talk about hate crime hoax and the 50 million dollar question. please welcome wilfred reilly. and our next speaker is the author of 11 books including thought criminal beyond woke google archipelago the digital gulag and the simulation of freedom just to name a few. please welcome michael rectenwald. and finally these gentlemen are joined by carly kylie carlino the senior media relation strategist at ragnary publishing who will moderate the panel. hi everyone. thank you for coming to this. i'm really excited about this conversation where we talking about the state of speech in book publishing specifically. the dystopian idea of book banning is becoming a trend among american publishers regular publishing where i work is a conservative book publishing company based in washington, dc and over 75 year history. we have gained a reputation for publishing books that new york publishers won't touch one of them being mr. riley's book, taboo. i book banning is a reality. we will be discussing today. it happens among publishers before a book even makes it to the public eye. it happens among distributors who have apologized for shipping taboo. topic books that disagree with the mainstream sentiment and among booksellers like amazon who have even refused to carry books for the same reason. so well if you could just briefly introduce yourself talk about your book a little bit. you talk about the brilliant. what do you talk about in taboo? and why is it important to today's discussion? yeah, so taboo is a book. it's subtitled the 10 facts you can't talk about and what i do is look at 10 of the more prominent kind of public narratives in society and see what the facts underlying them if any happened to be so i look at the black lives matter narrative for example, which is that there's an epidemic number of african-american unarmed men being killed by police. i look at sort of the broader narrative that there's a massive amount of interracial crime and conflict in the country. and i really go across the spectrum. i look at the idea of systemic racism are there hidden forces in america that make it very difficult for people of color to succeed. and to sort of switch it up in the final chapter. i look at the things the alt-right says the idea for example that diverse society's just don't work. and what i find, is that a lot of these narratives are the word i usually use as --. although i'll avoid this in front of a polite audience like this one, but i find that there's very little factual basis for a lot of the things that mass media kind of promotes in modern society. so in terms of the black lives matter argument, for example, the total number of unarmed african-american men that were killed by police last year turns out to be 17. and you can really go into this data at some length. i mean the total number of people overall that were shot and killed by the police last year and as in almost every year was under a thousand. of those about 250 were black where african-american the majorities people turned out to be attacking the police with guns knives in knives in one case a cadillac escalade. so the the core of this argument that we're constantly confronted with is unreal. it's fictional and there seems to be a problem not so much with people understanding this reality, but with people expressing it and that turned out to be true for most of the other things as well interracial crime at least in the traditional sense kind of a violent incident involving either a black perp and a white victim or a white perp and a black victim was about three percent of crime. the most recent year on record, which is what i use in the book there were 600,000 of these cases and there were about 20 million total crimes. of the interracial crimes that did occur about 90% of them 89% were actually black on white now again, this is not an epidemic in any direction the person most likely to kill you in the usa is your ex-wife at least for males, but i mean that that is a bit of an indication of what's actually going on. how real a lot of what you hear is and this is this is just true on and on down the line. i mean in terms of the idea of systemic hidden bias the claim there is really what dr. abram kindy says if you're familiar with that gentleman but that any large gap in performance between groups has to be due to some kind of hidden subtle racism unless you want to propose that it's due to genetic inferiority. in fact what i found is that adjusting for really basic things like age the most common age for a black man in the usa is 27 for a white man. it's 58 closed almost all of the gaps. just so on down the line. i mean the major alt right claims diverse societies don't function for example, where no more likely to be accurate. i mean large countries have been diverse since ancient rome if you own a lot of land generally there are a lot of different kinds of people that live on it. so point of the book i think is that many things that almost everyone seems to believe really aren't accurate and we believe these things because we're being told them by people. so i look at that i examine why and apparently this is a very controversial thing to do and this came on top of a previous book hate crime hoax which makes the point that a lot of the very high profile kind of racial incidents that we've seen in recent years covington catholic here in kentucky. jussie smollett, obviously mocked by dave chappelle is the mad frenchman juicy smilier. so on turned out simply not to be true. so the topic of both these books i think which we'll get into is that a lot of things that we're all expected to believe aren't real. and so the question is why we're expected to believe them and there are there are many people that object to this sort of line of inquiry taking place. i think. so that that's it for me. oh, i'm i am an associate professor at kentucky state university here in frankfort quick drive over from lexington glad to be here. thank you will and michael. can you briefly tell us about your book thought criminal and how it's prepared for you to talk about this discussion. sure. yes. i'm michael rutkin walton and -- criminal is my 11th book. i was a professor full professor at nyu in global liberal studies and um, i was basically a leftist a marxist and then the social justice excesses in the university started to alarm me and i saw the sort of totalitarian of what they represented. and i started to speak out against it on twitter first, and then i was interviewed by the student newspaper there. and two days after the interview appeared i was pressured into a force a forced into a leave of absence and driven off campus. condemned by a committee called the diversity equity and inclusion group. and effectively my academic career was ruined. so since then i've been writing. i have written springtime for snowflakes, which is a memoir that treats my journey through the academic left and back out. and then another book called google archipelago, which treats the same sort of ideology as it permeates big tech. and how big tech and why big tech is a leftist authoritarian outfit. cartel really is what it is and then the next book was beyond woke and which i treat. all of these subjects from big tech through i'm dealing with the social justice ideology and all of its permutations and then finally thought criminal is a novel and that novel treats? uh, it's based the premise of neuroscientist who has come up with a theory about a virus. and he thinks that the virus is actually. being perpetrated by the state. and that it has a function which is to connect the neurons of the neocortex of the various subjects to this massive database and processing system called collective mind. and there's a vaccine program. and he believes that the vaccine is actually doing something other than what they say. in fact, it turns out to be true. that the vaccine serves in fact make the virus more effective and to make it more permanent, so that almost all of the thinking is supplied. and replaces one's own thinking it's all supplied by this body called collective mind, which is this vast database processing system. so he's a thought criminal because he's trying to maintain his own individual autonomy and thinking process at the risk of being. of being infected with the virus, which will then eradicate his personality in effect. and he is a amongst a group called the network of thought deviationists and that derives from basically i take that language from the soviet union. in which basically dissidents were considered deviationists from the party line. so this is about totalitarianism. and how it eradicates individual thought and attempts to replace it with party line thinking. all right. thank you. yeah, so you guys have published some pretty against the against the mainstream media messaging. topics you've published some controversial stuff that have really gotten people's eye up and a lot of ways among publishers over the past year. we have seen books signed and then canceled and or just authors refuse to be signed were not signed on an all by for example, simon and schuster mike pence was signed by simon and schuster to publish a memoir, but then cancel called culture got in there too and a bunch of employees made a petition demanding the cancel mike pence's memoir because his policies were quote racist and sexist the ceo. jonathan karp said simon schuster would commit to publishing a broad range of views. and so they ended up committing to publish that but earlier in 21, they had canceled a man's book named josh hawley. i don't know if you've heard of him. and he was canceled by simon & schuster because he objected to certifying the 2020 presidential election. so he was for the same reasons political his political stance. that's why he was canceled by a publishing company. and so i wanted to hear from you. is michael? have you had any difficulty with publishers not wanting to publish your books because they didn't want to promote your message. yes, i did. when i wrote spring time for snowflakes one of the things i examined was transgender ideology. and i'm going to talk about trans. transgender here. i'm talking about the ideology and the cultural. trend and agenda and so i i analyzed what was going on with transgender ideology, and i i decided that it had to do with postmodernism which is a school of philosophical thought so to speak if you can call it thought. that basically suggests that reality is is determined by language. so that reality is really a social and linguistic construct that's made by language itself. and that is not you know, there's no out there out there really everything is produced by the subject. it's very subjectivistic and it's very it's very it's actually nihilistic in terms of epistemology. but what i was getting at here is i talked about how transgenderism depends on naming and effect. you are who you say you are so it all comes down to words and language determines reality. so anyway, i had a publisher saint martin's press we were all through the whole revision process. maybe seven times. that's how they were adam. bella was the editor and he's a conservative actually of a certain ilk and he tried to get the book through but the transgender thing tripped it up saint martin's press is actually an academic press but he had he had a certain imprint called all points books and they tripped it up over the transgender issue. so i had to move it to a different publisher, which i'm perfectly happy about because i could say exactly what i wanted to say without any apologies or whatever. yeah, how about you will we're discussing the book business. do you feel your choice of very edgy topics has gotten you in trouble with publishing. uh, yeah, i think i mean i have a great relationship with you guys, but there's a reason that this came out with regnery. um in all honesty, i think that there's a great deal of resistance to a whole range of topics in modern academia and modern publishing. i don't think that's much of a secret for this audience, but i'll tell you i have a background in sales. i was a sales director for marcus evans international in chicago for a couple years and how i got my first book published was that i just identified the emails and the phone numbers for the executives that publishing companies which isn't hard to do they're on the websites and i just made a pitch call like i'm a pretty serious guy. i'm a professor at a local university. i have this background. i'd be interested in setting up 20 minutes talking about a book idea and everyone accepted it was it was enjoyable a great funds the phrase that comes to mind talking all these guys in a new field but a lot of them said very openly when i mentioned the premise of the book hate crime hoax there's no way we can publish this. one of them actually called me kid. the guy was about 70. i think a little past that point, but it's just sort of interesting like you don't understand how our business works. there's no way we can get this out. i'll tell you there's a book. you should check out called crying wolf by a guy named laird wilcox, which is the first version of hate crime hoax and this guy laird wilcox is an extreme as a researcher conservative guy down to kansas tried to publish this book for something like four years. he finally got a deal with one publisher. i forget the name of the business, but was told just before publication when they had a cover. this is something post. for example, tawana brawley that we're simply not going to be able to release so that obviously exists. i mean, i openly talked to people who said you seem like a nice guy, this topic's not one we're gonna go with and i somehow feel that that would have been a little bit of a different situation if i'd written a book called, you know anti-racist toddler. so there are definitely our prejudices in every field. i mean their fields like the us military obviously that lean wright but in publishing i think across the arts in general and academia in the ngo sector you're gonna run into a lot of people that lean toward the political left and that's that's going to affect the topics. you can quote unquote get away with i actually avoided the trans issue in taboo, because the books already based around 10 or 11 major taboos, so i didn't want to have to fight about this one. i mean, i think it's obvious that men aren't women if you want to put it that way but chose not to really take that on, you know full frontally that may be my next book, although i think mr. rechtenwald my coauthor and a number of people have already covered that ground pretty well. but yeah, the there really is a form of censorship it comes mostly from the left today that makes the situation such that saying men aren't women would be a wildly controversial statement. and yeah, that's something people can notice and people can react to but yes that obviously has affected me. yeah, and michael does censorship in the publishing world and in the media at large day resemble any historical precedence that you your research? well, yeah, i mean i mean i mean, it's it's very reminiscent of stalinism frankly and the cultural revolution in china. where in china for example, they? effectively ran on a rampage destroying the four olds customs habits idea. i don't know all the four olds, but you can look it up on wikipedia where they'll tell you lies about mostly everything. but anyway, before the four olds and basically they destroyed all remnants of traditional culture and routed out what they thought of as bourgeois ideology or bourgeois ideas and in the same thing happened in soviet union, except they didn't have a cultural revolution. it just was a basically routing out all the scent and in dissonance and putting them in gulags, i mean, so we don't have we're having a soft. cultural socialist revolution in the united states. i mean this this should not be a surprise to anyone to realize that we are undergoing that. and as such it is permeated all of these culture industries the publishing houses. i think we're actually late in coming to this but almost every cultural institution in the united states and around the world, but you know, this seems to be the hotbed or the belly of the beast in terms of where this is actually coming from so it seems that it really resembles the soviet union it resembles the eastern bloc. where these dissidents would have to create what they called sam's about books and publish. basically, they called him parallel structures. they tried to develop parallel cultural institutions and various types of other mechanisms by which to survive first of all to keep their sanity second of all and third of all to try to flourish creatively and otherwise so yeah it very much is to me. we're undergoing something that i think is very serious. it is not. simply a joke wokeness isn't just funny. although there's a funny book about it right here. wokeness is actually a very dangerous ideological means by which to exclude and destroy people and it's not it's not a joke. so yeah, i think this is a very serious situation that very much resembles. the soviet union and in fact, i just read an article before this talk called the soviet is a sovietization of the united states. which talks about all then this is from a russian dissident who who fled the soviet union he defected and he said what's happening here? has had was was it's it's making its hair stand on end. and also i've heard from other people from the cold from china that came over the that came here and they're saying the same thing this minds them of the chinese cultural revolution. so publishing is definitely one of the elements but it's very widespread. no. no, i would make about my co-authors comment there. we're already seeing the development of quote unquote parallel institutions in the usa. where you're seeing almost separate right-wing if you will and then sort of mainstream center left medias. i mean you're seeing alternative academic institutions. a hillsdale college is one we're just talking about but this is actually a major problem for my field of political science because you're creating two bases. you're creating two americas, which is something that even george bush even barack obama fairly partisan fellows spoke out against quite recently, but the audience base for fox news. last i looked was about 91% conservative and fox at least identifies itself as somewhat ideologically conservative, but you see the same thing in reverse the base for the new york times the washington post. so on down the line leans 80 90 percent or more to the left. it's over 95% last i looked at any real data for msnbc. so not to just drop a bunch of figures on you guys, but we are moving toward this sort of two camps that disagree on everything but because they're receiving different information. for example, i mentioned last line, but i mentioned the total number of in black men shot by the cops in a typical year. it's about 10, maybe 20. um a good well done recent poll from the skeptic research center found that the average liberal american thinks it's 10,000. this isn't me exaggerating. they asked a bunch of people identified as leftist or very liberals how many people they thought this was and it was more than 35% thought. it was about 10,000 if i recall court now 35% thought it was about a thousand. i don't want to exaggerate 15% thought it was about 10,000 and about 10% thought it was more than that. so the constant panic on one side of the aisle and the reaction to that something like the covid vaccine sometimes extremism on the right reflects entirely different bases of knowledge and thought and even information which is very problematic. that's a good point. yeah, i agree with connect. and just that something i agree with that. and i think there is a split there's there's two at least two americas, but i would like that though that one of them has the cultural power. they control all the cultural industries. they control for the most part all of academia other than a few schools like hillsdale and a few others. they're controlling most of the publishing world. they're controlling most of the media and you know fox notwithstanding. but even those institutions like fox is getting tremendous pressure from this left. which is marsh trying to marshal all their forces to get people canceled. there's been numerous campaigns to get tucker carlson's canceled for example, and this is just ongoing he's luckily got quite a spine. so i admire for that but this is not yeah, this is true. there's but i would say that the in in this sense. a kind of parallel structure that just happens to be has to be almost subversive as against the dominant culture. yeah one. can i add one? just going back and forth one final comment here. also, is that the bias that you see in the media and academia? i mean again a set of numbers the media means about 93% left. that's a famous study by pew in 2004. that's the number of national media journalists that are if i recall correctly leftist liberals or left-leading moderates see about the same in academia and my field of political science we have about 20 democrats for every republican but one result of this is that the extremists can tell normal people that they are extremists. i mean when murdoch founded fox news, he was asked bluntly who the hell do you think the audience will be for this conservative tv station? he said 51% of america. because he just looked at demographics. he had seen that all of the pre-existing media was on this one side of the fence dividing two equally sized camps, but i mean in academia, it's not 50/50 it is again 95 five. so the people that are coming out of fields like gender studies are saying things that are in fact rejected. i don't want to focus on this one french topic, but that are in fact rejected by the massive majority of americans, but that are presented as utterly mainstream. this is what the experts say. we hear this a lot with everything from covid-19 to policing. are you questioning the experts are you questioning the science as an intelligent tax paying citizen one thing i would encourage you to remember is that an expert or a scientist is just another ordinary upper middle-class citizen with a degree in a specific arena like education. so it does matter if 95% of these very human people are in one of the political camps. so yeah ragnari and others fox do great work. i do agree there needs to be more buildup of this and i think you're seeing that now i think you're seeing the daily wire for example, like consum. of conservative media, but they're hiring people like gina carano and alice and williams adam carolla, like actual mainstream figures. so there's like dw comedy now, will that be enough? i don't know, but i think it makes it more difficult to just lie. if one media outlet in five is saying no no every major story from the other four-fifths of this block is usually wrong that's going to have a massive breaking effect. obviously gonna swing back to the other two thirds of the panel, but we just saw this with russia gate the entire thing turned out to just be a set of lies. this is something that went on for a four years. so keep that in mind keep in mind that experts are simply humans often less educated than you are across fields. yeah, so on that topic you guys had some really great things to say and i really like you're a phrasing of the messaging of x2 with the purpose of excluding and destroying things that we don't want that people don't want to hear this happened in this past year with the american book sellers association the aba there are national nonprofit trade organization that promotes and connects books with independent booksellers. there are distributor. and other their job is to distribute books that's their job and they mailed out one of our books a book by abigail schreier. and what's a it's down. there will make you get down to get it. it's called irreversible damage, but when they mailed out this book, they got one complaint on twitter one and they sent out a an official apology saying that we have traumatized and endangered the members of the trans community by mailing this book out by mailing the book out. this is a serious and violent incident that goes against the aba's ends and policies values and everything. we believe in and support it is inexcusable. and so i wanted to ask you guys how do you what do you think about this language that's being used. where are they getting this language? yeah, let's talk about that. yeah, i can start with the word violence. there's this term came out of academia. it's called discursive violence that is language. use that is deemed violent again. it stems out of postmodern ideas that language of its in and of itself is a form of action that it that it has this kind of efficacy and that has this kind of power that an act itself has and this filtered into legal studies through critical race theory and other types of studies. and so the idea then is that language is violent and this is a means by which people get shot up, basically basically the to the left your language is violence. or your speech is violence and our violence of speech. that's basically what it comes down to in other words. we can burn down buildings up and down the street and that's just free expression, but if you actually talk and say things we don't like that's violent. so this is the standard that we're under so i think it's pathetic on the part of this up distributor to cave to these twitter mobs, even if it's one, especially if it's one person one person one person even if it's a a twitter mob most of them a lot of them are bots plenty of them are just these people are just phrase repeaters, basically. i say that they have this lexicon of woke ideology or woke phraseology. it's plug and play rhetoric. they have all these words they plug them in and then they spit them out and they say them all you could they may as well be computers computer bots are ai agents because they have every bit as per as much predictability as a computer application. they're so boring and they're so there's their sameness and their words that they use like it's almost identical they all sound alike. that's they're like agent smith in the matrix, they're all identical and they just repeat the same things. yeah, there's actually i mean there's actually a term for that npc the idea that if you're arguing with someone online, they're just going to repeat set woke rhetoric without really coming up with any new arguments or any innovations. that's often true. so i think that there are two things that actually come into play there. one of them is the redefinition of language by sort of the postmodern left and you see this go well beyond what we're talking about here. i mean, so in my arena when someone like ibraham kennedy or robin d'angelo says you're racist. they don't actually mean you're racist and the sense that you genetically dislike people of another race what they mean is something like you support any system in the usa that produces different outcomes for people of different races. so the argument is that the sat for example is racist because whites outscore blacks and blacks often outscore latinos, and the only reason this could occur the only way this could occur is through some kind of hidden subtle prejudice and society this of course doesn't answer the question of why asians outscore everybody. but that that's the argument the word racism has been redefined to mean any system that is seen as advantaging white people the same thing with violence like i was actually born on the south side of chicago so come from a military family. so the idea that it is violent to speak freely as opposed to to beat someone up strikes me as utterly ridiculous, but someone said this in an academic paper, and now other people can say well following the lead of bell hooks. i describe unwanted speech as a form of violence against people of color. so we're dealing with this silly constant word redefinition a big problem. i think quite seriously, is that the other side has most of the english teachers so we have to reason i don't mean that as a joke. we have to speak in a bookstore we have to respond to this when someone defines opposing every system in the usa as anti-racist as dr. abram candy, in fact does because all of these systems produce slightly different outcomes for blacks and whites and asians and latinos when someone says that's anti-racism you have to redefine that and say no that's neo racism or something like that word redefinition is an issue. so is social media, i don't want to ramble on about this but the idea that the people on social media are very representative of the country is simply false if i can ask just short show of hands how many of you have a twitter account with more than say a hundred followers. all right. we got two in the room solid solid group of taxpayers in here. i mean that that's about to go. that's what i see when i give speeches. so the people on twitter are in general. they're young upper class coastal. they're mostly college kids. if you ever look at twitter's demographics, so saying that something doesn't play on twitter saying something like mike pence is unpopular on twitter, which may be one of the silliest single analyzes i've ever heard whatever you might think of the former veep. it's just meaningless. so one we have to cling to real definitions of words and two don't focus too much on the artificial world social media twitter instagram, and the whole world beyond that meta second life someone down the line focus on first life go out and actually talk to people and you'll see what americans think i think so the social media influence is very real. i know it's real in academia. i imagine it's real and publishing, but it's mostly fake last line. i was on twitter the other day i actually do have about 50,000 twitter followers many wants to follow me. um, but i logged logged on and i saw a person who's avi was a vagina keeping this polite arguing with a person whose twitter avi was a roman statue indicating that they're probably on the right both. these people were under one of my twitter posts and i just logged out. there's no real point in engaging in that conversation. i think the statue probably had the better points, but these aren't real people. these are cartoon characters created in the metaverse. so actually focus on your fellow citizens. that's a good idea for every business. yes, excellent, excellent point and real quick. i wanted to make a correction on that the one person who complained that was in relation to target taking the book off their website briefly of the same book transgender book and this other time with the distributors with aba a couple of booksellers who receive the book complained. so i just want to make sure i had that clarification there was one person but that was in relation to target and target did end up putting it back up standing media here, so i'm not worried my conscience. all right. well we have we have about 10 minutes left and i would like to open this up for questions from you guys for either will or michael or both of them. and we have a microphone here too if you raise your hand and i just wanted i did want to add one point about the redefinition of words before we go because this is exactly what we're well talks about in 1984, and this is exactly what happens in the soviet union where language changes meaning and the this is a way of distorting reality so that people can't trust their own senses and they have no idea the total disorientation and this makes them very easy to control. yes, just one quick sentence political correctness is actually you might correct me on this michael, but it's a soviet term it came from lennon lennon embedded the term. yeah, it's soviet not chinese. but yeah, that was the only conflict in my mind. but so the idea was that something can be wrong, but you still have to say it and a classroom. i'd probably repeat that something can be wrong, but everyone still has to say it because it's governmentally correct. it's correct under the law and we're now seeing this with i think transracialism will be the movement beyond transgenderism, but i mean the idea of dead naming on campuses the idea that you have to identify students as if they are multi-ethnic for example the race they identify with the gender of course is where this began they identify with and those two things in some situations are harmless, but this is going to continue going on. we now recognize the director of the cdc. rochelle wolinsky said yesterday that wearing ordinary non-n-95 masks reduces your chance of getting covid-19 by 80% that's just not true, but it remains up on the cdc account. so we seem to be seeing an increasing wave of people saying things that are not fact, and i don't think this is entirely a left-wing thing. but that's who's in charge now at least in discourse, but we're seeing people say things that absolutely are not true and then command you to agree with the thing that is not true at risk of for example losing your job. yeah. are there any questions? yes, sir in the back of q state your name if you have affiliation or if you just book buyer here. where you all see yourself? where do you see us time 10 years? turn around. so for the live stream he asked where do you see us now? where are we going down the road? i think that frankly. this may not be popular. but you know what? this is a this is the what's the name of this talk? this panel got the state of speech safe. speech. it may not be safe. speech. but i think that the woke social justice business has has basically morphed into and basically made possible the covid narrative as well and the way that people are being canceled. just like they were for incorrect political speech now they're being canceled for incorrect science. for not following the science. there's a slues of medical doctors and scientists. who are totally object with the mainstream narrative of what's going on? and they i think what i'm seeing going on here is a kind of woke covid totalitarianism developing. and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna sugar coat this i think it's very scary. that's where i'll leave it. my honest take is i think a lot of this will be regional and local. i mean one of the issues with the american elite so when we talk about wokeness, we're talking about a particular thing which in academic writing i would call the discursive elite you're talking about the fact that 93 to 95% of academics and mass media journalists are on the far left. that's a reality, but i think that the problem with this elite is that most of the people in the country don't really respect it at all. i mean thomas soul who all of you should read as much of as possible while we're in a bookstore, but thomas sold decades ago called this the vision of the anointed right? he said there's a specific group of coastal mostly white. all that doesn't really matter now. they're diversifying urban lower upper class. ivy league may be big ten or sec over educated people that run these specific sectors of the country like academia, but one of souls points was that the anointed have a limited reach of power because many of the states are full of people that view them as idiots. that come from the other large collegiate conferences or where the leaders come from the military the union sector a number of other things so i think when you talk about covid one of the things we've noticed is that powerful governors like desantis and abbott just aren't doing what they're being told to so i i think that wokeness will continue up to a breaking point in academia personally as someone who is a betting man. i'm a pretty heavy investor. i see that breaking point about 25 years when this -- gets into the hard sciences and we start really to china the moment we fall behind say a third place power like the eu i think there's gonna be the same sort of revisionism. we saw when we started losing the space race to russia. anyway, that's neither here nor there, but even in the meantime, i think in kentucky, for example, there's gonna be a significant backlash if you look at these school board moms, so on against a lot of this stuff, so i think on the east coast and where i'm from in chicago, it'll probably almost almost unbearable for about two decades. other places i think it'll depend radically on who the people are there, and this is kind of a task service for you guys. what the people there do? yeah, i just yeah, i'm just chime in on that. i agree. there's this regionalism and that makes things different and that that gives a lot of space. for people, you know, and i must admit that i i do have a sort of i'm involved in the east coast. i've been a majorly an urbanite, you know lived in new york for 11 years and then now i live in pittsburgh. so i'm i'm talking about i do i do agree that my experience is inflected by those regional variations. but the vaccine rollout is not dependent upon regions and the facts about it are not dependent upon regions and the people that are working for these companies are across all these regions the people that are going to get fired or already have been fired because they work for a company that requires them to have the vaccine if they have more than 100 employees. that is not regional. there are many things that are across the whole country and across the whole world. not to disagree with the china is light years ahead of us in fourth industrial revolution technologies. that is ai machine learning. robotics and effectively automation and they're light years ahead of us. these technologies combined with particular ideology, which is what i argue in google archipelago. these technologies combined with an authoritarian ideology is a is a very frightening prospect because this can be enforced by virtue of technological imposition. yeah, i think just a quick response there. yeah, i don't i think that we're the truth may well be somewhere in the middle. i agree with a lot of that. i do think that in terms of some of the states like florida under desantis have actually as i understand addressed some of this like the simple rule i suppose would be something like in this state. you can block an ocean inspector at the door or you cannot reveal, you know, x component of your health care policy. so no one would know then or no one be able to access employees and see how many people define whatever absurd amount. it is a hundred forty thousand dollars per violation. that's what that is. yeah. well, i mean they yeah they increased it under the new mandate. but so i mean, i think what you're gonna see is some of the red states taking that whole idea to court the mandate is not implement. it's not implementable for 120 days as i understand which is an odd thing considering the whole argument is that we're on the edge of the precipice and we're all going to die. but first we're going to wait a bit over a hundred days to let you know the legal expert let legal take a look at this and so on but i do think that most of this will vary to an extraordinary degree regionally. policy said at the state level the china thing is problematic. i mean, we're not alone in the world. so i mean a couple weeks ago two things happened at once china launched the first intercontinental low-flight non-ballistic missile. it's a pure smart missile that could fly around the world and we announced that the us army and the rest of the federal government now has a formal gender policy. so, i mean we announced that they're going to be certain things we do to make female soldiers. feel more welcome and we're looking for more diversity. we're gonna have some more accommodations for pregnant soldiers if i recall it. i think that's an exaggeration. so so that's not a good thing. the reality though is i think after we lose a couple big skirmishes with the chinese even nationally america's a tough and competitive country. people are gonna start saying enough with this nonsense. we don't want an exactly divert an exactly proportional mix of diverse people flying planes necessarily. we want the best pilots flying planes because you might have to go to war with the chinese government. so i think the pressure of reality exerts a strong downward press on fantasy. that's why people stop becoming small children mentally or stop being small children. mentally. i i suppose that happens to societies as well. we've had it too good for too long, but that's about to change. a great points. yeah, i think i talk about this in terms of death died but death by diversity, you know, hopefully we don't get to the point where bridges are falling down because some engineering professors said that rigor was a bad thing and in engineering which they did they said rigor was fallowcentric and was you know, basically recalled the -- of the of the male of the species so they had to get rid of rigor from education engineering education and if they get rid of rigor from engineering education, you know, you'll have death by diversity or bridges will fall down your buildings of crash but like like wilford said the reality pushes back against these nonsense ideas eventually. well, i'd some very quick final comments there. um, first of all, i actually once had a feminist girlfriend tell me that buildings were phallic symbols and what this seemed to mean was that they all go up. none of them are i guess internal few of them are in caves. so i mean she would look at skylines and be quite critical of them but moving and this is i mean they're mere feminist articles about this the follow centrism of building. how long did you date her? um we went on three dates. you know, um at any rate, so into imminent currently in a relationship with someone else my fiancee so, you know maybe that was a fantasy because these buildings are always erect always hot. okay, let's moving on moving on. yeah, i mean this again you can't they can't be built around, you know a cotton core or something like that. so a lot of feminism is nonsense, too, but that wasn't the topic of today's speech. but anyway, i do think that we are seeing some of this already. i mean there was a bridge you can look this up. i think everything michael and i have said today is factual. although we have i'm biased to the center right pretty openly but they're actually was a specific bridge that was built by an all-female very sexually diverse group of engineers. that was really hailed in the building trades, press as like the future of the field and it did fall down about a year ago. so i i there are many great female engineers, but if the primary first goal is this type of diversity how many bisexual greek women are on the team or something like that? i think you will see the result. but again we have to compete in consensus reality and i think a lot of people are gonna do lip to this kind of nonsense while going on competing in consensus reality. i mean, you know microsoft gave their minute long land acknowledgment yesterday, if any of you saw this we can see that our campus was the former home of the squomish tribe or whatnot and then they went on being one of the leading computer powers in the world. they're not going to give the campus land back. so all right. well, thank you both for being here. this has been a great conversation and thank you all for coming if you have any more questions for them. they will be out signing books. and yeah, they'll be here afterwards as well. all right. thank you. we want we have this compelling debate on should america rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe and we want to give them the full hour we did this debate at the university of miami in florida and at cu boulder last week and that in that case those two debates. it was alex epstein debating general wesley clarke and you can find both of those debates on steamboat institutes youtube channel today. we have alex epson, but