The Influence and Spread of Misinformation through TED Talks

A discussion about how certain worldviews and ideologies can spread rapidly in today's interconnected world, and how this can lead to polarization when opposing viewpoints clash. We reflect on the importance of building connections and understanding across divides.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] the virus is a predominantly white thing. It descends from European cultural groups. It is a form, a new form, you could call it Neo European imperialism.

It's goal is to... Target and erase the cultures of not just because it's gotten bad at erasing the cultural background of the people who live near it, you know, they've begun to develop immunity. So now because as soon as somebody is infected with it, it tells them, Oh we want you to be as happy as possible all the time.

Like, do not challenge yourself. Just do whatever that you want to do in the moment, and that will make you happier in the long term, right? And don't allow anyone else to challenge you for doing those things. , but in doing that, it makes people not have kids.

 And it causes bigger problems when they say, okay, well now we need to get immigrants into the country because they don't have a resistance to us and we'll just take their children . And well, then these immigrant groups, they begin to get wise to this as well. And they're like, Hey.[00:01:00]

I don't want you to take our kids. And then, people like us, traditional conservatives, we go to the immigrant groups and we're like, Oh, we have a lot in common with you. You don't want our children. We don't want your children. We are both terrified of the same thing. Let us work together. And I think that This is the, the real turning that we are having as a society now.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Record. I hit record. Oh, great. Perfect. Good. You're not going to forget this time.

Simone Collins: So you're so pretty and smart. Oh, my pretty.

Malcolm Collins: I know you're also smart. No, my

Simone Collins: brain can't handle things because it's so, so female. I don't know how to deal

Malcolm Collins: with that. So one of the things that we often get is people are like, why don't you do More like explicitly pronatalist stuff or explicitly stuff about the virus or explicitly stuff about stuff that are like main talking [00:02:00] points for us when we're on other podcasts.

And the core reason is, is we've actually tried to, like, we've recorded a number of episodes on the topic of the virus and how it works, but they end up like. You know, like a cart following a path that's been read, ridden through a bunch of times and grooves get dug into the path and then the cart just slips into those grooves and it ends up going the same route.

It's gone every time. And that leads to a very boring conversation. Cause it's the exact same talking points I go through whenever I'm on somebody else's show. And I know that you guys have heard all of them before, and so I don't want to bore you with them. And so in talking about the virus this time, we're going to give it another shot.

We're going to do something different. We are going to explore it through the lens of a specific organization to understand how the virus spreads and how to potentially fight the virus, how to recognize the virus and how it works. So when I talk about the virus, I'm talking about the colt, whatever you want to call it, this thing [00:03:00] that is Becoming an increasing and increasing influence in our society.

People want to call it wokeness, but calling it wokeness is wrong. Extends so far beyond just the wokes. It's

Simone Collins: also specifically not actually. In advocacy or in favor of what you would consider to be woke advocacy or social justice. Like it doesn't serve actual social justice outcomes. Anyone who actually cares about these causes is going to find over time that this is doing more harm than good.

So also it is unfair to call it woke because it is inherently not woke. It is inherently hurting the woke platform. And so you actually had a great way of putting this in, in context with like the current conflict in Gaza. Do you want to, I didn't remember. Oh, yeah. So you were saying that like, you know, in the same way that Hamas will set up its headquarters in hospitals to defend itself and like, you know, be in the most defensible position

Malcolm Collins: when it knows that to attack it, you have to attack a [00:04:00] vulnerable group.

Exactly. So it specifically puts itself where, you know, if it gets bombed or something, then they can go, Oh look, they're bombing you in the hospital.

Simone Collins: You clearly hate children and sick people. Yeah. So the,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, this sort of local virus sets itself up within the most vulnerable communities and it uses the agents within those communities.

To perform the most insane and unspeakable of its injustices so that the other side ends up targeting and bombing those communities, basically, and then it can go, Oh, look, gay people, LGBT community. They hate you. Oh, you know, look, minor, you know, BLM community. They hate you. But it's, it's, it's because they are.

intentionally drawing this ire on those communities. It's a strategy that they're using. And they use those communities for protection. So it is a human,

Simone Collins: it is a human, a vulnerable human shield strategy. And it is, it is inherently therefore sickening and disgusting. Yeah. So they're

Malcolm Collins: like, Oh, you're attacking [00:05:00] wokeism.

You must be racist or homophobic or, you know, there'll be to use these words. Where they've set up their headquarters in these vulnerable communities because they like to use those communities as human shields, but this very tactic

Simone Collins: agendas, this very tactic victimizes and hurts the causes that it proposes to support the people that it supposes to proposes to protect.

Malcolm Collins: While we're talking about what's going on in Israel right now. One of the things that we've been seeing increasingly among our social circles, especially among young people is I think a lot of young people, they go into life, even if they have these intuitions that like the system that they're living in is lying to them, that it's controlled by this sort of virus or cult.

And That for now they will just stay under the cover for now they can probably play it politically neutrally. Like why do they need to take sides? And then things happen that just like a baseball bat hitting a cage over and [00:06:00] over again that they're in there like, Oh, like this is worse than I thought.

I didn't know they were this bad. The response that leftist organizations have had to the atrocities committed by Hamas. For a lot of the young gen Z that we know in, in the U S who at least was like, I say open to truth. I won't even say that they were partially right leaning has really been radicalized.

I think one of the things that keeps happening with the left is they do not realize when they are radicalizing these communities because they have created an environment where these communities are afraid to speak freely or let them know. How angry they are getting or how much of their opinion of the left has changed.

But what I can say is opinions are shifting really severely due to the approved set of responses to what's been going on here. And people should buckle the [00:07:00] f**k up for what ends up coming after this. And the left would be like, oh, you must mean like young Jews. No, I mean like young Iranians in the U.

S. Like they are horrified at, at the response. Horrified. But anyway, to get to this, we for this topic are going to use TED as an organization to sort of do an anatomy of what it looks like for an organization to become infected and what makes an organization vulnerable to infection.

Simone Collins: To this memetic virus, which again is not a woke virus.

It is a strong memetic virus that has been strengthened in the face of globalism, the internet, you know, basically technology that has allowed this memetic strain. To make itself invulnerable and like

Malcolm Collins: a rapid iteration number of like features, like we're not, it's not like a vague thing.

Like people will ask, well, what do you mean by wokeness?

 So this virus that we're talking about sometimes when people are trying to define wokeness, which again, this is not one to one overlap with [00:08:00] wokeness. It's a much bigger thing than just wokeness, but it is what the naive identify as

Simone Collins: wokeness. It is a viral mimetic strain.

Malcolm Collins: It's not defined.

by a set of values, which is very important. It's more defined by a set of behavior patterns, a set of ways it infiltrates organizations, a set of ways it proliferates within organizations and a set of ways that it enforces its cultural norms. It is much closer to saying what is Buddhism or something like that.

It's like, well, that's a really complex set of belief systems. Except unlike Buddhism, it's not a. Traditional intergenerational belief system, but rather a virus that spreads not through improving the quality of life of people who hold it as a belief and encouraging them to have more kids, but through using them as vectors through which it could convert organizations and then use organizations to convert additional infected vectors.

So let's talk about Ted. [00:09:00]

Simone Collins: Yes, Ted. Most people are familiar with TED Talks. Almost certainly you have watched a TED Talk. These are also very expensive to attend conferences. This has been happening for like, what, roughly 20 years. This originally was a pretty, High quality speaking series that would, you know, be attended in the form of a conference and then the talks would be made available for free online through Ted's website and through YouTube.

These are talks that get millions of views. You know, whoever is invited to give a TED talk is able to have. you know, significant reach. It boosts ideas. It is. It has changed the course of research academically. For example, some, some researcher will give a Ted talk. It will change the way that everyone views the subject.

And then later it'll turn out that their research wasn't replicated. This is actually a common issue with Ted talks that we're not going to talk about on this podcast. But this is suffice it to say, Ted talks are extremely influential. They, they make and break careers and they also to change the way that I would say, like a certain educated leadership, knowledge worker [00:10:00] class of developed world comes to view reality.

Malcolm Collins: Before you go further given what you have laid out about TED Talks already I think that the audience can see and infer why a virus trying to spread mimetically would differentially target this organization.

Simone Collins: Right. Like if, for example, a virus benefits from infecting a super spreader who is, who is exposing themselves. And, and, and, and intimately contacting the vulnerable, that is to say, like, capable of catching contagion parts of other organisms, right? So this is the perfect vector, the perfect vector to infect.

Malcolm Collins: If you, if you wanted to set the narrative to determine what's true and what's untrue and to spread to as many people as possible, and it's very important to determine what's true and untrue. Because this means if something threatens your ability to spread as a memetic virus, if some fact, if some study, well, now you can use this institution to suppress that, which allows you to spread faster within other organizations.

So [00:11:00] you as Ted would be a key target for the virus. So would universities. Yes. So would. Media institutions, so would academic institutions. Like these are all of the top targeted institutions. So would newspapers, so would anything like this. Anything that has a wide reach like this is going to have a huge amount of effort to break it by the virus.

This is why Twitter was so infected by the time that Musk acquired it. It was the perfect institution to infect if you wanted to spread a memetic virus and disseminate it as widely as possible within a population. So

Simone Collins: continue. Yeah. And so to give an example of like the influence that that TED talks have had, someone gave a TED talk on power poses.

That is to say, like standing with your legs spread and your hands on your hips, you know, really affected people's behavior. Then that just like everyone believed that, you know, everyone wrote about, of course, this is reality. And then, you know, Later that [00:12:00] there was some nuance introduced that, you know, that information hasn't perfectly been replicated, you know, caveat caveat.

But by that point it was too late. Like, this is already spread. This is already what people believe. And so, you know, there were very innocuous ways in which TED texts were capable of releasing misinformation. But anyway, most people still love them. Most people kept going year after year. If they were, you know, among those paying insane amounts of money to attend in person.

And then I I, Thank you. I'm sure you noticed this and I know this is too. After a while, like we just stopped listening to TED Talks because they were really bad. And most of them just felt like they were kind of about social justice narratives. And we were like, Oh you know, what's going on here.

And I recently listened to an all in podcast episode, of course, great podcast. Everyone listens to it about what happened to Ted and they interviewed Coleman Hughes who was invited To go on to Ted and give a talk on basically on his choice and the way that Ted works when you're invited to go give a Ted talk is you choose your subject.

You're invited. This is a huge privilege. And then you go [00:13:00] through a huge amount of coaching and iteration to give this talk. very tight 20 minute approximately talk. And then you go on stage and you give the talk and everyone loves you and you enjoy massive success because of the platform boost that you just got.

So Coleman Hughes his, he wanted to talk about his next book. The, the book is called the end of race politics. And he wanted to talk about why. Yeah. We should be colorblind. And, and on the all in podcast, he was interviewing. He talked about his experience giving this Ted talk about why we should all be colorblind and seeing what happened when he gave what you would consider to be a heterodox statement.

I mean, it's, it's a pretty controversial thing to argue in favor of colorblindness and to argue anything. Anything that doesn't tow the mainstream line of, of anti racism even if you're black and he is super, super dangerous thing to do. And he described what he experienced. And in a nutshell, what he experienced was he gave the talk, 96 percent of the audience was like super fine and cool with it.

A couple people, especially people on stage, he noticed like viscerally and [00:14:00] physically reacted negatively to his talk. And then after he gave his talk a subgroup within the Ted staff, that is to say like this conference staff you know, like submitted a formal complaint about his talk, that this was intolerable, that Ted was platforming, you know, the horrible, racist, terrible ideas and then Coleman Hughes ended up finding himself in this protracted negotiation with the organization, Ted, about how his talk was going to be released on their website and on YouTube.

And ultimately after, it Not agreeing to have his talk appended with a debate discussing the legitimacy of his views or even released on the same day is that debate, which he did agree to happen, which he did have he had his video released and then later the debate was released. But he found that his video only got 13 percent of the traffic given to the lowest performing video.

That was also released that day. In other words, Ted clearly had throttled the amount of traffic invisibility that his video had gotten. And he became very. Sort of disenchanted with the organization of Ted [00:15:00] that he was sort of misled. He wasn't told that his video would have throttled reach. He you know Ted was supposed to be a place where people could discuss heterodox ideas, revolutionary ideas, dangerous ideas.

And this was sort of like the tipping point at which it was just super obvious that this organization had been hollowed out. Now the the guy who invited him to talk probably was pretty cool with his message, but the problem is that by this point he would have experienced. Essentially an employee rebellion had he not conceded to the complaints of this very passionate group that had submitted, you know, a passionate complaint.

Let's

Malcolm Collins: talk about why the virus would care about this message being distributed. So what the virus tells people and organizations in order to affect it. Is that only by accepting us, accepting our faith, basically, I mean, it's really like a religion or a cult. Can you remove all emotional pain, first from your organization, and [00:16:00] then from the world?

And the thesis of the virus is that emotional pain is something that is born overwhelmingly by specific groups of individuals who are more vulnerable than other groups of individuals. And through teaching everyone to , treat these vulnerable individuals. As sort of elevated status of, of sort of priests of the virus.

Then we can fix this and through always subverting your ideas to them. So if two people disagree was in a company and one of them is of one of these protected groups and the other one isn't, then the one who isn't has to. back down from this disagreement and the one who is has to say, aha, I was right.

 The core groups raised are, are trans individuals, women or then BIPOC people.

Simone Collins: I mean, we're, we're more talking about intersectionality. So it's actually like what, who has the combination.

Of [00:17:00] the most vulnerable statuses. Exactly.

Malcolm Collins: But as soon as it begins, as these ideas begin to infect an organization, they give enormous power to anyone who happens to be of one of these groups, which incentivizes them to encourage the expansion of these ideas and bodies within the organization. that enforce these ideas.

And one of the reasons why, and we said this, why the definition of transness, like, we would be considered trans by the current definition of transness. Specifically, we don't really identify with any gender, I just don't think it's that important, which makes us agender, which makes us genderqueer, which makes us trans.

Why is it important that the trans identity continues to expand? And it's not something that you can scientifically pin down. Something we talk about in the trans people are canonically magical video.

Because I do think there are real trans people who were really and are in some environments still really persecuted against. It's because it allows any individual within one of these organizations to become. [00:18:00] One of these disenfranchised classes, like we could, we could just say we're trans because we are technically trans by the definitions of trans and we wanted to take the social cost of identifying that way publicly, but we would be in this case, all of a sudden, within any conservative organization, likely.

have our statuses dramatically lower, but within organizations that are infected, have our status dramatically raised. So now we have a huge incentive to promote and expand the infection to new organizations that we are affiliated with. So if we are also on the board of some other organization or something like that.

So Once these individuals are like, Okay, I want to expand within this organization. I want the power of these ideas to grow within this organization. I want to infect more people. If you think of organization as a sort of nodal cloud, I want to infect more people in the organization with the virus. How do you do that?

Well, what you do is you set up. ESG departments, or you set up and not all ESG departments, some ESG departments are like actual good ESG departments, but some are really just like, we're going to give everyone [00:19:00] in this organization a test to make sure they all hold the same ideas about how power should be structured in our society and about norms for interacting with other people and, and they're going to understand why it's important that if they're in any other organizations that they cause ESG department.

I think of it almost like a cancer, you know, when a cancer forms in a human, it releases hormones that cause like blood vessels to begin to grow around it. So that it's getting a disproportionate amount of nutrients and energy from the organization that is not tied to the organization's real mission or message.

This is not what TED was about. TED was not about spreading the ideas. Of the cult of the virus, but as soon as the virus had set itself up within the organization, then it begins to develop these tumors, which you will see in any infected organization. These tumors then begin to convert as many people within the organization as possible, while also silencing any output from the organization that might be of any new way unuseful to the virus or the [00:20:00] cult.

And so that's what had happened with Ted at this point, it became this sort of tumorous zombie. Now, eventually as you've seen with Ted, nobody listens to it anymore, really. Or, I mean, it still has reach, but nothing like it used to. And so this virus lacks a lot of intentionality. It may have the intentionality of a slime mold.

It can be like, this organization has a lot of reach. So, the iterations of myself that targeted organizations with a lot of reach, out competed the iterations of myself. Basically, it's just evolution. The, the iterations of it that disproportionately target organizations with a lot of reach are the iterations of it that exist in higher numbers.

But another thing happens. Because all iterations of it kill the host. All iterations of it make the host, or at least make the host ineffective. Well then the host can no longer spread the message anymore. So then it needs to kill the host or the iterations of it, which did kill the host were the ones that spread more.

This makes it more parasitoidal than like a typical parasite. Like one of those wasps that weighs caterpillar, like little worms inside a caterpillar that split open from [00:21:00] the caterpillar. Yeah. And what

Simone Collins: you mean by parasitoidal, because not everyone has a biology background or Parasitoids

Malcolm Collins: are different from parasites in that they always kill the host.

So the classic example is. One of these caterpillars where a wasp lays its eggs in it and then the little worms eat it from the inside and explode out from it or you know, that ant, the fungus that grows in the ant's brain and causes it to climb high on the stalking and then spurt from its head so that spurs, spores can go as far as possible.

But

Simone Collins: this is an important distinction. Because if you actually care about the values that many of these most vulnerable to the virus, to the cult organizations support, you really need to understand the actual dynamics of this, this virus that is spreading within them and destroying. their causes because their causes are extremely undermined by the presence of the virus, by the virus hollowing them out and taking them

Malcolm Collins: over.

So any organization, when it reaches a late stage infection, which is just [00:22:00] like a certain number of people within the organization infected to a certain degree we're really all they're ever thinking about is the virus anymore. They're no longer useful. Like if all of these nodes are sort of captured within this one cloud, so the virus needs to rip open the cloud.

So the nodes can spill out like spores into the environment and affect a bunch of different organizations. You know, this is what happened with occupy wall street. This is what happened with Gawker. I mean, obviously there was external pressures on that one as well.

This is what happened with Chaz or Chop or whatever you want to call it. You begin to see the leadership become radically divided. Everyone begins accusing everyone else of, of, of whatever, right? And they, they begin fighting a bunch. And the internal power fights lead to the organization dying, splitting up, and the spores going out and infecting new organizations now that they've been sort of completely brainwashed.

And this is, as Simone said, really bad because it means that the organizations that this virus disproportionately targets, which are usually the most historically pro social organizations, because they're the most [00:23:00] open to infection. You know, if it goes to let's talk about like religious organizations.

If it goes to a conservative iteration of one of these religious organizations, they'll just tell it to f**k off. But if it goes to an extremely historically progressive one and this is why it's so common in progressive environments. Why I just hollowed out so many progressive causes, you know, whether that be the civil rights movement or feminism or anything, you know, now these things are the progressive iterations of many religions.

This is why, you know, when we say, you know, if you ask progressive Muslim or progressive Catholic or progressive Protestant, you know, what do you think of gender? What do you think of sexuality? What do you think of our relationship to the environment? What do you think of morality? What do you think of like the future of humanity should be?

You're going to get the exact same answers. But if you talk to. Conservatives from those traditions will have wildly different answers because they aren't really of that tradition anymore. They're of one cultural group, the virus, which or the cult or whatever you want to call it, which has hollowed out their traditions and now wears them like a ghoulish skin suit.

So when I go to someone and, and I'm like, Hey, what you are doing under the name of [00:24:00] feminism is one clearly against the actual goals of feminism. And two really cruel and messed up and dehumanizing of men. And they'll say, well, look at all the great things feminism did historically. And I'm like, yeah, but you're not acting like those people.

You're not doing the things that they did historically. You are just operating on the same orders that everyone else who's infected with the virus is

Simone Collins: operating. Well, and we also need to look at outcomes. When you look at what. Past feminist activists did and you see what happened to all women got the right to vote.

All women entered the workplace. Oh, women entered universities at much higher rates. What's happening now? One of the leading male secure influencers among youth is Andrew Tate. Like this is clearly not. Working very well anymore. And I think, you know, the same thing exists with racism. When you look at a lot of polling about, you know, our, our race relations better in the United States now is racism better in the United States.

People are saying, no, it's not so clearly, you know, all these organizations that purport to be addressing this, that purport to be making it better. Appear to be [00:25:00] making matters worse, or at least making the perception of racism much worse, which is deeply disturbing. You could argue that

Malcolm Collins: actually a lot of the actual racism, much worse.

I mean, we can talk for

Simone Collins: like actual, you know, deaths in, in you know, neighborhoods that are vulnerable or higher now because, you know, post poll George Floyd protest, et cetera. Right. That's what you're talking about. Well,

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to tell you what, you know, it doesn't help black people is removing police from black neighborhoods.

If you, if you look at polling for black communities, they did not want this to happen. This was just the virus, you know, does not care about the people.

Simone Collins: It hurts. It is not helping the causes. It purports to support

Malcolm Collins: BLM as burning down Hispanic neighborhoods. And let's be clear, that's what they were burning down.

A lot of people are not like. Because the, the media really hides what's happening in a lot of these instances they will not tell things that are off message to people. If you look at the LA riots, why was it the Korean communities were disproportionately targeted? A lot of people don't know this.

They're like, they know about the Korean roof snipers, but they don't know about the rest of what was going [00:26:00] on. They don't know why the Korean neighborhoods were targeted is because they were recent immigrants. So they often lived around , we're poverty occurred in black neighborhoods, so they would be on the outskirts of this.

So when they would go out and they were destroying things, it was mostly recent immigrant neighborhoods. In the recent BLM riots, this stops being burnt down as people who have a very wide network of Hispanic friends. The way that information travels within those communities is different than the way it travels within mainstream communities.

It mostly travels through family networks, and they know who burnt down their stores. They know exactly after a year of liberal hand wringing about wanting to help hispanic immigrants who ignored them when people were ransacking their neighborhoods and and the horror that they went through and the family members that they that they and the businesses that they had worked everything for given everything for that were destroyed.

And I think that, that, that there is a backlash growing to this[00:27:00] and, and let's be clear, the virus is a predominantly white thing. It claims to care about, you know, black people, it claims to care about, it's, it's mostly a white thing. It descends from European cultural groups. It is a form, a new form, you could call it Neo European imperialism.

It's goal is to... Target and erase the cultures of not just because it's gotten bad at erasing the cultural background of the people who live near it, you know, they've begun to develop immunity. So now as soon as somebody is infected with it, it tells them, Oh we want you to be as happy as possible all the time.

Like, do not challenge yourself. Just, just do whatever . That you want to do in the moment, and that will make you happier in the long term, right? And don't allow anyone else to challenge you for doing those things. But in doing that, it makes people not have kids.

I think

Simone Collins: another really good example of this, this virus clearly not supporting [00:28:00] the causes that it purports to support and specifically growing by playing the intersectionality game. That is to say by trying to champion whoever is, is seen optics wise as being a victim is showing up in the recent Israel.

Gaza, like Palestine conflict in that there's a lot of L like super pro LGBT groups that are 100 percent siding with Hamas. Not, not like Palestinians, but Hamas, which is super not in favor of LGBT rights, which really just goes to show how far and how blatant this has become. Like when an organization is that.

Rotten, when it will actively support and ally itself with, only because it appears to be the underdog in mainstream media you know, an organization that

Malcolm Collins: actively No, it's not because it appears to be the virus is incredibly antisemitic. It is intentionally doing this because the people they're killing are Jews.

And I think that this is something [00:29:00] you miss. Why is the virus anti Semitic? This is something that you miss. So the reason why the virus is anti Semitic is because... Isn't

Simone Collins: it because Jews succeed? I mean, it does play, it grows to intersectionality. Jews

Malcolm Collins: undermine its entire narrative. Oh, that's right.

Its narrative is all inequality in the world. comes from oppression

Simone Collins: and therefore oppressed groups don't succeed because of inequality. If there's

Malcolm Collins: a group that's disproportionately succeeding, it is definitionally oppressive. Worse, if it is disproportionately succeeding And it says it used to be an oppressed group, or is still an oppressed group, if it says that it had this holocaust against it, well that must be a lie, because a group cannot both be oppressed and succeeding, that goes against the narrative.

Right, right. For the virus to survive, the Jews must go, and I think many reformed Jews are just now waking up to how virulently anti Semitic the [00:30:00] virus is, but they've already gotten too deep. There's nothing they can do. You know, I've seen videos of like Jewish people like stomping on the Israeli flag while holding Hamas flags and stuff like that.

Like, it is wild. Wow. But it shows you, you know, these are not people who are having kids. And that's the thing about the virus. It doesn't have kids. It can only survive by taking the kids of other people. It'll have one or two, but like you're not going to get anywhere near above repopulation rate. And this causes problems as groups develop resistance to this.

And it causes bigger problems when they say, okay, well now we need to get immigrants into the country because they don't have a resistance to us and we'll just take their children and we'll march them through the streets. And well, then these immigrant groups, they begin to get wise to this as well. And they're like, Hey.

I don't want you to take our kids. And then, people like us, traditional conservatives, we go to the immigrant groups and we're like, Oh, we have a lot in common with you. You don't want our children. We don't want your children. We are both terrified of the same thing. Let us [00:31:00] work together. And I think that This is the, the real turning that we are having as a society now.

Which is increasingly, and you can look at the statistics on this, you can look at Hispanic groups in the U. S., you can look at Muslims like Andrew Tate, obviously a conservative influencer, also a Muslim. You look at people like Oliver Antony, the guy who wrote Richmond, North of Richmond, America's greatest strengths is our diversity.

Increasingly, immigrant communities are beginning to realize, and minority communities are beginning to realize, that yes, the virus will say it cares about them, will say it protects them, but from when push comes to shove, only people who actually, durably, will create real, just deals with them, is the conservative movement.

And we will help them protect what really matters, which is their culture and their children. And I think that things begin to shift when the, we [00:32:00] say that this cultural genocide must stop.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting is that, you know, you and I, at least as millennials came of age in a world in which conservatism really wasn't.

The, the movement that protected diversity, the movement that was like, let you be you.

Malcolm Collins: Nowadays. It was like an LGBT theocratic thing. Mm hmm.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. And now, now the interesting thing is it still has those groups within it, but suddenly conservatism has become rather Like a collection of city states that are all trying to resist this one colonizing entity.

And so it is, it is a very different thing now than it used to be. And I think, you know, a lot of people consider themselves to still be progressive who just yet they've yet to be burned by the movement that you have, they've yet to really understand this. We were talking with

Malcolm Collins: someone recently and I was like, You know, you should be, you're like, how is, how does he still self identify as a progressive?

Yeah. And, and what we realized is he was in this position where he didn't need to interact with infected organizations a lot. But. And this is the story that happens to [00:33:00] everyone. And we were somewhat alluding to this at the beginning. They think they can play by the virus's rule. They think they can play both sides.

Because they think it's just a more extreme version of the Democrats they knew in the 90s. It is a completely different thing. It is wearing their corpse. It is not them. The moment. You say something that is heretical, you will be tied to the stake, and you will be burned, and you will say, oh, this is what everyone warned me against.

You move ahead of this. And you have some protection against it. Look at us. We have said the wildest stuff. We have had newspapers write angry things about us, but we have yet to be cancelled. Because there is strength in numbers, and there is strength, the people who it really targets, are the people who it sees as infiltrating it.

And by that what I mean, the people who try to identify as moderates or progressives, but who are saying things that could [00:34:00] heed the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, eventually the virus self extinguishes, because it's so sterilizing, because other groups develop resistance to it. But the question is, is how much damage does it do in the meantime?

How many lives does it destroy in the meantime? If I look at the people who are infected, they are despondent. They believe there's no hope in the future. Hope has been stolen from them. Vitality has been stolen from them. Dynamism has been stolen from them. It's like, there's nothing behind their eyes anymore.

It's so sad, but what can we do? We're trying the best we can to save as many people as possible and as diverse a group as people as possible.

Simone Collins: Well, so what we say in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, what, what we, I think we earnestly believe is going to have to happen. And I see this being discussed on everything from.

The all in podcasts like Barry Weiss's publication and her philosophy in general is you know, to make it through this, you, you are not going to be able to stop the virus. The virus, this, this cult that is growing is a lot like climate change and demographic collapse. It is [00:35:00] happening. The momentum is there.

It's unstoppable. All we can do is plan around it and try to reduce the damage that is done by it while it plays out its course. So really the solution is. to, to build alternate channels, to build alternate communities. And we would say that there are many, many groups that are doing this quite successfully, people who are building alternate community structures, alternate, even like informal governing systems.

Sometimes they're DAOs, sometimes they're just literal, you know, communities and co ops alternate media empires, of course, are slowly growing, although it's, it's difficult to get the critical mass to get something really big. So, you know, think about where you can build your own alternate networks and communities and businesses and everything else if this is something that you're concerned about.

Well, anyway, I love you. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Bye. I love you. Bye.