https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4plCAbAmU9M
One of the things that constantly bothered me, because I was also talking to classic liberals and people more on the right at that time, was that whenever I was talking to even relatively moderate people on the left, I had to watch what I was saying all the time. Yeah. And like, look, it’s good to pay attention to what you say and to be careful, but I get damn sick, damn quick, of walking on eggshells when I’ve got something to say, especially among hypothetical peers that are hypothetically working to solve a problem. It’s like, I just want to say what I think. And if you find that, if that’s going to disrupt our personal relationship, it’s like, maybe I don’t want to be around you because it’s just too damn annoying. And one of the things I have found, it’s been a very big surprise to me that I’ve ended up as a conservative spokesperson. I am not a conservative person. Like, I’m very high in trade openness. Although I’ve learned to be a traditionalist. That was hard-won knowledge. I partly learned that because I learned that most social science interventions go dreadfully wrong. I really learned about the iron law of unintended consequences. But one of the things that has happened is that I found it way easier to talk to even fundamentalist, conservative Christian traditionalists than radicals on the left. There’s no comparison. And that’s a very strange thing. It’s not what I expected at all. And I think that that is really where we’ve seen the flip. I mean, for all of the excesses and problems, a critic of kind of 1960s, but they were authentic, they were committed, they had open expression, they were trying to push boundaries. And you kind of flip this on of its head. Once the left took institutional control. I mean, it is the most restrictive, the most limited, the most restrained, the most punishing orthodoxy. And then you get this point, to the point where you have now hundreds of thousands of kind of DEI agents, left-wing bureaucrats, enforcers of the orthodoxy. And they just repeat the same 10 points. I’ve done reporting for now a few years on critical race theory, gender ideology. They inherit kind of 10 ideas, they dumb them down, they pass them through a bureaucratic euphemistic filter. And I mean, they’re like the decentralized propaganda agents from Soviet times. I mean, it’s like, this is the party line. We must say this. You cannot say anything that would contradict the great party line. And it’s like, once I ejected from that world, once I opened up this new terrain, and actually, frankly, once I moved out of a big urban center in Seattle and moved out to a smaller town, it’s like, this is where kind of actual free thinking, actual, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of intellectual possibility. And I think one of the reasons that my work has been successful is because I’ve been kind of liberated from that stifling orthodoxy, that cultural milieu, that institutional pattern. And then, I see all of these folks attacking me. You can’t say this, you can’t do this. You have to observe this. The Atlantic wrote a piece recently that said a qualified endorsement of Christopher Ruffo. But it was 90% qualifications and 10% endorsement because these folks on the center left, they know they agree with me, but they can’t behave as I behave. And really, that’s because I’m much more free than they are. And I love that feeling, I love that spirit, I love fighting these fights with a sense of doing things that others cannot even contemplate doing because they risk their academic sinecures or whatever. President Trump recently issued a warning from his Mar-a-Lago home. Quote, our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons why the central banks are dumping the US dollar. Inflation, deficit spending, and our insurmountable national debt. The fact is, there is one asset that has withstood famine, wars, and political and economic upheaval dating back to biblical times, gold. And you can own it in a tax sheltered retirement account with the help of Birch Gold. That’s right, Birch Gold will help you convert an existing IRA or 401k, maybe from a previous employer, into an IRA in gold. When currencies fail, gold is a safe haven. How much more time does the dollar have? Protect your savings with gold. Birch Gold has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers. Text Jordan to 98-98-98 and get your free info kit on gold. Again, text Jordan to 98-98-98. Yeah, well, that’s the joy of having a free tongue, man. Well, you know, it’s also very perverse temperamentally because I looked a lot at what predicted political viewpoints from the temperamental and cognitive front. Because if you’re looking at individual differences in people’s behavior at the psychological level, you look at general cognitive ability and you look at personality. Those are very good, powerful, reliable, valid predictors of individual difference in such things as opinion. And the biggest predictor of liberal left belief is trait openness, which is the creativity dimension. And what you would, which is why, for example, leftist ideas are rife in places like Hollywood. But what’s so bloody perverse about this is that people who are high in openness, first of all, all they really have to offer is the fact that they can think 10 different things at the same time. That freedom of movement, that’s especially true with regards to artists. That’s all they have. And then what you see on the left is this stifling orthodoxy that makes art dull and predictable, it reduces everything to these 10 axioms and it seems to fly completely in the face of what open people, creative people, would truly want. And so I’m still puzzling through that. I can’t understand yet. See, it’s partly that the open people don’t want barriers to information flow. And so when they see conservatives putting up barriers of any type, even barriers of category, that destabilizes them because the open types capitalize on free information flow. But perversely, that rejection of the boundaries that conservatives put up has led to a situation where, well, you didn’t want any boundaries and now all you’ve got are boundaries around what you can say and think and do. And I can’t see how that can sustain itself for any length of time on the artistic front because, well, it’ll do the whole enterprise in, but it’s gotta just stifle the hell out of creative producers. Yeah, and I felt that in my time working in the documentary film world. I would attend the conferences, I would go to the festivals, I would participate in the industry. And looking around and it’s like, these people, no one says anything new. The festival programmers are pure ideology. You look at the catalog of films for any kind of A-list film festival in the last 10 years and it looks like a social justice syllabus. It’s the kind of transgender basket weavers of Madagascar. These things that are so niche, so absurd, and then they’re only propped up because, again, these are artificial economies. You look at these Sundance award-winning films, they have all the prestige, they win the institutional game, but then you put them on the marketplace, you look at like an Amazon film rentals, they have like three reviews at two stars, nobody’s watching this stuff, nobody cares, it has no actual organic audience. And then one of the big distinctions that I see is it’s this kind of artificial culture versus a true organic culture. And we’ve created an artificial culture that is high in openness maybe, but really high in intellectualism and verbal ability. And Machiavelli had the distinction, he had two archetypes. There’s the lion and the fox. The fox is highly intelligent, adaptable, open, verbally very proficient. The lion is strong, tough, setting standards, kind of the strong, quiet type. And I think that it’s kind of a proxy maybe for left and right. But the conservative movement needs people that have the more kind of fox attributes as well. Because look, we’re in a postmodern world, we’re in an information economy. You have to be able to do the ideological fights with a sense of skill, with a sense of sophistication, with a sense of narrative. And so that’s what I think we need. We need folks like that that also recognize the value of the kind of the lion mindset, which is saying, we wanna have standards, we wanna have institutions, we wanna transmit values from one generation to the next. We want to appeal to human universals. We want to respect our past and our culture. But we also have to kind of do battle in the world as it exists today.