they are going to be able to access all of the best intellectuals and entrepreneurs of an age pretty easily because, you know, that entrepreneur or those intellectuals are going to want access to the other, and they're going to want their kids more importantly, to have access to the other members of that network, whereas the old money networks only have access to Capital, which becomes [00:24:00] increasingly less important when contrasted with competence in this new world order that we're entering into.
Then a person can be like, why is capital worth so much less than competence in this new world? Well, one, you look at what startups are doing these days. So, you know, we have a lot of friends and family. It used to be that you had. You know, the big startup teams, you know, forming and now most startups are like 2 to 3 people living in different locations working at home with a huge squad of A.
I. S. doing most of the work. And we're even seeing this in the traditional industries. You know, 1 of the leader in stuff these days is John deer, for example, like, that's farming and everything like that. No, they have, you know, Really cutting edge AI program. Simona's quietly talking to me while caring for the kid.
And so, you know, I think more and more we're going to see this eat other industries. And that means you need fewer and fewer, but more and more competent individuals to, to do stuff. And those individuals can really [00:25:00] name their price. As for the capital itself, it's useful in terms of setting up a big AI centers and stuff like that.
But the people who are doing that, then, like, you know, we have people working on stuff like that, who bring in people like Simone and I. To work on these projects because they know that the social capital that we have can be useful. And the competency that we have, we show through appealing to specific high competency communities.
Can, can be useful in getting these projects done more quickly in the same way that additional capital can be. But the problem with the problem was just capital is capital is. Very interchangeable with other sources of capital. Woofie is not. You can't interchange us for another person with a similar view count because they are going to appeal to a different audience.
And the various audiences do not have equal access to [00:26:00] competence. A lot of people have said, you know, if you dumbed down your content, if you went more, you know, Mainstream. If you just decided to fit one niche, like just preached to a classic conservative audience, you would get a wider audience and we would get a wider audience, but we would get a lower utility audience.
The interesting thing about Wolfie based economies is it matters much, much more who is is the people paying attention to you than, , the number of people paying attention to you.
Simone Collins: Oh, kind of like how on Twitter, if Elon Musk retweets you, then like, whoa, you know, everything changes. Versus like if just some random user.
No, no, no. I,
Malcolm Collins: I, I wouldn't say that at all. I, I, Elon Musk, because he has High profile has the normies following him. So, you know, if he retweets you, then millions of people are going to see that here. I'm thinking more of you know, it, it is more useful to me to be friends with somebody like Curtis Yarvin, than it is [00:27:00] for me to be friends with somebody.
Like, Windigoon, for example. Windigoon seems like a great guy, from all I've seen. He has a very big audience. But the audience is just not the audience that is, like, really, you know, it's not gonna have a huge overlap with, like, high competency and stuff like that. It's a generic audience.
Curtis Yarvin is a fringe individual.
Simone Collins: What you're, you're kind of saying is, like, there's different, Currency, like there's the, the Wendigo and peso and the Curtis, Curtis Yervin yen and the you know, Alan, the currency is the individual eyes on each of these. Yeah. Like the, the nature of the, yeah. And some currencies you can, you can transfer easily.
Sometimes the exchange rate sucks. That kind of thing.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, so here's an example of this, right? Like, okay. I would say that you're probably better off in terms of like the highest tier, biggest eye currency individual in the world is probably Scott Alexander.
Simone Collins: Oh, because the [00:28:00] eyes on him are also very high agency eyes.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If he, if he puts something out, it's probably being read by Mark Andreessen. It's probably being read by Elon Musk. It's probably being read By half of both a Democrat and conservative White House staff. Now it's not being read by the mass population, right? But it is being read by a huge chunk of the people who actually make the decisions which decide the future and who have access to capital and who have access to the gates of power.
So if you were going to, you know, change Woofie, somebody like Scott Alexander's Wolfie Supply, I would argue, is bigger than somebody like Mr. Beast's Wolfie Supply. Because who's Mr. Beast's primary audience? It's people under the age of 14. You know, that is just not a very valuable Wolfie Supply except in terms of influencing the next generation, which I do think matters and, and the eyes matter in terms of, like, selling Ads and stuff like that, not as big as influencing the [00:29:00] future of humanity.
But now I want to talk about the, the death. Of the online sphere. Oh, what Talk about, there's been a lot of talk about the death of the influencer, and I don't think that what we're seeing is the death of the influencer. We're seeing a transformation in what the influencer is.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Relate to their audience.
So how do I, how do I put this? So a lot of people, they've been like, what, how can you believe in this woofy concept if you know, influencers seem to be dying? Yeah. And, and I will argue that the age of the, you know, Pootie Pie and stuff like that is kind of over. Like the mega influencer is kind of past day at this point.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. But they're not passé because fewer people are watching YouTube. They're not passé because fewer people are watching online content. They are passé because influencer networks disintermediated. The age of the mega influencer is over. The age of the disintermediated influencer is rising. If [00:30:00] you look at, for example, our audience and what they were watching online 10 years ago I'd, I'd argue the vast majority of them were not watching micro influencers like us.
They were watching mostly mainstream voices because that's the way the algorithms worked back in the day. Yeah. And before that they were
Simone Collins: watching TV
Malcolm Collins: which was even more constrained. Yeah, which was even more constrained and, and, and, and yeah,
Actually, this allows for a great analogy here. It would be like at the end of the era of TV and individuals saying, well, the age of the pundit is over. Know that YouTube is rising when really the age of the pundit wasn't over. It just became slightly more disintermediated.
And that process of disintermediation is just continuing into the modern era.
Malcolm Collins: now it's much more catered to individuals and you have much more the concept of like communities of influencers.
[00:31:00] Also the ways that people communicate is changing. It used to be that the disintermediated conversations happened. And that was the primary form of communication, whereas now what you have is the disintermediated conversations facilitate disintermediated communities. Let me explain what a disintermediated community is.
The disintermediated community is the discord group or signal group or what's that group which is increasingly becoming the most valuable small communities you can have access to where you know, you've got these investor groups and we're on lots of these investor groups. It's where deals come in and we see the deal and then people like talk about, you know, Oh, are you interested in this deal?
You're interested in this deal. And people would be like, why would an individual have it? Like, what's the utility? Why did these come to exist and come to dominate deal making spaces? When I say deal making spaces, I mean where capital is going. Well, it's because you've got to consider the alternative.
What's the alternative? The [00:32:00] alternative is you, you all live in like a Palo Alto area, which just doesn't happen anymore, right? Like you don't have these big collections of thinkers anymore because this became too expensive for the, you know, if you're like a young ambitious person who believes in your own competence, do you want to be spending like 70 percent of your income just because you're living in a fancy area?
Or are you going to go, you know, move to the woods because you know that smart people will come to you, which is largely what we're seeing now in terms of investments. You don't see as many. Concentrating in San Francisco as you used to, it's actually much more. And like, I'd actually said the digital nomad community is probably the biggest hotbed of talent right now.
And then outside of that is a, the, the, the just sort of spread out online community where people, when they're looking for deals, go to specific online community networks. Well, then within those networks they can source deals, disintermediated deals. From each other, all the various investors and then drop them into community channels where they get social capital from dropping them in.
If the deal's not perfect for them [00:33:00] and other people also get social capital for dropping their deals in and it helps them find deals that are more perfect for them in the future. It's just a better system than everybody living in Palo Alto and going to a party every night, which is the way it worked when I was at Stanford business school.
It was like, Not fun. The parties were business things. Do you remember these parties, Simone, where they'd always have like the most ridiculous, expensive swag. Yeah. You know, you go, you get your iPad as like a leaving present and stuff like that. It was whack. But what are your thoughts on this?
Simone Collins: I don't know if it's going to play out that way.
I, I think we still see a very significant network effect of cities and that even though, for example, the Bay area. Doesn't have that much going for it, you know, like I left it right there are still people who? Despite the cost despite the taxes despite increases in crime etc are staying and there's they seem like they're just in for life They may well actually I was
Malcolm Collins: I was talking with Scott Alexander about this and he was saying that he [00:34:00] Like he wanted to be able to form the same kind of community that he had formed in in you know, Silicon Valley area somewhere outside where it's cheaper, you know, and his kids can play more easily and stuff like that.
But the challenge is, is the very community network, you know, some people in that network Are are tied to the city for their jobs, i. e. they work at Google or something like that. And so they can't easily pick up and move as a community that is going to increasingly of your like, well, why would that effect not stay?
It's because these big giant companies are likely going to become less and less relevant economically as the new small players come up. I mean, so you look at the people in his community right now that are stuck at a company like Google. Like I now do personally, like if you look at Google's like search results, like, like the number of people searching on Google, it's been going down precipitously over time.
Even me personally, I use perplexity probably 70 percent of the time now and Google 30 percent of the time. Perplexity is a [00:35:00] small team. That was able to build a product better than the absolute mega corp of Google. So I think that you'll have that effect. But then I also think you will have the these sorts of communities while they exist in this generation.
I don't think they'll exist in the next generation. Because the people who lived in these communities, I just think are going to produce Disproportionately so much fewer competent kids than the people who are living in environments where it is cost efficient to have tons of kids that is going to be hard to keep them stable because to get a community like the one he built you don't just need like the competent people that a city brings.
You need a critical mass of ultra competent people. Who also get along with each other. And the question is, is, are these masses in the future going to be found more easily outside of cities or more easily in cities for people of our generation? I think they're found more easily in cities still for the people of the next generation.
I think they're [00:36:00] found more easily outside of cities.
Simone Collins: It could be. Yeah, well, we'll find out.
Malcolm Collins: I want to get your thoughts on the creator of like, like the death of the, the influencer. Do you think it's possible when people say like, that's a thing that could happen?
Simone Collins: No, I think it's, it's going to be a transformation.
Like you say, the influencers themselves aren't dying. The, the economies on which they were built have to evolve because people didn't understand in the first place, how they worked and how to get an ROI out of working with an influencer, you know, how to best sponsor influencers. And, you know, how to know what their networks are like and how to not.
Work with fake influencers. I just think it's about a maturing industry. That's all. It's nothing beyond that. But what, maybe you could help me with my like final communist question. Cause as you know, for our holiday of lemon month, where we explore a topic that we find deeply offensive, I chose communism this, this year.
And that's how I came to have this, this [00:37:00] concern with you. Cause I understand that communism involves It's a classless society at the end, but what also really confused me is that if I understand this correctly, and maybe you can tell me where I'm wrong, the, the concept of communism was just like, oh, well, wouldn't it be great if like.
We lived in a post scarcity society.
Malcolm Collins: What your, your reading of the communist works, what you have told me you read from them, is that they presumed a post scarcity world. Yes. And that they thought that they could only work in a post scarcity world.
Simone Collins: Yes, yes. And that, that you really couldn't have communism without it.
And that the, the point of like socialism at moving into communism is to just make sure that we get there eventually. But that doesn't make sense to me because if you really want post scarcity, probably like hyper capitalism in hopes that someone develops AGI, which then in turn creates a post scarcity [00:38:00] world is kind of your best bet.
Not, you know. Yeah. I want to try that.
Malcolm Collins: Communism in a pre scarcity, in a scarce, scarce world. Okay. In any scarce world, you still need people to produce the goods, right? Presumably in post scarcity worlds, you can have AI or automation producing the goods. In a scarce world, you need people to produce the goods.
The core economic difference between a communist and capitalist system is how they motivate people to produce the goods. A capitalist system motivates them to By giving them things, giving them more things for producing more things. The communist system does it at gunpoint, right? You know, it pushes, it says, if you don't produce these things, bad things will happen to you, I will shoot you, I will kill you, et cetera.
And a lot of people misunderstand this. They're like, well, But isn't capitalism implicitly doing the same thing by leaving the person without any money to begin with? And so they suffer if [00:39:00] they don't do something that contributes to society. And the suffering of hunger is astronomically less than the suffering of the gulag or the horrors that happened under most of the communist systems.
And people are like, well, not real communism. And it's like, yeah, but do you not think that the people who went into those projects were trying to create real communism? We have their writings. It's just that that was the direction that communist systems went when they realized they had to find a way to motivate people to work in a scarce world.
To put it another way in a world where scarcity still exists. You're always going to need a way to motivate people, to produce , the things that keep society functioning, , who don't want to produce those things. Will always say, this is one of the greatest richness is of coming ism. If you have any communist friends who, you know, are living in a group house, it is always the group houses that trend more towards communism, but where nobody ever wants to pitch in to do the [00:40:00] basic thing that need to get done.
So back in Silicon valley, I would go between group houses. And if you go to the more capitalist oriented group houses, everything was clean. Everything was orderly. Even though people were pitching in just because they wanted to pitch in, in the communist group houses, the dishes were never done. Everything was old moldy and gross.
There's actually a, one of my favorite stories about Bernie is that he was kicked out of a communist commune because he would always go to communist communes and just do nothing, but give speeches all day. And I think that's what a lot of communists think that their job is going to be in this new utopia.
They're creating. But obviously society can't function on speeches. You actually have to do hard labor. And so what's interesting is that the individuals who actually have this intrinsic drive that communist hope individuals have to go out and do labor tend towards capitalism because they're actually already being rewarded within a capitalist system.
So they're quite okay with the system as it exists. , it is , the communists who don't want to do [00:41:00] anything who want to be rewarded despite the fact that they're not doing anything that push the most for a system change. , But then , how did these two systems motivate people more broadly? In capitalism, it is through carrot.
That those people produce the things. In a communist system, there are only a few options. One is a direct stick. I. E we will kill you. However, another is that I didn't mention here is gated communist systems. These actually work pretty well, even in a modern environment. That is to say. , a kibbutz or the Haven state that I mentioned recently. , it's a small community that says anybody who doesn't chip in gets expelled. , that that can work. But it works even better when membership is explicitly optional. , and you not just born into it. This is why in the example I gave in the vignette.
In the last episode on fertility [00:42:00] collapse in the real estate market, you would have a ritual in which at a coming of age, as soon as somebody was mostly fully myelinated and could make decisions for themselves, they had to live outside the society and then had a choice of a rejoining the society that makes their joining the society explicitly a choice as it is with things like Amish communities.
, and here, I would note that I'm not saying that the havens will be communist, but I expect that they will have elements. Cements of that. I E they will have specific rules and expectations of individuals that individuals are supposed to adhere to. That go far, far, far beyond what is expected of an individual in modern capitalist societies, you will not be able to be lazy or indolent and be allowed to live within these communities.
, but what can't work is a total society. Now, some individuals will say, well, we can make communism work by convincing everyone to love their fellow man. And the love their fellow man so much. They'll just get out there and work. But here, what they're really [00:43:00] talking about is some form of systemic brainwashing.
They're saying we will no longer allow individuals who have value sets that are at odds with this value set that I have. And what's interesting about this value set that they have is that it's basically never existed in human history. , people predominantly love and care about the people closest to them, their friends, their family, not wider society overall, and therefore will do things that disproportionately benefit that closer network. This is why coming to them actually works at the family level.
I E and we'd say this in lots of our videos. , my family right now. The academy and assistant. , from each according to their ability to each, according to their needs, like my kids don't produce any income because they are not able to produce any income, but we give them what they need because we love them.
And we are invested in them.
You cannot force people to have this mindset to larger society without like [00:44:00] genetically modifying people. Because due to our evolutionary history, we are always going to disproportionately favor our families and closer relatives and closer kinship networks. And I should also know that it's not that the deep community thinkers are totally unaware of this either. This is why many communist groups today. I see the first goal in bringing about communism as the dissolution of these kinship and family networks, the dissolution of the family as a unit. , you'll see this in groups like black lives matter and stuff like that.
We need to dissolve the family. , this is also why, and we have another video recorded, but we haven't gone live yet. That was inspired by this video. Cause I started looking into it after the video was, I was like, wait, wait, wait.
If there's scarcity in a communist system., that scarcity creates a dominance hierarchy, which creates a class system. So what if somebody wants something like sex from an individual and that [00:45:00] individual declines? Access to sex. Doesn't that create a form of scarcity and class. , and then I was like, so how does communism deal with this?
And this is what I learned about coming as hymns, very big issue with PDA files, which are very, very common in Ubon major communist thinkers. And we will have a video on this coming up.
Because well, Just so you get to the point in here before we get into that video or, you know, As a prelude to that video, why are they so common? Well, it actually goes part and parcel with the dissolution of family units. And the basically taking of kids from families at a very young age. Or to put it to yet, another way communism's greatest enemy is consent.
And this often creates interesting problems where you will see was in the circles that lead towards communism. You see really high rates of stuff like grape. , actually, that's the huge problem itself, like chop or Chaz or whatever you want to call that breakaway state they tried to do. In [00:46:00] Seattle, , where there were huge, huge amounts of grape in that area. , and it is because the violation of individual consent is necessary. For there to be a classless society in any environment where some individual has something they want to deny another individual access to like their labor or their body. Final thing I'll note here, which I always find one of the silliest arguments for communism. Is there like, well, yes, communism may force some people to work at the point of a gun, but in capitalism, access to the rewards at the system are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same ability to access and rewards. Due to birth conditions, family, et cetera.
And like, this is the wildest thing I've ever heard. You have one system, one table where there are rewards. But the game is unfair and you have another system where there are no rewards and your shot for not working. Which one are you going to want to be at?
Malcolm Collins: But the point, [00:47:00] or I guess the larger point of this video is communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.
You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.
It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera. And it's the extreme capitalists who often [00:48:00] have less interest in that stuff because they care about getting the best product for, to fit whatever, you know, In the moment need they have for the lowest cost possible.
You know, if you look between two groups, communist versus capitalist, you know, who do you think is using more Android phones? Who do you think is using more iPhones and paying more for like a lower quality product? Or who do you think is using more like Apple computers, right? You know, Oh, I'm gonna get some angry Apple users in the comments here, but it's just like objectively true.
You're paying more for a lower per per. Any spec that you're getting. So what are you paying for? If you're paying for more, you're paying for a brand. I mean, people will make up excuses to themselves like, Oh no, I'm paying for the network effects of the devices or I'm paying because it, it, it runs more smoothly or, you know, but we all know that's not true anymore.
This isn't like we're, we're in the Tim Cook era now. Okay. People we know what this is about. We know that you don't get the Starbucks coffee because it tastes better. Okay. You get the Starbucks coffee because you have built a habit. around [00:49:00] Starbucks coffee, or you have some sort of status associated with Starbucks coffee.
So I, I find that really interesting as well is that, that the communists actually seem more drawn to artificial scarcity than the capitalists is.
Simone Collins: I don't find that nearly as confusing as I do. Just capitalism as I understand it now from a technical standpoint is really just more Interest in a sci fi futuristic world and not so much about like actual, I don't know, I, I, like achievable things today.
It's, it's very bizarre to me, but let's just focus on the things we can control our own little communist home. Our children. What would you like me to make you say communist
Malcolm Collins: home? Because people might not be familiar with it
Simone Collins: makes sense. At a very, very local level. Where, like the family level is inherently communist.
I don't remember the phrase. From each according to [00:50:00] their ability. That is what our household
Malcolm Collins: is and don't contribute financially to the family because they can't, you know, we, we give them what they need because we care about them. And, and this is where communist networks have worked when people genuinely.
Care about the other people around them. And I think leftists are like, well, what if we could build a society where everybody genuinely cares about everybody else in a society? And it's like, well, you can't do that without making the entire society one culture, right? Because you're always going to have some degree of conflict with people of different cultures than you because they will have different values and different things they want for the direction of the society.
And And I think that this is ultimately why the urban monoculture is so monocultural, is because it's trying to create that single united class where everybody can value everyone else but the problem is that it doesn't work. They end up losing all sense of personal identity and then desperately trying to recreate some identity.
Because when you lose a connection to your heritage you then [00:51:00] are like, well, then who am I? How do I define myself? Right? If I'm not the. The culmination of my ancestors' efforts. And then they say, well, I guess I am you know, A-L-G-B-T-P-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B. I'm a demi queer squirrel goddess or something.
And then this culture, because it, it understands the importance of giving you an identity has this need to validate that whatever it is, but it turns out that it doesn't help mental health wise and leads to spirals pretty quickly. And I think that that's what we're getting here in the urban monoculture is it's, it's had to cut people off from their ancestral identities.
And as such, they are desperate to create something new to identify with and be proud of. And I think that's fundamentally what we see from this concept of, of capital puny pride, right? And that's why we advocate so much for choosing a family culture or an ancestral culture to learn about your ancestors and, and learn who you are so that you can take pride in that and see the value in [00:52:00] bringing that into the next generation.
Well, let's go
Simone Collins: pick up the next generation for
Malcolm Collins: dinner. Okay. I'm sorry. I love you.
Simone Collins: I love you too. What do you want me to make for you?
Malcolm Collins: Let's try the ravioli.
Simone Collins: Oh, with the pesto. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think I'm gonna use the, the sun dried tomato pesto so we can see if that's any good and just use any ravioli you want and what else?
Yeah, that's good for me tonight.
Simone Collins: All right, it's on. Do you want a little bit of anything else? Just a couple raviolis. I'm fine. You don't eat.
Malcolm Collins: I don't want to get obese, you know, I've got to look gaunt and beautiful and how can I do that with drinking as much as I do? Well, I love you. I'll see you downstairs in a
sec.
Guys, wait. Guys, where are we? We're on the boat. Do
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the grim reality of housing markets in a world facing demographic collapse. They delve into the rapid decay of abandoned properties, the unsustainability of cities and suburbs, and speculate on a future where technologically advanced "havens" emerge amidst the ruins of our current civilization. This video offers a stark look at the potential consequences of population decline and technological advancement on our living spaces and social structures.
Key topics covered:
* The rapid deterioration of abandoned properties
* The unsustainability of modern cities and suburbs
* The impact of climate change on housing markets and insurance
* Speculation on future "haven" communities and their characteristics
* The potential divide between technophilic and technophobic societies
* The role of AI and advanced technology in shaping future communities
* Geopolitical implications of demographic collapse and technological advancement
Whether you're interested in urban planning, futurism, or the long-term consequences of current demographic trends, this video provides a thought-provoking look at the potential shape of our future world.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.
Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.
And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.
I'm just
Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.
about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.
This person. Is hiking. They've got a drone companion flying alongside them. It's doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast [00:01:00] exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Hello,
Malcolm Collins: Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is.
Cheap housing. Oh, hooray. Everyone always says, they say, well, when the population is 5 percent of its current size, then housing will cost almost nothing. And that will be fantastic. Because then all of the young people will be able to afford houses and everything will stabilize and go back to normal.
Except that isn't what's going to happen. Talk about how quickly A house that is worth nothing begins to fall apart. And this is something that we saw [00:02:00] in Detroit. So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration, but I also want to start a bit closer to home. So I grew up part time living on an island with my family that my family owns and now I don't inherit it or anything like that.
It goes to my sister. So it's not like, again, I get nothing, don't worry about it guys still starting from scratch here, but,
Simone Collins: Hey, I have to stop and say though, when we were first dating,
Malcolm Collins: I
Simone Collins: was like, this is a caricature of life, because no one actually has private islands, but apparently they do. But then, like, you and I learned that there's a reason why people don't have private islands. Because it kind of sucks. Well, another thing
Malcolm Collins: that people know is that my family lost all its money and was unable to maintain things.
And it is hard to sell a private island. Who wants that? Like, how can you even buy one, you know? And then [00:03:00] I'm going to go over what ended up happening to the property. Because I love when people are like, oh, islands, so defensible. So this is the living room. Of the house I grew up in. For those who are listening on the podcast it has trees growing inside of it now, all of the walls have fallen out of it well it has plate glass windows overlooking the ocean, but like, it looks like there is a forest in it now.
And as I go through this, I encourage you the listeners to not think of this in the abstract, but as what your own home is going to look like. 10 years after you stopped. Living in it or you fail to sell it because of your population is declining. Because this is a picture that we see across rural Japan right now, so much so that they're giving away free houses.
And I think that that is. , what we're going to see the future of the U S.
, I've even heard of instances as some people paying for people to take their houses. So they don't become these horrible nightmares.
Malcolm Collins: This room is, I believe, my parents bedroom right here for people who are just [00:04:00] listening, it's just debris everywhere, people took the beds, the mattresses, everything. Oh, this is my bedroom! And my brother's bedroom. This is where we Slept as little kids and it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.
Here is my childhood bathroom. Completely smashed. It would literally be safer, I am now showing the inside of the bathroom, to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place. This looks super dangerous. Yes. This is the patio. It looks like a forest.
Oh, and this is the play area. Now this, the ceiling has completely caved in. It looks worse than any of the locations did in Jurassic Park for any on the podcast.
Simone Collins: No, Jurassic Park does not play a very accurate. tale of urban decay, right? Because like, you know, things just kind of, there's like a, a, a vine tastefully draped.
Oh, you know, over it. It's, it's more like, you know, the, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic. It's not, this is [00:05:00] not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble. Everything's so muddy. And here
Malcolm Collins: is the forest spilling into our living room and patio here. And I'll just throw up some other pictures.
You can get an idea of what it used to look like. I, well, I guess in terms of the beach and stuff like that, So people can get an idea of just how much, you know, even a decade of not caring for something costs.
And if you haven't owned a house, if you have only rented a house, You would be surprised at how much it costs to keep the house together. You are spending a fairly large amount of money. I, I'd actually say you're probably over the course of 40 years, probably spending at least half the cost of the house on the modern market.
So for example, this graph that I pulled up here, estimates that right now, , On average, you're paying somewhere between around 15,000 and 18,000 USD. , and here is a map of how that varies state by state.
Malcolm Collins: In terms of maintenance fees and a lot of people all the time. [00:06:00]
Simone Collins: It's awful.
Malcolm Collins: And it is no longer worth those maintenance fees. If the house has reduced to zero in value, the reason why people. Spend the money upkeeping their property is because said property has value. The reason why properties historically had value was because the number of people who wanted that limited set of properties was growing exponentially.
Once that number evens off, property value is going to collapse and people might be like, well, if fertility has already collapsed, why hasn't property value collapsed? And there are. Two reasons why property value has continued to go up. One, fertility, like the effects of fertility collapse in the United States have not yet been felt by the working population, i.
e. the age groups that are buying a house.
It's the younger people, the kids and stuff, where you're seeing these smaller class sizes, where you're seeing schools having to drop classes every [00:07:00] year because they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So one, we haven't seen that yet, but two, we've actually seen a huge increase. In the cost of house because of fertility class, and a lot of people can be like, what, why would that happen?
Well, it turns out that when you have an atomized society, when people aren't getting married anymore, when you don't have, you know, five people living together, the two parents and the kids, there is demand for a lot more houses. Because two people, you ever seen one of those pictures where they show you how many fewer cars would be on the road if people were in buses instead of cars?
I'll put one on the screen here. But that's basically what's happening to the housing market in this last death throw of the housing market, real estate more broadly right now, outside of like farm real estate, I'd say is. Not a good long term investment. And I, I should say here, long term, we're actually heavily invested in real estate short term because I know about this trend of people needing these smaller houses.
So it makes sense to embossed in
multifamily housing. Yes. So this is like apartment [00:08:00] complexes and stuff like that. And it's done very well for us for a while. But I want to take as a case study, because people are like, people wouldn't really just let houses next to what used to be like a major urban center rot away to dust.
So I'm going to start putting some pictures on screen here of time lapses of places in Detroit. Because this does a very good job of showing just how quickly parts of Detroit ended up having to be rolled back and then just given back to nature because eventually they become hazards and the state then decides to plow them over.
So here for podcast listeners, we have two, what looked like fairly normal houses in 2009 by just 2015, you can see it would probably cost. About as much to restore them as it would cost to just rebuild new houses. They are mostly retaken by nature. They're [00:09:00] teardowns. They're teardowns. They're complete teardowns.
Six years. Six years of no one living there. That happens. Six years of no maintenance. It is like that. It's not like, oh you know, it needs to be abandoned for 40 years. It needs to be abandoned for 20 years, six years. Sorry. Now look at 2019. So here we're looking at only 10 years.
One of the houses has already had to be demolished and the other house is completely unusable. And then we go to 2022. So 2022. Honestly, I
Simone Collins: think, I think too that these Detroit houses may even not be fully. Illustrating how quickly this will happen because keep in mind that construction quality has changed significantly recently as well.
So more newly constructed houses, which in some cases, they're made like tissue paper. Like, you can punch through walls are going to degrade very quickly and some more old buildings or even like industrial buildings may last a lot better. And we're going to see shifts towards those in the housing market.
We'll see though.
Malcolm Collins: [00:10:00] So, so I, I completely agree with you. And that's definitely something that we need to discuss. It's the old houses versus the new houses and how long it lasts. But by 2022, so that is only, 13 years after the houses were abandoned nature has completely retaken the area. They both had to be torn down and you wouldn't even know that houses were there. So let's keep going. Here you have an abandoned group of three normal looking houses in 2011. By 2013, you can see one has already collapsed in on itself, only two years after being abandoned.
2015 you see there's basically nothing left. 2022, you can see it's as if they were never there. So keep in mind, 2015, that's only four years after these were abandoned. That they are just rubble. Here in 2009, you see two houses. 2013, they actually look okay. These were slightly better construction than the others, but by 2019, just 10 years later, completely unlivable.
2022, somehow a boat appeared [00:11:00] and otherwise nature has reclaimed. Pokemon, a boat appeared. Again, I am going to show, uh, just a few here for the, the listeners that I don't want to go through them all. They're all dealing with the same timelines. You're looking at a four year jump, , four year jump, five year jump. And, and while I've been talking, I have been flashing these on screen for you guys. And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.
And so, And then people can be like, well, you know, okay, that's individual houses, right? What about the big public works projects and stuff like that, right? Like that stuff, of course, will, will stay working. And it's like, well, no, not, you know, So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.
Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And [00:12:00] abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become. And what's interesting is, you know, we live in a house from the 1700s.
And if you walk around our area, you can see, sadly, some of the old homes also falling apart, but they take much longer. They take 60, 70 years to fall apart, these old stone houses. And it's worth trying to recover them because they act as a much more sturdy foundation than these that are falling apart with only four years without maintenance.
And also keep in mind, one of the things that hastens the Speed that houses fall apart is when you can't live in a house and protect a house, especially as police in various regions of the U S start to collapse. And people wonder why police funds are going to collapse. Well, they were meant for larger populations than will exist in the future, and they will be paying the pensions of police for larger populations that exist in the future.
And so either those pensions will fall [00:13:00] apart, which is very hard for a government to do. We didn't even in the pensions for Nazi. soldiers. When, after World War II, I think now there's still a few SS soldiers that are receiving pensions. Like that is wild, but it is very hard to claw back pensions.
And so you'll have smaller police forces. These homes have valuable things inside of them, the copper in the wall, some parts of the various appliances. And so they go and they rip those out. Here I'll put the kitchen that I grew up in. Using and you can see every bit of it has been ripped apart. And and that's what we're headed to.
So, Simone, do you have any thoughts before I go further?
Simone Collins: Are we going to discuss the insurance issue that's going to accelerate this or should I bring that up now? Because I'm not sure if you remember that. Yeah. So there's a great podcast on this issue done by the New York Times podcast called the bombshell case that will transform the housing market.
And this brings in an additional little hitch to the [00:14:00] problem that, that, that is going to then be compounded by demographic collapse. So already Malcolm, you've alluded to in some of our podcasts, how it's kind of ridiculous that you can buy a home in Florida because, you know, there's so many regions of it.
I haven't heard of
Malcolm Collins: it with a 30 year. The loan
Simone Collins: with a 30 year home loan. Yes. Because your home is going to be underwater. Like how on earth, like, can, can you get a home loan on these things? I think it is getting a little bit harder now, but what's getting extra hard already because of climate change is just getting home insurance in Florida and in some other states that are now more subject to severe weather.
Just getting homeowner's insurance is almost impossible now in the United States. In many cases, you cannot get a mortgage. You cannot get debt to finance the purchase of your home unless you have home insurance. Meaning that as we experience more extreme climate, meaning as more insurance companies go underwater, because honestly, they just can't [00:15:00] pay for all these wildfires and for all the tornadoes and for all the hurricanes and the floods and the derechos, which we have here, which you didn't even know existed.
We didn't know existed before we came here and they're terrifying. They're like, miniature, they're like hurricane meets tornado that lasts really like five minutes,
Malcolm Collins: a very short, it's not a, it's not like a spiral, like a hurricane or tornado. It's just really strong wind that comes out of nowhere and like knocks over trees.
Yeah. Like lots of trees. Not like, like you'll see like big swaths of trees all knocked over.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, yeah. Like hurricane meets tornado, but just really fast. You don't know it's coming. And So there are going to be more states in the New York Times podcast, they, they discuss this. It's, it's quite interesting that they go into some detail on how this is not just happening in the states that you think are obvious.
Meaning that we're, we may hit this point at which a lot of homes sit empty because people literally can't buy them because people don't have enough money to buy a house outright. [00:16:00] Right. But they can't get a mortgage because they can't get homeowners insurance.
Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. That's not exactly what will happen.
I mean, market forces, Detroit homes were selling for like 50 cents in some instances, you know, like it's not that they won't be able to get money to buy them. It's that they won't be able to get money to build sustainably on that plot. I E it won't be worth it to tear them down and then build something new.
Yeah.
And I think that you're, you're absolutely right about that. Now we need to talk about the plight of both cities and suburbs and why both are pretty screwed. The unsustainability of cities, I think should be fairly obvious to people in a world where work from home is the norm. If you go to a lot of these major cities and you start looking around, like we do this in New York, you will just see empty, empty, empty, empty, empty everywhere you look.
It is so scary that like these markets are sort of stable. The, the core reason people are like, well, then why don't, why doesn't New York convert the commercial properties to residential [00:17:00] properties? There's two problems, giant government bureaucracies that make zoning changes, very expensive and difficult.
But other is that in a place like Manhattan, for example, it's often easier to tear down and completely rebuild than it is to do a conversion. Because Commercial buildings are built with the assumption that the restrooms are going to be in the center of the building all around a central shaft, whereas residentials have, like, multiple towers of plumbing going in different parts of the building.
And it's quite different construction techniques, so it's hard to switch between the 2. And it means that I, I think already cities are financially unviable, just the world hasn't realized it yet. As cities are going further and further left, right? And because of their progressive tax policies, when I say progressive, I don't mean like lefty.
I just mean there is a financial term called a progressive tax policy. It means wealthy people pay more in New York. 4 percent of the population is paying over 50 percent of taxes. So what that means is [00:18:00] that 4 percent is who the city's customers are, and that 4 percent of the ones that are being scared away with a lot of their new rules and regulations, right?
Especially the, the stuff that makes it less safe to be there. You know, these people want their kids around. And now there's just not the same reason to be in a city as there was historically.
Here I am, of course, referring to the work from home revolution, which has hit the types of businesses that utilize getting everyone together and working together in a city the most, um, And it's also the, the highest paid professions, which are most hit by the work from home revolution, because these are the professions where the individuals in them can demand the most from their employer. I E the opportunity to work from home.
You know, if you're a top. Player at like a finance firm or something. Like that you basically get a name, your terms. AI also is a big player here because the type of white collar work that was in cities is one of the first categories that gets automated.
Malcolm Collins: And so, with all of [00:19:00] this expansion, They have to maintain, they're likely going to begin to fall apart, but we'll likely see a similar thing in the suburbs.
We've mentioned this before, so I'm going to go quick. But for those who haven't heard our spiel on this suburbs really got subsidized during white flight when you had a bunch of people moving to suburbs all at once. And this was about, I want to say like 60, 70 years ago, 60 years ago at this point and when suburbs were first being charted out what they would do is the developer would front roll the cost for the paving, for the sewer system, for the electrical system, for basically all of the infrastructure but then going forwards, it was cared for by the tax base.
Well, now a lot of that stuff needs to be rebuilt but the tax base was never really optimized to pay for its rebuilding. And a lot of it was built out in ways that weren't sustainable. So suburbs are kind of screwed as well. Now, suburbs can just raise taxes, especially in the more rural or ex urban areas like where we live, and they're probably going to be fine.
And I think [00:20:00] that's where culture is going to re coalesce in terms of like where people actually want to be, whereas the cities are going to turn into quite a bit of a hellscape. Do you have any thoughts on this, Simone? I'm just
Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.
So this story, because this was, this was framed for somebody else when they, when they thought about all of the rotting cities in the future, all of the rotting infrastructure in the future. Somebody was telling somebody else a version of the story. And I just decided to flush it out about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.
And this person. Is hiking. They've got a little AI robot companion alongside them. The little, it's a drone companion flying alongside them. And they're, they're out exploring the old ruins an old city. [00:21:00] They've got, you know, special shoes and stuff. So they don't have to worry about stepping on anything.
It would be quite easy to, to have a protection in the AI companion. It's likely doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.
But of course. They don't have access to many of the things that you need larger technical networks to gain access to. So while they're LARPing a 1950s lifestyle, they are doing it without cell phones. They are doing it with maybe electricity during the day, but it gets shut off at night because it's coming from generators that are expensive to run and you need to buy the fuel.
And ship the fuel over long, dangerous roads because a lot of the state law has broken down. Now this group might otherwise attack [00:22:00] this traveler but they know not to because they've seen travelers like this before with these drones that they know are armed and could easily mow down their entire settlement.
And so, the community would have nothing to of value to this person because in a world where you can produce more than enough food on the land you already have
and they don't have access to tech that you don't have, they are quite literally irrelevant except for any potential threat they might pose to your community. And when they have become dangerous to, you know, technophilic explorers on the regular they just end up getting wiped out by a drone swarm.
I also, I'm always surprised when the naturalist people think that the tech acceleration is, or if I've heard them call them, the cyborgs are the ones who pose a threat to them because they really don't, this, you would have nothing that the cyborgs want. You, you, you don't have any tech that they want.
They wouldn't care about land. You wouldn't have more efficient forms of energy than they [00:23:00] have access to. What like. What do you think you have that they want? You only matter in so far as you decide to become a threat to them, in which case you aren't even that much of a threat, and they won't let you become that much of a threat, even if you can get your hands on old aging nuclear tech or something like that.
And some might expect, well, you know, they might be you know, marginal value is breeding partners for genetic diversity, but at that point, I actually don't think they would. I suspect that while they might sometimes be accepted into the technophilic communities outbreeding outside of the technophilic communities would never be allowed because you wouldn't want that.
You know, intelligent, modified genes to get into these communities that are naturally going to be more xenophobic towards outsiders and could end up doing very dangerous things as they ever developed a degree of industrial productivity. In fact, I actually suspect. Hundreds of years, a hundred years from now or so, our descendants, once we gain a bit more [00:24:00] understanding of human genetics will likely have developed prohibitions around sex more generally making it taboo and editing out arousal pathways in the human mind, while likely fine tuning some other pathways during an individual's use, like the ones that give us emotional rewards for exploration, gen.
Learning and productivity to allow an individual to gain even more satisfaction from productive tasks while out was out being distracted by unproductive tasks. The Explorer is likely going to just keep going down that road for months. Because they are engaged in a coming of age ritual. That's why they have been out on this exploratory thing where they voluntarily agree to live in the hardships of the fallen world for a year to better appreciate what they have at the haven.
And because rejoining the haven must be done voluntarily. So, when they join as an adult to the community and and they agree to the sacrifices that are coming with the Haven community because I expect all the [00:25:00] Havens would have fairly strict rules around austerity and other things like that to ensure a virtuous life and a life of productivity, very different from, you know, the classic what I think the communists want, you know, while it will be a post scarcity world to gain access to one of these post scarcity communities, it'll be quite discerning in who they let in.
And I think that it would be useful to have a ritual like this where you go and explore the world and then come back and rejoin voluntarily. The the drone traveling with the explorer in this scenario is meanwhile building up it, it leads into food and water. It purifies the food and water. And it's been building a profile on the individual for the marriage pool that they are now accessible for after the coming of age ritual, they are now qualified for a, a marriage pool.
And then the marriage pool is a meeting of all of the various havens within a network. So this is how you'd likely get more outbreeding is instead of just dating was in your community, you would [00:26:00] hold like a season once a year All of the eligible people along with their psychological profiles would be paired off.
And I'll go to one haven which would host it and which haven hosted it would be a cycling phenomenon. And I suspect In the far future, about 100 years from now, the global economy will be somewhat differentiated based on what level of technology you decided to engage with or stay with. So, for example, I don't think that there will be much trading between.
Networks like the Haven Network, as I call it, of the ultra technophilic individuals, and the individuals who decided to LARP living in the 1920s. I expect those individuals will likely have a series of communities that range LARPing like they're living in the 1990s, to LARPing like they're living in, like, the 20s.
the 1920s and they will roughly trade with each other. And then I suspect there'll be a third lowest tier of sort of human group that is basically [00:27:00] feral. And is the ultra, ultra, ultra you know, like barely working, you know, I think that this is what's going to happen to, like, the types of people who tried to start ISIS and stuff like that.
But then there are also, you'll have remnants of them in the developed world, likely descending from criminal organizations which attack caravans and stuff like that, but never really able to build any sort of sustainable civilization. What are your thoughts on this speculative fiction? Our descendants get it quite well in this, in this world.
They get to explore pretty much what is impunity, ruins of the old world. Wouldn't you have found that a joy when you were younger?
Simone Collins: Well, now I know. A friend of the pod had said something to us at a dinner party we were hosting recently. Something along the lines of You know, someone was telling me that actually my descendants will probably love wandering around the abandoned cities, you know, like, I'm the kind of person who would be better off in that world.
So I, I know, I know where you're going with this. [00:28:00] That's hopeful. I think we're going to end up in more of a South Africa style situation. Where. It is not, not necessarily like, just because it's a little lawless and unsafe, not really okay to wander around the non gated zones, but also from a climate and safety and survival standpoint, just a lot more difficult in many parts of the world to, to wander through them.
So. I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you.
Malcolm Collins: Why don't you think that the technophilic group, because I think that the technophilic group with AI is going to be astoundingly more productive than humans are today. They will be astoundingly smaller portion of the population than humans today.
Simone Collins: Yeah. It's just that I think that the world is going to be just because larger swaths of people are going to not have any tech and be like [00:29:00] lower tech and probably a lot more xenophobic, you know, they can, they can still pack a punch. They can still be pretty harmful, you know, and there can still be a lot of
Malcolm Collins: them.
This is actually an interesting point here that's, that's worth talking about a little bit where some people are like sometimes lower tech groups. End up taking control of governments and then the higher tech groups and here they would choose an environment like South Africa. The, the reason that happened in South Africa was international pressure.
The reason that happened was caving to woke ideas.
And I should clarify here. I don't mean ending apartheid. It was bad. I mean, the way a government was set up in a post apartheid world was bad. And I think patently, so we can see from the suffering that the south African people are undergoing right now.
Malcolm Collins: Like that is what caused South Africa to fall to the state that it's fallen to today. And I'd also point out that most of the competent group left both the [00:30:00] competent tribes that wasn't just, you know, white versus black. There were some tribes that were much more productive than the other tribes and many of their members just immigrated to America.
And I want to make clear, this isn't a white versus black thing, or a some tribes good, some tribes bad thing. It's that across communities, those individuals who had the means to get out and start life anew somewhere else, when they were choosing between having to start over and the risk that their daughter would be kidnapped and gang graped and murdered, they chose the former because most civilized people would do that.
And intergenerationally, that causes a cultural shift in all the groups that are having pretty much everyone from them that's either not involved in the government bureaucracy or has an opportunity to get out to leave.
Malcolm Collins: When a place becomes that lawless, the lawlessness begets lawlessness as people migrate, like the productive individuals migrate to non lawless areas.[00:31:00]
And the key to maintaining a, a non lawless area is just to never give an inch in terms of a group being like, well, I understand that I'm contributing a lot less, but I deserve something from you. Yeah. Like I,
Simone Collins: I basically, I see, I think that they're going to be much larger city states where you have like.
Very advanced, very like genuine, like cities, clusters of cities. But the borders are hermetic, you know, there are drones, there are walls, there are everything's, you know, there's no tunneling. They are hermetically sealed and then there's going to be the rest of the world and there will absolutely be a lot of people in the rest of the world.
But it is just going to be. A lot less fun to be there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of sci fi that, that describes this. And I always found it kind of arbitrary and stupid. Like why are, why is, why is there this class system in all these various [00:32:00] AI. Or sorry, all of these various science fiction stories where there's like the underclass and this overclass that lives in their beautiful city in the sky or whatever.
Right. And I don't, I don't think things play out the way that a lot of these stories have it. I think it's more that there's this portion of society that's willing to be technophilic and pluralistic. And then there's this portion of society that's not, it's not a story about. Keeping people down.
It's not a story about some evil capitalistic overlords creating this hierarchy. In fact, the, the, the, the gated community that's so nice and wonderful is, is going to be technically communist, but, and, and the outside world is going to be. The height of pure capitalism.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I don't think it'll be pure communist either.
I am sure it will to some degree because there is no such thing as pure communism. And we'll do a separate episode on this. We've got to do that. When you [00:33:00] live in a post scarcity environment, you just mean post scarcity of like goods. You don't mean genuine post scarcity because in a communist system, whatever.
It ends up being a thing of artificial scarcity as in what the status hierarchy around, but
Simone Collins: from a, like, we'll say Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it gets all the bottom portions of that fricking triangle. Okay, like, as
Malcolm Collins: long as you're contributing. And I think that what we would likely see. So when you say her medically sealed, I agree with you, but I don't know if it's literally her at medically sealed, probably gun drones, Patrolling a perimeter, but, but very strict about who comes in and out.
I think we, as we move to the systems where you have a high degree of social services within a Haven, you can not allow low skilled migrants to come in. That's always been true of social services. You cannot have social services that go to all members of a community. and porous borders. [00:34:00] Yeah. You, you, you get one or the other.
You also can't have social services that go to all members of the community and guaranteed membership in the community. Unless that guaranteed membership is only going to a very small class. And I just don't think it's useful to have that anyway. I think that people should have to prove their utility to the community and people should be able to come into the community.
If they can prove that utility. So I don't think that they're going to be that hard separated from the outside. If somebody can prove their utility to the community.
Simone Collins: Oh, for sure. Like, I'm sure there might be some kind of program for immigration. But that, that doesn't change the fact that these are going to be totally different worlds and the odds of.
over time people actually qualifying to get in, you know, being capable of integrating with that society may go down. I don't know. So,
Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I think that the people here will be like, well, what about, you know, like something like the a large state military trying to attack one of these, right.[00:35:00]
I just don't think you'd have that either because I think we're entering a world. We're the small havens or like clusters of incredibly technologically engaged people. So today this is like the type of people who run big AI companies and stuff like that are going to have access to better weaponry than state governments that have to acquire them through a very slow procurement bureaucracy.
And two, even though the governments are much larger if they attack any one government attacks, any one haven, that would be incredibly stupid of them for two reasons. First it would make them an enemy of all havens because network would now see them as an eventual threat. But two, they wouldn't be able to get access to the tech that the havens were
Simone Collins: producing.
So it's kind of like a Taiwan situation. Duplicated a bunch of times, copy and paste Taiwan all over the world and make it for all the stuff that we need. And then you've got,
Malcolm Collins: Well, I think we basically already have the emergence of three haven states. I think Taiwan is one of them. It's a proto [00:36:00] haven state that the world basically needs to protect because of its ability to produce something that no one else can produce, the chips.
Israel, I see is another one of the initial haven states. And Singapore is another one of the initial haven states. And I suspect we will see What does Singapore
Simone Collins: produce of value for the world that's so necessary?
Malcolm Collins: Singapore produces in, in a big way Exchange between the West and the East, financially speaking, if Singapore was to disappear, Americans ability to invest or work with the Chinese economic system would decrease substantially, as would China's ability to interface with the West, especially now that Hong Kong is gone, which used to be one of the haven states.
And I also think that this is partially why China is struggling so much. They showed that they were a danger to one of the, the, the Haven network. And now they sort of made themselves enemies of it through the integration and destruction of Hong Kong as a separate entity before Hong Kong really had the ability to defend [00:37:00] itself due to differential technology, which it didn't have back then.
I also think as technology develops and as AI develops, we're going to enter a world in which attacking becomes much harder than defending, which makes havens much easier to build out. However, I think that the best place to build one is in the tundra, as I've always said, which is what I really want to do somewhere in the fairly far north.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: but I
Simone Collins: also feel like on so many of these fronts, the tundra has a lot going for it. The reason why we have extra dramatic photos to show from your childhood home is because it is on an island. It is by the ocean is in the heat. It is under the sun, the hot beating sun and the corrosive salt air. And so of course, like it, it degraded extra fast.
If we were talking about an old stone hut, In, like, Norway. Yeah, islands
Malcolm Collins: are the worst place, like, [00:38:00] like, except for large islands, I will say small islands are the worst place you can build a haven state. They are incredibly undefendable. People think that they're really defendable. Well, but also, like,
Simone Collins: the amount, you basically have to rebuild it.
every few years based on how much things are corroding and degrading. I need
Malcolm Collins: to talk about why they're so undefeatable. People who have never lived on an island don't know how much a problem pirates are. Even in today's world, like on our island, you know, you had to have guns and everything. You had to have defense plans because pirates will come and they can land on any beach anywhere around the island.
And. Quickly make it without us knowing because you know, to, to like, if they come on at night or something like that so you would need a big security network, which would need electricity, which is very hard to keep running. One of the things about the island is we always had to replace the generator because it would corrode.
You know, so those only last like 5 to 10 years often. It's, it's just terrible idea.
I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about island defense in a historic context. Rather than in a modern [00:39:00] context, they're not thinking about a few families needing to depend an island against speed boats that can run quietly and a group of men with,
aK 40 sevens. , and grenades, they're thinking about having to defend against a big fleet of triremes of. , medium. Populated. , you know, historic, maybe offshoot of Athens or, you know, something around busy and Tim, uh, The the. Logistics are totally different. It used to take a long time and. It would be very loud and.
visible to get a boat to an island.
But now with speed boats and modern weaponry, , It's almost as if you're living in an area where a small army can teleport to any one of your immediate borders. it is incredibly hard to defend an island.
Malcolm Collins: Now, large islands are fine, especially when they are, very like they don't have many beaches or landing areas. Taiwan is a great example of this. It's very, very [00:40:00] hard to invade Taiwan. But even still, I think the corrosion is just not worth it.
You are better being in a coastal tundra area is what I'd say. Because that allows you to likely next to a large river somewhere. So you have access to the, the water. The cold helps cool your data centers, allowing you to run more calculations faster. You can convert the land around you into farmland using your technology, but radar groups have no utility to the land and other governments you can tell when they're coming towards you for a long time beforehand with future technology.
When you're talking about like radar technology and stuff like that. An island. You don't know if it's a merchant vessel or something that's coming specifically to see you, if you are, you know, until it like veers off course to come right at you. Even when you're dealing with government actors, if you are in somewhere in the fairly far North, they would have no reason to be going that way.
And so when you see something beginning to head in your direction, you know, Oh, [00:41:00] okay, this is something I need to get clearance for and everything like that long before it gets to me, it allows you to have much larger perimeters. But that is, is my thought on that. And I think that the Haven network will be a natural transition for humanity to get to the stars.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is kind of a, an inevitable next step. And then things just feel a lot more weirdly controllable once you get to space, because things are in a colony based level on a ship based level. And it's because things are more circumscribed, it just feels, I don't
Malcolm Collins: know. I feel like havens are going to function very much like spaceships on earth.
They are likely going to be with smaller communities than we are used to. Likely, I suspect like 50, 000 people per community. Except for the mega havens, which are the descendants of modern states, like potentially Israel, Taiwan. In Singapore but yeah, and I think they'll function very much like, like spaceships, sort of, where you have a lot of controlled systems, because I just think it's going to be more cost [00:42:00] efficient to sort of run the entire network with all of your AR stuff built into your environment, or perhaps even I expect the cities themselves will be combinations of VR and real life and Which might also make interactions with other Havens much easier as you may be able to go out and meet with someone from another Havens virtual avatar pretty easily.
Simone Collins: Well, yeah, well, but also like, you know, we'll have to, I guess we'll have to ask what will cities actually need or what's the purpose of cities if it's not you know, interfacing with people like what physically do people have to do in close proximity to each other. How are systems best set up there, but that's for a different conversation.
It's still, it's interesting to think how things are going to play out. And I would say my favorite piece of, of real estate philosophy from you that I just not heard from anywhere before that might be kind of relevant to this conversation is that you alluded to this earlier, old houses are [00:43:00] more desirable, not just because they degrade more slowly, but because they're like collectibles on a market, they are a.
A thing of limited quantity that is differentiated and unique, whereas in a world of, of a housing glut, you're going to need something where the supply is not so elastic and abundant. So if you are looking to buy a house, consider buying a collectible one in some way. I love you to death Simone.
I love you too, Malcolm.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into a candidate survey from Keystone Equality, exposing controversial LGBTQ+ policy proposals. They critically examine questions about gender-affirming care, educational curricula, and legal protections, highlighting potential unintended consequences and ethical concerns. This video offers a nuanced perspective on complex issues surrounding LGBTQ+ rights, cultural sovereignty, and the balance between protecting vulnerable groups and preventing exploitation by bad actors.
Key topics covered:
* Analysis of LGBTQ+ policy proposals in Pennsylvania
* Critique of gender-affirming care for minors and associated legal liabilities
* Debate on transgender athletes in sports
* Discussion of LGBTQ+ content in school curricula
* Examination of the "LGBTQ+ panic defense" in legal proceedings
* HIV disclosure laws and their implications
* Same-sex marriage and adoption rights
* The concept of cultural sovereignty in LGBTQ+ issues
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] they're saying basically that the state of Pennsylvania is like, you know what, if you receive gender affirming care as a minor, You should have the right up until age 30 to sue your healthcare provider for offering that gender affirming care to you if it turns out that they were acting in a completely flagrantly irresponsible manner Oh, s**t!
They're like, no, no, no, no. Because I think they know. That a lot of people who are getting gender affirming care as minors are going to sue their healthcare providers when, when they reach their twenties, when they reach their thirties, when they're fully myelinated, when they learn more and they're like, Oh no, no, no, we can't do that
Malcolm Collins: So you can be tried with
Reckless endangerment. If you know you have HIV and you intentionally hide that from another individual and give them HIV., I can't even believe that they are trying to prevent this from the case. That they would, they oppose increasing criminal penalties. This is what I talk about.
I don't know how you can be pro gay and pro Democrat at the same time. Like you have to, who, who suffers? From this being [00:01:00] removed from the law, who is going to predominantly suffer from this being removed? It's going to be gays who are trying to practice safe sex. That is who's going to suffer for this.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, everyone! In a previous episode, we mentioned that Simone got A letter in the mail because, you know, she's running for office and they ask her, what are your thoughts on various issues? And with a lot of them, you know, when it's like an anti gun organization, she can just basically throw it in the trash because she knows she's not going to come off smelling like roses to these groups.
But
Simone Collins: I was super excited about this because this, this came from this group called Keystone Equality. They, they, they say that they support LGBTQ plus rights. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, like, this is one of those things where You know, we are more socially progressive, at least when it comes to our, our, our cultural sovereignty stance, you know, we may not you know, we may be on the conservative end, but we very much support people having the freedom to pursue whatever culture they want.
So this is slam dunk, like, I should take this candidate survey. So they can endorse me and I [00:02:00] can show to Democrats and libertarians and more socially progressive people in my district that, you know, I, I may be a candidate worth consideration. I was so excited. And then I dive into it and I'm like, you know what I should have, I should have known that there were going to be problems because their logo is not the classic gay flag,
Malcolm Collins: Republican gay flag.
I call it, it is
Simone Collins: as I think one of. The base camp followers named it, which is the best name, the colonizer flag, which includes the additional triangle of white, pink, blue, brown, and black, because race is a sexual orientation. I do not understand
Malcolm Collins: how, like anyone who grew up with like a traditional understanding of non discrimination.
This is wild that this flag thing happened. The, the rainbow represented everything under the rainbow. That was, that was the point. Yeah. The full spectrum. Less inclusive. We need to, we, it's, it's so freaking animal farm. I [00:03:00] really wish I had a good animal farm clip I could use every time I bring this up.
Cause it's so insane. It's like, well, yes, I know we're all equal, but some of us are more equal than others and need special representation on the flag. And we'll just arrange a little. Bit of the historic gay identity with every little notch. And this is where I think in this survey, as we're going over this survey, people are going to learn that the progressive, like what the quote unquote progressives are advocating for with gay bills and LGBT bills these days, it is not something that like any sane person would want.
Yeah, this is, it's, it's
Simone Collins: no longer about protections. It's about. providing privileged status to people and, and frankly, creating a liability for genuinely LGBTQ plus people, because what you're more doing than anything at this point is creating space for bad actors. So let's get into these questions because I found them to be, I was so excited.
I was like, Oh, I'm going to, you know, I'm just [00:04:00] getting all these, all these, right. You know, I love getting questions, right. I love teacher, you know, saying that I was correct. And I got increasingly alarmed. You can
Malcolm Collins: choose almost every single one, but two bad guy on them. I'd rather say that they've become the bad guys and I am mortified at how yeah, I, I just, I think that sometimes,
Simone Collins: I can just read out some of the questions and you can stop when we get, let's just, let's
Malcolm Collins: just go into it right now.
Simone Collins: Did you vote in favor of the fairness act or if you're not an incumbent, did you support adding sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics and Pennsylvania's non discrimination civil rights act?
So what made me uncomfortable about that is this is just adding additional red tape whereby people are going to be able to
Malcolm Collins: start gender identity. It doesn't, it doesn't say you know, like. That would include things like non binary, which is basically a class that anyone can opt into.
Simone Collins: Well, yeah, so basically this enables you [00:05:00] to, you could, like, this enables any abusive actor to suddenly say, oh, well, I'm non binary and now I'm going to sue you because even though you fired me because I showed up late five weeks in a row and I'm an a*****e.
And I didn't follow the company rules. I'm going to say it's because I was not
Malcolm Collins: allowed everyone to become a protected class, which is obviously a bad idea.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Then there's also, and this sort of more just runs against our cultural sovereignty rules. It says, do you support legislation that would ban the practice of conversion therapy for minors in Pennsylvania?
Now you and I, in the pragmatist guide to sexuality clearly state that like conversion therapy. doesn't work unless it's like literally subjecting you to gay orgies until you get super saturated and tired of them for a while. But then you have to like re up that. So like, based on the evidence we have, based on the evidence.
Yeah. So like one, the only form of gay conversion therapy that works is like intense gay orgies that kind of get you just kind of done with it for a while. And, but you have to like [00:06:00] re inoculate. So one it's not effective anyway, but two, like to, to prevent families from with their minors, you know, giving them the form of therapy or like sort of religious treatment that you think is appropriate runs against our cultural sovereignty stance.
So I couldn't answer that.
so to add color to our position here. I would be okay with being in camps based on specific modalities of treatment, like what happens to the children at a camp? If these camps are doing something illegal with the kids, then of course they should not be legal. What I am against is being in camps based on the intent of the treatment. Because while we have said no known therapy, modality is effective. Helping same-sex attracted individuals. , either transition. , what they find most attractive. Or.
Suppressing their attraction. That doesn't mean that. It is impossible for such a. treatment. The [00:07:00] method to one day be invented. And some people, some children, even, you know, I know when I was younger, , I had gay friends who would constantly tell me how much they wish they could just not be gay. There are young people who you have a treatment like this existed would want said treatment. And to deny that they exist is to deny the lived experiences of hundreds, of thousands of individuals.. However would I would be open to is a requirement that sending a kid to one of these camps that requires the consent of both parents.
Malcolm Collins: And I would note here that people would be like, well then how do you, you know, if you think that this isn't something that can be cured, for example, quote unquote cured like why are you okay with religious frameworks that you know, tell people to suppress their sexual desires and it's because you don't have to act on them.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: You can decide. Yes, this is my preference, but it is not my lifestyle choice. And I want, and it's so [00:08:00] funny that like we get these comments from urban monoculture brain to people who don't get it. You go, you want to force, you know, you want to allow some cultures to force same sex attracted individuals to, you know, marry a woman.
Or join the clergy and it's like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to, unlike you, allow same sex attracted individuals to make choices about which culture they identify with. Yeah.
Simone Collins: And this is just one option. This is one way you can choose to do same sex identification. You can also choose to. Convert into a different culture.
That's all about flamboyant gay life. Or you can convert into a culture that's like, Oh, you're a gay female. That means you're a man into a culture. That's like, Oh, you're, you're just going to be super non binary and not talk about it and do whatever it is you want. Like, I don't care. You're the one who wants to
Malcolm Collins: remove choice from same
Simone Collins: sex attracted individuals.
Yeah. And that's, that's the problem is that's, that's [00:09:00] coercion when, when you start to dictate that. So here's another question. Hold on.
Malcolm Collins: I wanted to point out here. A same sex attracted Catholic priest is not not going out there having sex with people because the Catholics are forcing him to. He chose that lifestyle.
Yeah. Okay? We don't live in a Catholic monarchy. No. You are the one trying to remove choice from him. Yeah. I am trying to give him the maximum amount of choice. You just don't see it that way because you see a choice. To not be a member of your cultural group to not instantly gratify every desire you have as being a non choice
Simone Collins: Yeah So another question they ask is do you support adding sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to pennsylvania's hate crimes law?
And strengthening penalties for those who commit hate crimes. So obviously I couldn't answer yes to this either because you know, we express candid opinions about um Um, being transgender about youth gender transition, about LGBT stuff that [00:10:00] could be interpreted like perhaps in the UK where there are stronger hate crime laws, you know, as a, as a hate crime.
You know, JK Rowling has, has played with these rules on Twitter you know, in Yeah, in the uk. So, you know, we have a YouTube channel where we comment on these issues. We comment on the policies and we talk about the green lines. And if I was in support of adding, you know, strengthening the penalties and adding sexual orientation and gender expression to the hate crime laws in our state, I could be subjecting us to genuine legal liability, like personally.
So I couldn't support that one
Malcolm Collins: again. You cannot extend to hate crimes, opt in sexual identities. And I know non binary people will be like, it's not a choice, but like,
Simone Collins: right. But bad actors, bad actors can make it a choice. Yeah. Like, I mean, there's that one there's that one shooter. Who allegedly identified as, as gender and they're like, Oh no, no, no, that doesn't count.
But like, it does. But it went
Malcolm Collins: out under the hate crime [00:11:00] law. So you don't get to like disavow him because it hurts your community that now you're identified with a mass shooter. Yeah. But you would disavow him like.
Simone Collins: And that's like when, when you're legislating, you have to keep in mind that you're not just legislating for the people you're defending.
You also have to legislate around bad actors who may use this against the very people you're trying to protect. Which of course. Like, you know, loops into the whole turf issue, you know, this is
Malcolm Collins: a problem in Australia right now. As somebody in Australia is being sued because they tried to keep a transgender women off of their app, transgender women who didn't pass.
So keep going. Transgender women were allowed, just not non passing. And that was considered you know, illegal in, in Australia. You are not allowed to have lesbian only spaces from a legal perspective. Now, because anyone can identify this way. You, there is no cutoff for what is transgender.
Well, now any. Cis male sex pest can go on lesbian dating apps and harass lesbians. Like, yeah, of course it's going to piss off. Like, so
Simone Collins: that's, that's another issue, right? Okay. So let's go to the next year. I'm like, okay, come on. There has to be something here. Like I'm, I'm an ally. I'm an ally. Do you [00:12:00] support efforts to modernize and simplify the process for legal name changes, including the removal of the requirement that name changes be advertised in local newspapers or law journals?
Now, keep in mind, this is for people who have things like pending debts who may have committed crimes Like, the thing is, now, this is another law that I can't support because It could be abused by bad actors. And, and I don't really see why, like, if I'm changing my, my gender and I need to legally change my name, is it so bad that I advertise in a, I mean, no one, no one even reads the newspaper.
You're
Malcolm Collins: absolutely right. Like the, the reason why that exists as a law is so people can't use this to like escape debt or defraud people.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And again, like these are not, you're not being forced to post it. On Facebook to your friends and family. If this is a private and sensitive matter, this is, this is advertising this in, in, in a, in a place where if there are legal [00:13:00] pending or financial issues, people will see it.
But again, only bad actors would abuse that. So again, I can't, I can't just like, okay, come on. There's gotta be something. Okay. Well, Oh, here's another one. We're totally going to lose on, do you oppose efforts to prevent. transgender students from participating in all publicly sanctioned for or funded school athletic programs according to their gender identity.
Well, no, that's totally not fair. You know, if you have, you know, a 17 year old natal male who's transitioned to female, who's, you know, competing in athletics, he's going to absolutely school on average, of course it's his female competitors. This is not, this is not their game.
Malcolm Collins: I love it where they will come to you with like studies that have obviously been like combed through by the ultra monoculture to like, and I think that people don't understand what happens when they do that, when you come to me with a study and I can look at this person and be like, Obviously they have an advantage and you go, yeah, but look here.
And if you, [00:14:00] if you, if you split the data this way they don't, that doesn't make me believe that they don't have an advantage. It makes me distrust academic institutions and studies. Okay. , everyone can see that we're being gaslit on this. Like it's not hard. You have to be. Like a religious level of delusional to not be able to look at pictures like the ones I'm putting on the screen and be like, this person has an obvious biological advantage.
And then you can say, well, well, well, well, well, well, some humans have a biological advantage over other humans and that's unfair. And it's like, yeah, that's what sports were about. We created women's leagues. So that women could compete. So
Simone Collins: yeah,
Malcolm Collins: it's women because their
Simone Collins: bodies are on average quite different.
Which is, is, yeah, if
Malcolm Collins: you want to create transgender leagues, that's fine. If you want to create mixed gender leagues, that's fine. I am open to a world where everyone can [00:15:00] strive and S and succeed. But when you in mass allow. trans individuals into women's leagues, you create an environment where young girls who have worked very, very, very hard have their opportunity to be on top taken from them.
Yeah. And that is incredibly cruel.
Also as somebody with the number of trans friends. What I've heard from them. They view laws. That prevent people like Leah Thomas from unfairly engaging in these competitions as primarily protecting trans individuals. it hurts the entire trans community. When you see somebody. Obviously taking advantage of the carve-outs that are meant to protect. Trans people. To get an advantage over other individuals. We used to see jokes about trans people competing in sports teams And being allowed in women's changing rooms. as being fundamentally anti-trans because it [00:16:00] was seen as, so obviously an unfair thing to do.
Miss Mann? Come in, dear. Have a seat. Take off your bra if you'd like. I need to talk. See, I have this problem, I have a terrible secret. Well, Cindy, we all have our little secrets.
Sometimes we do things we're not so proud of. To gain the athletic edge on the competition. Sometimes those secrets come back to haunt us. And I also need to point out here in the case of someone like Leah Thomas, when you create. These carve-outs that mal actors are going to use them. For their own sexual gratification and to well goon on girls to be a sex pest.
If you look at somebody like Leah Thomas, , here's a quote from one of our teammates. We did not give our consent. They did not ask for our consent, but in that [00:17:00] locker room, we turn around and there's a six, four biological man dropping his pants. And watching us undress. And we were exposed to male genitalia. I mean, do. Do people really support this? Like, do they really know what's happening?
That you have other attorney age girls. In this room and they should be protected from somebody just being able to say, I identify as trans. Now I get to go in a woman's locker room. And all goal at underage girls and forced him to see my genitalium. Do you not see that somebody. Might be abusing these sorts of carve-outs and that this abuse doesn't just hurt these underage girls, but also real trans people. And I, as, somebody who believes the trans narrative, that real trans people exist. There are. Real people in the world. Who are born the wrong gender and just want to be seen. As the correct gender. [00:18:00] Do I believe for a second that somebody who actually just wanted to be seen. As a girl would be walking around. A girls' locker room with their penis hanging out. Did they would be ogling. At naked girls. In a girls' locker room.
Do I believe that. No. No, I don't. If that is what trans is. But if trans is the ability for a guy With an exhibition is in fetish. to assume an identity that allows him into girls locker rooms and forces girls to look at his genitalia. Well, that's a different thing. That's not what I was told trans was, and that's not what I believe.
Anyone who is really trans believes what trans is.. Amy real trans person is going to want laws on the books. That prevent individuals like Leah Thomas from.
Engendering ill will [00:19:00] on their community.. Even if it means. Did they have to undergo. I go. Really pretty trivial sacrifices. Like not being able to participate in intermural sports.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So there's, there's another one here that's actually quite fascinating. They asked, Do you oppose extending the statute of limitations under which a person could file a civil claim related to gender affirming care, which could cause providers to leave the state in response to higher insurance premiums.
So, to give a little bit more color here. There is an amendment, a House Bill 138 that would, according to Keystone Equality, which is, I guess I'm going to out them the organizations that's asking these questions, that would inappropriately increase the statute of limitations for gender affirming care of any kind for up to the age of 30.
30 in cases where a minor was provided such care, they say that if passed, legislation would have the effect of making the cost of liability insurance prohibitive for healthcare workers seeking to provide affirming care [00:20:00] for transgender people. And that the bill intentionally targets a transgender community by making healthcare harder to obtain for all transgender people.
In other words, they're saying basically that the state of Pennsylvania is like, you know what, if you receive gender affirming care as a minor, You should have the right up until age 30 to sue your healthcare provider for offering that gender affirming care to you if it turns out that they were acting in a completely flagrantly irresponsible manner and you were, you regret the care that you were given and you were not given care with a lot of Oh, s**t!
They're like, no, no, no, no. Because I think they know. That a lot of people who are getting gender affirming care as minors are going to sue their healthcare providers when, when they reach their twenties, when they reach their thirties, when they're fully myelinated, when they learn more and they're like, Oh no, no, no, we can't do that because they can't afford the liability insurance for that.
That's what it is. I know. I know. I know. So I'm like, Oh man, I
Malcolm Collins: want to reframe this in, in, in, in, in like a tighter form. Okay. They are [00:21:00] trying to make it illegal for children that they have groomed and then believe like a kid. I'm not saying like the parents think the children have been groomed. Like a minor gets convinced by their psychologist or something like that to get this care later.
ends up realizing that they were brainwashed into getting this or that they weren't really told what the alternatives are, which is something we know is happening at scale now from numerous leaks that have happened. Okay. Then they go back and they try to sue the provider and they would otherwise win the lawsuit.
No, we're not saying just anyone who spuriously decides that they want to sue their provider of this stuff. Yeah.
It is trying to make it so that this individual, even if they would have won this lawsuit, based on the evidence, because the statute of limitations will pass, provably provable that they were brainwashed that 25 Go back on this and keep in mind.
This isn't even that long. It says by the age of [00:22:00] 30, right? Yeah, that's
Simone Collins: that's the the that's where they're trying to extend the statute of limitations with this pennsylvania house bill That is not
Malcolm Collins: that long.
Simone Collins: Yeah
Malcolm Collins: Is they're basically comping right here what I'm seeing here that they know this wave of lawsuits is coming and they are trying to prevent it because they know internally.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's not just
Malcolm Collins: that. It's not just
Simone Collins: that. Because 1, if this does pass, it will make liability insurance more expensive for healthcare providers who choose to provide gender affirming care.
Malcolm Collins: That because of the level of misconduct. Yeah. Conduct wasn't high,
As to how big is this flood detransition is going to be what we now know from the study that. It came out in 2020 for development of gender, non contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood. That. Of 11 year olds who are discontent with their gender. Over 90% of them by the age of 23 or 100% content with their gender. It just turned out that they were [00:23:00] gay. So you are, if you put 11 year olds who are discontent with their gender on gender affirming care. Sacrificing castrating. Nine gay kids for everyone.
Trans kid, you are quote, unquote saving. That sounds like a pretty anti-gay position to me. The systematic and meth castration of gay children.
Malcolm Collins: you
Simone Collins: know, they could argue, you know, because again, this is, this is the cost of liability insurance.
So they could argue that, well, this is insurers expecting that, that there's bad conduct and there's going to be a lot of expensive lawsuits and then therefore charging prohibitively expensive. No, no, no. I, yeah, I do too, but I'm just, I'm just, I'm just making this as, as balanced as I possibly can, even though I'm, I'm obviously biased, but anyway, so like, I can't, I can't say yes to that.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: That's not even, that's not even, like, that is genuinely monstrous that you would try to prevent that. I know, I know, I know. Here's, here's
Simone Collins: another question from them. Hold on, hold on,
Malcolm Collins: hold on. I want to point out a few other things here. This is like, if, if, if [00:24:00] they know, and I suspect that most of the trans community now knows that puberty blockers have long term consequences, this means all of the doctors who are telling their patients that which we basically know from the evidence isn't true anymore, they can be sued.
They don't want that to happen because lying. to the patient is a key part of gender affirming care. But anyway, continue.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So this, this next question, a little more difficult, I would say, do you oppose efforts at the state or school district level to restrict curricula, ban books, or curtail other age appropriate educational materials or individual expression of the instructor because of LGBTQ content?
Now, I mean, we don't care. Obviously. Well, we don't care if, if, you know, a teacher is gay, we don't care if a teacher says that they're married to someone of the same gender or if they're trans or whatever. But yeah, I mean, in general content that promotes any type of pairing as being the correct type of pairing is something that.
Well, no, I think I'll put,
Malcolm Collins: [00:25:00] I'll put on screen here a, a tick tock where you will see a teacher discussing what she is doing with her elementary school class
My first year in preschool with a class of my own teaching alongside another queer neurodivergent educator and we have been rocking R2's class.
We've been talking about gender and skin color and consent and empathy and our bodies and autonomy. It's been fabulous. But our teaching team is shifting, and a new person is being onboarded. Someone with many years of experience. So today at the lunch table, when the topic of gender and genitals came up, one of our students plainly looked up and said, Well, I'm a girl today.
But I know that Teacher Co isn't. No, they're Enby. And the look on the incoming teacher's face was priceless. She was shocked in a good way. And she just looked around at the two of us and said, This class is incredible, and I am so [00:26:00] impressed.
Malcolm Collins: is talking to them about genitals, about gender expression, about, she's like, yeah, when the topic of genitals came up, I'm like, Whoa, why is genitals coming up with kindergartens as a regular lunchroom discussion?
And why are all of the other teachers okay that this just happened, because that's part of the story? You know, why are you indoctrinating the kids into your culture's framework around gender, which, frankly, is a fringe framework? It is and I think that this is something that fundamentally that the urban monoculture, like people who are really seethed in it, struggle to understand.
It's gender. Is at the end of the day, a completely cultural phenomenon, the way that our culture relates to gender. There is a truth of gender, which is sexual expression, right? But the way you relate to sexual expression is important. Completely. Well, and gender expression, right? So when I talk about like X, Y chromosomes and the difference that makes and how people develop, and sometimes you can have [00:27:00] intersex individuals and different cultures will relate to those individuals differently.
But most cultures have chosen just to lump people broadly into one of two genders, whichever one they seem more like. But that's a cultural decision. The urban monoculture has decided to atomize this almost as much as they can. But that doesn't mean that that's like necessarily the right way to react to it.
And when I look to the unaliving rates within the urban monoculture, it seems to me it obviously isn't the right way to react to it. So am I okay with this system that seems to be correlated with high rates of unaliving oneself and increasing rates? as acceptance for the LGBT community is accepted more.
So it's not due to discrimination because the rates are increasing as acceptance is increasing. Am I okay with that my child being exposed to that cultural system? No. And, and, and this is, this is one of the things that always got me about the Florida law, like the don't say gay law. I know the person who worked on drafting this law and I had actually believed the urban [00:28:00] monocultures lie that the law made it so that gay teachers could not tell their students that they were gay.
And actually among Republicans when they were drafting the law, she's like, yeah, actually, In the first draft of the law, it could have been read that way. And we, the Republicans, before it went out, changed it so it couldn't be read that way, because that isn't something that modern Republicans actually want.
They just don't want to get brainwashed.
Simone Collins: Okay. Let me, let me go to the next one. This is actually interesting and I've never heard of this before. They asked, do you support prohibiting the LGBTQ plus panic defense in legal proceedings in Pennsylvania? So I asked perplexity what this was because I'd never heard of it before.
Basically it's one, not even really a defense that's used in murder cases a lot. But basically it's, it's something that sometimes defenders try to use. To say like, oh, this person was so freaked out related to the other person's lgbtq plus [00:29:00] status, that that's why they murdered them or did something who
Malcolm Collins: are underselling it.
The panic defense comes into play when a person lies about their sexual gender. Yeah. That's
Simone Collins: where it most likely comes into it. So
Malcolm Collins: it happens if a today they be trans. Historically they would've been gay. You know, there's been changing the way we relate to gender as a society. But a, a, a trans person, for example lies to a person uh, that they were cis um, and then when that person realizes, often because they haven't undergone, you know, full, they, they, they say, oh, you, I just had sex with you and now I see you have a penis, or, you know, something like that they freak out and they murder the person.
This is obviously a horrifying thing. But here's sort of the way I would put it. Do I think that Muslims should be able to use of the defense? In a murder case, this person secretly slipped me pork intentionally. [00:30:00] Because I view that as a similar kind of offense in this offense, the individual has knowingly done something that the Muslim thinks is going to cause them to be tortured for all eternity and maliciously done it for their own momentary pleasure, maybe a laugh or something like that.
While I do think it is a truly monstrous thing for an individual to do because that's, that's why these people are so mad. Like, they're acting like they're mad because the person is
Simone Collins: LGBT. It's kind of, it's not something that's used to get people off the hook. It's just, it's, it's something that's used in a court of law to be like, They were driven insane.
They panicked because of their belief structure. And the reason why a lot of people who support LGBTQ rights are like, Hey, let's just not allow people to use this defense at all, is it's offensive to even suggest that being LGBTQ plus in some way could Would cause someone to freak out that much.
That's not
Malcolm Collins: what they're freaking out about. That's the point. They are [00:31:00] not freaking out that their partner is gay. They're freaking out that they just had sex with a guy. I know, I know, I know.
Simone Collins: But Malcolm, what you're missing is that, is that the reason why they're trying to remove this from defense cases is that that shouldn't be something that's normalized.
Like you shouldn't be allowed to, to wake up next to someone who you thought was one Sex
Malcolm Collins: shouldn't be
Simone Collins: allowed to hold their religious belief. Exactly. Yes. So anyway, that's you know, I don't, I, I think people should be allowed to give that context in the court of law because like, like to your point, if someone was fed pork, when it's against their religion, I would want to know that in a court case.
Cause I couldn't, I would want to know like, Why were they freaking out so much? Like, this is weird. You know, you need to know the context. It
Malcolm Collins: should be admissible in a court context, but it shouldn't necessarily get them off, but that's the way. But it doesn't, and it
Simone Collins: doesn't, and it hasn't. They're basically just saying this shouldn't be discussed at all.
So that's, that's one. And it's interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Which is actually kind of insane. The court, who's making the [00:32:00] decision, shouldn't be allowed to know that this person who was constricted into sleeping was a guy.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: In their mind. Maybe not in the other person's mind, but in their mind, they thought it was a guy.
Simone Collins: So anyway, this goes back to this next question ties back to what we were discussing in terms of like, HIV positivity in the LGBTQ plus world. They asked, Do you oppose increasing criminal penalties for people who are HIV positive? When those who are not HIV positive would not be subject to those increased penalties for the same offense.
So here they're basically saying like, you know, Should people be penalized for being irresponsible when they have HIV and could hurt other people because of it? No,
Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, this is, this is about a specific legal statute. So you can be tried with It's like reckless endangerment, right? I don't think it's yes.
It's reckless endangerment. If you know you have HIV and you intentionally hide that from another individual and give them HIV. I, I, I can't even believe that they are trying to prevent this from the case. That we would, yeah, that, that they [00:33:00] would, they oppose increasing criminal penalties. This is what I talk about.
I don't know how you can be pro gay and pro Democrat at the same time. Like you have to, who, who suffers? From this being removed from the law, who is going to predominantly suffer from this being removed? It's going to be gays who are trying to practice safe sex. That is who's going to suffer for this.
Who benefits from this? Gays who are preying on other gay Yeah. Yeah. Bad actors.
Simone Collins: Bad actors. That's a key thing here. That is a,
Malcolm Collins: why would you try to protect that if you wanted to protect the gay community? Because they don't care about the gay community. Right, right, right.
Simone Collins: They
Malcolm Collins: care about the bad actors.
That's literally it.
Simone Collins: I actually found two questions here that I do support. So that they're right next to each other. One is, do you support guaranteeing the rights of LGBTQ plus parents to seek and retain custody of their children? Including foster and adopted children without bias based on their status?
Totally, it should have nothing to do with it. And two, the second one that we would finally [00:34:00] say yes to, do you support equal rights for legally married same sex, same gender couples as those granted legally married couples who are the opposite sex or gender? Totally. Doesn't
Malcolm Collins: matter if, you know. I actually want to push back on what some of our fans will say on these two issues.
Oh, yeah. The one is, is some of our fans will say, how dare you allow a gay couple to adopt kids? Like, what about the effects that has on the kids? And I'm like do you know how bad foster care is? Right. Like, this is demonstrably better for the child.
Simone Collins: Well, like, anyone who, who typically passes the requirements to adopt a child or whatever, you know, like, and also one Having a kid.
So one adopting is really hard. If you can adopt, you're probably way above like the standard of most parents who biologically have kids. And two, if you are conscientious enough to make the money and go through the intense hardship of having children, especially if you're a gay couple, lesbians, it's a tiny bit easier, but gay is like really hard to have kids.
And this is also
Malcolm Collins: why we can't trust the data that [00:35:00] says, because if you look at the data on, do gay parents have a negative effect on their children growing up? It turns out that they actually have much more successful and mentally healthy kids. Yeah. Because they're like the people who are capable of having kids.
Yeah. The reason why this is the case is because of the gating that's required. The barriers to entry. people to end up getting access to kids, so it basically skews the study, but this is relevant if you're trying to bar these couples who are having better outcomes from even adopting when keep in mind kids who are adopted can often, if they want to say, I don't want to be with this family anymore, or I find this situation abusive.
But they're choosing not to because they believe this is better for them than what the alternative would be. How dare you make that decision for the child? In the second case, the, the, the gay married couple should have the same rights. We had a comment in our last video. They said, well, these people aren't married.
It's not a real marriage because you can't have a real marriage between same sex people. I'm like, from your cultural [00:36:00] perspective, that's true. But there are versions of Christianity, and there are versions of Judaism, and there are versions of Islam, and there are versions of Buddhism that do believe that.
So you can't just annul other religions because it's not what your religion is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That comes back to cultural sovereignty. Being insane, one, and then two, even if like, like you 100 percent believe this and you think that our society is made worse for them being able to marry, right? You know, you don't have the voting power to enforce that.
You know, all you do is hurt Republican chances of winning by going out there and being a hard liner and trying to get this into Republican policy positions. Why are you doing this? Even the majority of the Republican base don't want this. You know, over, it's like it was 61 percent the last time I looked at the Republican base, not the Democrat base, the Republican base [00:37:00] wants gays to be able to get married.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Especially the younger Republican base. So it's only a matter of time until the system. Only
Malcolm Collins: 30 percent of the young Republican base didn't want gays to be able to get married. It is, no, you are not helping anyone. And are you even helping the people you're banning from getting married? Do you think, okay Do you really want to, do you really want to suppress marriage?
No, no, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. You prevent a gay couple from getting married. I think increased or decreased the probability that they find Jesus. Obviously you've decreased the probability. Fair point. Because they're stuck in a degenerate, you know, uh, Yeah, you're forcing them away from. They now see you as the enemy because you kept them from entering a marriage.
And I also think here, this is where I get to the ordering of sins. And I think that this is something where classic Christianity is incredibly unbiblical, and I find it very frustrating. Okay. You are a sinner, [00:38:00] but Jesus still saved. How dare you try to deny his salvation to somebody else because they're going through some phase in their life or something like that, right?
Um, Look at a rank order of sins. Yes. I think if you go with a classical interpretation, of Christianity, sleeping with a partner of the same sex is absolutely a sin. Okay. Do I think that that prevents these people from getting into heaven? If you read the Bible no more than the person who speaks poorly to his wife or too much, or Yeah, there's a lot of sins out there.
Or, there are so many sins, where there's sins every night, you know, watching football games and going out there and contributing to the community. That's, that's not how it works in [00:39:00] most versions of the Catholic Church. Yeah. Um, And uh, we've just sort of twisted it on a tag, you know, we should adjudicate morality like this, and it's like, uh, no, I'm sorry.
A gay couple that is married. Having sex is not more of a sin. Then an unmarried couple having sex then premarital sex, biblically speaking. Do you want to ban premarital sex as well? Or it's just you pick on the sins where you think you can get the public on your side.
It's the second then you're just a bully. And that's not. That's not what Jesus asked of you. , let these people know that they're sending yes. Teach them the Bible. Yes, but you cannot possibly adjudicate all of the Christian moral system. People need to see the light of it and live by it themselves.
Malcolm Collins: The, the thing that really gets me about these individuals who are like, yeah, we need to make it part of the party platform that like we you know, [00:40:00] ban gay marriage and stuff like that, it's like.
, they, they are so pathetic looking from my perspective because they know this isn't helping with their mainstream issues. They know that doing stuff like this only hurts Republicans chances of victory. They are just LARPing about a world that they don't exist in.
You don't live in a world where your. Moral framework is the dominant moral framework. You look as buffoonish as the man who plays with the samurai sword and daydreams about living in a world where their skill with a samurai sword is going to matter. They don't live in feudal Japan. You don't live in 1950s America.
Okay, you live in modern America, so why don't we work for the things that can actually get passed and help all of us on the right, instead of doing this whole splitting, splitting, splitting, splitting purity test, when the only way to pass your purity test is to be [00:41:00] some extremist that doesn't represent a right wing voter.
Like this is insane at this point. All right, even if you disagree with us on this, why are you fighting? You're fighting because you are LARPing. You are the fat bearded man in a fedora flailing around a katana in his backyard dreaming about the day he can use this in a fight to the death in feudal Japan.
He doesn't live in feudal Japan. You don't live in 1950s America.
As a quick aside here, some people in the comments of another video, we're trying to argue against gay marriage from quote unquote, a secular perspective, except marriage. Isn't a secular thing. It's. It's not the piece of paper that they want. It's the ability to undergo the particular marriage ceremony that they want. , to, to be this new status of a married instead of not married.
That's what comes from a marriage.
[00:42:00] Because it's a religious thing. And because there are some versions of various religions that allow gay people to marry. We as a secular society should not be preventing it.
And if we do that, we have the government come in and begin to adjudicate, which interpretations of the Bible are correct in which are wrong in which religions are we allowed to practice.
And I don't think any real. Christian wants government bureaucrats, coming in and saying these parts of the Bible.
Should be seen this way. And these parts of the Bible should be seen this way because we know exactly what they're going to do when they start doing that.
Malcolm Collins: Um, That's, that's, anyway. Right. And, and I think that this is One of the things that I've, I've been angling for recently is to get you on the board of the Log Cabin Republicans.
Because I think that they're now the only group that really supports. Well, and we got to raise
Simone Collins: a lot of money for them.
Malcolm Collins: I don't know what to tell you. That's what we've been told. If we can raise more money for them, we can, we can get on the board, which would be fun. But Dear Basecamp donors,
Simone Collins: please donate to the Log [00:43:00] Cabin Republicans and say, I came here.
Malcolm Collins: What I love about this episode is that oh, by the way, people who don't know what the Log Cabin Republicans are, it's the gay Republican lobby. They're really awesome.
Simone Collins: They're fantastic. They're
Malcolm Collins: actually like really fun people. Gay Republican parties are like the most fun parties. You can go to because they are all so based and by based, and this is the thing, a lot of people, they're like, this isn't based because it's not like conservative or straight conservative.
If you're just repeating everything that your group wants to hear, you are the
Simone Collins: antithesis of based.
Malcolm Collins: Being based means saying what you believe is true, regardless of what your group or other groups or society is going to say about it. You know, like, We've had some of our gay friends be like, well, I agree with conservatives on everything, but like they're, they're gay issues.
I just can't, I'm like, that's not the, the, the mainstream, even in Trump's platform at the RNC, the Republican platform this year does not have marriage as being between a man and a [00:44:00] woman. It says that we should think to find marriage and we should try to make, you know, more marriages happen, but it does not.
And we should, marriage is great.
So, okay, here's where things left off with the survey . 'cause I, I, I obviously can't take this survey.
Simone Collins: I, I, it just is not gonna work out well. Can't take it back. Yeah. Yeah. I, I responded to her to the CEO of this organization and I said, oh, you know, thanks. I've added this to my list of surveys to review. TLDR. You know, we're, we're very transparent about our stance on lgbtq plus issues on our podcast, and I linked to our podcast, so, oh, sh shoot.
They're gonna find out if they actually, I don't, I don't think they'll watch any of it. And I'm like, you know, the gist is that, you know, we support cultural sovereignty, you know, that we believe everyone should be allowed to live the lifestyle that they want, but we're also against imposing your cultural values on other groups.
AKA we're against cultural imperialism. And that's, that's just where I left it. So, these lovely, these lovely people from Keystone Equality may come to the channel and absolutely [00:45:00] hate everything that we're saying here and hate the fact that we've highlighted their candidate survey and suggested that they're leaving room for bad actors.
That is ultimately going to damage the LGBTQ plus community by giving them a bad name. They're
Malcolm Collins: murdering gay
Simone Collins: people. They are, they
Malcolm Collins: are. Okay. Yeah. Malcolm's shooting. No, no, it's, it's very clear, like, especially the one where you can't be prosecuted for lying to someone about your HIV status. That hurts.
Simone Collins: No, no, no, that, they were, that was in opposition to increased penalties, but yeah, I mean, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, they said, hold on. You, you, you didn't read it correctly then. They said that your HIV status should not be able to increase the penalties you are subject for, for any form of action. What that means is a HIV person telling someone, I don't have HIV and sleeping with them, should not legally be treated any differently than a non HIV person telling someone they don't have HIV and sleeping with them.
The HIV cannot be taken any differently. into consideration [00:46:00] when the, when, when the legal status is judged, it would make it impossible to in any way punish someone for lying about their HIV status. That's the intention of that law and that will kill gay people.
Simone convinced me of one possible alternative as to what this wording may mean. It may be to prevent higher penalties. In great cases where the attacker had HIV positive status. , I don't see this as particularly better because, , who would a gay man be griping, but another gay man.
So it just further victimizes the gay community.
Cause I can't think of any other instance where HIV status would be taken into account for more punishment in a crime other than grape or lying to someone about it.
Simone Collins: Well, maybe we can share a link to the Google survey, which they might take down.
But what I can say, here's our one nice thing we're going to say, okay, is that They used a Google form and most of these packs, most of these organizations, [00:47:00] they give you a fricking like PDF that you're supposed to fill out. There's like no room to put anything. It's like terribly antiquated. It looks like it was copied three times from like a paper printout.
At least they are civilized in technology. Okay. So good guys. Love it. Love you too, Malcolm. Okay. Bye. Love you. Okay, bye. Love
Malcolm Collins: you. Bye. Love you. Okay. Okay.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, we sit down with Maxim Lott to discuss the surprising recent political developments, including why Biden dropped out of the race, the influence of betting odds versus traditional polling, and the odds for Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. We also explore the evolution of prediction markets and their growing importance in political forecasting, as well as the potential impact of the new right on future elections. Tune in for a detailed and engaging conversation on the dynamics of election betting, political strategy, and the changing landscape of the Republican party.
Maxim Lott: [00:00:00] Yeah. I'm excited for this too. I really appreciate your natalism work that you guys do. So
Simone Collins: we really appreciate the work you do, man. You're on at a perfect time. Like we're probably going to run your interviews with us.
Like usually. Months for us to run these and now we're like, oh my God, we got to run it
Malcolm Collins: with all this election stuff that's going on. This is wild. Yeah. You had, you had disagreed with the betting odds recently.
Maxim Lott: Yes. Yes. I had a post about why Biden won't drop out and all this good reasoning, but the betting odds said he would and he did.
So the lesson is to listen to the betting odds, not any one analyst.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'd love to hear why you thought he wouldn't drop out.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, you know, I thought it wasn't in his interest. If he wanted to, he could have gone to the convention and got the nomination. Yes, thank
Simone Collins: you. That's, that's what I kept telling everyone.
I was like, he's not, like, all the way up through Saturday, it was like, he's not going to drop out. No one can technically force him to drop out. And he's no reason to want to, why would he do it? No one can stop him. He's not going to drop out. So I'm with you on that. And
Malcolm Collins: you also [00:01:00] have the problem that Jill hates Kamala.
And this is like publicly,
Simone Collins: and
Malcolm Collins: if she's making the decisions for Biden, she definitely wouldn't want him to drop out if she was a presumptive nominee.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, and it seemed like there was no way for them to truly force him out either, but I think I underestimated how much kind of soft power there is in the Democratic Party with Obama and Pelosi really running the show.
Simone Collins: Like, I don't know, man, they tried everything. I feel like they literally tried everything. Like people drove out to his house, you know, George Clooney, like just, they threw everything at him. And I think, and maybe in the end, because donations started drying up. That was it. You know, just like, yeah, I think it was probably
Malcolm Collins: donors that got him out.
Simone Collins: So
Maxim Lott: you'd think if you can make it to the convention, the donors would, who else are they going to donate to? They don't like Trump. So, but clearly he felt the pressure and he had COVID and a lot of things conspired and he dropped out. So [00:02:00]
Simone Collins: the
Maxim Lott: bettors were not surprised. They had, This at like 70% a couple days before he dropped out.
Simone Collins: Wow. So they,
Maxim Lott: they were right. I, I lost money betting on the other side, but . Wow. Yeah. You
Malcolm Collins: know, he, he got covid we'll see if there was any you know, there was a lot of people interested in something like that happening to him. I was, I was joking. There was a thing about Trump's assassination and people were like, well.
You know, Republicans would be cheering too if Biden was assassinated. I was like, not a single Republican I have ever met would be cheering if Biden was assassinated. They love it. It's a disappointing development
Simone Collins: for Republicans that Biden is no longer running. They were thrilled with Biden running.
Maxim Lott: Yeah. Now the polls have Kamala Harris up by like, maybe, or losing by one point less than Biden was losing by. So we'll see how that goes for them. The betting odds, yeah, the betting odds. It's interesting because you can look at these conditional odds. So you say, if this person's nominated, What are their odds of winning?
And Biden's odds were always [00:03:00] around 30 percent. Kamala Harris's were around 37 percent. So she's slightly more electable, but not much more electable. Oh
Malcolm Collins: gosh. Okay, so we have been talking generally right now. I'm going to introduce you
To anyone who is wondering why the election betting on numbers are a bit off in this. It is because this was filmed.
Around a week ago. And so sorry about that. It just took me a while to process it.
Malcolm Collins: but so people who don't know Maxim Lunt, I Grew up on your stuff, every election cycle.
Loading what's the URL here? Election betting. Election betting odds.com and then the, you had your own website because it is historically speaking, the most accurate predictor of who's going to win an election cycle. And I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about why it's such an accurate predictor of who's gonna win and, and, and it's advantages over traditional polling.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, absolutely. And great to be here with you guys. I love your natalism work. The so I created the site in 2015 and we've tracked [00:04:00] hundreds of races since then. And you can graph it out to see how accurate it is. And what we find is that in general, If the markets say there's a 20 percent chance that someone's going to win a race, that actually happens about 20 percent of the time.
So it's not exactly perfect. You can see the lines, they almost match up. But basically you can go to electionbettingodds. com, click track record, and it'll show you this. And it's been very accurate. It's the single best predictor. If you just want, tell me quickly, who's going to win. This is the best thing.
Thing to go to.
Malcolm Collins: So you're sort of the granddaddy of betting odds stuff. And the field has undergone, we met you at manifest. I think an enormous evolution in the past probably decade or so. Can you talk a little bit about how much, how prediction markets have evolved over the course of your life? Yeah.
Maxim Lott: And I don't know if it's quite accurate to say I'm the granddaddy, you know, there are people like Robin Hanson who might fit that role better.[00:05:00]
He goes to all this stuff. I guess for the general,
Malcolm Collins: you were my first, to this stuff. You made it accessible in a topic that I was passionate about. Right.
Maxim Lott: For, for, for popularizing it. I think. Election betting odds got more than 25 million unique views. So hopefully that's made a difference
And yeah, so prediction markets it has changed a lot over the years I first started looking at these in 2007 And at that time there was one big site It was based in ireland called intrade. com and it was great and people traded there and they accurately predicted things. They were shut down mostly by the U.
S. government. First, their founder died climbing Mount Everest, which is tragic. But then the government said, hey, you're taking American customers and you're not registered with our government. So they sued them and they shut down immediately after that. So there were a couple of years then where there was really almost no [00:06:00] prediction markets.
The best thing was Betfair, which was this UK based place where people bet 99 percent of it. People are betting on sports there and it's legal there. They had this 1 percent yeah, where they were betting on elections. And it was annoying for me as a reporter, cause we would want to report on these odds on the Stossel show on Fox news and they The Betfair site, cause it's these English gamblers there.
The odds are really hard to read. It's like, you know, 30 over 4. 5. So I'd have to manually convert all these in Excel sheet to like 55%. And then eventually I figured, Oh, let's, I can automate this and then I can put it on a website. So that's how election betting started. And since then, there've been a lot more entrance into the market.
Like,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, you were at Fox. You said,
Maxim Lott: yeah, yeah. Fox news. I was working for John Stossel. So he's a big prediction market guy too, [00:07:00] and help popularize the site.
Malcolm Collins: What happened? So your site goes live because now, you know, there's whole conferences around betting odds and stuff like that. And there's like different ways of measuring them than there were historically, because it's not like sports betting.
Like it was historically now it's like status hierarchy games.
Maxim Lott: Interesting. Yeah. Well, there, people are betting on all sorts of things now. You know, people are betting on the Oscars on foreign elections. Yeah, Matt manifold has a lot of creative markets. But yeah, it's really a blooming area. You had
Malcolm Collins: and you were talking about conditional markets as well.
Where do you see those coming up?
Maxim Lott: Yeah, so on our site, what we do, we create we use the implied odds. So if you have people betting on the nomination and on who's going to win, you can divide them and get a pretty accurate estimate. Manifold, which is still play money for now is trying out literally just saying, okay, bet if you, if Kamala Harris is [00:08:00] the nominee.
How likely is she to win the general election? So that's this conditional odds. It means if something Then what's the odds and that helps you make decisions in life. So if you're a democratic voter you want to know that gavin newsom if he's the nominee it's close to 60 percent that he'll win But if it's harris, it's 37 percent.
So that's pretty important information that the Bettors tell us no, I did not know
Malcolm Collins: now. Let's talk about some of the existing odds right now. So they have a You Like what percent are you looking at? Like what, what are the interesting things you're seeing in the betting odds right now?
Maxim Lott: Yeah. So Trump is favored over Harris by about two to one.
So he's a big lead, but she could definitely win. Yeah. It's a little less than two to one right now. And yeah, the state map, you know, the blue wall, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, they all lean. In Trump's column right now,
Malcolm Collins: Florida, which has Trump at 92. 5 percent to win. Yeah.
Maxim Lott: Used to be a swing state four years ago, but it's [00:09:00] deep red now.
There's no chance of Biden. When Trump's a Florida man,
Malcolm Collins: you know, he
Maxim Lott: is now officially. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: That is fascinating. What do you think has changed there? Like what, what are your sort of calculations going into this? What would you be doing if you were a Democrat right now in terms of the VP candidate, et cetera?
Maxim Lott: I. Yeah, well, I'm in Florida right now, actually, and it it seems like the Santas made a big difference there in terms of having a coven response that was so diametrically different from New York, et cetera. People said this is the alternate model. Pretty much everyone here liked that alternate model.
Yeah. And. So I think people shifted their politics there. Oh,
Malcolm Collins: so you think he's literally shifted Democrats to believe that the, like, Republicans work?
Maxim Lott: In Florida, I think, yeah, that's how, that's why it's deep red on the election betting odds map.
Malcolm Collins: I think it also shows how unpopular Harris is that DeSantis is, is predicted to win.
And she, [00:10:00] she's at only one third odds.
Maxim Lott: Trump is, yeah. And yeah it, it, It does show that if the Democrats did run a normal candidate like Newsom or Whitmer, the bettors think that that candidate would win. Even though the polls currently have them down a lot, that's likely just because they don't have name recognition.
So the bettors are forecasting that. That's why bettors are better than just looking at polls, because they model all sorts of things.
Malcolm Collins: So what do you think the odds are of a contested convention these days?
Maxim Lott: They're low. It looks like Kamala Harris has wrapped it up. She's at 87 percent to get the nomination.
And Pelosi just endorsed her, so I think that's right. Oh,
Malcolm Collins: the Democratic voters are not going to like this. It's actually been pretty interesting from our perspective. We're going to fill in an episode on this. Is watching the Democratic commentators response to the Kamala Harris candidacy. It's just like holistically positive.
It doesn't even include the plausibility of changing her for a different candidate, which I think is going to [00:11:00] really bite them in the butt.
Maxim Lott: You know, it's really interesting because it reminds you of what they were doing with Biden one year ago, two years ago. It's like, Oh, he's not senile. This is a conspiracy theory.
Simone Collins: And
Maxim Lott: then, you know. Yeah, same thing with Harris as soon as she starts going off on her maniacal lap or her, the future of tomorrow is what tomorrow is. I love that
Simone Collins: so much. Her catchphrases are,
Malcolm Collins: I've got to add the SNL skit about Oh, no, no, it was a daily show skit about that, where she has like a guru speechwriter, like in the sand or something.
Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. Seems like maybe it's a small issue. It's a big issue. You need to get to go. I need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work [00:12:00] and get home.
She's come so far since our first session
My name is Dahlia Rose hibiscus and I am vice president Kamala Harris's holistic thought advisor I lead the vice president on not so much sentences as idea voyages. It's a process I call speaking without thinking. That's on top of everything else that we know and don't know yet. Based on what we've just been able to see and because we've seen it or not doesn't mean it hasn't happened
the first thing I do is cut out all the words, individually. And then I take those words to my word cave.
That's where I wait to learn what order the universe wants them to be in. Have vibrations. The feeling they give you is so much more powerful than what they mean. We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible possible. Actually happen. Hi, I'm Oliver [00:13:00] Bartholomew, and I'm 16 and a half years old, and I'm the speechwriter for Columba Harris. Since I was little, I liked words. Writing words is fun, so I made writing words my job.
Space is exciting. Space, it affects us all. And it connects us all. It's not all fun though. Sometimes I have to write about bad stuff, like war. Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.
Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that's wrong. Once, I thought it would be neat if Karma wore a blue suit.
And told people she was wearing it. Because I like it. I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit. I can't take all the credit though. Me and Mr. [00:14:00] Kamala are a team.
But she kind of is crazy or something, and she kind of scares me, and you can't fake that kind of influence.
You're either born with it, or you're either not. it is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.
Malcolm Collins: Well,
Simone Collins: so I have, I have a broader question about Betting rather than polling for accurate election data. I'm running for state rep, no one in the political sphere, you know, among people running for office, PACs, et cetera discuss betting odds when they're looking at things, they're like, Oh, well, what does the polling say?
Well, you know, like, Oh, you should run a poll. And I think a lot of that's because. They're very incestuous. Like there's a lot of like, Oh, well, everyone hires each other's companies. And this is almost like an MLM scheme. Like people are just trying to get politicians to come in and raise money so that everyone can just hire the same people and keep the industry running.
But. I'm just so confused as to why [00:15:00] the discussion hasn't already shifted to looking only at betting odds because it's just one, it's way cheaper to it's way more accurate. It's very confusing. Where are you seeing things going in terms of adoption? Because I think that the media is starting to look at it more and cover betting odds more.
But it's very lumpy in terms of like, the establishment in the political realm, like actual operatives, actual donors making decisions based on betting odds rather than pulling, which is bizarre.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing to notice is that better is do need polls. So we're never going to a hundred percent switch, but they need to have some basis for what's going on.
And then, you know, But the other thing why, why don't the political class look at these betting odds, which are better than just polls? And Robin Hanson, brilliant guy who actually kind of coined this prediction market idea, he's thought a lot about this, and I think The reason that he's come up with is [00:16:00] that decision makers don't like their power being taken away.
So if you are a political decision maker, you can say, Oh, this poll, you know, it's up 12 percent among black Americans and down four, you know, and therefore we should do this. If it's just the betting odds saying, Oh, you should pick Newsome. They lose their power. Power to weigh in. And it's just, okay, this is what it was.
You know, you didn't really need me to tell you that you could have looked at the betting on it. So that might be a reason for the slow uptake among political consultants. The good news is, yeah, the media seems to be picking up on it more and more. Nate Silver is citing them all the time now. I do think I do think they played some slight role in the Biden stepping down, like.
The fact that they had his stepping down at such high odds made Silver very widely read, reciting that a lot. I think, I think that may have made some difference or self reinforcing cycle there.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, I often thought if we were running for a [00:17:00] slightly higher position than when you're running for Simone, that I put big bets on myself, then use that to raise money from donors.
Yeah. Look at how high up in the odds I am. Yeah, you see the odds. Cause nobody,
Maxim Lott: I mean, fewer people bet on the local stuff. And this is why the CFTC wants to ban them, might be a good segway to that. But yeah,
Malcolm Collins: let's talk about the battle about banning or unbanning. Like what's the public utility of these systems?
Maxim Lott: Yeah, I mean, the public utility is huge. Like, you know, if you're a voter, it tells you who's most electable. It's if you have a business and you're going to be regulated out of business by one president, but not the other, that's really important to know to plan for. So the public utility, I think, and also just intellectually interesting and All of us are spending many hours following the news.
Why not make it efficient? I know you can get all that information by looking at the odds in minutes. The public utility is huge. The government regulators don't care that much is the [00:18:00] latest from them.
Malcolm Collins: It's it's so are you, Oh, so they've been disinterested recently, or have you seen interest? Oh, well,
Maxim Lott: the yellow.
Yeah. They're, they're planning on banning. So a couple of years, what's the
Malcolm Collins: argument for that?
Maxim Lott: Yeah. So, so a couple of months ago, they announced, they put together this formal proposal of regulation, which would ban political betting in the U. S. and also betting on Oscar winners, all this stuff. Yeah, so, yeah.
Wait,
Malcolm Collins: what's the logic for banning Oscar winner betting?
Simone Collins: Yeah, and we have sports betting is now pervasive here. It's so odd to me that, That we've now seen this giant rollout of sports betting in the U. S. And yet now we're seeing suppression of the cool, like the substance, substance. I don't know why I'm saying it's substantive betting, but I, I don't know.
I just feel like, you know,
Maxim Lott: It is more substantive than, you know, blackjack. So why they, they say, they say manipulation, like we were [00:19:00] joking about earlier, but in practice, you know, that's, that's pretty hard to do. Like if you have money on Trump, like you're not actually going to be able to swing the election to Trump, for example.
So, and no one person can really do that. So I think it's. very good reason to ban them. You asked about the Oscar thing. Yeah, I guess you could have manipulation there too. Some Oscar judge throws it. But it's, it's, it pales in comparison to the benefits and it just, So rarely happens. I don't, I
Malcolm Collins: love this complaint.
Like, Oh, politically interest people could manipulate this. And it's like, well then, so are you punishing the pollsters that manipulated the odds in the Hillary Trump election?
Maxim Lott: Right. Great point.
Malcolm Collins: You're not. So that's not really what you're worried about.
Maxim Lott: Right. Yeah. People manipulate polls all the time.
Like there are politically affiliated consultants that it's well known that they do. It's
Malcolm Collins: part of the industry. It's shocking to me that that would be the [00:20:00] core argument that they're using. But I guess the bureaucrats are going to bureaucrat. It
Maxim Lott: is, yeah. The other reason is that they don't want to It would be too much work for them.
To Well,
Malcolm Collins: which department actually has the ability to make these laws? Because, you
Maxim Lott: know CFTC, one of the many alphabet soup agencies out there. Commodity Futures and Trading Commission.
Malcolm Collins: If Trump wins and we get in the administration, we'll push to get those guys, just get rid of them.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If Trump wins, it's interesting.
I mean, the election actually has implications for the betting markets. If Trump wins, likely this regulation, even though it's been formally proposed, won't go through. But if Biden wins, it's pretty much on track to do that, though people are trying to stop it by threatening legal action and stuff.
Malcolm Collins: Well, okay. So, what do you think of, and this is something we've been talking a lot about on the show recently, is this of the rise of the new right as somebody who's been like a political watcher for a long time. [00:21:00] By that, what I mean is there seems to be a shift, as we said, like in the nineties, the big, big corp.
Interest was Republican and tech entrepreneur was Democrat, and now it's tech entrepreneur, Republican, big corp, Democrat. How, how do you see this shift playing out in sort of the, the likelihood of different people winning, et cetera?
Maxim Lott: Yeah, well, yeah, there's absolutely been this huge shift and realignment going on.
And I think JD Vance, Trump's new VP pick really exemplifies that. Yeah. Where he's, he's a populist through and through, you know, he supports tariffs, he supports more redistributive economic things. But then culturally, he's very much like, we need to revive the culture that we used to have, which was healthier.
And I, that, that, I, I think the pick of Vance was actually very, will be very important in cementing that whether you agree with it or not in the future, because he's going [00:22:00] to be leading if Trump wins this election. Whereas if you had picked Burgum or more of a business Republican, I think in 2028 you could see this reverting.
So, you know, it's very, this only happens like, I don't know, once or twice a century that you get a realignment, but it seems like we're living through one of those.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, do you think that the business Republicans could ever come back at this point? Yeah. Absolutely. I,
Maxim Lott: if Trump loses, maybe, yeah. But if he wins, I think Vance is a pretty big shoe in for 2028.
And I think the populists have a big edge there.
Malcolm Collins: And what are your thoughts on the theocratic faction of the base? Because they seem to have a lot less power in this election than I've seen them have historically.
Maxim Lott: Yeah. Although I guess they already won in some ways by getting Roe v. Wade repealed. Yeah.
So I think there is a bit of a. pendulum swinging back now where Trump got on the platform now saying we don't, he removed the part saying we want a national federal legislative [00:23:00] ban on abortion. And so yeah, they're definitely, oh, sorry.
Malcolm Collins: I think that was really astute of him. I mean, I think
Maxim Lott: he's right.
Agreed, agreed, agreed. I
Malcolm Collins: got you guys the win of the century now. I don't have to do anything else for you.
Maxim Lott: Yeah. And it should be a state by state issue. And yeah, so I agree. I think that's smart politically and policy wise, but yeah, you're right. The religious faction is losing power. I mean, people in the U S are less religious now, including conservatives.
So just the trends line up with that.
Simone Collins: I mean, Catholics are getting tons of abortions and using birth control. So what's up with that? One thing I really wanted to ask you though, just, As we, as we wrap up discussion of like, political betting and betting odds I I'm really interested in the effect when it comes to education and learning with kids that pre testing has on knowledge acquisition, you know, like when you test yourself on a subject before and you're like, well, I don't know the answer, maybe it's this, then later when you're learning it, you're like really paying attention.
And now that you've been, you know, like you said, he lost money on like, you know, [00:24:00] Biden. Dropping out of the race, you know, you are involved in making these predictions, you know, you're playing the game. I'm really curious over time how this has changed your consumption of knowledge. Like, have you, have you changed the way that you're looking at information?
What are your new sources and how are you making these calculations in your head? Like, has your process changed? I guess, cause it's kind of hard to like explain how you're internally thinking and how it's different, but. I'm curious.
Maxim Lott: I do check my own website. So when there's something big going on, that's the first thing I go to.
I still also look at the polls to then make my own judgment about whether I think the betters are right. Which polls
Simone Collins: do you like? Which do you trust?
Maxim Lott: Well, I, I use the real clear average for the most part. And then I also, I look within the polls. So if you have a New York Times poll. One week that has Trump up two and the next week they have Trump up five, that probably says something because the New York Times didn't change internally.
Oh, so directionality.
Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yes. Oh, interesting. Very smart.
Maxim Lott: So that's my personal strategy, reading the polls. But yeah, the betters are doing the same thing and adding even more fancy and intelligent stuff sometimes.
Simone Collins: Hmm. What's an example of something slightly more fancy that they do now? I'm very curious.
Maxim Lott: Well, I mean, the models get very complex.
So Nate Silver has his public model. Yeah. But people who are trading like big money on these things definitely have their own private models. It's, you know, regression analysis. Oh,
Simone Collins: wow. Different
Maxim Lott: variables, all, all this stuff.
Simone Collins: Getting super mathy on it. Wow. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: I
Simone Collins: love
Malcolm Collins: how slow some of the polls could be.
Hold on. I just checked out where 538 to win is right now, and it just says forecast suspended. The final question I wanted to ask you on this stuff is you used to be a Fox News like worker in the days of the old Republican party. Can you describe sort of [00:26:00] culturally what it's been like in terms of the people, you know, to see the shift in the Republican party that has happened since that period?
Maxim Lott: I think definitely a lot of people have shifted and I think people. I think the big thing is Republicans at some point were kind of the party of the establishment, like protecting the institutions and all this. And I think in the 2010s, they really did, the institutions really kind of turned against them.
They started, you know, banning Republicans from social media, the university started firing them, all this stuff, and they kind of felt okay, so we're, we're not defending the institutions anymore, what are we doing? And I think a lot of people had this kind of reconversion to, okay, we're going to either take this over, as you know, DeSantis is trying to do in Florida with the universities, or, but some kind of more pop, more interventionist, more populist [00:27:00] thing.
And so that's the big shift I've seen, and I think that's the cause of the shift. And yeah, not really anything.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and so you hang out with like a lot of techie crowds and stuff like that. Have you seen their attitudes shifting recently? I mean, I would say personally, I have like, it used to be that Republican would like keep you from getting hired.
And now it's like avant garde.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, definitely. In the last two years, my personal theory is that must buying Twitter caused a lot of this vibe shift as it's referred to, because, you know, So many tech CEOs and journalists are on there. They're getting your information there. And we like to think of ourselves as above algorithms, but we're not.
So they're suddenly getting fed all this viral content and articles that they weren't seeing before, before they were getting, you know, only the Jack Dorsey approved hashtags and they don't even notice this, but suddenly their information diets, totally different. And yeah, you have. Tech people endorsing Trump.
And it's a very different [00:28:00] vibe.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I that's a, yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, I, I'd say that, that now was in tech circles, like being Republicans, the new trans it's like out there and weird, but like accepted which was not in tech circles. Five, six years ago when I was, you know, first in this stuff.
Well, this is fantastic. It's been any, any final thoughts that you wanted to have on betting odds or anything like that, or the election cycle right now?
Maxim Lott: I guess the last thing I'll say, there's a lot of money on these markets. There's over 200 million on poly market. Yeah. Yeah. Just on the presidential election, there is over 50 million on predicted tens of millions on that fair.
It's a big. Industry and
Simone Collins: bigger than ever, right? Presumably this is a lot more than last cycle.
Maxim Lott: The last cycle is big too. I think by the time the cycle wraps up, it'll be bigger than ever. But yeah, these are efficient markets with these kinds of markets and. They give good information.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, [00:29:00] that'd be very hard market to manipulate.
Maxim Lott: Yeah, exactly.
Malcolm Collins: Why are they legal? Like, how have these companies, did they need to register as betting markets? Or how'd they get away with that?
Maxim Lott: It's a whole mishmash. So some of them are in the UK, predicted got grandfathered in, which the government is trying to take away that status. They're fighting it in court.
Polly Market doesn't accept Americans. And yeah, but they're crypto based. So anyone in the world can kind of use that. So there's yeah, so there are all sorts of ways these places are still running without completely running afoul of the regulators.
Malcolm Collins: That's really cool. Well, it's been great having you on.
We'd love to have you on again. And thank you for your time.
Maxim Lott: Thank you. This has been great. Great talking to you.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial topic of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) and its implications for public health, personal responsibility, and healthcare costs. They explore the ethical dilemmas surrounding government-subsidized HIV prevention medication, questioning whether lifestyle choices should be funded by taxpayers and insurance premiums.
Key points covered:
* The effectiveness and cost of PrEP medication
* Government and insurance coverage of PrEP
* The moral and ethical implications of subsidizing sexual health choices
* Comparisons to other lifestyle-related healthcare costs
* The impact on insurance premiums and healthcare accessibility
* Cultural shifts in attitudes towards sexual behavior and public health
* The intersection of personal freedom, responsibility, and societal costs
This video offers a balanced yet critical examination of a complex issue, challenging viewers to consider the broader implications of healthcare policies and personal choices. It's a must-watch for anyone interested in public health policy, healthcare economics, or the evolving cultural landscape of sexual health.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Keep in mind straight people can get HIV too and straight people might need to prep as well. Straight people who wouldn't need prep are straight people who are in monogamous relationships and trust their partner. It is not the being gay that makes somebody need prep. It's the orgies. That makes somebody need prep, or the treating sex like a handshake among friends that makes somebody need prep. If you are straight, and you are doing that, you will need prep.
If you are gay, and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. When the Act was passed It was mandated that all insurance plans have to pay for this.
So if a person is sexually active. They have to pay for this
Obamacare has made things insane because insurance companies can't say, well, we won't take you. You need to go for a higher cost insurance. If you're going to make these lifestyle choices because at the end of the day, going to orgies is a lifestyle choice
It's not just that it's affecting insurance. A number of states just offer this for free to people who want it. People pretend like this stuff, money comes [00:01:00] from nowhere, but no, it's always from something. If it's going to this, it's, it's not going to sick kids and I actually want to point out the perversion of a society that sees it as a moral necessity to pay for a drug that enables sex whenever you want, but that doesn't see it as a moral necessity to pay for IVF, the creation of new human life.
Simone Collins: Oh, s**t.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today's episode was inspired by actually an episode that Short Fat Otaku had done, opened my eyes to something I had no idea was going on. And it means when you ever look at your health care bills and you're like, why is Obamacare so unaffordable?
Why is it so unaffordable to force everyone on to the same health care plan? And the answer, it turns out, is gay orgies.
Simone Collins: Among other things, but definitely it seems gay orgies.
Malcolm Collins: In part, gay orgies, yes. So, we're [00:02:00] going to get to something, and I don't think that there is actually That easy, a moral solution to this.
Like at first it's gonna seem like, oh, obviously you should do X. But then when you think about it for a second, you're like, oh, but that'll have some really negative downstream effects.
Simone Collins: I don't know. I I, I have maybe some moral equivalence, so I'm, I'm excited to discuss this with you.
Malcolm Collins: So, what started was a Twitter fight. So I will describe to you the first tweet in this chain that led to the Twitter fight. Plant Mommy Posadis said, Realizing that sex doesn't have to be this sacred, all important thing and can instead just be an expression of affection between friends who are dear to one another is honestly the most life changing realization for me, surpassed only by realizing that I'm a girl.
So this is obviously a trans person they're pointing out here. And saying, well, because you don't, most girls don't realize they're girls. I don't
Simone Collins: know. I feel like I realized I was a girl when your mom [00:03:00] was like, did you know that you can dress nicely and wear makeup? And I'm like, Oh,
Malcolm Collins: wow. I want to reread.
What we're saying here, right? Because I actually think this ends up being important to the conversation.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: That the, the huge realization for them. That was the second biggest realization they've had in their life. That sex can just be an expression of affection between friends.
Simone Collins: Just a fun thing to do
Malcolm Collins: with your friends, getting drinks, going out, having drinks, going out, having sex.
Yes. Then a person responded to them, Mia Aren't we in another AIDS epidemic or something? Y'all are seriously trippin And then the original poster replied, I literally take pills every day that make it so I can't contract HIV. And then short fatter taco but it in here with the SpongeBob fish meme looking like,
And says, You need to take pills to not contact, to not contract.
HIV. You can't just not have sex with people who have [00:04:00] HIV. And this tweet blew up. It's at 9.3 million views now. It went super viral and for, with, with, with a lot of hatred as well, that's considered just a completely out of line thing for him to say.
That they should be, that he, from his cultural perspective, that he expects them to exercise any level of of sexual constraint.
But this just opened a new world for me. I was like, wait, wait, wait, there's a pill that can keep you from getting HIV now. I did not know about this. But
Simone Collins: isn't it called PrEP? Like I'd heard of people taking PrEP. It
Malcolm Collins: is. We're
Simone Collins: going to go. Friends who take PrEP. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: This pill is how it works, how well it works, et cetera.
Because that was one thing I didn't know. I also didn't know that the drugs around HIV are so good now that generally if you're on them, you're non contagious. So, you know, this is needed more for people who aren't already on drugs or don't know that they have HIV, i. e. This isn't really as relevant if you have a partner.
So somebody can be like oh, well, you need this if you have a partner with HIV, but not [00:05:00] necessarily anymore because now you can be made non contagious. If you want. So
Simone Collins: basically, as long as the partner is taking it, it's okay.
Malcolm Collins: Right. So this is really important. Specifically, mostly meant for orgies. Or,
Simone Collins: yeah, well, basically, if you can't guarantee that the people with whom you're sexually intimate are being very conscientious about taking this medication if they indeed are HIV positive, right?
So if one, you aren't being indiscriminate about having sex or two, you're having sex, but only with people where, you know, they're not HIV positive or three, you do know they're HIV positive, but you can 100 percent trust that they're taking this medication. You wouldn't need this. You wouldn't need PrEP.
Malcolm Collins: Yes but if you are treating a you know, sex is just something you do with your friends when you feel like it You know, and you're gonna need
Simone Collins: this medicine. Yeah, you're
Malcolm Collins: definitely gonna need he is not that she is not being irresponsible In taking this medicine. Yeah Safety first and and and she is not spreading hiv because she's taking this [00:06:00] medicine So, you know, I support that she has chosen this lifestyle, but then that got me thinking.
Okay, how much does this stuff cost? And who's paying for it? And who's paying for it. Now this gets interesting because this is where I was like, Oh, Oh, this is a moral quandary.
Anyway, so I'm just going to read to you cause I decided to ask perplexity about some of this stuff. So a month's supply of prep pre exposure prophylaxis medicine, specifically Trivetta.
Cost nearly 2, 000 without insurance while the generic version is approximately 60 per month. The total annual cost can exceed 21, 000 if purchased without any financial assistance or insurance coverage. However, most private health insurance plans, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, are required to cover the cost of PrEP without any out of pocket expenses due to provisions under the Affordable Care Act.
However, patients may still incur costs related to lab tests and doctor visits, which are [00:07:00] necessary for monitoring while on PrEP. And that's because it's very hard on your liver. If you, if you consistently take this, you will probably die from it.
So I dug into this a bit more because I wanted to make sure I was correct in this statement. And it turns out that most of the people who are on prep are regularly seeing doctors to monitor for dangerous levels of things like lactic, acidosis, or liver cancer. , which they are at. A much higher risk of, uh, so, well, it is almost certainly shortening your lifespan. It is not a.
Necessarily going to kill you.
If you were seeing the doctor regularly for it.
Malcolm Collins: It seems to be my understanding. Oh,
Simone Collins: boy. So they're
Malcolm Collins: also sacrificing their health and you know, lifespan for, you know, these in the moment indulgences.
Okay. And so. So
Simone Collins: basically if, if the government's supporting this, probably they're going for the generic version. You're being prescribed the generic version and the government or your insurance company. [00:08:00] No. Oh
Malcolm Collins: no. Sorry. I've got to keep going here because we've got to go. Who pays for this? Okay. Yeah.
Simone Collins: And which, which is being purchased the generic or the brand?
Malcolm Collins: To assist those who may not have insurance or whose insurance does not cover prep, several programs are available. Advanced access medication assistance program covers out of pocket costs 7, 200 per year. This is a Program that is run by Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of trivia, and it's likely really just a a tiered pricing thing.
So people don't know companies do this, where they will create a another version of their product that they can still be cash positive on. But that only poor people can buy so that they can make money from those for people. And look like they're doing a nice thing, or really, they're just doing price discrimination.
Because, you know, they still want to sell the drug right to as many people as possible, but they don't want to lower the price for the people who can pay more. Right. The next one is Ready, Set, Prep, which provides pre travidia to individuals without prescription drug [00:09:00] coverage. This is a national program run by the U.
S. Department of Health and Human Services. It's available across the United States. And then co pay relief programs offer up to 7, 500 a year for out of pocket expenses. And this is offered by the Patient Advocate Foundation and is available nationwide.
Simone Collins: Okay, so hold on. They're not Paying for the generic, they're paying for the name brand.
Malcolm Collins: I assume that this has to do with U. S. patents, because my understanding is that you just can't get the generic in the U. S.
All right. So I dug into this more because it was very confusing to me is
white people are not buying the generic. So it appears that the primary reason people are not buying the generic is bureaucratic bloat. , so a lot of the insurance companies remember how all the insurance companies had to cover prep. Well, a lot of them never added the generics to their sort of approved drugs lists.
So they are paying for the much more expensive form. , so this cost is being passed on just because from the perspective of the customer, they don't really notice a difference for them. It's [00:10:00] free either way because you know, the Obamacare plan. , forces . , insurance companies to carry prep and because they don't carry the. Generic, , people are just buying the more expensive one because the cost isn't going to them that's appears to be what's going on here. , but it is going to you.
It is going to your child health insurance. , costs and stuff like that. , and another side here , is it, the generics only really came onto the market in 2021. , and because of that, A lot of the debate around should this be covered and how much it's impacted our healthcare system happened before the price drop.
Malcolm Collins: Okay So one thing to note here is when the Act was passed It was mandated that all insurance plans have to pay for this.
So if a person is sexually active. They have to pay for this and wants this drug. So that means that you know, outside of well, first, also, let's talk about this program that I was talking about that pays 7, 500 a year for out of pocket costs for [00:11:00] this.
I went to this program's website because this is a nonprofit.
Right. And I was like, okay, what did they tell people who are giving them money that the money is going to, right? They tell people that the, the money is going to food and nutritional expenses, utility bills, written or mortgage payment, temporary lodging, transportation costs, and childcare expenses.
So the money that is, and people are like, why, why is there a moral problem here? Well, it's because of an opt in lifestyle choice. This money now 7, 500 a year is, is going to allow for a lifestyle that I assume many of the people don't know that they are donating to enable instead of going to sick children.
Like you, you, people pretend like this stuff, money comes from nowhere, but no, it's always from something. If it's going to this, it's, it's not going to sick kids. It's not going to utility expenses. Well, I
Simone Collins: also think that the bigger issue is that We are now paying in the United States, [00:12:00] very high insurance premiums.
Like I, and, and our insurance covers very little. And when insurance companies are from a regulatory perspective, obligated to pay for services for certain people, that means that they're going to charge more to everybody else to be able to cover those costs. Again, somebody has to foot the bill. This is also families who are not able to get insurance at all because they can't pay for their premiums.
This is, this is offering crappier programs to their employees because their premiums are so high. This is people, you know, not. having deductibles they can ever meet. Like we're on a deductible plan that I think for our families, something like 12, 000 before our insurance starts to cover anything. We have to pay, we might as well not have insurance.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the, the Obamacare has made things insane [00:13:00] because insurance companies can't say, well, we won't take you. You need to go for a higher cost insurance. If you're going to make these lifestyle choices because at the end of the day, going to orgies is a lifestyle choice and we'll get into how much of a lifestyle choice it is in a second.
But I want to finish it with the pre prepared stuff before we get into any moral questionability of this. It's not just that it's affecting insurance. A number of states just offer this for free to people who want it. So, several States have established a program. That can cover the cost of prep, including lab tests and doctor's visits.
The states with such programs include California, Colorado, district of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Washington. So, a lot of states. Quite a few states. Yeah. Totally. And quite populous states too. Yeah. So I, I want to, before we go into the discussion of this, talk about how it works and the current sort of state of AIDS treatment, because I think that is important to talk about it.
Yeah. It sounds also pretty cool. Like, I'm [00:14:00] glad that this exists and I'm glad that it's becoming less expensive. Yeah. I do have questions about the morality of this being covered by Medicaid and being mandated by the government. Because that means that you are mandating you know, people who might have pretty strong religious objections to this to essentially be subsidizing lifestyles that they believe, not us, but I can totally understand how somebody would have questions about this, even without having a problem with a person being gay or a person being trans, you know, you can be gay and trans and not go to orgies all the time.
You know, this is, this is a, subsection of these communities. You know, not all gay people are degenerates, you know. And I'm not saying that everyone who goes to orgies all the time is degenerate, but probably. You know, there's, there's probably some correlation there. But anyway, I mean, I'm, it's not for me to judge other people's lifestyles
And when I say it's not for me to judge, you know, who is it to judge? It's God to judge that, not me, God. I let people make their own choices [00:15:00] and deal with the consequences of those choices. It's not for me to Dole out those consequences. However, in our discord, somebody was asking, you know, do we really want, because a number, especially of gay men, like the real gay community, not the opt-in LGBTQ plus oh, I'm non-binary today community, but the real OJI gay community has been moving increasingly Republican over time. And some people on our discord were wondering, , is it actually good to bring these types of people into the Republican coalition? And one of the things that I have noticed with this community and a gay person within our discord was also saying, yeah, this observation that you had is very accurate of the community. Is it sort of split into two groups, which kind of hate each other. , one is sort of wholesome, mostly monogamous. , gay people who are looking for long-term partners and looking to raise families. And even, you know, as a Christian, if I believe that they live a life of sin, [00:16:00] Yes, but I don't see it as a particularly higher life of sin than a couple that is childless by choice. , you know, that they both are engaging in non reproductive sex for pleasure.
Like that is. Bad from my perspective. , but again, so I don't, I don't, you know, should we let, should I, you know, as a state be breaking up couples who don't want to have kids like no. So I don't see a problem with the other type of couple. And I should note here that I think they're living significantly less lives of sin
then then somebody who is out there having, you know, straight sex with a different girl every other week and going to night clubs and partying all the time. , but then the other community has just gone full on like degenerate to generate degenerate mode. , and it is, and you'll see this in another episode that we actually recorded alongside this episode, but that's going to go live on different days is just. How fully degenerate the stuff they're fighting for is these days.
It will shock you. Believing Americans have essentially a constitutional right to orgies is [00:17:00] low scale on the degeneracy.
Malcolm Collins: so, I will read about how it works and what it is. is a preventative medication for individuals at high risk of contracting HIV. It is designed for those who do not have HIV but may be exposed to it through sexual activity or injection drug use.
And, and keep in mind straight people can get HIV too and straight people might need to prep as well. Straight people who wouldn't need prep are straight people who are in monogamous relationships and trust their partner. So really the thing here, and I think a lot of people will say like, you're being homophobic or you're being transphobic.
But the truth is, is that it is not the being gay that makes somebody need prep. It's the orgies. That makes somebody need prep, or the treating sex like a handshake among friends that makes somebody need prep. If you are straight, and you are doing that, you will need prep. If you are gay, and you are doing that, you will need prep.
If you are gay, and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. And the vast majority of cases, now there are minor cases that we'll get to in a [00:18:00] second, and if you are straight and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. So this is about a lifestyle choice, not like an inborn difference between individuals, or maybe is it, we'll get to that in a second.
Okay. Prep involves taking medications that can significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection. When taken consistently, it can lower the risk of getting HIV from sexual intercourse by 99 percent and from sharing needles by at least 75%. So that's the only thing that that exists. Yeah. There are two main forms of PrEP.
Daily oral medication. This is a pill taken once a day., an injection that is administered every two months, which may be more convenient for some individuals. Who should consider PrEP? PrEP is recommended for individuals who meet the following criteria. Having a sexual partner who is HIV positive.
No consistent use of condoms during sex. Having been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted STI in the past six months. Which basically means they're sleeping around a lot. Injecting drugs and sharing needles or having an injection partner with HIV. An injection partner? You just use a different needle, you [00:19:00] f ing nutjob!
Hold
Simone Collins: on! I I doubt I doubt that those are common cases. They're just, they're just outlining all the scenarios. No one wants to share, Malcolm, trust me, no one wants to share a needle. They just get more blunt, you know, it's not fun. So, yeah, this is not, I don't think it's a common scenario. Especially because there are so many needle distribution programs now, not an issue.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah I was asking about what's the probability that somebody who's on normal HIV medication today is contagious to their partner? Based on recent research, people with low HIV viral loads have extremely low risk of transmitting HIV through sex.
A systematic review of eight studies involving 7, 762 couples found that the risk of sexual transmission of HIV is almost zero when the HIV positive partner has a viral load of less than 1, 000 copies per milliliter. Three studies showed no HIV transmission when the HIV positive partner had a viral load of less than 200 copies per milliliter considered [00:20:00] undetectable.
Across all studies analyzed, there were only two cases of transmission when the HIV positive partner's most recent viral load With less than a thousand copies. However, these cases had long intervals between the viral load testing and transmission, complicating the interpretation. So, basically, it's never been confirmed that somebody with a low load has transmitted HIV.
CDC stated that people who take antiviral therapy art daily as prescribed and maintain an undetectable viral load have a quote unquote effectively no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to an HIV negative partner. This concept is known as quote unquote undetectable or untransmissible or U equals U.
And it's actually so low now that there is a, a sperm bank for HIV positive individuals. That's inclusive of them. So I'll talk a little bit about this sperm bank. Because I mean, this shows you how low it's perceived is within the community based on the latest scientific evidence and updated regulations.
Sperm [00:21:00] and egg donation from HIV positive individuals with undetectable viral loads can be safely done without transmitting HIV to the recipient or the resulting child under certain circumstances. The donor must have sustained undetectable viral load, less than 200 copies for at least six months prior to the donation.
The donor must be on an effective anti retroviral treatment for at least six months. And the recipient must be informed about the donor's HIV positive status. And this is, and I'll post it on screen here called sperm positive. I. And the two women on it are two fat women, of course.
There's a baby. A lesbian, fat, interracial couple with a baby. Nothing that there's anything wrong with it, they just look very stereotypically like SJW. Which is fine. I mean, I guess that's the type of person who would want this, right? You know? I don't, I don't I actually think people expect me to be like Morgan says if a couple is informed that that's what they're doing and they're doing this I don't know for them.
Well, Malcolm,
Simone Collins: you know, if in the end you are, you know, someone who [00:22:00] through things that happened in your past, I mean, listen, people, I don't think consensually choose to have unprotected sex. sex with someone who's HIV positive, you know, it happens once, whatever. And then, you know, that's something you have to live with for the rest of your life.
I think it's great that these people are still able to have kids if they want them. That's fantastic. So, yes, I think we can all agree that this is a fantastic medical treatment. And that I'm really glad that this exists and that it's available as an option. This is great.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the question is, is it ethical to force families to subsidize this?
Simone Collins: And this is where I feel like it's, it's less of a gray area than you are. Now I understand from a governmental and policy perspective that it's, you know, you, here's a chance for a government to, you know, To quash the spread of a very dangerous disease where there is collateral damage, you know, when you don't openly control it in this way.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I want to highlight the collateral [00:23:00] damage that he's talking about here. You know, during the AIDS epidemic, little kids died from like blood transfusions or like, you know, you step on a needle in a park , As the rates, it's not just the people who have consciously chosen a behavior that you disagree with who end up suffering because drugs like this are not widely available.
Anyway, he did.
Simone Collins: Yeah. At the same time, I, I do have. Some doubts about this, because as you point out, this is a lifestyle choice. You do not have to have sex with people in a way that would require you to take this medication. And when I think about the, like trying to find an equivalent, it's not charged.
You know, this might be like, okay, well maybe, you know, my life is better. You know, this is part of my identity, right? My identity is that I am, you know, gay and I have sex in this way. And it's just like part of my expression. It's part of what I do to have fun. But I think a lot of people. You know, [00:24:00] identify as, you know, social butterflies who like to go out and, you know, have a nice brunch once a month.
Right. Let's just say, let's say that the actual cost to governments and insurance companies like marginal is 60 per person to be like 65 per person, bare minimum. Right. So what if also, you know, for some people to live a happy, fulfilled life, they, they, you know, went out. To brunch with their friends once a month, because that made them happy.
And that costs, you know, for them, you know, good boozy brunch, 65 per person. Should the government also subsidize that because it's part of their life. It makes them happy. They wouldn't be as happy if they didn't do it.
Malcolm Collins: I thought the thing that you said to me really moved my mind on this is you're like, yeah, what, what if somebody wants like a nicer apartment, right?
Like does the government have to subsidize that nicer apartment? Because it would, you know, it's better. They'd be much more comfortable. Yeah. You know, they're in a long distance relationship with someone, right? Does the government [00:25:00] have to subsidize their plane flights? Or they like to travel to Europe once a year, you know, that's part of who they are, you know, does the government have to subsidize that?
Is it moral? To have families that are struggling to get by, that are struggling to, you know, keep their, whether whose kids have diseases and stuff like that, to be taking from like kids cancer funds to fund this, is that moral?
Simone Collins: Yeah, and
Malcolm Collins: that's
Simone Collins: where I really question it.
Malcolm Collins: I, I think you're right here, but here's the, the, the question I would have, because this is where I do support it.
I do support it in instances where somebody has a committed monogamous marriage and their partner is HIV positive. In that case, do you still not support? Now, you remember they, they can be basically non transmissible, but it's still recommended they take it. I, I guess, I guess I wouldn't even support it there.
And I'll explain why. It is a not [00:26:00] that we are saying this drug should not be accessible to anyone who can afford it. There are tons of things involved with a monogamous marriage that people choose to afford to have sex, for example, right? Like. If you're in a monogamous marriage, but you don't want to have kids yet, should the government be forced to pay for your condoms?
Or birth
Simone Collins: control. Yeah, and like there are plenty of religious groups that are not really in favor of insurance companies by default covering the cost of birth control. pills for example, or,
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, even between a husband and wife I, I, I, I even still think, so keep in mind, we're not talking about gay couples here.
I'm talking about a husband and wife, where one of them is HIV positive. I unfortunately think it is not the government's responsibility to cover this. I would like to see the price continue to drop and for it to be more affordable, but I think at the end of the day I Sex is a recreational activity.
It's an option.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, well, and if we're, if we're going to, if we're going to subsidize [00:27:00] recreational activities, then the question is, well, why aren't we subsidizing all of these other things? You know, you know, what if, what if this person is, you know, anxious and they really hate taking public transportation because, you know, they're autistic, like I'm autistic.
I had a huge fear of public transportation for a very long time. Like, should the government pay for my Ubers? Like. You know, there, there are all these questions that this, this opens up and it just, yeah, I, I don't, I don't know really, unless we're capable financially of subsidizing a whole bunch of other things, which we're not.
How can this be justified? I guess, so there's, you know, we have to come back to the public health question of what about, you know, the children who may be born, who may have HIV because this wouldn't be subsidized. That's I, you know, I, that's where I start to get like, you know, and kids get hurt, I draw a line, you know, I can't deal with it anymore.
So that's, that's one potential issue. You know, I also think about the fact that like a lot of people from [00:28:00] a, this is my identity and lifestyle perspective, make a lot of financial decisions that are unsustainable for them. You know, like, let's say like, I'm the person who identifies with, you know, having a boozy brunch once, you know, every month.
And then they put that on credit card debt. And then their debt sort of spirals out of control and then they can't retire and their children are forced to take care of them in old age or, you know, worse, they become, you know, a burden on the state and all these sort of bad things happen. So I would also argue that it's not just with, you know, HIV risk where people.
Can cause a lot of damage to others, like collateral damage by being irresponsible and pursuing their hedonic pursuits, such as eating out or taking an Uber instead of public transportation or walking, for example. So, so we can't even say that like, Oh, this is different. You know,
Malcolm Collins: this is the other interesting thing.
That's come down from this is that this went viral, that short saying. [00:29:00] You need to take pills to not contract HIV. You can just not have sex with people who have HIV. Was such an offensive thing within this modern cultural context that we're in. Advocating Any form of restraint is seen as a sin.
I think that that's one element of it, but I also think, because keep in mind, this isn't a gay versus straight thing. This is a orgies, sex with strangers versus non sex with strangers thing. Is that now a culturally sacred practice to the urban monoculture? Is the orgy Now something that they consider almost like a sacred religious tradition.
which must be subsidized by the state. Well, so was the reaction mostly negative
Simone Collins: or was it a
Malcolm Collins: lot
Simone Collins: of people?
Malcolm Collins: Mostly negative, mostly negative and horrified negative. Like this guy needs to be off the internet. They said that he [00:30:00] was trying to commit genocide. They said that he was, you know, it was extremely, extremely negative.
And you know, here I want to put the South Park clip of them all having gay sex in the human race because that's sort of where I feel the urban monoculture is going these days. It's like they They don't have a reason to keep going. And so they've invented this strange orgy ritual. And, and, and now it's become a sacred cow for them.
. These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. Joining me now is their spokesperson, , what exactly are you trying to accomplish? We're doing the only thing we can do. We have to take matters into our own hands.
We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans. Present day America. Number one.
Malcolm Collins: And I think that people outside the urban monoculture, because there's some things with the urban monoculture where you just don't realize that there's like this new sacred line that's been created. And that if you cross it, you get like beaten down. And, and the factor of sancteness of being able to have [00:31:00] sex whenever you want with whoever you want without any consequences is now like a sacred thing.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I'm noticing that it's, it's something that as a candidate for state rep, I'm also coming across, like I, I get a lot of candidate questionnaires from groups that may or may not endorse me as a candidate, right? That may or may not donate to me too, like they sort of want to say, like, these are our, you know, official candidates that are approved because they are with us on policy.
And just today I received an email from a big LGBTQ plus group in Pennsylvania. And I was like, Oh, this is awesome. Like I can fill this out and they'll see that I, you know, like we're, we're super supportive of, you know, basically LGBT rights. And then I start going through the questionnaire and it's not really about, about rights or freedom.
It's about making. [00:32:00] people with, who, who choose to classify in certain LGBTQ plus categories, a protected class. It's about regulating protections and privileges for them that go above and beyond standards to which normal people are held. And I got really uncomfortable, like looking at the questions and I'm just not going to
Malcolm Collins: fill it out.
I think, I actually think maybe we should do an episode on the questionnaire.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah, maybe we should. Cause it was. You know, I went in and I was like, Oh, this is gonna, you know, like slam dunk. This is going to be great. You know, I can, I can show to centrists and, and, and Democrats in our district that like, Oh, you know, actually, you know, we're, we're pretty socially progressive.
And then I'm going in and I'm like, well,
Malcolm Collins: We are not. Are you realizing that we're not socially progressive? Apparently not. Apparently I'm a, an evil bigot. Like what socially progressive means now is that you believe that class, like, like human, our society should be divided. [00:33:00] Into different cast groups that have different levels of rights to human dignity.
Ethnicity is one divider here, but gender is another opt in divider. You can opt into this like non binary identity and be treated as
Simone Collins: suddenly get all these well Per per their preference suddenly get all these additional protections and privileges. What are some again? That are not afforded to other people.
Malcolm Collins: So I have a thought
Simone Collins: experiment for you about sort of, you know, where are we going to end up on prep? Right. Because we've kind of already said the state shouldn't subsidize people's lifestyle choices. You know, especially if, if they're culturally based and, you know, kind of like, well, you don't have to, you don't have to pursue this, or you could pay for it yourself if you really need to, right, it's a nice to have not a necessity, a necessity.
We've known. young people who definitely use like government healthcare and who definitely use and who we really like. And you know, if there was a world where like the government stopped [00:34:00] paying for PrEP, like, what if we were sitting across from them, like having drinks, you know, and we're having this conversation and they're like, yeah, well, but I use PrEP.
You know, and I can't afford it, you know, if, if suddenly the state's not paying for it anymore. Like, do you want me to get AIDS? You know, what do we say to
Malcolm Collins: our young friends? I want you to exercise. And I think that this is a really interesting thing that within the urban monoculture, explaining to someone that there are consequences for their actions, and that they need to exercise a degree of personal austerity for their own financial or health safety.
Is seen as sinful and so within their cultural framework, I'd be like, I understand that there's no way that you can really understand what I'm saying to you, but from any sane cultural perspective you are sometimes asked to exercise some degree of discretion and austerity. And an episode that we're going to do after this, we actually go into an organization that is campaigning to try to have it be that gay [00:35:00] individuals cannot be persecuted for lying to another gay individual about them not having HIV.
So I can understand why people are freaking out out there if, if that's what their culture is fighting for, is, is that people can just go out there and do whatever they want, and there should never be any consequences for any of their actions. But I'd say, do, do I feel bad that I'm saying that your culture actually does learn, need to learn to sometimes exercise austerity and sometimes to change cultural norms around risks?
Yeah. I mean, I, I point something out. I think
Simone Collins: actually here's, here's where I would probably come down. I'm like, I'm actually trying to model a conversation with this young person who I quite like. Okay. Cause I don't have a problem with him sleeping around and having fun. Like it's, it's actually kind of cute.
Cause you know, we, we used to like kind of talk about like people that he was dating and stuff and like whatever, you know, like I would feel the same if it was a young woman, you know, this is fun stuff. You know, love, young love. I would say, listen, okay, like we can look for some of these programs.
The generic [00:36:00] version can be as low as 65 a month. Let's find a program where you can get it 65 a month. Okay. What do you have to do? To get an incremental income of 65 a month. Okay. You can probably, you know, create an account on TaskRabbit or, you know, creating a task or an account on any like gig worker platform.
And for like one weekend a month, spend five to six hours doing some gig work to get the 65 to pay for the medication that will make sure that you can do this all safely. I guess that's what I would say. Like, what
Malcolm Collins: if it turns out it's not 65 a month and it's actually 2000 a month, like the first estimate said,
Simone Collins: then we're going to have to work out how you can make, honestly, like, I'm super okay with just being like, if you want to have that lifestyle, like let's get that lifestyle
Malcolm Collins: or how do you cut 2000 a month in expenses?
Simone Collins: Yeah. And like, and life is about trade offs. Like, you know, we, we didn't make the government pay for our IVF and actually more and more people keep reaching out to us being like, Hey, how can I get my IVF paid for? Like [00:37:00] you're going to have to find a way to pay for it. We gave up travel. We gave up fun. We gave up every luxury in life.
We lived on a mattress in the warehouse district outside Miami for a year in a studio
Malcolm Collins: apartment. So just like mattress on the ground. Like, I think we shared
Simone Collins: one chair between the two of
Malcolm Collins: us. Maybe there were two, there were two chairs. Well, because we don't sleep in the same bed. I had a tent in the room.
And you had the mattress right next to me. Yeah. Which I absolutely love. It was nice.
Simone Collins: But no, but we sacrificed. And I think the thing is in the end, it wasn't that bad because when you know what you care about and what you don't care about, it's actually easy to make those sacrifices and a lot of people pay for things they don't really need.
So then we probably talk with this friend and be like, okay, well, like, what do you really care about? Like, what can we cut out? That is not as important as you having sex with like fun people.
Malcolm Collins: And I actually want to point out a how, how the perversion of a society that sees it as a moral necessity to pay for a drug that enables sex whenever you want, but that doesn't see it as a moral [00:38:00] necessity to pay for IVF, the creation of new human life.
Simone Collins: Oh, s**t.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I didn't even think about that.
Simone Collins: I think, you know, where we fall is people should not be granted privileged status based on group membership to pursue their cultural values that we believe in cultural sovereignty.
And the way that we support that is by saying, you do you don't force you on us and don't make us pay for your lifestyle. And that's, that's fine. And I, you know, I think. That's a, a pretty fair stance. So, when it
Malcolm Collins: comes to Yeah, but unfortunately, it will be seen as transphobic. Because, I don't know. Like, I don't know.
Like, it's actually homophobic and transphobic to try to try this issue to gays or trans people. Because To type, pay for PrEP. Yes, because straight people are at almost as much risk if they are out having orgies. Well, a little less because transmission rates are less, but they're still at risk too.
This is, this is not an, a gay straight, this is an orgy, not an orgy issue.
Simone Collins: I mean, you know, it
Malcolm Collins: All right. [00:39:00] I'll get the kids and I'm going to go get the other kids.
Simone Collins: Okay. I love you. Bye bye. Hey, Octavian.
Octavian Collins: Yeah, I got the toys right here at the box. Stacy doesn't need any more toys, only just a teddy.
Simone Collins: Yes, because we don't like having a lot of clutter everywhere, right, buddy?
Octavian Collins: Right.
Simone Collins: Right. Can you tell everyone to like and subscribe, please?
Octavian Collins: Oh, yes. Go ahead. Um, Do I gotta describe on here?
Simone Collins: No, ask them. Say, please like and subscribe.
Octavian Collins: Please
Simone Collins: like and describe. Okay, life and describe, people. Life and describe.
I love you, buddy.
Octavian Collins: Love you, too.
Do you want a blackberry? Oh, yeah, You want to go out and get a blackberry with me? Here, have the fans seen you toasting? [00:40:00] I'll get it by myself. That's the way. You go get it by yourself.
We
Simone Collins: were
Octavian Collins: great. What were you talking,
Simone Collins: what were you talking to mama about? He told everyone to, to life. And describe to like, and subscribe to life. And describe to life
Octavian Collins: and subscribe. I did not, did it? No,
Simone Collins: no, no. To life. And describe to life and describe.
Octavian Collins: OC Octavian,
Malcolm Collins: Sometimes, are you not able to do a fun thing that you want to do?
Octavian Collins: Well, I do like doing a fun thing. I just like toy trains.
Simone Collins: Should the government, Octavian, should the government pay for your toy trains?
Octavian Collins: Food not on train, dad. I cannot eat it. Oh, you can only
Malcolm Collins: eat food on trains now?
Octavian Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: This is in relation to the sushi train we got them.
Octavian Collins: Yeah! I find it's not food. Good
Simone Collins: job, Toasty. Octavian, should the government buy you trains?
Octavian Collins: Yes, I really like food on trains. [00:41:00]
Malcolm Collins: So you like it, and therefore the government should give it to you. Yeah. We're gonna have to watch out for you, buddy.
Simone Collins: Hey, remember, he likes communism.
Malcolm Collins: And remember, Octavian,
Simone Collins: real communism has not been tried.
Hi, Titan.
Malcolm Collins: What do you want to tell mommy? Hi,
Simone Collins: Titan. What do you want to say? Hi, Titan. So
Octavian Collins: I just took a walk. Oh, you just took a walk?
Simone Collins: Titan wants the mic too. Can you ask Titan a question? Octavian? Sharon is Karen. You know, they, they just, they, what they do know, and I call it Sharon Karen, as in like bad woman, Karen.
They, they, they go up to one of their siblings, they immediately like snatch something, like they do something a*****e ish, and then they say Sharon Karen which is just so appropriate. It's the Sharon Karen.
Malcolm Collins: What do you think of that, Titan?[00:42:00]
I love you, Titan.
Alright, you can come down. I'm sorry for all holding you.
Octavian Collins: Ah! I love it when the news is like, you hit your child? How could you, how could you ever, ever lightly hit your child? And then you
Simone Collins: see our children and you're like,
Octavian Collins: oh,
Simone Collins: they're clearly terrified of you, Malcolm. They're clearly terrified.
Octavian Collins: Oh, yes it is.
Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. All right, Malcolm. I love you. We're gonna hit end recording. Bye!
Octavian Collins: I love you! I love you, Mom! Can you tell Mommy you love her?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92
In this in-depth exploration, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into the fascinating history of the Baby Boom and its surprising origins. They challenge common misconceptions about what caused this demographic phenomenon and discuss its implications for modern pronatalist efforts. Drawing from historical data, academic research, and their own insights, the Collins couple offers a fresh perspective on fertility trends and what they mean for our future.
Key topics covered:
* The unexpected fertility decline in early 20th century Europe and North America
* Debunking myths about the causes of the Baby Boom
* The role of medical advancements in reducing maternal mortality
* The impact of World War II on societal values and family planning
* Cross-cultural comparisons of Baby Boom effects
* The limitations of housing policy in addressing fertility rates
* The importance of cultural shifts in promoting higher birth rates
* Implications for modern pronatalist movements
Whether you're interested in demographics, history, or social trends, this video provides valuable insights into one of the most significant population shifts of the 20th century and its relevance to today's fertility challenges.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! We are back to pronatalist coverage! All right. And today we're going to be talking about a very Interesting phenomenon that not many people know about.
Not many people are aware that half of Europe was below repopulation rate before the baby boom. In TFR numbers, that means that they weren't having enough kids to replace themselves. The entire world was in a bit of a fertility collapse during that period. And, We somehow got out of it with the baby boom, and then that's at a new sort of set point that we've been declining from ever since then.
But I want to talk about two things. One, this initial slump, and two, theories for what caused the baby boom to potentially recreate a phenomenon like this. A phenomenon that we can recreate every hundred years or so, and then just have this cycle. That would be great, right?
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: This was written by Phoebe Arcelognick Wakefield.
Phoebe came to our
Simone Collins: dinner in London, remember?
Malcolm Collins: We met her?
Simone Collins: Yeah, we know Phoebe.[00:01:00]
Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, oh, her, yes! Yes, Phoebe. The Indian food in London? Yes, yes, yes.
I do think you begin to see her blinders near the end of the piece that is mostly due to the areas of policy in which she has worked.
Malcolm Collins: But outside of that I actually think the piece is fantastic because it brought a lot of information to me that I didn't know. And I'd also say another thing I really liked about this piece and her writing Is usually when I take a piece, I just read like a few paragraphs from it to get like the core of the message.
I'll be reading over 50 percent of this piece. Because she presented so much consistent new information. That I really have to read most of it to get the point across.
Simone Collins: Right. I think we should be clear that Phoebe is one of the most prominent pronatalists in the UK. She's very respected, she's very smart, and she's a wonderful person.
And you may be bad with names, but yes, we do know her. And she was always presented to us as a who's who of one of the, the top pronatalist policy wonks and thinkers. in the United Kingdom. So if you want to read [00:02:00]
Malcolm Collins: this or other work of hers, you can check out works in progress, in 1800s, the average British woman had 4. 97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Birkenau Fosso today. A century later, Britain's fertility rate had slipped to 3. 9 children per woman. And 30 years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1. 79, well below the replacement rate of 2. 1, the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady. So in 1935, the TFR of the UK was only 1.
79. That's kind of shocking.
Simone Collins: Yeah, those are modern numbers so much for, Oh, it was women entering the workplace. It was the pill.
Malcolm Collins: No, no, this is actually very important. Very clearly this debunks the women in the workplace and the pill arguments
Simone Collins: and even women getting educated at that time, women, you know, also didn't have such high levels of, higher educational attainment either.
So yeah.
Malcolm Collins: [00:03:00] Yeah. This trend occurred across Europe by the 1920s. Over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic. The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the 19th century. By 1800, the average American woman had over 7 children.
By 1900, she had fewer than 4. 30 fewer than three. So talk about how quick that's happening. It goes from four to three in just 30 years there. And that's,
Simone Collins: sorry, that's from what you said, 1850 to 1900.
Malcolm Collins: So, 1807, 1904. Okay, over the course of 100 years. No, no, 1904, 1933. Oh. Okay, and I'm going to put a graph on screen so everyone can see and they can more easily visualize than you can.
If you look from.
1800 to 1880 in most countries except for the U. S., you had a steady fertility rate. In the U. S., you had a slightly declining fertility rate. And then [00:04:00] 1880 to 1920, pretty much across the board, you have steadily declining fertility rates. And it seems to accelerate in the U. S. a little bit during that period.
So France's fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier to great alarm in 1896.
An organization called the Alliance Nationale pour le Croisement de la Population. The way you butcher French.
Simone Collins: Can you, it's like when Gomez speaks to Morticia in Italian.
Tish. That's French. Gomez.
Simone Collins: No, I speak French. Which is better. Okay. Like the guy on glorious. What gets me harder for you is when you butcher French for me.
Like, oh, Malcolm Butcher some more French for me. I
Malcolm Collins: love it, . Yeah. But you love how, how, how patriotic I am. And I've, you keep, keep doing it. Keep reading it up. Read it. Sorry. Read that off again. Honestly,
Created. [00:05:00] No, read it again! Oh my gosh, okay. Alliance Nationale pour le Croisement de la Population Francaise was born,
Gli amici della vedetta ammirata da tutti noi questa gemma provera della nostra cultura saranno naturalmente accolti sotto la mia protezione per la durata del loro soggiorno.
Grazie. Colomi. Do I pronounce it correctly? Uh, yes, uh, correcto.
Malcolm Collins: Created expressly to combat denatelite, essentially depopulation. It had attracted some 40, 000 members by the 1920s, was novelist Emily Zola an early recruit. The Alliance Nationale was merely one of many organizations, local and national, established to resist France's apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr.
Jacquerie Berlite [00:06:00] Tillion , disparagingly called the imminent disappearance of our country.
French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security. In 1914, the Alliance Nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans. The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were.
That is A great prenatalist propaganda there. We need to get some of that on board, right? So, hold on.
I will give the context of this. This was actually sent to us by a fan, and it was a Theodore Roosevelt speech from this period, about, I love it that we can have Theodore Roosevelt tell us his thoughts on demographic collapse, and how we should fix it, and what it means for a country.
Simone Collins: Yeah, so, so this this, this friend of the Base Camp pod said to us one of Theodore Roosevelt's most famous speeches given in Paris in 1910 is known as the man in the arena speech.
For [00:07:00] the first time in my life, our Base Camper says, I just read the entire speech and found this very powerful paragraph. So now I'm going to read the paragraph from Teddy Roosevelt's speech as sent by our base camper finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need is to remember that.
The chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.
The first essential in any civilization is that men And the women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through the fault of society, there is failure to increase, it is a great [00:08:00] misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, Then it is not merely a misfortune.
It is one of those crimes of ease and self indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run, nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people, who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down upon our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to preddle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.
No refinement in life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development. Of art and literature can in any way compensate for the loss of great fundamental virtues. And of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the racist power to [00:09:00] perpetuate the race. That's some
Malcolm Collins: prose right there, right? Right? Yeah. Well, he, he talks about the willfully barren and how disgusting they are, morally speaking. And, you know, that's, that's maybe what we think of
Simone Collins: Well,
Malcolm Collins: but also like,
Simone Collins: you know, what, what is the point of all of our progress?
What is the point of all of our luxury? If it is not used as a flywheel, if it is not used as momentum. To create more human flourishing. Yeah. Like what, what, what is, what was all of this for? If we're just like a match going to light it and then flame out what the hell a match is for lighting kindling a matches for creating a bonfire and these people just want to snuff like I can't believe they want to
Malcolm Collins: consume as much fuel as possible because they just Morally quite selfish.
They are the darkness. Let's keep going here because this is and if you, and if you're like, well, no, antinatalism makes sense because I have childlike understanding of morality. You should check out our video on these people want [00:10:00] us all dead and are weirdly reasonable about it. And we go over all of the antinatalist arguments and they are not strong.
But anyway I'm gonna keep going with the piece here. The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes and quieter maternity wards. The British government established the national birth rate commission in 1912 in fascist Italy, the battle for births was named one of Mussolini's four key economic campaigns of 1922.
Wow. Isn't that crazy? And he apparently had like posters up everywhere about it and everything like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Just the, the understanding that the prior, I guess, that I grew up with was that always there was this Malthusian concern for growing populations and that there was never any deviance from that ever since Malthus wrote his seminal piece, right?
Like that's sort of where things left off. I, and I was wrong. This is so cool.
Malcolm Collins: By the way, was he after this or before this? Thomas
Simone Collins: Malthus is before this.
Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. Okay. Contemporary demographers looked [00:11:00] to shifts in values to explain the decline, like rising individualism, new family structures, and ways of living that were less compatible with parenthood.
Enid Charles, a British statistician and feminist, argued that increasing female empowerment was one cause, because motherhood made it difficult for women to compete with men economically. So they were even arguing that back in the 1920s.
Charles, a mother of four, called children a handicap to vocational advancement in adult life. Despite the organized resistance of groups like Alliance Nationale, at least some Eastern European demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible or even arrestable. In 1936, Dr. Carr Sanders, an English biologist, eugenicist, and later director of LSE, Wrote, and this is in 1936, once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain in time to become so small that the reproductive rate will fall below replacement rate.
And that [00:12:00] when this happened, the restoration of the replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem. But even as car Saunders wrote those words, he was being proven wrong. Something was happening Europe and further afield, something we are still trying to understand the baby boom.
And here I am putting a graph on the screen that shows the giant jump in fertility rates. That basically happened out of nowhere in tons of different countries.
The baby boom was an unexpected change in the direction of fertility rates. from half a century of falling fertility rates that had taken place in Europe and North America.
Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War II, the boom in fact began in the mid 1930s. It was not simply an American or British phenomenon either. Demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland, thousands of miles across the sea.
It even happened in Australia and New Zealand. And yet Saunders doubt had been extremely [00:13:00] well justified. For and wherever we have had data, and since the Industrial Revolution, with the crucial exception of the baby boom, it has been a nearly iron law of fertility that higher incomes are associated with lower birth rates.
Which, by the way, is something that the Institute of Family Studies guy what's his name? Lyman
Simone Collins: Stone.
Malcolm Collins: Limestone, he says this isn't true. He's just completely delusional. You really should not be citing his work. Or as like an authoritative source. He seems completely to have gone off the deep end.
In some recent pieces. Well, I mean, he wants to use the data to argue for socialism. And It doesn't work. You know, so he lies about the data or lies about what the data is saying to he
Simone Collins: doesn't even necessarily like hide the data. He will even point out that there is a very, very, very high cost to quote unquote paying people through services or bonuses for pronatalism.
He just wants. Countries to do it anyway, which I think is really interesting. Like he doesn't deny the fact that it's [00:14:00] prohibitively expensive. He just, I don't know, somehow wants money to come from. Well, I think you just don't know where.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, he wants the government to like create a Christian family department sort of thing that forces people to give birth is sort of my read.
this is where I'm going to begin to start summarizing what's in the piece we're going to see on the screen here a graph that does show. Okay. Higher incomes associated with lower fertility rates where we will see this in different time periods in the U. S., The most widely known piece of information about the baby boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War II. The baby boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war. It saw lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children, but had more of them overall.
And in many countries, including the U. S., U. K., Sweden, and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started, while neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced booms that [00:15:00] began during the war in 1940. Now we're going to talk about one of the explanations for this, called the Easterlin hypothesis.
Okay. Is there anything that you want to say to this so far? Like, has this changed your understanding of anything?
Simone Collins: No, my initial, my initial hypothesis around the baby boom is something we've discussed in other episodes where I think that the hardship that people endured, even in neutral areas that weren't necessarily actively engaged in war, you know, caused by limited supplies caused by, you know, trade issues that, that, that forced austerity on people's lives at the very least, if not genuine trauma drove people to, you know, a level of vitalism that encouraged them, inspired them to have families, and that without some level of austerity or hardship, which could be culturally imposed through strong, hard culture or religion, or could be imposed through the vicissitudes of geopolitical conflict, as you saw with World War II, I think that's what drives higher birth rates.
And I'm curious to see what this [00:16:00] hypothesis is. And I'm enjoying this. So this is fun. Thanks for sharing this.
Malcolm Collins: Easterlin's explanation rests on the idea , that the decisions individuals make in terms of whether and how many children they will have are strongly influenced by the difference between what they had expected their adult income to be while growing up, their quote unquote expected income, and what it actually is once they join the labor market, which he called relative income.
He argued that people form an expectation of their income based on a range of social and economic settings. Signals, primarily those they received growing up the current average standard of living, the standard of living they experienced during their childhood and a sense of their own prospects. The childhood of parents of the baby boom were marked by the great depression during which unemployment rose to 25%.
And 9, 000 U. S. banks collapsed, taking people's savings with them. The U. S. downturn was felt around the world. U. S. GDP fell by 29 percent between 1929 and 1933, and global GDP was estimated at 15%. It was only [00:17:00] around the end of the 1930s and the onset of the Second World War that the economic growth began to pick up.
In 1978, east Easter used the cyclical element of his theory to predict that another baby boom would hit the west in the mid 1980s, but it never did. Instead, American fertility rose from 1.83 in 1980 to 2.07 in 1990, and then fell a far cry from the demographic wave of the baby boom in which fertility rose by over 75% in many cases.
Meanwhile in Europe, fertility largely flatlined or declined. The cycle that is at the heart of the theory never emerged. And little trace of it can be seen in the decades that precede the baby boom. Even the strongest research, so obviously a lot of academics have researched this, and this is a question that we can research.
Even the strongest research showing a robust relationship between relative income and fertility finds the best. It can explain only a small faction of the increase during the baby boom [00:18:00] of around 12 percent of the overall rise. So, you know, lots and lots of people have tried to prove his theory because it sounds right.
Like when you hear it, You're like, Oh, that makes sense. I can see how that would have an effect.
Simone Collins: And even the converse of it, like, you know, yeah, sure. I could see people having more kids than expected. If they're like, Holy smokes, I live like a millionaire. I never expected this. And you just kind of appreciate what you have.
And then, you know, the, the, the converse of that being, you know, millennials and younger generations being like, Oh, I'm never going to have the lifestyle that my parents had and then proceeding to not have kids. So it seems so intuitively to make sense.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I think it's very much like the initial reaction a lot of people have, which is like, well, if I had more money, I'd have more kids and like, we know that the opposite is true.
A lot of stuff around fertility is counter to an individual's intuitions. And I think that that's what we're dealing with in this case, because again, you can look at the data. It looks like it should line up in a fuzzy sense, but it doesn't line up. Because you can look at [00:19:00] it today. We can, we can, we can measure this in populations.
They've been trying to prove this for half a century is when he had this hypothesis, he had this a long time ago. And we just haven't found it. It doesn't seem to be true. Easterlin focused on parents perceptions and expectations in his attempt to understand what drove the boom. A recent wave of research has looked instead at objective factors, in particular, the cost of having children upon parents and how those change.
And here I'm putting a graph on the screen of the adoption of electric power, refrigeration, stove, vacuum, and washing machines from 1930s to 1960s. Parenthood rapidly became much easier between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labor saving devices in homes, such as washing machines and fridges, made raising children easier.
Movements in medicine, making childbirth safer and easier access to housing, made it cheaper to house large families. In the 1930s, only two thirds of U. S. homes had electricity, but in 1960, 99 [00:20:00] percent did. So we went in a 30 year period for two third of homes having electricity to 99 percent of homes having electricity.
Simone Collins: Wow. That's huge. Yeah, that is revolutionary.
Malcolm Collins: The UK and other European countries saw similar rollout rates. The household electrification paved the way for other technologies, including home refrigeration, which became more popular after an introduction of a compound called Freon in the 1920s, a safer alternative to toxic chemicals previously used in fridges.
Between 1930s and 1950s, the share of American households with a refrigerator increased from 10 to 80 percent 1930s and 1950s. This allowed consumers to take advantage of other innovations. In 1928, Birdseye developed the double belt freezer, which allowed rapid freezing of fresh produce, improving the quality of frozen food.
As refrigerators found an increasing number of foam, frozen food became popular, From the 1930s onwards, followed by frozen ready meals. [00:21:00] In 1946, the UK's frozen food sales amounted to only 150, 000 pounds, but by 1964, it had grown to 75 million, about 1 billion in 2020 is mine. So, basically allow it for frozen food.
I think many people don't know or, or if they haven't really meditated on this, how big a change this was in people's daily lives, life was. Yeah. The ability to refrigerate food completely changes the way you relate to food. You are no longer spending a portion of your day or only buying cured meats.
You no longer have to kill the animal and then immediately, or like within a week, eat that animal. You know, you no longer, the types of food you have access to dramatically and the cost of that food dramatically decreases. Now you can have industrial food.
So, I'm going to keep going here. Other labor saving technologies proliferated and transformed the lives of ordinary people, particularly women. Consider the washing machine. [00:22:00] Before this revolutionary object became a feature of daily lives, doing the laundry meant heating water with coal or firewood and scrubbing every item by hand.
This was hot, sweaty work. often including pounding the laundry in a tub with something called a washing dolly, and its strenuous nature meant that women generally scheduled the chore for a Monday as it followed Sunday's day of rusk. One early washing machine advert explicitly promised to transform blue Monday into a bright and happy day.
By the 1940s, electric washing machines were becoming normal in middle class homes. And this is, again, not true. If you have never washed clothing by hand, I almost suggest you try it so you know how difficult
Simone Collins: it used you were going to say, and because of its strenuous nature, women were ripped. Because man, it was, it was actually quite a lot.
There are, there are a bunch of YouTubers actually who, you know, do like, sort of 1950s cosplaying and be like, I'm going to eat depression era meals for a week and stuff like that. He'd go through this. So there are lots of examples really [00:23:00] readily available online for you to see how hard it actually was.
And in my grandmother's autobiography, when she came to the United States and had access for the first time in her life as a young adult, a washing machine, she was just, she Like this changes everything. It was huge for her. It was amazing. It was the best thing ever. But you know, I'm, I'm hearing you say this and I am thinking about my grandmother a lot because you know, she was in Nazi occupied Paris and she came to the U S and you know, she was part of this baby boom.
They only had two kids, you know, this wasn't like, I'm going to have a ton of kids now. So I don't really know how this would correlate. Your
Malcolm Collins: family seems to be genetically less natalist than other families. Is what I've noticed because I look at my family and they had tons of kids in these generations 12, you know, 14 depending on the generation.
We did that for a number of generations. Even now, my family is very, very high fertility. I have a very large cousin network. We're actually about to go see them in Maine. And pretty much everyone I'm related to has three plus kids [00:24:00] which is rare these days in the United States.
Simone Collins: Well, I applaud your fecundity, Malcolm.
Um,
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it shows that our world framework kind of works with high fertility. We'll see if we can keep it going because the fertility rate has dropped a little bit in this generation. Now there, there is a paper that was done that basically destroys this entire argument. And I want to see if you can guess how they did it.
If a baby boom was seen in what other population would this argument completely fall apart?
Simone Collins: It would have to be a population that, oh, was it Japan or something? No. No, no, no. I'm just thinking it's near us.
Malcolm Collins: Who near us doesn't use washing machines? Does it use Oh, the
Simone Collins: Amish?
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: Ah, I see what you mean. So, I'll
Malcolm Collins: put a paper on stage.
The screen here is done in 2009. And it showed that the Amish did have an exactly equivalent baby boom to the rest of the population.
Simone Collins: Really? During this period? They [00:25:00] weren't involved in the war? What did they have to do with any of this? Like, we're off
Malcolm Collins: the grid. Yeah. That's where it gets really interesting.
Only 50 Amish people ended up serving in the military. So it also kind of hurts your argument as well. My thesis. Yeah, it's my hardship.
Simone Collins: Well, except, well, right, right. Actually, because they already, well, they, my, my, yeah, my, my position for them would be they already had hardship because they live a life with a hard culture and with deprivation.
But then why would they experience a bump? Because you just think they'd just be level.
Malcolm Collins: I think you're partially right with the austerity, but I think there's another factor here, and we're going to get to it at the end of the article. Yeah, because something has to cause
Simone Collins: the bump. Like, why would they have more fertility?
It would just be steady.
Malcolm Collins: Historical demographic data on practicing Amish is scant, but The language Pennsylvania Dutch is spoken almost exclusively by the Amish, and the language is recorded in a census. By analyzing data from the U. S. census censuses from the relevant time period that included data on primary language spoken.
In the home and the number of children 1940, 1980, and 1990, it is [00:26:00] possible to gauge the impact of the baby boom on the Amish community by tracking changes in completed fertility among Pennsylvania Dutch speakers. It turns out that during the baby boom, Pennsylvania Dutch speakers did see a fertility rise at the same time at a similar magnitude to other Americas.
, and for as long, all without washing machines or refrigerators, so, nope, it wasn't that stuff Between 1936 and 1956. America's now. Now this is the one where I think they're on to something. This one. Can you guess what it would be? What else might have changed between the thirties and the fifties that could have caused the number of babies?
People had to hugely spike
Simone Collins: globalization.
Malcolm Collins: It's medical technology, medical technology. It's the one
Simone Collins: infant
Malcolm Collins: mortality went down. Is that a yeah. And maternal death maternal.
Simone Collins: Okay. Yes. Like this is when we're like
Malcolm Collins: online. This is [00:27:00] when, yeah. So. Between 1936 and 1956, America's maternal death rate fell by 94 percent from 51 deaths per 10, 000 live births to under 3 per 10, 000 live births.
51 to 3 over a period of just 20 years. This was mirrored by declines across the West. Sweden saw maternal deaths drop from 30 per 10, 000 to 4 per 10, 000 in England. In 1874, maternal mortality peaked at 75 per 10, 000 70 years later in 1945, it was less than five. And here I'll have a graph on the screen that shows this sort of across the board.
The U. S. states that had higher maternal mortality than others, for example, averaged between 1915 and 1935, Florida had almost double the mortality rate of Minnesota, 86 per 10, 000 as compared to 44. By the 1950s, death [00:28:00] rates had massively converged, and those two states with the biggest improvements saw the biggest birth rates.
increases. So, um. that explains a lot. There you go. Wow. Hold on. We're not done with this, this explanation yet because it's going to turn out it's not the huge explanation we would like it to be. Interesting. But it helps. Okay.
By comparing state falls in mortality with state baby booms, one analysis shows the effect of these medical advances on fertility in America was about 1. 8 children per woman or 55 percent of the rise in fertility during the baby boom generation. I, I would say, I believe it was probably 58%. I think that this is right.
Now I should note, this is not a good thing. It is satisfying that we solved part of the problem, but it basically means fertility collapse never abated. The,
Simone Collins: the, yeah, there was basically like a, a false modifier to the numbers, the false
Malcolm Collins: modifier to the numbers that is unreplicable in modern times.
Yeah. We can't lower [00:29:00] for, we can't lower infant death rates by that much again in modern times and create another baby boom.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: So, okay, great, but shoot, I'm going here.
Simone Collins: Yeah. You would have preferred to have something we could do something about, you know,
Malcolm Collins: The average American woman born in 1930 had three Children, while the average Amish woman born the same year had 4.
5. So I also think that's interesting during this early period of the births explosion. When we're talking about the baby boom, there wasn't that much of a difference between Amish. Families and the average American family. If you look today at Amish families, their fertility rate is 5. 76. So much higher than it was historically.
So their fertility has actually been inching upwards since the baby boom. That's interesting. We're thinking about solutions here. Yeah. Here is why I'd say it's not just infant mortality. And this is also going to blow up her [00:30:00] next argument as well, but I suppose I should throw it out there. The little hand grenade.
This got me interested. I was like, Oh, well, we should be looking cross communities to find out where the baby boom existed and where the baby boom didn't exist. Okay. Okay. So what did I do? I decided to start just Googling. Did X country have a baby boom? Did X country have a baby boom? Dig X country have a baby boom?
And I found something rather peculiar in the data. A lot of countries didn't have a baby boom. Most essential in South America didn't have a baby boom. Africa didn't have a baby boom. You know who did have a baby boom? Strangely, Japan, Korea. So basically like the people who are adjacent to or involved in the war?
Everyone who was adjacent to the war had a baby boom. Oh man! Everyone who was, so Ireland had a baby boom, but it was Smaller than other countries. That is so weird. Ireland had a baby boom of only [00:31:00] 8%. So many people might not know this about Ireland, but Ireland.
Oh, I don't want to say the Irish were terrific cowards during World War II. Um, But they did side with the Nazis.
Irish b*****d! What? What's that? McCarron. That's an Irish name. Uh, yes. Can I assume you're CIA? No, you know what, Patty?
Hang on! Okay, God. So where did you get Axis power? Ireland? Ireland was not an Axis power! Are you sure? They were neutral, you a*****e! Oh, that's right.
Malcolm Collins: Sorry, I don't mean they sided with the Nazis. They, they couldn't, they couldn't hold their nose and side with the, the UK and the United States. They decided to be neutral in the war. And as such, they experienced hardships, but not the same hardships everyone else was fighting, you know, fighting against true evil in the world and trying to save.
the West. [00:32:00] Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I don't I don't I don't think anyone should ever forget that they didn't participate in the war. And I and I am partially Irish. But fortunately, my Irish ancestors came to America before this display of cowardry, cowardice, cowardice.
Yes, or obstinance, whatever you want to frame it as it is. Well,
Simone Collins: come on. I mean, the Irish who were This is, oh, this is, no, you're probably going to need to take this out. But the Irish who were left after, these are the people who couldn't bother to leave the country during the potato famine. All right. You know, people dying, starving all around them.
S**t country, you know, just like nothing's going well there right now. People are literally saying like, we will pay your way to America. Like just leave, evacuate. This is not good. People don't
Malcolm Collins: know this, but a lot of the landlords offered to pay for people to move because they were afraid of results because there'd been a few revolts before the potato famine that led to them killing the landlords and the landlords was like, Oh my God, we're not going to be able to feed these people.
We need to get them out of here. We're going to die. Now, a lot of them died on these ships. That's why they were called [00:33:00] coffin ships. It was risky prospect, but the people who are willing to risk their safety for a better future, pretty much. All left Ireland. The ones
Simone Collins: who stayed and who, you know, chose to not get super involved in World War II.
Is it, can it be so surprising when those were the same people who, when faced with almost certain death from starvation were like, I mean, let's just see this
Malcolm Collins: out. You know, let's write it out. I think it was more obstinance. And I think, I think that it's, it, it, it, you, you could say it's obstinance might be an overly negative term.
Stubbornness. They, they , steadfastness stu stubbornness that also led them to not participating in the war. Yeah. Sure. But anyway this was really interesting to me and it leads to my theory before we go further, is my theory is that what caused this.
Was a, and you can contrast this theory. It was a theory that they're laying out because I don't think that people have kids for economic reasons. Largely speaking, [00:34:00] people have kids because they feel they have a duty to something greater than themselves. During this war, when nobody was sure how the world's future was going to turn out when they weren't sure if there was going to be a future, if they were going to live in a Nazi totalitarian state, if they were going to live in a, you know, it's very scary.
It was a very scary time where people, even in the places that didn't fight, like the Amish and the Irish had a, a world framework of sacrifice for a better future. And if you are living a life that is dedicated to a better future, if you are seeing your friend shot around you for a better future, if you are, In the news every day, the world's an existential threat.
Let's see if we can get through this. Yeah. Then you are like, what is all this for? What am I making these sacrifices for? Right? Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And you also
Simone Collins: start to in these periods of deprivation in these periods of almost hopelessness, you start to fantasize about a bright future too. And I think that plays some role in it.
It's something that my grandmother wrote. about in her [00:35:00] biography. You know, she wrote about like how she would fantasize about this future that she would fight to create if she could just survive this.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: And for
Malcolm Collins: her kids, she would write about them. And this is what you saw in the retrofuturism of this period, the 19, 40s retrofuturism was always of these techno utopias.
That is what they were fighting for. And I think that it's why the techno utopian mindset is so important to our own view of the future. I think it is necessary to motivate intergenerational growth and expansion and a betterment of our species. I think the generations that have had this ended up improving our species and the generations that didn't, I think, ended up hurting our species, largely speaking.
Yeah. And so I think that what happened is you come back from the war and you're like, well, what are kids for? Well, I'm for my kids. Kids aren't for me. Kids aren't another appliance that are meant to make my life happier. My life is for the future. And I think it was that [00:36:00] mindset shift and that morality shift.
It comes to like, when you read that professor's book on fertility, and it was basically like, how do kids modify my own experience of the world instead of I should have kids for their experience of the world. And that is a huge shift in mindset that happened in this generation and that wasn't around after this generation.
I think that can explain the other 40%. Let's look at what they put the other 40 percent to. Alongside strides forward in household and medical technology, there is one factor that acted to lower the cost of having children and create the baby boom. It became easier to secure a home in which to raise children.
The number of houses built soared across the West after World War II, including in New Zealand, Sweden, the U. S., Switzerland. In the U. K., development did not increase immediately after the war, but the rate of house building did remain close to an all time high hit in the 1930s. This house building bonanza led to sharp rises in home ownership [00:37:00] rates.
In 1940, less than 30 percent of American men over the age of 18 were homeowners. By 1960, it was 52%. In the UK, rates of home ownership jumped 32 percent in 1938, just before the war, to just over half by 1967. There was a strong social expectation that married couples should have their own household in 1940.
93 percent of married 25 year olds in the United States had their own households, while just 44 percent of non married 25 year olds did. With easier access. to housing that social pressure made necessary, marriage rates rose between 1930 and 1960.
Marriage rates in the US increased by 21 percent. And I'll put a graph on screen here where you'll see the increase in marriage rates. And again here, what you'll really notice is the increase in marriage rates is highly correlated by how much a country participated in the war. With Ireland again, having the lowest of these increases [00:38:00] which I think yeah, I think that this is Spain also had a very small increase, only 6%.
And many people in Spain largely didn't participate. So, yeah I think that the problem with this theory, that the home theory is one, you've got to remember the person who's writing this is. heavily involved in UMD policy. Yeah. It's like her core policy area is make housing cheaper. So I get it.
But the problem And there are
Simone Collins: lots of prominent pronatalist advocates like Morberts on Twitter Dan Hess, who we, we interviewed here who also, you know, believe that housing policy plays a big role. And we're not just saying that. This is an isolated thing among advocates.
Malcolm Collins: The problem is, is that we have data on this.
Like we, we have actual data on how much housing access, the size of a house, the cost of a house in an area increases fertility rates. And it's like, 13%. It's just not that big. [00:39:00] Like, we have very robust data on this. Here is where they are not wrong, and this I do need to note. You know how I say it's all culture at the end of the day?
Or mostly culture at the end of the day? The reason why housing affects fertility rates negatively is because of the cultural expectation that you should have your own home before you get married. That is the only reason that housing affects fertility rates. It's because of cultural expectations. If you remove that cultural expectation, housing stops affecting fertility rates, as we see in cultures that where it's very common to have a multifamily houses, the house that you and I live in here, when we're talking about, you know, in the 1800s, when the average American had seven kids and when this house was built.
Or families were living in this house, you know, as they'd have kids, they'd get married and they just section off a part of the house to keep living in. That's probably what we'll do with our kids if they can't afford their own place. The cultural [00:40:00] expectations of additional houses is highly toxic to fertility rates.
And When you focus on fixing this intractable problem, and the reason I say it's an intractable problem, right, is it's a problem that everybody else wants to fix for their own reasons, right? Like, it is a generally popular thing. If I talk to somebody who's not a perinatalist, like, what percent of the population wants to make housing less expensive?
I'd say probably 70 percent at least. Pretty much everyone who isn't a homeowner wants that, right? So, that being the case, there is a lot of public will to attempt to solve this problem. Adding the additional 1 percent that the weirdo pronatalist movement adds to that public will Is going to make a trivial move and actually getting housing policy passed.
Okay. Not that it shouldn't be passed for like public good reasons, but we just aren't going to matter. We should be looking at the angles of this problem that are unique to the pronatalist movement and that can [00:41:00] solve it without moving glaciers. Do you need to change a diaper?
Simone Collins: No, she's just like slowly passing out and getting wiggly, but trying to get a little more comfortable.
We're good.
Malcolm Collins: But anyway so that's why I don't think it's housing because we can study that. I mean, you see that it's not that big an issue and I'm sorry that it's not. It would be convenient if we could tie it to something so easy as housing. But I think it's primarily an unreplicable change that happened in terms of the decrease in maternal deaths.
The change in perspective on reality that were caused by the war and the purpose of an individual's life that were caused by proximity to the war. And I think that we as a movement need to push for that as well, while also understanding that things like housing do matter, but they matter because, they matter because, We have the social expectations that you need a house before you get married, and that's just not true cross culturally, [00:42:00] and it's not true in most of history.
It's something that was actually caused by this housing boom. So, to read this again, 93 percent of married 25 year olds in the U. S. had 1940s, while only 44 percent of the non marrieds did. It basically meant as soon as you got a house, you would get married. You only had a 5 percent chance of not getting married if you got a house.
Simone Collins: Well, or when you got married, you also got a house.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. But this is, this was not true historically in America. So, so just to understand how much it was not true historically in America in 1940s, less than 30 percent of American men over the age of 18 were homeowners, less than 30 percent before that.
So this cultural shift was a toxic pill. One of the big toxic pills, the other has been the focus on the self that we saw before this period. And we've seen re increase after this period.
And so only,
Simone Collins: yeah, [00:43:00] almost a recontextualization of identity that before people used to see themselves as their family, their community, their clan.
And then it started to become atomized. I am me, this, you know, the second son of this family who's interested in this thing and not so much identified with it. everyone else, right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, not, not identified with the future. Well, I don't, I also think the future was just on everyone's mind at this period.
What happens next? And, and I think that futurism is intrinsic to any non toxic form of frenatalism because you're doing all of this for the future.
This drill will open a hole in the universe, and that whole will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow! My drill is the drill that creates [00:44:00] the
Malcolm Collins: I love you to decimone. Uh, Any final thoughts?
Simone Collins: No, this is really interesting. I'm glad that you uh, Are following Phoebe's work. I agree with
Malcolm Collins: my theory on this by the way, or do you agree with hers? Like, well, where do you come down on this?
Simone Collins: I come down on, you know, both of you being right, but housing policy, not being the boon that people think it will be, not just for the reasons you said, but because actually solving housing policy from a policy perspective is a lot harder than you would think.
Like if you declared a dictator to rule your country, you know, area, it would be easy, but because there are a bunch of NIMBY people and because you know, the way that, that government actually works saying, Oh, just solve housing is not, it's not that much more practical than, Oh, just give everyone 500, 000 to have more children.
You know, that kind of thing.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I also think that many people, even in their own [00:45:00] lives, they are unwilling to think outside of the cultural box that they were placed in. Everybody always asks me, they're like, Malcolm, why did you go to St. Andrews? Like, why did you go to an undergraduate school in the UK?
And it was, well, I, I drew a list of all of the colleges that I was thinking about applying to. And then I said, which ones may I have not put on this list because of like, Whatever blinders I might be wearing and not realize I'm wearing and then I was like, ah, yes one's outside the United States So I started putting together charts of all of the best schools outside the United States and that's how I ended up there and then you know when I was applying for jobs, it was very much the same way or you know, even when we were looking for work, we were like at one point we sent emails to a bunch of bed and breakfast owners like after I graduated from Stanford business school offering to help them run and grow their operations.
If we could live for free and in the areas like a recent say, nobody else is thinking like that, but I just wanted like the cozy lifestyle. Right? And I, I, I think for a lot of people. It's like, well, they're like, well, it's too expensive to buy a [00:46:00] house here. And my parents won't let me have kids in my house.
Right. And then of course, you know what I'd say, I'd say, well, why don't you move to another country then? And they're like, well, I don't want to think about that. Like, that's basically the answer, right? It's like, if your family's not going to be supportive in you doing the most important thing you can do as a human being, then you need to break the rules.
You need to do something that no one else has considered yet.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, that's difficult. And I think one of the core elements of prenatalism when it comes to the, you know, importance of culture is by Making pronatalism a no brainer by bringing back having kids in a family to the evoked set of someone's default life plans.
The problem is that our default settings have switched from have kids to not have kids or only have one kid.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. I love you, Simone.
Simone Collins: Love you too. Gorgeous. All right. [00:47:00] Shall I send you my, oh my God, we're going to.
Malcolm Collins: I just love so much being married to you. This is such a reward for me.
Simone Collins: It really gets me through like, everything. I, you know, there's nothing saying You make
Malcolm Collins: it sustainable, you make it fun. I'll read, to put as an outro to one of the pieces, this crazy thing I saw in one of the anti natal groups I'm subscribed to on Facebook that I just love.
Watching my enemies fight amongst themselves. It feels like, you know, it's not only are you on the good guy side, but the bad guy side makes themselves miserable with their own lives, like fighting in Lord of the Rings or something when they're in the Orc camp. And, you know, that's what it feels like whenever I enter like ultra woke face spaces, they're all fighting amongst each other and like live these nihilistic lives.
Why [00:48:00] can't that's the manhole. I'll bail at the flank.
Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys.
Malcolm Collins: But anyway, this mean that went viral on one of these save the earth, reduce child birth that was this group.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And the post says, if you're 20 to 5 to 30 and your main circle isn't frequently discussing nihilism, human consciousness, morality, generational trauma, and the intractable pain of human existence, and is instead discussing cribs, diapers, and prenatal vitamins.
Then it's time to elevate your circle. This gets a Facebook post that has over 600 upvotes. And you know, you're reading this thing that everyone's like, Oh, I feel so seen in this. And I'm looking, I'm looking at this and I'm like, what [00:49:00] you wait, you want people to be less satisfied with their lives.
Like you think that's an upgrade? Like what tipsy topsy world do you live in? Yeah.
Simone Collins: And when I first read that, I thought it was the other way. My reading comprehension near the end of the day just plummets because I get so tired and I read. Like, Oh, well, if you're, if you're talking about, you know, nihilism and intellectual stuff and not baby stuff, you should be elevating your circle.
That's what I thought.
Malcolm Collins: That's a broken for, but what I also find interesting is the guy who this is attributed to here. I went to his page, the wealth dad, cause they had reshared this and then it went viral. I think he might've been making fun of them. Because he has two kids and a third on the way and he was talking about how great his wife was for deciding to not redecorate their house in one of his posts when I was trying to find where he had said this well, he, what he said is I'm glad my wife is not saving money and not redecorating the house so we can put more money for our third [00:50:00] kid.
And I'm like, okay, he pretty obviously doesn't think like this. So I think he posted this as a joke and the, and the anti natalist took it seriously. Whoops. Anyway You
Simone Collins: know, I think that's actually a genre now, which is that jokes or parody created by one political side become appropriated by the other side.
And in sort of unironic, like sometimes it's ironic, sometimes it's unironic and it's just. Like, yeah. And, and it, it happens, it goes in both directions, you know, like when, um, I think like four chan tried to, to make it so that peace signs or okay signs or something were like supposed to be a sign of white pride and then like actual white pride groups were like, this is perfect.
Why did I think of this? Oh my God. Just adopted it. And I, I think that is, is happening in, in both directions and it's wonderful. It's wonderful that it happens.
Malcolm Collins: All right. So, I will get started here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the complex and controversial topic of transgender identity, its potential links to mental health issues, and its societal impact. This video offers a nuanced examination of the trans phenomenon, touching on social contagion theories, the relationship between high IQ and gender dysphoria, and the potential risks and benefits of transitioning. Key points covered: The correlation between high IQ and transgender identity Theories on social contagion and the spread of trans ideology The impact of transitioning on mental health and suicide rates The role of autism in gender dysphoria Critiques of current approaches to treating gender-questioning individuals The potential exploitation of trans identities by bad actors The impact on lesbian and gay communities The political implications of the trans movement This video presents a critical analysis of current research and societal trends surrounding transgender issues. It challenges viewers to consider multiple perspectives on this sensitive topic. Note that this discussion contains mature themes and controversial viewpoints.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] What if this memetic structure which encourages transition instead of being something that is intrinsically toxic is actually a social technology that evolved to treat the increased nihilism and bupacidality caused by the urban monoculture.
Simone Collins: I like that
Malcolm Collins: as a premise spicy. So how could it do this? When you transition, you are basically abandoning an identity, your current identity, and then building a new one.
Simone Collins: You're literally killing it. Actually. For example, dead naming people is dead naming them that person is dead to them
Malcolm Collins: What is most disturbing is that after a year on blockers, a significant increase was found in the first item.
Quote, I deliberately try to hurt or kill self, end quote. This is in the youth survey questionnaire. So it was increasing. Puberty blockers increased even by Travis stocks own, as pro trans as you can get. They just didn't want to [00:01:00] publish this increases. Do
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone! I'm excited to be spitting some information and new theories with you that I have had recently today. Today, we are going to go back into the trans rabbit hole. We are going to be discussing a new framing I heard for gender transition that makes me dramatically more pro gender transition than I ever have been historically, and the way that gender transition is played out in mainstream society which is really interesting, which I think is different than just talking about trans issues.
As I've said before in the show I think that there's the historic trans movement. And now there's the new trans movement, which contains some elements that are more like a religion than like a traditional gender ideology movement. Now the second thing I wanted to talk about, which I find really interesting is a recent Emil Kierkegaard, I know, [00:02:00] thought criminal piece that was talking about something that everyone basically knows, but I thought he did a pretty good job of summarizing it and laying out the stats again, which is that trans people are much more likely to be high IQ than other individuals.
Simone Collins: And this isn't
Malcolm Collins: like a small thing. In fact, the difference between trans people and the general population is higher than the difference between Ashkenazi Jews in the general population.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: About a standard deviation, higher IQ than the general population. That
Simone Collins: doesn't surprise me because you're looking at a very small, very unique and very differentiated population.
And Ashkenazi Jews are not that different.
Malcolm Collins: What are you talking about? You've heard of trans people? Compare to trans people. For example, gay people have a lower IQ on average than men. No. Really? Yes. Yes. No. This group is really unique. Wow. And they checked. It's not explained by anything else.
It's not that they're, disproportionately birthed male or female, it's not that they're, their age. It's not that [00:03:00] they're. They don't have a different,
Simone Collins: do they have a different gender? I feel like there's pretty much every background, culturally, religiously, ethnically. No, but they controlled for that in this study.
They did. Oh, okay. So even if
Malcolm Collins: it's true That doesn't matter to this answer. It's just something disproportionately now, this is actually really interesting if what we are seeing in the modern trans movement is a disorder. So one of the things I say about transness is it would make sense. If human brains are gender differentiated to some extent, like that seems obvious that sometimes this gender differentiation would get messed up in like a systemic way.
Like intersex people exist, stuff like that. Like why wouldn't that happen in the brain? But if that was what was causing the modern trans movement, usually when somebody has a major Deformity, basically, we'll say it's some sort of like psychiatric condition or deformity like this. They are in a lower IQ group which just makes sense.
When you have one weird mutation in the way somebody's developing, you're likely to have other weird mutations. You're likely to just have a higher genetic [00:04:00] load. And the Trans status is not having that is really interesting. In fact, there's only two other conditions that fall into that. One is autism.
Simone Collins: It must be schizophrenia, right?
Malcolm Collins: No, schizophrenia is not associated with higher IQ. The other is anorexia.
Simone Collins: No.
Malcolm Collins: All right. I've got a two for here. This gets really interesting. And there's a high correlation with transness and autism. So I suspect that this is what's actually booing the IQ.
Simone Collins: Body dysmorphia. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah yeah, so I, I think it's just that they're drawing disproportionately from the autistic community, and I'll explain and I think it's part of the memetic structure only works in higher IQ people, and I'll explain what I mean by this in just a second
oh yeah that anorexia is interesting in that the studies that have looked at it it's pretty different from a lot of other disorders. It appears a lot more like a multiple personality disorder in that it appears to be culturally transmitted to an extent. A great example of this is it was pretty unheard of in Japan until they, like [00:05:00] 1970s when they really began to consume Western media and then they had an explosion of it.
And so one thing could be is that when something is culturally transmitted, it is more likely to appeal to high IQ populations, but also think about it this way. If you look at autistic people, they develop special interests slash obsessions. And some, there was actually a study done on de transitioners where a lot of them said that transitioning was their special interest.
They didn't realize it at the time, but it was one of their sort of autistic special interests. And
Simone Collins: I think you're missing also a major filtering. thing here too, which is the, a level of conscientiousness, which correlates with IQ, if memory serves, that goes into being both anorexic and a transitioner and some of these other weird things is that the amount of self control you need to have to be successfully anorexic and to successfully transition.
Malcolm Collins: Point is it's a differentiator that requires higher self control instead of lower self control, [00:06:00] which is most, psychological illnesses you're going to have but I'm going a spicy take here. So as you remember when I was younger, I would do a lot of studying how brainwashing works and building I'd look at different sequences of words and I would mass AB test them in online environments to find the perfect way to get women to sleep with me.
For dating. That's a strong interest to me. I was very interested in how, people, how they get them to transform their identity and how I could utilize those techniques. And I will admit I was not a great person at the time to get my immediate needs met. I just then reached a point where I saturated those needs and then was able to think clearly and realized that I never should have wanted those needs in the first place.
In that a life. Built in pursuit of, sexual conquest is not a life that is ever going to be fulfilling to anyone. I don't believe any of these people who pretend that they're fulfilled by this art. I think they're deeply sad [00:07:00] people. But, one of the techniques that I learned, and this isn't brainwashing, it's more like a logical structure, like a memetic structure.
which was very effective at getting people to sleep with me. But anyway these techniques that I was using they were often like a mimetic structure and they did not work very well on people of medium to low IQ.
I, I really struggled with it, and people can be like, that's surprising, you think that they would be like The
Simone Collins: gullible dumb people who would, The gullible dumb people, Yes, yeah. But that's not
Malcolm Collins: true logical structures, if what you're doing is like implanting a memetic machine, Logical structures only work
Simone Collins: on logical people, and fewer people are logical than one might like to conclude.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they basically break it down when you put it in their head. So i'll give you an example of one of these structures so people can understand broadly how like a memetic machine works
Simone Collins: Okay
Malcolm Collins: so this is a very simple one that I used to get someone to sleep with me But somebody can understand you might have a more complex self replicating structure Which is I think what part of [00:08:00] the modern trans movement is but just for the sleep with me structure Okay, you know starts with a question like you don't find me unattractive, right?
And very few people are going to, if you're broadly trying to say, I think you're attractive. And I'm like and you think like happiness and positive emotional subsets are like an intrinsically good thing. Like you want more pleasure and happiness in the world. And they're like, yeah.
And I'm like and because you find me good looking, it would make you feel good to hook up with me and it would make me feel good to hook up with you. Therefore, what is your argument against hooking up with me? And what I am setting up there that is is a pillar system. So people might not see what I'm doing.
I actually want them to give me an answer there, right? Because then they have established their logical pillars as to why they're not open to me hooking up. And then you just get to attack their remaining pillars. And then you knock over the pillars and you've got the sale. But people can see that's a very simple, logical set.
Actually, this might [00:09:00] be why when I began building like deeper philosophy outside of just I want to win these status games I was born into in the society around me, I had such a disrespect of systems based around pleasure because I saw how I had been able to use those systems to so medically hack people.
Yeah. So there's two things you probably notice about this logical structure argument, right? Two, it's gonna, one, it's gonna be less effective on, um, less intelligent people. And two, it's actually going to be much more effective on more autistic leaning people.
Simone Collins: I wouldn't work on me because I don't really care about pleasure or happiness.
No, you
Malcolm Collins: never did, but a lot of people do. They have, I'd say the vast majority of people, we've talked about in our levels of thinking video or these general utilitarians, and they do. And it's very hard for generally utilitarian to argue against that argument once they've set themselves in that position.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And And I think that's what the, you can think of this larger trans memetic structure as, it's a self replicating memetic structure [00:10:00] that needs a fairly high competence substrate. to grow with it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And when a
Malcolm Collins: substrate is lower competence, it begins to break it down because it's fairly heavy.
I would say like it's a fairly sophisticated internally reinforcing memetic subset. So this is one thing, but I don't want to talk about the boobicide. Cause we can't talk about it in any other terms given, um, YouTube's restrictions and everything like that. But as people know let's be clear
Simone Collins: that we're not talking about mastectomies here.
Malcolm Collins: No, I'm talking about the other word that starts with an S that we cannot talk about. Yes.
Transness relates to boobicide in a couple really weird ways and I began to think about these you see this huge portion of increased boobicidality in, in, in leading up to transition for a lot of people. And some studies have argued against this.
I think it's probably true. [00:11:00] but you also see an increased risk of boobicide in the general population now that has never been seen
Simone Collins: before.
Malcolm Collins: And so I'm going to post some stats on screen here and it was like okay, so you've got trans individuals in this sample
boobicidal ideation. You're looking at 92 percent had it.
And 45 percent had an attempt in the sample.
Not trans you had 70 percent had it. And 22 percent had an attempt non binary 89 percent had it and 35 percent had an attempt. Um, you're just seeing like incredibly high rates.
Simone Collins: I wonder what these numbers look like for anorexics. Is that being a sort of control pop?
Just, this
Malcolm Collins: specific study was from the Stonewall school support, 2017. A lot of critics have attacked it. But let's just pretend that these numbers are true because we do know that there is an explosion in bupacidality among young people right now.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: What if transition instead of being or this memetic structure which [00:12:00] encourages transition instead of being something that is intrinsically toxic is actually a social technology that evolved to treat the increased nihilism and bupacidality caused by the urban monoculture.
Simone Collins: I like that
Malcolm Collins: as a premise spicy. So how could it do this? When you transition, you are basically abandoning an identity, your current identity, and then building a new one.
Simone Collins: You're literally killing it. Actually. For example, dead naming people is dead naming them that person is dead to them.
You are. Like a phoenix completely immolating and rising from the ashes is this new, beautiful identity.
Malcolm Collins: So isn't that fascinating? That's what we're actually seeing here. And something that would encourage this belief is that if you look cross culturally, the concept of transness that you see with the native American communities is actually very [00:13:00] interesting because it doesn't look like the concept of transness we have within our own culture.
Simone Collins: Are you talking about two spirit people?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was in two spirit people and Fafafine people, which is in Samoa, you have a similar concept. So in these groups, while they have been adopted as a type of trans by the current trans community they don't actually function like trans people. They're more like a recognition of gay people as a separate gender.
So if I was going to word this differently these would be like, if you were recognized as for example as a young man, you are allowed to take part in female gender norms and sleep with straight men or otherwise categorized by society as heterosexual men, but would likely in real life. Like in our society, not in real life in Western culture, be categorized as gay pitchers.
Now it's also important to understand that gay pitchers historically were considered straight. If you look at like ancient Greece, if you look at even in medieval [00:14:00] Europe men who were the tops in gay relationships were often considered straight or straight adjacent. The thing you really weren't supposed to be as the bottom.
Simone Collins: Wait, I've not heard pitchers before. So what's the other side of this batterers
Malcolm Collins: and
Simone Collins: Catchers. Okay. Thank you. Carry on.
Malcolm Collins: So it was really interesting about FFA. Is they basically live their lives and two spirits, very similar to the way we would say an effete gay man lives their lives and they're happy.
And they're not having these higher rates of boobicide that you're seeing in other groups uh, that we're seeing in the West. Um, Indicates that there's something different going on here with this community.
And
Simone Collins: You mean totally unmoored from mainstream developed societal concepts around transness?
Totally unmoored
Malcolm Collins: from our biologies.
Simone Collins: Ah, okay.
Malcolm Collins: So what would be the case, as I'm saying here, is that if we didn't have this trans identity, many of the people who are transitioning would just be considered butch lesbians or very ethite gay men. [00:15:00] And, one of the studies that was done this year that is worth mentioning, as you also see this in the West, there was a study done in 2003, great study, I'll give the name and the edits here.
We thinking of the 20, 24 study development of gender, non contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood.
Malcolm Collins: 90 percent of, when you're talking about 11 year olds who identify with a different gender at that age, identify with their birth gender by the time that they are 23. And the majority, and a lot of them are disproportionately within this group, they were just gay. That's basically what we find out.
This is a common thing here, but I want to go deeper here because I looked at some other reports.
So there was another report and I'll put it on, on, on screen here. Which shows something really interesting. So you might've noticed in the other group is boobacidality among non binary individuals was also really high.
Yeah, that surprised me. But it's not just not binary, it's also bisexuals. So I'm gonna put a, another graph on the screen here and you don't need to see it to know, but [00:16:00] the female to male BIC side rate is high, but not particularly higher than the bisexual girl BIC side rate,
Simone Collins: right?
Malcolm Collins: So what if what we're seeing here is people who are gender confused are much more likely to be pulled in. to these ideas, right? And then we're going to be like who gets gender confused? Who gets pulled into these ideas? And now we need to talk about a whole other weird thing about bubicidality. In the news, you're not supposed to talk about bubicidality. Who like the
World Health Organization has prohibitions on talking about
Simone Collins: bubicidality. Because there is a bit of a social contagion with it, right? It's not a
Malcolm Collins: bit of a social contagion. It's
Simone Collins: a
Malcolm Collins: very serious social contagion.
But yeah, no, you have a very big risk of contagion. When people hear about bubicidality, they're much more likely to think about bubicidality. Which is why in all other parts of psychology, there would be like, obviously you should never tell a patient, if you have X condition, you're much [00:17:00] more likely to be bubicidal.
Because it makes them much more likely to be bubicidal.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Malcolm Collins: And then we can say, oh, come on, that can't have anything to do with what's going on here. Except. There are two groups that are uniquely susceptible to suggestibility when it comes to boobacidality. They are teenagers and autists. Which are also groups that are hugely over represented within the trans movement.
To get an idea, 72 percent of autistic adults scored above the psychiatric cutoff for boobacide risk, compared to 33 percent of the general population. So you basically have this, both cause that you can implant in somebody's rage, which is bubicidal ideation, and then a solution as one memetic package, which is very good at spreading in our society, but that historically, you would never tell people this reminds me of the [00:18:00] South Park episode where Cartman Rob Reiner is trying to sacrifice Cartman to prove to everyone how serious his movement is.
And I feel like with many of the young people, if you're a trained psychologist, you need to know that you are through bringing these kids into a session being like, oh, if you don't do this, you're going to commit boobicides. That you're going to dramatically increase the number of young people in this cohort boobiciding.
And yet they don't seem to care. even when there is a lot of data showing that it may not even be higher within this cohort. And so we're going to get to that in a second. But it almost certainly is higher now. Just everything we understand about how boobicide works would say, if these people are going to an authority figure and this authority figure is telling you, this is the one solution to not boobicide, that it's going to become the one solution to not boobicide, especially if you're autistic.
Wow. Yeah.
Hell do you think you're doing? This is the girls bathroom! Alright, I need to tell you something, I'm trans ginger. [00:19:00] What?! Did you notice the bow? It's okay Red I can take a s**t here.
I'm a dumb chick, too. You are not transgender, Eric. You don't even know what that means. Yeah, huh, it means I live a life of torture and confusion because society sees me as a boy but I'm really a girl.
Trust me, you don't want this hot potato. But this isn't a hurting, confused child we're talking about. This is Eric Cartman. Nobody else is gonna know that. You better just give him what he wants. All you gotta do is just read the words on the teleprompter here. Heh, okay. Let's see how the
Transphobes. deal with this.
You know, some people say there's no proof that
Not transitioning children. kills. I guess I'm the proof. By the time you see this commercial, I'll be dead.
Dead? That was fantastic! , what does that mean, I'll be dead? That was very good, Eric. Here, eat this cupcake. It has sprinkles. Do you know what a hero is?
A hero is somebody who [00:20:00] sacrifices himself for the good of others. You can be a hero, Eric. . Jesus Christ!
Simone Collins: So we could
Malcolm Collins: see it as a quote unquote solution to the increased nihilism of our society, right? Yeah,
Simone Collins: or you could, you're insinuating too, though, that they're creating the problem and then presenting a solution.
Malcolm Collins: But that's the problem as well, is that it's not really a solution because they're also creating the problem.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: Um, And, and they might be making the problem worse. So if you look at some of these other studies that I've been giving you, they'll have like small cohorts, like 13 people or something that's actually in the boobicide group.
Simone Collins: This is what
Malcolm Collins: I call like the PACE study, but there's some longer and another thing that the trans community does, a lot of trans individuals might not know that they do this, is when they talk about transitioning, lowering the risk of boobicidality.
They're often using different studies. So to establish the risk, they'll use a study that was specifically pulling from like a concerned population. And so the risk will be really high. That's why it was really high in the [00:21:00] straight population was in that study as well. And they were establishing the lowered rates, they'll then pull from a separate study that was pulling individuals in a totally different way.
When you look at longitudinal studies, you end up with studies like this one called the long term follow up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment study cohort study in Sweden. So to quote here, the overall mortality for sex reassignment persons was higher during follow up than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from bubicide.
Sex reassignment persons also had an increased risk in bubicide attempts and psychiatric inpatient rate of care. So it showed that they had a 19 X higher rate than the control group. So it made them. When you're looking longitudinally, it basically makes everything astronomically worse. Okay, so let's look at a different study here.
The National Center for Transgender Equality Preventing Transgender Bubicide is the name of this study. [00:22:00] So in this study, it was looking at the Travestock board of directors and unpublished reports. So people know the whole Travestock thing. They were this very pro trans organization. And so there was a reason they didn't publish this report, but they had it when people were going through their files after they were shut down for abuse.
Um, and it says, quote, only one change was positive according to their parents. The young people experienced, this is for people who underwent puberty blockers. Only one change was positive. According to their parents, the young people experienced less internalizing behavioral problems as registered by the Child Behavioral Checklist.
That was a, less internalizing behavioral problems. There were three negative changes. Natal girls showed a significant increase in behavioral and emotional problems, according to their parents. Also from the Child Behavioral. Oh,
Simone Collins: That's the testosterone for you.
Malcolm Collins: Of course, right? So I don't even really take that.
Yeah, that doesn't count. One dimension of health related to quality of life scale completed by parents showed a significant decrease. [00:23:00] And keep in mind, these are affirming parents, generally, if their kids are at Travistock. For sure. A decrease in physical well being of their child. What is most disturbing is that after a year on blockers, a significant increase was found in the first item.
Quote, I deliberately try to hurt or kill self, end quote. This is in the youth survey questionnaire. So it was increasing. Puberty blockers increased even by Travis stocks own, as pro trans as you can get. They just didn't want to publish this increases. Do
Simone Collins: you think that's because in these cases, people were transitioning and then discovering that.
It didn't miraculously cure their depression, anxiety, or body dysmorphia?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they talk about this a lot in the community. You first get this feeling of euphoria when you're on this because you feel like things are changing, everything's getting fixed, and then Following the euphoria, you typically get in a really high increased risk of bupocidality because you begin to doubt.
But now you've also othered yourselves and made a lot of big claims, causing cognitive [00:24:00] dissonance. Yeah. And this isn't it, so there was a large U. S. survey in 2009 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Tax Survey. force. And the results were published in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care.
And it showed those who have medically transitioned 45 percent and surgically transitioned 43 percent have higher rates of attempted boobicide than those who have not, 34 and 39 respectively. Across the board, we're seeing that this doesn't actually fix it. It's more like a temporary fix.
For bubicidal ideation that makes the problem worse over time.
Simone Collins: Here's what I might argue. Going back to the earlier point that transitioning can feel like a rebirth following a death, right? That maybe you and I've talked about before that the impact of completely changing your context, how if you have an addiction or some other emotional problem, if you.
[00:25:00] Move to Japan to quit smoking or you completely change the cast of characters around you, your costume and your set. Yes, you can become a different character. And yes, you can break out a lot of, out of a lot of really harmful or nonproductive mental loops. And I think maybe the problem here is transition can absolutely facilitate that by allowing you to break down and then create a new identity.
The problem is a lot of these kids, especially, And I think maybe we're looking at the impact of this happening with youth gender transition versus adult transition is these kids are still stuck with their parents. They're still stuck going to school. They're able to try to start the process, but really it's an aborted death and rebirth.
Like they've singed the phoenix. But the phoenix has not become engulfed in flames and turned into ashes, right? The phoenix is now just burnt. And now you have a burnt phoenix, right? And they haven't been reborn. They haven't been able to start anew. So the problem is they're not quite born yet.
I'm
Malcolm Collins: gonna challenge you here. I think it's probably pretty effective. For a short term, feeling like a different person and reestablishing the narratives with which you're [00:26:00] engaging with reality, I think it is probably very effective.
The problem is the new narratives that they're building, if you look at our levels of thought are athetic moral systems based around gender identity which IE when they're choosing an action, what to wear, what to do, et cetera the question that they're thinking is, does this align with X gender expression?
Simone Collins: And the
Malcolm Collins: gender expression may be nuanced, but they confuse. gender identity with morality, right?
Instead of, and I think that this is the problem. I think most people with any sort of sophisticated moral framework, unfortunately, and this is the thing, like sophisticated for moral frameworks do not correlate really strongly with high IQ. You need to be above a certain IQ to have one. But if you look at something like my Stanford reunion, remember, I mentioned that like a lot of people there were just living lives to get the money counter as high as possible,
Simone Collins: status optimizers or achieve money
Malcolm Collins: optimizers.
That's like the least sophisticated moral framework a human can [00:27:00] have. And yet these people are like objectively some of the smartest humans of our generation. And I know this is someone who interacts with a lot of people. Like these are smart people, some of them smarter than myself. But that doesn't mean that they are.
philosophically sophisticated that they haven't seen. Why do I exist? It's just okay. I'm not optimized money. So I'm not saying that, uh, so being extra smart does not protect you, but it can make you susceptible if you are not intently engaging with your own philosophy on these sort of self replicating moral.
Frameworks,
Simone Collins: right? The
Malcolm Collins: problem that you're going to deal with is most sophisticated moral frameworks would see gender identity is just not particularly important because most sophisticated moral frameworks do not find human emotion like optimizing for self comfort or positive emotional states in oneself as a thing of moral value.
Simone Collins: Or as aesthetic presentation is something of great moral value. Yeah, it doesn't matter that much, right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They're just like, what, why does it [00:28:00] matter? If I can do this to become slightly more efficient than I'll do it, it's probably not going to make me more efficient. And this also, when you look at the trans maxing community, you can see it was an it, like the.
The, these are in cells who are like, look, I just can't make it in life as a guy, so I'll be a woman because life is easier for women. They're like being a woman is like living life in tutorial mode. Okay, your ceiling is lower, but I was never going to get near the ceiling either. Um, and these individuals for them, what is it?
But the in cell alternative to boobicide, right? Okay, game over. I'm starting again. Yeah. Within this lifetime. The other really interesting thing to consider here is that trans men. So women who transition they often look about 10 to 20 years younger when they transition. So it's also like they're being reborn at a younger age.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Okay. Yes. They look more like a boy, an adolescent male rather than a man.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Which [00:29:00] is really interesting within all of this. Yeah. And they
Simone Collins: start and a younger start. That's very interesting. Another
Malcolm Collins: really interesting thing. Cause I've been listening to a lot of detransition videos recently.
Another really interesting phenomenon in detransition is a talk about how when they D transition it was like the transition just encapsulated almost the way like a foreign body in your body can get encapsulated by a little piece of skin, like a piece of glass or something like that.
Like inside your, not skin, but like tissue that's meant to protect your body from it.
Simone Collins: Kind of like how clams make pearls.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, they encapsulated all of this negative stuff. about their previous identity that then explodes when they detransition again and they need to deal with it.
Like nothing was ever really dealt with. It was just encapsulated and set aside and it's waiting there for them. Like a
Simone Collins: cyst in their body that's going to burst.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is sad. And so people can say, why do we look at all this? I think at [00:30:00] least Simone would have definitely transitioned. So I've got to look at my daughter's likely transitioning.
And I need to think of how do I build a system? Where, and I'm not saying I'm, transitioning. I just want to make sure daughters
Simone Collins: and not our sons would transition or feel gender dysmorphia in some way.
Malcolm Collins: I think that women and men transitioning now, if you look at the deleterious type of transitioning, they're doing it for different reasons and it plays to different things.
Simone Collins: And yeah, I guess the fact that I was an anorexic autistic, Adolescent probably doesn't work well in terms of genetic tendencies. Plus, I think our sons are so hyper masculine already that it would be weird. I don't think
Malcolm Collins: that really, a lot of people who transition actually do really fit their gender subtype before they do.
I think a lot of people so there's two groups that I think are deleterious transitioning groups. One is the women who feel love bombed and social pressured and everything like that. And that's the group I think our daughters might fall into because it's very good against very intelligent, autistic women.
Or it's very good at not [00:31:00] against, but like at convincing them when they're not actually trans individuals. Keep in mind, I said, I do believe that actual trans individuals exist. But with men, I think that there's another group that's really exploded within the trans movement. And these are what historically, like when I was really involved with the GSA and stuff like this, we saw some of these individuals and we just shamed them to no heaven because everybody knew what was up.
They were cis guys who were pretending to be trans to harass lesbian women. Um, And everybody knew what they were up to. Like they didn't try to transition really. They just use the identity to get into lesbian spaces or to get into other. And people can be like, come on, nobody's doing this really. And I'm like, Okay.
Or nobody was power is doing this really. Look up like
Alok Vaid Memon, right?
I recently saw, so if I keep thinking this person must be like a minority player in the gender identity movement. Is
Simone Collins: this someone's name?
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Alok Vaid [00:32:00] Memon. So recently a friend randomly, like a Facebook friend shared a video of his and was like, wow, I think he's one of the like deepest or she, or I don't know.
I think he's. They are one of the most and I do care about correctly gendering people, by the way. People should see this in this. I do care about it because they've gone through a lot of their culture. I don't want to hurt
Simone Collins: them.
Malcolm Collins: I don't want them to force people who aren't in that group. To if a Christian doesn't want to do it whatever, don't do it.
And I want the Christian to have the right to not do it. But I'm going to do it because I just don't want to hurt people's feelings. That's my culture. If I don't have a strong reason to hurt someone's feelings, I shouldn't be hurting their feelings. But anyway the, this individual on my Facebook, while I was being shared as like a good thinker in the space, And I thought that maybe they had been like popular at one point, but weren't still popular.
So the thing that they're famous for saying is quote, these days, the narrative is that freaky transgender people will come into your bathrooms and abuse innocent little [00:33:00] girls. There are no fairy tales and no princesses here. Little girls are also queer. Trans, kinky, deviant, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous, and peculiar.
Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think this is, I think obviously to me, this reminds me of
I should have never shoved all those poor animals up my ass! Just do good! God, you people get it? I'm trying this kind of behavior should not be acceptable from a teacher! Yeah, Jesus Christ! But the museum tells us to
be tolerant! Tolerant, but not tolerant! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn't mean you have to approve of it. Tolerate means you're just putting up with it. You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane, or you tolerate a bad cold.
It can still piss you off, Jesus tap dancing Christ! He's right. Our boys didn't hate homosexuals, they just hated the way this a*****e was acting.
And [00:34:00] this is a problem. You let enough a******s like this guy. I have the public stage for long enough. And people begin to start hating gay people more broadly because they begin to believe all gay people are like this, and this is uniquely a problem. Is that real normal queer people or gay people? , don't have this intense desire to parade themselves around in public doing these perverted things.
That's just a sex pass. , and so Eve you're an average person just trying to live your life. You're actually going to encounter whether it's on TV or in Netflix specials, their sex pest category, much more frequently, even if they're the minority of the community, which is why it's so important that the rest of the queer community. Absolutely demonized and villainized individuals like this and keep them from getting public stages. , very interestingly., I, after recording this episode, I found out that Alex made men. And in 20 front T4 heading Netflix comedy special. He is still being [00:35:00] put in front of the public eye. When he should be hard canceled, but there is just nothing you can do to get canceled on the left.
That, that seems to be. Unless it's being slightly right-wing in some way.
Malcolm Collins: This is a menace to the entire real LGBT community, like a real trans person who just wants to live their life does not want activists out there who aren't even trying to pass and sexualizing underage girls.
And their speeches, they, that is a menace to a real trans person who just wants to live their life because they're just born in the other body and they just want to transition and live that life.
Simone Collins: Yeah. It's like how we feel about people who say that they're pronatalists and then they talk about the great replacement theory and we're like, no whoa.
Not like I hate
Malcolm Collins: those people more than people who aren't pronatalists hate those people because they cause problems for our movement. Gay people, gay men, 45 percent of whom who are. Voted for Trump in the last election cycle by one poll, at least. I haven't found a strong argument against this.
Obviously they're not represented by this and [00:36:00] they get victimized and called out because they're part of the larger community that's allowing this. Lesbian women who are the ones being primarily victimized. You're not seeing this because you're not on the lesbian dating apps. But like lesbians reach out to each other on dating apps, like women reach out to men on dating apps.
So not much, but these individuals, like no social boundaries have realized they can use this identity for cover are extremely aggressive
Simone Collins: in
Malcolm Collins: these communities. And, keep in mind, they're larger, they're more muscular. One, I actually heard Lesbian woman and she would tell the story in two ways.
She's like a man photoshopped himself to look like a woman so that he could get me alone on a date. And she said, when people heard that they freaked out. And then I said, a trans woman photoshopped herself so that she could get me alone. And. Everyone was like, how could you even suggest that this is a problem?
And the fact that this social reality exists has allowed this group of, keep in mind when you were in high school, like the creepiest, most sexually aggressive guy who you ever saw, who had no friends and [00:37:00] otherwise everyone hated. Now he can use this identity as a cover. Of course those guys are going to do that.
Like when a lot of people are like, Oh, a guy like that wouldn't. pretend to be a trans woman just to further victimize. I think you think for a second, oh, you, oh yeah, that guy didn't care what anyone thought of him. He was just, a sex pest. And these sex pests who have taken over the trans identity, like nobody suffers more from this than gay men.
lesbian women, and real trans people. And I have a lot of sympathy for those individuals who are now being victimized because these individuals have realized sort of a social hack they could use to take over their movement.
Simone Collins: It's scary.
Malcolm Collins: And that's why I'm not afraid of our sons, because I don't think that many men are.
Who transition do it because of some sort of social contagion. I think it's because they realize that there's a social hack that they can use to their advantage. The bad kind. Now, I do think a number transitioning for real, like they're actually just born with the wrong brain. But with women, I think a lot of them are otherwise well intentioned and got [00:38:00] caught up in a social contagion.
But anyway now this might be way too spicy. We still haven't done the video with the AGAP or whatever guy. We'll eventually post that. Oh, we should.
Simone Collins: No. Yeah. I like him.
Malcolm Collins: Kind of boring interview. So it's one of the interviews I'm on the fence about. Cause he's too
Simone Collins: reasonable and people want crazy.
Malcolm Collins: I just didn't think he had a lot of new ideas to be honest. I think his core thing was shock. Um, Shock within the communities that he's engaged with, but the ideas I don't think are shocking to our audience. So I guess we'll see. A lot of them have heard these ideas before. But anyway, I absolutely love you.
Oh, and by the way, I should know for people who again might be like, Oh, this allot guy you might've seen him randomly among your friend group, but he's not popular. No by queer magazine, he was rated one of the top a hundred queer people of the year. Like he is, you absolutely a major influencer in the movement.
And I think that the way the youth movement used to be, it just needs to learn to have a little bit of criticality around sex pest men using this identity to exploit [00:39:00] women. Obviously, sex pests would do that. Like, why would anyone think differently? But they are always overly aggressive and cross boundaries and don't have any social sense and don't care what other people think of them.
If you give them a memetic hack of course it's going to spread within that community. And I do not think that they make up the majority. of the trans community at all today. But I will say that if you are a lesbian woman, that's the majority of interaction you're having with the trans community because they're aggressive.
They are out there interacting with people. They are not trying to just live their lives. And so there needs to be a bit of, I think, an inquisition within the LGBT community if the community, wants, I actually think that's like the number one thing that the LGBT community can do is find the ill actors within their community.
Because I don't think it's good if you allow outside groups to do that, which right now is what's being forced is, they're pushing it, but I've seen increasingly like very reasonable trans people recently. I might post on the screen here.
That is basically dedicated to doing this, it's a trans guy who's dedicated to doing this and I really appreciate his efforts.
To calling
Simone Collins: out people who [00:40:00] seem to be in the movement for exploitative reasons? Yeah. So there is a backlash forming. People are pushing back. Let's say, I would say that a lot of lesbians, maybe unfairly branded as TERFs have been fighting back for a while. I don't know if this is necessarily new.
They
Malcolm Collins: have, they've been getting beaten up in bars and then, it's so sad because I've heard these things on like the lesbian subreddit, where one woman was like, this is when I realized that the community had turned against me. Is when A couple trans women overheard another lesbian woman say that she didn't want to, like she wasn't even talking to them, that she didn't want to date trans women and they beat her up.
And that this was being cheered as like a positive thing in the lesbian subreddit. And then she realized, oh, everyone in this Reddit thread basically still is a sexually aggressive cis man pretending to be a lesbian, because who else, even a real trans person wouldn't be cheering that, right?
The only people who would be cheering that are sexually aggressive cis men pretending to be lesbians.
Simone Collins: Or [00:41:00] people who are just performatively. woke in a way where no matter what, if someone meets a certain classification, you have to be on their side. You cannot say anything in criticism of them.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And for this reason, I think that the woke movements greatest victim has been the real LGBT community.
Simone Collins: Yeah. No kidding. Like you said, they, they have been used the same way that hospitals have been used by Hamas, you just put them up like a shield. Yeah. And then use them to grow it's terrifying.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, wait, but by the way the Alok thing, just so people know how big he is, he walked for several fashion brands at New York Fashion Week including the Opening Ceremony and Studio 189 and Chromat. Oh, and Harry's in Polaroid Eyewear. Polaroid Eyewear! And he's appeared in editorials in Vogue Italy, Bust Magazine, Wussy Magazine, and Paper [00:42:00] Magazine. So I'm not talking about a fringe. Anyway. Love you to death, Simone. And I really am excited to see the LGBT community beginning to clean itself up. And recently I was asked by someone and I think right now, given what the urban monoculture is doing by promoting these sexually aggressive cis men as transgender people and then protecting them gay rights now is fundamentally a right wing issue because there's the only group that has a real sustainable plan for gay rights.
And they're the only group with a sizable mass that has a real sustainable plan for gay rights. And I, again, I have to point out Trump was the first president Ever elected in the United States who, when he was elected, supported gay marriage, Obama,
Simone Collins: Obama didn't get elected with that stance, right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
I don't think he ever like really truly held it. I think that he's actually much more conservative on gay stuff than people think. And I think Trump is much more progressive on gay stuff than people think because he, he was a New York liberal for like how many decades, of course he didn't [00:43:00] care.
And this is reflected in Trump, ensuring that in his 2024 election cycle, that marriage in the orient Z platform itself is not defined as between a man and a woman. So to those Republicans who I knew, um, you know, we'd get a few people in our comments who are like, well, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's not real marriage. And it's like, okay. Even if I agree with you on that point, it doesn't affect my marriage, that they are getting married. And even if I believe it's a sin.
That doesn't mean that my marriage is without sin. I drink, for example, that's a sin. I play video games. That's a sin.
Are you living a marriage without sin?
But you now represent even the minority. Among Republican voters. You know, you, you, you, you act like I am the extreme progressive among the Republican voters. When my position is actually normative among the Republican base. Now you are the extremists [00:44:00] who are fighting for a position that could not even win.
If the entire American electorate was just made up of Republicans.
All you are doing by getting this type of language in two bills and putting it out there for the public to hear. Is to convince the LGBT community. Of. What the left wants them to believe, but what is not true? Which is that Republicans are out to get them.
Literally you do more to hurt the party's chance of election.
And the chance of getting our legislation passed, then your average Democrat does.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you to death, Simone. And you are an amazing woman.
Simone Collins: You're perfect. I love you so much.
Malcolm Collins: And
Simone Collins: there, I've been looking forward to this all day.
Oh my! And keep I got [00:45:00] it! You got it? Yeah! Good! I got my pear! Octavian, are you going to get the corn? I got my corn! You got your big one first! Here you go, Tayden. Oh, thanks, buddy. Do you like it when food comes on a train? Yeah. I love it. Let's get in another. Washing machine is coming to you. You get that, okay?
Oh, yeah, I can't eat this. Aw. Well, then, take more. Two ones. And
I have one. I have this one for you. No! You got me. I'm so tired. Octavian, you guys have to eat it, okay? You gotta eat it. It's not the same food. Octavian, you also need to eat it, okay? [00:46:00] Oh, who's gonna get the broccoli? Um, Tayden certainly doesn't want any more food like this. Only pear. It's okay, Octavian. You take the food that you're gonna eat, okay?
You don't want food? Um, um, I want to eat broccoli! And carrots! That's for chickens and this is for me. Okay? I want my broccoli.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial political career of Kamala Harris, examining her record as a prosecutor and her potential impact as a presidential candidate. The video offers a critical look at Harris's background, from her early career moves to her current position as a frontrunner in the Democratic party.
Key topics covered:
* Harris's controversial prosecutorial record and its implications
* Her rise in politics and relationship with Willie Brown
* Analysis of Harris's authoritarian tendencies and policy positions
* The impact of her candidacy on different Democratic factions
* Comparison with other political figures and potential election outcomes
* Discussion of her public persona and communication style
This video provides a balanced yet critical examination of Kamala Harris's political career, offering insights into her potential presidency and the concerns surrounding her candidacy. Whether you're a political junkie or simply trying to understand the current political landscape, this analysis offers valuable perspectives on one of the most talked-about figures in American politics.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] in every single instance, I thought the meme ified version of the scandal was like exaggerating things, a great example to start is the accusation that Harris kept people in prison to use as cheap laborers. I thought, , what they must mean is she didn't let some people out of prison and the state probably had a policy at the same time of using the people as laborers. There is no way she went on record and said,
I, I'm supposed to release this person, but we need cheap labor right now. Now, I heard some allegations that she slept her way to her position. My assumption about these allegations was maybe she had a relationship with someone else in her department.
There's no way! There's no way! Someone who she was sleeping with is is on record saying I gave her a job because she was sleeping with me. [00:01:00] There's no way that this person had a age gap with her.
Simone Collins: Now, age gaps are considered quite hot by quite a few people.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think you'd find this one hot. Harris dated Willie Brown when she was in her 20s and he was 60. I. surely she didn't provide cover for police who fatally shot people in questionable circumstances. Okay, what about corruption? Conflict of interest matters, When you aren't the only body that can investigate them.
You don't just get to say they get to do whatever they want because they're your friend. That is wild
I will post a picture here. Oh, Emily Harris's face made up of pictures of black people. She kept in jail knowing they were innocent. She did this to. Thousands of black people and she did it to secure the endorsement of the police union to win an election.
If you wonder, [00:02:00] is this the type of person who would put me and my family in jail to win an election?
No, but genuinely, if you are worried about our democracy, like, like for people who are like, I am worried about the health of the democracy, you should be being terrified of this candidate.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: HEllo, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today.
This the writers of the America show have been doing a great job recently. Cause I'm loving these twists. Kamala Harris is something really. So for people who don't know American politics or what's going on right now, just a little recap the person running against Donald Trump, Joe Biden, it turned out in a debate that he seemed to basically be comatose.
Like he did not seem like a fully mentally functioning person. And it became very clear that. Our government is now run by the deep state. I love it. The last election cycle, deep state is a myth. Now it's, well, yes, Biden may not be able [00:03:00] to think clearly, but everything's operating fine without him. So you really should vote for him.
Shouldn't you? I
Simone Collins: feel like it's, it's more than that. It's even like, but isn't, isn't it nice that the deep state's running? I mean, like politicians who like them anyway,
Malcolm Collins: we literally nearly had an election cycle where it was Trump versus the deep state. Because obviously Biden's not running anything.
So he got a lot of pressure from Dems to drop out. Interestingly, not from Kamala. She stayed very loyal in this respect to the end saying that he shouldn't drop out and that the deep state had everything handled, basically. The right move. It was, it
Simone Collins: was very savvy on her
Malcolm Collins: part. And then he said recently, okay, I am dropping out and Kamala is the presumptive dominate.
Well, This is interesting because it wasn't what I thought would happen. In fact, I thought it was the least likely thing to happen because it seems like it's literally the only thing that could have happened [00:04:00] that was worse than Biden staying at the top of the ticket. What I suspected would happen is they would have some sort of election cycle at the convention or some sort of write in thing and they would choose another candidate.
But we need to talk about why I didn't expect it. anyone to give Kamala Harris this. Okay. Because, and, and, and in broad terms, you know, when BLM was marching on the streets, right, the human manifestation of every complaint they had Is Kamala Harris. She, she is a human manifestation of all of the complaints of the BLM movement.
Simone Collins: Well, and Malcolm is saying this because prior to becoming a Senator, prior to becoming vice president, Kamala Harris was a district attorney. And we'll be talking about her
Malcolm Collins: record in this.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And you know, a district attorney, their, their job to a great extent [00:05:00] is to to put away criminals. And that, that's not, I think
Malcolm Collins: that you're.
You have said this to me earlier today, and it's just wrong. Like you don't think that woke district attorneys exist and they do. Yeah, no, there
Simone Collins: was even one in Southern California that was so egregious and not putting away criminals and sort of just letting them out. That, you know, they ultimately were removed.
Yeah. So,
Malcolm Collins: so it's not the problem that she was a district attorney. The problem is, is she was an authoritarian district attorney, like her politics. And I think this is really interesting. And we mentioned it in a previous episode. Are the Democratic Party right now is made up of a few aligned factions, and we'll do an episode on this.
One of the factions is big business. They move from the Republican side to the Democratic side, as well as intergenerational wealth which now is like straight up. Incredibly left leaning. Another side is the urban monocultural faction. These are people who are primarily dominated by this like cult basically that exists [00:06:00] now.
And is seen in things like wokeism and DEI and stuff like that. Kamala Harris is in neither of these factions. She's in the third democratic faction, which I call the authoritarian faction, which is primarily driven by the belief. That society can be fixed by strict government control either by police forces or by military.
Which she has shown through her actions, which we'll go over.
Simone Collins: But I would say this is notable because it's otherwise very difficult to even get a picture of what Kamala Harris thinks or believes. She's kind of famous for non statement statements and also for, Demonstrating whatever is the most politically in vogue amongst Democrats at the time.
So the interesting analysis that Malcolm has done recently and what I think is going to be most interesting about this conversation is what through Kamala Harris's actions. The few times she has sort of done something, it's irrevocably like taking a stand on something. What that actually reveals about her true [00:07:00] beliefs, because it can be very hard to center in on what they are.
Malcolm Collins: And I have, well, I don't think it's hard when you look at her actions, she is completely authoritarian minded.
Simone Collins: I've looked, I know, but I've looked through the coverage of her discussion of her from both her proponents and her detractors, and there is very little discussion of her actual track record. So I'm glad you're doing well.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and this has also been interesting for me. And I think that there, before we get into this, the progressive media is making a huge fundamental misstep here. When Biden retired. And said, Kamala Harris is who I am backing. You know, you look at your Rachel Maddow's and I'll do some stuff here.
I'll, I'll call it like Kamala Harris derangement syndrome,
With President Biden voicing a strong and unequivocal endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, with Vice President Harris confirming immediately that she is running, saying, We have 107 days until election day. Together we will fight and together we will win. With no resulting ambiguity about who will be the [00:08:00] Democratic Party's nominee, the little scratchy papery sound you're hearing in the distance? That's every Democratic donor in the country writing the biggest check they have ever written in American politics.
Malcolm Collins: Where they all just went over how amazing Kamala Harris is as a candidate. This is a mistake. They should not be doing this. We actually earlier today in the episode, we'll go live later. We're doing an episode with Maxim Lott, who runs a lot of the betting odds websites.
The betting odds right here now give her a 30 percent chance. Third probability to win against Trump. Well, most other Democrats actually are like 63 or 65 percent probability to win. Yes, they don't win in the mainstream polls, but that's just because of name recognition. The betters, which are typically more accurate say that they have a dramatically higher chance of winning.
And so now we need to. Talk specifically about why she has such a low probability of winning and her actual record. Because it is the, the interesting thing about the authoritarian [00:09:00] faction of the progressive party is among the progressive elite. And we hang out with these groups and stuff like that.
It's a faction that is like politically palatable to them. The, the big business types and stuff like that. It is politically toxic to the base. The, the democratic base, like any with any numbers, hate the authoritarian side of the party. And the authoritarian side exists only because a portion of the party has basically grown up living in the bureaucratic governing system.
And their views are not built around designing to appealing to the base, but rather the mindset of somebody who's been a lifelong bureaucrat and thinks the bureaucracy knows what's best. And when I say best, well, In sort of horrifying ways. So I'm going to go over a few sort of AI responses on issues because I've been going into AI to sort of get good summaries of various scandals that I happen to know she was involved in, and they, in every single instance, [00:10:00] I thought the meme ified version of the scandal was like exaggerating things, and typically the meme ified version was, more bad than I thought.
So a great example to start is the accusation that Harris kept people in prison to use as cheap laborers. I thought, well, what they must mean is she didn't let some people out of prison and the state probably had a policy at the same time of using the people as laborers. There is no way she went on record and said,
I, I'm supposed to release this person, but we need cheap labor right now. But here's the thing. Okay. Let's go over this. The accusation that Kamala Harris used prisoners for labor primarily referred to actions taken by her office while she was Attorney General of California. Specifically in 2014, lawyers under her oversight argued against the early release of non [00:11:00] violent inmates, citing the need to maintain a cheap labor force for the state's prison work programs, including those that help fight wire fight, wildfires.
Background details, prison overcrowding and Supreme Court ruling in 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California's prison overcrowding violated the constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Malcolm Collins: The state was ordered to reduce its prison population, leading to a series of legal and administrative measures to comply with this ruling, arguments against early release.
In 2014, as part of the effort to address overcrowding, a three judge panel ordered California to make non violent prisoners with only two felonies eligible for parole if they had served half their sentences. So a panel of judges goes to her, says, This is cruel and unusual punishment by the US and this was the US Supreme Court.
It's not like activist [00:12:00] judges or something like that. Yeah, by the Supreme Court and then another court, your your prison system is cruel and unusual punishment. And then And then Kamala goes, lawyers from Harris's office argued against this order stating that releasing these inmates would negatively negatively impact the prison labor programs, particularly the fire camp program essential for combating wildfires during a severe drought.
Simone Collins: Okay,
Malcolm Collins: so. Holy, so you see what I mean when I say unauthorized. authoritarian mindset. This is not normal Democrat or normal progressive or normal urban monoculture. In a way, I have to admire her parallel what's the word I'm thinking about? Lateral thinking here.
Simone Collins: Someone's got to get the work done.
Someone's got to put out those fires, Melvin.
Malcolm Collins: The Supreme Court says this is cruel and unusual punishment. Another court says you have to release these inmates. This is a [00:13:00] presidential
Simone Collins: candidate who gets things done. Thank you very much. She gets things done. She's got a resource on hand. People, I mean, you know, we, we want, you know, Trump says he'll be dictator for a day.
Kamala has proven that she can be, she's got it in her. She's willing to be dictator for life.
Malcolm Collins: No, but genuinely, if you are worried about our democracy, like, like for people who are like, I am worried about the health of the democracy, you should be being terrified of this candidate. You should be terrified of somebody who didn't win their primary democratically, is not doing the honorable thing and putting this up to a democratic vote at the convention, and it's just trying to walk into the presidency here and has a very, very, very authoritarian mindset.
But hold on, no, I need to say, you might be like, well, she only gets on the bad side of BLM. You know, there's been, you know, it's a woman president, right? This must be great for the Me Too movement. Now, I heard some allegations that she slept her way [00:14:00] to her position. My assumption about these allegations was maybe she had a relationship with someone else in her department.
There's no way! There's no way! Someone who she was sleeping with is is on record saying I gave her a job because she was sleeping with me. There's no way that this person had a 30 year age gap with her.
Simone Collins: Now, age gaps are considered quite hot by quite a few people. Like, I see it come up again and again in romance novels.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think you'd find this one hot. Harris dated Willie Brown in the 1990s when she was in her 20s and he was 60. I don't know of any book that has a 20 year old dating a 60 year old. No,
Simone Collins: yeah, usually it's a 40 year old. Okay, yeah. Okay. Or, or it's like a, a, a fairy that's 500 years old, a vampire that's 300, but [00:15:00] they all look.
The same age. So
Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no. This is very clearly for moving up in the world. This was not a relationship of sexual attraction. Brown, the man who she was cheating with was a married but separated from his wife during the relationship. So, okay. The relationship ended before Harris first ran for office.
So good point in her nature there. The problem is. His appointments during Brown's tenure. While they were dating, Brown appointed Harris to two state commissions. The California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission. These were part time positions that provided additional income to Harris.
Brown's influence. Brown has publicly acknowledged that he may have influenced Harris early career, stating he had, quote, helped her with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco, end quote. Phew. Huh. Now for people who don't know, they can be like, Oh, that was early in her career. It doesn't really matter.
Actually. These early career jumps are the very hardest part. Oh,
Simone Collins: totally, totally [00:16:00] getting in the door, getting those connections. That's everything. Totally.
Malcolm Collins: He, and, and state commissions, high level positions within the state commissions are huge if you're planning to run next, get donor money, et cetera. She literally, and on record, slept her way to the top.
Not like attractive sleeping their way to the top, but 20 year old with 60 year old sleeping your way to the top. Well, but
Simone Collins: remember, you know, this is something that we've, we've often discussed when it comes to Me Too. When we, that once, like, really anchoring time when we saw a panel of people in entertainment have an off the record conversation about Me Too.
And the one man on the panel who was A notable actor who we'd seen in movies was like, well, gosh, I wish that I had that as an option. She, I think represents the thing that is wonderful about me too, which is that women can sleep their way to the top. And it is so [00:17:00] nice. That one can use one's feminism.
Okay, that she's, she, she's a power. He's a girl boss who's using the resources available to her to get it done. And. That's great. But hold on,
Malcolm Collins: we're going to keep going here. It doesn't get over. I'm just, I'm just getting into the beginning here. You know how a lot of people have said that you and I have this insane fantasy that an authoritarian faction of Democrats would force children to go to public schools or be arrested.
That is surely an insane conspiratorial fantasy. As San Francisco's district attorney, Kamala Harris launched an anti truancy program around 2008 aimed at reducing chronic absenteeism by holding parents accountable. This program was later expanded statewide when she became The California attorney general, the law enacted in 2011, allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a [00:18:00] misdemeanor if their children missed 10 percent or more of the school year without a valid excuse.
Simone Collins: Yeah. That's, that's really screwed up. This is
Malcolm Collins: mostly like poor black families that are being arrested over this because they can't, you know, keep an eye on their kids as easily. And like, it is insane who's getting targeted for this. It's mostly poor black, single mothers. And this is by the data. This is like what the, the, the interviewers found.
This is me. When black people are like, the police are like, coming to our neighborhoods and trying to take our kids from us and stuff, Kamala Harris is who they're thinking of. If you're like, well, I'm an all cops or b*****d person, right, no, I'm not that way, I actually Think police prefer a valuable service in our country.
However, I don't know optically how Kamala Harris calling herself California's top cop is going to look to the BLM crowd. That is who she sees herself as. Aspirationally, she's top cop. Where to her, the police are a way to enforce her social values [00:19:00] on a population. And we can talk about some of her role in this sort of stuff.
So, Here is a, a, a thing where you're like, surely she didn't provide cover for police who fatally shot people in questionable circumstances. . The query appears to be referring to Kamala Harris's actions, or lack thereof, regarding police shootings when she was California's Attorney General.
Here are the key points. As California's Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, Harris did not intervene or investigate several high profile police shootings, despite calls from the public and local officials to do so. Specifically, the article mentions that Harris did not investigate the fatal shootings of two unarmed men by the same Anaheim police officer, Nick Belknack, less than a year apart.
This was despite calls from Anaheim's mayor, Nick Belknack. and members of the public following the second shooting. Instead of conducting an independent investigation, Harris left the task to the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which was known for being [00:20:00] lenient on police officers and was embroiled in a misconduct scandal at the time.
Harris suggested her office would review the findings of the district attorney's office, but the article states there is no evidence that a serious review ever took place. And so, and so what happened as a result of this? The officer in question was involved in another fatal shooting later. This is, this is, Wild.
Okay, what about corruption? The San Bernardo County corruption case was a significant issue involving allegations of bribery, fraud, and other corrupt practices by county officials and developers. The case included a controversial 102 million settlement with a developer over a land dispute and allegations of kickback to county officials.
Harris's role. Critics argue that Harris's office did not take a proactive stance in investigating the corruption allegations in San Bernardino County. Despite the gravity of the case, there were perceptions that her office was slow to act and did not pursue the investigation with necessary rigor. [00:21:00] So,
Oh my gosh. And then there's a different one here. The, the, the Moonlit Fire Incident. The Moonlit Fire Incident involved allegations of corruption and misconduct by state employees in relation to wildlife fire investigation. The, there were accusations that state officials had falsified reports and engaged in other unethical practices.
Harris declined to investigate the allegations, citing potential conflicts of interest. The decision was criticized as the failure to hold government officials accountable and raise questions about her commitment to addressing corruption. So she's not like normal authoritarian, like you might be like, Oh, she's a by the rules person.
No, she's a, the bureaucrats cannot break the law. If you are a bureaucrat, your actions are intrinsically good. If you are a citizen under the bureaucrats, your actions are intrinsically evil. She is a brown store style, Gestapo style authoritarian.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that's, that's I'm having a difficulty [00:22:00] figuring out ways to like rationalize this after everything you've presented it.
I, I mean, I think it's hard for a normal prosecutor, obviously not a crazy woke one to not look a little authoritarian. But this is, this is further along than she also
Malcolm Collins: completely lacks empathy. So there's a great thing here where she went. Yeah. She went to the border in 2021, you know, into her candidacy.
So, she went to a Oh God, what was it called again? So,
Simone Collins: detention center where it's visiting to
Malcolm Collins: the border. Vice president Kamala Harrah visited the border city of El Paso, Texas, marking her first trip to the border since taking office. This visit was part of her role in addressing the root cause of migration from Central America.
. The wave incidents. During her visit, Camilla Harris was photographed waving to a group of children who were behind a chain link fence. And they were in a child these were children who had been separated from their parents under her administration and were being kept in a detention center.
And so she's just [00:23:00] like, Hey guys! Great to see you! I'm keeping you as slaves! That's basically her take on this. And that is absolutely wild. And if you look at illegal border crossings, if you look at illegal border detentions as well, during the Biden presidency you know, the things that you would criticize a Republican for, and this is the interesting thing.
She is actually, I think in most ways where you actually see her policy positions, quite to the right of Trump in terms of her authoritarian mindedness. Which I don't know, is that going to peel off some Republicans or are they like it? Yeah, I wanted an authoritarian, not a, a, a fascist communist which is, but also
Simone Collins: she, she is getting involved with the exception of abortion with, with policies as a vice president that I think are, Quite unpopular among many centrists.
Like, I don't think Americans are very happy with the immigration situation in the United States. And that's one of those things she's tried to champion is her [00:24:00] thing as vice president along with activity in Israel, Ukraine along with Activity around voting rights. And abortion, I think is probably the one thing where she's going to do really well.
So I don't know. I just, it's an interesting choice.
Malcolm Collins: I will post a picture here. Oh, Emily Harris's face made up of pictures of black people. She kept in jail knowing they were innocent. Because she did this to. Thousands of black people and she did it to secure the endorsement of the police union at the time, which she used to win an election.
So let's go over this particular incidents here. So, 1st, prosecutorial record. The former district, okay. For instance, she was involved in cases where her office failed to disclose crucial information to defense attorneys, leading to the dismissal of numerous drug cases. So, let's see what was she talking about in this instance here.
Kamala Harris willingness to bend rules to [00:25:00] secure convictions can be attributed to several factors. including political ambitions, pressure to improve conviction rates, and the broader context of her prosecutorial career. Harris's career trajectory shows a clear pattern of using her prosecutorial record to build a political platform.
During her first rate for San Francisco District Attorney, she campaigned as quote unquote tough on crime, contrasting herself with her more progressive opponent, Terrence Hallahan, who had a low conviction rate. So it is possible to be a district attorney and have a low conviction rate. This trough on crime stance helped her gain endorsements from law enforcement and conservative leaning entities, which were crucial to her electoral success.
Now we need to talk about this, this individual case.
Simone Collins: I like that you're covering a lot of things that are not just her. Ridiculous speech style and the extent to which she is channeling Selina Meyer from the HBO show Veep, which for whatever reason, you just don't really like, but I've watched like [00:26:00] three or four times now because it's so frigging hilarious.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So I will go over this particular incident as well. So this scandal occurred while Harris was San Francisco's district attorney and running for California attorney general in 2011. So remember, this occurred so that she could win that second race, which she was able to do given the high crime conviction rate that she was able to achieve.
It involved a crime like technician who was found to have been stealing cocaine from the lab's evidence supply, potentially compromising evidence in numerous drug cases. Neither Harris nor her team informed defense attorneys about this issue. Despite rules mandating such a disclosure, this failure was under criticized by the superior court judge.
Initially, Harris shifted blame to the police and downplayed the impact on cases. However, as the worsened, she took more decisive action. To address the growing crisis, Harris made the decision to dismiss around a thousand drug related cases to prevent further chaos in the criminal justice system.
This scandal highlighted a Harris's failure [00:27:00] after six years as district attorney to establish clear procedures, ensuring defendants were informed about potentially compromised evidence and testimony. Harris eventually acknowledged responsibility for her shortcomings,
so this is huge. Thousands of people were left in jail and, and most of them were black. So that she could win, that should have been notified that they had the right to be released based on compromised evidence, so that she could win an election. If you wonder, is this the type of person who would put me and my family in jail to win an election?
What if I'm the type of person who agrees with her, i. e. I'm one of the protected classes in progressive worlds? What if I'm a A black single mother. Is she the type of person who would put me in jail if it helped her win an election? That's exactly the kind of person she is. Yeah, it
Simone Collins: doesn't seem like anyone's safe in this, in this world from policies that she's enacted.
And
Malcolm Collins: I'd also point out that everyone who seems to work with her hates [00:28:00] her. Her office has been very famous and has been quite a scandal for the administration for having an extremely high turnover rate.
Simone Collins: Oh, really?
Malcolm Collins: Yes, including that Jill Biden apparently hates her guts. And that's probably the reason it took so long for Biden to step down because Jill didn't want her to be the successor.
It's like, I would rather burn down the party than let Harris win. So specifically Kamala Harris. was seen by Jill as using Joe to for her own career. Kamala added anything to his candidacy and that he could have won easily without her. And she's probably right across the board there. I think Kamala has always been a net negative and really always just a diversity hire by sort of a generation of older conservatives who don't understand that this authoritarian mindset doesn't work.
It's the base. And yeah. So apparently Jill hates her and her office has really high turnover. So I think you can learn about somebody's true nature by the people around them, right? For example, Trump's [00:29:00] true nature is incredibly high gossip in his offices and high infighting. And that seems like the type of thing Trump would engender in those around him, given the way that he runs things.
In terms of Kamala, it's just that nobody could stand to be around her or work under her for very long. So have fun. world. This is where we're going. I'm wondering if you have thoughts and I want to get into her politics specifically, because I find this authoritarian wing of the democratic party really fascinating personally.
Simone Collins: I'm struggling to understand maybe because I wasn't that involved in the backstory, you know, how she ended up as VP. How this even came to happen, because it, she didn't make it very far in the primary process when it was, you know, she dropped out super early. No one thought she was a really strong candidate.
And I just don't really understand how it came to be that she, Was [00:30:00] selected as vice president in the first place.
Malcolm Collins: He was looking for a black woman. That was the core thing he was working, looking for. I bet he really only looked at candidates who were black women.
Simone Collins: There are other black female.
Malcolm Collins: There are not that many that are that high up in the democratic party.
And, and that can be chosen. And then you've got to remember, he's looking for a black woman who isn't woke. That was the other requirement there, which, because Joe Biden isn't woke fundamentally, right? From the next faction in the same way that like, I described the two sort of antagonistic sections of the Republican party being Joe plea Inc and the new right, and then the Trumpists are sort of the middle governing faction.
In the democratic power politics, right now, the governing middle faction is, I call it the democratic gerontocracy. These are people who basically think the world still operates the way the world did in the 90s. The, the parties represent what [00:31:00] they represented in the 90s. And they're just sort of blind to the ways their base in the world has changed.
And Joe Heavily represents that mindset. But this mindset is also the mindset of. Obama. And so it's one that we have seen through throughout a lot of the ruling Democratic party for a long time. Now, if you look at the parties that have formed under this, you have the authoritarian faction which believes that the government should basically through the police force control every aspect of your life.
And then the other group, which believes that the government should be torn apart. And we need to move towards some sort of new system of governance. Right. Obviously the entrenched bureaucrats really hate that. So who supports the authoritarian faction? Who is their voting bloc and who are their avatars?
Yeah. Clinton is the first avatar of this faction. She is less aligned with them. She was half gerontocracy, half authoritarian. Kamala is pure authoritarian. Who is keeping them in office? It's organizations like teachers unions. [00:32:00] They appeal really heavily to groups like this, and they can peel off some state unions from people like Trump by appealing to things like police unions.
For example, do you think that police unions were going to recommend anyone vote for any Democratic candidate other than Kamala? But now they've got Kamala, you know, she can actually appeal to these groups. Which I, I suppose is nice. I will never wake you where body cams. I will never put you in jail for a fatal shooting.
Just look at my track record. People will die. I am so insistent that you will never face consequences for anything. And okay. I, I get that. I personally support the police force, but I do believe that governments because where, where she gets me, It was the police force, I don't know, wishy washy, one way or the other, maybe she was in the right with that stuff, but the not investigating general corruption charges that absolutely she should have investigated was the squirrelly conflict of interest, complete, like, well, conflict of interest [00:33:00] matters, When you aren't the only body that can investigate them.
You don't just get to say they get to do whatever they want because they're your friend. That's basically what she meant by conflict of interest there. That is wild. And so, why did this faction rise? Well, they rose in the same way that Christian Socialists rose. Remember how we talked GOP Inc.
Right. It gained power because the old GOP was an alliance of The theocrats and the big business interests. When big business interests left the remainders of that faction were no longer tethered to any sort of economic reality. And a few elites that had worked their way to the top and had worked within bureaucracy for a long time, because they live and breathe bureaucracy, to them, bureaucracy is how you solve all problems.
Christian bureaucracy. And in our discord, in some of our comments, people are like, Oh yeah, that'll work a more Christian democracy, bureaucracy, no Marxism plus Christianity. These two [00:34:00] things are opposed to each other. When you hold these two mindsets together, you end up fundamentally failing. When countries try to enforce a Christian value system on a population, they don't help that population get into heaven.
You know, Preventing gay people from marrying doesn't help save their souls. What it makes is the church their enemy, and it makes it less likely that they're going to view the church favorably and engage with it. And you're unable to win elections, and you're not even appealing to a the vast majority of the Republican base, which is a pro gay marriage at this point.
It's something like only 30 percent still oppose it. So the idea that like, this is a good idea is just dumb, but they have a vast amount of power within the political apparatus of the Republican party. It's the same with the authoritarian faction of the Democrats. They have lived in brief bureaucracy their entire life.
And so from their perspective, the bureaucracy enforcing the urban monocultural value system [00:35:00] is the best way to make a good society. And, and it's. I, I, and so it's this faction that is like, I think if you're talking about like the democratic base, how big is it? I'd say it's maybe 12, 13 percent of the democratic base, really just a few specific public sector unions and a few You know, people who are really agree with this sort of strict teacher mindset.
But I'd argue that they're a good 60 percent of the democratic political apparatus. And that's what people are missing. Especially the younger individuals in the democratic political apparatus. And they are. Way more dangerous than the wokes because they're more efficient and they really have no moral system.
They operate off of except for accumulate power, exercise power.
Simone Collins: And this really exemplifies how divorced from humans many political factions have become. And by that, I mean, like, it is more unions. It is more [00:36:00] large bureaucracies that are selecting and platforming these candidates and ensuring that they have money and not individual People, not the interests of families or even like smaller churches or, you know, workers associations.
It's crazy.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, we also need to keep in mind how crazy the Democrats have gotten. So now 34 percent of registered Dems believe Trump staged his own assassination. Democrats are building like an absolutely crazy, crazier than QAnon conspiracy theory around Trump. I've seen this was in my circles.
Complete denial of Kamala Harris's past deeds. You will hear over and over again, well, it wasn't really that bad that she kept people in jail who she knew should have been released based on policy. And it's not like she wasn't told by people she needed to move ahead with this stuff. That's the thing that gets me.
It's not like she forgot to do X or she forgot to do Y. She would have [00:37:00] other departments say, you need to release these people and she goes, I need free labor. Like, what the what? And it's not even efficient free labor. That's the thing to remember about authoritarianism. If you look at the cost per head per year of a prisoner, It is more than hiring firefighters to handle these fires.
It is about control for these people. It is not about the public utility. It is about the belief that the state should have as much control of the population as possible through as direct a means as possible.
Simone Collins: That's scary. I mean, what are
Malcolm Collins: your thoughts? I mean, what was your historic perception of Camelot?
Like what, what, et cetera?
Simone Collins: I always thought she was an odd selection because of the way that she had called out Biden in the beginning. Cause I think she called him a racist, if memory serves.
Malcolm Collins: And then she was
Simone Collins: selected as. His running mate, it just seemed really odd to me. Like the [00:38:00] party was basically trying to show like, yeah, we, we hate old white men, they're, they're terrible.
And that's why we selected a running mate that, that hates him. And then as, as the VP, I was, I was also confused because she, you know, you don't have to actually do that much as a VP. Like you just have to be there. If the president dies, like there have been vice presidents who've just spent the entire time in New York.
Blitz, like, which sounds fantastic to me. Sign me up for that. But she's actually been going on trips. She's traveled to over a hundred countries as vice president. She has, you know, policy decisions. She's wanted to be very publicly and prominently involved in immigration and foreign policy and gun control.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, let's talk about the gun control issue here really quickly. So, For example, her suggestion to use executive orders for gun control if Congress didn't pass an act within 100 days was viewed by critics as bypassing the legislative process. So if you're like, [00:39:00] afraid somebody's going to take your guns, yeah, she wants to use executive authority.
To declare an executive act, regardless of what Congress and the Senate do, to take your guns. This is not a, well, No, there's a reason why
Simone Collins: I was telling you this morning. I'm like, we should get more AR 15s and have one on the wall in any room of the house. Well, then, let's
Malcolm Collins: create a task item. Let's do that right now.
Simone Collins: I'll create a task item. Yeah, well maybe, maybe, I don't know, like are there Blackfire, there have to be Black Friday gun sales. Maybe this can be our Black Friday thing. Yeah, let's
Malcolm Collins: go Black Friday gun crazy this year.
Simone Collins: It's, you know, falls around the corner. I can't wait. But so what also surprises me is That normally when you're selecting a presidential candidate, you're trying to go as centrist as possible.
And she's actually a lot more, what's weird is that she's more hardline authoritarian, as you've pointed out, but she's also perceived in the media and she presents herself as being a lot more. far left is being more extreme [00:40:00] progressive, more extreme woke. And that was how I think she was selected from a narrative perspective as the running mate.
You know, she was the party's apology to people who wanted to be. Castigated by a, but her, a non white jail, black people, jail, yes, I guess that's just the non white female they got, but she's still absolutely playing up the role of the more extreme leftist candidate here. So there's, I feel like there's this really weird interplay between this like conservative authoritarian and this like woke Avatar or amulet being used by progressive and
Malcolm Collins: she's a communist authoritarian.
So, so keep that in mind. Oh, thank
Simone Collins: goodness. Okay. That makes
Malcolm Collins: everything
Simone Collins: better.
Malcolm Collins: But we've also got to keep in mind Why I don't think she has a shot, like a shot shot at [00:41:00] all. So one thing that is going to keep Democrats from voting from her and a lot of Democrats is that I just will not make this vote is her stance on Israel.
You know, she is pro Israel in this war and for a lot of Democrats, that is an absolute red line for a candidate.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So, but they wouldn't have
Simone Collins: voted for Biden anyway. So. That's the thing is she's marginally, slightly marginally better in some people's eyes. And that's, I guess what we're going for now.
And by we, I guess not we, because that's what Democrats are going for now.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I, I just say that, that if she is running one thing that, the thing that scares me most about her running is the possibility of her winning. Not because I think she actually has a possibility of winning, but I think that If she wins, it will be confirmation for most sane Americans that there was, without any shadow of a doubt, election rigging.
Simone Collins: [00:42:00] Just because there's, the interest in her is so mediocre.
Malcolm Collins: She's, there's no way she could be, I mean, with the assassination attempt and the, you know, A lot can happen
Simone Collins: in the
Malcolm Collins: intervening
Simone Collins: hundred days or so that we have. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe there's some big thing that blows up for Trump. But if, but if things are continuing on the path that they've been going, right.
And I saw her elected, I would say, I absolutely, like me personally do not believe that's possible, was the current electorate.
Simone Collins: I don't know, because I don't think that Democrats who are looking to vote for someone who's not Trump are going to understand that when they're being told. By mainstream media figures that Trump is advocating for a nationwide ban on abortions, which he's not, but that's what people are being told.
And that, you know, Trump plans on doing, you know, like is, is fully in support of, of Project [00:43:00] 2024, which he's not, but that's what people are still saying. I just don't. I don't
Malcolm Collins: Trump literally written into the, to the Republican platform, people who don't know that one marriage is not between a man and a woman.
So like, I don't think gay Republican platform. Now, he literally wrote into the Republican platform, nothing about this abortion stuff. Which, which they wanted to write it, you know, he pushed against that. He said, look, I won you the abortion victory already that you needed. We will not go further on this issue.
Trump has been. Okay. very clear on this. And J. D. Vance has capitulated to jump Trump's position. And I think, of course, J. D. Vance, I, I, I like
Simone Collins: him. And what is the media saying? They're saying, oh, and now Trump has selected for his VP pick J. D. Vance, who is in favor of categorically removing all abortion access, even in the case.
Well, hold on, this is what they're saying, but, but the truth is. Well, but my argument is, it doesn't matter what reality is. What matters is that [00:44:00] people who are Democrats and who are not already interested in voting for Trump, and there are many people, are not going to be exposed to information that shows them that the other side is more moderate than they think.
Malcolm Collins: I I don't know. I suspect that, like, this is my read, like for, for example, the Harris pick, right, you go into like black Twitter or like, black online conversation places. It's not like they don't know about Harris's history. She is not an Obama to them. She is the personification of everything BLM was campaigning against.
And this was made clear because of the divisive primary that she participated in an election cycle ago. Or two election cycles ago. So everybody remembers that everybody remembers the Dems attacking her even was in Dem media. They know about all of her convictions and I'm sure that this was something that was top of mind during the presidency of like why we still need to watch out about a Biden presidency.
She was always the [00:45:00] black mark on his presidency. Well, her and his son. And so I think that, I think that just more Democrats remember this. I think that this is pierce the informational veil. Already by dims pushing it and it's also why dims can't have a contested convention because if they have a contested dimension, I suspect this is why they're not pushing for one right now and she ends up winning.
It will be out within dim circles. All of the crazy stuff. She's done.
Like this is not like small stuff. This is when I've had power. I have used it in an authoritarian fashion. Yeah
I don't I don't know like any final thoughts the audience lets you hear from you. What's your summation of all this?
Simone Collins: My summation, ooh Kamala Harris, yikes. Now the election has switched from Trump versus deep state to [00:46:00] Trump versus deep state autocrat which is,
Malcolm Collins: I think an aspirant dictator.
Simone Collins: Aspirant dictator.
Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Okay.
Simone Collins: I mean, Trump is an aspirant dictator, kind of. So I guess now we have a more matched run and,
Malcolm Collins: I don't think Trump no, I, I think. He
Simone Collins: says he wants to be dictator for a day on his first day, you know, like that. You know,
Malcolm Collins: that is, that is just saying he wants to get s**t done.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm sorry, Kamala got s**t done. Someone has to put out those fires. She keeps those people in their work programs. No, what I mean
Malcolm Collins: is if you look at Trump's history, he doesn't have a history of dictatorial like actions. He's much more cult of personality based. Kamala Harris. Has a history of let's lock up the dissidents, et cetera, type mindset.
I just don't think Trump could stomach that sort of thing. He's got a revolutionary mindset, I would argue, which does worry some people, but it's not the revolutionary mindset of a dictator. It's the revolutionary [00:47:00] mindset of somebody who wants to be the hero of a revolution or the hero of a story.
Kamala has a revolutionary mindset in a Well, let's just silence the stupid people. They're making things harder for the machine to work as it's supposed to. Which is a very different type of revolutionary mindset. In a way I sort of feel like if she's running from my perspective, she's much further right than Trump.
Simone Collins: In some ways, she absolutely is actually in many ways, Jack. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Um,
Simone Collins: but I don't know if, if a large portion of the electorate is going to see beyond old white man to slightly less old, she's 59 years old not white woman, you know, I, I don't, I don't know. If we're gonna be thinking about that. Oh, oh, by the
Malcolm Collins: way if you're wondering so I was trying to find out what her religion is, right?
Okay.
Simone Collins: Oh, Kamala Harris. [00:48:00] Oh. What happened? I don't know if she thought about Kamala Harris too much. I think she just had a bad dream. She was very asleep.
Malcolm Collins: So Kamala Harris identifies as a Baptist. She grew up in an interfaith household, attending both Black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple. Her mother, Shamala Gobelana, was Hindi and her father, Donald Harris, emphasized that her faith journey began in her adulthood where she and her sister attended services at the 23rd Avenue.
Church of God in Oakland, California. Harris's religious identity is also influenced by her marriage to Douglas Emhoff, who is Jewish. They incorporate Jewish traditions and celebrations in their home life. Harris has expressed that her faith is an integral part of her life and leadership and describing it as something that extends beyond worship services to the way she lives and works.
So, you know, I think if you wanted a Christian dictator Campbell Harris is a good pick
Simone Collins: for those Christians who
Malcolm Collins: are [00:49:00] looking for that.
Simone Collins: There you go. That's a fun take. Okay. Yeah. I mean, at least like you said, the writers of the show America doing a good job, at least we're not bored. And, and literally now, you know, we have a cartoonish president who came from the internet and TV and a woman who.
You know, has been in countless side by side comparisons with Selena Meyer of Veep. This is great.
Malcolm Collins: What is Selena Meyer of Veep? I don't understand. Veep
Simone Collins: is an HBO TV show about a fictional vice president who is very self centered and incompetent and not actually interested in like doing good things.
And she says a lot of nonsense stuff. And there are tons of side by side mashups of Selena Meyer, this fictional vice president character saying complete nonsense. And then Kamala Harris saying stuff that seems worse than that.
Malcolm Collins: Yikes. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, she, she seems [00:50:00] from everything I've seen of her.
Pretty low IQ, but high diligence. And she's got a good work ethic, which I appreciate. But she doesn't appear to be like cognitively all there, which is also really interesting about her.
Hi, I'm Oliver Bartholomew, and I'm 16 and a half years old, and I'm the speechwriter for Columba Harris. Since I was little, I liked words. Writing words is fun, so I made writing words my job.
Space is exciting. Space, it affects us all. And it connects us all. It's not all fun though. Sometimes I have to write about bad stuff, like war. Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.
Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that's wrong. Once, I thought it would be [00:51:00] neat if Karma wore a blue suit.
And told people she was wearing it. Because I like it. I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit. I can't take all the credit though. Me and Mr. Kamala are a team.
But she kind of is crazy or something, and she kind of scares me, and you can't fake that kind of influence.
You're either born with it, or you're either not. it is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.
Simone Collins: It could be. You know, my brain turns off when I'm around people and I'm just on auto response and trying to make it through.
She could be someone who has very high levels of social anxiety and in private, she's capable of thinking again, you know, for the benefit of
Malcolm Collins: the doubt. 70 IQ from her, but we'll see. I'll put on some videos of her talking so you can see what I mean.
[00:52:00] Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. Seems like maybe it's a small issue. It's a big issue. You need to get to go. I need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work and get home.
She's come so far since our first session
My name is Dahlia Rose hibiscus and I am vice president Kamala Harris's holistic thought advisor I lead the vice president on not so much sentences as idea voyages. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context. Of all in which you live and what came before you. It's a process I call speaking without thinking. It's not about the destination of the thought.
It's about the journey and how many words you use to [00:53:00] describe the journey. That's on top of everything else that we know and don't know yet. Based on what we've just been able to see and because we've seen it or not doesn't mean it hasn't happened
the first thing I do is cut out all the words, individually. And then I take those words to my word cave.
That's where I wait to learn what order the universe wants them to be in. Have vibrations. The feeling they give you is so much more powerful than what they mean. We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible possible. Actually happen.
Malcolm Collins: Which is you know, unfortunate that somebody was able to literally sleep their way to the president, but okay.
And then get there was diversity points.
Simone Collins: Empowering, you know, a lot of people in jail.
Malcolm Collins: She did also, I should, to her credit, she did also violate a lot of [00:54:00] normative ethical standards to get there as well. It wasn't like she just slept your way. To the top and used her identity. She also jailed a lot of innocent people.
Yeah. And, and protected dirty politicians. That is lovely. All right. Have a good one, Simone. At least, you know, if you back her, she'll have your back. That's the good thing about somebody like her. She's loyal. Then if you go to the bat for her, she'll have your back. That, you know, doesn't happen so much these days.
Simone Collins: I like, oh, you found a, you made, you found a nice thing. Thanks, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and on a high note, I love you, Simone. By the way, I'm just going to reheat the meal I had earlier today, tonight.
Simone Collins: Oh, oh, you have leftovers again?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in the fridge. Love you. Okay.
Simone Collins: All right. Tater tots for the kids, though. They need their tots.
Malcolm Collins: You're so special.
Simone Collins: Oh my God. No, we're using the sushi train tonight. [00:55:00] Oh yeah. We got a little sushi train for the kids. Everything has to be small bite size then. Okay. What am I going to do? Ooh. Oh, we made the bread on the weekend. So we're going to make French toast bites and I'll make little squares, dinosaur nuggets.
Malcolm Collins: Octavian, come here. Come sit with daddy. You got to talk to mommy. Here, hold the
Simone Collins: We have a sushi train for your food tonight. Do you know what a sushi train is? Can I see the sushi train? Yes, you can, my friend. It's a train that carries your food. And you get to eat food off of the train.
Octavian: Does it have plates too? It has little plates
Simone Collins: on
Octavian: top
Simone Collins: of little train cars.
Octavian: Does it need batteries?
Simone Collins: It, it is battery powered and so daddy put in the battery.
Octavian: Oh, it is battery powered.
Simone Collins: Can I ask you some questions about Kamala Harris Octavian?
Octavian: Yes.
Simone Collins: Okay. Kamala Harris is going to run for President against President Trump.
What do you think about that? Yes. Would you vote for President Trump or Kamala Harris? Which name do you like [00:56:00] better?
Octavian: Trump.
Simone Collins: Okay. So you'd vote for Trump. Kamala Harris puts a lot of people in jail sometimes because they actually did a bad thing.
Sometimes because she's. There are other reasons, but not because they're bad guys. Is that, is that okay? Yes. Oh, would you put a lot of innocent people in jail too? Octavian?
Octavian: Well, I'm not mother play two 80, so I cannot, that's 2 80, 100 spread .
Simone Collins: What would you put people in jail to make your life easier, even if they didn't do a bad thing?
Octavian: Yeah.
Please like and describe.
Simone Collins: Say it louder. Please like and describe. [00:57:00] No, no, no. Please like and describe. Sorry, can you please, can you, can you tell our audience to please like and subscribe?
Octavian: You're welcome.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the emerging "New Right" or "Silicon Valley Right" coalition within the Republican party. They delve into how this group, which includes tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, is reshaping conservative politics and policy positions.
Key topics covered:
* The shift from "GOP Inc." to a new conservative faction
* Trump's alignment with the New Right and distancing from traditional social conservatives
* The evolving stance on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage within the Republican party
* The clash between old guard "Christian socialist" conservatives and the new tech-savvy right
* How demographic changes and generational shifts are influencing conservative politics
* The impact of this realignment on the future of the Republican party
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone, I am excited to be here with you today. Some days I just have like this breakthrough in my perception of reality that changes everything for me in a way. Like I wish people are like, why can't you only record the good, you know, the good episodes, like do it once a week, but they're like really good.
And I'm like, that's like not how my brain works. I know you're freezing, but occasionally I'll have an idea and I'll be like, Oh wow, this is earth shattering for me. And I wish I could make like a better, a premium but this is definitely going to go in the best episodes category because. I think I now understand something that was really difficult for me to understand before.
And it gives me a better vision of what the Republican party is and where it's going. I'm so intrigued.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: So, the thing that I didn't understand Is, I saw this at NatCon, but I've seen this more broadly. When I talk to conservatives that are in the old [00:01:00] conservative intellectual elite, these are the conservatives from the pre Trump era sort of staffers, intellectual elite, when I say intellectual elite, I mean the type of people who are at the think tanks, the type of people who are being paid.
Yeah, like career conservatives. They often come off to me as incredibly socialist, bordering on Marxist. And like Lyman Stone's a great example of this. He is a hardcore socialist. And I just didn't understand it. I didn't understand why they identified it with conservatism.
Now they're Christian socialists. And so I could kind of get that. I was like, well, maybe it's that because they're Christian, they don't feel that there'll be accepted in the progressive circle, so they just try to push their socialism in conservative circles. But generally speaking, I didn't get it.
I didn't get where this was coming from. And I also feel like my understanding of the conservative party transition was the introduction of Trump in post Trump has been, [00:02:00] Diluted, or like, not as good as I would like it to be. It has felt very, like, eh, like, I kinda get it, and I can put together, like, long explanations.
about what it is. But a really tight explanation that made it easy for me to understand like how the policy positions flipped in the way that they flipped. No, I was not capable of doing that.
So. I had this realization to me and I was like, oh my God, everything makes sense. So we're going to go over it.
But it is in understanding the conservative party and the waves of the conservative party. So first you had what I'm going to call GOP Inc. This is the pre Trump conservative coalition. This coalition used disgust based morality, as we've talked about in other episodes, to motivate its base. Like, ew, like that would be an ew thing.
But like, who actually made up its elite class, its philosophical class, and the class that it used to staff administrations? [00:03:00] It was an alliance of two interests. One interest group was These are people who had a strong religious framework for reality and believe that's, that should be represented in the government and should be legalized.
Like morality should be legislated. And the second IE people should be the, like the laws should be designed to force people to act more in line with their religious frameworks.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: In the second framework in this team up was big business. And intergenerational wells. Now people today, if you're like gin alpha or Gen Z, you'll be like wait.
The people who ran large companies, people thought they were conservative. Historically, they didn't think they were the people staffing the white house. They were the core in like the Bush era in the 90s. This was a, like a Mr. Burns type characters. That was like, obviously Mr. Burns was a conservative and not a far progressive.
[00:04:00] But now it's
Simone Collins: inconceivable to think of an organ of a corporation, not being. At least trying to look woke
Malcolm Collins: ultra woke.
Actually here, I'm reminded a lot of a character like Jack Donaghy from 30 rock. The Jack Donaghy character in the modern world would just 100% be a progressive woke person. But in the time period, when 30 rock was filmed, it made sense to film him as a very conservative person, because he was a big business stooge. If you, It and just, you know, imagine like this.
So you go in the nineties, if you went to a company like a McKinsey or something like that. The default assumption would be, you know, you are a Bush supporter. If you go to McKinsey today. Cause I have a lot of friends who work at companies like Mackenzie. And Bain and everything like that. These companies. Wouldn't even hire someone like me.
Like I would be barred from being hired because I am publicly conservative.
That is how much things have flipped. Also this reflection. Helps me realize how perfect an avatar. I have [00:05:00] this old institution, Mitt Romney was the perfect big business. Plus theocrat candidate. And he couldn't win. And that's why the transition to a new system was necessary.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, it is also true for like the billionaires that were made in that generation. You know, you look at your Mark Zuckerberg's, you look at your Bill Gates or like really any of them.
They all are very much and a lot of the old money families went that way. I, there's this conference that you can go to, it's called a Nexus, which I'd been invited to, you know, cause my family is. love intergenerational wealth. I didn't get any of it, by the way. I was kicked out, but they did have it, which gives me invites to these sorts of things.
Or
I, PI,
Simone Collins: Institute of private investors, I think.
Malcolm Collins: But anyway, lots of intergenerational wealth at both of these, and they are the first furthest left things you could possibly imagine.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah.
Malcolm Collins: No better way to get a communist these days than be a billionaire's kid. And
Simone Collins: the Institute for Private
Malcolm Collins: Investors.
So, so I've been to these and this is a change. This didn't used to be the case. You know, it used to be that these [00:06:00] were pocket conservative factions. But they left the business owners and they left before trump came around. By the time trump hit the stage These people had left the coalition and the coalition was desperately signaling to try to keep them on board But they were mostly gone at that point and during that era while the Intergenerational wealth was conservative and the heads of companies, you know, your Jack Donaghy's, right?
Like he was a character that represented this were ultra conservative. Your entrepreneurs and your techies were you know, people who had made their wealth off of their brains, like your first generation brain wealth, right? These people were actually very progressive. You know, this is your, you know, your Steve jobs and stuff like that at that period, right?
Like it's super, super progressive. Then as half of this coalition left, the coalition became somewhat unviable, and the base of the coalition began to get angry. And then a new demographic, a new voter demographic came to exist. [00:07:00] This is the demographic that Trump appealed to. And I would say this is the, angry disenfranchised. So essentially the conservative party went from a big business old money alliance with theocrats to a angry disenfranchised Americans who are just angry at the way the system is working and do not believe that it cares about them at all.
Now this created a huge problem for Trump in his first administration. If you're trying to staff your administration with people who are disenfranchised well, often they're disenfranchised for a reason and they're really thinking with their emotions. It's not that everyone is, but in the early Trump era, that was to an extent the case.
And it made it very hard to build like a cohesive, Working institution. You need some group of like a large pool of competent, hardworking individuals who are okay with working at least adjacent to bureaucracies to staff something like this. Well, these individuals didn't exist in this early era of Trump.[00:08:00]
And then. Something queer happened. A new conservative faction began to arise. So if this is the faction that is called in media often the new right, or that we in previous episodes have called the techno Republicans, either individuals like Elon, Peter Thiel, Clemasse, Vivek, David Sachs, Mark Andreessen.
And JD Vance these individuals typically hated Trump when he first came to power. And then as we've talked about in other episodes some people like JD Vance, but also many other thinkers, they began to bridge the gap with this community. So this community had begun to move against the progressives for two reasons.
They saw that progressivism was beginning to become a Nazi cult, as we pointed out before, you know, they value human dignity based on a person's ethnic group with Jews at the bottom. And when they were like, no, they don't, you know, they literally so, so if you look at the the [00:09:00] National Academy of Sciences, engineering and medicine recommended prioritizing racial minorities for COVID vaccines, they sought safe lives and ACIP of the CDC indicated that it went with this framework when it was deciding, so they were literally not based on a person's medical needs, but based on a person's race, they believe some races were more deserving of human dignity than other races.
And you look in there like, Oh, we don't. hate Jews. It's just a Zionist. And then I, you know, you point it to a video of a Jewish person, not a Zionist walking on a college campus and being randomly attacked by a group of progressives. Like, no, you can say you don't feel that way, but that's what's become the mainstream of your party.
And then you can look at the, You know, castration of children that's become more and more rampant and they're like, Oh, we're doing this to save trans kids, but we know from the 2024 study development of gender non consensus during adolescent and early adulthood that so this is a 2024 really good longitudinal paper.
Over nine and 10, 11 year olds who feel [00:10:00] discontent with their gender and aren't given the social transition stuff. They end up growing up to be a 23-year-old who is 100% convi, you know, comfortable with their gender, but they're either just gay or autistic. Right. And just
Simone Collins: sterilizing a portion of autistic and, well, it's not
Malcolm Collins: abortion, it's nine gay and autistic kids for everyone, trans kid, like it is insane.
And a lot of these. You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps people then realized and you know, this was a message made clear by people like JD Vance's and one of our Appalachian viewers sent this to us. They said Vance is urging the tech elite side to side with what he said first, he said that the tech elite sided with.
the liberal elite or the big business owners. Cause they were both elite historically, but I don't actually think these two groups are really ever on the same side for that long. In the era of ,
GOP Inc.
Malcolm Collins: the tech elite were always on the progressive side and the the other faction, the big business and blue bloods, they were always on the conservative [00:11:00] side.
So they're just reorienting things in the way that they naturally reoriented. And it was, you know, Vance is urging the tech elites to side with rural Appalachia because rural Appalachia is scrappy and entrepreneurial. We have a quote unquote, pull yourself up by your boots mentality, the tech entrepreneurs like, and that is true.
They actually found a great deal of personal synergy. And as the. Progressive group began to become more religious, i. e. just believe these things. It doesn't matter what the data says. It doesn't matter what's obvious and real to you. I mean, so you had this switch and this was the core switch that happened.
during the Trump era, or this happened recently is in the nineties, it was big business intergenerational wealth conservative tech entrepreneurs progressive. Now it's tech entrepreneurs conservative intergenerational wealth and big money or big business is Progressive. And so this, which then explains to me also why GOP Inc's remnants are so damn communist.
Because I [00:12:00] did not understand this to begin with. GOP Inc historically had to appease the big business interests. It had to appease, it was an alliance between theocrats and big business and intergenerational wealth. They had to, you know, go for this more capitalistic like approach. When all of that left, they no longer needed to appease that faction, and that faction left all of their you know, Yeah, intellectual circles, everything like that.
And as such, they began to think, and also they were not the old Calvinists of old, right? Like, this is mostly like a Catholic group these days. Yeah, and there's
Simone Collins: nothing inherently capitalistic about Catholicism or being a Baptist or being, You know, an evangelical Christian of like any typical American sort.
Right. So.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it's something that the wokes actually used to chastise them for. Why aren't you feeding the poor? If that's what your Jesus guy was all about, why aren't you helping the disenfranchised? And they've moved to a, [00:13:00] actually, this is what we need to do mindset. But then there's the other filtering mechanism that pushed them into this position.
The secondary filtering mechanism that pushed them into this position is these are individuals who have spent their entire adult careers working within bureaucracies. Conservatives that don't have a socialist bent to them or a pro bureaucracy bent to them are not going to be able to maintain those positions their entire lives.
Simone Collins: So, yeah, just the ones who survived in the same establishment long enough are going to be inherently bureaucratic.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely.
Simone Collins: That. Huh. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And so that's what caused this transformation, but there, there is a secondary thing at play here. Well, first I want to hear your thoughts on this first bit here.
Simone Collins: This makes a lot of sense. It's, it was always confusing to me that, you know, I always saw conservatives as being let markets make a solution, [00:14:00] right? Right. Let business do business. And. You know, less government is good. And then to show up at NatCon this year and hear people there say, Oh no, bureaucracy is good.
I just want it to be more Christian or you know, Well, f**k
Malcolm Collins: the base was one of the things they said, or let's ban pornography or let's, you know, like all these sort of like
Simone Collins: big government good. As long as it's run by us kind of mindsets. Really blew my mind. And this free market approach was gone.
I also thought that cultural sovereignty was universal across all conservatives. You know, basically don't tell me how to live my life. Like I want to practice my religious freedom and therefore. You know, we should all be fighting for that. The fact that conservatives, despite the fact that really all they should be fighting for right now, like they should before getting to be coercive, to impose your [00:15:00] culture on other people, even if that is your ultimate plan, it's so bizarre to me.
That they're not first saying, okay, just let me do my thing instead of forcing me to do your thing. They're just immediately no, you're going to do my thing. Which is also bizarre to me. I would expect them to first try to get to a neutral point before they go to the other extreme. From being forced to forcing.
So, yeah, I didn't understand that. And now that you're showing me how there's factions forming. And, yeah. Also that Trump has chosen a faction that's not GOP, Inc. I'm quite heartened.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. So now I need to read to you because I found this. Fascinating. I decided to bring some questions to AI to see if it's just me who's thinking this. Am I imagining something? Is there really a new faction of conservatism? What do they care about? So I went to Perplexity and I asked, I am trying to name a growing faction of conservatives that includes voices like Elon, Peter Thiel, Chamath and Vivek [00:16:00] Ramaswamy.
Who else would you put in this group? This growing faction of conservatives you're referring to is often called the New Right or the Silicon Valley Right. It includes tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and business leaders who have shifted towards more conservative right wing views. Based on the search results and additional context, here are some key figures that should be considered part of this group.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Chamath, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sachs, JD Vance. So you notice it unprompted included JD Vance in this group. So it's not just me who's saying JD is in this group. It's a, I prime an AI was this. And it's like, yeah, he's part of this new, right. And Marc Andreessen. This group has a few common traits and then it goes into like their you know, Silicon Valley background and everything like that.
But then I thought something else was really interesting. So I did a follow up where I said, what are common policy positions? They push. And it said, because I thought this was an interesting summary. The new right or Silicon Valley right, which includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter [00:17:00] Thiel, Chamath Palsa, and Vivek Ramaswamy shares several common policy positions.
These include economic libertarianism. They advocate for free market principles, reduced government intervention in the economy and deregulation. Well, yeah. With the neoliberal act, this is what I thought conservatism
Simone Collins: was. That's just so
Malcolm Collins: weird. Which emphasizes individual freedom and responsibility, and minimum state intervention and economic affairs.
Cultural conservatism, this group often holds socially conservative views, including a commitment to traditional values and public morality. They tend to oppose progressive cultural movements and emphasize the importance of maintaining cultural. norms and traditions, skepticism of elite institutions.
There is a strong distrust of established elites and mainstream institutions such as media, academia, and government agencies. The skepticism is rooted in the belief that these institutions are dominated by leftist ideologies that seek to undermine conservative values and policies. So, so far you're like, Oh, this is like a hundred percent us.
Native or sorry, nationalism and populism. populism. They often support nationalist policies that [00:18:00] prioritize the interests of their own country over globalist agendas. They, this includes a focus on America First policies and a resistance to international agreements that they perceive to undermine national sovereignty.
Free speech and anti censorship. A significant policy position is a defense of free speech and opposition to what they see as censorship by tech platforms and other institutions. They argue that current policies disproportionately silence conservative voices. A critique of woke culture. They are vocal critics of woke culture and identity politics, which they believe stifles free expression and promotes division.
This includes opposition to affirmative action and other policies they view as promoting social justice at the expense of a meritocracy. Exactly us,
Simone Collins: I would say it's us, except for when it comes to social policy, I would say that we take a much more free market or libertarian approach to social policy, which isn't to say that we don't know all over and criticize certain social approaches, but we take it more from a liberal approach.
Well, they suck and [00:19:00] they're going to disappear. Like they're going to fail.
Malcolm Collins: We've talked about creating government departments that fund episodes of shows like they did in the seventies about like anti drug shows that are like cornet films that like, you know, show large, So no, we're totally in that.
We promote the idea of the government intervening in companies that own the medium of communication in the same way. The United States government used to nationalize things like the postal service and create really heavy regulations around things like telephone lines, and yet we don't have that around things like the companies like YouTube, for example, that might censor what you and I are saying to each other.
I agree
Simone Collins: with you on that. Where I would draw the line with our policy. So is coercive tactics like saying this is
Malcolm Collins: it's saying that this group doesn't do that. So it's not relevant
Simone Collins: anyway. So next, I don't know. I mean, where I will like,
Malcolm Collins: you know, JD Vance is JD Vance is really on the edge of this group.
He's got a foot in both communities. But he speaks to this group and he is adjacent to this group, but I wouldn't call him an avatar of this group. If you're looking for an avatar of this [00:20:00] group, you're looking for someone like Elon Musk. Yeah. And the same way that Peter Thiel built his political opinion sort of before this group existed, and he's also been an influence in JD Vance, which has influenced him with a lot of mysticism which is why people like James Lindsay freaked out when JD Vance was admitted.
'cause he sees a lot of JD Vance's mysticism that came from some of the influencers of Peter Thiel and we'll likely do a different episode of that. I'm not as worried about that. You know, I think that, and this is a fresh take that you're gonna hear to hear. While I support Trump and JD Vance, I do believe that God gives man signs.
And when I see a group of people walking around in red hats that say witch on them, I'm like, eventually these people are going to be our enemies. And we need to take that into consideration. For people who do not know MAGA is a. Is the feminine version of Mago, you know, when you read the Bible, like Simon of Magos, i.
e. Simon, the sorcerer it means a female searcher, sorcerer, i. e. a witch. The Bible tells us do not, it tells us to [00:21:00] be wary of witches. And so when a group of people come to, I just think that God makes these things obvious. It's weird. How freaking obvious as sometimes that God makes his will and I think that this is one of those instances where we just haven't had to deal with it yet.
Right now they are on our side, but God has told us to not overcast our chips. Okay. What? You disagree or you feel uncomfortable with the fact that there is a group of, that's a weird thing, right? That's gotta be weird to you. It's red hats that say which on them.
Simone Collins: Make America great
Malcolm Collins: again.
That's a weird phrase. It's a weird, it's weird that they shortened it and it's weird that it says which
Simone Collins: not really, maybe I'm on, I'm too autistic to get it. You're a schizoid enough to get it. You know what I mean? I'm
Malcolm Collins: schizoid enough to be, you're like, yeah, it's a group of people who wear red hats that say, [00:22:00] which.
They don't say
Simone Collins: which they say
Malcolm Collins: MAGA it's which in, in, in Latin, sweetheart, it's loud
Simone Collins: define MAGA Google type in what does MAGA
Malcolm Collins: mean in Latin, the language of the church.
Simone Collins: Okay, Latin. Fine. Because, yeah, because everyone's still doing mass in Latin.
I'm not
Malcolm Collins: choosing some obscure language here, Simone.
Simone Collins: Wizard, sorcerer, poisoner, poisonous, magical, magus, noun, adjective.
Malcolm Collins: I'm just saying, it's not like I'm choosing, like, Schizo or something Latin. The language of the church. Sorry I just gotta be like anyway, so I'll go further here. What does it say after that? It says that they use the use of government to counter leftist influence. , unlike class. The liberals who believe in limiting government power, the new right advocates for using government power strategically to counteract what they see as overreach of the left and cultural institutions and spheres.
These positions reflect a blend [00:23:00] of economic liberalism and cultural conservatism, aiming to reshape the political landscape by challenging both traditional conservative and liberal paradigm. And I looked at this and I was like, wow, this is a weird coalition of political beliefs that I thought you and I had come up with on our own.
But it's like, no, like this is, or not come up with on our own. But like, I thought that our political position was more unique than I think it really is. I think it's a reflection of a mainstream and growing faction of the conservative party and one that has to an extent just been knighted by Trump. I'm wondering your thoughts on this.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I think it's a good side, a good sign that we're converging on something similar because it implies that it is a natural and logical reaction to where we are as a society, economy and government. It's a good thing. It's a good sign. And I'm glad to know that we're not alone. But I'm also disturbed to know that this wasn't the norm, because I [00:24:00] have that same bias that most people do, which is, you assume that if someone is nice and reasonable, and they seem intelligent, that they hold the same views as you.
And going to NatCon and seeing that, Oh, actually the establishment of Republicans, which are nice, wonderful, smart people that I like. If so, of course I assume that they're going to, they're going to hold out the same stances as we are, really don't. And they're part of this old faction, which is largely socialist, which is quite socially coercive.
You know, that wants to ban porn that wants to do all the, I mean, they also want to do some other things like in Project 2025. Led by the Heritage Foundation, which is definitely of the old guard. But seems curious about the new guard. So that's good. Looks like it could update.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah. It looks like it could update.
But you know, like there are some things that seem more in line with new stuff, you know, like sort of breaking out a lot of ossified bureaucracy seems to be a part of it. But then also these, you know, more coercive or very conservative, socially conservative tactics. I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, Trump has been very clear about where [00:25:00] he stands on this.
So, you know, if you look at like, how do you merge these two groups? Because there are IE the tech entrepreneur group and the You know, angry disenfranchised group, right? Because there are a few areas where they're going to chafe with each other, right? And Trump has done it. So for example, then new Republicans are generally pro gay people being able to live their lives.
Huh? They're even pro adult trans people, but they are very antagonistic. For example, as JD has two programs that try to transition children or that try to convince or really brainwash children into this weird gender ideology cult thing that we've talked about in other episodes. And the, where I say that, you know, like.
A cult basically grew under trans ideology. And I think that most of the new Republicans realize that, and they're very scared by that.
Is the holy guide to living pure, this will help explain. First, [00:26:00] Laughter. Her name's Lorraine, too? We're all Lorraine, and you will be Todd. A name chosen especially for you oh. You're not
An oppressed minority. you're a cult!
Excuse me, are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love and Yeah, this is it
Malcolm Collins: So, so I want to read something from Richard Hanania. He tweeted this. So he said, Trump personally dictated the new RNC language on abortion and gay marriage, which are, I think, the two issues.
where these two groups need to be able to synergize, i. e. the tech elite are okay with being more restrictive on these things. And the disenfranchised Americans often want to go on absolute positions towards these things, or there's a small faction of them that does that is really loud. Actually I wouldn't even say, the rural disenfranchised group doesn't care about these things.
The group that cares about these things is GOP Inc. And Trump is trying to keep enough of GOP Inc., was basically telling them [00:27:00] to f**k off. He
Simone Collins: has to. I mean, it's still a significant contingent.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it's a significant contingent of funding. But it's not, you know, as voters, it's not the future of the party.
No. And so what is Trump doing here? So I'll read what Richard Hanania said. Trump personally dictated the new RNC language on abortion and gay marriage. His team put the delegates in a room, took their phones, and Trump said, you're going to pass this and you're going to do it quickly. Night of long knives.
For social conservatives is what it was called. And then he showed something from a a paper that had come out on this or an announcement about this. Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler. And in some cases, vaguer.
He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized as a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He actually wanted. Nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to [00:28:00] attack him. And he made clear to his aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme court was a conservative supermajority fair um, Mr.
Trump also. stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation. Quote, Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, end quote. He could not be throwing in harder with the new Republicans and against GOP Inc if he tried.
These are issues that don't matter to the world disenfranchised that much. Okay. So, so, so he's choosing a side between GOP, Inc and new Republicans. He's saying or, and the new right or tech concert techno conservative, as we call them sometimes. And he's saying it's a new right. That's who I'm with.
And I think it's incredibly true. [00:29:00] But do you have any further thoughts here?
Simone Collins: Well, what does this mean for the longer term future of the party, especially if Trump wins, having made this tone setting decision? Well,
Malcolm Collins: it means that he's sane and he's aware of what the base actually wants. So, According to especially the Young Base according to Pew in 2014, 61 percent of Republicans under 30 favored same sex marriage, while only 35 percent opposed it.
It's an incredibly unpopular opinion. Gallup poll from 2021 showed that 55 percent of Republicans overall, so this is overall, not just young Republicans, favored same sex marriage. Supported same sex marriage. It's a majority opinion in the Republican party. In 2015, 63 percent of Republicans under 30 supported protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination.
So again, the majority, when you're talking about young conservatives are pro that.
And then if you look at Pew, nearly half of Republicans younger than 30 say that abortion should be legal in all most cases. So this is [00:30:00] far to the left of our opinions on abortion 47%. And so this is the next generation.
And then you can say, well, what about like the mainstream conservatives? I can put a graph on screen here. It shows that 64 percent say do not take this life begins at conception mindset. They want to, you know, restrict abortion, but they still want it to be accessible. I think JD Vance's public initial point on this, the 12 week position actually falls in line with what a lot of Europe thinks on this point.
And probably what we'd agree with, I think 12 weeks are pretty good. It's interestingly, It's also around where Islam believe it's an installment happens. And it's not that far from early Catholic thinkers on when installment happens. So I find that pretty interesting. And it also, interestingly, I find this really interestingly is that if you correlate the early Catholic thinkers with what we actually know about the science and we'll get more into like abortion stuff in a different episode it correlates with when the nervous system begins developing.
So I think. that, you know, when the church was still in communion with [00:31:00] God, it understood God's will in regards to this, because that's actually kind of remarkable that they sort of guessed when the nervous system started developing without any knowledge of that. But anyway. That's like our religious.
I'm going to take that aside. But what I'm saying is if you're like, what's the consequence of him outlying himself with this faction, he's outlying himself with factions that represent the base, not factions that represent an out of touch and bureaucratic elite cast that really have nothing to do with the party anymore.
And another point we'll get to in another episode, which I really love to talk to you more, is this deontological religious system that in the nineties people thought was stable. And you had like the quiver full movement and stuff like that. Their kids deconverted at astronomically high rates. It turns out it's just not an intergenerationally stable system.
They were like, we're going to create the generation of Joshua. We'll do a few episodes on this. But what turns out and I think you're seeing this and like, The eight passengers family, for example, right? When you take this deontological moral perspective, it is very bad at intergenerational, like keeping [00:32:00] people and the groups that are doing that are just not relevant to the future.
It is the active theological conversation and in consequentialist moral systems, which seem to be able to actually motivate high fertility, which you see across traditions, whether it's Catholic or Mormon or something like that, you see some factions that are adopting these and maintaining high fertility.
But thoughts.
Simone Collins: That makes sense. And I'm excited for that, but is there a chance that this highly socialist, we'll say Christian socialist faction instead becomes a dominant faction and how would that play
Malcolm Collins: out in population numbers? Not at all. I think that we have a risk from them. Like, so, so the Heritage Foundation where they're like, we'll do Project 2025 and we'll staff the White Fest for you.
Trump, don't worry about it. We'll handle it all. Trump telling them basically to go off was very smart. I like Heritage Foundation people, I think they can update, but this original plan of like banning pornography saying life begins at conception, which basically means IVF gets [00:33:00] banned, you know?
putting kids on a military list. You know, this is not the new Republicans. This is some weird old theocratic holdout. And I think that when I talk to people at the Heritage Foundation, many of them are totally rational, normal people who follow the base. What I'm assuming is there's probably some donors to them.
Or some faction that they think they need to please, or maybe some old people who are still haven't been purged from these organizations. And during the Trump administration, because Trump seems very alive to this, you know, they're going to go through and they're going to clean house so that we can and then begin hiring people like you and me and other thought leaders in the new right to begin to add a.
Perspective that is more representative of both the Republican base, but also the Republican next generation, which is important if we want to keep the party healthy and strong. There, I think there was a plan to try to take over. with a Christian Marxist value [00:34:00] system. And we even saw this was the pronatalist movement.
I mean, Limestone did this. Limestone wrote this like manifesto about how the Collins's aren't true pronatalist because the Collins's aren't socialist. They don't believe because they look at the evidence that social handouts work that cash payments to families work, that the government should have control of how many kids the family should have.
And therefore, They are anti natalist. And it's like, I love that he's like, therefore they're not conservative or they're not the new right. Were two of the words he used. And I was like, we're not conservative because we're not Marxist. But I think that a lot of people like him they do, they have attempted over and over again to try to Wrestle control of movements that, you know, other people have built people like Trump, people like us.
And you just need to be vigilant against them. And frankly, they need to be shamed and kicked a bit. Like, when I think kicked a bit, I think Trump did a good job with the project. 2025 saying, I don't think he needs to throw out this database. I think he should probably use it. I think [00:35:00] he can work with the Heritage Foundation, as long as they understand, don't try to like, take your socialist nonsense, your far left, wokey, ban porn nonsense, and try to insect it into the What is actually the conservative basis desires these days or banning gay marriage or something like that.
Like this is not modern conservatism. Okay. It's not what the base wants. It's not what the new philosophers in the party want. It is and I think that a lot of these groups can learn. I think that they need to. come to accept that their theological traditions are not a majority enough of the American population to do anything other than hurt them.
When you put these extremist positions around when life begins or gay marriage or something like that, even if you believe in them, right? Like, even if you think, Oh, it's good that the government's enforcing people to live this way, which doesn't get anyone else into heaven. So I don't like, even if that, right?
And I really want to [00:36:00] stress this point again. There is no Christian denomination, which believes that you have helped a person's chance of getting into heaven. By adjudicating their morality. If anything you've just removed an opportunity for them to reflect on their own immortality and potentially build a relationship with God. , so you have a hurt them in that regards and you have hurt our society further by preventing Republican candidates from potentially winning. To play this little silly. I don't know what it is.
Status game. It makes no sense.
Malcolm Collins: You are hurting conservatives ability to win because this isn't something most of the conservative base agrees with it's something that galvanizes Democrats to get out there and vote. I think sort of the last gift that that the sort of transitional group, Trump's group gave to these people.
Was this conservative Supreme Court [00:37:00] was the Supreme Court decision on abortion, which I think is just, I do think this should be a state's rights issue. And now we need to move on with what conservatives actually think instead of what these small pockets of extremists think that conservatives should think if they weren't so stupid, is basically what they think.
I mean, that's what we got from the conference is a lot of these people just think that the base is stupid because if they look at. This disenfranchised angry group of voters in the same way that the leftist bureaucrats do. They're like, just sit back, relax, and let the bureaucrats make all the decisions.
Simone Collins: This gives me hope, Malcolm. And it makes a lot of sense. It helps to explain a bunch of things that really confused me about what are conservatives now? But it's exciting to see things moving in an interesting direction. It's just kind of crazy. Also how capitalism is kind of going full circle.
I see the cycle there of, you know, originally one could say like productive world changing companies were conservatives. And began to [00:38:00] falter. And now once again, sort of productive world changing companies are conservative. So just different from a new wave of capitalism, a new wave of business formation.
So that's also interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Well, that's actually really interesting. I think both theocratically and in terms of business, the conservative circles are the ones where intellectually lively discussions are happening.
Simone Collins: Right. Yeah. Where generation is happening. I feel like conservatism feels more generative to me.
Whereas progressivism feels more degenerative to me rot excess and rot or decline. Whereas conservatism is more the belt tightening, the discipline and then the growth, the new growth.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it's austerity and discipline, I think are two of the conservative values. That you're just not going to get in these progressive circles.
And I think vitalism is becoming a key conservative value instead of you know, the old conservative party that we would argue is, was motivated by like, ick, like against gay because gay, ick, you know? And then we learned that's a stupid way to build morality. Like that's what Mother [00:39:00] Teresa basically taught the world.
Like, yeah just because somebody initiates a disgust reaction in you, like a leopard, doesn't mean you shouldn't hug them and show them love. Like that's a pre evolved thing that was meant to keep you, Healthy and safe and sure you have offspring, but that doesn't mean it's a good sign of actual morality.
Simone Collins: Yeah, a lot of our listeners disagree on that. They're like no Disgust good.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, when I see a deformed person and I feel disgust that's a wonderful thing that's god telling me that they must have sinned was this like Well, you know
Simone Collins: on average in the past, people before Germ theory and whatnot benefited from being afraid of people who had visible problems, open wounds, deformities, et cetera, because it could be associated with the
Malcolm Collins: world system evolved.
But you know, We also, you know, if you go to early Christianity, like what's happening, you know, in the tabernacle, you know, when they're escaping Israel and they're ripping apart birds and throwing blood all over their worship area, like our religion [00:40:00] evolves. Okay. And we need to, and I think that's commanded of us by God is to continue to, and even Catholicism, their view that life begins at conception, evolve.
That's only about. I think 200 years old was a Pius IX. That's not what, you know, Thomas Aquinas thought. That's not what Augustus of Hippo thought. That's a new belief. And that's okay. We evolve and we evolve again until we get closer to what God wants us to believe. That's
Simone Collins: what techno puritanism is all
Malcolm Collins: about.
Right, my friend. Oh yeah. I love you, Simone. You are an. Absolute star. What are we having tonight? I mean, we're gonna people hated us for our last night's food. They were like, Oh, this is not what a carnivore eats. You know, you're
Simone Collins: having teriyaki beef with stir fried
Malcolm Collins: rice. I'm very excited for that. I've actually been saving up for that today because I'm really looking forward to that.
Yeah. They were like, what about your seed oils? Cause I was having what? Like gyoza last time and like tomato soup. And I don't know, maybe I'm getting my seed oils. [00:41:00] I actually don't care. I don't want to live forever.
Simone Collins: I thought seed oils were out.
Malcolm Collins: I don't know. They're like, look at a rye nationalists.
You know, we've had them on the show, right? He'd tell us that the way we're eating is like terribly unhealthy. And I'm like, I really don't care. Like, I'm not here to live forever. I believe in forever puppy. That's the way we see humanity. People are like, why are you so okay with dying?
Are you tired of your puppies getting too big to handle? Are you sick of your cute little puppies turning into dogs? Then try Forever Puppy. Our puppies are guaranteed to stay youthful and lovable permanently. Each Forever Puppy is backed by our lifetime guarantee. If your puppy is starting to lose that youthful innocence and charm, bring it back to any one of our 500 locations, and we'll exchange it for free.
Malcolm Collins: Where it's, do you know what I'm talking about? No, but I can guess. You take it back whenever it gets old and it begins to become boring and sad and [00:42:00] nihilistic.
Simone Collins: And then it becomes
Malcolm Collins: excited again, just like our kids. Oh god, I love you. I love you, too
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the fascinating dynamics of Trump's VP pick, JD Vance, and what it means for the future of conservative politics. This thought-provoking discussion explores the concept of "identity laundering," the evolution of American cultural groups, and how authenticity is perceived in modern politics. The Collins couple offers unique insights into the shifting alliances within the Republican party and the rise of tech elites in conservative circles.
Key points covered:
* The concept of "identity laundering" in politics
* JD Vance's journey from hillbilly to venture capitalist to conservative icon
* The evolution of Trump's political identity
* The alliance between tech elites and rural conservatives
* The influence of Scots-Irish culture on American politics
* The shift in conservative elite culture
* The potential impact on the 2024 election
Whether you're a political junkie, a student of American culture, or simply interested in understanding the complex dynamics of modern conservatism, this video offers valuable insights into the changing face of American politics.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Both J. D. Vance and Trump. represent a form of identity laundering and fraudulence that is extremely authentic and trustworthy. It builds trust. he grew up an actual hillbilly. Then he found out that to achieve the things that society told him were valuable, he had to adopt another identity.
He's a Princeton venture capitalist, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Your true self is who you choose to be, how you choose to see the world. Yeah, he is not somebody who accidentally became who he is.
He became who he is because he had a goal, I want to be X type of person now, and he has transformed himself
Simone Collins: all culture is a LARP. I think this ties into that. And I think you're much more authentic when you're LARPing culture than when you're just defaulting into whatever culture surrounds you because [00:01:00] you have consciously chosen it.
Therefore, you own it.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am so excited to be talking to you today! We had done an episode on J. D. Vance that actually went live today, and I was, as Trump's VP pick and the writer of Hillbilly Eulogy.
Simone Collins: Eulogy. L and G.
Malcolm Collins: I'm always going to get that wrong.
Effigy is, I'm always going to say, don't say effigy. Anyway I, there was a really interesting discussion on the discord about the episode. And I'll put the interesting topic on the discord here so people can get these types of comments in real time as they're coming up. But it made me realize that this pic was fascinating.
From so many perspectives that I want to dive into, like the psychology of this pick and the psychology that's represented in Trump now having as his running mate, I think the personification of the never Trump movement. And what that [00:02:00] means for the shift that we've had culturally speaking. Both J. D. Vance and Trump. represent a form of identity laundering and fraudulence that is extremely authentic and trustworthy. It builds trust.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And so do you want to talk about this?
Because you were the one who first notices.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So there are particular brands and personalities. I think are comforting and trustworthy in the same way that franchises are trustworthy. And I'll explain why. So I'd said earlier that it was very fitting to me and I found it very pleasing that Trump is like the poor man's caricature of a rich man.
In yesterday's conversation how Trump is he frames himself as this very like classy, successful businessman. Whereas like your typical, like WASPy wealthy person in the U S would seem as pretty trashy.
And on the flip side, you have this [00:03:00] man who's branded himself as a hillbilly and a man of people who nevertheless, after coming out of the Marines, went to Yale law school, worked in venture capital, worked with the tech that we, it's totally not like the hillbilly. And yet we see them as being.
Probably more authentic when you actually come down to it than, like your average normal politician who's playing by the politician template of I'm authentic. This is me. And I'm basic. And I think a lot of what's going on there is they've both adopted characters that are predictable and in that way, trustworthy.
You don't have to like someone to trust them. You have to feel like you can model and predict them. That's it.
Malcolm Collins: I think it's more than that. So I think JD Vance is a bit easier to study this from than Trump, right? So JD Vance grew up like an actual hillbilly. So you read his book. Can you talk to some of the stories in
Simone Collins: it?
Yeah. I think, yeah, this is important that. People recognize it. He was mostly raised by his grandmother who he called Meemaw, and she really is this caricature as [00:04:00] well. This is like the classic Scots Irish back country, American. There was this one family story where apparently Meemaw said to.
her husband that if she came home, if he came home drunk again, she would kill him. And lo and behold, one day he comes home, drink, of course, like one day he comes home drunk, passes out on the couch and she, he wrote in his book actually, that she poured gasoline on him. The family actually quibble that no, it was probably lighter fluid, but that was the only thing, some context but yeah, and lit him on fire.
And it was actually JV's, I think, aunt, one of the, one of the daughters who, took pity upon this man and saved his life. But this is a woman
Malcolm Collins: who does not f**k around. This is very backcountry uh, value systems. Like, you, you know, You set boundaries and then you enforce them with, Violence.
Yeah, but I,
Simone Collins: and I think this is, the way that, people are like JD Vance is [00:05:00] not really a hillbilly. But he was raised in that kind of culture and environment and also people are like, yeah Trump's not really like a classy, wealthy businessman.
He was raised really wealthy. Like it, the way in which these people are frauds are like, not exactly the stereotypes that you're playing, that's playing topic I wanna get into, or nuance I wanna make here around fraudulence,
Malcolm Collins: which is to say he grew up an actual hillbilly. Then he found out that to achieve the things that society told him were valuable, he had to adopt another identity.
He's a Princeton venture capitalist, right? And he fit in with this new identity community that he was representing when he was writing Hillbilly elegy. He. Was writing it to explain how could anyone ever vote for Trump, which was genuinely something that was in his community.
People were asking, and he at the time was motivated to believe I could never do something like this. I would [00:06:00] never do something like this. Not the person I am today, but then he thought the environment I grew up in, I can model them. I can begin to see how they might
Simone Collins: do certain
Malcolm Collins: things or why they might do certain things.
And then he did something that a lot of people do at different points of their life, which is he was modeling this other community, this community he originally came from, and either because he thought through re adopting this identity in the same way that he adopted the. Ultra urban monoculture identity to achieve success in venture capital and Princeton law and all that.
He might have realized he could politically capitalize from this new identity and began to adapt it. Like maybe that was part of the early motive motivation, but people code switch too. Yeah. People code switch all the time. But maybe it was in modeling this in engaging with this population again, I don't believe in a true self like a lot of people are like, Oh, you should just be your true self.
Your true [00:07:00] self is who you choose to be, how you choose to see the world. Yeah, he began to choose like he realized, I think, Partially that he had distanced himself from his real cultural ancestry because he had began to dehumanize people with those value systems and that culture and he realized that, oh, I shouldn't be doing that.
They actually have some value to them. Perhaps more value than the urban monoculture. And this is the journey that many people have gone down. And so the question is when was he pretending? Was he pretending when he was ultra urban monoculture, venture capitalist, Princeton guy, or is he pretending now that he's still has many of their mannerisms.
He can still close switch to access their community, but when he's making decisions about the metaphysical nature of reality, good and evil, et cetera,
Simone Collins: which.
Malcolm Collins: Identity is a channeling. He tells us which identity he's channeling. I think both in his actions [00:08:00] and in his policy positions and in that we can see that he is not somebody who accidentally became who he is.
He became who he is because he had a goal, I want to be X type of person now, and he has transformed himself from the way that he dresses and talks to his value system into a high class hillbilly.
A poor mountain deer barely kept his family fed. Well, the first thing you know, Joe Jet's a billionaire. Said, California's the place you ought to be. So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly. Hills, that is there are so many people in this here town. It's gonna take a long time to meet everybody. That's real nice, son. This here's what I carry. Okay, [00:09:00] cool. Cool, cool.
Simone Collins: Um, One, you once tweeted that all culture is a LARP. I think this ties into that. And I think you're much more authentic when you're LARPing culture than when you're just defaulting into whatever culture surrounds you because you have consciously chosen it.
Therefore, you own it. You've thought through it. And you can Instead of deontologically or performatively acting out that culture, just Oh, I guess this is how it's done. Going through the motions, you're living it. You're living the values and you're executing on them with true fidelity to that cultural system.
Malcolm Collins: I actually think that this form of identity laundering or identity fraud is actually The core of the new vitalist framework. Oh, interesting. Look at our previous video where they see the concepts of we think that we've moved from a disgust based moral system to a cringe based moral system to know a vitalist based moral system.
Which elevates people like Tiger King, who is another person who I think represents this form of fraud.
Simone Collins: Oh, totally. Tiger
Malcolm Collins: King isn't who Tiger King [00:10:00] is because of random circumstances that happened to him throughout his life. Tiger King decided to become. Tiger King. It was a brand that he, uh, aspired to embody and now does embody in a very authentic way because it is it's not something that he is because it's just what the people around him are,
Simone Collins: Because
Malcolm Collins: he chose to be.
Keep rolling, keep rolling. Now this is the kind of movies we're gonna make here, okay? Ladies and gentlemen, before you hear it on the news, I'm going to tell you myself, about an hour ago we had an incident where one of the employees stuck their arm through the cage and a tiger tore her arm off. I can give you your money back, or I can give you a rain check.
Simone Collins: Yeah. This is what I value. This is what I like. This is who I'm going to be. And this is what I'm going to stand for. And I'm living it 100 percent of the time at volume 10. Yes. And I actually think Andrew Tate is very similar. Yes. [00:11:00] Yes.
I guarantee you don't walk around your house with a sword because you're not commander. I'm a commander.
Simone Collins: And I think that's one of the appeals about him for people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
It's so funny when people see our value system and they're like, you can't just choose who you want to be. You can't just choose what you want to believe in your moral system. Yeah, you absolutely can. That is the way the world works. That is. A value system that you actually have because you own it.
Now the, or because you chose it and you intentionally went into it. And this reminds me of when people are like, how could you guys be around racists? Or like, why would it be a problem if we're around racists? Like we're trying to convince them not to be racist. And they go if you're around enough racists, you'll become a racist.
And it's oh, what you're telling us is you hold your value system because the people you are around hold that value system. Not because you chose that value system. They are susceptible to What the general public is doing in a way that we are not [00:12:00] because they didn't choose to be who they are, who they are as just an average of the people around them.
And you also see this in Trump Trump's identity when people say it's like a fraudulent identity because he isn't accepted within high class culture. He's not high class. He doesn't he is as somebody who grew up and this is actually interesting to me because Trump did grow up wealthy, right? Yeah.
That's
Simone Collins: the thing. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But it's clear to me that his family was never accepted in high class culture. So I grew up in what was an exceptionally wealthy family. Now I inherited none of it. The family had all the money taken from them and I was disowned from them long before that. But they are a very, I call it a Bohemian Grove, wealthy family, like that type of person.
They were like Dallas. We, there was a Dallas social book that listed like the most important families in Dallas and we were in that but we still have a copy of it somewhere in our house where when they used to have a social register, you might not know what social registers are.
They had them in England where they would rank people by how important their family was. The Bratz, [00:13:00] my love. The
Simone Collins: peerage, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the peerage. It was very important to, like, how you address other people. A lot of the old southern cities had this as well and so we were in that book and we would go to all the parties, and so I really understood how to code to this community.
I went to Cotillion, I went to all that, And the
Simone Collins: house you were in when you were born was featured in this magazine, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, there was a lot of so I knew that community. Now, the reason why I was expelled from my family is because I intentionally decided I did not like that community and I did not like their value system.
But I think a lot of people can see when they interact with me or look at me. And my family was always considered an outsider within that community. We used to be called out. They called
Simone Collins: you an outsider. Yeah, they called you an outsider. Um,
Malcolm Collins: Because we were seen as so weird within that community. But that was the like, I knew how to code switch into that.
Simone Collins: It's clear that, and that was when you lived in Highland Park, right? So the other Highland Park families of Dallas, which is this wealthy neighborhood, it's like the Beverly Hills of Dallas saw them as Yeah, yeah, yeah. I
Malcolm Collins: grew up [00:14:00] hanging out with the Bush family and the, the, those sorts of individuals.
I so I understood how to code switch into that and what it means to be that. It's very clear to me that for whatever reason. Trump did not grow up or was not acculturated into actual blue blood culture. He doesn't, he appears to want to be something like that, but he doesn't know how to code that way.
And as I've mentioned in other episodes to me, he actually codes like a Persian.
Simone Collins: Right? Yeah.
Yeah, look, I'm guessing there's some kind of soccer match from your home country going on. . But, uh, some of us are trying to sleep.
And I could almost deal with the noise. But it's the cologne, alright? I can smell it in my bed, that's how powerful it is. Okay? That's how powerful it is.
Simone Collins: Well, But also he does all these other things that like, Classy people aren't allowed to do everyone knows
As a side note here, I genuinely do not think Trump knew this.
Simone Collins: that sure. If you want to, as like a very wealthy man of [00:15:00] a high social class, you can have your mistresses or whatever that you have to marry a respectable woman.
Like ideally, someone from your shared culture who has social status within your social groups and who is, educated And, respectable and I'm not, I mean, Melania is a queen. She is a fantastic woman, but she is a, an Eastern European model. That is what trashy people marry in a trashy people where I marry the, the mail order brides were incredibly sexy and accomplished and obviously great people, but that's not like the conforming thing to do.
Malcolm Collins: I think a great example, you look at somebody like JFK, you have the absolute queen, Jackie Kennedy, right? Yeah, but he's, and he
Simone Collins: got like the otherwise sexy women, he just, yeah, he slept with them, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he sleeps with the Marilyn Monroe, he marries the Jackie Kennedy. Yeah. You don't marry the Marilyn Monroe.
Yeah. But Trump got his signals crossed around. And if I had to guess around why this is, my guess would be because his family made money [00:16:00] in what was considered a low class industry. And so he, he was never really accepted as a use into the high class world. So he was
Simone Collins: like a wealthy merchant family rather than a wealthy lord family or something.
It's not
Malcolm Collins: just, yeah, it's not just that. That he's a wealthy merchant. It, so people might not know this but within blue blood circles real estate is considered a very low class thing to be involved in. It's almost as low class as car sales
Yeah, well, my dad totally owns a dealership dude, do you know who his dad is? He's totally rich. He will totally hook you up, dude. We're drunk.
Malcolm Collins: which is, you can make,
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Malcolm Collins: You can,
Simone Collins: so you don't know this, but there's all these genres now on Netflix of wealthy real estate brokers.
And they are the trashiest people in the entire world. They're great shows because they like trashy people by like only super designer brands and do a lot of conspicuous consumption, which again is like the ultimate sign of being trashy. So that is so funny because I've never actually heard you say that before.
And I never thought that [00:17:00] real estate was associated with like trashiness, but when you go and watch these real estate. reality tv shows on Netflix, which I do because I am low culture. Thank you very much. Um, Wow, you're right. It's it is not the waspy blue blood. It is not the prep. It is the It is.
Oh, yeah.
I'm the new agent, Francine. I'm like a lemur monkey. Mostly business, but I will throw my own s**t at you if I have to.
Malcolm Collins: Cause a lot of people don't know this. They don't know, if you didn't grow up in one of these families, you don't because you can make an astronomical amount of money owning chains of car dealerships, but it's just considered low class.
My dad's like totally rich, we own this dealership, and uh, what sorority are you in? Let's get together!
Dude, dude! Get off my shirt! It's worth more than your ass life, my dad owns a dealership! Hello! I can chill out for a while, I mean, I've already flunked out, but it's cool, I'm gonna work at my dad's dealership. My dad owns this dealership
Malcolm Collins: um,
Simone Collins: well, And this is, like for those who are not very familiar with American discussions of class, cause I know we have a lot of like non American viewers. Yeah. [00:18:00] They're, class, not at all in the United States is associated with how much money you have. There's like these two different version of versions of it.
There's like social class wealthy, which means like you could have absolutely nothing be drowning in college debt and like living in a hovel out, like slightly outside Brooklyn, but be very high class and know all the right people and go to all the right parties. Or you could be like, An air conditioning company baron or a real estate baron and have the best clothes and have the best houses and actually live in mansions and actually have economic power and not be in those circles and not being I know
Malcolm Collins: it about the American class system is if you know how to code switch into it, you will generally be accepted regardless of your background.
You will be considered higher class than the people who were born into that class.
This might actually explain why JD Vance was so readily accepted and elevated within this culture while Trump struggled so much to gain acceptance within this culture.
Malcolm Collins: This reminds me of something that Ayla wrote,
I realize this might need some context or people who aren't regular Watchers at the show. [00:19:00] ALA is a famous sex worker and sex researcher. And she ran away from her family at a young age and got her start working in factories.
Malcolm Collins: where she's I don't understand why I keep getting invited to all these parties and I'm treated as so, like why, why is it that upper class society is so interested in having me at all their events?
Simone Collins: Yeah. And like, when will they realize that I am not? Yeah
Malcolm Collins: but she doesn't get it. In upper class, because upper class America always wants to believe that it's not classes. Ayla codes very well for extreme upper class. Oh, totally, yeah. The way she talks, the way she does her house, the way she dresses.
The questions she asks her, her
Simone Collins: intellectual nature her level of education. Her intellectual nature. Totally.
This probably also explained to why ALA was so easily accepted into upper-class circles, but Trump was not signaling intellectual curiosity. Is considered intrinsically very high class by these communities. , which is something that [00:20:00] ALA constantly does. And Trump very rarely does. Well, attempting to signal your own wealth is considered incredibly low class. Um, and that's something that somebody like ALA never does, but Trump is constantly doing.
Simone Collins: And what's
Malcolm Collins: also interesting is sex work is not considered low class within upper class communities in the same way. And a lot of people are really shocked by this. They're like, what? Sex work has always been considered low class.
And I was like, actually, historically speaking, sex workers are generally You know like, Aspasia,
Simone Collins: right? That was her name.
Malcolm Collins: What? Aspasia. Aspasia. Yeah. So if you look at like ancient Greek culture, actually the highest class profession you could have as a woman was a special kind of sex work. Now, it's not normal sex work but this was also true in the philosopher
Simone Collins: queen sex worker.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This was also true in the courts of the French nobility. Yeah, being a courtesan.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Madame Pompadour.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So the idea of, which is also really interesting, that sex work is not considered a low class profession if you do it while being an incredible intellectual while something like real work, like being a involved in , [00:21:00] real estate or car sales.
I think people from a middle-class background or who didn't grow up in blue blood families would be very surprised by the professions that give you class status dings and the ones that don't. , an example here would be. I remember my mom telling me that I would be disinherited if I got a law degree because she considered being a lawyer.
So low class. , I actually got the similar threats. If I went into profession as a doctor. , And I think that a lot of people from, you know, non blue blood backgrounds would be confused by that and assume that those would be considered high class degrees. That I'm, I'm usually. , or is it something like ALA's work would bar her for being considered high class when it's like, no, no, not at all. Um, actually, this is something I noticed at, , St.
Andrew's. , where I went to school and it's known for having a lot of blue blood kids go there is that the blue blood kids, like all sorted into like one of two degrees. , either it was, if you went into [00:22:00] the arts, you would go into, The classics, which is like a completely useless degree. , or art history or philosophy. , but if you went into the sciences, we're actually about, I'd say 50% of the kids did, who came from blue blood families, the generic degree you would get, , or, or stem was neuroscience, , or, , particle physics.
Those were considered the two, like really high class degrees to have. , which you know, humorously, but it's my brother and I have degrees in neuroscience. , and, and again, there that's because it's considered the most technically challenging of the degrees and therefore it was the classiest of the degrees. Also, I hope people can begin to understand why I abandoned that cultural group. Even if it, you know, for a period, cut me off for my family. and It cost me what could have been a fairly easy life. it just wasn't worth it. Uh, and, and really interesting. , it's so funny that I grew up in this group that was traditionally aligned with the Republican party.
And as this group moved to align with the democratic party, that new group, I [00:23:00] ended up adopting, you know, tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They moved to the Republican party from the democratic party. Um, so I, I have this weird perspective and insight sort of across this transition.
Malcolm Collins: So I'm just going on a tangent here about how the class system works in America. I think many people would find this amazing and interesting and weird. But Because to me, I find it interesting and weird. It's a weird thing that like America still has this class system. What I will note is that it is mostly fallen apart.
So it existed when I was growing up, but that was really the last generation that maintained it. And it has now transformed itself. And the new high class faction is the faction that JD Vance is LARPing, which is a form of urban monoculture. If you look at our video, on Classically Abby about like why her channel never really caught on or worked out.
It's because when she says classy, she means normative within upper class culture. But the problem is normative upper class culture in America now is urban monoculture. And now there's a branch of upper class culture, which we'll get to in another video, which I find very [00:24:00] interesting, which is the tech elite.
And they are not urban monoculture. They actually have their whole own set of value systems. And that is where JD Vance is from and what we have seen. And I think what it has really transformed from the first Trump election till now, and with the party switch that's going on in the United States right now is the traditional upper class the old merchant, Class descendants, right?
They were bosom buddies with Republicans because of like deregulation and stuff like that. Trump is now basically a union guy in many ways. Um, And you know, pro terrorists, pro everything like that. But what's interesting is at the same time as he has lost the ability to work with this classic upper class and I said she wasn't able to sell it because that community doesn't exist anymore.
The tech elite rose. And they. began to move incrementally over the past years to being more Trump. This is like a Vitalik, Chamath, Teeter Teal, Elon, like us. The coded tech elite culture [00:25:00] is now a conservative cultural group and aligned with the conservative value system. This is the crypto conservatives, right?
A lot of the people in the crypto community have these extreme libertarian positions and stuff like that.
We have another video where we're going to go into this in a lot more detail, but if you look at the old conservative party, the conservative party before Trump. , and we'll call this GOP Inc. It predominantly existed as an Alliance of theocratic interests. And blue blood slash.
Big business interests. Big business left the Alliance. And so did blue bloods, as both groups went, woke. , and that allowed for Trump to rise where instead of appealing, primarily to theocrats or big business, he appealed to angry and discontent Americans, but this was also part of why his first administration struggled so much because angry discontent Americans don't exactly make up a good. , like governing bureaucracy, if you [00:26:00] want it to enact all of Trump's policies. During this period, if you, if you look back at the nineties and the eighties, well, big business and intergenerational wealth supported Republicans, tech entrepreneurs generally supported.
Progressive's. Well, just as big business went away. As Trump was changing the parties and the value systems and as big business and intergenerational wealth solidly aligned themselves with the progressive party. Tech entrepreneurs. I began to move from being progressive, to being staunch Republicans. And we'll have another video as to why and how this happened. , but I think JD Vance represents a solidification of this transition.
Malcolm Collins: But Trump's inability to properly signal that it seems at some point in his life, what he decided is he was just going to decide for himself what it meant to be and look like an upper class person.
And I think that is the core personal transformation he went through from his first presidency to this one. [00:27:00] And I think at first he thought that, Someday they would eventually accept him. The old upper classes would eventually accept him of New York. At least when he became president. At least when he became president and he's realized, Oh no, they'll never accept me.
And I, and all of these people who are more interesting and who like me for the way that I thought class worked, i. e. for me do represent me. And so the Trump that we see is more authentic. than somebody trying to be their authentic self.
Simone Collins: I think you can say a lot of people are like, why is he so moderated now?
Why is he so calm? Why is he looking more reasonable? This is so calculated. Maybe some of it's calculated, but I think a lot of it is that he's f**k you guys. I'm comfortable with myself now. And a lot of that. That calmness and that lack of abrasiveness actually comes from a place of greater personal security.
Malcolm Collins: And I think that in a way choosing JD Vance's, his running mate is the culmination of this. So I want to read something that was on our discord that I found really was like, wow, like [00:28:00] the right. Our
Simone Collins: discord regularly schools us. We're like, why don't we, why don't we listen to our podcast
Malcolm Collins: when we could just be on our discord?
We should just have a podcast reading the discord. Yes and no, to build a voter base, you need. To appeal to different groups because there are only two parties, different groups inevitably end up grouped together. You should differentiate between the technocratic elites and the liberal elites.
Technocratic elites built a company, they're smart and entrepreneurial. They pulled themselves up by their boots. Technocratic elites use. And I, here I'll note I'll say the techno elites because technocratic means something specific. Yeah. And it's a form of bureaucratic. I'll actually just say tech elites.
Tech elites. Tech elites used to vote alongside the liberal elites because both of them are quote unquote elites. But Vance is using tech elites to side with rural Appalachia because rural Appalachia is scrappy and entrepreneurial. We have a, quote, pull yourself up by your boots, end quote, mentality that tech elites don't have.
And that's true. That is [00:29:00] absolutely true. He found the overlap. One of the reasons why these two communities align with each other. I think it's also that the tech elites like contrarianism. That's another reason they really like this group. They like things that are true, that you will be shamed for saying.
That's the thing that's true. Status was in the tech elite community because that is what leads you to be more successful when you are a venture capitalist, for example, having ideas that are true that most people shame. It's how you beat the markets. It's how you choose to start up that everyone else thinks of the gun, is a good idea, right?
So of course these values end up getting lauded, which ended up aligning with this new conservative movement. And I think that is what Trump has done here. Now there's another thing that I think Trump has done here that somebody else in the discord was saying that I think is really true. Jaden Hansen, in a way, represents somebody who was part of that genuinely accepted into elite culture that Trump strove for in his early days.
But he turned it down. He didn't want it. [00:30:00] He was the picture of the never trumper because he was the picture of NPR elitism. And as society began to change, as that community became more and more basically just Nazis i. e. they have they believe society should be divided into an ethno hierarchy with Jews at the bottom.
And they're like, no, it's not Jews at the bottom. It's Zionists at the bottom. And I'm like depending on the survey, you look at Zionists make up 95 percent to 92 percent of Jews. So That's just semantics at that point. It's oh, I don't hate Christians.
Just the ones who, believe that Jesus was the son of God. It's yeah, it's pretty close to a perfect circle, that Venn diagram there. But anyway so he, he had that, that dream that Trump originally wanted and
Simone Collins: he
Malcolm Collins: threw it away. Now he works to denigrate that culture. He's that culture is bad.
That culture is toxic. He converted to Catholicism. He is, you look at his background on the Senate floor. He's not just trying to be a standard Republican. He's trying to build his own moral framework. He's racing. When you see
Simone Collins: [00:31:00] this like we talked about with his policies yesterday, how they, it's not along party lines that he makes decisions.
He's cool with trust busting, but he's also cool with building pipelines, natural gas pipelines. He's cool with nuclear. He's. Against untethered, unfettered immigration, like there's, I like it.
Malcolm Collins: I like it. Yeah. So what I see here is Trump choosing to side with and to have as his partner, somebody who represented the culture that he wanted access to and who turned it down for the culture that Trump wanted.
That actually liked Trump and admired Trump. And I think that represents a psychological development, character building, right? Is he realized that the best of the old culture are now realizing that culture is bad. And that the cultures that he always appealed to being this authentic in that he chose it identity of what he thought elitism was appeal to them.
Simone Collins: [00:32:00] Interesting. Yeah. So it's not as Jon Stewart claims that. Donald Trump merely selected for VP, the man who looked like Don Trump Jr's actor in a Lifetime movie.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think it is at all. I think that there's I don't know how much of this is psychological, how much of it is strategic, but it does to me represent, a real OG Trump, you've chosen the guy who led his.
Detractors as a running mate, he would have chosen the guy who was first to jump in and support him.
Simone Collins: Like you were saying to me earlier too Pence really represented as Trump's first Mike Pence represented as Trump's first VP pick, GOP Inc, the old guard Of the Republican party, of conservatives in the United States.
And so this VP pick represents something very different. It represents Trump and not just saying, okay, I'm going to. Go the tech elite route. I'm going to go the more [00:33:00] authentic route. I'm going to go this is the new tone for the Republican party. I'm going to call it. But yeah, it is going to shape the future of conservatism in the United States, especially if they win.
And
Malcolm Collins: this is what somebody else said which was interesting was the first Trumpian revolution. Is it didn't have any elite factions. It was a completely the disenfranchised who were supportive of Trump in the early days in his first run. And you can't build a an entire party off of just the disenfranchised.
You, and I think that this is why his party was so ineffective at actually operating the White House.
Simone Collins: They really struggled just to staff people. Things like people didn't show up to meetings. There was, I can't remember the title of the book, but there were several books about what happened after Trump was elected.
And in many cases, what happened is major governmental departments, when the changeover happens, they have these meetings, the people get sent out from the president's office and they're like, here's what's going to change and of [00:34:00] course, they're here, you get these large government agencies sitting and waiting.
Okay. Day one, like the people are going to come in and tell us how it's going to be, and no one shows up. And I was like and then the deep state just did and went what it was going to
Malcolm Collins: do. Stop doing the deep state. You need the thing about elites is what often makes them elite.
There's different ways that they can be elite. They can be born elite, like the progressive elite, but at least they have, high quality education and stuff like that. Or they can prove their efficacy in the economic system by either ability to be productive. And that's what makes people
Simone Collins: money.
That's a big one.
Malcolm Collins: And siding with the elites who proved their elite status through shot calling and genuinely building value for other people. That's a pretty smart faction to bring over to your side. Damn straight. The tech elite.
Simone Collins: That is the tech elite. And that's what makes them so useful.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now we should note that there are two groups of the tech elite, right? There's the old guard tech elite who are fully urban monoculture. These are the ones who own the giant natural monopolies that [00:35:00] control our means of communication. These are the founders of Twitter. These are your Bill Gates, your Mark Zuckerberg.
They are from a different generation and their core goal is just to fit in with the old elite factions, but the new tech elite. Is predominantly of this new faction which is just fascinating to me and it's a very strategic alliance building. But there's another aspect of the interesting thing of the Trump Alliance with the tech elite and the Appalachian Tech Elite Alliance,
Simone Collins: the Appian Tech elite.
Yes. What an unexpected alliance, but it makes sense.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, it's an unexpected alliance, but when you think about it, it makes sense. But there's also like the ethnic thing about it. So one of the things about the Taculate is that they have a huge number of Indians in them. And so you're noticing a huge number of Indian American conservatives rising.
And I think we'll begin to see more and more leaders of the American movement, American conservative movement to be Indian Americans. [00:36:00] You've got your Viveks, your Chamas, your or the last guy who ran the conservative party in the UK or name and post or even
Simone Collins: Kamala Harris, Indian American.
Malcolm Collins: No, she's half Jamaican.
Simone Collins: Jamaican, I thought she was like,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, she's black. I think she's half Jamaican, half white, but she could be half Jamaican, half
Simone Collins: yeah. Harris's maternal ancestry comes from Tamil Nadu, India. Her parent, her parental, an ancestry comes from St. Anne. Sorry, paternal ancestry comes from St. Annina. Paternal, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Her mom was Jamaican. Yeah. So she's
Simone Collins: Indian and Jamaican.
Malcolm Collins: But I would consider Kamel Harris has chosen to identify as black.
She she chooses whatever helps her in the moment, but I don't think that she's like part of the Indian community or no, she doesn't present herself
Simone Collins: as even remotely Indian, which is interesting,
Malcolm Collins: but this is also something that we're seeing. If you look at like our friends who are part of this new conservative movement, like you can look at God, the Arya Babu, for example, who I think is like a great natalist intellectual in the UK, an [00:37:00] Indian immigrant.
So I think what we might see is in the conservative intellectual class more Indians are going to be represented. Which I think is going to piss off some thinkers I know who but I personally think it's fine. I love this alliance of the people who are able to economically compete with the people who are forced to economically compete.
And then there's this entire class of bureaucrats who've never really needed to make a change in their lives. And I think that's what represents the urban monoculture is they got ahead through conformity.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. The nonconformists, the rebels. And if any of David Hackett Fishers for groups that he covered and Albion seeds is going to. Be the adoptive group of the venture capital class in the United States, it would be the Scots Irish. It wouldn't be the Quakers. It wouldn't be the Cavaliers and it wouldn't be the
Malcolm Collins: Puritans.
Simone Collins: Why don't you talk
Malcolm Collins: about this cultural group because a lot of people don't know what you're talking about.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So in LBNC, David [00:38:00] Hackett Fisher, a historian describes four basically foundational waves of immigration that colored American culture going forward. David. David. The Puritans who were very conservative, religious extremists, visionaries who came over and settled in New England they were very hardworking, very conscientious very looking down their nose at everyone else and very exclusionist.
Then you That's not
Malcolm Collins: true, by the way. That was the Quakers. The Quakers were the exclusionists look down your nose. Remember the Quakers always look down their nose at the back country. Malcolm,
Simone Collins: What did the pilgrims do to Quakers who tried to proselytize in their area?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that wasn't looking down.
That was just get out of my community. They would talk. That was like
Simone Collins: tarring and feathering them and dragging. That's
Malcolm Collins: not looking down. They never, no, it's literally not looking down. Like it's literally not the Quaker community. Sorry, you're just misremembering the book based on modern stereotypes.
Huh. So the Quaker community would constantly hand wring, which we see as the ancestor of the urban [00:39:00] monoculture, about the backcountry Scotch Irish, who came in and were very rough and tumble.
Simone Collins: These are the wild, yeah. So the, to jump ahead, the Scots Irish were like, the wild rebels and castoffs of Ireland and Scotland, where there were like massive border skirmishes all the time.
It's a much more rural and tribal and less formal and one could argue less civilized part of the country. Quakers would debate among themselves what was worse the savage Indians who would come in and attack and kill them or the Scots Irish, they were like all terrifying and. It was a group also that was, even they, the way that they dressed freaked out the Quakers who were very prudish, they wore higher skirts.
The women did, they were very, informal and the women were tough. And that, in one moment, one moment would, Slaughter a cow and then come in and serve tea. These are very tough people which of course also stand in contrast to the the Cavaliers.
These were like the [00:40:00] second third sons of wealthy Lords in the UK who came to the United States as immigrants working very closely with the crown to basically make a lot of money, have a plantation maintain the social class system that they were accustomed to the United Kingdom and England at the time.
When you're looking at these different groups, you have these very conformist Quakers who are, very also like religiously extreme, but they're in their own way. You've got the Puritans who are also religious extremists and also conformist and within their own, Within their own culture.
And then you have these crazy renegades. Of course, the crazy renegades are going to be the ones most likely to ally culturally with the crazy renegades of venture capital, of startups, of going out and breaking things and doing things. And as for forgiveness, not permission, move fast and break things.
That is, these are the mottos of Silicon Valley.
Malcolm Collins: Think about even the stories of Elon, like fighting in the halls of his company with his brother.
Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Yeah. When you read his latest bureaucracy, sorry, bureaucracy, when you read his latest. Latest biography by Walter Isaacson, [00:41:00] he describes how he would sometimes just wrestle with his brother Kimball in their office, their early startup offices as employees looked on with Mixed probably horror and amusement at one point.
I think Kimball was even hospitalized
Malcolm Collins: Fighting but that's very much backcountry scotch irish. Yeah to correct The misinterpretation was important to correct because it is something that the culture believes but just isn't true the Quakers Absolutely looked down upon and hated the scotch irish immigrants.
Simone Collins: Let's be honest just to, not that I'm going to split hairs while you're here, but every one of these four cultures looked down upon the others. No, they didn't. That's the exact point I'm making. No, the Scots Irish absolutely looked down upon the Quakers and raided them sometimes.
Um, And of course the Cavaliers are like, who are all these savages?
Malcolm Collins: What you're missing, and the point I'm making, is that Puritans and the Scotch Irish actually got along and created an intermixed culture, which is what my family comes from. So if you look at [00:42:00] why they got along and why they, because it's even mentioned in the book, like I'm very surprised you don't remember this.
You were like, what? The Puritans charred and feathered the Quakers who would come to their communities and preach. And it's yes, of course they did. I would char and feather a woke person who came to my community and preach too.
Get the f out, but, they got along very well with the Scotch Irish communities, which is where the anti slavery experiment started.
This is where John Brown came from, or the Free State of Jones movement, or many of these others. And you would be like why would these two communities get along? Because they were both very the Puritans were very okay with speak your mind mindset, which is what the Scotch Irish were known for.
They were very much just say whatever they believe. They were not
Simone Collins: prude. They were both largely Calvinist as well. Just different ways. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: They were not prude like the Quakers were. The Quakers were incredibly free about sexuality, and they thought the Scotch Irish were just like these [00:43:00] lewd, like they would dress down, they would just dress in whatever was useful at the time, they didn't really care about sexuality one way or the other.
It was a tool. And the Puritans were also known for engaging in sexuality more, and they were like you're of a different cultural group, they very much had this mindset you're not saved, but I like that you speak your mind, that you have a strong sense of whatever, and you're not telling me how to live my life.
And that was where the Puritans had a hard line.
Simone Collins: Is other
Malcolm Collins: cultural groups coming in and telling them how to live their life. They were like, absolutely not. You guys are wrong. But then the other thing is both the Scots Irish and the Puritans were morally uncompromising in a true sense. So the Quakers had this sort of like social signaling moral hierarchy.
But they were actually morally compromising in the extreme. They were theologically against slaves, but they owned slaves at higher rates than any of the other groups. So you can look at wills of the period, and we have an episode where we talk about this, but it was like 43 percent of Quakers owned slaves which was higher than even the height of the South.
They were very How much you have quotes from the period of Amish thinking that slavery was a Quaker institution? Hey, really [00:44:00] the pyramid and so do it that much. And we don't do it, as the Quaker thing, right? So so they control the education systems and they created this like lie of history, right?
That it was a Puritans who did all these things. They're not know there was them but the Puritans were generally fairly again and they had this like moral extremist position. And the back country people were very okay with moral extremist positions. This is what's right. This is what's wrong.
This is why it's right. This is why it's wrong. Instead of what the Quakers had, which was these deontological like virtue signaling value positions. And so it allowed the two communities to merge very easily. And I would say that almost entirely. The Puritan community that survived, that ended up having high fertility rates, ended up completely merging with the Scotch Irish tradition.
But the Scotch Irish tradition, there is a branch that is just Scotch Irish, so that's left in the United States, which is where like country music and hillbilly culture comes from. But there's a different branch, which is [00:45:00] represented a lot in Texas, for example, where my family's from which was the merger of the Puritan and Scots Irish traditions.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And that checks out. So let's bring this back to JD Vance as we wrap up for people watching then. I could see them being okay, so what is he? Is he urban monoculture? Is he tech bro? Is he hillbilly? What can I actually expect from him? What can I model him? You guys are saying he is authentic.
You're saying he's trustworthy, but what the hell is he now? I'm so confused. What would you say to
Malcolm Collins: that? I'd say he is who he has chosen to become, who he has chosen to become. And you can say why did he choose to be, even if you're like, okay, but he only chose to become that thing because it helped him politically.
He became urban monoculture because it helped him make money and move up. He became what he is now because it helped him, win the love of the conservative party. I want to say. Even if that's true, if he acts out of line with this new identity, he will lose the power it has given him. If he is really that mercenary, then, it's that line from Pirates of the Caribbean.
A [00:46:00] dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for. Because you can never predict they're going to do something incredibly stupid.
Malcolm Collins: Let's see if I can push it here. You can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest or really what he means by that is do what's in his best interest. So he's very trustworthy, a trustworthy man. That's a man who might do something stupid. That's good. And so either. You could say he's a trustworthy man and he is honestly signaling his value system, or he's a dishonest man.
And now this value system is what has allowed him to achieve power and fame. And so he will continue to do what's in line with it. So whatever it is, when you
Simone Collins: Trump is definitely Captain Jacking it. Like the, and it's so easy to know what he's going to do. Yeah. And that's, I think that's why we like him.
We like him for the same reason we like Captain Jack Sparrow. You know what I mean?
Malcolm Collins: He actually, like that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean
[00:47:00] Hold up there, you. It's a shilling to tie up your boat at the dock.
Malcolm Collins: Where his little ship is sinking and he steps off onto the pier, that is Trump walking into the presidency. His entire like immediate empire is burning to the ground.
And he's just Um, and the progressives, it's always like you are without a doubt the worst politician I have ever heard of. But you have heard of me, but you have heard of me.
You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of. But you have heard of me. That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen. So it would seem.
Malcolm Collins: And that's what, and that is the vitalistic framework is not the type thing the same way. Yes. You're without a doubt.
Yes. The most, the worst animal conservationist I've ever heard of. And he'd be [00:48:00] like, well. but you have heard of me. And I think that's very much like us. Like people are like, Oh my God, you guys, you're always being attacked. Everybody thinks you're crazy. And we're like, ah, I was thinking like, if we ended up getting one of our shows approved, we should do a cover of if you're ever going to survive, you got to get a little crazy song
Malcolm Collins: because that is the truth of the world we live in now.
The groups that survive are the groups that are willing to think for themselves. And I also like that we live in a period where that is becoming culturally lauded among the conservative faction of our society and the old pearl clutching, you must stay within our value set. Like my family being called the Adams family growing up in the local environment, which was like an elite conservative culture.
They were like, Oh, they're weird. They do their own thing. Like, how dare they? And that is [00:49:00] not. That is not the elite culture of today. And so it's, it is cool that in a way, we've been able to find ourselves back into the good graces of an elite cultural faction, despite largely spurning that in my childhood,
Because the faction that I spurned ended up crashing, burning and disappearing.
It's the faction that, that Abby, classically Abby, you know, Ben's sister keeps trying to appeal to.
Simone Collins: Yeah. God. Yeah. You really. You really did come from Scotts Irish. I was just thinking about like stories about things that your mom would do when you were a kid and she totally like, what?
Oh it, you would be your birthday party or something, when you'd be like, oh, I wanna, go do this. And then, you'd run off and the other kids are like, I don't wanna do that. And your mom like, nail down to them just like you, s**t, you're gonna do it and you're gonna look happy.
And like little s**t that's, that literally came from Scott's Irish culture.
And note here. People may be surprised because they heard earlier that my family was quite a blue blood family, like intergenerational wealth. Uh, when I was growing up and they may be like well, that [00:50:00] precludes you from coming from the hillbilly culture. And it's like, not really. I mean, you can come from the Scots-Irish culture and then end up making intergenerational wealth.
and moving into the center of a major city and becoming an important political family there without completely abandoning all of your cultural traditions.
And I should also note that my mom married into the blue blooded family. She did not grow up in a family like that. So she maintained a much pure version of this culture as you'll hear in some of these stories.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. She took it. She took it with one of my friends. I said, she goes, you're here to make my son happy today. So you go f*****g do what he says he wants to do. I already loved it. My favorite thing that she did.
It's very much of this culture is I came home from school one day and the teachers came to them and told them that I had snitched on another kid and how good I was for doing that and she took me aside and she goes, you little s**t.
I was like, but they were beating, they were like picking on another kid. She goes, that's what your fists are for. And I was like, but I'll get detention. And she's like, I don't care. I don't f*****g care. Be a man. Um, [00:51:00] uh, Don't go to the authority. Handle this yourself. That's how morality is enforced.
Respect. Respect. Where I got in trouble with the teachers at my school and I go to my mom and I was like, I just was doing what I thought was right. And she heard what I had done and she goes, Oh, yeah I'm gonna let you in on a secret. To you, Being a kid, teachers are like your authority.
They're the height of, what sets the culture in your community. I don't know how she says exactly but she's like two adults. Teachers are losers. They are, They are they're making minimum wage then. I don't know if they actually were. But she goes, and nobody respects it. So you shouldn't respect them.
If you listen to their advice, you're going to end up just like them. So she goes, so you do what you think is right. And if you get punished for it, so be it deal with that as well. And I was like, okay, that, that is why I kept getting kicked out of schools. And that is also part of why, you know. Um, because my mom did not grow up in a wealthy [00:52:00] culture.
She married into one of those families. And so I think it was her raising of me to be so annoyed where they would like kowtow or bend the moral systems to fit what was socially normative. And I was like, But no, like it's wrong. It's wrong. And I need to say it's wrong because I know it's wrong. And it would be immoral of me not to do that. By the way, people are wondering just like how white trash your family is. Her name was Winnell. She was the first fan of the show, but she has died since, since this show started. So she'd watch it every day early and she encouraged me to keep doing it.
But um, Her name was Winnel. Her name was Winne because her parents couldn't decide between the names Winnie and Nel. Um, And I was like, yo, that
Simone Collins: was another element of the Scotts Irish culture was insane. Names often Port Manaus too. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So it's very much a um, uh, a Jackie bar cultural bob, or like, uh, it is very common in this culture to have double barrel names of your Jim, Bob, Mary Sue, like Jim, Bob, Mary Sue.
She was Winnie Anelle .
Simone Collins: [00:53:00] She, in the end, she was the classiest woman I have ever met.
Malcolm Collins: And I actually think that's where a lot of her life came from, is a desire to be in this upper class culture instead of being able to be who she was.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that was the constant, uh, yeah, no, she's, in, in the context of this conversation, that was this constant pressure is that we always loved the Scots Irish Whannell, and then it was like the singing frog of Warner Brothers phenomenon where we'd like, Present her to people and look it's my mom.
It's the woman we keep telling you about, like we'd share her texts, that she'd send to us that were like super based with our friends. And then she'd hang out with our friends and just be nothing but the sophisticated, classy, witty woman. And we'd be like, okay, that's fine.
But what we
Malcolm Collins: like, that's not what anyone who really
Simone Collins: takes,
Malcolm Collins: but it was because she, unlike Trump was able to succeed where Trump wasn't, she was accepted into extreme upper class culture multiple times, my dad. And then the guy who she remarried [00:54:00] she was in like in Naples, Florida, which we don't know.
It's like this it's where a lot of the Midwestern business elite go
Simone Collins: to winter. And she was
Malcolm Collins: considered a very influential person among the Wellesley society there because she was also classy. It's but that's not who she was, was, you know, a heavy drinking and she was a very heavy drinking person.
She'd always say well, you know, I can't, I can't talk with you until I've had my morning constitutional. Um, Instead of a morning um, Uh, uh, expresso.
Simone Collins: Jen with a massive ice cube and fresh squeezed
Malcolm Collins: lime juice. Yeah, that was what she always wanted. But she needed to stay skinny and attractive, but, she couldn't risk, Don't make it classy.
She anyway,
Simone Collins: Here's to authenticity, cosplaying culture and a very interesting election season in America ahead, which will set the tone of our culture for the next four years, too.
Malcolm Collins: I'm becoming increasingly confident that Republicans are going to win. Now, the [00:55:00] assassination of Tim apparently didn't change things because half of society is run by a cult.
I mean, 30 percent Trump derangement
Simone Collins: syndrome is real. They are going to vote for whatever is not Trump. I, how many times do I have to say this? It changes nothing.
Malcolm Collins: I think this I think this election cycle may break Trump derangement syndrome for a lot of people. And I think J. D. Vance was built like a machine to do that.
You are so sweet. You are so truly pronatalist. That's a cute baby. She's got the wiggles.
Simone Collins: Oh
Malcolm Collins: no. Do I need to go,
Simone Collins: uh,
Malcolm Collins: Pick it together.
Simone Collins: It is time, mac and cheese night. Double cheese. Yes. Oh, I
Malcolm Collins: was gonna have mac and cheese and tomato soup. I think they'd go really well together.
Simone Collins: The tomato soup, if I don't open it will be good until August.
So unless you feel like eating more of it later, you can. So then I'll have some more mac and cheese. Now you want mac and cheese with pulled pork on top would be so good. I don't know why. Oh, sorry. Pulled slow cooker. [00:56:00] Five day, what, brisket?
Malcolm Collins: That's an interesting idea, but today I'm interested in something a little simpler from my
Simone Collins: belly.
Your belly's feeling a little delicate.
Malcolm Collins: And you guys should know, Simone is in extreme searing pain right now, and she has been this entire episode. She is just tanking through it because one of her goals this year is to not show any of her Any negative emotional states
Simone Collins: and I've totally failed at that for multiple occasions so far this year.
So I really got to make it up. Ah,
Malcolm Collins: I don't think so. I think you've done an amazing job. You are a picture of stoicism, which is something I deeply appreciate, you know, show your emotions, but then keep with that Puritan stoicism. Okay.
Simone Collins: Damn straight, Malcolm. I love you.
Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Good. Okay. I was terrified about having to go get the kids in that rain.
Simone Collins: It should let up. It's going to come back this evening, but I love me a good storm, especially now that soon we'll have power banks. Yay.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they explore the fascinating transformation of online political discourse from the early days of the internet to the present. This in-depth discussion covers the journey from atheist communities to the birth of modern online conservatism, touching on key movements like anti-feminism, GamerGate, and the rise of the "red pill" ideology. The Collins couple offers unique insights into how these shifts have shaped today's political landscape and the disconnect between online conservative culture and traditional conservative think tanks. Key points covered: The evolution of online atheist communities The transition from anti-religious to anti-feminist content The rise of the "red pill" and men's rights movements The disconnect between online conservative culture and traditional think tanks The role of platforms like YouTube and Reddit in shaping political discourse The impact of these shifts on modern conservative politics The potential future of conservative ideology and religious belief Whether you're a political junkie, a student of internet culture, or simply curious about how online communities shape real-world politics, this video offers a thought-provoking look at the unexpected twists and turns of internet-age political evolution.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. We just got back from NatCon, which is the National Conservative Convention, where all of the high and mighty conservative thought leaders, not real thought leaders, i.
e. they don't lead the public's conservative mindset, they actually seem almost completely disconnected from the mainstream conservative movement which was a real takeaway for me when I was there. So these are all the people who work in the Washington conservative think tanks.
Simone Collins: I heard Tower people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I heard some thoughts there that really made me be like, wow at one point I was like, why are you doing this? The base doesn't want this, and they literally said, f**k the base. And I was like, wow, what one person where you got all mad where he's bureaucrats are good. Actually, we just need conservative bureaucrats.
We need a larger bureaucracy and we need it to be conservative. And then another person was like, Don't complain about like socialism's okay. So long as it's within our value set and this is where you get like insane things. Like the heritage foundation did project 2024 where [00:01:00] they put out like this plan 2025 2025 for the trump administration and in this plan one of the things that they had was banning pornography And I was like, that is a leftist position, but what, are you not familiar with the stellar blade?
Malcolm, they're
Simone Collins: coming together. Unity at last. We can finally agree on something.
Malcolm Collins: No, it's a bunch of woke bureaucrats, it was like, Mild conservative overlay. Between
Simone Collins: NOFAP, men's rights activists, and radical feminists, we finally found common ground! Porn is bad! Except that you guys know No, but I mean Making porn illegal, and making porn something that's shameful is the one number one thing no, hold
Malcolm Collins: on.
When you're talking about the base Like, NoFap is about self control. Even NoFap people are mad about the Stellar Blade controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Tracer butt controversy. Even NoFap people are mad about the Skullgirls controversy. Every time a group has attempted to censor male sexuality, [00:02:00] it has been a progressive leaning group.
But I want to talk about how these groups became so Wildly different from each other. Why is the conservative online base which is the group that really got Trump elected, like Trump was the 4chan candidate to begin with. That is the group that made Trump happen. That is where Pepe came from. That is where emperor, god emperor Trump came from from the Warhammer stuff.
That is where basically most of modern. Conservative internet culture came from a lot of people would say, okay a lot of this is downstream of 4chan, and it is, but it's not just downstream of 4chan, a very bizarre thing happened in internet history, which is the atheist movement online became the birthplace of the culture That is [00:03:00] now internet conservatism.
Or internet republicanism, or internet Trump base, basically. Interesting. And the question is, how did this happen? you grew up a Muslim.
Like, why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being
Simone Collins: atheist,
Malcolm Collins: like, why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals the Muslims, would send me messages about how they were going to kill me.
The Christians would send me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me and they were praying for me to be saved and they wanted me, and this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking the Christians and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians, they were very open to be friends with these people because these people had always been.
Nice to them, even when there was conflict, [00:04:00] whereas the opposite side group had always been very antagonistic. The wokes send us death threats constantly
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: And let's chart the history of this for people who are too young. Now, if you are young and not familiar, like you have not been, like if you are my age and chronically online, I just said something that is completely uncontroversial to you.
You're like, oh, yeah, I remember when that happened. That was weird. Because everyone who has been actively engaged with online culture for a long time and, mildly open to conservative ideas knows that this happened. But if you aren't, then you might think that's a controversial claim.
Or if you just haven't been engaged with online culture, like if I said this NatCon, they'd be like, that can't be true. They'd say something like that. And then Somebody at the table would like lean over and be like, actually that did happen. So let's talk about how this happened, what happened and why it happened.
So first we need to go back to the early days of the internet. If you are talking [00:05:00] about the early days of the internet, the war between the fundies and the atheists was absolutely enormous. It was like the core show on the internet. It was the core conflict on the internet. It was as big a conflict as something like woke vs.
anti woke is today.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: It is what everyone was talking about. And then and I should note that people can be like, oh then the modern conservative movement must have come out of the early online religious movement, right? That's it. The people who are fighting the Atheists. The problem is Those people were always like 1 to 10 versus the Atheist community in the early days of the internet.
They were the vast minority. They were people that brought on for people to take who had no internet illiteracy for other people to take potshots at that was basically what was going on for years and then even the people who [00:06:00] were online were more dedicated to their individual communities i.
e. like promoting Catholicism or promoting some brands of Protestantism than any sort of wider political battle. So those were two of the things that caused that. And partially because of this shift, but partially fueled by this shift is the theocratic portion of the conservative party just lost pretty much all of their power in the shift to the Trumpist movement.
But this will also explain how that happened because Alternate version of conservatism began to grow online which appealed to many more people than the theocratic form, and we can talk about why this happened. Early atheist community online. You have this early atheist community online.
And then they, and they were mostly like YouTubers that was where a lot of this was happening in the early days. And pretty much all of their content was look at this stupid thing religious [00:07:00] people believe. Ha. Let's laugh at the religious people for having these stupid.
Simone Collins: All the subreddits. Oh yeah, really?
One of
Malcolm Collins: The pinned core subreddits of the top ten was rAtheism.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So do you have any thoughts on this period of history or any memories you have of it before I go further?
Simone Collins: I do remember it. It was and this was something that I definitely encountered more in my upbringing, right? As, as a young girl growing up in a very progressive area where basically, Religious people were seen as, as quite weird and it was genuinely quite funny.
Like how could this person possibly have these weird traditions and believe these weird things? And yeah, making fun of them seemed.
Malcolm Collins: And that's actually the core of what caused the switch. And I'll actually mark an interesting anecdote here. So Sarah Hader was in these early days.
She's a guest that we've had on the show. She's great. She is an ex Muslim who was a big figure in this early atheist [00:08:00] community. Now she probably was the second most famous Muslim in the community. Now, or ex Muslim, I should say in the community. Yeah. Yeah. Now she's known as an anti woke podcaster.
And I remember actually, because she hadn't contextualized that this had happened. And we were with a group of more like online savvy, like people. And she was thinking about what she was going to do next with her career. And I was with a bunch of think tank people and I go, you could just go and be like a public face of a conservative think tank.
And she was like, Oh no, I wouldn't appeal to the conservative base. I'm just An ex Muslim anti woke activist because, she hadn't thought of herself the new base. She was still thinking of these early days of the internet before this switch happened. But I think it shows how if you said that today, you'd be like, You would be fantastic for being a public face of many of these organizations.
But how did this happen? The, I think it was two things happened in the early days and we'll get into specific examples where this happened. But [00:09:00] first, I'm just talking about what happened? How did it happen?
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Was that these early atheists the arguments that you can make against the conservative positions get boring after a while because they are consistent.
Yeah, they're not going to
Simone Collins: Change their minds. The argument's not going to evolve and they're also not going to change their policies in ways that give you new things to work with.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you're just working with the ha stupid thing. It's the debate you can run 50 times, a hundred times, but you're not going to be able to run it, a million times, which is what you need, right?
Yeah. Something to attack that is constantly evolving, but patently stupid. You need a group of people who is completely disconnected from reality and is willing to take the bait when you are trolling them. That was the other thing about the Christian communities, is one, they weren't really online that much and two when they were online, they eventually would [00:10:00] learn to not take the bait if they were like a prominent figure in the community, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And so it just got boring. But then they found another community that was beginning to evolve at that time as well. And this was the beginnings of wokeism. So it wouldn't, at the time they wouldn't have called it wokeism. They would have called it anti feminism or anti sort of tumblerina culture.
And to people who don't remember the tumblerinas, they were insane. They were like crazier than the modern woke movement in many ways. This is where
Simone Collins: They were the female equivalent. of 4chan. Equally crazy, equally unhinged, just, and equally autistic, just female. They were
Malcolm Collins: equally crazy and equally unhinged, but unlike 4chan where everything was about, attack and the joke and like being thick skinned being females one person would write like a fan fiction or would say that because, they were accepting of everything or say, my gender is turtle or my gender is [00:11:00] clout.
Those were two real genders. I think all of our
Simone Collins: genders are turtle. Thank you very much.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah your community would begin to buy into this because women more than men begin to buy in the community consensus more. Yeah, I'm already
Simone Collins: buying into turtle gender now. You can call me a turtle.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah they're also statistically more spiritual.
If you look at things historically women were seen as the more religious group which I think modern people might be pretty surprised about It's because women buy into these sorts of stories much faster than men do You know, if somebody writes a fan fiction women are going to start thinking these characters are real like a small group of women Yeah, yes and stuff like that.
You don't get this phenomenon in men that much. So you begin to have the development of early woke culture before it was mainstream and it was just seen as like a crazy thing.
And so these early atheists then begin to turn on this new ultra feminist, ultra woke culture because it was constantly providing new content.
People would always fight. [00:12:00] It was just better content to be honest.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: the people who they were debating against genuinely hated them. This was another thing that was a difference between these communities and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. Is they began to build camaraderie! The atheists didn't really hate the religious community, and the religious community didn't really hate the atheists either.
They were a few abused fundie kids, but it wasn't everyone. The vast majority were, like, they wouldn't say, look, I'm just trying to convince you that these things are silly and you don't need to follow them. It's religious I should be
Simone Collins: able to save your soul. They're you know, rival football teams.
Just people who really, love their side. And love dunking on the other side, but also know that they need the other side in order to have fun. So it's all.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah there, what, there was nothing like that was the woke community. The woke community genuinely thought that these people were trying to kill them.
And these people genuinely thought that the woke community, when I say trying to kill them, don't, not specifically, but they bought into this lie that like, if somebody [00:13:00] denies that cloud gender is real, that they were causing
Simone Collins: trauma, that they were causing harm.
Malcolm Collins: They'll say they're, you're denying my existence, which is akin to genocide was in there
Simone Collins: and that offending someone is akin to physical violence that, Oh it's I'm feeling real pain.
That kind of thing. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And in this moment, like nothing happened, like people, and this is how many of these atheists, I think didn't realize was there a hater that they were becoming. The new Republican bases initiating point because for them, all of this was just small incremental changes.
And if people are wondering some examples of individuals where this happened armored skeptic, or individuals like Peter Bergosen, or Michael Schmerer or individuals like, I'd even say Siwan Head, to an extent, really started in that community now she considers herself a progressive now, but progressives don't own her because she was, anti woke and you can't disagree with them on anything.
And I think that also the way that this wokest movement worked now, keep in mind in these early days, the wokest movement hadn't [00:14:00] taken over yet. And we're going to talk about mainstream people as well. So you can look at Sam Harris, right? One of the four horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse, right?
Or of Atheism, right? So when you look at his policy position he considers himself a libertarian internationalist in approach to foreign policies which includes some interventionist policies. He was, during the Bush era, he supported specifically in regards to attacking Islam in the Middle East and the war of that period.
He was seen as being willing to talk to anyone, even when he disagreed with him. For example, Charles Murray, he talked to, he's a conservative individual, and people were like, oh, how could you do that? And like the Israel Palestine conflict, he's on the Israel side he has, or you can talk about Christopher Hitchens, who in the, even in the early days supported the Iraq war, right?
So you would have these individuals now in the early days, what progressivism was when all of this started, these people wouldn't have been hard removed from the progressive sphere for it's agreeing with [00:15:00] the topics, but That wasn't the case in this new, rocus form of progressives that were beginning to evolve in the online sphere, okay?
I see. You can't disagree on a few issues. You can't, they, they don't allow that. And then the thing that really caused the split was a lot of the trans issues. And this was a really interesting thing, I was watching a Sarah Hayer episode and she was talking about how weird it was.
Basically what happened was, is, was, in this atheist attack community, there was cred for continuing to say anything so long as you believed it was true. Now, this cred actually works in conservative circles. Most conservatives, so long as almost everything you think is true isn't progressives, are going to respect you if you just say what you think is true.
Whereas So this applies
Simone Collins: basically to religious extremism, or what? Can you give me an example of [00:16:00] this?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, they might say that certain ethnic communities cause more crime than other ethnic communities. And as
Simone Collins: long as you're really, you dig into it and you seem to really believe it, people don't look down on you
Malcolm Collins: for that.
So I'll word it this way. Okay. Okay. You might have an individual who supports some level of social redistribution, but also believes crime rates differ between ethnic communities in the United States. All right. A conservative meets that individual and they go, Oh we disagree on one thing.
We agree on one thing. You're a conservative. A progressive meets this individual, and they go, you are a far right extremist who I won't talk to because we disagree on one thing.
Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. Yeah. What happened
Malcolm Collins: with shoe on head?
Simone Collins: Yeah. So in other words with progressives it's all or nothing.
With conservatives it's a la carte case by case. Yeah, it's
Malcolm Collins: a la carte, whereas progressives are all or nothing.
Which pushed these individuals further and further into conservative audiences and conservative communities. But then [00:17:00] some big things happened. So Sarah Hader had this story on her podcast and I thought it was very telling.
It was a story. Of, from her perspective, when they were doing an episode on who's black science guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? And he's been just like totally pro, like, all of the insane trans stuff that's happening now that just the science doesn't back.
Simone Collins: I
Malcolm Collins: point out that 2023 study that, now we know that out of 11 year olds who are gender non conforming, By the time they're 23 more than 9 in 10 is completely comfortable with their gender but likely just gay.
And so what that means is that by the data, about 9 in 10 people who we are transitioning, we are basically chemically castrating. 9 out of 10 gay kids, for every one trans person, we're quote unquote saving.
Like that is, yikes, we know this now we live in a post cast report era, things are different now.
But a lot of people are just not up to date with the data, right? Or they willfully ignore the data. And what she said, Was it was [00:18:00] really interesting to see these people who like Neil deGrasse Tyson, she would have considered an ally in the early atheist days. And the community basically split into two groups.
There was one community that just was looking for the truth.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: there was another community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives and Republicans. And you realize who these two communities were, pretty quickly, right? Which was the community that just wanted to dunk on conservatives. They are now this, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye the Science Guy or, you know who these people are, right?
They are totally detached from reality and the stuff they're seeing now, which is a conservative religion.
Simone Collins: Now people
Malcolm Collins: might be like, yeah, but These early online atheists, they weren't really the core birthing place of the modern conservative movement. Conservative base, like online base. And here I would say one, I just think you're wrong.
You just need to [00:19:00] talk to many online conservatives. That's where a lot of them converted to the mainstream conservative ideology today. But two, You think of these individuals as having static views and they didn't have static views. Many of them became increasingly conservative as time went on. And so we need to talk about why that happened.
So it happened for a few reasons. One, they began to, they would just side with whatever movement was more rational at the time, right? That was their idea, right? The men's right movement was much more justified given the statistics during the time when it was growing than the women's. movement or the feminist movement, right?
And the men's right movement also was a core birthing place of modern conservative culture. So a lot of these individuals, they switched from anti feminist content to men's right adjacent content, which again made them part of this early birthing part of the red pill, the MGTOW, the et cetera communities, right?
So it may not [00:20:00] have been the initial figures in this community, but it was people who were weaned on their content or who were mimicking their type of content. But then, you had the secondary thing that was happening during this period. And I think what's her name? The one who you were talking about, the Muslim who was one of the, original poor horsemen of the of the Atheist movement, who she wasn't actually at the conference.
So she's often called the fifth horseman, but she was supposed to be who converted to Christianity. And she was originally a Muslim, de converted, then converted to Christianity. Is she? Hold
Simone Collins: on. I don't know I just know that on Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a critic of Islam and yeah. Writing in a column in November 2023, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming That in her view, the Judeo Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So she said something about why people were like you grew up a Muslim.
Like, why did you convert to Christianity? Instead of just being
Simone Collins: atheist,
Malcolm Collins: like, [00:21:00] why did you first try Christianity when you started praying to God? Because she had this. depressed period and then she prayed to God and she, she felt that she was saved. So why did you do that? And she goes, of all these years, when I was attacking and preaching against religious individuals the Muslims, would send me messages about how they were going to kill me.
The Christians would send me messages about how they hoped they were praying for me and they were praying for me to be saved and they wanted me, and this is actually true of most of the atheist community. When they were attacking the Christians and then when their value system started to align more with the Christians, they were very open to be friends with these people because these people had always been.
Nice to them, even when there was conflict, whereas the opposite side group had always been very antagonistic. The wokes send us death threats constantly. We say stuff against [00:22:00] conservatives. They never almost never. Occasionally we'll get something because, we're pro IVF and stuff like that.
That's mean, but we don't really get death threats from,
Simone Collins: No, I don't think we've ever. Received really mean comments from anyone aside from people who, if you click through to their profiles, if they have a public one or something associated with their identity are totally progressive. Yeah.
The only thing that maybe sometimes comes up is criticism of our using IVF for genetic testing from religious conservatives, but that criticism is typically not an ad hominem. Attack even so yeah,
Malcolm Collins: no, it's like specific like logical argument. Yeah,
Simone Collins: or this is not the work of the lord You know that kind of thing and it's yeah, it's Do you not?
Yeah, but
Malcolm Collins: they're not relevant here. But what it means is I don't like maybe progressives don't fully understand this or they're just, their culture is so toxic because it's so built into attacking each other [00:23:00] was in their culture. But when you constantly attack somebody who is trying to take a middle ground, you end up pushing them further and further to the other side and they become a more and more open.
To genuinely reconsidering their positions. You might have been an old atheist. You might not have had a strong stance on abortion to begin with, but you knew the approved stance was abortion is fine in pretty much all circumstances. Now you've been attacked over and over again, and we'll do a video on our changing stance on abortion over time.
And you're like, you know what? I should probably go back to the evidence on that. The nice guys seem to be really against this abortion thing. In most of the circumstances that it's being used today. Maybe I should learn more about this. And then they do, and they're like, Oh I agree with that position.
And here is one of the big things that shifted along this period as well. And I think that this is indicative partially of why the new conservative base is so different from the old [00:24:00] conservative base. The old conservative base was primarily a theocratic base. That's what they were interested with, theocratic and sort of plural clutching.
The new conservative base is a mixture of two communities. It is this original I call them caustic atheists, i. e. atheists who are really interested in debating people doing stupid things, who are interested in what is the technically correct answer? And a
Simone Collins: no. To your point, Because they're seeking out people who are doing stupid things.
I want to be technically correct and have an easy win. And I know I can win. I want a guaranteed win with no effort. It's pretty gross. So a mix of this
Malcolm Collins: community no, but they also are interested in technical correctness. This is why, for example, you have problems with people like, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or other like mainstream atheists, even Richard Dawkins unfortunately from the perspective of wokeism.
Having wrong policy positions, having wrong [00:25:00] positions about the way the government should be structured because it turns out that if you're just interested in what's rational, you eventually realize actually capitalistic systems seem to work much better for everyone involved in socialist systems.
So let's move to those systems. So there was a mixture of this earlier let's be technically correct. And Not the old fuddy duddy Christians who were afraid of technology and afraid of change, but the theologically alive Christians, I would call them, the people who are having this active theological discussion.
And so you got a melding of these two communities And that produced the type of conservatism that led to Trump, where individuals were like, Hey, we need to stop. It doesn't really make sense for people in this country for us to be focused on so much on what's going on overseas anymore, let's stop that.
Or it's also why the party. In terms of it's if you talk to the Republican base, if you go to these rallies, they are often much more, and I didn't realize how socialist the conservative elite class [00:26:00] was. Oh my gosh, seriously. They are much more libertarian and they're much more libertarian in part because it works.
And now you're having a weird. sort of circle back to the beginning thing. I don't know if you've heard some of the controversy of Richard Dawkins, for example, bemoaning the fall of the church in his country where he has been complaining a lot and saying it's really sad that we don't have, the cathedrals are being turned into mosques in England, and he's but, If you don't have people going anymore, then they're not tithing and they can't afford the buildings anymore.
And this is all in a way downstream of his movement. He hasn't come to the perspective of converting yet, but he has come to the perspective, which most of the original Atheist community has now, which is unavoidable, is our society was better with religion specifically Christianity.
And that It was to some extent a mistake to be attacking these [00:27:00] communities and that a lot of the societal problems that we have right now are downstream of the deconversion of people. However, there is not a version of Christianity that they feel comfortable with. Returning to because they're just like, but I can't believe it.
So for example, when that whatever her name was, Muslim lady was talking with Richard Dawkins about her conversion to Christianity. And, she was talking about how she was depressed and noodle sidle and she wanted to she was looking for something and she finally had a psychologist.
It was like, have you tried praying? And then after this like heartwarming story and the crowd has cheered, he's yeah, but do you really believe that Mary became pregnant when she was a virgin? And it's they, Because they don't have an iteration of Christianity that can conform with this Ultralogical perspective on reality.
They're like, I don't, I want to rejoin. I want to believe And this is really what the tracked series project is about So for anyone who's weird here and doesn't know you go to technopyrithon. com [00:28:00] And see a summary of like our religious beliefs and the tracks that we're putting out, but we are trying to synthesize One, something that I believe is true so it is something that we synthesize through work, but it is also, when I was originally creating it, before I realized, oh my god, I think this is actually true it was a hypothesis in creating the type of religious system that That my kids could continue to believe even in this secular world, even with all of this information out there.
And then only while I was constructing it was, I was like, Oh s**t I can't explain how some of this stuff is true other than the God is real in this system is true. And I don't come at that from like revelation or anything like that. I'm literally coming at that from logic. Like I plausibly can't come up with another explanation for how this worked out this way.
That is. And if you're looking for the one on this you can go to the episode of why we believe in a techno puritan god Which goes over like why we believe this is stuff that I just found implausible From any other metric. But I do think [00:29:00] that's where we're going to see a lot of this community go is back towards these religious traditions because unfortunately if you're taking this logical contrarian stance Now is in modern wokest society.
It's going to push you back to towards religious systems. But I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on this? Or do you remember this? As it was happening or like thinking of this is it's weird that all these ex atheist people are now like the most popular conservative YouTubers. Do you, Or anti feminist is what it was originally, and then it became conservative.
Simone Collins: Anti feminist? Yeah so what I think it was more, what it feels like to me, at least, is that these were always rebel, anti establishment people online. And they didn't always move in the direction of conservative or anti progressive. In fact, some people who were avid members of the church of the subgenius and who loved being irreverent online [00:30:00] remained in the progressive atheist camp and continue to be progressive online.
I just think that it happens to be that a lot of the anti establishment people who were effective players online also became conservative. So my larger answer isn't that. all of the people who were atheists online originally became conservative influencers. It's instead that both the conservative and progressive influencers online are prolific, active debaters and flame war lovers online who started out as people very likely to engage in anti atheist debates.
Malcolm Collins: I hear what you're saying, but I'm less interested in the specific individuals other than how the communities developed. Because a lot of people will be like, oh there are a few now fringe players in the online conservative movement. They weren't the birthing place of that movement. And so what I'm trying to walk people through, who didn't live through this period of internet [00:31:00] history, is early internet history was Online atheists versus a mostly offline fundee crowd evangelical crowd.
Then it became feminists versus anti feminists. The anti feminist community, most of the leading figures in it were either raised within or got their initial start. in the atheist fights on the atheist side. Then it moved from feminist to anti feminist to the woke community and the red pill MGTOW community, and the pickup artist community. And so this the community that then was the Anti feminist community became that community, but it had originally been seeded and created by this atheist community.
Simone Collins: I think there's another element of this which is the one unifying factor of a lot of the groups that you're describing here, the rebel groups specifically.
So the atheists and then the anti [00:32:00] feminists and then the anti woke people is that they typically started out. Or often started out in the enemy camp and then were cast out for some reason, sometimes for pretty egregious reasons. In the enemy
Malcolm Collins: camp?
Simone Collins: Yeah, in the enemy camp. So for example, people like Jesse Sinkle and Katie Herzog, the whole like Barry Weiss Free Press team.
Oh no, I
Malcolm Collins: strongly disagree with you. They
Simone Collins: started out as very progressive, working in progressive institutions.
Malcolm Collins: You're describing a modern phenomenon, but that wasn't what happened with this community. These individuals were not cancelled. They became conservative before they were cancelled. They became conservative before even the concept of cancellation existed.
They became conservative. So you've also got to remember GamerGate and everything like that. That was led by these former online atheist community. When this thing was happening, okay,
Simone Collins: these
Malcolm Collins: individuals weren't like, Oh, I broke X progressive [00:33:00] norm, which is something that happens, a lot of times you'll have these progressives.
It happens a lot. You then get thrown out from the progressive community. That is not what happened with these individuals. When they made the switch and I would say when they predominant, like the biggest part of the switch over happened was the transition from. Atheist content to anti feminist content.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that's so interesting. I guess I missed it. I wasn't paying attention.
Malcolm Collins: As soon as the transition to the anti feminist content happened the inevitable pipeline of, as the woke community rose, anti woke content. And now if you're an anti woke content producer, you are a conservative. The thing is that the anti woke community online.
Was much bigger than the conservative intellectual community online. In fact, that community online almost didn't really exist. It was also much bigger than any of the individual religious denominations online, because yes, they did exist online and [00:34:00] were advocating for their positions, but they would often advocate within communities that were specific to their religious traditions.
Now, this has changed over time. Recently, there has been the rise of the, I think I call it, pan religious YouTuber. But, i. e., that they just promote conservative religions regardless of what those religions are. But what's interesting is most of those individuals are like us and started in the atheist community.
Which is why they don't really care what religion an individual is because they are coming at religion without a team. And this is what like the only one I can really think of that started with a team is Paul VanderKley. But a lot of them that come at this come like for example, Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson is able to take this pan religious perspective because he doesn't really have a faith himself. He's just I promote all religions. And he's very downstream of this internet atheist thing that was the community that he was appealing to and [00:35:00] it turned out that, and I think that this is another thing, that people who, at the end of the day, were really just promoting their own religious community's value system, always did a very bore job within the granular world of the internet, building audiences outside of their tradition.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay.
Malcolm Collins: If you were like a Catholic YouTuber, you would build the Catholic tradition because what you were trying to do is move towards a more Catholic value system. Or if you were a Lutheran YouTuber, if you were a So
Simone Collins: you're going increasingly niche, like you're Limiting the reach of your message.
Malcolm Collins: And if you try to reach out to be like a pan religious individual, then the other religious individuals you're talking to, they're going to be as interesting as debating you over theology as an atheist would be. Sure, yeah. Because, So that's what prevented these individuals from ever being leading figures.
Actually, it reminds me of a Ben Shapiro's complaint about you and [00:36:00] I becoming leading figures within the, or the leading figures within the pronatalist movement. And I think he was mad that his sister didn't become a leading figure of the pronatalist movement. I think that's what he expected.
They put all this money in. She clearly wants to be like pronatalist in her value system. She's been attacked as a pronatalist. by progressives. Why isn't she being elevated? And it's because ultimately we were not coming at this from a team perspective to begin with. And therefore we were able to speak on this issue in a way that resonated with many more people than the way that they were speaking about this issue.
Their way about this issue was just frankly, it was tainted by their own community background. If it's why are you having a lot of kids? It's Oh, I'm doing it for these Jewish reasons. And it's what does that have to do with anyone else? What does that have to do with me, Christian person?
What does that have to do with me, secular person? Whereas when we were coming at this we started from a purely secular perspective. And so we were like, these are the ways that make sense for everyone, regardless of your [00:37:00] religion or faith system. And then when we went. Back into a harder religious system and we built that for our family and then ended up believing that happened to us Because we were genuinely like what's best for our kids?
What's the system that's best for our kids and we built that and we ended up believing it. But When I think a lot of people they look at us and they're like you don't you know, really believe right? And what i've noticed is the only people who say that are the christians you know i'll explain why You Because I think a lot of atheists who are interested in believing in a religious system when they look at our system, they're like in the same way where when Dawkins was talking to the other person, he goes, you don't really believe that, Jesus was born to a virgin.
He was like, oh, there's this logical inconsistency, which is the type of thing that would hang me up, right?
.
Whereas our system is just completely un fraught with this. And so you're not going to have, I think most atheists who look at it are like, yeah, no, I bet they really believe all of this.
Because it doesn't trigger any of the. I just [00:38:00] can't bite that as an atheist problems. That many of the other traditions do, which is why we call it a secular religious system. Which I think religious people are confused by, but atheists, when they look at it, they go, Oh, it's a materialist monist system that doesn't believe in things like souls, but believes in a God.
Okay, that's makes perfect sense. Like I can see why they would believe in that. Whereas religious people, I think are more like, you can't make something up and then end up believing it's true just because you found evidence that it's true, believing something requires faith. And I think that this is actually the difference.
Like we don't really have faith. I believe my system because I believe it explains things that I can't explain using any other world metric or any other, what is it? Like metaphysical system for understanding reality. Not because God came to me and talked to me or like it helped me out of this rough time or anything like that.
Like what's weird is we believe in our system and I think that many of these ACS who are reconverting, they believe [00:39:00] in these systems and they follow these systems. Almost in the way an atheist would without, and then after that they develop the blind passion, which I think the religious community has a trouble model. And I'm wondering why they have trouble modeling that could happen. It might be because for them so much. I can tell you a couple camps that I can understand why they can't believe it. One is the religious community. That's really. Only persuaded by the awe that these giant things like cathedrals and temples are able to inspire in them.
Like it's a very sort of emotional, like the ceremony and the cathedral and the antiquity, like that's What makes these things true in my mind and so it's really that they were persuaded through emotion rather than through logic and that is why the other is the group that was raised in a tradition and these individuals don't understand how you could convert into a tradition.
Because [00:40:00] they've just never done it. So they've never switched traditions. They've never deconverted from a tradition. Just the idea that you could can genuinely convert into something and believe it is surprising to them, especially if that thing doesn't have antiquity. They're like things that are true must have antiquity.
And we would argue our system is a derived system, but I would argue it's actually truer to the antiquity of Christianity, which has always been an evolving religion than many of the other forms of Christianity, which I see is. As lacking that because they're LARPing a stasis that didn't really exist.
But the other thing that I would point out here is I think that a problem that they have, oh, I would point out here with the antiquity. Is we even know from the biblical tradition. I always mention this but it is worth noting whenever the concept of antiquity comes up Because I know you know, not everyone watching has seen all their episodes we know anyone in the abrahamic tradition from the snake staff of moses That ended up being put in the temple and worshiped which was a form of idolatry not worshiped But it was prayed to you know in the same way people today pray to rogues [00:41:00] that it then was commanded by god that it was broken.
After 500 600 years of being there and the antiquity of a tradition doesn't mean that God approves of it. He's basically just waiting for you to figure out that what you're doing is idolatry. And some people never figure that out until he's finally screw it.
I'm sending, a messenger and people need to know that this is not okay what you're doing. And I do find that, most of the traditions I think have trended towards idolatry. And I actually think What? is the problem and what's prevented many atheists from fully returning to the faith is that most of the new faith systems which are trying to attract them are ultimately mystic systems and use mystical appeals.
And those are never going to be palatable to somebody who left religion for these logical inconsistency reasons. And I say who is buying into these mystic systems? I actually think the core groups is buying into these mystic perennialist systems are the, I guess I call them crystal worshipers.
They're the people [00:42:00] who left their original religion to For emotional reasons, like they were mean to gays or they didn't treat women well enough or they didn't allow women preachers which never would have pushed me out of a faith community. Now, again, I was raised in an atheist community, so that wasn't even a thing.
But something like my dad's question around the arc that would have pushed me out of a community. The thing that deconverted my dad's, I should say, like how I ended up becoming a deconverted person. Was he got in trouble for trying to figure out the logistics of how Noah's Ark could possibly have worked.
And kept all the animals alive. And he didn't like the magic answer. Because he's if magic's the answer, then why doesn't it say that there was magic in the story? That seems like a pretty big plot hole. Like why it's giving me like specifics on the sides of the boat But it doesn't talk about the magic that was making the food like it doesn't mention that they were in like embryos like some sort of i'm imagining like a jurassic park thing
[00:43:00] But anyway, do you have any final thoughts on this because people love to hear your ideas simone You are the star and I know in the future we're gonna have people who just go to the end for your Summations.
Simone Collins: I just find this really interesting. It's amazing to me how entire movements flourishing online can be totally missed by Me and huge other swaths of the you knew about the anti nudist
Malcolm Collins: movement, or did it just never catch your algorithm?
Simone Collins: It never really caught my algorithm, because why? I'm looking at cooking and fashion and decorating online or, even when I was in the Men's Rights Activist I got really into MGTOW and the Red Pill and Pickup Artistry subreddits back around when things like Gamergate were happening But Gamergate didn't really bleed into them.
They were talking about dating strategy. They were talking about building a better independent life and becoming better people. But they weren't really talking about the wider world. [00:44:00] And I just find it so fascinating how so many of these things can happen with only a small number of people really being aware of what's going on.
And I see that happen so much in other realms. Like you started out talking about NatCon. And going to this conference was so bizarre to me because these people were living in an extremely bounded world where everyone knew each other. Everyone kind of played with their own internal languages and internal networks and they read each other's stuff and they didn't really interact with the world outside of that.
And we see something similar with effective altruism and rationalism. And there are these worlds and they all are in different ways, definitely impacting the larger world and changing the way that society unfurls. But we don't, they don't really understand larger society. Larger society doesn't understand them.
And a lot of people are being affected by these various groups, by the political elite, by [00:45:00] rationalists and effective altruists, by men's right, or by, anti feminists or by atheists.
without understanding that they are being affected by them by not understanding who they are or by not understanding how they work. So it's like the blind leading the blind in a really interesting subcultural way. And I love that you are one of those few people that seems to be able to look from a higher level, down into the terrarium, that all of these different ecosystems And get a picture of how they're affecting each other and their blind spots while not necessarily being lost in any in particular.
I don't really consider you a member of any of these communities, but you are watching very carefully how they're interacting with each other, or really not. How they're affecting each other, how they interact within their own groups and it's just, it's fascinating.
Malcolm Collins: I love it when you talk because you always give me so many ideas.
So there was two things I wanted to mention. One that I thought was really interesting here is I was talking to a group of people at NatCon. So this was supposed to be like [00:46:00] the conservative intellectuals who are writing our bills. And I mentioned GamerGate 2, not only were they unaware of the Sweet Baby Inc controversy.
No surprise to me
Simone Collins: again, just exactly my point, right?
Malcolm Collins: Unaware of GamerGate 1. They were unaware. They are making national policy decisions And they are unaware of the core conservative progressive battles that have happened in the past decade. Not at all surprised. It was shocking to me personally. I was like,
Simone Collins: like you, you are in a different world.
I guess you're aware of what these distinct groups are doing, but you weren't aware before of the extent to which they didn't even know of each other's existence or norms or effect on broader society.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. Like you thought they
Simone Collins: knew about each other.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, yeah, that's that.
I thought that at least they were broadly aware that these other groups existed. And now that we are. Didn't we learn
Simone Collins: this though? Like when we first went into private equity and we started exploring other industries and we told them [00:47:00] things like, oh, I used to work in VC and now I'm in PE and they're like what's that?
They did not know what. VC was, or even if we called Adventure Capital, they wouldn't know what it was.
Malcolm Collins: Here's, here is something I wouldn't know. I went into the conference expecting this is what I say, I had a misunderstanding of the various groups, due to the Heritage Foundation, like they have the weird anti porn thing in the 20, Project 2024.
Heritage Foundation I went in expecting them to be one of the most gatekeepy and they were not at all. They are actually interested. I've been talking to them about putting on a conference for them to meet with online conservative influencers and build some connection there. And Heritage Foundation was like the most gung ho about this.
The people at the Heritage Foundation. They seem
Simone Collins: like really willing to play ball, which is surprising for an organization that's take away porn.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The people at the Heritage Foundation were out of all of the groups. I talked to by far the most willing to
Simone Collins: Learn from the outside
Malcolm Collins: world.
Learn from the outside world and learn how the Republican base had [00:48:00] moved to new ideas and passed where they are now. The other groups, and I'm not going to call it specific groups because I don't want to damage our ability to work with any of them in the future. But some of the other groups.
We're just like, when I pitched this idea, they go, why would we care what the base thinks? Like we are going to staff the white house. We are going to control policy. And it doesn't matter what the people who are voting for Trump want him to do. Our plan is a socialist Christian state. That was basically what they were pushing for.
Simone Collins: Wish you were. I'm not lying about this, but
Malcolm Collins: I
Simone Collins: was
Malcolm Collins: there too. I saw this.
Simone Collins: It
Malcolm Collins: happened. I wish it didn't happen. You even see this within the pronatalist movement. So like Lyman Stone, he wrote this manifesto that we'll do a full piece on. Where he's everyone needs to stop. listening to the Collinses because their form of pronatalism doesn't involve socialism, just because socialism doesn't work.
And he, he lies through the moon to say it works, but we've gone over the stats. It just doesn't work. It was so funny. Even at the conference, like we were at a table with a bunch of Heritage Foundation guys, they're like, [00:49:00] why would he write that? He does know it doesn't work, right?
And I'm like, yeah, but he is just a, when I say it doesn't work, like cash handouts just do not seem to work. He will not stand any form of perinatalism that is not first and foremost socialist in its nature. And he'll even
Simone Collins: point to data that indicates that cash handouts don't work and be like, Don't you see?
This proves that cash handouts work, which is
Malcolm Collins: Yeah it's almost interesting. He is a socialist before he's even a Christian. It is wild. I don't understand but what I've learned is that there's a lot of people like him in the conservative movement. They are Christian. Yeah, we thought it was,
Simone Collins: we thought it was him being weird and it's not him being weird.
Malcolm Collins: No, yeah they're in this conservative intellectual group. There are eight. And when I say socialist, I mean bordering on Marxist. And I say he borders on a Marxist who are just happen to also be Christians. And so they think the way that they create their Marxist Christian utopia. is through the Republican Party.
But if you're wondering how these people gain so much power, this is another thing I've realized, the reason they gain so much power is I think that they're the only conservatives. There's a lot of reasons a person may be a conservative. But [00:50:00] one is, you held very strict religious values, but you're also a Marxist, and so the Democrats just won't talk to you, basically.
Is that, These individuals are the only ones who can stand bureaucracies and work their way up through bureaucracies because other conservatives who actually, understand the damage that bureaucracies and large government does just don't stay in those departments long enough. And so these departments in this sort of upper conservative bureaucratic class are actually, christian Marxist. And they keep trying to infiltrate the departments. And I think that Trump needs to be incredibly watchful of this. This form of Christian Marxism will destroy his presidency. The public does not want banned pornography. Okay. They don't want banning IVF which was part of the thing for project 2025.
I was like, why would you do that? Why would you, that's not like the conservative position. What? That's 10 percent of the conservative base wants that. Like what? Why are you trying to obviously this is going to damage Trump. But I think that they can update and they can get better.
And I'm really excited about that. [00:51:00] Specifically the heritage foundation. So you can update more with what the conservative base actually wants. Now the final thing I was going to note, which I hadn't noted until you were talking and I was like, Oh my God, like great idea here is I had mentioned that women are much more spiritual than men on a historic basis.
Like you see this in much more religious. When women deconvert, they much more likely are going to become some form of spiritualist. They're going to become a Wiccan, they're going to become a spiritualist, they're going to do little spells, they're going to become pop culture spiritualists. There's lots of types of spiritualists they're going to become.
They are very unlikely to become hardline atheists. Whereas when men deconvert, they're much more likely to become hardline atheists. And so the atheist movement was always overwhelmingly male, which also meant that as the internet became more of a fight of women versus men the witches the deconverts who went to the women community all just went to the progressive sphere.
But then the hardcore atheists. Were mostly [00:52:00] autistic women and men. And they then intrinsically identified more with the men's rights movement and reg pill and mgtow and stuff like that. And then the modern online conservative movement is very much, I call it the mig the red pill diaspora, because those movements basically died, split up, spread out, and that created the seed bed of what is now the online conservative culture, which is also I think the culture of.
The active part of the conservative base, like the intellectually active part of the conservative base where the, where conversation is still happening. Yeah.
Simone Collins: That makes sense.
Here's actually a second part of this weird phenomenon that I didn't get to in this video, but I want to cover briefly. , women when contrast it was men have historically. That you considered the much more religious gender. , and , they just seem hard coded to be more spiritual in the way that they relate to reality. When men relieve their traditional religious structures, they often become atheist. Whereas [00:53:00] when women leave their traditional religious structures. They often become Wickens that were pagans or some other form of spiritualist tradition. Well, this created a very interesting phenomenon that meant that the online atheist community wasn't disproportionately male.
So when you begin to have the battle between men and women in the anti-feminist, , birth feminist debate, , the atheist community was already predispositioned to fall into sort of the red pill side of that debate. In addition, because the atheist presumably is looking for what is true. We're as the, , you know, Wiccan or pagan is just using spirituality to, , for themselves and sort of self masturbate. , there isn't any reason for the Wiccan pagan to go back to religion, but there is a reason for the online atheist to go back to religion.
If they can find a logical structure for doing that. , which is, I think, why you've seen a lot of reconversion on that side, but [00:54:00] not on the other side. , another really interesting thing that I noted when I was talking with some people is if you look at the four Hertz men of the atheist movement, all except for Sam. , have since basically said this was a bad idea and religion is good and it was wrong to roll religion back.
Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You are amazing. Any final thoughts?
Simone Collins: No, let's go get the kids.
Malcolm Collins: I will go get them. Don't you worry.
What do you want to eat tonight? Or what are you thinking of cooking? Do
Simone Collins: you want to do hot dogs?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'd love to do hot dogs. Or do you want to do ravioli?
Simone Collins: Or pizza? Or potstickers?
Malcolm Collins: What I'm gonna do is hot dogs and some tomato soup if I could do that. And I've got the cut up shallots, so I can use those for sprinkles and Oh, but the one thing I don't have is, we don't have any sauces for the hot dogs.
Simone Collins: We have a billion sauces.
Malcolm Collins: No, they're all like cooking sauces now. Like the last time I checked the fridge, somebody had dumped like all the
Simone Collins: Somebody? I don't dump your sauces. That's [00:55:00] sacrilegious. I do not. Regardless of expiration date.
Malcolm Collins: You are so sweet to me. You know my things. I would never. I would never.
I dumped them, but I just haven't thought to re get them yet. I might go pick up the kids and then swing by Redner's and get like a sauce.
Simone Collins: Okay. How many hot dogs do you want? Two? Two. How many buns do you want?
Malcolm Collins: Three. Wow. Because I also want some tomato soup.
Simone Collins: So you're going to dip the bun in the soup?
Malcolm Collins: I'm going to toast it. Or you're going to toast it. Toast it with butter. Toasted bread goes really well with tomato soup.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay. There we go then. I'll get a bunch of bread out. Please do not forget the yoto player. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Get in the kitchen and cook me some food, you disgusting animal of a woman.
And you get the yoto player?
Simone Collins: Yes. Okay, I love you. I love you. I'm gonna take a little while to get down because she has a major
Malcolm Collins: Great section here. [00:56:00]
Simone Collins: Thanks for doing all this prep. You rock for that. It's so much work. And I just show up with a gassy baby.
Malcolm Collins: You are amazing and fans want to hear more from you. I've got to remember at the end of episodes to have you do a little spiel. Like I did that one time because fans really like that.
Simone Collins: Oh my diatribe. Simone's corner where she. I get angry about something because she has PMS again. Ha. People are
Malcolm Collins: like, oh, Simone's spitting truth. That's what they always say.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: spitting. Everybody loves you, Simone. You're the hero of the show. You're the smart one. That's been confirmed.
Again,
Simone Collins: because. I keep my mouth shut. Okay. Do you want me to
Malcolm Collins: introduce myself? Like, all good women should. Anyway, hold on. Alright. Get started here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they break down the significance of Trump choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election. This in-depth analysis covers the shifting landscape of conservative politics, the rise of tech conservatives, and what this means for the future of the Republican party. The Collins couple offers their unique perspective on Vance's background, his transformation from Trump critic to ally, and the implications for upcoming elections.
Key points covered:
* The two main factions in current conservative politics
* J.D. Vance's background and political evolution
* Trump's strategy in choosing a younger, tech-savvy running mate
* The decline of traditional GOP Inc. and rise of tech conservatives
* Immigration policy and border control strategies
* The importance of religious engagement in modern conservatism
* Implications for the 2024 election and beyond
Whether you're a political junkie or simply interested in understanding the changing face of American conservatism, this video offers valuable insights into the current state of Republican politics.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It is so exciting to be here with you today. Again, the world has changed and. In an incredibly positive direction. I should think previous episode. I had said that there are two paths Trump could take with his VP pick and which path he takes is going to show which team he is on and it is going to set the future of Republican politics in this country
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: and right now there are two core Republican.
factions that are like cultural groups. One is the GOP Inc. Remnants. This is the theocratic faction, which believes in a deontological theocratic morality and wants to enforce that morality on the general public.
Simone Collins: performative Cultural conservatism, [00:01:00] what a lot of people think about when they think about traditional conservatives, like religious and typically very Christian, that kind of thing.
No, the other faction is
Malcolm Collins: religious and Christian as well. Yeah, but in
Simone Collins: a very different way. Yeah, that's what I,
Malcolm Collins: that's why I didn't say religious, because that's not the important part. The important part is that they are theists. Theocratic and morally deontological. So what I mean by that is these are the types of people, that wants to do things like, you saw in project 2025 in their mission, ban pornography force young men to do programs that basically put them on military enlistment lists.
This is very different from the ideology that Trump represents, right? Yes. It's much
Simone Collins: more socialist leaning, much less libertarian, much less classically liberal too.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah but, yeah it's very much like the government's role is to enforce a moral system. Yes. And this was the party that Mike Pence, his last running mate, [00:02:00] represented.
Very, I can't be in another room with a woman without my wife there sort of stuff, oh the horror of this and it's not that we have anything against being in an alliance with this group or anything like that, but there is always, or up until I would say really just two days ago, there was always a chance that the conservative party post Trump reorganized around this group.
But then there's been a new conservative faction growing this is the faction that's represented by individuals like Elon and Vivek and Tamath and they are the tech conservatives, I guess some people would call them. Where Peter Thiel's in
Simone Collins: there too.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Peter Thiel's in there. They've been around for a while, but they have been growing in terms of their ability to actually interact with mainstream conservative politics.
And I think that if Elon wasn't a foreign national, he would be the obvious [00:03:00] person to take over American conservatism after Trump. He's just very lined up to do that in terms of public sentiment these days. Now the, talking heads don't think though. But I think, when I talked to the base, I see much more yeah, way to go fight the man, you be you which is also the difference between these two factions.
The theocratic faction is very much, we should have an authoritarian system. Or authoritarian in the way it relates to the people, culturally speaking. It's just, we don't like who's running it now. Like, when we were at NatCon, something we kept hearing is bureaucracy is good. It just needs to be a conservative controlled bureaucracy enforcing conservative cultural values.
Simone Collins: Yeah. They just want to be the man. Yeah, they just want
Malcolm Collins: to be the man. Then you have the other faction, which is much more formal. Fight the man. It's an anti authoritarian faction where it does implement controls. The controls are generally designed to prevent authoritarian cultural overreach.
So they would promote [00:04:00] ideas like there should be some restrictions around what schools should teach and show children when that stuff is literal pornography. Or literal like brainwashing yeah, okay. You're trying to mess with people's kids and stuff like that.
But anyway, so there were these two large factions. They have different ideologies. We will lay out this divide more in another episode. But Trump really had the choice, which faction is his successor faction or crowned as his successor faction,
Simone Collins: right?
Malcolm Collins: In his VP, he chose J. D. Vance, the writer of Hillbilly Effigy.
Elegy. Elegy, sorry. Not Effigy, Hillbilly Effigy. Hillbilly Elegy. In doing this, he basically threw in 100 percent with the tech faction.
Simone Collins: Thank goodness. And
Malcolm Collins: in a very interesting way, and in a way where a lot of people, when they look at What Trump is doing right now. They're like, how could he support this guy?
This [00:05:00] guy said Trump was a Nazi. This guy said he hated Trump, that he was an idiot. This guy said all sorts of horrible things about Trump and Trump said horrible things about him. And I would note here that when I first heard of this guy, when I first heard that he had been elected to office, I was mortified because I hated him from my first impressions of him.
Who?
Simone Collins: Trump?
Malcolm Collins: J. D. Vance. Interesting. So my first introduction to J. D. Vance was through NPR segments on Billbilly
Simone Collins: Elegy.
Malcolm Collins: I saw him, and this is who he was. He was the real East Coast elite type guy going into the environment where he was born, because he was born into these poorer communities and
Simone Collins: He was raised in like rural Ohio, right?
Mostly by his grandmother, mom was at a rehab, dad wasn't really super there.
Malcolm Collins: He was translating this experience [00:06:00] to the NPR audience. Yes. To help them understand how anyone could have ever voted for this fascist monster Trump in their eyes. Trump is obviously not that. He is fighting against fascism, I think, in terms of everything I see.
Yeah, but he was,
Simone Collins: essentially the role that he played at the time that Trump was elected Was to explain to the NPR Americans, the liberal educated elite that was out of touch with middle America, why less educated white voters could possibly vote for Trump.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And he, I believe was thoroughly dehumanizing of these groups in the way that he saw them.
It was like, how could anyone possibly be this stupid?
Simone Collins: Now I, so I disagree because I actually read Hillbilly Elegy. while we were in Peru. 2016. It's an autobiography. He talks about his life growing up. He talks about the stories and everything. And he leans heavily into that Scott's Irish culture, which is.
In some ways pretty [00:07:00] freaking awesome.
Malcolm Collins: Part of our cultural background as well. Yeah, like a little crazy, a little, yeah so just, she's not talking about Scotch Irish culture more generally. She's talking about the backwoods, Scott Irish culture as described in Albion's seed.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Which ultimately became, hillbilly culture modern when people refer to hillbillies, like the progenitor of that, Culturally in the United States was this wave of Scots Irish immigration in the early colonies.
Malcolm Collins: But anyway to take a step back here. So I genuinely think who he was when he first hit the public spotlight was a detestable person.
Here's,
Simone Collins: here's the thing. All right, Malcolm. I just want to. Let me lay it out for you. Just how poetically and narratively perfect this combination is. So what do we have now on the ticket for the Republican party for the 2024 election? All right. We have got a man who is masquerading as a classy billionaire.
Who in the end is ultimately super trashy by like WASPy [00:08:00] standards and we have a super WASPy guy, Princeton law grad, ex military the perfect, politician, extremely WASPy coded essentially, who's cosplaying and masquerading. As a hillbilly and they're both these like classic American stereotypes, the billionaire businessman, the backwoods hillbilly, but they're also both classically American and that they're cosplaying.
These roles that they actually don't hold in the name of political or commercial expediency. I just find that really satisfying.
Malcolm Collins: I agree, but I think that it's more than that because there's also an understanding of how did he transform into somebody who today I actually really and see myself as culturally aligned with.
Cause I look at JD Vance today and I'm like. He is one of the major players of this tech conservative faction. How did, and I think the only really big one who held a currently high office, [00:09:00] which made him the perfect pick for the ticket. So how did he make this transition? And I think that this transition was pushed by a few things because he's not the only person who made this transition when Trump was first running.
Did Elon support Trump? No. And they
Simone Collins: still cast shade at each other.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think you'd see Vivek supporting Trump in his first run. I don't think you'd see Chamath supporting Trump in his first run. The cultural situation has changed the urban monoculture. Trump basically saw what was happening and one spoke to the real conservative base.
And once the tech faction learned and began to understand the real conservative base, they realized they had much more in common with them than they thought. The old conservative base, the old theocratic conservative base, this basically like socialist deontological ethical system thing that still exists within many upper echelons of the Republican party.
They were very much about control and motivated by disgust. Like this grosses me out, [00:10:00] stop it. The new conservative base is motivated primarily by anti authoritarianism and a Feeling that their lives are being controlled, that their children are being taken from them. And they don't like the way the government has stepped in and attempted to erase their personal cultural autonomy and their ability to raise their family and live the ways that they want to live.
And. When they began to realize, and I think that this has been a realization process. It's been for me as well. Like when I was very suspicious of Trump the first time he ran. But now as I understand who he represents and what he is, I was like, wait, those are things I can get behind.
Simone Collins: That is a
Malcolm Collins: cultural movement that I 100 percent support.
And I think that transition is where he's like, Oh, wait. I still was so influenced by the urban monoculture. I still had this lingering trust in legacy media that I believed aspects of their narratives [00:11:00] and framings about Trump, which breaking yourself out of a cult is hard. And the urban monoculture has become a cult.
It is very hard. And it's a transitional process to break yourself out. Now it's getting easier now as they are becoming more extremist. When I say that this is an anti fascist faction. What is the urban monoculture? We've done other videos on this, but like literally Nazism reinvented at this point, they are a group that ranks humans into a class system where different ethnic groups are deserving of different levels of human dignity.
You saw this, for example, in PA, our home state where the COVID drugs that they believed were saving lives were given to people not based on their need, but based on how disor historically discriminated their ethnic group was. So they were literally allowing people to die to play this game of some human ethnic groups deserve more dignity than other ethnic groups.
And at the bottom of this pyramid recently is the Jews. Like they are just like literal Nazis now. They [00:12:00] want to use the government to promote their ideology. And they have specifically called out. If you look at what a lot of people are like they're not out there, rounding up people yet.
And it's yeah, but they're calling for it. They just tried to assassinate a president. They hit him with a bogus felony charge. Like this is like third world country stuff that we're dealing with now. This isn't what America used to be. This assassination attempt didn't come out of nowhere.
It came out of More than a decade at this point. This guy was 20. So he was 12 when Trump was first elected all of his formative years. He was in an educational system and exposed to media that tried to frame Trump as an existential threat to our democracy when he is a 50 percent supportive, like the American public and a, somebody who historically.
was a progressive New York lefty and his positions really haven't changed that much from those days. It's the progressive party that has changed pretty [00:13:00] dramatically.
Simone Collins: Oh, isn't that wild?
Malcolm Collins: But anyway, what are your thoughts on, on, on this?
Simone Collins: What I find promising about also the sort of, Vanguard that of which JD Vance is a part is that it isn't monolithic in its stances.
I would say it's more pragmatic in its stances. And to say that you couldn't just be like, these are the party's stances. I think it's much more. Selective and and targeted. For example, when you look at JD's foreign policy stances, while he has been against intervention in Ukraine, he has been in favor of intervention to protect Taiwan, for example because he has, differing opinions on the utility for the United States on those stances.
And it's nice to see that someone's not just categorically Yes or no to
Malcolm Collins: his Ukraine stance has been framed by some individuals is [00:14:00] anti giving them support when it is much more focused on ending the conflict as quickly as possible. possible. Through land grants, stuff like that which is a stance.
I personally don't think it's in our best interest. I can understand it from a human cost perspective. Whereas, he's also taken, because I do think you could get peace in that region. Through some form of compromise that would be meaningfully lasting due to the demographics of that region.
Russia just can't afford demographically speaking another war. All these people are like, Oh, they'll attack NATO. They will not they don't have the people anymore. They have exhausted themselves. Yeah. Whereas you contrast his comments on things like Israel, where he goes, you cannot long term have a safe Israel and a Gaza.
And that is, I think for people who are being realistic probably true. Yeah. No,
Simone Collins: I think that's really interesting about many of his stances. Like when I read some of his stances at face value, I'm like, Oh, what? Like he at one point was in [00:15:00] favor of a higher minimum wage. But then. When you dig deeper, you're like, oh s**t, like you're just hardcore.
Because, apparently he's of course this means that, McDonald's, for example, will just fire more people and just have a lot more kiosks and that the people who are left will have a lot more responsibilities. But that means that, Those people who get fired will get retrained and have new jobs.
And it's just oh, he gets it. Like he understands the policies. Whereas most people who are in favor of, for example, raising minimum wages are like, we just need better pay for the workers. They don't realize that a bunch of people are going to get laid off. And he's no. I know. I know they're going to get laid off.
It's fine. It's fine. And I think that's really interesting. He does, he shows that he thinks through things and that I think is more of the it's more indicative of this class of politician. Now, keep in mind, he like Vivek, has been involved in investment. He's done venture capital investing.
Yeah, exactly. And so when you have someone who has been trained professionally to look at second and third order consequences about long term impacts, about how markets will be [00:16:00] affected and they're doing this from the perspective of a more, a long term perspective. And also like you're, you are directly punished if your long term bets don't play out, which totally is not how politics works, right?
Everything's like very short term, like either you get, reelected or you don't, either you immediately get blowback or you don't, either the political machine spits you out or it doesn't like it's none of the incentives are aligned properly. You've got this different political class in this faction.
That is trained around that. And I find that so exciting and promising. And of course he does show a lot of the things that we highly agree with. Like he's one of the few politicians out there, especially among the conservative party, that's in favor of trust busting. And I love that. Which we are super
Malcolm Collins: aggressive
Simone Collins: about.
Yeah. And he's pro nuclear. He's in favor of building more natural gas pipelines. Of course, as green as possible, but not going too far. He's in favor of reducing regulatory burden. Like this guy now, of course, when someone's a vice president, I feel like the role that I would most like.
His first lady. And then the second role that I would love is vice president because like it's the most like chill role ever. I'm gonna get
Malcolm Collins: you there one day, [00:17:00] Simone. You will be vice president one day. Oh, that'd
Simone Collins: be cute. That'd be super cute if a husband and wife. That'd be so adorable.
Malcolm Collins: Either
Simone Collins: that or like
Malcolm Collins: brothers, I think could be really good.
Oh, that'd be great. You have But anyway another thing I want to note here about him is there is an episode that this episode is unfortunately going to be superseding that's on the history of the internet atheist community and how the community basically fractured into the community that cared about what was true and what was good and the community that just hated conservatives and was into dunking on them.
And that's where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye went into that community. And then you had, the armored skeptic and a bunch of the early like internet. Voices that moved into this other community and ended up being very influential in the anti feminist community, which then spawned the red pill movement, which then spawned a lot of what became internet conservatism today.
And that is why I think that transition is what pulled and generated this sort of tech conservative [00:18:00] mindset. Because a lot of these individuals have become increasingly red pilled over time about many things, including religion. As you've seen, if you look at like the four heartsmen of the atheism like new atheist movement the ones who didn't go woke are now unanimously saying religion is a good thing and it was bad to roll it back.
And then you have individuals like us who are moving from the, young, angry, atheist phase to religion was good after all. I got to play my Starship Troopers thing here. And God is real. He's on our side and he wants us to win. He wants us to win.
Across the Federation, federal experts agree that A. God exists after all, B. He's on our side, and C. He wants us to win.
Malcolm Collins: And moved back into genuinely a place of religious fervor.
Some people are like, you guys actually come off as Genuine Bible thumping fundies in your brain. And
Simone Collins: the interesting thing, too, is you also see this with J. D. Vance, where he became a [00:19:00] Catholic, what, in 2019 or
Malcolm Collins: 2021?
Simone Collins: He didn't
Malcolm Collins: just become a Catholic. He pointed out that he had an angry atheist phase.
He started, when he was moving into all this, I bet when he wrote Hillbilly Eulogy. Eulogy. Elegy. Okay. Yeah. Elegy, hillbilly, Elegy Effigy, hillbilly
Simone Collins: eulogy, hillbilly effigy.
Malcolm Collins: Like how many variations of this are we? I dunno. I don't dunno. But anyway, big words. I don't like him . But he is was writing that.
And when he first hit the public phase, I think he was still in this angry atheist phase. And he has been transitioning. And recently he converted to Catholicism, which was not his birth religion. Interestingly because he said he was convinced that it was true. And I think that this is something we're increasingly seeing is people developing their own religious beliefs or reconnecting with religious communities because they see the value in them.
And that's really what you had from this old atheist community, which was the faction that sorted for truth. And at first it pushed them away from religion because they were like, I can't [00:20:00] see how this is logical. And then they realized largely, Oh, society is worse without religion. What were we doing?
That was illogical. And then there was the other group that's just like urban monoculture. Let's dunk on and, Conservatives, right? Even if it means we have to take insane stances. And so there's been this reconvergence. And that's also really interesting that he has followed this journey.
That's so similar to ours, venture capitalists or former venture capitalists. Former angry atheist phase, and then we begin engaging with this culture. You'd start off being very suspicious of Trump or in his case, outright hating Trump and begin to realize, Oh, Trump is really the savior of our country.
And the one sort of political hope we have of uniting the various factions in opposition to the urban monoculture right now. But yeah, it, and you could say, why does it matter so much? Who's Trump VP pick was like which faction he came from. And it's because Trump's [00:21:00] VP pick is by far the candidate most likely to win or be running as the Republican presidential candidate.
In the next viable election cycle, which means that the party is going to naturally be coalescing around this mindset. Now he is going to really LARP the, um, the traditionalist parts of his perspective, because I think he. to, but I think, no,
Simone Collins: I think he's going to code switch. I think he's going to do both.
He's going to do tech elite when he's with the tech elite. He's going to do hillbilly when he's with the hillbilly. So they don't call themselves that anymore. And that's something that's really favorable about him as a candidate. And I, he's not going to. Speak as much to this old guard, conservative, performative, traditional Christian, or as you say GOP Inc.
But GOP Inc is already bought in dev voting Republican. They Trump may have disavowed project 2025, but they're still well, maybe he's not that organized in, use it [00:22:00] anyway. And a lot of people associate it and we'll
Malcolm Collins: probably apply through it, I would love it if it works out.
I think it was started. Was a good mindset. They just are a little disconnected from the base, but we've talked to the heritage foundation. They're open to reconnecting with the base. They're very curious. It's just that they were isolated due to the way the conference system works. But the other thing I want to know on the point that you're making here is who does JD Vance specifically appeal to?
He appeals to the people who were there. critical and scared of this change that Trump represented when Trump was first coming in, particularly from a progressive perspective. And I think he's going to pull a lot of them over because he can think and model like them. And he is the person who explained to them why people were voting for Trump.
Yeah. In a way, he did what Louise
Simone Collins: Perry did in the UK and to a certain extent in the U S before she did it. And that she, there are these people. Who sort of act like these emissaries. From the other side that [00:23:00] speak articulately to progressives and honestly speak much more to progressive audiences than they will ever speak to conservative audiences.
Malcolm Collins: And I think we also need to consider the integrity that Trump showed in choosing somebody who had spoken so derisively about him historically. That required, I think, swallowing a lot of Pride on Trump's part. And I think a lot of people thought him incapable of doing something like that. And I think it shows his character, but I also think it's new Trump, which is something that's been noted in our discord and we've noted it in the debate video is this is not the Trump from two cycles ago.
It is he's much more aligned with his base than he was historically. He really seems to understand them now. He He understands the tomfoolery of the old GOP intellectual classes, and he's not going to stand up for it unless they are willing to actually serve him instead of their own secretive agendas.
He is Really not over bombastic this [00:24:00] time. He still knows how to play to a crowd, but he is not, he doesn't come across as unhinged. And I don't even think the unhinged narrative works anymore because no one's really afraid of that anymore. And he's also playing to an audience now that is much more open to how aggressive media manipulation has been.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's promising. It's a good development. I'm excited for it. And again, just narratively, because I'm the kind of person who loves a VP and president pair that is cute and narratively poetic. I think this is great. The fake hillbilly and the fake Classy businessman.
Malcolm Collins: There's also the other thing to note about this.
That was really shrewd of Trump. If you're thinking about the long term health of the Republican party is JD Vance's age. Could have chosen a lot of old people who may have had more mainstream. And he's
Simone Collins: one year older than you. JD Vance is just one year older than you. Yeah, he is. Not to make you [00:25:00] disappointed in your lack of being a VP right now.
Sorry. You know
Malcolm Collins: That annoys me, Simone.
Simone Collins: I'm sorry, I should not have, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. That was bad. I
Malcolm Collins: will be president one day. I will. It's a long
Simone Collins: game, Malcolm. It's a long game. We're playing
Malcolm Collins: the long game here, okay? Yes. But I do I, look, we've been gaining public traction, we've been gaining public mindshare inch by inch, we will get there one day and I, I know that things will play out, and I see this as a largely positive sign, but it was very shrewd of Trump, because to choose a contemporary of you and me, Trump is choosing to uplift people who relate to younger conservatives and this new conservative movement and who can run things, when he's gone.
And I think that if Democrats don't do that and Biden. Sticks was Camelot, who is detested by the young base. She is really just [00:26:00] there as a diversity play and because she follows orders.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but not even like just a diversity play that nobody wanted. And that, yeah, it is so
Malcolm Collins: stupid that they are forced into choosing her.
If Biden's not the one running because she does not appeal to anyone. She is Hillary plus. But they can't do anything at this point because they weren't, they thinking long term and in the best interest of the party. And I feel like almost to an extent, Trump hurt his electability a little bit with this decision.
I think it was the right choice. Because he's
Simone Collins: too techno VC elite.
Malcolm Collins: I think that there were other choices he could have made. So I think that J. D. Vance. Helps Trump's odds of getting elected when contrasted with someone like Pence. But when contrasted of all potential VPs Trump could have chosen, there were probably better choices, but I cannot imagine a better choice if what you were optimizing for was the long term health of the Republican Party in this country.
And that was really smart. But I also think it it, this shows [00:27:00] Trump recognizing, rightly the people who, Mike Pence appeals to. Are no longer a politically relevant faction. They'll vote conservative no matter what at this point. And they're not as big as they were historically.
And and they're especially not big among the youths vote. And actually this is something I was having a really interesting conversation with a Mormon about today. Because I don't even think they matter from a fertility standpoint. Like they're just not going to exist in the future. Is he was saying that for a while so people who aren't familiar with Mormon history Mormon culture, because they believe in this sort of iterative prophecy idea you would have a group of like philosophical elite Mormons who were having this discussion.
And that discussion determined what the most recent like Mormon theology was. And then Mormonism went through this period of intense hardship from like the twenties to the fifties, where it was. hemorrhaging members. It almost went extinct as a church. And [00:28:00] what ended up happening was during that period, they transitioned to a completely hierarchical system where like the only one talking to God from God was the prophet for what leads the head of the church.
this active philosophical conversation, it was like this commandment system. And instead of every Mormon basically being commanded, like in the old Mormon church, to be like, or at least the Mormon males, to be like part of this, even on the fringes, this active philosophical theological conversation, it was much more no, here's what's ethical, here's what's not ethical.
They moved to this deontological system. And during a period where that deontological system worked really well. We see this in terms of Catholic fertility rates during this period, which was operating off of a deontological system as well during this period. And it was just very easy in this sort of before modern contraception and stuff like that to motivate really high fertility rates with this system.
But the problem is it is a uniquely susceptible system to the urban monoculture, and the [00:29:00] type of people who genetically seem to really have a strong disposition towards it are uniquely susceptible to, like, all of the rules that come with modern wokeism, and seem to deconvert at a higher rate. And It has just been completely ravaged in terms of low fertility rates within those communities.
And we were talking about how what he was noticing was in the Mormon culture, you see this new rebuilding of the active theological conversation. And those communities are the ones that are doing really well fertility rate wise in the modern Mormon movement. And the ones who were seduced by this deontological, so people wonder, they're like what's an example of the deontologically moral old Mormon?
Girl Defined I think represents a perfect example of this. She was constantly using this deontological signaling. We hate X. Don't do X. Live like this. Live like this. Live like this. Instead of do this with these consequences for God, it was like this set of rules that you had to really strictly [00:30:00] follow.
And what are they doing now? They're in the process of deconverting. That is what happened to those individuals when it was follow these rules without the active theological engagement of let's understand these rules. And so I think we're probably gonna also see something in the Catholic system.
Is a reemergence of the active theological conversation, because these are the Catholics I know that still have a lot of kids. It's not the old deontological ones, like Nick Fuentes, right? It's the Catholic system. New ones who are just like really studious and interested in the actual theology.
Converts like JD Vance can represent I think a good part of this conversation because he seems like the type of person who would be part of that. And I forgot why I originally was making this point. But I, oh, yes, it's that this old deontological system that ruled in the age of the GOP ink theocrats, in the age of the satanic panic in the age of, gays ick, [00:31:00] therefore we can't, even if it helps us win an election, say, okay, it's okay if you guys I might think gay marriage is immoral, but if it helps me win an election, it's okay for gays to marry that doesn't affect me.
They're part of a different cultural framework, right?
Simone Collins: I don't
Malcolm Collins: To adjudicate their salvation using the state government because that doesn't even get them into heaven. They need to actually believe, so all of this other stuff doesn't help. Adjudicating morality doesn't help the country.
And as we've shown, it actually seems to lower fertility rates in the countries that are more prone to doing it. And I think this transition is necessary for most of the conservative cultural frameworks that are going to survive fertility rate wise. And it, it is actually very shrewd from that perspective as well, instead of clinging to the pearl clutchers moving to the people who are working on solutions.
And actual tactics to beat the urban monoculture before it, castrates our kids. Yeah.
Simone Collins: And he, just go to go back to to JD Vance, [00:32:00] he definitely seems to be one of these people who's very tapped in to the danger of modern culture. He met his wife at Yale, I think in a social club talking about America's social decline.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he absolutely represents a recapturing of this sort of person and bringing them over to the new conservative party. He
Simone Collins: knows about it. He, he was also largely about this culture is broken in the United States. A lot of things aren't working. So yeah, he seems to be, very awake to it, very aware.
It's more what he represents obviously because vice presidents don't do anything.
Malcolm Collins: But whatever. Vice president is the next person running in an election often. It's who's in the yeah. And that's a good tone setter. It'd be great to see him, you
Simone Collins: know, run in But he also seems
Malcolm Collins: like he would be very competent within the administration and pretty loyal to Trump and his base agenda given this personal transformation that he has undergone this last decade.
And keep in mind, it's been a decade [00:33:00] since he came out against Trump about, um, that's a lot of time to have this sort of personal transformation, by the way, he has three kids, I believe Yeah,
Simone Collins: yeah.
Yeah. And they're all about like our kids ages. His youngest was born in December, 2021.
So we should put them in the index. Not that he would ever respond to our emails. But
Malcolm Collins: I, I think the odds of us could date our date. Positions in the administration have risen dramatically with J. D.
Simone Collins: Your names are good. It's it's Ewen,
Malcolm Collins: Vivek, and Mirabelle.
Simone Collins: Nice. I actually like
Malcolm Collins: the name Vivek. I was thinking about that.
Simone Collins: But
Malcolm Collins: I was also going to say, one thing that I hope that we can continue to become for this new faction is become Sort of what Curtis Yarvin was for the last iteration before we move into, to large hard politics positions work on pushing the philosophical envelope and better understanding sort of the game plan, how we win and how we beat this monolithic, [00:34:00] basically Nazi group that has taken over our country.
And taking over our school system and taking over media, particularly children's media which is, what's most disturbing and has led to the cultural rot of our country. One thing I'd say is that, you, you watch videos today, you watch movies, you watch what's coming out of Hollywood today, and there's just no light behind their eyes anymore.
It's it feels so. Soulless is the only way to put it and yet, we live in pennsylvania You go talk to amish people and they have this spark in them and it's something that we're just not seeing that much in society anymore and I think that it the only people who can reignite it because The force that's blowing out the candle is the urban monoculture is this progressive force and so if we want to carry the light through the darkness of the frontier we need to go all in and ensure that they can win this election cycle.
And obviously we're doing our part with running right now and offering our services to anyone who's working on campaign stuff. And, we're talking to the various campaign groups. And I think that we've seen divine Providence, I think. Being shot through the ear, if Trump [00:35:00] had just had his head turned, even just like this, just a little split he would be dead now.
And that is, I think, divine providence. And, you know what he was looking at that saved his life? Was a graph of immigration statistics, illegal immigration statistics. Um, So illegal immigration saved Trump's life. Um, Well, I mean, I would See it as uh, sort of, you could argue a divine blessing or approval of his plan on illegal immigration policy.
Yeah, a God wing because I've seen some people in our comments are like, I hate this plan. He has to allow immigrants who get advanced degrees in the US. And it's has God personally done something like that for you recently? I think that incredibly strict immigration restriction combined with allowing and becoming a brain drain, especially of countries that we have conflict with.
I don't know if we should do it for everyone who gets a degree, but especially if you get a degree at a top 10 [00:36:00] college in the U S. Like it is nuts that we kick out like our Harvard PhDs. Like, why are we doing this? That's insane. Especially in STEM degrees, maybe not the liberal arts. Kick them out if it's anything other than a STEM degree.
I'm I deal with that. I'd also say like our immigration policy one area where I think Trump. Could do better on the immigration policy. Is I think patrolling the Southern border is unrealistic. And it's unnecessary given that we have net migration out from Mexicans specifically right now
I should note that this trend actually reversed recently and I misspoke. Well, we did have a period of net migration out of Mexican immigrants. When you're now dealing with a. Migration in of Mexican immigrants, but small wind contrast it with other countries.
Likely due to the cartel violence right now.
Malcolm Collins: instead we should work with the Mexican government and patrol their Southern border because one, they hate immigration as well.
And it is a much, much easier border to [00:37:00] police. And I would also argue that we should work with Panama to develop a U. S. military base at the Durian Gap to prevent immigrants from going through there, which would cut off a huge chunk, because right now a lot of our Latin American immigration is actually coming from South America.
So if you can cut off the Durian Gap, which is actually very easy to do
Sorry. I just realized that some listeners might not have any idea what the Darien gap is or why it would be so easy to cut off a boot between Panama and Colombia. There is eight area that has no infrastructure and no roads that is called the durian gap. As to why it has no infrastructure, no roads.
It's an incredibly hard area to build in. So there is actually no direct infrastructure connection between central America and south America. Uh, it is considered the hardest part of the south American migration route. [00:38:00] Um, and it would be, it's also a very, very tight choke point. That would be very, very, very, because then the actually viable path through the durian gap, our view there's only like four viable pathways through it. Uh, it would be very easy to cut off.
Malcolm Collins: you've cut off something like 30 percent of the immigration. You cut off then further the southern Mexico border, then we can begin military intervention against the cartels which I think is going to one day be necessary for the U.
S. to do and let's just get it handled right now before it spirals out of control and we need to do it because of some sort of mass killing in the U. S. I think that's where we need to go. And then people will be like, so you think that Mexico should live as a basically United States run police state?
And I'd say I think you need to realistically look at the situation on the ground in Mexico these days, the ways that people are being [00:39:00] tortured and killed, what's happening and ask, would that genuinely be better or worse? It would be cheaper for us and it would help more people. And Mexico, by the way, in Arizona, when we freaked out about the progressives are like, how dare you do an immigration policy where the cops can just ask for your proof of, birth at any time that's racist.
And I was like, when they were freaking out about that, when they were freaking out about what was his name? Sheriff whatever immigration plan and him being this racist guy. That was actually less strict than Mexico's exact same policy at the time. If we begin to adopt more of Mexico's immigration policy, which I think would be optically an interesting path to go is say let's stop immigrants at the Mexican southern border and then adopt Mexico's immigration policy, which progressives don't know is actually extremely strict compared to America's immigration policy.
I think that we could realistically and at a real cost snuff out [00:40:00] most of the illegal immigration of low skill immigrants that are coming into this country, which I do think is where we need to target because that's just an economic drain. If we're having people come in on Actually, somebody tried to get me for this.
They were searching for quotes from my grandfather,
Context. My grandfather was a Republican Congressman.
Malcolm Collins: and they found one of him using a term that was commonly used to describe Hispanic immigrants at the time but today is not. And he said in the quote, because they didn't, Tweet the full quote, they were trying to say that, oh, this is proof that Malcolm's family is just the worst.
And we've spent generations fighting racism, like we're obviously not racist. He said you cannot have porous borders and social services at the same time. You cannot have a socialist like system and porous borders because it's just economically unfeasible.
It will cause tons and tons of unproductive immigrants to come into the country. And he was saying this before the Republican party was anti immigration. This was actually a [00:41:00] pretty spicy take at his time. And I was just reading this being like, way to go, granddad, like seeing this coming before it hit us.
Maybe using language at the time.
I should note here We have an episode that we filmed that goes over all of our political positions, but we filmed it three times already. And just none of them really caught us because I want it to be a really, really solid, tight, punchy. Like this is our entire political philosophy. And so we haven't fully gone into our perspectives on immigration, in any of the videos. , and I think that people can misinterpret because we're pro pluralism, , that we are pro unconstrained immigration, which we are absolutely not, , think it's common sense that you cannot have lightly constrained immigration in any system that offers social services like social security, Medicare. , police protection, et cetera. , because those cost money to deliver, , and you also cannot have uncontrolled or [00:42:00] immigration that is overly politicized in a system where recent immigrants can vote. As we have seen Progressive's pushing for again and again and again. , Because then you have a political motivation to promote immigration, which is a bad thing to bring into a country. And in a world where we have any form of social services in our countries, we need tight restrictions on unproductive immigrant groups. , so basically any immigrant who's not going to come in and be an active and large participant in our economy. , that's, that's just going to hurt everyone.
, you know, it's, it's insane. It's insane. But that doesn't mean that we are anti-immigration entirely. If somebody is going to be paying tax dollars, especially more tax dollars than me that are paying. For my social services.
Yeah, sure. I'm fine with that. , and in that case, , we are. Open to high skilled immigrants, particularly people with, , elite stem degrees. , and in addition to [00:43:00] that, , we are open to policies that would allow people to immigrate into the United States. While voluntarily adopting more aggressive, personal tax schedules. , no one has purple. Like seriously push this forwards yet.
And I'm kind of surprised because I think it's a good idea. I E. You know, you opt to pay. Uh, you show one that you are a decent earner into, you have to pay. You know, 25% more in taxes than a natural born citizen. And you get a fast track to becoming a citizen. , I think a lot of people would take that and I think that's a very fair trade.. If your pushback to this proposal is. Yeah, but what about the culturally the cultural dilution effects of these. High earners, you know, they won't,
Integrate. Or assimilate well with the native population, I would just ask you to think about the immigrants, you know, who assimilate quickly and the ones who assimilate poorly. It's almost a direct line [00:44:00] graph on how productive they are. , individuals who are more economically productive, assimilate very quickly.
It is actually fairly rare for an economically productive immigrant to not assimilate within two generations. , whereas it is, if you look at the immigrants who just. Are not assimilating at all. Often the thing that allows them to not assimilate is not being an active participant in the local economy.
Malcolm Collins: I love that they tried to get me to disavow him. I was like, imagine you live in a world where you have to disavow your grandparents because you hear a racial slur from this, like normal grandparents stuff, like everyone knows the grandparents do that.
And you're like, okay, we don't talk like that anymore. But anyway, sorry, that really got me this idea that people are disavowing their heritage like that.
Simone Collins: Not everyone,
Malcolm Collins: just
Simone Collins: some people.
Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone. You are a picture of human perfection. And I cannot wait for the day when [00:45:00] you become vice president.
Simone Collins: I'd much rather be. First lady to okay. Okay. I'll work on it. I'll work on it. Vice first lady. I love this vice word. We can put the vice and president.
Malcolm Collins: You want to put the vice and vice presidents?
Simone Collins: Yes. Let's
Malcolm Collins: see. You're already running against a party that dedicates an entire month to one of the seven deadly sins, right?
You
Simone Collins: got to fight back. Okay. We'll find a way. All right, Malcolm. I love you. Love you to death. By the way, what do you want for dinner?
Malcolm Collins: What do you suggest? You got
Simone Collins: I can make you we can use your leftover miso soup. I can heat that up in a pan and make you potstickers. I can make Ooh, miso soup
Malcolm Collins: and potstickers would be good, but I feel like I want to use the onions and tomatoes Would you like to use that
Simone Collins: stir fried chicken from Trader Joe's?
I can do that with white rice with you and miso soup on the side.
Malcolm Collins: Why don't I use the things that I made deep fried and then we froze and then I'm going to cook that up with some onions and [00:46:00] tomatoes and put it on rice. We, we did a, like a three day deep cooker. We shared it with guests and then Oh, the slow cooker
Simone Collins: meat.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The slow cooker meat.
Simone Collins: Okay. I can microwave it to thaw it. And then you want to stir fry it?
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Let's put some in the fridge to thaw. And then tonight what I'll have is miso soup and gyoza.
Simone Collins: Okay. Love
Malcolm Collins: you.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com - Mostra di più
