When Liberals Become "Left-ugees"

Hey everybody. A very comprehensive episode with Michael Schellenberger. We talk about San Francisco, nuclear energy, the Twitter files, Five Eyes, John Brennan, and the religion of the woke.

It's an excellent, thoughtful conversation that I think you'll enjoy. Email us as always. Freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Become a member today. Members.CharlieKirk.com. Members.CharlieKirk.com. Get involved with Turning Point USA at TPUSA.com.

Turning Point USA is on the front lines, so get involved at TPUSA.com. Buckle up everybody here. We go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

That's why we are here. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to turn it over to Michael Schellenberger for this hour, someone who I have a great deal of respect for. It is Michael Schellenberger, and he joins us for this hour. Michael, thank you for taking the time. Welcome to the program. Nice to meet you, Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. There's a lot I want to talk to you about, and I want to start just by kind of your story, your background, your journey. You call yourself LeftUG. Did I get that right? You also published San Francisco. Tell us all about it.

Sure. Well, I'm a child of the radical left, honestly, the very progressive left. I mostly was involved as a young man with various progressive Latin American movements, very, very, very progressive. I worked on environmental causes in the first part of my career, worked for a lot of different progressive causes. But then we started working on climate change in the late 90s and early 2000s, and it quickly became clear that renewables had a bunch of problems. The biggest one was environmental problems in that if you use solar or wind, you have to use somewhere between three and 600 times more land than you do for natural gas or nuclear. And there was all this resistance from environmental, from conservationists to renewables projects. And I looked into them more, and over a period of time, people asked why I didn't take a closer look at nuclear. So I became very interested in nuclear power and particularly why were progressives against it? Why were people who cared about the environment against it when it has, you know, really its main benefits are mostly environmental? So that really started me on a journey, culminated in a 2020 book called Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

And then after that, I wanted to do a book on homelessness, and then that became San Francisco. Well, that is awesome. I actually have a kind of a wonky, nerdy question on nuclear. So I've been consuming a lot of information and RFK is against nuclear power. And I'm not going to ask you to. But the one objection I don't know how to respond to is he says that nuclear can't get insurance protection. The insurance companies won't. Have you ran into this objection before? And I know that's kind of a wonky way to start the interview.

I'm just super curious how someone who studied this would respond. Yeah, it's not true. I mean, they do pay insurance. The utilities that own nuclear plants pay insurance on them. There are liability limits in the same way that doctors and other people that do professions where you need to put limits on how much a jury can award somebody.

So you're seeing this right now. I mean, just to give one example, the award given against Trump in New York, this huge bill with a $350 million or some crazy amount. That's the kind of abuse that people wanted to protect against in the case of nuclear because they were worried that people would come up with these really inflated sums. So you have limits on liability. And then in those limits, then the operators of the nuclear plants have to buy insurance. But it's just a myth to say that they are insured. They're insured by private companies. And so it's really what they're saying is that they couldn't insure them without these liability limits.

And you can say the same thing of a lot of things, including airlines, doctors, hospitals, just things that would not be able to happen if you didn't have some sort of risk sharing. I'm going to read the book, by the way. I love it because I think climate alarmism is insane. Why do progressive environmentalists oppose nuclear power?

Well, that was for me is such an interesting question. I think for most environmentalists, it's just that we were conditioned to think that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear weapons. And the left is tended to be against nuclear weapons.

And that's a whole other story. But people that saw Oppenheimer, the movie, have some sense of it. So a lot of it's based on fear. But it also stems from a kind of really radical environmental idea of how to restructure society in the name of renewables. I mean, it's important to remember that there's a deeper desire among anti-nuclear folks that traditionally wanted to move to renewables before there was climate change that anybody was worried about, before anybody was really concerned about it. Environmentalists advocated renewables because they required small scale living. They required massively reducing energy consumption. I mean, basically, they required going back to a pre-industrial period. So renewables were what we had in a pre-industrial period before industrial capitalism. And there's a lot of reasons to think that renewables could never, in my view, could not power a modern industrial society like ours.

And they end up being parasitical. So if you're a very radical, de-growth, anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, so-called environmentalist, then they've traditionally been against things that would allow for abundant energy. And you can see the consequence really requires undoing industrial civilization to do a lot of renewables. What's happening in Germany right now is that Germany just lost its big chemical manufacturing facility operated by BASF, one of the big chemical companies.

It lost it to China. So it's now moved to China and Germany's in the process of de-industrializing. That's really, in some ways, an outcome of what the de-growth, anti-energy, anti-nuclear German Greens have always wanted. Do you think that is at the root of a lot of it? Is it more about de-industrialization than it is about genuine concern for the environment?

Definitely. This is a theme of my work and my interest is how you go from a kind of New Deal liberalism, which is pro-growth, it's pro-industry, it's pro-heavy industry, it's actually pro-nuclear in the early 60s. How do you go from that to basically its opposite, which is anti-growth, de-civilization?

It's really the move from the greatest generation and the silent generation to the baby boomers. And it becomes very anti-civilization. And so you see with all of these movements that we've been tracking, they share a view that Western civilization is wrong and that it should be undone, basically.

And so one way you do that is through energy. You deprive civilization of abundant, cheap energy since that's one of the core prerequisites to having modern civilization. But you also see it in these other anti-civilization movements against law and order, against police, wanting to shut down psychiatric hospitals, wanting to allow people to camp anywhere on the streets that they like. That's the second book on homelessness.

Homelessness is not some sort of natural response to high rents that liberals had said. It's really a consequence of anti-civilization policies, civilization at the heart of which is cities. So this has been very interesting to me is the understanding of how the left turned against civilization when for so many years and decades there were Democrats and liberals who were very pro-civilization.

So, Michael, help me understand when did how did this change, in your opinion, what thinkers, what movements made the left go from a pro-industry, pro-Western civilization to one that wants mass industrialization and civilization? Yeah, well, that's so that's I mean, that's just that question for me is. The most or one of the most important questions that I want to that I'm trying to answer in my work.

And there's a long story. But let's just talk about the cultural roots of it. There's certainly financial motivations which are important. There's a kind of class element to this, you know, where I think there's a sort of way in which these institutions that progressives and liberals control are undermining civilization in ways that actually end up being good for them at a class level. But fundamentally, I think it comes from nihilism and a response to nihilism, which is itself mostly a consequence of secularization, which is this long standing process of declining belief in traditional religions and traditional gods and traditional after sense of afterlife for the soul. Nihilism is sort of this idea that, you know, we're just like other animals that when we die, we become, you know, worm food and that's it. There's no soul that lives on afterlife. And that turns out to be extremely difficult philosophy for most people, not everybody.

Some people can really embrace, but a lot of people have a hard time with it. And so they end up subconsciously constructing new religions. And the first two big new religions that people created were fascism and communism.

You know, they both were defeated, obviously in different periods, one in 1945 and the other one took another 40 some years. And then what you get with what we call wokeism or this very identity based leftism is a kind of new religion. And so you see it particularly on race, climate change, and gender, really the creation of new religious categories that are very similar to older Judeo-Christian categories that provide meaning and a moral framework for people that actually then drive how people think about these other issues. So climate change goes from being, you know, a manageable pollution based problem. We just need some better technology, just need to move from coal to nuclear and natural gas. Ends up being no, no, it's this apocalyptic threat.

It requires this radical change to how we live our lives. Or you see something like police violence. You know, you have a problem that a couple dozen people are killed every year by, you know, unarmed people by police violence.

It's been going down. It's best dealt with through better training for police. No, it's got to be this radical change of the criminal justice system where you fire the police, you defund the police. And then with gender, this idea that some people are born with what are basically souls that are a different gender. The gender becomes a kind of replacement soul for secular people. And this idea that I'm going to behave like God himself and change my body in order to express this inner soul. This is a concept, by the way, that Abigail Shrier introduced me. So there's sort of a and there's other issues like homelessness has its own dynamic, but at least with race, climate change and gender. You basically get a kind of new secular woke religion that has an alternative apocalypse with the race.

You have a kind of different racial hierarchy and morality. Are you ready to lose weight, but not sure where to start? I understand.

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Dr. Ashley Lucas, great American, check it out, myphdweightloss.com. So if you look at woke, and I'm certainly not the only person to point this out, but if you look at what we call woke-ism on particularly climate change, race and gender, it really constitutes a kind of replacement religion to Judeo-Christianity. So you have an alternative idea of the apocalypse and climate change with race.

You have an alternative moral hierarchy whereby the historically most oppressed people are now more moral, or at least their ancestors or rather their descendants are more moral than people who were ostensibly less victimized in the past. And then with gender, you kind of get this new godlike role for individuals and their doctors to basically change the body to conform to a sort of new soul, which is this idea that people have a gender that's different from their biological sex. And in each of them, they're very interesting because each of these cases, you really end up with consequences that are doing the opposite of what the people who are espousing those ideas claim they want.

So we see with Black Lives Matter, you end up with about 3,000 more black folks that lost their lives between 2020 and 2023, just with an increase of black homicides largely stemming from both the emboldement of criminals and also the withdrawal of police. With climate change, you get this opposition to natural gas and nuclear, which results in more carbon emissions and pollution. And then with gender, you actually get what trans and LGBT activists had warned against, which is conversion therapy, an effort to convert gay and lesbian young people, not all, but certainly some.

There's also a lot of folks on the autism spectrum that get trans. But you see an effort to change the biological sex of many gay and lesbian youth. So I'm very interested in this phenomenon of the ways in which progressives, as they take over institutions, actually do the opposite of what they claim they want to do. And they end up reinforcing, they end up increasing pollution, worsening racism and harming gays and lesbians. And so you can see over the homelessness, a similar thing you see in this effort to help the homeless.

You end up enabling addiction, which is the root cause in many situations of the homelessness. And so that's always fascinated me as just as a you know, it's obviously a political, it's social problem because they're creating problems. But it's also intellectually very interesting and a problem, I think, problems we have to get to the bottom of if we're to fix them. Yeah. And so just to kind of to close this part of the conversation out, you say it's inherently nihilistic.

I totally agree. And so that means the goal is destruction, not building, not flourishing or prosperity. Is that truly the predominant view of the of the now of the now powerful progressive movement? Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that I mean, if you just look at the consequences, you know, we've lost all these good police. We see crime going up. We see the downtown San Francisco is just been devastated.

People don't like being downtown San Francisco. It's not what it was. You see the destruction of people's bodies in the name of so-called gender medicine. And you see the ravaging of natural landscapes by so-called renewables and also a reversion of coal and wood.

And I think that, you know, I mean, I think there's a lot of people who are interested in in in response to more expensive natural gas due to so-called climate protests. They say in every instance that they're trying to create some positive utopia. But it's even even on that point, it's pretty thin, you know, and not just because the consequences are horrible. So that really the the intense focus, I mean, remember the Martin Luther King had and I have a dream speech and it was about racial neutrality, basically. What you get with Ibram Kendi is anti-racism. It's this sort of obsession, this exaggeration and really racism itself.

Kind of, you know, with the call, reverse racism, but certainly racism is racism. So, yeah, I think that it's fair to say it's nihilism. But then the response to it becomes this ideology. And then the ideology is just making up stories to justify what are at bottom nihilistic practices, the destruction of bodies, the destruction of natural landscapes, the destruction of cities. Those are, I think, the three big consequences of woke ideology.

Check out San Francisco and also the one I'm going to read first, Apocalypse Never. Michael, I'll walk our audience through the bombshell story you had recently about Five Eyes, the CIA and all all the different elements there, please. Well, sure. There's actually multiple stories here and there's some complexity.

But basically. What we reported is that the former CIA director under Barack Obama basically weaponized the Five Eyes. Those are the English speaking, intelligence sharing countries that we work with.

UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. We work with those other countries. Basically, he mobilized those other countries to so-called bump or reverse target Trump associates, deliberately had a list of 26 Trump associates that they asked foreign intelligence agencies to basically entrap in suggesting that they were involved in something nefarious or they had some information from the Russians. And the story had already, we knew that the FBI created a investigation of President Trump and it should not have done that. That was the results of the Durham investigation that came out last year, the special Justice Department special counsel. What we really didn't have until our reporting on this was just that there was this deliberate effort that was started by Brennan to go and bump these folks. There's some complexity here because we also think there was another effort that may have been unrelated or was trying to influence the Brennan process, which was the Clinton campaign trying to allege some Russian interference and connections to Trump. But I think that's the most explosive thing is that it looks, according to our sources, and I think there's a good strong amount of evidence for it now, is that the effort to falsely link then candidate Trump to the Russians came right out of the CIA, which is illegal and a grotesque abuse of power.

I can't really think of anything in U.S. history. After I've said this, we'll say, oh, that can come up with some other examples, but proven cases of U.S. history where the intelligence community was weaponized against a presidential candidate is quite shocking. Then there was three other stories that we did related to it, which was that, in fact, the intelligence showed that the Russians favored Hillary over Trump, and that Brennan, again, the former CIA director, changed the intelligence assessment to say the opposite, to say that the Russians favored Trump. And then finally, that there is this report, there's a 50-page report that the House Intelligence Committee, which is called HIPSI, but the House Intelligence Committee, nonetheless, has a 50-page report where they evaluated the raw intelligence data that was used to create that 2017 intelligence community assessment that falsely claims that the Russians favored Trump over Hillary. That report still exists.

It has not been released. It seems to be related with a larger binder of materials, which likely includes the original intelligence or some of the original intelligence. And so the government is sitting on, I mean, that's sort of the final punchline, is that the government has this report, and it has this binder of materials, and the Trump folks say that they declassified them and wanted them out, but at the very last minute, we were told that Trump's CIA director really slow-walked it and prevented both the report and the binders from getting out. There's also been some speculation that the FBI was trying to get that binder, and that's part of the reason they raided Mar-a-Lago. There were some differences of opinion about that.

But nonetheless, a huge story about the weaponization of our intelligence community against a presidential candidate, and then this ongoing issue is that there's some very important information out there that would help us to get to the bottom of the Russia collusion hoax that we don't have and we really should have access to. Do we know for certain that Donald Trump had a binder of these documents declassified at Mar-a-Lago? Do we know for certain? We don't know that.

There are some people that say that, there's other people that say that's not true, and it doesn't depend on their sympathy to Trump who's saying that, so I don't know. It's a big mystery. It's one that I'm dying to get answered.

Yeah, I mean, it would theoretically connect some dots as to why you raid somebody's home, so that would be interesting and how they concocted this whole document nonsense. The world is in flames, and biodynamics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day. Why? Because I start my day with a hot America first cup of blackout coffee. It's 100% America and 0% grift. Blackout coffee is 100% committed to conservative values, from sourcing the beans to the roasting process, customer support, and shipping.

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Promo code Charlie. So, Michael, there's some other stories I want to get to, but any other closing thoughts on the Five Eyes saga? And I guess my other question I have is how did they block it so successfully? Do we have an understanding of that?

Can you add some context there? Well, I mean, the person that people really believe played the pivotal role in blocking this was Gina Haspel, and it's notable that she was Trump's CIA director. He appointed her, but she was head of the London field office when the Trump collusion hoax was allegedly begun by Obama's director of the CIA. And so there's a lot of speculation that she knew about that operation, participated in it, gave the green light to it since there was British operatives that apparently targeted or reverse targeted those Trump associates.

I think she has a lot of questions that she should be required to answer about this because we're looking at both an illegal effort to spy on and entrap the people associated with the Trump campaign in what clearly appears to be an effort to spread disinformation and discredit him. And then you also have an ongoing cover up of what was actually going on. And so I don't think that I think we need to get to the bottom of it. I mean, you may know more because you talked to President Trump. Maybe you know what's going on with the Mar-a-Lago raid.

They're playing it very close to the chest. So we're trying to figure it all out. I want to I want to now talk. We mentioned briefly that San Francisco situation, but that reminds me of Twitter and your reporting on the Twitter files. Can you just kind of tell our audience about your involvement, what you helped report on in regards to that major story?

Sure. So people probably know that Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it over in November of 2022. And then in December 2023, he invited in two journalists.

Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss. And Barry Weiss is a friend of mine. And she invited me to then join her.

And so I went in under her with her support. And the three of us did a story about how Twitter made the decision to deplatform President Trump. And the most important thing to know about that is that Twitter staff themselves did not think that Trump had violated the company's terms of service. And so they were there sort of making up some reason to get him off the platform for their own political reasons. And so many people were demanding that it occur.

And of course, January 6 is a whole other story. But that was the justification that was given for deplatforming the president, but they didn't have any justification. That was what the Twitter files proved. And then I did the Twitter files on the Hunter Biden laptop, where we discovered a number of very incredible things. First, Twitter staff did not think that the Hunter Biden laptop was in violation of terms of service. The New York Post article should not have been censored according to Twitter's own rules.

That was important. But we also discovered that there was clearly an operation being run, either directly by the FBI or by former FBI people, although I think it's almost certainly involved the FBI, where the FBI was going to Facebook and Twitter and all the social media companies, warning of some sort of hack and leak operation of the Russians of something relating to Hunter Biden. And the Aspen Institute, which is a heavily U.S. government funded think tank, held these workshops to basically train and brainwash journalists on how not to cover the Hunter Biden. Like a dry run. Can I interrupt you, Michael?

I've heard this tabletop exercises. What actually occurred here? Do you have the details? I'm super curious of the meat of what occurred at these Aspen Institute trial runs. Yeah.

And I'll just say up front, I'm not totally sure. The whole thing gave me the creeps as soon as I saw it. I mean, basically it's occurring, I think it's August it occurs, which is two months before the release of the Hunter Biden laptop. FBI, meanwhile, that summer is also warning of something related to Hunter Biden's laptop. Keep in mind, FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop and they knew it was his laptop since the previous December. So these, they held a Zoom workshop to do a tabletop exercise to basically train all of the major journalists who covered this at all New York Times, Washington Post, the networks, NPR, and the social media platforms.

And I mean, I don't know how to describe it. I mean, it was like a brainwashing exercise where they were like, what would happen if this thing happens? Well, we should not cover it basically, or rather we should cover it and cast doubt on it and basically spread disinformation. I mean, that was what they were planning to do, spread disinformation that somehow it was related to the Russians. I still have really serious questions about who these journalists are and why they're so terrible, either terrible at their jobs or have some other motivation.

Or just unspeakably morally corrupt. It looks bad because they're all very uniform. And I mean, I think this is part of the, what's so chilling about it is that there's a, they're all sort of feels like they're all kind of following orders and maybe they're not actually following anybody's orders. They're just trying to get along. But this is a group of journalists that had just been fully in the Russia collusion hoax. They're very partisan Democrats.

They're very counter populist. You know, they have many ties to the intelligence community, some of which I don't think are being fully disclosed. So I found the whole thing very creepy and disturbing. And then, and then you may know also that Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and said, yes, you know, we were being by by the FBI.

They did a house visit. Yeah, so it looks like a pre-bunking operation is what they call it, to spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop so that when it finally showed up on the scene, the media and the social media would in mass discredit it and the censorship by Twitter of the New York Post article, which was 100 percent accurate. That censorship contributed to the disinformation so that this is a very important example where the censorship, it couldn't stop the information from getting out there, but it sort of contaminated the story. And so then, of course, then the famously there was 51 former CIA and other intelligence community people who then came out and said, oh, this has all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation. So there was it just appears as though there was a deliberate effort to spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop. And that's that that for me, in some ways, then opened up this broader interest of mine in studying abuses of power because it's just not something I've ever studied before. Yeah.

And just it's just chilling and wondering, Michael, do you have any assurances that that's not all? I mean, I guess with Twitter right now, because of Elon, no, but the general social media ecosystem, what's to prevent these intel agencies from doing this again? Were lessons actually learned and internalized? Well, they you know, these the there's I will say, I think it's I think it's been very important for Congressman Jim Jordan to have this weaponization committee.

I've testified in front of it a couple of times with my call with my friend Matt Taibbi. I think it was very important to put pressure on the censorship industrial complex and to expose it and drag it into the light and to name names. So I do think it had an impact. You start to see some of the leaders of the censorship industrial complex sort of say, oh, maybe we went too far. We're seeing a little bit of that. But it's a little bit like that.

That that GIF of Homer Simpson slipping back into the bushes, you know, where you get the sense that these guys could easily pop back out. You know, you just saw The New York Times over the weekend acknowledged that the CIA has these bases in Ukraine and that they were somehow, they don't really specify how, were involved in the Russia collusion hoax, so-called intelligence. So, you know, these guys, these are very powerful individuals. They're very smart. They're very well educated. They're very arrogant. They're very entitled. They think that they should decide what we're able to say and read and write online.

They really believe that. They think that if they, they think they have to control the information environment in order to prevent, you know, populists like Donald Trump from destroying NATO and undermining the Western alliance. And they're the guardians of it and they should decide what messages and information is destabilizing.

I mean, it's anathema to what the founding fathers of our country wanted when they created the First Amendment. But these are the people that are really at the heads of these agencies and to some extent they reflect the culture of those agencies. We're always trying to figure out how much of this is just cultural, like even with this current controversy around Google's AI, how much of it's coming from the staff, the very woke staff internally, and how much of it's being demanded by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

And the short answer is usually a mix of both. In fact, some of this over, this inappropriate amounts of intelligence community involvement in social media or in the bumping, it's all a kind of arrogance. It's all coming from a kind of entitlement.

The sense in which they, because of their position, are somehow entitled to interfere in the election and interfere in the media. And I think it's gross and we have to actually call it out, not just as illegal, which it is, and as secretive, which it is, making it a conspiracy by definition, but there's something pathological in it. Like there's something wrong with you if you want to shut other people up rather than to let them speak. And you don't have to listen to them. I think there's something pathological in wanting to intervene in the ways that these guys have been trying to intervene in elections and intervene in the media.

I think it's important to point that out, that there's a kind of narcissism, antisocial, one can put sociopathy in it, that leads individual people to engage in those inappropriate behaviors. Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here. What an unbelievable start to 2024. We had last month saving babies with preborn by providing ultrasounds. And we're doing again this year what we did last year. We're going to stand for life because remaining silent in the face of the most radically pro-death administration is not an option.

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Go to charliekirk.com, click on the preborn banner. Michael, let's continue on another story here. We mentioned it, tell about your book San Francisco, please. Sure, so this is a book I did in 2020, 2021. Came out in 2021 and it's basically about homelessness. I also address crime and other problems of social disorder.

And the book basically argues that, once again, this sort of woke progressive ideology is anti-civilization. It enables untreated mental illness and addiction. That's really what is at the heart of so-called homelessness. We certainly need more housing, housing is too expensive.

I'm a big advocate of housing. But that's not why people living on the streets are there because they've, you know, their addiction has led them to basically lie, steal and cheat from family and friends and end up on the street where they're maintaining their addictions. And so the question is why do progressives not do anything about it and why do they enable it? And, you know, why don't, I mean, it's not good for people with addiction. People with addiction need an intervention. If they can't get it from family and friends, then they need it from law enforcement to mandate some kind of rehabilitation.

And we used to have that. And the short answer is, yeah, it's this idea that you can divide the world into victims and oppressors and to victims everything should be given and nothing required. People always ask me why is San Francisco so tyrannical about things like COVID masks and vaccines, but then so relaxed about letting people smoke fentanyl on the sidewalk. And it's completely understandable when you understand that one of those things is aimed at everybody, including the so-called oppressors and the other is for victims. So the idea is that if you're a victim of structural oppression and trauma and racism and whatever, that everything should be given to you, including hard drugs and the means to use them and cash, even though it's awful. If someone that's addicted to fentanyl should not be given cash and the means to use fentanyl, they're going to die.

That's what's happening. Seventy-five thousand deaths from fentanyl. But the ideology is so powerful. I mean, if you think about how powerful the ideology of communism or Nazism were, this ideology of wokeism is basically saying it's okay to let this mentally ill woman have her legs rot on the street. This is a true story. Or it's better to let this man lie on the street with a broken hip. It's a true story.

I discovered the man. They are saying it's better for that than for us to have the police or somebody intervene and require that they come off the street, even though they're breaking the law. So it just gives you a sense of how radical it really is, the so-called homelessness agenda, all the other parts of the homelessness problem, the lack of funding for psychiatric hospitals, the lack of shelters, basic clean shelter, all stem from this very inappropriate victimhood ideology.

And so, yeah, I mean, that's at the heart of it. It's the same victimhood ideology that leads you to defund the police, basically. It's de-civilization.

It's against law and order. When you look across all these issues, you have cheap energy, law and order, free speech, meritocracy. These are things that liberal democratic civilization require. You know, and if you, you know, or if you want liberal, you also need equal justice under the law.

You can't have different applications of the law depending on your race, except for now that's being advocated. So you really see that what runs through it all is a kind of opposition to civilization. And that's what should be so troubling to us. You know, if you're getting rid of the pillars of civilization, then it's just a matter of time before you lose civilization itself. Do you see any evidence that the leaders of San Francisco are adjusting or caring enough to try to restore it back to its once place as a respectable, beautiful city?

Yeah, for sure. There's definitely a reaction. In fact, the mayor of San Francisco just came out in favor of modifying this previous ballot initiative that effectively decriminalized three grams of hard drugs and shoplifting in the same initiative. Something I'm embarrassed to say I voted for, along with millions of other Californians, passed in 2014, it's called Prop 47. She came out for changing it so that we can crack down on open air fentanyl, drug dealing, mandate, drug treatment to people. And so there is a backlash and a response. It's not clear if it'll be if it'll be enough for that initiative, for example, to get to change this, it may not get on the ballot because for lack of funding, you know, part of the problem is a lot more conservative and moderate people have left California. And so now you're left with even more progressive folks. So it's hard to say what will happen, but certainly I think that there's there's certainly been a backlash to what the to what's happening there.

It is definitely central of where the woke mind virus lives and hosts itself. Michael, you're welcome back anytime. Excellent work. Thank you so much. Thanks, Charlie. Appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk Dotcom. Thank you so much for listening. God bless.